Gravity's Rainbow (90 page)

Through a patch of woods, and then cautiously out onto the open airfield. A sharp
sickle of moon has risen. Apes scuttle along in the bonelight, arms dangling. It’s
a nervous passage. Everybody’s a perfect target, there’s no cover except for airplanes
strafed where they stood into relics—rusted stringers, burned paint, gullwings driven
back into the earth. Lights from the old Luftwaffe complex glow to the south. Trucks
purr now and then along the road at the far edge of the airfield. There’s singing
from the barracks, and someplace a radio. The evening news from somewhere. Too far
to hear the words or even the language, only the studious monotone: the news, Slothrop,
going on without you. . . .

They make it across the tarmac to the road, and crouch in a drainage ditch, listening
for traffic. Suddenly, to their left, yellow runway lights come on, a double row of
them chaining to the sea, brightness bouncing up and down a couple-three times before
it settles in. “Somebody coming in,” Slothrop guesses.

“More likely going out,” snaps Närrisch. “We’d better hurry.”

Back in the pine woods now, heading up a road of packed dirt toward Test Stand VII,
they start to pick up stray girls and chimpanzees. Pine smells wrap them: old needles
lie at the margins of the road. Downhill, lights appear as the trees begin thinning
out, then the test-stand area comes in view. The assembly building is something like
a hundred feet high—it blocks out the stars. There’s a tall bright band where sliding
doors are open, and light scatters outside. Närrisch grabs Slothrop’s arm. “It looks
like the major’s car. And the motor’s running.” Lotta searchlights, too, set up on
fences topped with barbed wire—also what look like a division of security roaming
around.

“Guess this is it,” Slothrop a little nervous.

“Ssh.” Sound of a plane, a single-engine fighter, circling to make its approach low
over the pines. “Not much time.” Närrisch gathers the others around and issues his
orders. Girls are to go in from the front, singing, dancing, vamping the woman-hungry
barbarians. Otto will try to knock out the car, Haftung will get everybody rounded
up and ready to rendezvous with the boat.

“Tits ’n’ ass,” mutter the girls, “tits ’n’ ass. That’s all we are around here.”

“Ah, shaddap,” snarls G. M. B. Haftung, which is his usual way of dealing with the
help.

“Meanwhile,” continues Närrisch, “Slothrop and I will go in after Springer. When we
have him, we’ll try to get them to shoot. That will be
your
signal to run like hell.”

“Oh, definitely some shooting,” sez Slothrop, “a-and how about this?” He has just
had a brilliant idea: fake Molotov cocktails, a switch on Säure Bummer’s old routine.
He holds up a vodka bottle, pointing and grinning.

“But that stuff won’t even hardly burn.”

“But they’ll
think
it’s gasoline,” beginning to pluck ostrich feathers from the costume of the nearest
girl. “And just imagine how secure it will make
us
feel.”

“Felix,” the clarinet player asks the tuba player, “what have we fallen among?” Felix
is eating a banana, and living for the moment. Presently he has wandered off in the
woods with the rest of the band, where they can be heard moving around in circles,
tootling and blatting at each other. Hilde and Slothrop are making Phony Phirebombs,
the other girls have taken off, Zitz und Arsch, downslope.

“So we’ll present a plausible threat,” Närrisch whispers, “we’ll need matches. Who’s
got matches?”

“Not me.”

“Me either.”

“Gee, my lighter’s out of flints.”

“Kot,” Närrisch throwing up his hands, “Kot,” walking off into the trees, where he
collides with Felix and his tuba. “You don’t have any matches either.”

“I have a Zippo,” replies Felix, “and two Corona Coronas, from the American officer’s
club in—”

A minute later. Närrisch and Slothrop, hands each cupped around the coal of one of
Havana’s finest, are sneaky-Peteing like two cats in a cartoon off toward Test Stand
VII, with vodka-bottle bombs stuck in their belts and ostrich-feather wicks trailing
behind in the sea breeze. The plan is to climb the pine-topped sand-and-scrub embankment
around the test stand, and come in on the Assembly Building from behind.

Now Närrisch here’s a guidance man, a guidance man is he. And ev’ry day at Rocket
Noon, there’s death, and revelry. . . . But Närrisch has managed, in his time, to
avoid nearly all of it.

