GRAVITY RAINBOW (48 page)

No "Darlene" either. That came in yesterday. They traced the name as far as the residence of a Mrs. Quoad. But the flashy young divorcee never, she declared, even knew that English children were named "Darlene." She was dreadfully sorry. Mrs. Quoad spent her days lounging about a rather pedicured Mayfair address, and both investigators felt relieved to be out of the neighborhood…

When are you going to see it?
Pointsman sees it immediately. But he "sees" it in the way you would walking into your bedroom to be jumped on, out of a bit of penumbra on your ceiling, by a gigantic moray eel, its teeth in full imbecile death-smile, breathing, in its fall onto your open face, a long human sound that you know, horribly, to be a
sexual sigh…

That is to say, Pointsman avoids the matter-as reflexively as he would any nightmare. Should this one turn out not to be a fantasy but
real,
well…

"The data, so far, are incomplete." This ought to be prominently stressed in all statements. "We admit that the early data seem to show," remember,
act sincere,
"a number of cases where the names on Slothrop's map do not appear to have counterparts in the body of fact we've been able to establish along his time-line here in London. Es-

tablish
so far,
that is. These are mostly all first names, you see, the, the Xs without the Ys so to speak, ranks without files. Diificult to know how far into one 'far enough' really is.

"And what if many-even if most-of the Slothropian stars
are
proved, some distant day, to refer to sexual fantasies instead of real events? This would hardly invalidate our approach, any more than it did young Sigmund Freud's, back there in old Vienna, facing a similar violation of probability-all those Papi-has-raped-me stories, which might have been lies evidentially, but were certainly the truth
clinically.
You must realize: we are concerned, at PISCES, with a rather strictly defined, clinical version of truth. We seek no wider agency in this."

So far, it is Pointsman's burden alone. The solitude of a Fuhrer: he feels himself growing strong in the rays of this dark companion to his public star now on the rise… but he doesn't want to share it, no not just yet…

Meetings of the staff, his staff, grow worse and worse than useless. They bog down into endless arguments about trivia-whether or not to rename PISCES now that the Surrender has been Expedited, what sort of letterhead, if any, to adopt. The representative from Shell Mex House, Mr. Dennis Joint, wants to put the program under Special Projectiles Operations Group (SPOG), as an adjunct of the British rocket-scavenging effort, Operation Backfire, which is based out of Cuxhaven on the North Sea. Every other day brings a fresh attempt, from some quarter, to reconstitute or even dissolve PISCES. Pointsman is finding it much easier of late to slip into a 1'etat c'est moi frame of mind-who
else
is doing anything?
isn 't
he holding it all together, often with nothing beyond his own raw will…?

Shell Mex House, naturally, is frantic about Slothrop's disappearance. Here's a man running loose who knows everything it's possible to know-not only about the A4, but about what
Great Britain
knows about the A4. Zurich teems with Soviet agents. What if they've already got Slothrop? They took Peenemunde in the spring, it appears now they will be given the central rocket works at Nordhausen, another of the dealings at Yalta… At least three agencies, VIAM, TsAGI, and NISO, plus engineers working out of other commissariats, are even now in Soviet-occupied Germany with lists of personnel and equipment to be taken east. Inside the SHAEF sphere of influence, American Army Ordnance, and a host of competing research teams, are all busy collecting everything in sight. They've already rounded up von Braun and 500 others, and interned them at Gar-misch. What if
they
get hold of Slothrop?

There have also been, aggravating the Crisis, defections: Rollo

Groast assumed back into the Society for Psychical Research, Treacle

setting up a practice, Myron Grunton again a full-time wireless per

sonality. Mexico has begun to grow distant. The Borgesius woman still

performs her nocturnal duties, but with the Brigadier ill now (has the

old fool been forgetting his antibiotics? Must Pointsman do every

thing?) she's beginning to fret. Of course Geza Rozsavolgyi is still with

the project. A fanatic. Rozsavolgyi will
never
leave.:

