GRAVITY RAINBOW (49 page)

inside the Fist of the Ape… but looking over now at the much more likely candidate, cream-skinned Katje under the Wheel of Fortune, who is herself getting ready now to bolt down the beach and into the relative calm of the switchback railway. Pointsman is hallucinating. He has lost control. Pointsman is supposed to have absolute control over Katje. Where does this leave her? In a control that is out of control. Not even back in the leather and pain of gemutlich Captain Blicero's world has she felt as terrified as now.

Roger Mexico is taking it personally, oh-I-say, only trying to help…

What the somewhat disconnected Mr. Pointsman has been hearing all this time is a voice, strangely familiar, a voice he once imagined a face in a well-known news photograph from the War to have:

"Here is what you have to do. You need Mexico now, more than ever. Your winter anxieties about the End of History seem now all well comforted to rest, part of your biography now like any old bad dream. But like Lord Acton always sez, History is not woven by innocent hands. Mexico's girl friend there is a threat to your whole enterprise. He will do anything to hold on. Scowling and even cursing him she will nevertheless seduce him away, into a civilian fogbank in which you will lose him and never find him-not unless you act now, Pointsman. Operation Backfire is sending ATS girls out to the Zone now. Rocket girls: secretarial and even minor technical duties at the Cuxhaven test range. You have only to drop a word to SPOG, through Dennis Joint here, and Jessica Swanlake is out of your way. Mexico may complain for a while, but all the more reason for him, given the proper direction, to Lose Himself In His Work, eh? Remember the eloquent words of Sir Dennis Nayland Smith to young Alan Sterling, whose fiancee is in the clutches of the insidious yellow Adversary: 'I have been through the sort of fires which are burning you now, Sterling, and I have always found that work was the best ointment for the burns.' And we both know what Nayland Smith represents, mm? don't we."

"I
do," sez Pointsman, aloud, "but I can't really say that
you
do, can I, if I don't even know who you
are,
you see."

This strange outburst does not reassure Pointsman's companions. They begin to edge away, in definite alarm. "We should find a doctor," murmurs Dennis Joint, winking at Katje like a blond crewcut Groucho Marx. Jessica, forgetting her sulk, takes Roger's arm.

"You see, you see," the voice starts up again, "she feels that she's protecting him,
against you.
How many chances does one get to
be
a synthesis, Pointsman? East and West, together in the same bloke? You

can not only be Nayland Smith, giving a young lad in a iiink wholesome advice about the virtues of work, but you also, at the same time, get to be
Fu Manchu!
eh? the one who has the young lady in his power! How's
that?
Protagonist and antagonist in one. I'd jump at it, if I were you."

Pointsman is about to retort something like, "But you're
not
me," only he sees how the others all seem to be goggling at him. "Oh, ha, ha," he sez instead. "Talking to myself, here. Little-sort of-eccentricity, heh, heh."

"Yang and Yin," whispers the Voice, "Yang and Yin…"

Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas any more…

– dorothy, arriving in Oz

we are safely past the days of the Eis-Heiligen-St. Pancratius, St. Servatius, St. Bonifacius, die kalte Sophie… they hover in clouds above the vineyards, holy beings of ice, ready with a breath, an intention, to ruin the year with frost and cold. In certain years, especially War years, they are short on charity, peevish, smug in their power: not quite saintly or even Christian. The prayers of growers, pickers and wine enthusiasts must reach them, but there's no telling how the ice-saints feel-coarse laughter, pagan annoyance, who understands this rear-guard who preserve winter against the revolutionaries of May?

They found the countryside, this year, at peace by a scant few days. Already vines are beginning to grow back over dragon's teeth, fallen Stukas, burned tanks. The sun warms the hillsides, the rivers fall bright as wine. The saints have refrained. Nights have been mild. The frost didn't come. It is the spring of peace. The vintage, God granting at least a hundred days of sun, will be fine.

Nordhausen puts less credence in the ice-saints than do wine regions farther south, but even here the season looks promising. Rain blows scattering out over the town as Slothrop comes in in the early morning, bare feet, blistering and reblistering, cooled here in the wet grass. There's sunlight up on the mountains. His shoes got lifted by some DP with fingers lighter than dreams, on one of the many trains since the Swiss border, someplace rolling across Bavaria fast asleep. Whoever it was left a red tulip between Slothrop's toes. He has taken it for a sign. A reminder of Katje.

