GRAVITY RAINBOW (40 page)

Out at sea a single clarinet begins to play, a droll melody joined in on after a few bars by guitars and mandolins. Birds huddle bright-eyed on the beach. Katje's heart lightens, a little, at the sound. Slothrop doesn't yet have the European reflexes to clarinets, he still thinks of Benny Goodman and not of clowns or circuses-but wait… aren't these
kazoos
coming? Yeah, a
lotta
kazoos! A Kazoo
Band!

Late that night, back in her room, she wears a red gown of heavy silk. Two tall candles burn an indefinite distance behind her. He feels the change. After making love she lies propped on an elbow watching him, breathing deep, dark nipples riding with the swell, as buoys ride on the white sea. But a patina has formed on her eyes: he can't even see her accustomed retreat, this last time, dimmed, graceful, to the corner of some inner room…

"Katje."

"Sshh," raking dreamy fingernails down the morning, over the Cote d'Azur toward Italy. Slothrop wants to sing, decides to, but then can't think of anything that'd work. He reaches an arm, without wetting his fingers snuffs the candles. She kisses the pain. It hurts even more. He falls asleep in her arms. When he wakes she is gone, completely, most of her never-worn clothes still in the closet, blisters and a

little wax on his fingers, and one cigarette, stubbed out before its time in an exasperated fishhook… She never wasted cigarettes. She must have sat, smoking, watching him while he slept… until something, he'll never be asking her what, triggered her, made it impossible to stay till cigarette's end. He straightens it out, finishes it, no point wasting smokes is there, with a war on…

"Ordinarily in our behavior, we react not singly, but complexly, to fit the ever present contents of our environment. In old people," Pavlov was lecturing at the age of 83, "the matter is altogether different. Concentrating on one stimulus we exclude by negative induction other collateral and simultaneous stimuli because they often do not suit the circumstances, are not complementary reactions in the given setting."

Thus [Pointsman never shows these excursions of his to anyone], reaching for some flower on my table,

I know the cool mosaic of my room

Begin its slow, inhibitory dissolve Around the bloom, the stimulus, the need

That brighter burns, as brightness, quickly sucked

From objects all around, now concentrates

(Yet less than blinding), focuses to flame.

Whilst there yet, in the room's hypnotic evening,

The others lurk-the books, the instruments,

The old man's clothes, an old
gorodki
stick,

Glazed now but with their presences. Their spirits,

Or memories I kept of where they were,

Are canceled, for this moment, by the flame:

The reach toward the frail and waiting flower…

And so, one of them-pen, or empty glass-

Is knocked from where it was, perhaps to roll

Beyond the blank frontiers of memory…
Yet this, be clear, is no "senile distraction,"

But concentrating, such as younger men Can easily and laughing dodge, their world Presenting too much more than one mean loss- And out here, eighty-three, the cortex slack, Excitatory processes eased to cinders

By Inhibition's tweaking, callused fingers,

Each time my room begins its blur I feel

I've looked in on some city's practice blackout

(Such as must come, should Germany keep on

That road of madness). Each light, winking out…

Except at last for one bright, stubborn bloom

The Wardens cannot quench. Or not this time.

The weekly briefings at "The White Visitation" are all but abandoned. Hardly anyone sees the old Brigadier about these days. There is evidence of a budgetary insecurity begun to filter in among the cherub-crusted halls and nooks of the PISCES facility.

"The old man's funking," cries Myron Grunton, none too stable himself these days. The Slothrop group are gathered for their regular meeting in the ARE wing. "He'll shoot down the whole scheme, all it'll take is one bad night…"

A degree of well-bred panic can be observed among those present. In the background, laboratory assistants move about cleaning up dog shit and calibrating instruments. Rats and mice, white and black and a few shades of gray, run clattering on their wheels in a hundred cages.

Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears unruffled and strong. His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Savile Row serenity, suppressed waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather rakishly notched lapels. In this parched and fallow time, he gushes affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he speaks, soothing: "There's no danger."

"No danger?" screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off again muttering and growling.

"Slothrop's knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!"

"The whole thing's falling apart, Pointsman!"

"Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of the scheme, and there've been embarrassing inquiries down from Duncan Sandys-"

"That's the EM.'s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!"

"We've already begun to run into a deficit-"

"Funding," IF you can keep your head, "is available, and will be coming in before long… certainly before we run into any serious trouble. Sir Stephen, far from being 'knocked out,' is quite happily at work in Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home there should any of you wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active on the program, and Mr.

Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we
are
budgeted well into fiscal '46 before anything like a deficit begins to rear its head."

"Your Interested Parties again?" sez Rollo Groast.

"Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted with you day before yesterday," Edwin Treacle mentions now. "Clive and I took an organic chemistry course or two together back at Manchester. Is ICI one of our, ah, sponsors, Pointsman?"

"No," smoothly, "Mossmoon, actually, is working out of Malet Street these days. I'm afraid we were up to nothing more sinister than a bit of routine coordination over this Schwarzkommando business."

"The hell you were. I happen to know Clive's at ICI, managing some sort of polymer research."

They stare at each other. One is lying, or bluffing, or both are, or all of the above. But whatever it is Pointsman has a slight advantage. By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all conies down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires-on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It's work, that's all it is, and there's no room for any extrahuman anxieties-they only weaken, ef-feminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter. "I do wish ICI
would
finance part of this," Pointsman smiles.

"Lame, lame," mutters the younger Dr. Groast.

"What's it matter?" cries Aaron Throwster. "If the old man gets moody at the wrong time this whole show can prang."

"Brigadier Pudding will not go back on any of his commitments," Pointsman very steady, calm, "we have made arrangements with him. The details aren't important."

They never are, in these meetings of his. Treacle has been comfortably sidetracked onto the Mossmoon Issue, Rollo Groast's carping asides never get as far as serious opposition, and are useful in presenting the appearance of open discussion, as are Throwster's episodes of hysteria for distracting the others… So the gathering breaks up, the conspirators head off for coffee, wives, whisky, sleep, indifference. Webley Silvernail stays behind to secure his audiovisual gear and loot the ashtrays. Dog Vanya, back for the moment in an ordinary state of mind if not of kidneys (which are vulnerable after a while to bromide

therapy), has been allowed a short break from the test stand, and he goes sniffing now over to the cage of Rat Ilya. Ilya puts his muzzle against the galvanized wire, and the two pause this way, nose to nose, life and life… Silvernail, puffing on a hook-shaped stub, lugging a 16 mm projector, leaves ARF by way of a long row of cages, exercise wheels strobing under the fluorescent lights. Careful youse guys, here comes da screw. Aw he's O.K. Looie, he's a regular guy. The others laugh. Den what's he doin' in here, huh? The long white lights buzz overhead. Gray-smocked assistants chat, smoke, linger at various routines. Look out, Lefty, dey're comin' fer you dis time. Watch dis, chuckles Mouse Alexei, when he picks me up I'm gonna
shit,
right'n his hand! Better not hey, ya know what happened ta Slug, don'tcha? Dey
fried
him when he did dat, man, da foist time he fucked up run-nin' dat maze. A hundrit volts. Dey said it wuz a "accident." Yeah…
sure
it wuz!

From overhead, from a German camera-angle, it occurs to Webley Silvernail, this lab here is also a maze, i'n't it now… behaviorists run these aisles of tables and consoles just like rats 'n' mice. Reinforcement for them is not a pellet of food, but a successful experiment. But who watches from above, who notes
their
responses? Who hears the small animals in the cages as they mate, or nurse, or communicate through the gray quadrilles, or, as now, begin to sing… come out of their enclosures, in fact, grown to Webley Silvernail-size (though none of the lab people seem to be noticing) to dance him down the long aisles and metal apparatus, with conga drums and a peppy tropical orchestra taking up the very popular beat and melody of:

pavlovia (beguine)

It was spring in Pavlovia-a-a, I was lost, in a maze… Lysol breezes perfumed the air, I'd been searching for days. I found you, in a cul-de-sac, As bewildered as I- We touched noses, and suddenly My heart learned how to fly!

