Gravity's Rainbow (54 page)

“I think we should hurry,” sez Glimpf.

“Aw, I just thought of a good one about his mother.” Slack has been disappearing inch
by inch from the bight of cable between the hoist and the bar stock, which Glimpf
has rigged to topple across the doorway, hopefully about the time the Americans show
up.

Slothrop and Glimpf light out through the opposite exit. About the time they reach
the first curve in the tunnel, all the lights go out. The ventilation whines on. The
phantom voices inside it gain confidence from the dark.

The bundle of Monel falls with a great crash. Slothrop touches rock wall, and uses
the wall then for guidance through this absolute blackness. Glimpf is still someplace
in the middle of the tunnel, on the tracks. He is not breathing hard, but he
is
chuckling to himself. Behind are the hollow staggerings of the pursuit, but no light
yet. There is a soft clang and sharp “Himmel” from the old professor. Sounds of yelling
have grown louder and now here are the first flashlights, and it’s time to get out
of the bathtub—

“What’s happening? For Christ’s sake . . .”

“Come here.” Glimpf has collided with some kind of miniature train, just visible now
in outline—it was used once to show visitors from Berlin around the factory. They
climb aboard the tractor in front, and Glimpf fiddles with switches.

Well here we go, all aboard, lights must’ve been all that Marvy cut, sparks are crackling
out behind and there’s even a little wind now. Good to be rolling.

Ev’ry little Nazi’s shootin’ pool or playin’ potsy

On the Mittel-werk Ex-press!

All the funny Fascists just a-twirlin’ their mustaches

Where we goin’? Can’t you guess?

Headin’ for the country just down the tracks,

Never heard o’ shortages or in-come-tax,

Gonna be good-times, for Minnie and-Max,

On the Mittel-werk Ex-press!

Glimpf has switched on a headlamp. From side-tunnels booming by, figures in khaki
stare. Whites of eyes give back the light for an instant before flicking past. A few
people wave. Shouts go dopplering
Hey-eyyy-y-y-y
like car horns at the crossings going home at night on the Boston and Maine. . . .
The Express is rolling at a fair clip. Damp wind rushes by in a whistle. In the lamp’s
backscatter, silhouettes of warhead sections can be made out, stacked on the two little
flatcars the engine’s towing. Local midgetry scuttle and cringe alongside the tracks,
nearly out of the light. They think of the little train as their own, and feel hurt
whenever the big people come to commandeer it. Some sit on stacks of crates, dangling
their legs. Some practice handstands in the dark. Their eyes glow green and red. Some
even swing from ropes secured to the overhead, in mock Kamikaze attacks on Glimpf
and Slothrop, screaming, “Banzai, banzai,” before vanishing with a giggle. It’s all
in play. They’re really quite an amiable—

Right behind, loud as megaphones, in massed chorale:

There once was a fellow named Slattery

“Oh, shit,” sez Slothrop.

Who was fond of the course-gyro battery.

With that 50-volt shock,

What was left of his cock

Was all slimy and sloppy and spattery.

Ja, ja, ja, ja,

In Prussia they never eat pussy, u.s.w.

“Can you get back and uncouple those cars?” Glimpf wants to know.

“Reckon so. . . .” But he seems to fumble at it for hours. Meantime:

There was a young fellow named Pope,

Who plugged into an
os
cillo
scope.

The cyclical trace

Of their carnal embrace

Had a damn nearly infinite slope.

“Engineers,” Glimpf mutters. Slothrop gets the cars uncoupled and the engine speeds
up. Wind is tearing at all Irish pennants, collar-points, cuffs, buckles, and belts.
Back behind them there’s a tremendous crash and clank, and a few shouts in the dark.

“Think that stopped ’em?”

Right up their ass, in four-part harmony:

There was a young fellow named Yuri,

Fucked the nozzle right up its venturi.

He had woes without cease

From his local police,

And a hell of a time with the jury.

“O.—K., Jocko babes! Got that old phosphorus flare?”

“Stand by, good buddy!”

