GRAVITY RAINBOW (92 page)

And if it isn't exactly Jamf Olfabriken Werke? what if it's the Krupp works in Essen, what if it's Blohm Voss right here in Hamburg or another make-believe "ruin," in another city? Another
country?
YAAAGGGGHHHHH!

Well, this is stimulant talk here, yes Enzian's been stuffing down Nazi surplus Pervitins these days like popcorn at the movies, and by now the bulk of the refinery-named, incidentally, for the famous discoverer of Oneirine-is behind them, and Enzian is on into some other paranoid terror, talking, talking, though each man's wind and motor cuts him off from conversation.

[Sort of a

Hoagy Carmichael piano can be heard in behind this, here]

Just a daredevil Desox-yephedrine Daddy

With m'pockets full o' happee daze,

Zoomin' through the Zone, where the wild dogs roam,

Givin' all m'dreams away…

Took the tubes outa my radi-yo,

Don't mean a thing to me-

Wouldn't spend a nickel on the Stars 'n' Stripes, cause

I'm doin' my own fer free…

Mouth keeps goin', nobody listenin', Gabbin' at a terrible pace- Aw, you're so sly, but I wave good-by, With a shit-eatin' grin on m'face!

Don'tcha ephedrine of me, my honey,

Swoon just to hear my name-

In the curfew cells when all the lights are gone, oh,

Ev'ry thing'll be the same

(Just light the candles)

Ev-rything'll be the same…

Last night in his journal, Enzian wrote: "The Mouth lately has been too much in service. Too little coming out of use to anybody. A defense. Oh God, oh God. Then they really are getting to me. Please I don't
'want
to pontificate this way… I know what my voice sounds like-heard it at Peenemunde years ago on Weissmann's Dictaphone… chrome and Bakelite… too high, obnoxious, Berliner Schnauze… how they must wince inside whenever I begin to speak…"

"I could go tomorrow. I know how to be alone. It doesn't frighten me as much as they do. They take endlessly-but they never
use
what they take. What do they think they can take from me? They don't want my patriarchy, they don't want my love, they don't want my information, or my work, or my energy, or what I own… I don't own
anything.
There's no money any more-nobody's seen any out here for months, no it can't be money… cigarettes? I never have enough cigarettes…

"If I left them, where could I go?"

Back among the reservoir tanks now, into the evening wind, skidding on this synthetic wastefield, all of it ungraded blackness… Christian's motor seems to be missing now and then, dithering toward a stall. Spot decision: if he breaks down let him walk. That way less trouble if Pavel's there, if he's not there pick up Christian on the way

back and see about getting a truck out to repair it… keep it simple, that's the mark of a great leader, Enzian.

Christian doesn't break down, though, and Pavel turns out to be there, sort of. Well, not "there" the way Enzian in his current state of mind would consider for very long. But present, all right, along with an amazing collection of friends who always seem to show up whenever he comes to sniff Leunagasolin, such as, oh, the Moss Creature here, brightest green you can imagine, more burning than fluorescent, lurking over in a corner of the field tonight, shy, stirring like an infant now and then… or how about the Water Giant, a mile-high visitor made all of flowing water who likes to dance, twisting from the waist, arms blowing loosely along the sky. When the Ombindi people took Maria off to find their doctor in Hamburg, voices began calling- voices of the Fungus Pygmies who breed in the tanks at the interface between fuel and water-bottom began to call to him. "Pavel! Omunene! Why don't you come back, to see
us?
We miss you. Why have you stayed away?" Not much fun for them down here at the Interface, competing with the bacteria who cruise by in their country of light, these cellular aristocracy, approaching the wall of hydrocarbons each for his share of God's abundance-leaving their wastes, a green murmur, a divergently unstable gabbling, a slime that grows with the days thicker, more poisonous. It is a depressing thing indeed to be a pygmy clustered together with thousands of others, hundreds of thousands, and have to live on the other side of all this. You say other side? What do you mean? What other side? You mean in the gasoline? (Clustered Pygmies, playfully and to some well-known swing riff:) No-no, no, no! -You mean in the water, then? (C.P.:) No-no, no, no! -Well you gotta tell me please, 'fore I drop my BVDs! We mean, explain the Pygmies, gathering their little heads into a symmetrical cauliflower pattern, and settling into a soft, wistful a cappella like kids around the campfire with Bing Crosby in a baseball cap (yes these Le-unahalluziationen have been known to get weird all right, weirder than cultural shock, even, this here is
meta
shock's what it is, 3-sigma white faces in a ritual whose mystery is deeper than north light over the Kalahari…) we mean on the other side of the whole thing, the whole bacteria-hydrocarbon-waste cycle. We can see the Interface from here. It's a long rainbow, mostly indigo, if that's any help-indigo and Kelly green (Bing, directing, raises up all these brainwashed little Irish faces in a moving firelit crescendo) green… gasoline… between… submarine… fading, because by then Pavel was on his way out to the refinery, forget this 2 1/2
weeks of self-imposed torture, Ombindi's men after him down by the glasswool boiler pipes, men and women both trying to caress him, pressure from both sides of the Tribal Suicide Question, Enzian complaining, too entangled with the Rocket, too encrimsoned in his feud with the Russian, to care much about anyone outside himself… and here Pavel was trying to stay away from this, from the breath of Mukuru, only trying to be a good man-

