GRAVITY RAINBOW (50 page)

the world-
it is the breath of the Forbidden Wing…
essence of all the still figures waiting for him inside, daring him to enter and find a secret he cannot survive.

Once something was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless…

His erection hums from a certain distance, like an instrument installed, wired by Them into his body as a colonial outpost here in our raw and clamorous world, another office representing Their white Metropolis far away…

A sad story, all right. Slothrop, very nervous by now, reads on. Lyle Bland, eh? Well, sure, that fits. He can recall dimly once or twice having seen Uncle Lyle. The man used to come to visit his father, affable, fair-haired, a hustler in the regional Jim Fisk style. Bland was always picking young Tyrone up and swinging him around by his feet. That was O.K.-Slothrop had no special commitment at the time to right side up.

From what it sez here, Bland either saw the Stinnes crash coming before most of its other victims, or was just naturally nervous. Early in '23 he began to sell off his interests in the Stinnes operations. One of these sales was made through Laszlo Jamf to the Grossli Chemical Corporation (later Psychochemie AG). One of the assets transferred in this sale was "all interest in Schwarzknabe enterprise. Seller agrees to continue surveillance duties until such time as Schwindel operative can be relieved by purchaser equivalent, acceptability to be determined by seller."

Jamf's codebook happens to be in the dossier. Part of the man's personality structure, after all. "Schwindel" was his code name for Hugo Stinnes. Clever sense of humor, the old fart. Across from "Schwarzknabe," now, are the initials "T.S."

Well, holy cow, Slothrop reckons, that must be me, huh. Barring the outside possibility of Tough Shit.

Listed as a "Schwarzknabe" liability is the unpaid remainder of a bill to Harvard University, about $5000 worth including the interest, "as per agreement (oral) with Schwarzvater."

"Schwarzvater" is the code word for "B.S." Which, barring the outside possibility of Bull Shit, seems to be Slothrop's own father, Broderick. Blackfather Slothrop.

Nice way to find out your father made a deal 20 years ago with

somebody to spring for your education. Come to think of it, Slothrop

never could quite put the announcements, all through the Depression, of imminent family ruin, together with the comfort he enjoyed at

Harvard. Well, now, what
was
the deal between his father and Bland? I've been sold, Jesus Christ I've been sold to IG Farben like a side of beef. Surveillance? Stinnes, like every industrial emperor, had his own company spy system. So did the IG. Does this mean Slothrop has been under their observation-m-maybe since he was
born?
Yaahhh…

The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with a simple Fuck You… A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory. He can't see it, can't make it out. Doesn't want to. It is allied with the Worst Thing.

He knows what the smell has to be: though according to these papers it would have been too early for it, though he has never come across any of the stuff among the daytime coordinates of his life, still, down here, back here in the warm dark, among early shapes where the clocks and calendars don't mean too much, he knows that what's haunting him now will prove to be the smell of Imipolex G.

Then there's this recent dream he is afraid of having again. He was in his old room, back home. A summer afternoon of lilacs and bees, and warm air through an open window. Slothrop had found a very old dictionary of technical German. It fell open to a certain page prickling with black-face type. Reading down the page, he would come to JAMF. The definition would read: I. He woke begging It
no
-but even after waking, he was sure, he would remain sure, that It could visit him again, any time It wanted. Perhaps you know that dream too. Perhaps It has warned you never to speak Its name. If so, you know about how Slothrop'll be feeling now.

What he does is lurch to his feet, over to the door of the freight car, which is going up a grade. He drags open the door, slips out-action, action-and mounts a ladder to the roof. A foot from his face, this double row of shiny bright teeth hangs in the air. Just what he needs. It is Major Marvy of U.S. Army Ordnance, leader of Marvy's Mothers, the meanest-ass technical intelligence team in this whole fuckin' Zone, mister. Slothrop can call him Duane, if he wants. "Boogie, boogie, boogie! Catch all
'em jungle
bunnies back 'ere in 'at
next
car!
Sheee-
oo!
"

"Wait a minute," sez Slothrop, "I think I've been asleep or something." His feet are cold. This Marvy is really fat. Pants bloused into shiny combat boots, roll of fat hanging over a web belt where he keeps his sunglasses and.45, hornrims, hair slicked back, eyes like safety valves that pop out at you whenever-as now-the pressure in his head gets too high.

