GRAVITY RAINBOW (42 page)

At the Casino Hermann Goering, a new regime has been taking over. General Wivern's is now the only familiar face, though he seems to've been downgraded. Slothrop's own image of the plot against him has grown. Earlier the conspiracy was monolithic, all-potent, nothing he could ever touch. Until that drinking game, and that scene with that Katje, and both the sudden good-bys. But now-

Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

And then, well, he is lately beginning to find his way into one particular state of consciousness, not a dream certainly, perhaps what used to be called a "reverie," though one where the colors are more primaries than pastels… and at such times it seems he has touched, and stayed touching, for a while, a soul we know, a voice that has more than once spoken through research-facility medium Carroll Eventyr: the late Roland Feldspath again, long-co-opted expert on control sys-

terns, guidance equations, feedback situations for this Aeronautical Establishment and that. Seems that, for personal reasons, Roland has remained hovering over this Slothropian space, through sunlight whose energy he barely feels and through storms that tickled his back with static electricity has Roland been whispering from eight kilometers, the savage height, stationed as he has been along one of the Last Parabolas-flight paths that must never be taken-working as one of the invisible Interdictors of the stratosphere now, bureaucratized hopelessly on that side as ever on this, he keeps his astral meathooks in as well as can be expected, curled in the "sky" so tense with all the frustrations of trying to reach across, with the impotence of certain dreamers who try to wake or talk and cannot, who struggle against weights and probes of cranial pain that it seems could not be borne waking, he waits, not necessarily for the aimless entrances of boobs like Slothrop here-

Roland shivers. Is
this
the one? This? to be figurehead for the latest passage? Oh, dear. God have mercy: what storms, what monsters of the Aether could this Slothrop ever charm away for anyone?

Well, Roland must make the best of it, that's all. If they get this far, he has to show them what he knows about Control. That's one of his death's secret missions. His cryptic utterances that night at Snoxall's about economic systems are merely the folksy everyday background chatter over here, a given condition of being. Ask the Germans especially. Oh, it is a real sad story, how shoddily their Schwarmerei for Control was used by the folks in power. Paranoid Systems of History (PSH), a short-lived periodical of the 1920s whose plates have all mysteriously vanished, natch, has even suggested, in more than one editorial, that the whole German Inflation was created deliberately, simply to drive young enthusiasts of the Cybernetic Tradition into Control work: after all, an economy inflating, upward bound as a balloon, its own definition of Earth's surface drifting upward in value, uncontrolled, drifting with the days, the feedback system expected to maintain the value of the mark constant having, humiliatingly, failed… Unity gain around the loop, unity gain, zero change, and hush, that way, forever, these were the secret rhymes of the childhood of the Discipline of Control-secret and terrible, as the scarlet histories say. Diverging oscillations of any kind were nearly the Worst Threat. You could not pump the swings of these playgrounds higher than a certain angle from the vertical. Fights broke up quickly, with a smoothness that had not been long in coming. Rainy days never had much lightning or thunder to them, only a haughty glass grayness collecting in

the lower parts, a monochrome overlook of valleys crammed with mossy deadfalls jabbing roots at heaven not entirely in malign playfulness (as some white surprise for the elitists up there paying no mind, no…), valleys thick with autumn, and in the rain a withering, spin-sterish brown behind the gold of it… very selectively blighted rainfall teasing you across the lots and into the back streets, which grow ever more mysterious and badly paved and more deeply platted, lot giving way to crooked lot seven times and often more, around angles of hedge, across freaks of the optical daytime until we have passed, fevered, silent, out of the region of streets itself and into the countryside, into the quilted dark fields and the wood, the beginning of the true forest, where a bit of the ordeal ahead starts to show, and our hearts to feel afraid… but just as no swing could ever be thrust above a certain height, so, beyond a certain radius, the forest could be penetrated no further. A limit was always there to be brought to. It was so easy to grow up under that dispensation. All was just as wholesome as could be. Edges were hardly ever glimpsed, much less flirted at or with. Destruction, oh, and demons-yes, including Maxwell's-were there, deep in the woods, with other beasts vaulting among the earthworks of your safety…

So was the Rocket's terrible passage reduced, literally, to bourgeois terms, terms of an equation such as that elegant blend of philosophy and hardware, abstract change and hinged pivots of real metals which describes motion under the aspect of yaw control:

preserving, possessing, steering between Scylla and Charybdis the whole way to Brennschluss. If any of the young engineers saw correspondence between the deep conservatism of Feedback and the kinds of lives they were coming to lead
in the very process
of embracing it, it got lost, or disguised-none of them made the connection, at least not while alive: it took death to show it to Roland Feldspath, death with its very good chances for being Too Late, and a host of other souls feeling themselves, even now, Rocketlike, driving out toward the stone-blue lights of the Vacuum under a Control they cannot quite name… the illumination out here is surprisingly mild, mild as heavenly robes, a feeling of population and invisible force, fragments of "voices," glimpses into
another order of being…

Afterward, Slothrop would be left not so much with any clear symbol or scheme to it as with some alkaline aftertaste of lament, an irreducible
strangeness,
a self-sufficiency nothing could get inside…

Yes, sort of
German,
these episodes here. Well, these days Slothrop is even dreaming in the language. Folks have been teaching him dialects, Plattdeutsch for the zone the British plan to occupy, Thur-ingian if the Russians happen not to drive as far as Nordhausen, where die central rocket works is located. Along with the language teachers come experts in ordnance, electronics, and aerodynamics, and a fellow from Shell International Petroleum named Hilary Bounce, who is going to teach him about propulsion.