The Moss Creature stirs. It has crept an alarming distance closer since Pavel last looked. A sudden overflow of smooth cherry-red down the mountainside to his right (were there mountains? Where did the
mountains
come from?) and at once he knows, beyond deception or hope, that he has slipped into the North, that inhaling the breath of the first ancestor has taken him over into the terrible land, as he must have known it would, step by step over these last years, impossible to turn (what
is
turn? don't know which way to begin to move… don't know
how
to move…) too late, miles and changes too late.

And now his head in Christian's steel notch at 300 yards. Suddenly, this awful branching: the two possibilities already beginning to fly apart at the speed of thought-a new Zone in any case, now, whether Christian fires or refrains-jump, choose-

Enzian tries his best-knocks the barrel aside, has a few unpleasant words for the young revenger. But both men saw the new branches. The Zone, again, has just changed, and they are already on, into the new one…

They ride on up to where Pavel's sniffing synthetic gasoline on the side of the lampless beige hill, under the tanks snailing whitely to heaven, here he is, one of the IG's happiest customers…

Does Pavel know something the rest of us don't? If the IG wanted this to be a cover-up for something else, why not the breath of Mukuru?

Enzian can project himself back in the Erdschweinhohle starting a new file on the IG-see it getting fatter and fatter as the interlocks develop, the books are audited, the witnesses come-not forward but sideways at least, always in shadows… And if it should prove not to be the Rocket, not the IG? Why then he'll have to go on won't he, on to something else-the Volkswagen factory, the pharmaceutical companies… and if it isn't even in Germany then he'll have to start in America, or in Russia, and if he dies before they find the True Text to study, then there'll have to be machinery for others to carry it on… Say, that's a swell idea-call the whole Erdschweinhohle together, get up there say,
My people, I have had a vision
… no no but there
will
need

to be more staff, if it's to be that big a search, quiet shirting of resources away from the Rocket, diversifying while making it look like an organic growth… and who to bring in on it? Christian-can he use the boy now, Christian's anger, will
It
use Christian regardless to help suppress Ombindi… because if the Schwarzkommando mission in the Zone has been truly revealed just now, then there'll have to be something done about Ombindi, Empty Ones, doctrine of the Final Zero. More staff will mean more Zone-Hereros, not fewer-more information coming in about the enemy, more connections made will mean a greater threat to the people, will mean the tribal numbers will have to increase. Is there an alternative? no… he would rather ignore Ombindi but the needs of this new Search will not allow him that comfort now… the search will rule…

Somewhere, among the wastes of the World, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom.

Andreas has been talking with Pavel, who is still out with his strangely lighted companions, playing at this and that. Presently, with love and subterfuge, he gets the address of Ombindi's medical connection.

Enzian knows who he is. "Saint Pauli. Let's go. Your machine running a little rough, Christian?"

