Gravity's Rainbow (53 page)

Post-A4 humanity is moving, hammering, and shouting among the tunnels. Slothrop will
catch sight of badged civilians in khaki, helmet liners with
GE
stenciled on, sometimes getting a nod, eyeglasses flashing under a distant light
bulb, most often ignored. Military working parties go at route-step bitching in and
out, carrying crates. Slothrop is hungry and Yellow James is nowhere in sight. But
there is nobody down here even going to say howdy to, much less feed, the free lance
Ian Scuffling. No, wait, by golly here comes a delegation of girls in tight pink lab
coats reaching just to the tops of bare thighs, tripping up the tunnel on stylish
gold wedgies “Ah, so reizend ist!” too many to hug at once, “Hübsch, was?” now now
ladies one at a time, they are giggling and reaching to drape around his neck lush
garlands of silvery B nuts and flange fittings, scarlet resistors and bright-yellow
capacitors strung like little sausages, scraps of gasketry, miles of aluminum shavings
as curly-bouncy ’n’ bright as Shirley Temple’s head—hey Hogan ya can keep yer hula
girls—and where are they taking him here? into an empty Stollen, where they all commence
a fabulous orgy, which goes on for days and days, full of poppies, play, singing,
and carrying on.

Moving into Stollen 20 and up, traffic grows heavier. This was the A4 part of the
factory, which the Rocket shared with V-1 and turboprop assemblies. Out of these Stollen,
the 20s, 30s, and 40s, Rocket components were fed out crosswise into the two main
assembly lines. As you walk deeper, you retrace the Rocket’s becoming: superchargers,
center sections, nose assemblies, power units, controls, tail sections . . . lotta
these tail sections still around here, stacked alternately fins up/fins down, row
on row identical, dimpled ripply metal surfaces. Slothrop moseys along looking at
his face in them, watching it warp and slide by, just a big underground fun house
here folks. . . . Empty dollies with small metal wheels chain away back down the tunnel:
they carry four-bladed arrowhead shapes that point at the ceiling—
oh.
Right—the pointed holders must’ve fit inside the expansion nozzles of the thrust
chambers, sure enough here comes a bunch of them,
big
fucking things tall as Slothrop, capital As painted in white near the burner cups. . . .
Overhead the fat and sinuous white-lagged pipes are lurking, and the steel lamps give
no light out of their scorched skullcap reflectors . . . down the tunnel’s centerline
run Lally columns, slender, gray, the exposed threads locked in rust of long standing . . .
blue shadows wash through the spare-parts cages, set on planking and I beams hung
from damp and chimney-sized columns of brick . . . glass-wool insulation lies beside
the tracks, heaped like snow. . . .

Final assembly went on in Stollen 41. The cross-tunnel is 50 feet deep, to accommodate
the finished Rocket. Sounds of carousing, of voices distinctly unbalanced, come welling
up, reverberating off of the concrete. Personnel are weaving back up the main tunnel
with a glassy and rubicund look to their faces. Slothrop squints down into this long
pit, and makes out a crowd of Americans and Russians gathered around a huge oak beer
barrel. A gnome-size German civilian with a red von Hindenburg mustache is dispensing
steins of what looks to be mostly head. Ordnance smoke-puffs flicker on nearly every
sleeve. The Americans are singing

R
OCKET
L
IMERICKS

There once was a thing called a V-2,

To pilot which you did not need to—

You just pushed a button,

And it would leave nuttin’

But stiffs and big holes and debris, too.

The tune is known universally among American fraternity boys. But for some reason
it is being sung here in German Storm Trooper style: notes clipping off sharp at the
end of each line, then a pulse of silence before the attack on the next line.

[Refrain:] Ja, ja, ja, ja!

In Prussia they never eat pussy!

There ain’t hardly cats enough,

There’s garbage and that’s enough,

So waltz me around again, Russky!

Drunks are hanging from steel ladders and draped over catwalks. Beer fumes crawl in
the long cavern, among pieces of olive-drab rocket, some upright, some lying on their
sides.

There was a young fellow named Crockett,

Who had an affair with a rocket.

If you saw them out there

You’d be tempted to stare,

But if you ain’t tried it, don’t knock it!