In fact, no two people have been so ill-equipped to approach a holy Center since the
days of Tchitcherine and Džaqyp Qulan, hauling ass over the steppe, into the North,
to find their Kirghiz Light. That’s about ten years’ gap. Giving this pastime about
the same vulnerability to record-breakers as baseball, a sport also well-spidered
with white suggestions of the sinister.

Holy-Center-Approaching is soon to be the number one Zonal pastime. Its balmy heyday
is nearly on it. Soon more champions, adepts, magicians of all ranks and orders will
be in the field than ever before in the history of the game. The sun will rule all
enterprise, if it be honest and sporting. The Gauss curve will herniate toward the
excellent. And tankers the likes of Närrisch and Slothrop here will have already been
weeded out.

Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the
Anubis
era, has begun to thin, to scatter. “Personal density,” Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde
office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear
his name, “is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.”

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your
now.
It is the familiar “Δt” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in
the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona.
But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where
you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as
Slothrop now—what you’re doing
here
, at the base of this colossal curved embankment. . . .

“Uh,” he turns slackmouth to Närrisch, “what are we . . .”

“What are we what?”

“What?”

“You said, ‘What are we . . . ,’ then you stopped.”

“Oh. Gee, that was a funny thing to say.”

As for Närrisch, he’s too locked in to business. He has never seen this great Ellipse
any other way but the way he was meant to. Greta Erdmann, on the contrary, saw the
rust-colored eminences here bow, exactly as they did once, in expectancy, faces hooded,
smooth cowlings of Nothing . . . each time Thanatz brought the whip down on her skin,
she was taken, off on another penetration toward the Center: each lash, a little farther
in . . . till someday, she knows, she will have
that first glimpse of it
, and from then on it will be an absolute need, a ruling target . . . wh-wh-wh
-whack
the boneblack trestling of water towers above, bent to the great rim, visible above
the trees in light that’s bleak and bruise-purple as Peenemünde sunsets in the chill
slow firing-weather . . . a long look from the top of some known Low Country dike
into a sky flowing so even and yellowed a brown that the sun could be anywhere behind
it, and the crosses of the turning windmills could be spoke-blurs of the terrible
Rider himself, Slothrop’s Rider, his two explosions up there, his celestial cyclist—

No, but even
That
only flickers now briefly across a bit of Slothropian lobe-terrain, and melts into
its surface, vanishing. So here passes for him one more negligence . . . and likewise
groweth his Preterition sure. . . . There is no good reason to hope for any turn,
any surprise
I-see-it
, not from Slothrop. Here he is, scaling the walls of an honest ceremonial plexus,
set down on a good enough vision of what’s shadowless noon and what isn’t. But oh,
Egg the flying Rocket hatched from, navel of the 50-meter radio sky, all proper ghosts
of place—forgive him his numbness, his glozing neutrality. Forgive the fist that doesn’t
tighten in his chest, the heart that can’t stiffen in any greeting. . . . Forgive
him as you forgave Tchitcherine at the Kirghiz Light. . . . Better days are coming.

Slothrop is listening to faraway peripatetic tuba and clarinet being joined in on
now by trombone and tenor sax, trying to pick up a tune . . . and to the bursts of
laughter from soldiers and girls . . . sounds like a party down there . . . maybe
even some stag dames . . . “Say, why don’t we, uh . . . what was your—” Närrisch,
leather scarecrow, trying to ignore Slothrop’s behavior, has decided to dismantle
his firebomb: he uncorks the vodka and waves it under his nose before taking a belt.
He beams, cynical, salesmanwise, up at Slothrop. “Here.” A silence under the white
wall.

“Oh, yes I was thinking it was gasoline, but then it’s fake, so it’s really vodka,
right?”

But just over the embankment, down in the arena, what might that have been just now,
waiting in this broken moonlight, camouflage paint from fins to point crazed into
jigsaw . . . is it, then, really never to find you again? Not even in your worst times
of night, with pencil words on your page only Δt from the things they stand for? And
inside the victim is twitching, fingering beads, touching wood, avoiding any Operational
Word. Will it really never come to take you, now?

