GRAVITY RAINBOW (89 page)

Out the slats of the car, the sky is darkening, the clouds turning orange, tangerine, tropical. Otto and his girl are murmuring in one corner. "Scrub that one," Narrisch with sour mouth. "Five minutes away from his mother, he's a Casanova."

Otto is earnestly explaining his views on the Mother Conspiracy. It's not often a sympathetic girl will listen. The Mothers get together once a year, in secret, at these giant conventions, and exchange information. Recipes, games, key phrases to use on their children. "What did yours use to say when she wanted to make you feel guilty?"

" 'I've worked my fingers to the bone!' " sez the girl.

"Right! And she used to cook those horrible casseroles, w-with the potatoes, and onions-"

"And ham! Little pieces of ham-"

"You see, you see? That
can't
be accidental! They have a contest, for Mother of the Year, breast-feeding, diaper-changing, they
time
them, casserole competitions, ja-then, toward the end, they actually begin to use the
children.
The State Prosecutor comes out on stage. 'In a moment, Albrecht, we are going to bring your mother on. Here is a Luger, fully loaded. The State will guarantee you absolute immunity from prosecution. Do whatever you wish to do-anything at all. Good luck, my boy.' The pistols are loaded with blanks, naturlich, but the unfortunate child does not know this. Only the mothers who get shot at qualify for the finals. Here they bring in psychiatrists, and judges sit with stopwatches to see how quickly the children will crack. 'Now then, Olga, wasn't it
nice
of Mutti to break up your affair with that long-haired poet?' 'We understand your mother and you are, ah,
quite
close,
Hermann. Remember the time she caught you
masturbating into
her glove?
Eh?' Hospital attendants stand by to drag the children off, drooling, screaming, having clonic convulsions. Finally there is only one Mother left on stage. They put the traditional flowered hat on her head, and hand her the orb and scepter, which in this case are a gilded pot roast and a whip, and the orchestra plays
Tristan und Isolde.
"

They come out into the last of the twilight. Just a sleepy summer evening in Peenemunde. A flight of ducks passes overhead, going west. No Russians around. A single bulb burns over the entrance to the cargo shed. Otto and his girl wander hand in hand along the dock. An ape comes scampering up to take Otto's free hand. To north and south the Baltic keeps unrolling low white waves. "What's happening," asks the clarinet player. "Have a banana," tuba player with his mouth full has a good-sized bunch stowed in the bell of his ax.

Night is down by the time they get started. They head inland, Springer's crashout party, along the railroad tracks. Pine trees tower to either side of the cinder embankment. Ahead fat pinto rabbits scurry, only their white patches visible, no reason to suppose rabbits is what they are. Otto's friend Hilde comes gracefully down out of the woods with his cap that she's filled to the brim with round berries, dusty blue, sweet. The musicians are packing vodka bottles in every available pocket. That's tonight's meal, and Hilde kneeling alone at the berry bushes has whispered grace for them all. In the marshes now you can hear the first peepers start up, and the high-frequency squeals of a bat out hunting, and some wind in the upper trees. Also, from farther away, a shot or two.

"Are they firing at my apes?" Haftung chatters. "That's 2000 marks apiece. How am I ever going to get that back?"

A family of mice go dashing across the tracks, and right over Slothrop's feet. "I was expecting just a big cemetery. I guess not."

"When we came we only cleared out what we needed to," Narrisch recalls. "Most of it stayed-the forest, the life… there are probably still deer up in there, someplace. Big fellows with dark antlers. And the birds-snipes, coots, wild geese-the noise from the testing drove them out to sea, but they'd always come back in when it was quiet again."

Before they reach even the airfield they have to scatter twice into the woods, first for a security patrol, then for a steam-engine come puffing up from Peenemunde-East, its headlight cutting through a fine nighthaze, some troops with automatics hanging on to steps and ladders. Steel grinding and creaking by in the night, the men shooting the breeze as they pass, no feeling of tension to it. "They might be after us anyway," Narrisch whispers. "Come on."

