GRAVITY RAINBOW (44 page)

"With one difference," sez Blodgett Waxwing. "This really happened tonight. But that octopus didn't."

"How do you know?"

"I know a lot. Not everything, but a few things you don't. Listen Slothrop-you'll be needing a friend, and sooner than you think. Don't come here to the villa-it may be too hot by then-but if you can make it as far as Nice-" he hands over a business card, embossed with a chess knight and an address on Rue Rossini. "I'll take the envelope back. Here's your suit. Thanks, brother." He's gone. His talent is just to fade when he wants to. The zoot suit is in a box tied with a purple ribbon. Keychain's there too. They both belonged to a kid who used to live in East Los Angeles, named Ricky Gutierrez. During the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, young Gutierrez was set upon by a carload of Anglo vigilantes from Whittier, beaten up while the L.A. police watched and called out advice, then arrested for disturbing the peace. The judge was allowing zoot-suiters to choose between jail and the Army. Gutierrez joined up, was wounded on Saipan, developed gangrene, had to have his arm amputated, is home now, married to a girl who works in the kitchen at a taco place in San Gabriel, can't find any work himself, drinks a lot during the day… But his old zoot, and those of thousands of others busted that summer, hanging empty on the backs of all the Mexican L.A. doors, got bought up and have found their way over here, into the market, no harm turning a little profit, is there, they'd only have hung there in the fat smoke and the baby smell, in the rooms with shades pulled down against the white sun beating, day after day, on the dried palm trees and muddy culverts, inside these fly-ridden and empty rooms…

Imipolex G has proved to be nothing more-or less-sinister than a new plastic, an aromatic heterocyclic polymer, developed in 1939, years before its time, by one L. Jamf for IG Farben. It is stable at high temperatures, like up to 900°C., it combines good strength with a low power-loss factor. Structurally, it's a stiffened chain of aromatic rings, hexagons like the gold one that slides and taps above Hilary Bounce's navel, alternating here and there with what are known as heterocyclic rings.

The origins of Imipolex G are traceable back to early research done at du Pont. Plasticity has its grand tradition and main stream, which happens to flow by way of du Pont and their famous employee Carothers, known as The Great Synthesist. His classic study of large molecules spanned the decade of the twenties and brought us directly

to nylon, which not only is a delight to the fetishist and a convenience to the armed insurgent, but was also, at the time and well within the System, an announcement of Plasticity's central canon: that chemists were no longer to be at the mercy of Nature. They could decide now what properties they wanted a molecule to have, and then go ahead and build it. At du Pont, the next step after nylon was to introduce aromatic rings into the polyamide chain. Pretty soon a whole family of "aromatic polymers" had arisen: aromatic polyamides, polycarbonates, polyethers, polysulfanes. The target property most often seemed to be strength-first among Plasticity's virtuous triad of Strength, Stability and Whiteness
(Kraft, Standfestigkeit, Wei?e:
how often these were taken for Nazi graffiti, and indeed how indistinguishable they commonly were on the rain-brightened walls, as the busses clashed gears in the next street over, and the trams creaked of metal, and the people were mostly silent in the rain, with the early evening darkened to the texture of smoke from a pipe, and the arms of young passersby not in the sleeves of their coats but inside somewhere, as if sheltering midgets, or ecstatically drifted away from the timetable into a tactile affair with linings more seductive even than the new nylon…). L. Jamf, among others, then proposed, logically, dialectically, taking the parental polyamide sections of the new chain, and looping
them
around into rings too, giant "heterocyclic" rings, to alternate with the aromatic rings. This principle was easily extended to other precursor molecules. A desired monomer of high molecular weight could be synthesized to order, bent into its heterocyclic ring, clasped, and strung in a chain along with the more "natural" benzene or aromatic rings. Such chains would be known as "aromatic heterocyclic polymers." One hypothetical chain that Jamf came up with, just before the war, was later modified into Imipolex G.