With only that warning, in blinding concussion the Icy Noctiluca breaks, floods through
the white tunnel. For a minute or two nobody in here can see. There is only the hurtling
on, through amazing perfect whiteness. Whiteness without heat, and blind inertia:
Slothrop feels a terrible
familiarity
here, a center he has been skirting, avoiding as long as he can remember—never has
he been as close as now to the true momentum of his time: faces and facts that have
crowded his indenture to the Rocket, camouflage and distraction fall away for the
white moment, the vain and blind tugging at his sleeves
it’s important . . . please . . . look at us . . .
but it’s already too late, it’s only wind, only g-loads, and the blood of his eyes
has begun to touch the whiteness back to ivory, to brushings of gold and a network
of edges to the broken rock . . . and the hand that lifted him away sets him back
in the Mittelwerke—

“Whoo-wee!
There’s
’at ’sucker now!”

Out of the flare, inside easy pistol range, emerges a lumbering diesel engine, pushing
ahead of it the two cars Slothrop uncoupled, itself stuffed with bloodshot, disheveled,
bloated Americans, and at an apex, perched lopsided on their shoulders, Major Marvy
himself, wearing a giant white Stetson, and clutching two .45 automatics.

Slothrop ducks down behind a cylindrical object at the rear of the tractor. Marvy
starts shooting, wildly, inspired by hideous laughter from the others. Slothrop happens
to notice now that what he’s chosen to hide behind, actually, seems to be another
warhead. If the Amatol charges are still in—say, Professor, could the shock wave from
a .45 bullet at this range succeed in detonating this warhead here if it struck the
casing? e-even if there was no fuze installed? Well, Tyrone, now that would depend
on many things: muzzle velocity, wall thickness and composition—

Counting at least on a pulled arm muscle and hernia, Slothrop manages to tip and heave
the warhead off onto the track while Marvy’s bullets go whanging and crashing all
over the tunnel. It bounces and comes to rest tilted against one of the rails. Good.

The flare has begun to die. Shadows are reoccupying the mouths of the Stollen. The
cars ahead of Marvy hit the obstacle a solid WHONK! doubling up in an inverted V—diesel
brakes screech in panic
yi-i-i-i-ke
as the big engine derails, slews, begins to tip, Americans grabbing frantically for
handholds, each other, empty air. Then Slothrop and Glimpf are around the last curve
of the integral sign, and there is another huge crash behind them, screaming that
prolongs, echoing, as they see now the entrance ahead, growing parabola of green mountainslopes,
and sunlight. . . .

“Did you have a car when you came?” inquires the twinkling Glimpf.

“What?” Slothrop recalls the keys still in that Mercedes. “
Oh. . . .”

Glimpf eases on the brakes as they coast out under the parabola into daylight, and
roll to a smooth and respectable stop. They flip salutes at the B Company sentries
and proceed to hijack the Mercedes, which is right where that rail left it.

Out on the road, Glimpf gestures them north, watching Slothrop’s driving with a leery
eye. They wind snarling up into the Harz, in and out of mountain shadows, pine and
fir odors enveloping them, screeching around curves and sometimes nearly off of the
road. Slothrop has the inborn gift of selecting the wrong gear for all occasions,
and anyhow he’s jittery, eye in the mirror and out the back of his head aswarm with
souped-up personnel carriers and squadrons of howling Thunderbolts. Coming around
a blind corner, using the whole width of the pavement to make it—a sharp road-racing
trick he happens to know—they nearly buy it from a descending American Army deuce-and-a-half,
the words
fucking idiot
clearly visible on the mouth of the driver as they barely scoot past, heartbeats
slamming low in their throats, mud from the truck’s rear tires slapping over them
in a great wing that shakes the rig and blots out half the windshield.

The sun is well past its zenith when they pull up, finally, below a forested dome
with a small dilapidated castle on top, hundreds of doves, white teardrops, dripping
from its battlements. The green breath of the woods has sharpened, grown colder.

They climb a switchbacking path strewn with rocks, among dark firs toward the castle
in the sunlight, jagged and brown above as a chunk of bread left out for all its generations
of birds.

“This is where you’re staying?”

“I used to work here. I think Zwitter might still be around.” There wasn’t enough
room in the Mittelwerke for many of the smaller assembly jobs. Control systems mainly.
So they were put together in beerhalls, shops, schools, castles, farmhouses all around
Nordhausen here, any indoor lab space the guidance people could find. Glimpf’s colleague
Zwitter is from the T.H. in Munich. “The usual Bavarian approach to electronics.”
Glimpf begins to frown. “He’s bearable, I suppose.” Whatever mysterious injustices
spring from a Bavarian approach to electronics now remove Glimpf’s twinkle, and keep
him occupied in surly introspection the rest of the way up.

