GRAVITY RAINBOW (16 page)

Suppose, Pointsman argues, that Jamf's stimulus
x
was some loud noise, as it was in the Watson-Rayner experiment. Suppose that, in Slothrop's case, the hardon reflex wasn't completely extinguished. In that case he ought to be getting one on at any loud noise that's preceded by the same kind of ominous buildup he would've found in Jamf's lab-as dogs to this day find in Pointsman's own lab. That points to the V-1: any doodle close enough to make him jump ought to be giving him an erection: the sound of the motor razzing louder and louder, then the cutoff and silence, suspense building up-then the explosion. Boing, a hardon. But oh, no. Slothrop instead only gets erections when this sequence happens
in reverse.
Explosion first, then the sound of approach: the V-2.

But the stimulus, somehow,
must
be the rocket, some precursor wraith, some rocket's double present for Slothrop in the percentage of smiles on a bus, menstrual cycles being operated upon in some mysterious way-what
does
make the little doxies do it for free? Are there fluctuations in the sexual market, in pornography or prostitutes, perhaps tying in to prices on the Stock Exchange itself, that we clean-living lot know nothing about? Does news from the front affect the itch between their pretty thighs, does desire grow directly or inversely as the real chance of sudden death-damn it, what cue, right in front of our eyes, that we haven't the subtlety of heart to see?…

But if it's in the air, right here, right now, then the rockets follow from it, 100% of the time. No exceptions. When we find it, we'll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul. There will be precious little room for any hope at all. You can see how important a discovery like that would be.

They walk down past the snow-drifted kennel runs, Pointsman in Glastonburys and fawn-colored British warm, Mexico wearing a scarf Jessica's lately knitted him whipping landward a scarlet dragon's tongue-this day the coldest so far of the winter, 3 9 degrees of frost. Down to the cliffs, faces freezing, down to the deserted beach. Waves run up, slide away to leave great crescents of ice fine as skin and dazzling in the weak sunlight. The boots of the two men crunch through to sand or shingle. The very bottom of the year. They can hear the guns in Flanders today, all the way across the Channel on the wind. The Abbey's ruin stands gray and crystal up on the cliff.

Last night, in the house at the edge of the stay-away town, Jessica, snuggling, afloat, just before sleep was to take them, whispered, "Roger… what about the girls?" That was all she said. But it brought Roger wide awake. And bone-tired as he was, he lay staring for another hour, wondering about the girls.

Now, knowing he ought to let it go, "Pointsman, what if Edwin Treacle is right? That it's PK. What if Slothrop's-not even consciously-
making
them fall where they do?"

"Well. You lot'd have something then, wouldn't you."

"But…
•why
should he. If they are falling wherever he's been-"

"Perhaps he hates women."

"I'm serious."

"Mexico. Are you actually worried?"

r

"I don't know. Perhaps I wondered if it might tie in, in any way, with your ultraparadoxical phase. Perhaps… I want to know what you're really looking for."

Above them now throb a flight of B-17s, bound somewhere uncommon today, well out of the usual corridors of flight. Behind these Fortresses the undersides of the cold clouds are blue, and their smooth billows are veined in blue-elsewhere touched with grayed-out pink or purple… Wings and stabilizers are shadowed underneath in dark gray. The shadows softly feather lighter up around curves of fuselage or nacelle. Spinners emerge from hooded dark inside the cowlings, spinning props invisible, the light of the sky catching all vulnerable surfaces a uniform bleak gray. The planes drone along, stately, up in the zero sky, shedding frost as it builds, sowing the sky behind in white ice-furrows, their own color matching certain degrees of cloud, all the tiny windows and openings in soft blackness, the perspex nose shining back forever warped and streaming cloud and sun. Inside it is black obsidian.