Slothrop is hungry and thirsty. Despite the clear and present miasma of evil in Stollen
41, he starts looking for some way to go down there and maybe score some of that lunch.
Turns out the only way down is by a cable, hooked to an overhead hoist. A fat cracker
Pfc. lounges at the controls, sucking on a bottle of wine. “Go ahead, Jackson, I’ll
give you a good ride. They taught me how to run these in the WPA.” Bracing his mustache
in what he figures to be a stiff upper lip, Ian Scuffling climbs on, one foot through
an eye-splice, the other hanging free. An electric motor whines, Slothrop lets go
the last steel railing and clutches on to the cable as 50 feet of twilit space appears
underneath him. Uh . . .

Rolling out over Stollen 41, heads milling far below, beer foam bobbing like torches
in the shadows—suddenly the motor cuts off and he’s falling like a rock. Oh fuck,
“Too young!” he screams, voice pitched way too high so it comes out like a teenager
on the radio, which ordinarily would be embarrassing, but here’s the concrete floor
rushing up at him, he can see every shuttering mark, every dark crystal of Thuringian
sand he’s going to be splashed over—not even a body nearby to get him off with only
multiple fractures. . . . With about ten feet to go the Pfc. puts on the brakes. Maniacal
laughter from above and behind. The cable, brought up taut, sings under Slothrop’s
hand till he loses his grip on it, falls, and is carried gently upside down and hanging
by the foot, in among funseekers around the beer keg who, used to this form of arrival
by now, only continue their singing:

There was a young fellow named Hector,

Who was fond of a launcher-erector.

But the squishes and pops

Of acute pressure drops

Wrecked Hector’s hydraulic connector.

Each young American in turn getting to his feet (optional), raising his tankard, and
singing about different ways of Doing It with the A4 or its related hardware. Slothrop
does not know that they are singing to him, and neither do they. He eyes the inverted
scene with a certain unease: with his brain approaching the frontiers of red-out,
there comes to him the peculiar notion that it’s Lyle Bland who has hold of his ankle
here. So he is borne stately into the fringes of the party. “Hey!” observes a crewcut
youth, “i-it’s
Tarzan
or something! Ha! Ha!” Half a dozen Ordnance people, juiced and roaring happily,
grab for Slothrop. After a lot of twisting and shoving, the foot is freed from its
wire loop. The hoist whines back the way it came, to its prankish operator and the
next fool he can talk into riding it.

There once was a fellow named Moorehead,

Who had an affair with a warhead.

His wife moved away

The very next day—

She
was
always kind of a sorehead.

The Russians are drinking relentlessly and in silence, shuffling boots, frowning,
maybe trying to translate these limericks. It isn’t clear whether the Americans are
here on Russian sufferance or vice versa. Somebody presses on Slothrop a shell-case,
ice cold, foaming down the sides. “Gee, we weren’t expecting the English too. Some
party, huh? Stick around—he’ll be along in a minute.”

“Who’s that.” Thousands of these luminous worms are wriggling all over Slothrop’s
field of vision, and his foot is beginning to prickle awake again. Oh, this beer here
is
cold
, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it’s all—hahhhh. His
nose comes up drowned in foam, his mustache white and bubbly too. All at once comes
shouting from the edges of the company. “Here he is, here he is!” “Give him a beer!”
“Hi there, Major, babes, sir!”

There was a technician named Urban,

Who had an affair with a turbine.

“It’s much nicer,” he said,

“Than a woman in bed,

And it’s sure as hell cheaper than bourbon!”

“What’s happening,” inquires Slothrop through the head of another beer just materialized
in his hand.

“It’s Major Marvy. This is his going-away party.” Marvy’s Mothers are all singing
“For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” now. Which nobody can deny if they know what’s good
for them, is the impression one cannot help receiving. . . .

“Uh, where’s he going?”

“Away.”

“Thought he was here to see that GE.”

“Sure, who do ya think’s pickin’ up the tab f’r this?”

Marvy here by subterranean light is even less engaging than he was in the moonlight
on top of that boxcar. The rolls of fat, bulging eyes and glistening teeth are grayer
here, screened more coarsely. A strip of adhesive tape plastered athletically over
the bridge of his nose, and a purple, yellow, and green decoration around one eye
testify to his rapid journey down the railroad embankment the other night. He is shaking
hands with his well-wishers, booming male endearments, paying special attention to
the Russians—“Well, bet
you’ve
spiked
that
with a little vodka! Hah?” moving on “Vlad, fella, how’s yer ass!” The Russians do
not appear to understand, which leaves them only the fanged smile, the Easter-egg
eyes, to make sense of. Slothrop is just snorting foam out of his nose when Marvy
spots him, and those eyes bug out in earnest.

