Gravity's Rainbow (93 page)

The Moss Creature stirs. It has crept an alarming distance closer since Pavel last
looked. A sudden overflow of smooth cherry-red down the mountainside to his right
(were there mountains? Where did the
mountains
come from?) and at once he knows, beyond deception or hope, that he has slipped into
the North, that inhaling the breath of the first ancestor has taken him over into
the terrible land, as he must have known it would, step by step over these last years,
impossible to turn (what
is
turn? don’t know which way to begin to move . . . don’t know
how
to move . . .) too late, miles and changes too late.

And now his head in Christian’s steel notch at 300 yards. Suddenly, this awful branching:
the two possibilities already beginning to fly apart at the speed of thought—a new
Zone in any case, now, whether Christian fires or refrains—jump, choose—

Enzian tries his best—knocks the barrel aside, has a few unpleasant words for the
young revenger. But both men saw the new branches. The Zone, again, has just changed,
and they are already on, into the new one. . . .

They ride on up to where Pavel’s sniffing synthetic gasoline on the side of the lampless
beige hill, under the tanks snailing whitely to heaven, here he is, one of the IG’s
happiest customers. . . .

Does Pavel know something the rest of us don’t? If the IG wanted this to be a cover-up
for something else, why not the breath of Mukuru?

Enzian can project himself back in the Erdschweinhöhle starting a new file on the
IG—see it getting fatter and fatter as the interlocks develop, the books are audited,
the witnesses come—not forward but sideways at least, always in shadows. . . . And
if it should prove not to be the Rocket, not the IG? Why then he’ll have to go on
won’t he, on to something else—the Volkswagen factory, the pharmaceutical companies . . .
and if it isn’t even in Germany then he’ll have to start in America, or in Russia,
and if he dies before they find the True Text to study, then there’ll have to be machinery
for others to carry it on. . . . Say, that’s a swell idea—call the whole Erdschweinhöhle
together, get up there say,
My people, I have had a vision
 . . . no no but there
will
need to be more staff, if it’s to be that big a search, quiet shifting of resources
away from the Rocket, diversifying while making it look like an organic growth . . .
and who to bring in on it? Christian—can he use the boy now, Christian’s anger, will
It
use Christian regardless to help suppress Ombindi . . . because if the Schwarzkommando
mission in the Zone has been truly revealed just now, then there’ll have to be something
done about Ombindi, Empty Ones, doctrine of the Final Zero. More staff will mean more
Zone-Hereros, not fewer—more information coming in about the enemy, more connections
made will mean a greater threat to the people, will mean the tribal numbers will have
to increase. Is there an alternative? no . . . he would rather ignore Ombindi but
the needs of this new Search will not allow him that comfort now . . . the search
will rule. . . .

Somewhere, among the wastes of the World, is the key that will bring us back, restore
us to our Earth and to our freedom.

Andreas has been talking with Pavel, who is still out with his strangely lighted companions,
playing at this and that. Presently, with love and subterfuge, he gets the address
of Ombindi’s medical connection.

Enzian knows who he is. “Saint Pauli. Let’s go. Your machine running a little rough,
Christian?”

“Don’t sweet-talk me,” Christian explodes, “you don’t care about me, you don’t care
about my sister, she’s dying out there and you just keep plugging her into your equations—you—play
this holy-father routine and inside that ego you don’t even hate us, you don’t care,
you’re not even
connected
any more—” He swings his fist at Enzian’s face. He’s crying.

Enzian stands there and lets him. It hurts. He lets it. His meekness isn’t all politics,
either. He can feel enough of the bone truth in what Christian said—maybe not all
of it, not all at once, but enough.

“You just connected. Can we go after her, now?”

• • • • • • •

Here is the good Frau, leaning over Slothrop from way down at the foot of the bed:
her eye bright and cocky as a parrot’s, a big white boss of eye cantilevered on old
prickly arms and legs, a black kerchief above the roll of her pompadour in mourning
for all her Hanseatic dead, underneath heaving iron fleets, under waves of the Baltic
keel-edged and gray, dead under the fleets of waves, the prairies of the sea. . . .

Next thing is Gerhardt von Göll’s foot nudging Slothrop in a less than tender way.
The sun is up, and all the girls have gone. Otto grouches around deck with a broom
and swab, removing yesterday’s chimpanzee shit. Swinemünde.

