# 2 B R 0 2 B

**Author:** Kurt Vonnegut
**Tags:** Science fiction, Short stories
**Price:** Free
**Formats:** DOCX, EPUB, FB2, PDF, TXT
**Downloads:** 31
**Added:** 10.07.2026
**URL:** https://samolit.com/books/95922

## Description

In a future where science has conquered aging, disease, and death itself, humanity faces an unsettling new problem: how to control a population that no longer dies of natural causes. The setting is a society in which aging has been cured, individuals have indefinite lifespans, and population control is used to limit the population of the United States to forty million, a number which is maintained through a combination of infanticide and government-assisted suicide. In short, for someone to be born, someone else must first volunteer to die. Those willing to end their lives simply dial the titular phone number to reach the local Ethical Suicide Parlor.

Against this chilling backdrop, Edward K. Wehling Jr. anxiously waits in a Chicago hospital for his wife to give birth to triplets, while an old man paints a mural depicting doctors and nurses at work in a well-organized garden, in a room being redecorated to memorialize a man who volunteered to die. With devastating economy and biting irony, this short story confronts the true cost of a world that has traded mortality for order, offering a compact but unforgettable meditation on choice, sacrifice, and the value of a single human life.