Gravity's Rainbow (3 page)

The first few times nothing clicked. The fantasies were O.K. but belonged to nobody
important. But the Firm is patient, committed to the Long Run as They are. At last,
one proper Sherlock Holmes London evening, the unmistakable smell of gas came to Pirate
from a dark street lamp, and out of the fog ahead materialized a giant, organlike
form. Carefully, black-shod step by step, Pirate approached the thing. It began to
slide forward to meet him, over the cobblestones slow as a snail, leaving behind some
slime brightness of street-wake that could not have been from fog. In the space between
them was a crossover point, which Pirate, being a bit faster, reached first. He reeled
back, in horror, back past the point—but such recognitions are not reversible.
It was a giant Adenoid.
At least as big as St. Paul’s, and growing hour by hour. London, perhaps all England,
was in mortal peril!

This lymphatic monster had once blocked the distinguished pharynx of Lord Blatherard
Osmo, who at the time occupied the Novi Pazar desk at the Foreign Office, an obscure
penance for the previous century of British policy on the Eastern Question, for on
this obscure sanjak had once hinged the entire fate of Europe:

Nobody knows-where, it is-on-the-map,

Who’d ever think-it, could start-such-a-flap?

Each Montenegran, and Serbian too,

Waitin’ for some-thing, right outa the blue—oh honey

Pack up my Glad-stone, ’n’ brush off my suit,

And then light me up my bigfat, cigar—

If ya want my address, it’s

That O-ri-ent Express,

To the san-jak of No-vi Pa-zar!

Chorus line of quite nubile young women naughtily attired in Busbies and jackboots
dance around for a bit here while in another quarter Lord Blatherard Osmo proceeds
to get
assimilated
by his own growing Adenoid, some horrible transformation of cell plasma it is quite
beyond Edwardian medicine to explain . . . before long, tophats are littering the
squares of Mayfair, cheap perfume hanging ownerless in the pub lights of the East
End as the Adenoid continues on its rampage, not swallowing up its victims at random,
no, the fiendish Adenoid has a
master plan
, it’s choosing only certain personalities useful to it—there is a new election, a
new preterition abroad in England here that throws the Home Office into hysterical
and painful episodes of indecision . . . no one knows
what
to do . . . a halfhearted attempt is made to evacuate London, black phaetons clatter
in massive ant-cortege over the trusswork bridges, observer balloons are stationed
in the sky, “Got it in Hampstead Heath, just sitting
breathing
, like . . . going in, and out . . .” “Any sort of
sound
down there?” “Yes, it’s horrible . . . like a stupendous
nose
sucking in snot. . . wait, now it’s . . . beginning to . . . oh,
no
 . . . oh, God, I can’t describe it, it’s so beast—” the wire is snapped, the transmission
ends, the balloon rises into the teal-blue daybreak. Teams come down from the Cavendish
Laboratory, to string the Heath with huge magnets, electric-arc terminals, black iron
control panels full of gauges and cranks, the Army shows up in full battle gear with
bombs full of the latest deadly gas—the Adenoid is blasted, electric-shocked, poisoned,
changes color and shape here and there, yellow fat-nodes appear high over the trees . . .
before the flash-powder cameras of the Press, a hideous green pseudopod crawls toward
the cordon of troops and suddenly
sshhlop!
wipes out an entire observation post with a deluge of some disgusting orange mucus
in which the unfortunate men are
digested
—not screaming but actually laughing,
enjoying
themselves. . . .