So, together, we found our way, Shared a pellet, or two…

Like an evening in some cafe,

Wanting nothing, but you…

Autumn's come, to Pavlovia-a-a, Once again, I'm alone- Finding sorrow by millivolts, Back to neurons and bone. And I think of our moments then, Never knowing your name- Nothing's left in Pavlovia, But the maze, and the game…

They dance in flowing skeins. The rats and mice form circles, curl their tails in and out to make chrysanthemum and sunburst patterns, eventually all form into the shape of a single giant mouse, at whose eye Silvernail poses with a smile, arms up in a V, sustaining the last note of the song, along with the giant rodent-chorus and orchestra. One of PWD's classic propaganda leaflets these days urges the Volks-grenadier: SETZT V-2 ein!, with a footnote, explaining that "V-2" means to raise both arms in "honorable surrender"-more gallows-humor-and telling how to say, phonetically, "ei ssorrender." Is Web-ley's V here for victory, or ssorrender?

They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it's back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death-death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die… "I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday-that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level-and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive…" The guest star retires down the corridors.

Lights, all but a sprinkling, are out at "The White Visitation." The sky tonight is deep blue, blue as a Navy greatcoat, and the clouds in it are amazingly white. The wind is keen and cold. Old Brigadier Pudding, trembling, slips from his quarters down the back stairs, by a route only he knows, through the vacant orangery in the starlight, along a gallery hung to lace dandies, horses, ladies with hard-boiled eggs for eyes, out a small entresol (point of
maximum danger..
.) and into a lumber-room, whose stacks of junk and random blacknesses, even this far from his childhood, are good for a chill, out again and down a set of metal steps, singing, he hopes quietly, for courage:

Wash me in the water

That you wash your dirty daughter,

And I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall…

at last to D Wing, where the madmen of the '30s persist. The night attendant is asleep under the
Daily Herald.
He is a coarse-looking fellow, and has been reading the leader. Is it an indication of things to come, next election? Oh, dear…

But orders are to let the Brigadier pass. The old man tiptoes by, breathing fast. Mucus rattles back in his throat. He's at the age where mucus is a daily companion, a culture of mucus among the old, mucus in a thousand manifestations, appearing in clots by total surprise on a friend's tablecloth, rimming his breath-passages at night in hard ven-turi, enough to darken the outlines of dreams and send him awake, pleading…

A voice from some cell too distant for us to locate intones: "I am blessed Metatron. I am keeper of the Secret. I am guardian of the Throne…" In here, the more disturbing Whig excesses have been chiseled away or painted over. No point disturbing the inmates. All is neutral tones, soft draperies, Impressionist prints on the walls. Only the marble floor has been left, and under the bulbs it gleams like water. Old Pudding must negotiate half a dozen offices or anterooms before reaching his destination. It hasn't yet been a fortnight, but there is already something of ritual to this, of iteration. Each room will hold a single unpleasantness for him: a test he must pass. He wonders if Pointsman hasn't set these up too. Of course, of course he must… how did the young bastard ever find out? Have I been talking in m' sleep? Have they been slipping in at night with their truth serums to-and just at the clear emergence of the thought, here is his first test tonight. In the first room: a hypodermic outfit has been left lying on a table. Very clear and shining, with the rest of the room slightly out of focus. Yes mornings I felt terribly groggy, couldn't wake, after dreaming-were they dreams? I was talking… But it's all he remembers, talking while someone else was there listening… He is shivering with fear, and his face is whiter than whitewash.