Jamf at the time was working for a Swiss outfit called Psycho-chemie AG, originally known as the Grossli Chemical Corporation, a spinoff from Sandoz (where, as every schoolchild knows, the legendary Dr. Hofmann made his important discovery). In the early '20s, Sandoz, Ciba, and Geigy had got together in a Swiss chemical cartel. Shortly after, Jamf's firm was also absorbed. Apparently, most of Grossli's contracts had been with Sandoz, anyway. As early as 1926 there were oral agreements between the Swiss cartel and IG Farben. When the Germans set up their cover company in Switzerland, IG Chemie, two years later, a majority of the Grossli stock was sold to them, and the company reconstituted as Psychochemie AG. The patent for Imipolex G was thus cross-filed for both the IG and for

Psychochemie. Shell Oil got into it through an agreement with Imperial Chemicals dated 1939. For some curious reason, Slothrop will discover, no agreements between ICI and the IG seem to be dated any later than '39. In this Imipolex agreement, Icy Eye could market the new plastic inside the Commonwealth in exchange for one pound and other good and valuable consideration. That's nice. Psychochemie AG is still around, still doing business at the same old address in the Schokoladestrasse, in that Zurich, Switzerland.

Slothrop swings the long keychain of his zoot, in some agitation. A few things are immediately obvious. There is even more being zeroed in on him from out there than he'd thought, even in his most paranoid spells. Imipolex G shows up on a mysterious "insulation device" on a rocket being fired with the help of a transmitter on the roof of the headquarters of Dutch Shell, who is co-licensee for marketing the Imipolex-a rocket whose propulsion system bears an uncanny resemblance to one developed by British Shell at around the same time… and oh, oh boy, it just occurs to Slothrop now where all the rocket intelligence is being
gathered
-into the office of who but Mr. Duncan Sandys, Churchill's own son-in-law, who works out of the Ministry of Supply located where but at Shell Mex
House, for Christ's sake…

Here Slothrop stages a brilliant Commando raid, along with faithful companion Blodgett Waxwing, on Shell Mex House itself-right into the heart of the Rocket's own branch office in London. Mowing down platoons of heavy security with his little Sten, kicking aside nubile and screaming WRAC secretaries (how else is there to react, even in play?), savagely looting files, throwing Molotov cocktails, the Zoot-suit Zanies at last crashing into the final sanctum with their trousers up around their armpits, smelling of singed hair, spilled blood, to find not Mr. Duncan Sandys cowering before their righteousness, nor open window, gypsy flight, scattered fortune cards, nor even a test of wills with the great Consortium itself-but only a rather dull room, business machines arrayed around the walls calmly blinking, files of cards pierced frail as sugar faces, frail as the last German walls standing without support after the bombs have been and now twisting high above, threatening to fold down out of the sky from the force of the wind that has blown the smoke away… The smell of firearms is in the air, and there's not an office dame in sight. The machines chatter and ring to each other. It's time to snap down your brims, share a postviolence cigarette and think about escape… do you remember the way in, all the twists and turns? No. You weren't looking. Any of these doors might open you to safety, but there may not be time…

But Duncan Sandys is only a name, a function in this, "How high does it go?" is not even the right kind of question to be asking, because the organization charts have all been set up by Them, the titles and names filled in by Them, because

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Slothrop finds he has paused in front of the blue parts list that started all this.
How high does it go…
ahhhh. The treacherous question is not meant to apply to
people
after all, but to the
hardware!
Squinting, moving a finger carefully down the columns, Slothrop finds that Vor-richtung fur die Isolierung's Next Higher Assembly.

"S-Gerat, 11/00000."

If this number is the serial number of a rocket, as its form indicates, it must be a special model-Slothrop hasn't even heard of any with four zeroes, let alone five… nor an S-Gerat either, there's an I- and a J-Gerat, they're in the guidance… well, Document SG-1, which isn't supposed to exist, must cover that…

Out of the room: going noplace special, moving to a slow drumbeat in his stomach muscles
see what happens, be ready.
… In the Casino restaurant, not the slightest impedance at all to getting in, no drop in temperature perceptible to his skin, Slothrop sits down at a table where somebody has left last Tuesday's London
Times.
Hmmm. Hasn't seen one of
them
in a while… Leafing through, dum, dum, de-doo, yeah, the War's still on, Allies closing in east and west on Berlin, powdered eggs still going one and three a dozen, "Fallen Officers," MacGregor, Mucker-Maffick, Whitestreet, Personal Tributes…
Meet Me in St. Louis
showing at the Empire Cinema (recalls doing the penis-in-the-popcorn-box routine there with one Madelyn, who was less than-)-

