Gravity's Rainbow (100 page)

“We have to go where we go,” Andreas explains to him later. “Where Mukuru wants us
to go.”

“Oh. Oh, I thought you were out here looking for something, like everybody else. The
00000, what about that?”

“That is Mukuru’s. He hides it where he wants us to seek.”

“Look, I have a line on that S-Gerät.” He gives them Greta Erdmann’s story—the Heath,
the gasoline works, the name Blicero—

That
rings a bell. A gong, in fact. Everybody looks at everybody else. “Now,” Andreas
very careful, “that was the name of the German who commanded the battery that used
the S-Gerät?”

“I don’t know if they
used
it. Blicero took the woman to a factory where it was either put together, or a part
of it was made, from some plastic called Imipolex G.”

“And she didn’t say where.”

“Only ‘the Heath.’ See if you can find her husband. Miklos Thanatz. He may have seen
the actual firing, if there was one. Something out of the ordinary went on about then,
but I never got to find out what.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s O.K. Maybe you can tell me something now.” He brings out the mandala he found.
“What’s it mean?”

Andreas sets it on the ground, turns it till the K points northwest. “Klar,” touching
each letter, “Entlüftung, these are the female letters. North letters. In our villages
the women lived in huts on the northern half of the circle, the men on the south.
The village itself was a mandala. Klar is fertilization and birth, Entlüftung is the
breath, the soul. Zündung and Vorstufe are the male signs, the activities, fire and
preparation or building. And in the center, here, Hauptstufe. It is the pen where
we kept the sacred cattle. The souls of the ancestors. All the same here. Birth, soul,
fire, building. Male and female, together.

“The four fins of the Rocket made a cross, another mandala. Number one pointed the
way it would fly. Two for pitch, three for yaw and roll, four for pitch. Each opposite
pair of vanes worked together, and moved in opposite senses. Opposites together. You
can see how we might feel it speak to us, even if we don’t set one up on its fins
and worship it. But it was waiting for us when we came north to Germany so long ago . . .
even confused and uprooted as we were then, we
knew
that our destiny was tied up with its own. That we had been passed over by von Trotha’s
army so that we would find the Aggregat.”

Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes it will work like the mantra that Enzian
told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over), mba-kayere . . . a spell against Marvy
tonight, against Tchitcherine. A mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night. . . .

• • • • • • •

The Schwarzkommando have got to Achtfaden, but Tchitcherine has been to Närrisch.
It cost him Der Springer and three enlisted men in sick bay with deep bites. One severed
artery. Närrisch trying to go out Audie Murphy style. A knight for a bishop—Närrisch
under narco-hypnosis raved about the Holy Circle and the Rocketfin Cross. But the
blacks don’t know what else Närrisch knew:

(a) there was a radio link
from
the ground
to
the S-Gerät but not the other way round,

(b) there was an interference problem between a servo-actuator and a special oxygen
line running aft to the device from the main tank,

(c) Weissmann not only coordinated the S-Gerät project at Nordhausen, but also commanded
the battery that fired Rocket 00000.

Total espionage. Bit by bit this mosaic is growing. Tchitcherine, bureauless, carries
it around in his brain. Every chip and scrap belongs. More precious than Ravenna,
something goes erecting against this starch-colored sky. . . .

Radio link + oxygen = afterburner of some kind. Ordinarily it would. But Närrisch
also spoke of an asymmetry, a load inside near vane 3 that complicated roll and yaw
control almost impossibly.

Now wouldn’t an afterburner there also give an asymmetrical burning pattern, and heat
fluxes greater than the structure could take? Damn, why hasn’t he picked up
any
of the propulsion people? Do the Americans have them all?

Major Marvy, bowie knife in his teeth and two Thompsons propped on either hip, as
dumbfounded in the clearing as the rest of the attack party, is in no mood to talk.
Instead he is sulking, and drinking vodka out of Džabajev’s bottomless canteen. But
had
any propulsion engineers assigned to the S-Gerät showed up at Garmisch, Marvy would
have let him know. That’s the arrangement. Western intelligence, Russian trigger-fingers.

