Oh my. I took a nap and had a dream which had some Lil' Abner cartoons in it.

I remember now something I'd thought was interesting a while back -- that Al Capp came up with the general idea for Ice-Nine years before Vonnegut wrote Cat's Cradle. I mean, sort of.

In Cat's Cradle, Ice nine was the (water isotope?) molecule that, when touched by ordinary water molecules, would instantly realign them or crystallize them to be like ice nine molecules, which were perpetually frozen solid. So if you touched ice nine to your lips, it'd instantly freeze every bit of water moisture in you and you'd fall down dead. If you fell on a puddle, you'd freeze that and any water touching it and any water touching that. It was possible to kill a huge proportion of the world by freezing all in one stroke. Just imagine if you dropped ice nine into the ocean. All water in or touching the ocean would become ice nine, and would never melt again.

Now, in Lil Abner, the land of Lower Slobbovia, which was kind of like Siberia, all the ice was so cold -- colder, somehow, than our regular ice -- that a fancy businessman got the idea to export pieces of it to the United States, in order to cut down on our refrigeration and air conditioning bills. The Slobbovian ice never melted, so it could cool your drinks and all that -- or so he thought. I don't remember exactly what happened when it was imported into the US, but I think America became an arctic wasteland as soon as the ice was brought in.

Anyway, both stories seemed to hint that Dante was right, when Hell finally arrives and the world ends, it'll be in ice rather than fire.

(Al G. doesn't think so, though. And neither did Rod Serling.)