The Springer is his old chipper self: “Fresh eggs and coffee in the pilot house—fall
to. We’re due out of here in 15 minutes.”

“Well just belay that ‘we,’ Ace.”

“But I need your help.” Springer’s wearing a suit of fine tweed this morning, very
Savile Row, fits perfectly—

“Närrisch needed your help.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” His eyes are steelies that never lose.
His laugh, subtitled
Humoring the Fools
, is Mitteleuropäisch and mirthless. “All right, all right. How much do you want?”

“Everything’s got a price, right?” But he’s not being noble here, no, what it is is
that his own price has just occurred to him, and he needs to shim the talk here, give
it a second to breathe and develop.

“Everything.”

“What’s the deal?”

“A minor piracy. Pick up one package for me while I cover you.” He looks at his watch,
hamming it up.

“O.K., get me a discharge, I’ll come with you.”

“A what? A discharge? For
you?
Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“You ought to laugh more, Springer. It makes you look really cute.”

“What
kind
of a discharge, Slothrop?
Honorable
, perhaps? Ah, ah-ha! Ha! Ha!” Like Adolf Hitler, Springer is easily tickled by what
the Germans call Schadenfreude, the feeling of joy at another’s misfortune.

“Quit fooling, I’m serious.”

“Of
course
you are, Slothrop!” More giggling.

Slothrop waits, watches, sucking on an egg though he feels anything but sly this morning.

“Närrisch, you see, was supposed to go with me today. Now I’m stuck with you. Ha!
Ha! Where do you want it delivered, this—ha—this discharge?”

“Cuxhaven.” Slothrop has been having lately this dim fantasy about trying to contact
the Operation Backfire people in Cuxhaven, to see if they’ll help get him out. They
seem to be the only English connection to the Rocket any more. He knows already it
won’t work. He and Springer arrange a date anyhow.

“Be at a place called Putzi’s. It’s down the Dorum road. Local dealers will be able
to tell you where.”

So it’s out once again—out past the moles’ wet embrace, into the Baltic, crest to
crest, and into nimbus piling sheet on sheet bounces the jolly pirate bark, into a
day already squally and bitter, and getting worse. Springer stands outside the pilot
house hollering in above the sound of heavy seas that splash back over the bow and
down the decks. “Where do you make her?”

“If it’s Copenhagen she’s bound for,” Frau Gnahb’s windburned face, permanent smile-creases
all around her eyes and mouth, beaming like the sun, “can’t have more than an hour
on us. . . .”

Visibility this morning is too low to see the coast of Usedom. Springer joins Slothrop
at the rail looking at nothing, breathing the closing smell of gray weather.

“He’s all right, Slothrop. He’s seen worse. Two months ago in Berlin we got ambushed,
right outside the Chicago. He walked through crossfire from three Schmeissers to offer
our competitors a deal. Not a scratch.”

“Springer, he was going round and round with half the Russian Army up there.”

“They
won’t kill him. They know who he is. He worked in guidance, he was Schilling’s best
man, he knows more about integrating circuits than anybody they’ll find outside of
Garmisch now. The Russians are offering fantastic salaries—better than the Americans—and
they’ll let him stay in Germany, work at Peenemünde or the Mittelwerke, just like
he used to. He can even escape, if that’s what he wants, we have very good connections
for that—”

“But what if they
did
shoot him?”

“No. They weren’t supposed to.”

“Springer, this ain’t the fuckin’
movies
now, come on.”

“Not yet. Maybe not quite yet. You’d better enjoy it while you can. Someday, when
the film is fast enough, the equipment pocket-size and burdenless and selling at people’s
prices, the lights and booms no longer necessary,
then . . .
then . . .”
We now come in sight of mythical Rügen off our starboard bow.
Its chalk cliffs are brighter than the sky. There is mist in the firths, and among
the green oaks. Along the beaches drift pearl patches of fog.

Our captain, Frau Gnahb, heads into the Greifswalder Bodden, to comb the long firths
for her quarry. After an hour
(comical bassoon solos over close-ups of the old recreant guzzling some horrible
fermented potato-mash lobotomy out of a jerrican, wiping her mouth on her sleeve,
belching)
of fruitless search, our modern-day pirates head out to sea again, and up the eastern
coast of the island.

