Gravity's Rainbow (52 page)

One of the sweetest fruits of victory, after sleep and looting, must be the chance
to ignore no-parking signs. There are struck Ps in circles up all over the place,
nailed on trees, wired on girderwork, but the main tunnel entrances are pretty well
blocked with vehicles by the time the dimpled Mercedes arrives. “Shit,” hollers the
young tanker, turns off his engine and leaves the German short at no particular angle
on the broad muddy apron. Leaving keys in the car too, Slothrop’s learning to notice
items like this. . . .

The entrance to the tunnel is shaped like a parabola. The Albert Speer Touch. Somebody
during the thirties was big on parabolas anyhow, and Albert Speer was in charge of
the New German Architecture then, and later he went on to become Minister of Munitions,
and nominal chief customer for the A4. This parabola here happens to be the inspiration
of a Speer disciple named Etzel Ölsch. He had noted this parabola shape around on
Autobahn overpasses, sports stadiums u.s.w., and thought it was the most contemporary
thing he’d ever seen. Imagine his astonishment on finding that the parabola was also
the shape of the path intended for the rocket through space. (What he actually said
was, “Oh, that’s nice.”) It was his mother who’d named him after Attila the Hun, and
nobody ever found out why. His parabola has a high loft to it, and the railroad tracks
run in underneath, steel into shadows. Battened cloth camouflage furls back at the
edges. The mountain goes sloping away above, rock cropping out here and there among
the bushes and the trees.

Slothrop presents his sooper dooper SHAEF pass, signed off by Ike and even more authentic,
by the colonel heading up the American “Special Mission V-2” out of Paris. A Waxwing
specialty of the house. B Company, 47th Armored Infantry, 5th Armored Division appears
to be up to something besides security for this place. Slothrop is shrugged on through.
There is a lot of moseying, drawling, and country humor around here. Somebody must’ve
been picking his nose. A couple days later Slothrop will find a dried piece of snot
on the card, a crystal brown visa for Nordhausen.

In past the white-topped guard towers. Transformers buzz through the spring morning.
Someplace chains rattle and a tailgate drops. Between ruts, high places, ridges of
mud are beginning to dry out in the sun, to lighten and crumble. Nearby the loud wake-up
yawn and stretch of a train whistle cuts loose. In past a heap of bright metal spheres
in daylight, with a comical sign
PLEEZ
NO
SQUEEZ-A
DA
OXYGEN-A
UNIT
,
EH
? how long, how long you sfacim-a dis country. . . . In under parabola and parable,
straight into the mountain, sunlight gone, into the cold, the dark, the long echoes
of the Mittelwerke.

There is that not-so-rare personality disorder known as Tannhäuserism. Some of us
love to be taken under mountains, and not always with horny expectations—Venus, Frau
Holda, her sexual delights—no, many come, actually, for the gnomes, the critters smaller
than you, for the sepulchral way time stretches along your hooded strolls down here,
quietly through courtyards that go for miles, with no anxiety about getting lost . . .
no one stares, no one is waiting to judge you . . . out of the public eye . . . even
a Minnesinger needs to be alone . . . long cloudy-day indoor walks . . . the comfort
of a closed place, where everyone is in complete agreement about Death.

Slothrop knows this place. Not so much from maps he had to study at the Casino as
knowing it in the way you know
someone is there. . . .

Plant generators are still supplying power. Rarely a bare bulb will hollow out a region
of light. As darkness is mined and transported from place to place like marble, so
the light bulb is the chisel that delivers it from its inertia, and has become one
of the great secret ikons of the Humility, the multitudes who are passed over by God
and History. When the Dora prisoners went on their rampage, the light bulbs in the
rocket works were the first to go: before food, before the delights to be looted out
of the medical lockers and the hospital pharmacy in Stollen Number 1, these breakable,
socketless (in Germany the word for electric socket is also the word for Mother—so,
motherless too) images were what the “liberated” had to take. . . .

The basic layout of the plant was another inspiration of Etzel Ölsch, a Nazi inspiration
like the parabola, but again also a symbol belonging to the Rocket. Picture the letters
SS each stretched lengthwise a bit. These are the two main tunnels, driven well over
a mile into the mountain. Or picture a ladder with a slight S-shaped ripple in it,
lying flat: 44 runglike Stollen or cross-tunnels, linking the two main ones. A couple
hundred feet of rock mountain, at the deepest, press down overhead.