Pirate/Osmo’s mission is to establish liaison with the Adenoid. The situation is now
stable, the Adenoid occupies all of St. James’s, the historic buildings are no more,
Government offices have been relocated, but so dispersed that communication among
them is highly uncertain—postmen are being snatched off of their rounds by stiff-pimpled
Adenoid tentacles of fluorescent beige, telegraph wires are apt to go down at any
whim of the Adenoid. Each morning Lord Blatherard Osmo must put on his bowler, and
take his briefcase out to the Adenoid to make his daily
démarche.
It is taking up so much of his time he’s begun to neglect Novi Pazar, and F.O. is
worried. In the thirties balance-of-power thinking was still quite strong, the diplomats
were all down with Balkanosis, spies with foreign hybrid names lurked in all the stations
of the Ottoman rump, code messages in a dozen Slavic tongues were being tattooed on
bare upper lips over which the operatives then grew mustaches, to be shaved off only
by authorized crypto officers and skin then grafted over the messages by the Firm’s
plastic surgeons . . . their lips were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally
white, by which they all knew each other.

Novi Pazar, anyhow, was still a
croix mystique
on the palm of Europe, and F.O. finally decided to go to the Firm for help. The Firm
knew just the man.

Every day, for 2½ years, Pirate went out to visit the St. James Adenoid. It nearly
drove him crazy. Though he was able to develop a pidgin by which he and the Adenoid
could communicate, unfortunately he wasn’t nasally equipped to make the sounds too
well, and it got to be an awful chore. As the two of them snuffled back and forth,
alienists in black seven-button suits, admirers of Dr. Freud the Adenoid clearly had
no use for, stood on stepladders up against its loathsome grayish flank shoveling
the new wonderdrug cocaine—bringing
hods
full of the white substance, in relays, up the ladders to smear on the throbbing
gland-creature, and into the germ toxins bubbling nastily inside its crypts, with
no visible effects at all (though who knows how that
Adenoid
felt, eh?).

But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar.
Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca
pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of
the Firm. Months passed, World War II started, years passed, nothing was heard from
Novi Pazar. Pirate Prentice had saved Europe from the Balkan Armageddon the old men
dreamed of, giddy in their beds with its grandeur—though not from World War II, of
course. But by then, the Firm was allowing Pirate only tiny homeopathic doses of peace,
just enough to keep his defenses up, but not enough for it to poison him.

• • • • • • •

Teddy Bloat’s on his lunch hour, but lunch today’ll be, ack, a soggy banana sandwich
in wax paper, which he’s packing inside his stylish kangaroohide musette bag and threaded
around the odd necessities—midget spy-camera, jar of mustache wax, tin of licorice,
menthol and capsicum Meloids for a Mellow Voice, goldrim prescription sunglasses General
MacArthur style, twin silver hairbrushes each in the shape of the flaming SHAEF sword,
which Mother had Garrard’s make up for him and which he considers exquisite.

His objective this dripping winter noon is a gray stone town house, neither large
nor historic enough to figure in any guidebook, set back just out of sight of Grosvenor
Square, somewhat off the official war-routes and corridors about the capital. When
the typewriters happen to pause (8:20 and other mythical hours), and there are no
flights of American bombers in the sky, and the motor traffic’s not too heavy in Oxford
Street, you can hear winter birds cheeping outside, busy at the feeders the girls
have put up.

Flagstones are slippery with mist. It is the dark, hard, tobacco-starved, headachy,
sour-stomach middle of the day, a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death
and some of them even know it, many about now are already into the second or third
pint or highball glass, which produces a certain desperate aura here. But Bloat, going
in the sandbagged entrance (provisional pyramids erected to gratify curious gods’
offspring indeed), can’t feel a bit of it: he’s too busy running through plausible
excuses should he happen to get caught, not that he will, you know. . . .

Girl at the main desk, gumpopping, good-natured bespectacled ATS, waves him on upstairs.
Damp woolen aides on the way to staff meetings, W.C.s, an hour or two of earnest drinking,
nod, not really seeing him, he’s a well-known face, what’s’isname’s mate, Oxford chums
aren’t they, that lieutenant works down the hall at ACHTUNG. . . .