Through a patch of woods, and then cautiously out onto the open airfield. A sharp sickle of moon has risen. Apes scuttle along in the bonelight, arms dangling. It's a nervous passage. Everybody's a perfect target, there's no cover except for airplanes strafed where they stood into relics-rusted stringers, burned paint, gullwings driven back into the earth. Lights from the old Luftwaffe complex glow to the south. Trucks purr now and then along the road at the far edge of the airfield. There's singing from the barracks, and someplace a radio. The evening news from somewhere. Too far to hear the words or even the language, only the studious monotone: the news, Slothrop, going on without you…

They make it across the tarmac to the road, and crouch in a drainage ditch, listening for traffic. Suddenly, to their left, yellow runway lights come on, a double row of them chaining to the sea, brightness bouncing up and down a couple-three times before it settles in. "Somebody coming in," Slothrop guesses.

"More likely going out," snaps Narrisch. "We'd better hurry."

Back in the pine woods now, heading up a road of packed dirt toward Test Stand VII, they start to pick up stray girls and chimpanzees. Pine smells wrap them: old needles lie at the margins of the road. Downhill, lights appear as the trees begin thinning out, then the test-stand area comes in view. The assembly building is something like a hundred feet high-it blocks out the stars. There's a tall bright band where sliding doors are open, and light scatters outside. Narrisch grabs Slothrop's arm. "It looks like the major's car. And the motor's running." Lotta searchlights, too, set up on fences topped with barbed wire-also what look like a division of security roaming around.

"Guess this is it," Slothrop a little nervous.

"Ssh." Sound of a plane, a single-engine fighter, circling to make its approach low over the pines. "Not much time." Narrisch gathers the others around and issues his orders. Girls are to go in from the front, singing, dancing, vamping the woman-hungry barbarians. Otto will try to knock out the car, Haftung will get everybody rounded up and ready to rendezvous with the boat.

"Tits 'n' ass," mutter the girls, "tits 'n' ass. That's all we are around here."

"Ah, shaddap," snarls G. M. B. Haftung, which is his usual way of dealing with the help.

"Meanwhile," continues Narrisch, "Slothrop and I will go in after Springer. When we have him, we'll try to get them to shoot. That will be
your
signal to run like hell."

"Oh, definitely some shooting," sez Slothrop, "a-and how about this?" He has just had a brilliant idea: fake Molotov cocktails, a switch on Saure Bummer's old routine. He holds up a vodka bottle, pointing and grinning.

"But that stuff won't even hardly burn."

"But they'll
think
it's gasoline," beginning to pluck ostrich feathers from the costume of the nearest girl. "And just imagine how secure it will make
us
feel."

"Felix," the clarinet player asks the tuba player, "what have we fallen among?" Felix is eating a banana, and living for the moment. Presently he has wandered off in the woods with the rest of the band, where they can be heard moving around in circles, tootling and blat-ting at each other. Hilde and Slothrop are making Phony Phirebombs, the other girls have taken off, Zitz und Arsch, downslope.

"So we'll present a plausible threat," Narrisch whispers, "we'll need matches. Who's got matches?"

"Not me."

"Me either."

"Gee, my lighter's out of flints."

"Kot," Narrisch throwing up his hands, "Kot," walking off into the trees, where he collides with Felix and his tuba. "You don't have any matches either."

"I have a Zippo," replies Felix, "and two Corona Coronas, from the American officer's club in-"

A minute later, Narrisch and Slothrop, hands each cupped around the coal of one of Havana's finest, are sneaky-Peteing like two cats in a cartoon off toward Test Stand VII, with vodka-bottle bombs stuck in their belts and ostrich-feather wicks trailing behind in the sea breeze.

The plan is to climb the pine-topped sand-and-scrub embankment around the test stand, and come in on the Assembly Building from behind.

Now Narrisch here's a guidance man, a guidance man is he. And ev'ry day at Rocket Noon, there's death, and revelry… But Narrisch has managed, in his time, to avoid nearly all of it.

In fact, no two people have been so ill-equipped to approach a holy Center since the days of Tchitcherine and Dzaqyp Qulan, hauling ass over the steppe, into the North, to find their Kirghiz Light. That's about ten years' gap. Giving this pastime about the same vulnerability to record-breakers as baseball, a sport also well-spidered with white suggestions of the sinister.