But the shape is more than an elongated SS. Apprentice Hupla comes running in one
day to tell the architect. “Master!” he’s yelling, “Master!” Ölsch has taken up quarters
in the Mittelwerke, insulated from the factory down a few private drifts that don’t
appear on any map of the place. He’s getting into a grandiose idea of what an architect’s
life should be down here, insisting now on the title “Master” from all his helpers.
That isn’t his only eccentricity, either. Last three designs he proposed to the Führer
all were visually in the groove, beautifully New German, except that none of the buildings
will stay up. They look normal enough, but they are designed to fall down, like fat
men at the opera falling asleep into someone’s lap, shortly after the last rivet is
driven, the last forms removed from the newly set allegorical statue. This is Ölsch’s
“deathwish” problem here, as the little helpers call it: it rates a lot of gossip
in the commissary at meals, and beside the coffee urns out on the gloomy stone loading
docks. . . . It’s well after sunset now, each desk in this vaulted, almost outdoor
bay has its own incandescent light on. The gnomes sit out here, at night, with only
their bulbs shining conditionally, precariously . . . it all might go dark so easily,
in the next second. . . . Each gnome works in front of his drawing board. They’re
working late. There’s a deadline—it’s not clear if they’re working overtime to meet
it, or if they have already failed and are here as punishment. Back in his office,
Etzel Ölsch can be heard singing. Tasteless, low beer-hall songs. Now he is lighting
a cigar. Both he and the gnome Apprentice Hupla who’s just run in know that this is
an exploding cigar, put in his humidor as a revolutionary gesture by persons unknown
but so without power that it doesn’t matter—“Wait, Master, don’t light it—Master,
put it out, please, it’s an
exploding cigar!
”

“Proceed, Hupla, with the intelligence that prompted your rather rude entrance.”

“But—”

“Hupla . . .” Puffing masterful clouds of cigar smoke.

“It-it’s about the shape of the tunnels here, Master.”

“Don’t flinch like that. I based that design on the double lightning-stroke, Hupla—the
SS emblem.”

“But it’s also a double integral sign! Did you know that?”

“Ah. Yes: Summe, Summe, as Leibniz said. Well, isn’t that—”

BLAM.

All right. But Etzel Ölsch’s genius was to be fatally receptive to imagery associated
with the Rocket. In the static space of the architect, he might’ve used a double integral
now and then, early in his career, to find volumes under surfaces whose equations
were known—masses, moments, centers of gravity. But it’s been years since he’s had
to do with anything that basic. Most of his calculating these days is with marks and
pfennigs, not functions of idealistic r and
θ
, naïve x and y. . . . But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral
has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that
time falls away: change is stilled. . . . “Meters per second” will integrate to “meters.”
The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was
never launched. It will never fall.

In the guidance, this is what happened: a little pendulum was kept centered by a magnetic
field. During launch, pulling
gs
, the pendulum would swing aft, off center. It had a coil attached to it. When the
coil moved through the magnetic field, electric current flowed in the coil. As the
pendulum was pushed off center by the acceleration of launch, current would flow—the
more acceleration, the more flow. So the Rocket, on its own side of the flight, sensed
acceleration first. Men, tracking it, sensed position or distance first. To get to
distance from acceleration, the Rocket had to integrate twice—needed a moving coil,
transformers, electrolytic cell, bridge of diodes, one tetrode (an extra grid to screen
away capacitive coupling inside the tube), an elaborate dance of design precautions
to get to what human eyes saw first of all—the distance along the flight path.

There was that backward symmetry again, one that Pointsman missed, but Katje didn’t.
“A life of its own,” she said. Slothrop remembers her reluctant smile, the Mediterranean
afternoon, the peeling twist of a eucalyptus trunk, the same pink, in that weakening
light, as the American officer’s trousers Slothrop wore once upon a time, and the
acid, the pungent smell of the leaves. . . . The current, flowing in the coil, passed
a Wheatstone bridge and charged up a capacitor. The charge was the time integral of
the current flowing in the coil and bridge. Advanced versions of this so-called “IG”
guidance integrated twice, so that the charge gathering on one side of the capacitor
grew directly as the distance the Rocket had traveled. Before launch, the other side
of the cell had been charged up to a level representing the distance to a particular
point out in space. Brennschluss exactly here would make the Rocket go on to hit 1000
yards east of Waterloo Station. At the instant the charge (B
_iL
) accumulating in flight equaled the preset charge (A
_iL
) on the other side, the capacitor discharged. A switch closed, fuel cut off, burning
ended. The Rocket was on its own.

