GRAVITY RAINBOW (134 page)

Always remember.

The first star hangs between his feet.

Now
-

descent

The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these walls, which are hard and glossy as coal:
Come-on! Start-
the
-sho-w! Come-on! Start-
the
-show!
The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who've always been at the movies (haven't we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in. The last image was too immediate for any eye to register. It may have been a human figure, dreaming of an early evening in each great capital luminous enough to tell him he will never die, coming outside to wish on the first star. But it was
not a
star,
it was falling, a bright angel of death. And in the darkening and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see… it is now a closeup of the face, a face we all know-

And it is just here, just at this dark and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t.

There is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between your own cold legs… or, if song must find you, here's one They never taught anyone to sing, a hymn by William Slothrop, centuries forgotten and out of print, sung to a simple and pleasant air of the period. Follow the bouncing ball:

There is a Hand to turn the rime,

Though thy Glass today be run,

Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low

Find the last poor Pret'rite one…

Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,

All through our crippl'd Zone,

With a face on ev'ry mountainside,

And a Soul in ev'ry stone…

Now everybody-