Marvy hitched a lift on a P-47 from Paris far as Kassel, got coupled

onto this train here west of Heiligenstadt. He's headed for the Mittel-werke, like Ian Scuffling. Needs to coordinate with some Project Hermes people from General Electric. Sure makes him nervous, those niggers next door. "Hey, ought to be a good story for you people. Warn the folks back home."

"Are they GIs?"

"Shit no. Kraut. South-West African. Something. You mean you don't know about that? Come on. Aw. Limey intelligence sure ain't too intelligent, hahah, no offense understand. I thought the whole world knew." Follows a lurid tale-which sounds like something SHAEF made up, Goebbels's less than giddy imagination reaching no further than Alpine Redoubts and such-of Hitler's scheme for setting up a Nazi empire in black Africa, which fell through after Old Blood 'n' Guts handed Rommel's ass to him in the desert. " 'Here's yer ass, General.' 'Ach du lieber! Mein Arsch! YAH-hahaha…' " clutching comically at the seat of his own large trousers. Well, the black cadres had no more future in Africa, stayed on in Germany as governments-in-exile without even official recognition, drifted somehow into the ordnance branch of the German Army, and pretty soon learned how to be rocket technicians. Now they were just running loose. Wild. Haven't been interned as P/Ws, far as Many knows they haven't even been disarmed. "Not enough we have to worry about Russkys, frogs, limeys-hey, beg pardon, buddy. Now we got not just niggers you see, but
kraut
niggers. Well, Jesus. V-E Day just about everyplace you had a rocket, you had you a nigger. Never any all-boogie batteries, understand. Even the krauts couldn't be
that
daffy! One battery, that's 81 men,
plus
all your support, your launch-control, power, propellants, your surveying-champ, that'd sure be one heap o' niggers all in one place. But are they still all scattered out, like they were? You find out, you got you a
scoop,
friend. Cause if they're gettin' together now, oh dat's
bi-i-i-g
trouble! There's at least two dozen in that car-right down there, look. A-and they're
headin' for Nordhausen,
pal!" a fat finger-poke in the chest with each word, "hah? Whatcha think they have in mind? You know what I think? They have a
plan.
Yeah. I think it's rockets. Don't ask me how, it's just something I feel here, in m'heart. A-and you know, that's
awful
dangerous. You can't trust
them
- With
rockets?
They're a childlike race. Brains are smaller."

"But our patience," suggests a calm voice now out of the darkness, "our patience is enormous, though perhaps not unlimited." So saying, a tall African with a full imperial beard steps up grabs the fat American, who has time to utter one short yell before being flung bodily over the side. Slothrop and the African watch the Major bounce down the embankment behind them, arms and legs flying, out of sight. Firs crowd the hills. A crescent moon has risen over one ragged crest.

The man introduces himself in English, as Oberst Enzian, of the Schwarzkommando. He apologizes for his show of temper, notes Slothrop's armband, declines an interview before Slothrop can get in a word. "There's no story. We're DPs, like everybody else."

"The Major seemed worried that you're headed for Nordhausen."

"Many is going to be an annoyance, I can tell. Still, he doesn't pose as much of a problem as-" He peers at Slothrop. "Hmm. Are you really a war correspondent?"

"No."

"A free agent, I'd guess."

"Don't know about that'free,'Oberst."

"But you are free. We all are. You'll see. Before long." He steps away down the spine of the freighttop, waving a beckoning German good-by. "Before long…"

Slothrop sits on the rooftop, rubbing his bare feet. A friend? A good omen?
Black rocket troops?
What bizarre shit?

Well good mornin' gang, let's start it

Off with a bang, so long to

Double-u Double-u Two-o-o-o!

Now the fightin's over and we're all in clover

And I'm here ta bring sunshine to you-

Hey there Herman the German, stop yer fussin'

and squirmin',

Don'tcha know you're goin' home ta stay- No, there's never a frown, here in Rocket,

Sock-it Town,

Where ev'ry day's a beautiful day- (Quit kvetchin', Gretchen!) Go on and have a beautiful daa-aay!