Mass liquid cooing, damped in white fluff, greets them as they slip in a side entrance
to the castle. Floors are dirty and littered with bottles and scraps of papers. Some
of the papers are stamped with the magenta
GEHEIME
KOMMANDOSACHE.
Birds fly in and out of broken windows. Thin beams of light come in from chinks and
erosions. Dust motes, fanned by the doves’ wings, never stop billowing here. Walls
are hung with dim portraits of nobles in big white Frederick the Great hairdos, ladies
with smooth faces and oval eyes in low-necked dresses whose yards of silk spill out
into the dust and wingbeats of the dark rooms. There is dove shit all over the place.

By contrast, Zwitter’s laboratory upstairs is brightly lit, well-ordered, crammed
with blown glass, work tables, lights of many colors, speckled boxes, green folders—a
mad Nazi scientist lab! Plasticman, where are you?

There’s only Zwitter: stocky, dark hair parted down the middle, eyeglass lenses thick
as the windows of a bathysphere, the fluorescent hydras, eels, and rays of control
equations swimming seas behind them. . . .

But when they see Slothrop, there is immediate clearing there, and glazed barriers
come down. Hmm, T.S., what’s this? Who are these people? What’s happened to the apples
in old Glimpf’s cheeks? What’s a Nazi guidance expert doing this side of the fence
at Garmisch, with his lab intact?

OH . . . thur’s . . .

Nazis in the woodwork,

Fascists in the walls,

Little Japs with bucktooth grins

A-gonna grab yew bah th’ balls.

Whin this war is over,

How happy Ah will be,

Gearin’ up fer thim Rooskies

And Go-round Number Three. . . .

• • • • • • •

In the days when the white engineers were disputing the attributes of the feeder system
that was to be, one of them came to Enzian of Bleicheröde and said, “We cannot agree
on the chamber pressure. Our calculations show that a working pressure of 40 atü would
be the most desirable. But all the data we know of are grouped around a value of only
some 10 atü.”

“Then clearly,” replied the Nguarorerue, “you must listen to the data.”

“But that would not be the most perfect or efficient value,” protested the German.

“Proud man,” said the Nguarorerue. “What are these data, if not direct revelation?
Where have they come from, if not from the Rocket which is to be? How do you presume
to compare a number you have only derived on paper with a number that is the Rocket’s
own? Avoid pride, and design to some compromise value.”

—from
Tales of the Schwarzkommando
, collected by Steve Edelman

In the mountains around Nordhausen and Bleicheröde, down in abandoned mine shafts,
live the Schwarzkommando. These days it’s no longer a military title: they are a people
now, Zone-Hereros, in exile for two generations from South-West Africa. Early Rhenish
missionaries began to bring them back to the Metropolis, that great dull zoo, as specimens
of a possibly doomed race. They were gently experimented with: exposed to cathedrals,
Wagnerian soirées, Jaeger underwear, trying to get them interested in their souls.
Others were taken back to Germany as servants, by soldiers who went to put down the
great Herero rising of 1904–1906. But only after 1933 did most of the present-day
leadership arrive, as part of a scheme—never openly admitted by the Nazi party—for
setting up black juntas, shadow-states for the eventual takeover of British and French
colonies in black Africa, on the model of Germany’s plan for the Maghreb. Südwest
by then was a protectorate administered by the Union of South Africa, but the real
power was still with the old German colonial families, and they cooperated.

There are several underground communities now near Nord-hausen/Bleicheröde. Around
here they are known collectively as the Erdschweinhöhle. This is a Herero joke, a
bitter one. Among the Ovatjimba, the poorest of the Hereros, with no cattle or villages
of their own, the totem animal was the Erdschwein or aardvark. They took their name
from him, never ate his flesh, dug their food from the earth, just as he does. Considered
outcasts, they lived on the veld, in the open. You were likely to come across them
at night, their fires flaring bravely against the wind, out of rifle range from the
iron tracks: there seemed no other force than that to give them locus out in that
emptiness. You knew what they feared—not what they wanted, or what moved them. And
you had business upcountry, at the mines: so, presently, as the sputtering lights
slipped behind, so did all further need to think of them. . . .