So. A holiday by the sea. For political reasons, the party is made up of Pointsman, Mexico, Mexico's girl, Dennis Joint, and Katje Borgesius. Pointsman wears rope-soled shoes, his prewar bowler, and a rare smile. The weather is not ideal. An overcast, a wind that will be chilly by mid-afternoon. A smell of ozone blows up from the Dodgem cars out of the gray steel girderwork along the promenade, along with smells of shellfish on the barrows, and of salt sea. The pebbled beach is crowded with families: shoeless fathers in lounge suits and high white collars, mothers in blouses and skirts startled out of war-long camphor sleep, kids running all over in sunsuits, nappies, rompers, short pants, knee socks, Eton hats. There are ice cream, sweets, Cokes, cockles, oysters and shrimps with salt and sauce. The pinball machines writhe under the handling of fanatical servicemen and their girls, throwing body-english, cursing, groaning as the bright balls drum down the wood obstacle courses through ka-chungs, flashing lights, thudding flippers. The donkeys hee-haw and shit, the children walk in it and their parents scream. Men sag in striped canvas chairs talking business, sports, sex, but most usually politics. An organ grinder plays Rossini's overture to
La Gazza Ladra
(which, as we shall see later, in Berlin, marks a high point in music which everybody ignored, preferring Beethoven, who never got further than statements of intention), and here without snaredrums or the sonority of brasses the piece is mellow, full of hope, promising lavender twilights, stainless steel pavilions and everyone elevated at last to aristocracy, and love without payment of any kind…

It was Pointsman's plan today not to talk shop, but to let the conversation flow more or less organically. Wait for others to betray themselves. But there is shyness, or constraint, among them all. Talk is minimal. Dennis Joint is watching Katje with a horny smile, with now and then a suspicious stare for Roger Mexico. Mexico meantime has his troubles with Jessica-more and more often these days-and at the moment the two aren't even looking at each other. Katje Borgesius has her eyes far out to sea, and there is no telling
what
is going on with

this one. In some dim way, Pointsman, though he can't see that she has any leverage at all, is still afraid of her. There is still a lot he doesn't know. Perhaps what's bothering him most right now is her connection, if any, with Pirate Prentice. Prentice has been down to "The White Visitation" several times asking rather pointed questions about her. When PISCES recently opened its new branch office in London (which some wag, probably that young imbecile Webley Silvernail, has already dubbed "Twelfth House") Prentice began hanging heavily around up there, romancing secretaries, trying for a peep into this file or that… What's up? What afterlife have the Firm found, this side of V-E Day? What does Prentice want… what's his price? Is he in love with La Borgesius here? Is it possible for this woman to be in love?
Love?
Oh, it's enough to make you scream. What would her idea of love be…

"Mexico," grabbing the young statistician's arm.

"Eh?" Roger interrupted eying a lovely looks a bit like Rita Hay-worth in a one-piece floral number with straps that X across her lean back…

"Mexico, I think I am hallucinating."

"Oh, really? You think you are? What are you seeing?"

"Mexico, I see… I see… What do you mean, what am I
seeing,
you nit? It's what I'm
hearing."

"Well, what are you hearing, then." A touch of peevishness to Roger now.

"Right now I'm hearing
you,
saying, 'What are you hearing, then.'
And I don't like it!"

"Why not."

"Because: unpleasant as this hallucination is, I find I still
much
prefer it to the sound of your voice."

Now this is odd behavior from anybody, but from usually correct Mr. Pointsman, it is enough to stop this mutually-paranoid party in their tracks. Nearby is a Wheel of Fortune, with Lucky Strike packs, kewpie dolls and candy bars stuffed among the spokes.

