GRAVITY RAINBOW (110 page)

Double-declutchingly, heel-and-toe, away goes Roger Mexico. Down the summer Autobahn, expansion joints booming rhythmic under his wheels, he highballs a pre-Hitler Horch 87OB through the burnt-

purple rolling of the Luneburg Heath. Over the windscreen mild winds blow down on him, smelling of junipers. Heidschnucken sheep out there rest as still as fallen clouds. The bogs and broom go speeding by. Overhead the sky is busy, streaming, a living plasma.

The Horch, army-green with one discreet daffodil painted halfway up its bonnet, was lurking inside a lorry at the Elbeward edge of the Brigade pool at Hamburg, shadowed except for its headlamps, stalked eyes of a friendly alien smiling at Roger. Welcome there, Earthman. Once under way, he discovered the floor strewn with rolling unlabeled glass jars of what seems to be baby food, weird unhealthy-colored stuff no human baby could possibly eat and survive, green marbled with pink, vomit-beige with magenta inclusions, all impossible to identify, each cap adorned with a smiling, fat, cherubic baby, seething under the bright glass with horrible botulism toxins 'n' ptomaines… now and then a new jar will be produced, spontaneously, under the seat, and roll out, against all laws of acceleration, among the pedals for his feet to get confused by. He knows he ought to look back underneath there to find out what's going on, but can't quite bring himself to.

Bottles roll clanking on the floor, under the bonnet a hung-up tappet or two chatters its story of discomfort. Wild mustard whips past down the center of the Autobahn, perfectly two-tone, just yellow and green, a fateful river seen only by the two kinds of rippling light. Roger sings to a girl in Cuxhaven who still carries Jessica's name:

I dream that I have found us both again,

With spring so many strangers' lives away,

And we, so free,

Out walking by the sea,

With someone else's paper words to say…

They took us at the gates of green return,

Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why-

Do children meet again?

Does any trace remain,

Along the superhighways of July?

Driving now suddenly into such a bright gold bearding of slope and field that he nearly forgets to steer around the banked curve…

A week before she left, she came out to "The White Visitation" for the last time. Except for the negligible rump of PISCES, the place was a loony bin again. The barrage-balloon cables lay rusting across the

sodden meadows, going to flakes, to ions and earth-tendons that sang in the violent nights, among the sirens wailing in thirds smooth as distant wind, among the drumbeats of bombs, now lying slack, old, in hard twists of metal ash. Forget-me-nots boil everywhere underfoot, and ants crowd, bustling with a sense of kingdom. Commas, brimstones, painted ladies coast on the thermoclines along the cliffs. Jessica has cut fringes since Roger saw her last, and is going through the usual anxiety-"It looks utterly horrible, you don't have to say it…"

"It's utterly swoony," sez Roger, "I love it."

"You're making fun."

"Jess, why are we talking about
haircuts
for God's sake?"

While somewhere, out beyond the Channel, a barrier difficult as the wall of Death to a novice medium, Leftenant Slothrop, corrupted, given up on, creeps over the face of the Zone. Roger doesn't want to give him up: Roger wants to do what's right. "I just can't leave the poor twit out there, can I? They're trying to destroy him-"

But, "Roger," she'd smile, "it's
spring.
We're at peace."

No, we're not. It's another bit of propaganda. Something the P.WE, planted. Now gentlemen as you've seen from the studies our optimum time is 8 May, just before the traditional Whitsun exodus, schools letting out, weather projections for an excellent growing season, coal requirements beginning their seasonal decline, giving us a few months' grace to get our Ruhr interests back on their feet-no, he sees only the same flows of power, the same impoverishments he's been thrashing around in since '39. His girl is about to be taken away to Germany, when she ought to be demobbed like everyone else. No channel upward that will show either of them any hope of escape. There's
something
still on, don't call it a "war" if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate's gone down a point or two, beer in cans is back at last and there
were
a lot of people in Trafalgar Square one night not so long ago… but Their enterprise goes on.

