w because I never stopped dawdling like an eight year on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and wonder, and sometimes learn (17). And the Doctors farewell to the world is a game he has played, with himself. One day a Marine General asked him if he could make something that would eliminate mud, so that marines wouldnصt have to deal with mud anymore. So Dr. Hoenikker thinks up ice-nine, an imaginary substance that when it comes in contact with any other kind of water, it crystallizes it. And this crystallization spreads to all the water molecules this piece of water is in contact with. So to crystallize the mud in an entire armed division of marines, it would only take a minuscule amount of ice-nine. Dr. Gioielli 6Hoenikker’s colleagues see this as just another example of his imagination at work. But he actually does create a small chink of ice-nine, and when he dies, each of his children get a small piece of it. They carry it around with themselves in thermos containers the rest of their lives. At the end of book one small piece of ice-nine gets out , by mere accident, and ends up crystallizing the whole world. The game Dr. Hoenikker was playing with himself destroyed the whole world. The accident that caused the ice-nine to get out could be much like the accident that could cause World War III. One small thing that sets off an amazing series of events, like piece of ice-nine just falling out of the thermos. And Dr. Hoenikker, like the scientists of the world, was playing game and caused it all. Here is a description of the world after the ice-nine has wreaked its havoc:There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The Earth was locked up tight (179).This description eerily resembles what many have said the Earth will look like during a nuclear winter (Stone, 62). In ad...