"I say, what d'you think?" blond, hale-fellow Dennis Joint nudges Katje with an elbow as broad as a knee. In his profession he has learned to make instant evaluations of those with whom he deals. He judges old Katje here to be a jolly girl, out for a spot of fun. Yes, leadership material here, definitely. "Hasn't he gone a bit mental suddenly?" Trying to keep his voice down, grinning in athletic paranoia vaguely over in the peculiar Pavlovian's direction-not
right
at him

you understand, eye contact might be suicidal folly given his state of mind…

Meantime, Jessica has gone into her Fay Wray number. This is a kind of protective paralysis, akin to your own response when the moray eel jumps you from the ceiling. But this is for the Fist of the Ape, for the lights of electric New York white-waying into the room you thought was safe, could never be penetrated… for the coarse black hair, the tendons of need, of tragic love…

"Yeah well," as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his definitive 18-volume study
of King Kong,
"you know, he
did
love her, folks." Proceeding from this thesis, it appears that Prettyplace has left nothing out, every shot including out-takes raked through for every last bit of symbolism, exhaustive biographies of everyone connected with the film, extras, grips, lab people… even interviews with King Kong Kult-ists, who to be eligible for membership must have seen the movie at least 100 times and be prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam… And yet, and yet: there is Murphy's Law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem-
when everything has been
taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us… something will.
So the permutations 'n' combinations of Pudding's
Things That
Can Happen in European Politics
for 1931, the year of Godel's Theorem, don't give Hitler an outside chance. So, when laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born. Even as determinist a piece of hardware as the A4 rocket will begin spontaneously generating items like the "S-Gerat" Slothrop thinks he's chasing like a grail. And so, too, the legend of the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer from the tallest erection in the world has come, in the fullness of time, to generate its own children, running around inside Germany even now-the Schwarzkommando, whom Mitchell Prettyplace, even, could not anticipate.

At PISCES it is widely believed that the Schwarzkommando have been summoned, in the way demons may be gathered in, called up to the light of day and earth by the now defunct Operation Black Wing. You can bet Psi Section was giggling about this for a while. Who could have guessed there'd be
real
black rocket troops? That a story made up to scare last year's enemy should prove to be literally true-and no way now to stuff them back in the bottle or even say the spell backward: no one ever knew the complete spell-different people knew different parts of it, that's what teamwork
is…
By the time it occurs to them to look back through the Most Secret documentation sur-

rounding Operation Black Wing, to try and get some idea of how this all might've happened, they will find, curiously, that certain critical documents are either missing or have been updated past the end of the Operation, and that it is impossible at this late date to reconstruct the spell at all, though there will be the usual elegant and bad-poetic speculation. Even earlier speculation will be lopped and tranquilized. Nothing will remain, for example, of the tentative findings of Freudian Edwin Treacle and his lot, who toward the end even found themselves at odds with their own minority, the psychoanalytic wing of Psi Section. It began as a search for some measurable basis for the common experience of being haunted by the dead. After a while colleagues began to put in chits requesting they be transferred out. Un-pleasantries such as "It's beginning to sound like the Tavistock Institute around here" began muttering up and down the basement halls. Palace revolts, many of them conceived in ornamentally splendid flashes of paranoia, brought locksmiths and welders in by droves, led to mysterious shortages of office supplies, even of water and heat… none of which kept Treacle and lot from carrying on in a Freudian, not to mention Jungian frame of mind. Word of the Schwarzkom-mando's real existence reached them a week before V-E Day. Individual events, who really said what to whom, have been lost in the frenzy of accusation, crying, nervous breakdowns, and areas of bad taste that followed. Someone remembers Gavin Trefoil, face as blue as Krishna, running through the topiary trees stark naked, and Treacle chasing him with an ax, screaming "Giant
ape?
I'll show
you
a giant ape all right!"

Indeed he would show the critter to many of us, though we would not look. In his innocence he saw no reason why co-workers on an office project should not practice self-criticism with the same rigor as revolutionary cells do. He had not meant to offend sensibilities, only to show the others, decent fellows all, that their feelings about blackness were tied to feelings about shit, and feelings about shit to feelings about putrefaction and death. It seemed to him so clear… why wouldn't they listen? Why wouldn't they admit that their repressions
had,
in a sense that Europe in the last weary stages of its perversion of magic has lost,
had
incarnated real and living men, likely (according to the best intelligence) in possession of real and living weapons, as the dead father who never slept with you, Penelope, returns night after night to your bed, trying to snuggle in behind you… or as your unborn child wakes
you,
crying in the night and you feel its ghost-lips at your breast… they are real, they are living, as you pretend to scream