Pointsman has been talking about paranoia and the "idea of the opposite." He has scribbled in The Book exclamation points and
how
trues
all about the margins of Pavlov's open letter to Janet concerning the
sentiments
d'emprise,
and of Chapter LV, "An Attempt at a Physiological Interpretation of Obsessions and of Paranoia"-he can't help this bit of rudeness, although the agreement among the seven owners was not to mark up The Book-it was too valuable for that sort of thing, they'd had to put in a guinea apiece. It was sold him on the sly, in the dark, during a Luftwaffe raid (most existing copies had been destroyed in their warehouse early in the Battle of Britain). Pointsman never even saw the seller's face, the man vanishing into the hoarse auditory dawn of the all-clear, leaving the doctor and The Book, the dumb sheaf already heating up, moistening in his tight hand… yes it might have been a rare work of erotica, certainly that coarse hand-set look to the type… the crudities in phrasing, as if Dr. Horsley Gantt's odd translation were in cipher, the plaintext listing shameful delights, criminal transports… And how much of the pretty victim straining against her bonds does Ned Pointsman see in each dog that visits his test stands… and aren't scalpel and probe as decorative, as fine extensions as whip and cane?

Surely the volume preceding The Book-the first Forty-one Lectures-came to him at age 28 like a mandate from the submontane Venus he could not resist: to abandon Harley Street for a journey more and more deviant, deliciously on, into a labyrinth of

conditioned-reflex work in which only now, thirteen years along the clew, he's beginning to circle back, trip across old evidence of having come that path before, here and there to confront consequences of his younger, total embrace… But she did warn him-did she not? was he ever listening?-of the deferred payment, in its full amount. Venus and Ariadne! She seemed worth any price, the labyrinth looking, in those days, too intricate for
them
-the twilit pimps who made the arrangement between a version of himself, a crypto-Pointsman, and his fate… too varied, he thought then, ever to find him in. But he knows now. Too far in, preferring not to face it just yet, he knows that they only wait, stone and sure-these agents of the Syndicate she must also pay-wait in the central chamber, as he draws closer… They own everything: Ariadne, the Minotaur, even, Pointsman fears, himself. He gets flashes of them these days, naked, athletes poised and breathing about the chamber, terrible penises up mineral as their eyes, which glisten with frost or flakes of mica, but not with lust, or for him. It's only a job they have…

"Pierre Janet-sometimes the man talked like an Oriental mystic. He had no real grasp of the opposites. 'The act of injuring and the act of being injured are joined in the behavior of the whole injury.' Speaker and spoken-of, master and slave, virgin and seducer, each pair most conveniently coupled and inseparable-The last refuge of the incorrigibly lazy, Mexico, is just this sort of yang-yin rubbish. One avoids all manner of unpleasant lab work that way, but what has one
said?"

"I don't want to get into a religious argument with you," absence of sleep has Mexico more cranky today than usual, "but I wonder if you people aren't a bit too-well, strong, on the virtues of analysis. I mean, once you've taken it all apart, fine, I'll be first to applaud your industry. But other than a lot of bits and pieces lying about, what have
you
said?"

It isn't the sort of argument Pointsman relishes either. But he glances sharply at this young anarchist in his red scarf. "Pavlov believed that the ideal, the end we all struggle toward in science, is the true mechanical explanation. He was realistic enough not to expect it in his lifetime. Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better and better approximations. His faith ultimately lay in a pure physiological basis for the life of the psyche. No effect without cause, and a clear train of linkages."

"It's not my forte, of course," Mexico honestly wishing not to offend the man, but really, "but there's a feeling about that cause-and-

effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less… sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle."

"No-not 'strike off.' Regress. You're 30 years old, man. There are no 'other angles.' There is only forward-
into it
-or backward."

Mexico watches the wind tugging at the skirts of Pointsman's coat. A gull goes screaming away sidewise along the frozen berm. The chalk cliffs rear up above, cold and serene as death. Early barbarians of Europe who ventured close enough to this coast saw these white barriers through the mist, and knew then where their dead had been taken to.

Pointsman has turned now, and… oh, God. He is smiling. There is something so ancient in its assumption of brotherhood that-not now, but a few months from now, with spring prevailing and the War in Europe ended-Roger will remember the smile-it will haunt him-as the most evil look he has ever had from a human face.

They've paused in their walking. Roger stares back at the man. The Antimexico. "Ideas of the opposite" themselves, but on what cortex, what winter hemisphere? What ruinous mosaic, facing outward into the Waste… outward from the sheltering city… readable only to those who journey outside… eyes in die distance… barbarians… riders…

"We both have Slothrop," is what Pointsman has just said.

