"Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

synthetic materials from Du Pont could be used in the weapons systems in place of metal, in order to make them
lighter.
By the time the war was over, the company had gotten out of the washing-machine business entirely, had
changed its name to Barrytron, Limited, and was making weapon, airplane, and motor vehicle parts
composed of plastics it had developed on its own. My father had become the company’s Vice-President in Charge of
Research and Development.
When I was about 17, Du Pont bought Barrytron in order to capture several of its patents. One of the plastics
Father had helped to develop, I remember, had the ability to scatter radar signals, so that an airplane clad in it would
look like a flock of geese to our enemies.

This material, which has since been used to make virtually indestructible skateboards and crash helmets and skis
and motorcycle fenders and so on, was an excuse, when I was a boy, for increasing security precautions at
Barrytron. To keep Communists from finding out how it was made, a single fence topped with barbed wire was no
longer adequate. A second fence was put outside that one, and the space between them was patrolled around the
clock by humorless, jack-booted armed guards with lean and hungry Dobermans.

When Du Pont took over Barrytron, the double fence, the Dobennans, my father and all, I was a high school
senior, all set to go to the University of Michigan to learn how to be a journalist, to serve John Q. Public’s right to
know. Two members of my 6-piece band, The Soul Merchants, the clarinet and the string bass, were also going to
Michigan.
We were going to stick together and go on making music at Ann Arbor. Who knows? We might have become so
popular that we went on world tours and
made great fortunes, and been superstars at peace rallies and love-ins when the Vietnam War came
along.

Cadets at West Point did not make music. The musicians in the dance band and the marching band were Regular
Army enlisted men, members of the servant class.
They were under orders to play music as written, note for note, and never mind how they felt about the music or
about anything.

For that matter, there wasn’t any student publication at West Point. So never mind how the cadets felt about
anything. Not interesting.

I was fine, but all kinds of things were going wrong with my father’s life. Du Pont was looking him over, as they
were looking over everybody at Barrytron, deciding whether to keep him on or not. He was also having a love affair
with a married woman whose husband caught him in the act and beat him up.
This was a sensitive subject with my parents, naturally, so I never discussed it with them. But the story was all
over town, and Father had a black eye. He didn’t play any sports, so he had to make up a story about falling down
the basement stairs. Mother weighed about 90 kilograms by then, and berated him all the time about his having sold
all his Barrytron stock 2 years too soon. If he had hung on to it until the Du Pont takeover, he would have had
$1,000,000, back when it meant something to be a millionaire. If I had been learning-disabled, he could easily have
afforded to send me to Tarkington.
Unlike me, he was the sort of man who had to be in
extremis in order to commit adultery. According to a story I heard from enemies at high school,
Father had done the jumping-out-the-window thing, hippity-hopping like Peter Cottontail across backyards with his
pants around his ankles, and getting bitten by a dog, and getting tangled up in a clothesline, and all the rest of it.
That could have been an exaggeration. I never asked.

I myself was deeply troubled by our little family’s image problem, which was complicated when Mother broke
her nose 2 days after Father got the black eye. To the outside world it looked as though she had said something to