The old house has been subdivided by the slummakers of war. ACHTUNG is Allied Clearing
House, Technical Units, Northern Germany. It’s a stale-smoke paper warren, at the
moment nearly deserted, its black typewriters tall as grave markers. The floor is
filthy lino, there are no windows: the electric light is yellow, cheap, merciless.
Bloat looks into the office assigned to his old Jesus College friend, Lt. Oliver (“Tantivy”)
Mucker-Maffick. No one’s about. Tantivy and the Yank are both at lunch. Good. Out
wiv the old camera then, on with the gooseneck lamp, now aim the reflector just so . . .

There must be cubicles like this all over the ETO: only the three dingy scuffed-cream
fiberboard walls and no ceiling of its own. Tantivy shares it with an American colleague,
Lt. Tyrone Slothrop. Their desks are at right angles, so there’s no eye contact but
by squeaking around some 90°. Tantivy’s desk is neat, Slothrop’s is a godawful mess.
It hasn’t been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen
roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the
bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings,
dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash,
very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library
paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo
flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches,
pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope
and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer’s Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by
Slothrop’s mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string,
chalk . . . above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone
numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele
chords to a dozen songs including “Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland” (“He does
have some rather snappy arrangements,” Tantivy reports, “he’s a sort of American George
Formby, if you can imagine such a thing,” but Bloat’s decided he’d rather not), an
empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts
of the amber left eye of a Weimaraner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate-blue
veining in a distant cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset),
rivets in the skin of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up
girl . . . a few old Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2, a busted corkscrewing
ukulele string, boxes of gummed paper stars in many colors, pieces of a flashlight,
top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his blurry
brass reflection, any number of reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down
the hall—a dictionary of technical German, an F.O.
Special Handbook
or
Town Plan
—and usually, unless it’s been pinched or thrown away, a
News of the World
somewhere too—Slothrop’s a faithful reader.

Tacked to the wall next to Slothrop’s desk is a map of London, which Bloat is now
busy photographing with his tiny camera. The musette bag is open, and the cubicle
begins to fill with the smell of ripe bananas. Should he light a fag to cover this?
air doesn’t exactly stir in here, they’ll know someone’s been in. It takes him four
exposures, click zippety click, my how very efficient at this he’s become—anyone nips
in one simply drops camera into bag where banana-sandwich cushions fall, telltale
sound and harmful G-loads alike.

Too bad whoever’s funding this little caper won’t spring for color film. Bloat wonders
if it mightn’t make a difference, though he knows of no one he can ask. The stars
pasted up on Slothrop’s map cover the available spectrum, beginning with silver (labeled
“Darlene”) sharing a constellation with Gladys, green, and Katharine, gold, and as
the eye strays Alice, Delores, Shirley, a couple of Sallys—mostly red and blue through
here—a cluster near Tower Hill, a violet density about Covent Garden, a nebular streaming
on into Mayfair, Soho, and out to Wembley and up to Hampstead Heath—in every direction
goes this glossy, multicolored, here and there peeling firmament, Carolines, Marias,
Annes, Susans, Elizabeths.

But perhaps the colors are only random, uncoded. Perhaps the girls are not even real.
From Tantivy, over weeks of casual questions (
we know he’s your schoolmate but it’s too risky bringing him in
), Bloat’s only able to report that Slothrop began work on this map last autumn, about
the time he started going out to look at rocket-bomb disasters for ACHTUNG—having
evidently the time, in his travels among places of death, to devote to girl-chasing.
If there’s a reason for putting up the paper stars every few days the man hasn’t explained
it—it doesn’t seem to be for publicity, Tantivy’s the only one who even glances at
the map and that’s more in the spirit of an amiable anthropologist—“Some sort of harmless
Yank hobby,” he tells his friend Bloat. “Perhaps it’s to keep track of them all. He
does lead rather a complicated social life,” thereupon going into the story of Lorraine
and Judy, Charles the homosexual constable and the piano in the pantechnicon, or the
bizarre masquerade involving Gloria and her nubile mother, a quid wager on the Blackpool-Preston
North End game, a naughty version of “Silent Night,” and a providential fog. But none
of these yarns, for the purposes of those Bloat reports to, are really very illuminating. . . .