"Pointsman-what are you expecting out of this? Besides glory, I mean."

"No more than Pavlov. A physiological basis for what seems very odd behavior. I don't care which of your P.R.S. categories it may fit into-oddly enough none of you's even suggested telepathy; perhaps he's tuned in to someone over there, someone who knows the German firing schedule ahead of time. Eh? And I don't care if it's some terrible Freudian revenge against his mother for trying to castrate him or something. I am not grandiose, Mexico. I am modest, methodical-"

"Humble."

"I have set myself limitations in this. I have only the reversal of rocket sounds to go on… his clinical history of sexual conditioning,
perhaps
to auditory stimuli, and what
appears
to be a reversal of cause-and-effect. I'm not as ready as you to junk cause-and-effect, but if it does need modifying-so be it."

"But what are you
after?"

"You've seen his MMPI. His F Scale? Falsifications, distorted

thought processes… The scores show it clearly: he's psychopathi-cally deviant, obsessive, a latent paranoiac-well, Pavlov believed that obsessions and paranoid delusions were a result of certain-call them cells, neurons, on the mosaic of the brain, being excited to the level where, through reciprocal induction, all the area around becomes inhibited. One bright, burning point, surrounded by darkness. Darkness it has, in a way, called up. Cut off, this bright point, perhaps to the end of the patient's life, from all other ideas, sensations, self-criticisms that might temper its flame, restore it to normalcy. He called it a 'point of pathological inertia.' We're working right now with a dog… he's been through the 'equivalent' phase, where any stimulus, strong or weak, calls up exactly the same number of saliva drops… and on through the 'paradoxical' phase-strong stimuli getting weak responses and vice versa. Yesterday we got him to go ultraparadoxical. Beyond. When we turn on the metronome that used to stand for food-that once made Dog Vanya drool like a fountain-now he turns away. When we shut off the metronome, oh
then
he'll turn to it, sniff, try to lick it, bite it-seek, in the silence, for the stimulus that is not there. Pavlov thought that all the diseases of the mind could be explained, eventually, by the ultraparadoxical phase, the pathologically inert points on the cortex, the confusion of ideas of the opposite. He died at the very threshold of putting these things on an experimental basis. But I live. I have the funding, and the time, and the will. Slothrop is a strong imperturbable. It won't be easy to send him into any of the three phases. We may finally have to starve, terrorize, I don't know… it needn't come to that. But I will find his spots of inertia, I will find what they are if I have to open up his damned skull, and how they are isolated, and perhaps solve the mystery of why the rockets are falling as they do-though I admit that was more of a sop to get your support."

"Why?" A bit uneasy, there, Mexico? "Why do you need me?"

"I don't know. But I do."

"You're
obsessed."

"Mexico." Standing very still, seaward half of his face seeming to have aged fifty years in the instant, watching the tide three full times leave behind its sterile film of ice. "Help me."

I can't help anyone, Roger thinks. Why is he so tempted? It's dangerous and perverse. He does want to help, he feels the same unnatural fear of Slothrop that Jessica does.
What about the girls?
It may be his loneliness in Psi Section, in a persuasion he can't in his heart share, nor quite abandon… their faith, even smileless Gloaming's, that

there must be more, beyond the senses, beyond death, beyond the Probabilities that are all Roger has to believe in…
Oh Jessie,
his face against her bare, sleeping, intricately boned and tendoned back,
I'm
out of my depth in this…

Halfway between the water and the coarse sea-grass, a long stretch of pipe and barbed wire rings in the wind. The black latticework is propped up by longer slanting braces, lances pointing out to sea. An abandoned and mathematical look: stripped to the force-vectors holding it where it is, doubled up in places one row behind another, moving as Pointsman and Mexico begin to move again, backward in thick moire, repeated uprights in parallax against repeated diagonals, and the snarls of wire below interfering more at random. Far away, where it curves into the haze, the openwork wall goes gray. After last night's snowfall, each line of the black scrawl was etched in white. But today wind and sand have blown the dark iron bare again, salted, revealing, in places, brief streaks of rust… in others, ice and sunlight turn the construction to electric-white lines of energy.