The sad fact, lacerating his heart, laying open his emptiness, is that Jessica believes Them. "The War" was the condition she needed for being with Roger. "Peace" allows her to leave him. His resources, next to Theirs, are too meager. He has no words, no technically splendid embrace, no screaming fit that can ever hold her. Old Beaver, not surprisingly, will be doing air-defense liaison over there, so they'll be together in romantic Cuxhaven. Ta-ta mad Roger, it's been grand, a wartime fling, when we came it was utterly incendiary, your arms open

wide as a Fortress's wings, we had our military secrets, we fooled the fat old colonels right and left but stand-down time must come to all, yikes! I must run sweet Roger really it's been dreamy…

He would fall at her knees smelling of glycerine and rose-water, he would lick sand and salt from her ATS brogans, offer her his freedom, his next 50 years' pay from a good steady job, his poor throbbing brain. But it's too late. We're at Peace. The paranoia, the danger, the tuneless whistling of busy Death next door, are all put to sleep, back in the War, back with her Roger Mexico Years. The day the rockets stopped falling, it began to end for Roger and Jessica. As it grew clear, day after safe day, that no more would fall ever again, the new world crept into and over her like spring-not so much the changes she felt in air and light, in the crowds at Woolworth's, as a bad cinema spring, full of paper leaves and cotton-wool blossoms and phony lighting… no, never again will she stand at their kitchen sink with a china cup squeaking in her fingers, its small crying-child sound defenseless, meekly resonating BLOWN OUT OF ATTENTION AS THE ROCKET FELL smashing to a clatter of points white and blue across the floor…

Those death-rockets now are in the past. This time she'll be on the firing end, she and Jeremy-isn't
that
how it was always meant to be? firing them out to sea: no death, only the spectacle, fire and roar, the excitement without the killing, isn't that what she prayed for? back in the fading house, derequisitioned now, occupied again by human extensions of ball-fringe, dog pictures, Victorian chairs, secret piles of
News of the World
in the upstairs closet.

She's meant to go. The orders come from higher than she can reach. Her future is with the World's own, and Roger's only with this strange version of the War he still carries with him. He can't move, poor dear, it won't let him go. Still passive as he'd been under the rockets. Roger the victim. Jeremy the firer. "The War's my mother," he said the first day, and Jessica has wondered what ladies in black appeared in his dreams, what ash-white smiles, what shears to come snapping through the room, through their winter… so much of him she never got to know… so much unfit for Peace. Already she's beginning to think of their time as a chain of explosions, craziness ganged to the rhythms of the War. Now he wants to go rescue Slothrop, another rocket-creature, a vampire whose sex life actually
fed
on the terror of that Rocket Blitz-ugh, creepy, creepy. They ought to lock him up, not set him free. Roger
must
care more about Slothrop

than about her, they're two of a kind, aren't they, well-she hopes they'll be happy together. They can sit and drink beer, tell rocket stories, scribble equations for each other. How jolly. At least she won't be leaving him in a vacuum. He won't be lonely, he'll have something to occupy the time…

She has wandered away from him, down the beach. The sun is so bright today that the shadows by her Achilles tendon are drawn sharp and black as seams up the heel of a silk stocking. Her head, as always, is bent forward, away, the bare nape he's never stopped loving, will never see again, unprotected as her beauty, her innocence of how forever in peril it moves through the World. She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as "pretty"… but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him. Was. He is losing more than single Jessica: he's losing a full range of life, of being for the first time at ease in the Creation. Going back to winter now, drawing back into his single envelope. The effort it takes to extend any further is more than he can make alone.

He hadn't thought he'd cry when she left. But he cried. Snot by the cubic yard, eyes like red carnations. Presently, every time his left foot hit the ground walking he'd get a jolt of pain through half his skull. Ah, this must be what they mean by the "pain of separation!" Pointsman kept showing up with armloads of work. Roger found himself unable to forget Jessica, and caring less about Slothrop.

But one day Milton Gloaming popped in to deliver him from his unmoving. Gloaming was just back from a jaunt through the
Zone.
He'd found himself on a task force with one Josef Schleim, a defector of secondary brilliance, who had once worked for the IG out of Dr. Reithinger's office, VOWI-the Statistical Department of NW7. There, Schleim had been assigned to the American desk, gathering for the IG economic intelligence, through subsidiaries and licensees like Chemnyco, General Aniline and Film, Ansco, Winthrop. In '36 he came to England to work for Imperial Chemicals, in a status that was never to be free from ambiguities. He'd heard of Slothrop, yes indeed… recalled him from the old days. When Lyle Bland went out on his last transmural journey, there'd been Green Reports flapping through the IG offices for weeks, Geheime Kommandosache, rumors coupling and uncoupling like coal-tar molecules under pressure, all to do with who was likely to take over the Slothrop surveillance, now that Bland was gone.