Light rain has been falling. Otto breaks out slickers, and a Thermos of hot soup.
Clouds, a dozen shades of gray, go scudding along the sky. Great misty heaps of rock,
steep cliffs, streams in deep gorges, gray and green and spires of white chalk in
the rain, go passing—the Stubbenkammer, the King’s Seat, and presently, off to port,
Cape Arkona where waves crash at the base of the cliffs and on top the groves of white-trunked
trees are blowing. . . .
The ancient Slavs put up a temple here, to Svetovid, their god of fertility and war:
Old Svetovid did business under quite a number of aliases! Three-headed Triglav, five-headed
Porevit, SEVEN-faced Rugevit! Tell that to your boss next time he talks about “wearing
two hats!” Now, as Arkona slides away off our port quarter—

“There she is,” Otto calls from the top of the pilot house. Far far away, hauling
out to sea from behind the Wissow Klinken (the pale limestone latchkey with which
Providence today is probing the wards of Slothrop’s heart), barely visible in the
rain, dips a tiny white ghost of a ship. . . .

“Get a bearing,” Frau Gnahb grabbing the wheel and bracing her feet. “We want a
collision course!”
Otto crouches by the pelorus, shivering.

“Here, Slothrop.”

Luger? Box of rounds? “What . . .”

“Came this morning with the egg delivery.”

“You didn’t mention—”

“He may be a little exercised. But he’s a realist. Your friend Greta and I knew him
in Warsaw, in the old days.”

“Springer—tell me Springer, now, what ship is that?” Springer hands him some binoculars.
In fine gold lettering, behind the golden jackal on the wraith-white bow, is the name
he already knows. “O. . . . K.,” trying to see through the rain into Springer’s eyes,
“you knew I was aboard. You’re setting me up, now, right?”

“When were
you
on board?”

“Come on—”

“Look—Närrisch was going after the package today. Not you. We didn’t even
know
you. Do you have to see conspiracies in everything? I don’t control the Russians,
and I didn’t deliver him—”

“You’re really pushing that innocence today, ain’t you?”

“Quit bickering, idiots,” hollers Frau Gnahb, “and clear—for
action!”

Lazy and spectral pitches the
Anubis
, growing no clearer as they close with her. Springer reaches a megaphone out of the
pilot house, and bawls, “Good day, Procalowski—permission to come aboard.”

The answer is a gunshot. Springer hits the deck, slicker in rattling yellow flow,
lies on his back with the megaphone pointing up funneling rain in his mouth: “We’ll
have to without permission, then—” Motioning Slothrop over, “Get ready to board.”
To Frau Gnahb, “We’ll want to lash on.”

“Fine but,” one look at the evil leer now lighting up Otto’s mother’s face and it’s
clear that she didn’t come out today for money, “when do I get to, to
ram
her?”

Alone on the sea with the
Anubis.
Slothrop has begun to sweat, unpleasantly. The green rocky coast of Rügen backdrops
them, rising and falling through the squall.
Zonggg
another shot rattlesnaking off of a bulkhead. “Ram,” orders the Springer. The storm
comes down in earnest. Gleeful Frau Gnahb, humming through her teeth, spins the wheel,
spokes blurring, prow swinging over aiming for midships. The blank side of the
Anubis
rushes in—is the Frau gonna bust on through it like a paper hoop? Faces behind portholes,
cook peeling potatoes outside the galley, drunk in a frock coat sleeping on the rainy
deck and sliding as the ship rolls . . . ah—ja, ja, a huge blue-flowered bowl of shredded
potatoes at her elbow, a window, cast-iron flowers on spiral vine all painted white,
a mild smell of cabbage and dishrags from under the sink, an apron bow snug and tight
above her kidneys and lambs about her legs and ja little, oh, ja, here comes little—ah—here
comes
here-comes
LITTLE—AHH—

OTTO!
slams her boat into the
Anubis
, a most godawful earsplitting
Otto. . . .

“Stand by.” Springer’s on his feet. Procalowski is turning away and increasing engine
speed. Frau Gnahb moves up again on the yacht’s starboard quarter, wallowing in her
wake. Otto passes out grappling hooks, long in Hanseatic service, iron, pitted, functional-looking,
as Mutti puts it all ahead full. Couples have wandered out under awnings on the
Anubis
to watch the fun, pointing, laughing, gaily waving. Girls, their nude breasts beaded
with rain, blow kisses while the band plays a Guy Lombardo arrangement of “Running
Between the Raindrops.”