It seems that early in 1941, the British Ministry of Supply let a ?10,000 research contract to Shell-wanted Shell to develop a rocket engine that would run on something besides cordite, which was being used in those days to blow up various sorts of people at the rate of oodles 'n' oodles of tons an hour, and couldn't be spared for rockets. A team ramrodded by one Isaac Lubbock set up a static-test facility at Langhurst near Horsham, and began to experiment with liquid oxygen and aviation fuel, running their first successful test in August of '42. Engineer Lubbock was a double first at Cambridge and the Father of British Liquid Oxygen Research, and what he didn't know about the sour stuff wasn't worth knowing. His chief assistant these days is Mr. Geoffrey Gollin, and it is to Gollin that Hilary Bounce reports.

"Well, I'm an Esso man myself," Slothrop thinks he ought to mention. "My old short was a gasgobbler all right, but a gourmet. Any time it used that Shell I had to drop a whole bottle of that Bromo in the tank just to settle that poor fucking Terraplane's plumbing down."

"Actually," the eyebrows of Captain Bounce, a 110% company man, going up and down earnestly to help him out, "we handled only the transport and storage end of things then. In those days, before the Japs and the Nazis you know, production and refining were up to the Dutch office, in The Hague."

Slothrop, poor sap, is remembering Katje, lost Katje, saying the name of her city, whispering Dutch love-words as they moved down sea-mornings now another age, another dispensation…
Wait a
minute.
"That's Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij, N.V?"

"Right."

It's also the negative of a recco photograph of the city, darkbrown, festooned with water-spots, never enough time to let these dry out

completely-

"Are you blokes
aware"
they're trying to teach him English En-

glish too, heaven knows why, and it keeps coming out like Gary Grant, "that Jerry-old Jerry, you know-has been
in
that The Hague there, shooting his bloody rockets at that London, a-and
using,
the… Royal Dutch Shell headquarters
building,
at the Josef Israelplein if I remember correctly, for a radio
guidance
transmitter? What bizarre shit is
that,
old man?"

Bounce stares at him, jingling his gastric jewelry, not knowing what to make of Slothrop, exactly.

"I mean," Slothrop now working himself into a fuss over something that only disturbs him, dimly, nothing to kick up a row over, is it? "doesn't it strike you as just a bit odd, you Shell chaps working on
your
liquid engine
your
side of the Channel you know, and
their
chaps firing
their
bloody things at you with your own… blasted… Shell trans
mit
ter tower, you see."

"No, I can't see that it makes-what are you getting at? Surely they'd simply have picked the tallest building they could find that's in a direct line from their firing sites to London."

"Yes, and at the right
distance
too, don't forget that-exactly twelve kilometers
from
the firing site. Hey? That's exactly what I mean." Wait, oh wait. Is
that
what he means?

"Well, I'd never thought of it that way."

Neither have I, Jackson. Oh, me neither folks…

Hilary Bounce and his Puzzled Smile. Another innocent, a low-key enthusiast like Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. But:

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.

"I hope I haven't said anything wrong."

"Whyzat?"

"You look-" Bounce aspirating what he means to be a warm little laugh, "worried."

Worried, all right. By the jaws and teeth of some Creature, some Presence so large that nobody else can see it-there! that's that monster I was telling you about. -That's no monster, stupid, that's
clouds!
-No, can't you
see?
It's
his feet
- Well, Slothrop can feel this beast in the sky: its visible claws and scales are being mistaken for clouds and other plausibilities… or else everyone has agreed to
call them other
names
when Slothrop is listening…

"It's only a 'wild coincidence,' Slothrop."

He will learn to hear quote marks in the speech of others. It is a bookish kind of reflex, maybe he's genetically predisposed-all those earlier Slothrops packing Bibles around the blue hilltops as part

of their gear, memorizing chapter and verse the structures of Arks, Temples, Visionary Thrones-all the materials and dimensions. Data behind which always, nearer or farther, was the numinous certainty of God.

Well, what more appropriate way for Tyrone to Get It one cold morning than this:

It's a blueprint of a German parts list, reproduced so crummy he can hardly read the words-"Vorrichtung fur die Isolierung, 0011-5565/43," now what's this? He knows the number by heart, it's the original contract number for the A4 rocket as a whole. What's an "insulation device" doing with the Aggregat's contract number? And a DE rating too, the highest Nazi priority there is? Not good. Either a clerk at OKW fucked up, which is not unheard-of, or else he just didn't know the number, and put the rocket's in as the next best thing. Claim, part and work numbers all have the same flagnote, which directs Slothrop to a Document SG-1. Flagnote on the flagnote sez "Geheime Kommandosache! This is a state secret, in the meaning of §35R5138."

"Say," he greets General Wivern nipping in through the door, "like to get ahold of a copy of that Document SG-1."

"Haw, haw," replies the General. "So would our chaps, I imagine."

"Quit fooling." Every piece of Allied intelligence on the A4, however classified, gets stuffed into a secret funnel back in London and all comes out in Slothrop's fancy cell at the Casino. So far they've held back nothing.

"Slothrop, there are no'SG'documents."

First impulse is to rattle the parts list in the man's face, but today he is the shrewd Yankee foxing the redcoats. "Oh. Well, maybe I read it wrong," making believe look around the paper-littered room, "maybe it was a '56' or something, jeepers it was just
here…
."

The General goes away again. Leaving Slothrop with a puzzle, kind of a, well not an obsession really… not yet… Opposite the parts listing, over in the Materials column now, here's "Imipolex G." Oh really. Insulation device made of Imipolex G eh? He kicks around the room looking for his handbook of German trade names. Nothing even close to it there… he locates next a master materials list for the A4 and all its support equipment, and there's sure no Imipolex G in that either. Scales and claws, and footfalls no one else seems to hear…