Signs will find him here in the
Zone,
and ancestors will reassert themselves. It's like going to that Darkest Africa to study the natives there, and finding their quaint superstitions taking you over. In fact, funny thing, Slothrop just the other night ran into an African, the first one he ever met in his life. Their discussion on top of the freight car in the moonlight lasted only a minute or two. Small talk for the sudden background departure of Major Duane Marvy over the side bounce-clatter down the cobbled fill into the valley-well, certainly nothing was said then of any Herero beliefs about ancestors. Yet he feels his own, stronger now as borders fall away and the Zone envelops him, his own WASPs in buckled black, who heard God clamoring to them in every turn of a leaf or cow loose among apple orchards in autumn…

Signs of Katje, and doubles too. One night he sat in a children's play house on an abandoned estate, feeding a fire from the hair of a blonde doll with lapis lazuli eyes. He kept those eyes. A few days later he traded them for a ride and half a boiled potato. Dogs barked far away, summerwind blew in the birches. He was on one of the main ar-terials of the spring's last dissolution and retreat. Somewhere nearby, one of Major-General Kammler's rocket units had together found corporate death, leaving in their crippled military rage pieces, modules, airframe sections, batteries rotting, paper secrets rained back into slurry. Slothrop follows. Any clue's good enough to hop a train for…

The doll's hair was human. The smell of it burning is horrible. Slothrop hears movement from the other side of the fire. A ratcheting noise-he grabs his blanket, ready to vault away out the empty window frame, expecting a grenade. Instead one of these little brightly painted German toys, an orangutan on wheels comes ki-ki-ki-ing into the firelight, spastic, head lolling, face in an idiot's grin, steel knuckles scraping the floor. It rolls nearly into the fire before the clockwork runs down, the wagging head coming to dead center to stare at Slothrop.

He feeds the fire another tuft of golden hair. "Evening."

Laughter, somewhere. A child. But old laughter.

"Come on out, I'm harmless."

The ape is followed by a tiny black crow with a red beak, also on wheels, hopping, cawing, flapping metal wings.

"Why are you burning my doll's hair?"

"Well, it's not her own hair, you know."

"Father said it belonged to a Russian Jewess."

"Why don't you come in to the fire?"

"Hurts my eyes." Winding again. Nothing moves. But a music box begins to play. The tune is minor and precise. "Dance with me."

"I can't see you."

"Here." Out of the fire's pale, a tiny frost-flower. He reaches and just manages to find her hand, to grasp her little waist. They begin their stately dance. He can't even tell if he's leading.

He never saw her face. She felt like voile and organdy.

"Nice dress."

"I wore it for my first communion." The fire died presently, leaving starlight and a faint glow over some town to the east, through windows whose panes were all gone. The music box still played, beyond the running time, it seemed, of an ordinary spring. Their feet moved over clouded, crumbled old glass, torn silks, bones of dead rabbits and kittens. The geometrical path took them among ballooning, ripped arrases, smelling of dust and an older bestiary than the one by the fire… unicorns, chimaeras… and what had he seen festooning the child-sized entranceway? Garlic bulbs? Wait-weren't they to keep away
vampires?
A faint garlic smell reached him exactly then, an inbreaking of Balkan blood on the air of his north, as he turned back to her to ask if she really was Katje, the lovely little Queen of Transylvania. But the music had run down. She had vaporized from his arms.

Well here he is skidded out onto the Zone like a planchette on a Ouija board, and what shows up inside the empty circle in his brain might string together into a message, might not, he'll just have to see. But he can feel a sensitive's fingers, resting lightly but sure on his days, and he thinks of them as Katje's.

He's still Ian Scuffling, war (peace?) correspondent, though back in British uniform these days, with plenty of time on these trains to hash over in his mind the information Mario Schweitar bootlegged for him back there in Zurich. There is a fat file on Imipolex G, and it seems to point to Nordhausen. The engineer on the customer end of the Imipolex contract was one Franz Polder. He came to Nordhausen in early '44, as the rocket was going into mass production. He was billeted in the Mittelwerke, an underground factory complex run largely by the SS. No word on where he went when the plant was evacuated in February and March. But Ian Scuffling, ace reporter, will be sure to find a clue down in the Mittelwerke.