Holy-Center-Approaching is soon to be the number one Zonal pastime. Its balmy heyday is nearly on it. Soon more champions, adepts, magicians of all ranks and orders will be in the field than ever before in the history of the game. The sun will rule all enterprise, if it be honest and sporting. The Gauss curve will herniate toward the excellent. And tankers the likes of Narrisch and Slothrop here will have already been weeded out.

Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the
Anubis
era, has begun to thin, to scatter. "Personal density," Kurt Mondaugen in his Peene-munde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, "is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth."

"Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your
now.
It is the familiar "At" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even-as Slothrop now-what you're doing
here,
at the base of this colossal curved embankment…

"Uh," he turns slackmouth to Narrisch, "what are we…"

"What are we what?"

"What?"

"You said, 'What are we…,' then you stopped."

"Oh. Gee, that was a funny thing to say."

As for Narrisch, he's too locked in to business. He has never seen this great Ellipse any other way but the way he was meant to. Greta Erdmann, on the contrary, saw the rust-colored eminences here bow, exactly as they did once, in expectancy, faces hooded, smooth cowlings

of Nothing… each time Thanatz brought the whip down on her skin, she was taken, off on another penetration toward the Center: each lash, a little farther in… till someday, she knows, she will have
that first glimpse of it,
and from then on it will be an absolute need, a ruling target…
wh-wh-wh-whack
the boneblack trestling of water towers above, bent to the great rim, visible above the trees in light that's bleak and bruise-purple as Peenemunde sunsets in the chill slow firing-weather… a long look from the top of some known Low Country dike into a sky flowing so even and yellowed a brown that the sun could be anywhere behind it, and the crosses of the turning windmills could be spoke-blurs of the terrible Rider himself, Slothrop's Rider, his two explosions up there, his celestial cyclist-

No, but even
That
only flickers now briefly across a bit of Slo-thropian lobe-terrain, and melts into its surface, vanishing. So here passes for him one more negligence… and likewise groweth his Preterition sure… There is no good reason to hope for any turn, any surprise
I-see-it,
not from Slothrop. Here he is, scaling the walls of an honest ceremonial plexus, set down on a good enough vision of what's shadowless noon and what isn't. But oh, Egg the flying Rocket hatched from, navel of the 50-meter radio sky, all proper ghosts of place-forgive him his numbness, his glozing neutrality. Forgive the fist that doesn't tighten in his chest, the heart that can't stiffen in any greeting… Forgive him as you forgave Tchitcherine at the Kirghiz Light… Better days are coming.

Slothrop is listening to faraway peripatetic tuba and clarinet being joined in on now by trombone and tenor sax, trying to pick up a tune… and to the bursts of laughter from soldiers and girls… sounds like a party down there… maybe even some stag dames… "Say, why don't we, uh… what was your-" Narrisch, leather scarecrow, trying to ignore Slothrop's behavior, has decided to dismantle his firebomb: he uncorks the vodka and waves it under his nose before taking a belt. He beams, cynical, salesmanwise, up at Slothrop. "Here." A silence under the white wall.

"Oh, yes I was thinking it was gasoline, but then it's fake, so it's really vodka, right?"

But just over the embankment, down in the arena, what might that have been just now, waiting in this broken moonlight, camouflage paint from fins to point crazed into jigsaw… is it, then, really never to find you again? Not even in your worst times of night, with pencil words on your page only At from the things they stand for? And inside the victim is twitching, fingering beads, touching wood, avoiding any Operational Word. Will it really never come to take you, now?

Near the water towers, they have started to climb, up toward the rim. Sand leaks into their shoes and hisses away down the slope. At the top, back through the trees, they get a quick look at the lighted runway, the fighter now landed, surrounded by groundcrew shadows fueling, servicing, turning her around. Down the peninsula lights glow in patches, curves, zigzags, but over on this side, from the old Development Works south, it's pitch black.

They push through pine branches and down again, into the Egg, sacked of its German hardware, long converted to a Russian motor pool. The corner of the huge Assembly Building, as they come down, rises to face them across a hundred yards of jeeps and lorries. Down to the right is a three- or four-level test frame with a round, kind of quonset top, and underneath the frame is a long pit shaped like a shallow V. "Cooling duct," according to Narrisch. "They're probably under there. We have to go in through here."