This was toward the beginning of the great struggle for the IG's

intelligence machinery. The economic department of the foreign office and the foreign department of the economic office were both after it. So were the military, in particular the Wehrwirtschaftstab, a section of the General Staff that maintained OKW's liaison with industry. The IG's own liaison with OKW was handled by Vermittlungsstelle W, under Drs. Dieckmann and Gorr. The picture was farther confused by the usual duplicate Nazi Party offices, Abwehr-Organizations, set up throughout German industry after 1933. The Nazis' watchdog over the IG was called "Abteilung A" and was set up in the same office building as-in fact, it appeared perfectly congruent with-the IG's own Army liaison group, Vermittlungsstelle W. But Technology, alas, braid-crowned and gold-thighed maiden, always comes up for grabs like this. Most likely the bitching and bickering of Army vs. Party was what finally drove Schleim over the hill, more than any moral feelings about Hitler. In any case, he remembers the Slothrop surveillance being assigned to a newly created "Sparte IV" under Vermittlungsstelle W. Sparte I was handling nitrogen and gasoline, II dyes, chemicals, buna rubber, pharmaceuticals, III film and fibers. IV handled Slothrop and nothing else, except-Schleim had heard tell-one or two miscellaneous patents acquired through some dealings with IG Chemie in Switzerland. An analgesic whose name he couldn't recall, and a new plastic, some name like Mipolam… "Polimex," or something…

"Sounds like that would've come under Sparte II," was Gloaming's only comment at the time.

"A few directors were upset," Schleim agreed. "Ter Meer was a Draufganger-he and Horlein both, go-ahead fellows. They might have got it back."

"Did the Party assign an Abwehr man to this Sparte IV?"

"They must have, but I don't know if he was SD or SS. There were so many of them around. I can remember some sort of rather thin chap with thick eyeglasses coming out of the office there once or twice. But he wore civilian clothes. Couldn't tell you his name."

Well now what'n the bloody 'ell…

"Suveillance?" Roger is fidgeting heavily, with his hair, his necktie, ears, nose, knuckles, "IG Farben had Slothrop under surveillance? Before the War? What
for
, Gloaming."

"Odd, isn't it?" Cheerio
boing
out the door without another word, leaving Roger alone with a most disagreeable light beginning to grow, the leading edge of a revelation, blinding, crescent, at the periphery of his brain. IG Farben, eh? Mr. Pointsman has been chumming, almost

exclusively these days, with upper echelon from ICI. ICI has cartel arrangements with Farben. The bastard. Why, he must have known about Slothrop all along. The Jamf business was only a front for… well say what the hell is going
on
here?

Halfway up to London (Pointsman has repossessed the Jaguar, so Roger's on a motorcycle from the PISCES pool, which consists now only of the cycle and one Morris with virtually no clutch) it occurs to him that Gloaming was sent around deliberately by Pointsman, as some obscure tactic in this Nayland Smith campaign he seems to be into (Pointsman owns a matched set of all the books in Sax Rohmer's great Manichaean saga, and is apt these days to pop in at any time, usually while Roger is sleeping or trying to take a quiet shit, and actually
stand
there, in front of the toilet, reading aloud a pertinent text). Nothing is beyond Pointsman, he's worse than old Pudding was, no shame at all. He would use anyone-Gloaming, Katje Borgesius, Pirate Prentice, no one is (Jessica) exempt from his
(Jessica?)
Machiavellian-

Jessica. Oh. Yes ofcourseofcourse Mexico you fucking
idiot
… no wonder the 137th gave him the runaround. No wonder her orders came from Too High. He had even, lamb frolicking about the spit, asked
Pointsman
to see what he could do… Fool. Fool.

He arrives at Twelfth House on Gallaho Mews in a homicidal state of mind. Bicycle thieves run down the back streets, old pros wheeling them three abreast at a good pace. Young men with natty mustaches preen in the windows. Children loot the dustbins. Courtyard corners are drifted with official papers, the shed skin of a Beast at large. A tree has inexplicably withered in the street to a shingly black corpse. A fly lands belly-up on the front fender of Roger's motorcycle, thrashes ten seconds, folds its veined and sensitive wings, and dies. Quick as that. First one Roger has ever seen. P-47s fly over in squadron box formations, four checkmarks apiece RedWhiteBlueYellow on the un-amended form of the whitish sky, squadron after squadron: it is either some military review, or another war. A plasterer is busy around the corner, smoothing over a bomb-scarred wall, plaster heaped on his hawk luscious as cream cheese, using an unfamiliar trowel inherited from a dead friend, still, these first days, digging holes like an apprentice, the shiny knife-edge not yet broken to his hand, the curl of it a bit more than his own strength could have ever brought it to… Henry was a larger bloke… The fly, who was not dead, unfolds its wings and zooms off to fool somebody else.