Nordhausen in the morning: the lea is a green salad, crisp with raindrops. Everything is fresh, washed. The Harz hump up all around, dark slopes bearded to the tops with spruce, fir and larch. High-gabled houses, sheets of water reflecting the sky, muddy streets, American and Russian GIs pouring in and out the doors of the taverns and makeshift PXs, everybody packing a sidearm. Meadows and logged-off wedges up on the mountainsides flow with mottled light as rainclouds blow away over Thuringia. Castles perch high over the town, sailing in and

out of torn clouds. Old horses with smudged knobby knees, short-legged and big-chested, pull wagonloads of barrels, necks straining at twin collars chained together, heavy horseshoes sending mudflowers at each wet clop, down from the vineyards to the taverns.

Slothrop wanders into a roofless part of town. Old people in black are bat-flittering among the walls. Shops and dwellings here are all long-looted by the slave laborers liberated from the Dora camp. Lotta those
fags
still around, with baskets and 175 badges out on display, staring moistly from doorways. From the glassless bay window of a dress shop, in the dimness behind a plaster dummy lying bald and sprawled, arms raised to sky, hands curved for bouquets or cocktail glasses they'll never hold again, Slothrop hears a girl singing. Accompanying herself on a balalaika. One of those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes in 3/4:

Love never goes away, Never completely dies, Always some souvenir

Takes us by sad surprise.

You went away from me, One rose was left behind- Pressed in my Book of Hours, That is the rose I find…

Though it's another year, Though it's another me, Under the rose is a drying tear, Under my linden tree…

Love never goes away, Not if it's really true, It can return, by night, by day, Tender and green and new As the leaves from a linden tree, love, that I left with you.

Her name turns out to be Geli Tripping, and the balalaika belongs to a Soviet intelligence officer named Tchitcherine. In a way, Geli does too-part-time, anyhow. Seems this Tchitcherine maintains a harem, a girl in every rocket-town in the Zone. Yup, another rocket maniac. Slothrop feels like a tourist.

Geli talks about her young man. They sit in her roofless room

drinking a pale wine known hereabouts as Nordhauser Schattensaft. Overhead, black birds with yellow beaks lace the sky, looping in the sunlight from their nests up in the mountain castles and down in the city ruins. Far away, perhaps in the marketplace, a truck convoy is idling all its engines, the smell of exhaust washing over the maze of walls, where moss creeps, water oozes, roaches seek purchase, walls that baffle the motor sound so that it seems to come in from all directions.

She's thin, a bit awkward, very young. Nowhere in her eyes is there any sign of corrosion-she might have spent all her War roofed and secure, tranquil, playing with small forest animals in a rear area someplace. Her song, she admits, sighing, is mostly wishful thinking. "When he's away, he's away. When you came in I almost thought you were Tchitcherine."

"Nope. Just a hard-working newshound, is all. No rockets, no harems."

"It's an arrangement," she tells him. "It's so unorganized out here. There have to be arrangements. You'll find out." Indeed he will-he'll find thousands of arrangements, for warmth, love, food, simple movement along roads, tracks and canals. Even G-5, living its fantasy of being the only government in Germany now, is just the arrangement for being victorious, is all. No more or less real than all these others so private, silent, and lost to History. Slothrop, though he doesn't know it yet, is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days. Not paranoia. Just how it is. Temporary alliances, knit and undone. He and Geli reach their arrangement hidden from the occupied streets by remnants of walls, in an old fourposter bed facing a dark pier glass. Out the roof that isn't there he can see a long tree-covered mountain ascending. Wine on her breath, nests of down in the hollows of her arms, thighs with the spring of saplings in wind. He's barely inside her before she comes, a fantasy about Tchitcherine in progress, clear and touchingly, across her face. This irritates Slothrop, but doesn't keep him from coming himself.

The foolishness begins immediately on detumescence, amusing questions like, what kind of word has gone out to keep everybody away from Geli but me? Or, is it that something about me reminds her of Tchitcherine, and if so,
what?
And, say, where's that Tchitcherine right now? He dozes off, is roused by her lips, fingers, dewy legs sliding along his. The sun jumps across their section of sky, gets eclipsed by a breast, is reflected out of her child's eyes… then clouds, rain for which she puts up a green tarp with tassels she's sewn on, canopy style