Oh, he
smells
Enzian . . . even now the black may be looking in out of the night. Tchitcherine
lights a cigarette, greenbluelavender flare settling to yellow . . . he holds the
flame longer than necessary, thinking
let him. He won’t. I wouldn’t. Well . . . maybe I would. . . .

But it’s come a quantum-jump closer tonight. They are going to meet. It will be over
the S-Gerät, real or fantasized, working or wasted—they will meet face to face.
Then . . .

Meantime, who’s the mysterious Soviet intelligence agent that Marvy talked to? Paranoia
for you here, Tchitcherine. Maybe Moscow’s been tipped to your vendetta. If they are
gathering evidence for a court-martial, it won’t be any Central Asia this time. It’ll
be Last Secretary to the embassy in Atlantis. You can negotiate narcotics arrests
for all the drowned Russian sailors, expedite your own father’s visas to far Lemuria,
to the sun-resorts of Sargasso where the bones come up to lie and bleach and mock
the passing ships. And just before he rides out on the noon current, brochures tucked
between ribs, traveler’s checks wadded in a skull-socket, tell him of his black son—tell
him about the day with Enzian in the creeping edge of autumn, cold as the mortal cold
of an orange kept under shaved ice on the terrace of the hotel in Barcelona, si me
quieres escribir you already know where I’ll be staying . . . cold at the tip of your
peeling-thumb, terminally-approaching cold. . . .

“Listen,” Marvy by now a little drunk and peevish, “when we gonna
git
those ’suckers?”

“It’s coming, you can be sure.”

“Butchyew don’t know the kinda pressure
I’m
gettin’ f’m Paris! F’m headquarters! It’s fantastic! There’s people in high places
wanna wipe thim ’suckers out,
now.
All’s they got to do’s mash on a button ’n’ I never git to see no Mexican whores
again’s long’s I
live.
Now you can
see
what these coons’re try’n’ t’do,
somebody
got to stop them ’fore they
do, shit—”

“This intelligence man you saw—both our governments easily could have the same policy—”

“You ain’t got General Electric breathin’ over your shoulder, fella. Dillon, Reed . . .
Standard Awl . . . shit. . . .”

“But that’s just what you folks
need
,” Bloody Chiclitz interjects. “Get some business people in there to run it right,
instead of having the government run everything. Your left hand doesn’t know what
your
right
hand’s
doing!
You know
that?
”

What’s this? A political debate now? Not enough humiliation missing the Schwarzkommando,
no, you didn’t think you were going to get off
that
easy. . . .

“A-and what about Herbert Hoover?” Chiclitz is screaming. “He came over and
fed
you people, when you were starving! They
love
Hoover over here—”

“Yes—” Tchitcherine breaks in: “what
is
General Electric doing out here, by the way?”

A friendly wink from Major Marvy. “Mister Swope was ace buddies with old FDR, you
see. Electric Charlie’s in there now, but Swope, he was one-thim Brain Trusters. Jews,
most of’m. But Swope’s O.K. Now GE has connections with Siemens over here, they worked
on the V-2 guidance, remember—”

“Swope’s a Jew,” sez Chiclitz.

“Naahh—Bloody, yew don’ know whatcher talkin’ about—”

“I’m
telling
you—” They fall into a drawling juicers’ argument over the ethnic background of the
ex-chairman of GE, full of poison and sluggish hate. Tchitcherine listens with only
one ear. An episode of vertigo is creeping on him. Didn’t Närrisch, under the drug,
mention a Siemens representative at the S-Gerät meetings in Nordhausen? yes. And an
IG man, too. Didn’t Carl Schmitz of the IG sit on Siemens’s board of directors?

No use asking Marvy. He is too drunk by now to stay on any subject. “Ya know I was
purty ignorant whin Uh come out here. Sheeit, I used t’think I. G. Farben was somebody’s
name, you know, a
fella—
hello, this I. G. Farben? No, this is his wife,
Mizzus
Farben!
Yaaah
-ha-ha-ha!”