"Don't sweet-talk me," Christian explodes, "you don't care about me, you don't care about my sister, she's dying out there and you just keep plugging her into your equations-you-play this holy-father routine and inside that ego you don't even hate us, you don't care, you're not even
connected
any more-" He swings his fist at Enzian's face. He's crying.

Enzian stands there and lets him. It hurts. He lets it. His meekness isn't all politics, either. He can feel enough of the bone truth in what Christian said-maybe not all of it, not all at once, but enough.

"You just connected. Can we go after her, now?"

Here is the good Frau, leaning over Slothrop from way down at the foot of the bed: her eye bright and cocky as a parrot's, a big white boss of eye cantilevered on old prickly arms and legs, a black kerchief above the roll of her pompadour in mourning for all her Hanseatic dead, underneath heaving iron fleets, under waves of the Baltic keel-edged and gray, dead under the fleets of waves, the prairies of the sea…

Next thing is Gerhardt von Goll's foot nudging Slothrop in a less than tender way. The sun is up, and all the girls have gone. Otto grouches around deck with a broom and swab, removing yesterday's chimpanzee shit. Swinemunde.

The Springer is his old chipper self: "Fresh eggs and coffee in the pilot house-fall to. We're due out of here in 15 minutes."

"Well just belay that 'we,' Ace."

"But I need your help." Springer's wearing a suit of fine tweed this morning, very Savile Row, fits perfectly-

"Narrisch needed your help."

"You don't know what you're talking about." His eyes are steelies that never lose. His laugh, subtitled
Humoring the Fools,
is Mittel-europaisch and mirthless. "All right, all right. How much do you want?"

"Everything's got a price, right?" But he's not being noble here, no, what it is is that his own price has just occurred to him, and he needs to shim the talk here, give it a second to breathe and develop.

"Everything."

"What's the deal?"

"A minor piracy. Pick up one package for me while I cover you." He looks at his watch, hamming it up.

"O.K., get me a discharge, I'll come with you."

"A what? A discharge? For
you?
Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"You ought to laugh more, Springer. It makes you look really cute."

"What
kind
of a discharge, Slothrop?
Honorable,
perhaps? Ah, ah-ha! Ha! Ha!" Like Adolf Hitler, Springer is easily tickled by what the Germans call Schadenfreude, the feeling of joy at another's misfortune.

"Quit fooling, I'm serious."

"Of course
you are, Slothrop!" More giggling.

Slothrop waits, watches, sucking on an egg though he feels anything but sly this morning.

"Narrisch, you see, was supposed to go with me today. Now I'm stuck with you. Ha! Ha! Where do you want it delivered, this-ha- this discharge?"

"Cuxhaven." Slothrop has been having lately this dim fantasy about trying to contact the Operation Backfire people in Cuxhaven, to see if they'll help get him out. They seem to be the only English connection to the Rocket any more. He knows already it won't work. He and Springer arrange a date anyhow.

"Be at a place called Putzi's. It's down the Dorum road. Local dealers will be able to tell you where."

So it's out once again-out past the moles' wet embrace, into the Baltic, crest to crest, and into nimbus piling sheet on sheet bounces the jolly pirate bark, into a day already squally and bitter, and getting worse. Springer stands outside the pilot house hollering in above the sound of heavy seas that splash back over the bow and down the decks. "Where do you make her?"

"If it's Copenhagen she's bound for," Frau Gnahb's windburned face, permanent smile-creases all around her eyes and mouth, beaming like the sun, "can't have more than an hour on us…"

Visibility this morning is too low to see the coast of Usedom. Springer joins Slothrop at the rail looking at nothing, breathing the closing smell of gray weather.

"He's all right, Slothrop. He's seen worse. Two months ago in Berlin we got ambushed, right outside the Chicago. He walked through crossfire from three Schmeissers to offer our competitors a deal. Not a scratch."

"Springer, he was going round and round with half the Russian Army up there."

"They
won't kill him. They know who he is. He worked in guidance, he was Schilling's best man, he knows more about integrating circuits than anybody they'll find outside of Garmisch now. The Russians are offering fantastic salaries-better than the Americans-and they'll let him stay in Germany, work at Peenemunde or the Mittel-werke, just like he used to. He can even escape, if that's what he wants, we have very good connections for that-"