Slothrop sat in the swaying car with thirty other cold and tattered souls, eyes all pupil, lips cratered with sores. They were singing, some of them. A lot of them kids. It is a Displaced Person's song, and

Slothrop will hear it often around the Zone, in the encampments, out on the road, in a dozen variations:

If you see a train this evening, Far away against the sky, Lie down in your wooden blanket, Sleep, and let the train go by.

Trains have called us, every midnight, From a thousand miles away, Trains that pass through empty cities, Trains that have no place to stay.

No one drives the locomotive, No one tends the staring light, Trains have never needed riders, Trains belong to bitter night.

Railway stations stand deserted, Rights-of-way lie clear and cold: What we left them, trains inherit, Trains go on, and we grow old.

Let them cry like cheated lovers, Let their cries find only wind. Trains are meant for night and ruin. We are meant for song, and sin.

Pipes are passing around. Smoke hangs from the damp wood slats, is whipped out cracks into the night slipstream. Children wheeze in their sleep, the rachitic babies cry… now and then the mothers exchange a word. Slothrop huddles inside his paper misfortune.

The Swiss firm's dossier on L. (for Laszlo) Jamf listed all his assets at the time he came to work in Zurich. Apparently he had sat-as token scientist-on the board of directors of the Grossli Chemical Corporation as late as 1924. Among stock options and pieces of this firm and that back in Germany-pieces to be gathered in over the next year or two by the octopus IG-was the record of a transaction between Jamf and Mr. Lyle Bland, of Boston, Massachusetts.

On the beam, Jackson. Lyle Bland is a name he knows, all right. And a name that also shows up often in the private records Jamf kept of his own business deals. Seems that Bland, during the early twenties, was heavily involved with the Hugo Stinnes operation in Germany. Stinnes, while he lasted, was the Wunderkind of European finance.

Based out of the Ruhr, where his family had been coal barons for generations, young Stinnes built up a good-sized empire of steel, gas, electric and water power, streetcars and barge lines before he was 30. During the World War he worked closely with Walter Rathenau, who was ramrodding the whole economy then. After the war Stinnes managed to put the horizontal electrical trust of Siemens-Schuchert together with the coal and iron supplies of the Rheinelbe Union into a super-cartel that was both horizontal and vertical, and to buy into just about everything else-shipyards, steamship lines, hotels, restaurants, forests, pulp mills, newspapers-meantime also speculating in currency, buying foreign money with marks borrowed from the Reichs-bank, driving the mark down and then paying off the loans at a fraction of the original figure. More than any one financier he was blamed for the Inflation. Those were the days when you carried marks around in wheelbarrows to your daily shopping and used them for toilet paper, assuming you had anything to shit. Stinnes's foreign connections went all over the world-Brazil, the East Indies, the United States-businessmen like Lyle Bland found his growth rate irresistible. The theory going around at the time was that Stinnes was conspiring with Krupp, Thyssen, and others to ruin the mark and so get Germany out of paying her war debts.

Eland's connection was vague. Jamf's records mention that he had negotiated contracts for supplying tons of private currency known as Notgeld to Stinnes and colleagues, as well as "Mefo bills" to the Weimar Republic-another of Hjalmar Schacht's many bookkeeping dodges to keep official records clear of any hint of weapons procurement banned under the terms of Versailles. Some of these banknote contracts were let to a certain Massachusetts paper mill, on whose board Lyle Bland happened to sit.

The name of this contractor was the Slothrop Paper Company.

He reads his name without that much surprise. It belongs here, as do the most minor details during deja vu. Instead of any sudden incidence of light (even in the shape of a human being: golden and monitory light), as he stares at these eight ink marks, there passes a disagreeable stomach episode, a dread tangible as vomit beginning to assert itself-the same vertigo that overtook him one day long ago in the Himmler-Spielsaal. A gasbag surrounds his head, rubbery, vast, pushing in from all sides, that feeling we know, yes, but… He is also getting a hardon, for no immediate reason. And there's that
smell
again, a smell from before his conscious memory begins, a soft and chemical smell, threatening, haunting, not a smell to be found out in