Bloody Chiclitz is off on his Eleanor Roosevelt routine. “The othuh day, my son Idiot—uh,
Elliot—and I, were baking cookies. Cookies to send to the boys overseas. When the
boys received the cookies we sent them, they would bake cookies, and send some back
to us. That way,
everybody
gets his cookies!”

Oh, Wimpe. Old V-Mann, were you right? Is your IG to be
the very model of nations?

So it comes to Tchitcherine here in the clearing with these two fools on either side
of him, among the debris of some numberless battery’s last stand, cables paralyzed
where winch-operators levered them to stillness, beer bottles lying exactly where
they were thrown by the last men on the last night, everything testifying so purely
to the shape of defeat, of operational death.

“Say, there.” It appears to be a very large white Finger, addressing him. Its Fingernail
is beautifully manicured: as it rotates for him, it slowly reveals a Fingerprint that
might well be an aerial view of the City Dactylic, that city of the future where every
soul is known, and there is noplace to hide. Right now, joints moving with soft, hydraulic
sounds, the Finger is calling Tchitcherine’s attention to—

A Rocket-cartel.
A structure cutting across every agency human and paper that ever touched it. Even
to Russia . . . Russia bought from Krupp, didn’t she, from Siemens, the IG. . . .

Are there arrangements Stalin won’t admit . . . doesn’t even
know about?
Oh, a State begins to take form in the stateless German night, a State that spans
oceans and surface politics, sovereign as the International or the Church of Rome,
and the Rocket is its soul. IG Raketen. Circus-bright, poster reds and yellows, rings
beyond counting, all going at once. The stately Finger twirls among them all. Tchitcherine
is certain. Not so much on outward evidence he has found moving through the Zone as
out of a personal doom he carries with him—always to be held at the edges of revelations.
It happened first with the Kirghiz Light, and his only illumination then was that
fear would always keep him from going all the way in. He will never get further than
the edge of this meta-cartel which has made itself known tonight, this Rocketstate
whose borders he cannot cross. . . .

He will miss the Light, but not the Finger. Sadly, most sadly, everyone else seems
to be in on it. Every scavenger out here is in IG Raketen’s employ. All except for
himself, and Enzian. His brother, Enzian. No wonder They’re after the Schwarzkommando . . .
and. . . .

And when They find out I’m not what They think . . . and why is Marvy looking at me
like this now, his eyes bulging . . . oh, don’t panic, don’t feed his insanity, he’s
just this side of . . . of . . .

• • • • • • •

To Cuxhaven, the summer in deceleration, floating on to Cuxhaven. The meadows hum.
Rain clatters in crescent swoops through the reeds. Sheep, and rarely a few dark northern
deer, will come down to browse for seaweed at the shore which is never quite sea nor
quite sand, but held in misty ambivalence by the sun. . . . So Slothrop is borne,
afloat on the water-leas. Like signals set out for lost travelers, shapes keep repeating
for him, Zonal shapes he will allow to enter but won’t interpret, not any more. Just
as well, probably. The most persistent of these, which seem to show up at the least
real times of day, are the stairstep gables that front so many of these ancient north-German
buildings, rising, backlit, a strangely
wet
gray as if risen out of the sea, over these straight and very low horizons. They
hold shape, they endure, like monuments to Analysis. Three hundred years ago mathematicians
were learning to break the cannonball’s rise and fall into stairsteps of range and
height, Δx and Δy, allowing them to grow smaller and smaller, approaching zero as
armies of eternally shrinking midgets galloped upstairs and down again, the patter
of their diminishing feet growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound. This
analytic legacy has been handed down intact—it brought the technicians at Peenemünde
to peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, Δx by Δy, flightless
themselves . . . film and calculus, both pornographies of flight. Reminders of impotence
and abstraction, the stone Treppengiebel shapes, whole and shattered, appear now over
the green plains, and last a while, and go away: in their shadows children with hair
like hay are playing Himmel and Hölle, jumping village pavements from heaven to hell
to heaven by increments, sometimes letting Slothrop have a turn, sometimes vanishing
back into their dark gassen where elder houses, many-windowed and sorrowing, bow perpetually
to the neighbor across the way, nearly touching overhead, only a thin lead of milk
sky between.