Tantivy… Oh shit no, no wait-

"True charm… humble-mindedness… strength of character… fundamental Christian cleanness and goodness… we all loved Oliver… his courage, kindness of heart and unfailing good humour were an inspiration to all of us… died bravely in battle leading a gallant attempt to rescue members of his unit who were pinned down by German artillery…" And signed by his most devoted comrade in arms, Theodore Bloat.
Major
Theodore Bloat now-

Staring out the window, staring at nothing, gripping a table knife so hard maybe some bones of his hand will break. It happens sometimes to lepers. Failure of feedback to the brain-no way to know how fiercely they may be making a fist. You know these lepers. Well-

Ten
minutes later, back up in his room, he's lying face-down on the bed, feeling empty. Can't cry. Can't do
anything.

They did it. Took his friend out to some deathtrap, probably let him fake an "honourable" death… and then just
closed up bis file…

It will occur to him later that maybe the whole story was a lie. They could've planted it easy enough in that London
Times,
couldn't they? Left the paper for Slothrop to find? But by the time he figures that one out, there'll be no turning around.

At noon Hilary Bounce comes in rubbing his eyes wearing a shit-eating grin. "How was your evening? Mine was remarkable."

"Glad to hear it." Slothrop is smiling.
You're on my list too, pal.
This smile asks from him more grace than anything in his languid American life ever has, up till now. Grace he always imagined himself short on. But it's working. He's surprised, and so grateful that he almost starts crying then. The best part of all is not that Bounce appears fooled by the smile, but that Slothrop knows now that it will work for him again…

So he does make it to Nice, after a fast escape down the Corniche through the mountains fishtailing and rubber softly screeching at the sun-warmed abysses, tails all shaken back on the beach where he was thoughtful enough to lend his buddy Claude the assistant chef, about the same height and build, his own brand-new pseudo-Tahitian bathing trunks, and while they're all watching that Claude, find a black Citroen with the keys left in, nothing to it, folks-rolling into town in his white zoot, dark glasses, and a flopping Sydney Green-street Panama hat. He's not exactly inconspicuous among the crowds of military and the mamzelles already shifted into summer dresses, but he ditches the car off Place Garibaldi, heads for a bistro on the old-Nice side of La Porte Fausse and takes time to nab a roll and coffee before setting out to find the address Waxwing gave him. It turns out to be an ancient four-story hotel with early drunks lying in the hallways, eyelids like tiny loaves brushed with a last glaze of setting sun, and summertime dust in stately evolutions through the taupe light, summertime ease to the streets outside, April summertime as the great vortex of redeployment from Europe to Asia hoots past leaving many souls each night to cling a bit longer to the tranquillities here, this close to the drain-hole of Marseilles, this next-to-last stop on the paper cyclone that sweeps them back from Germany, down the river-valleys, beginning to drag some from Antwerp and the northern ports too now as the vortex grows more sure, as preferential paths are set up… Just for the knife-edge, here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to

Slothrop the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky's light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now.

Too impatient to wait for the first star, Slothrop enters the hotel. The carpets are dusty, the place smells of alcohol and bleach. Sailors and girls come ambling through, together and separate, as Slothrop paranoids from door to door looking for one that might have something to tell him. Radios play in the heavy wood rooms. The stairwell doesn't appear to be plumb, but
tilted
at some peculiar angle, and the light running down the walls is of only two colors: earth and leaf. Up on the top floor Slothrop finally spots an old motherly femme de chambre on the way into a room carrying a change of linen, very white in the gloom.

"Why did you leave," the sad whisper ringing as if through a telephone receiver from someplace far away, "they wanted to help you. They wouldn't have done anything bad…" Her hair is rolled up, George Washington style, all the way around. She gazes at 45° to Slothrop, a patient, parkbench chessplayer's gaze, very large, arching kindly nose and bright eyes: she is starch, sure-boned, the toes of her leather shoes turn up slightly, she's wearing red-and-white striped socks on enormous feet that give her the look of a helpful critter from one of the other worlds, the sort of elf who'd not only make shoes while you slept but also sweep up a little, have the pot on when you awoke, and maybe a fresh flower by the window-