That is one meaning of the shape of the tunnels down here in the Mittelwerke. Another
may be the ancient rune that stands for the yew tree, or Death. The double integral
stood in Etzel Ölsch’s subconscious for the method of finding hidden centers, inertias
unknown, as if monoliths had been left for him in the twilight, left behind by some
corrupted idea of “Civilization,” in which eagles cast in concrete stand ten meters
high at the corners of the stadiums where the people, a corrupted idea of “the People”
are gathering, in which birds do not fly, in which imaginary centers far down inside
the solid fatality of stone are thought of not as “heart,” “plexus,” “consciousness,”
(the voice speaking here grows more ironic, closer to tears which are not all theatre,
as the list goes on . . .) “Sanctuary,” “dream of motion,” “cyst of the eternal present,”
or “Gravity’s gray eminence among the councils of the living stone.” No, as none of
these, but instead a point in space, a point hung precise as the point where burning
must end, never launched, never to fall. And what is the specific shape whose center
of gravity is the Brennschluss Point? Don’t jump at an infinite number of possible
shapes. There’s only one. It is most likely an interface between one order of things
and another. There’s a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up
there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named
for it . . . but they lie so close to Earth that from many places they can’t be seen
at all, and from different places inside the zone where they can be seen, they fall
into completely different patterns. . . .

Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep, which is where Slothrop
wishes he were now—all the way back with Katje, even lost as he might feel again,
even more vulnerable than now—even (because he still honestly misses her), preserved
by accident, in ways he can’t help seeing, accident whose own much colder honesty
each lover has only the other to protect him from. . . .
Could
he live like that? Would They ever agree to let him and Katje live like that? He’s
had nothing to say to anyone about her. It’s not the gentlemanly reflex that made
him edit, switch names, insert fantasies into the yarns he spun for Tantivy back in
the ACHTUNG office, so much as the primitive fear of having a soul captured by a likeness
of image or by a name. . . . He wants to preserve what he can of her from Their several
entropies, from Their softsoaping and Their money: maybe he thinks that if he can
do it for her he can also do it for himself . . . although that’s awful close to nobility
for Slothrop and The Penis He Thought Was His Own.

In the sheet-metal ducting that snakes like a spine along the overhead, plant ventilation
moans. Now and then it sounds like voices. Traffic from somewhere remote. It’s not
as if they were discussing Slothrop
directly
, understand. But he wishes he could hear it better. . . .

Lakes of light, portages of darkness. The concrete facing of the tunnel has given
way to whitewash over chunky fault-surfaces, phony-looking as the inside of an amusement-park
cave. Entrances to cross-tunnels slip by like tuned pipes with an airflow at their
mouths . . . once upon a time lathes did screech, playful machinists had shootouts
with little brass squirt cans of cutting oil . . . knuckles were bloodied against
grinding wheels, pores, creases and quicks were stabbed by the fine splinters of steel . . .
tubeworks of alloy and glass contracted tinkling in air that felt like the dead of
winter, and amber light raced in phalanx among the small neon bulbs. Once, all this
did happen. It is hard down here in the Mittelwerke to live in the present for very
long. The nostalgia you feel is not your own, but it’s potent. All the objects have
grown still, drowned, enfeebled with evening, terminal evening. Tough skins of oxides,
some only a molecule thick, shroud the metal surfaces, fade out human reflection.
Straw-colored drive belts of polyvinyl alcohol sag and release their last traces of
industrial odor. Though found adrift and haunted, full of signs of recent human tenancy,
this is not the legendary ship
Marie-Celeste
—it isn’t bounded so neatly, these tracks underfoot run away fore and aft into all
stilled Europe, and our flesh doesn’t sweat and pimple here for the domestic mysteries,
the attic horror of What Might Have Happened so much as for our knowledge of what
likely
did happen
 . . . it was always easy, in open and lonely places, to be visited by Panic wilderness
fear, but these are the urban fantods here, that come to get you when you are lost
or isolate inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no time-traveling
capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and the absence that fill a great
railway shed after the capital has been evacuated, and the goat-god’s city cousins
wait for you at the edges of the light, playing the tunes they always played, but
more audible now, because everything else has gone away or fallen silent . . . barn-swallow
souls, fashioned of brown twilight, rise toward the white ceilings . . . they are
unique to the Zone, they answer to the new Uncertainty. Ghosts used to be either likenesses
of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred
badly. The status of the name you miss, love, and search for now has grown ambiguous
and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence—some still
live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses
will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images
of the Uncertainty. . . .