“
There
he is,” in a great roar, indicating Slothrop with a trembling finger, “by God the
limey sonofabitch go
git
him, boys!” Go
git him
, boys? Slothrop continuing to gaze a moment here at this finger, illuminated in cute
flourishes and curlicues of cherubic fat.

“There, there, my man,” begins Ian Scuffling, by which point hostile faces have begun
to close in. Hmm. . . . Oh, that’s right, escape—he sloshes beer at the head nearest,
heaves the empty shell case at another, finds a gap in the crowd, slithers through
and flees, across florid faces of drunks asleep, vaulting khaki paunches festooned
with splashes of vomit, away down the deep cross-tunnel, among the pieces of Rocket.

“Reveille you hammerheads,” Marvy’s screaming, “don’t let that ’sucker git away!”
A sergeant with a boy’s face and gray hair, dozing with a grease gun cradled against
him, wakes up crying, “Krauts!” lets loose a deafening burst from his weapon straight
into the beer barrel, which destroys the bottom half and sends a great gush of wet
amber and foam surging among the pursuing Americans, half of whom promptly slip and
go down on their ass. Slothrop reaches the other end of the Stollen with a good lead,
and goes sprinting up a ladder there, taking rungs two at a time.
Shots
— Terrific blasts in this soundbox. Either Marvy’s Mothers are too drunk, or the darkness
is saving him. He hits the top out of breath.

In the other main tunnel now, Slothrop falls into a jog down the long mile to the
outside, trying not to wonder if he has the wind to make it. He hasn’t gone 200 feet
when the vanguard comes clambering up off of that ladder behind him. He dodges into
what must be a paint shop, skids on a patch of wet Wehrmacht green, and goes down,
proceeding through big splashes of black, white, and red before coming to rest against
the combat boots of an elderly man in a tweed suit, with white, water-buffalo mustaches.
“Gruss Gott.”

“Say, I think they’re trying to kill me back there. Is there someplace—”

The old man winks, motions Slothrop through the Stollen and on into the other main
tunnel. Slothrop notices a pair of coveralls streaked with paint, and thinks to grab
them. Past four more Stollen, then a sharp right. It’s a metal storage area. “Watch
this.” The old man goes chuckling down the long shop among blue racks of cold-rolled
sheets, heaps of aluminum ingots, sheafs of 3712 bar stock, 1624, 723. . . . “This
is going to be
good.
”

“Not
that
way, man, that’s the one they’re coming
down.
” But this oversize elf already has set about hitching cable from a hoist overhead
to a tall bundle of Monel bars. Slothrop climbs into those coveralls, combs his pompadour
down over his forehead, takes out a pocketknife and saws off pieces of mustache on
both sides.

“You look like Hitler now. Now they will
really
want to kill you!” German humor. He introduces himself as Glimpf, Professor of Mathematics
of the Technische Hochschule, Darmstadt, Scientific Advisor to the Allied Military
Government, which takes a while. “Now—we bring them this way.”

I am in the hands of a raving maniac—“Why not just hide out in here, till they forget
it?” But here comes dim shouts up-tunnel now: “All clear in 37 and 38, Chuckie babes!”
“O.K., old hoss, you guys take odds we’ll take evens.” They are not going to forget
it, they are making a tunnel-by-tunnel search instead. It’s peacetime, they can’t
shoot you in peacetime . . . but they’re drunk . . . oh boy. Slothrop is scared shitless.

“What do we do?”

“You will be the expert in idiomatic English. Say something provocative.”

Slothrop sticks his head out in the long tunnel and hollers, in his most English accent,
“Major Marvy sucks!”

“Up this way!” Sounds of galloping GI boots, nailheads smacking the concrete and a
lot of other ominous metal too going snick . . . snick . . .

“Now,” beams mischievous Glimpf, setting the hoist in motion.

A fresh thought occurs to Slothrop. He puts his head back out and hollers “Major Marvy
sucks NIGGERS!”