Near the water towers, they have started to climb, up toward the rim. Sand leaks into
their shoes and hisses away down the slope. At the top, back through the trees, they
get a quick look at the lighted runway, the fighter now landed, surrounded by groundcrew
shadows fueling, servicing, turning her around. Down the peninsula lights glow in
patches, curves, zigzags, but over on this side, from the old Development Works south,
it’s pitch black.

They push through pine branches and down again, into the Egg, sacked of its German
hardware, long converted to a Russian motor pool. The corner of the huge Assembly
Building, as they come down, rises to face them across a hundred yards of jeeps and
lorries. Down to the right is a three- or four-level test frame with a round, kind
of quonset top, and underneath the frame is a long pit shaped like a shallow V. “Cooling
duct,” according to Närrisch. “They’re probably under there. We have to go in through
here.”

They have come halfway down the slope to a pump house, built into the earthworks,
for the cold water that used to carry off the tremendous heat from the test firings.
It is stripped now, hollow and dark inside. Slothrop isn’t two steps over the doorsill
when he walks into somebody.

“Beg your pardon,” though it comes out less than calmly.

“Oh, that’s all right.” Russian accent. “I don’t mind at all.” He backs Slothrop outside
again, oh, a
mean
looking junior sergeant here about 8 or 9 feet high.

“Well, now—” at which point Närrisch comes walking into them.

“Oh.” Närrisch blinks at the sentry. “Sergeant, don’t you hear that music? Why aren’t
you back at the Assembly Building, with your comrades? There are, I understand, a
number of eager fräuleins
entertaining
them,” nudge nudge, “in a most enchanting state of deshabille, too.”

“I suppose that’s all perfectly divine,” replies the sentry, “for
some
people.”

“
Kot . . .”
So much for tactics.

“And besides, this is out of
bounds
, you big sillies.”

Sighing, Närrisch raises his bottle aloft, brings it down, or up,
thunk
on the sentry’s nape, dislodging the man’s helmet liner, is what happens. “Naughty,”
the Russian, somewhat nettled, stoops to retrieve his headgear. “
Really
I ought to put you
both
under apprehension.”

“Enough chit-chat,” snarls Slothrop, brandishing his glowing cigar and “Molotov cocktail.”
“Hand over that gun there, Ivan, or I turn you into a
human flare!
”

“You’re
mean
,” sulks the sentry, unslinging his Degtyarov a little too quickly—Slothrop dodges
aside, aims his usual swift kick to the groin, which misses, but does knock loose
the weapon, which Närrisch is thoughtful enough to dive for. “Beasts,” whimpers the
Russian, “oh, nasty, awful . . .” scampering off into the night.

“Two minutes,” Närrisch already inside the pump house. Slothrop grabs the automatic
from him and follows at a run, accelerating down a sloping corridor. Their feet ring
faster, sharper, on the concrete, down to a metal door: behind it they can hear Springer
singing and babbling like a drunk. Slothrop pushes off his safety and Närrisch goes
busting in. A pretty blonde auxiliary in black boots and steel-rimmed glasses is sitting
here taking down shorthand notes of everything she hears from Springer, who leans
happily grandiose against a cold-water pipe four feet high that runs the length of
the room.

“Drop that pencil,” orders Slothrop. “All right, where’s that Major Zhdaev?”

“He’s in conference. If you’d care to leave your name—”

“Dope,” Närrisch screams, “they have given him some kind of
dope!
Gerhardt, Gerhardt, speak to me!”

Slothrop recognizes the symptoms. “It’s that Sodium Amytal. It’s O.K. Let’s go.”

“I expect the Major to be back any moment. They’re upstairs in the guardroom, smoking.
Is there a number where he can reach you?”

Slothrop has slid under one of Springer’s arms, Närrisch under the other, when there’s
this loud hammering on the door.

“Smoking? Smoking what?”

“
This way, Slothrop.
”

“Oh.” They hustle Springer out another door, which Slothrop bolts and wrassles a heavy
filing cabinet up against, then they drag Springer up a flight of steps into a long,
straight corridor, lit by six or seven bulbs, the spaces between which are very dark.
Along either side, floor to ceiling, run thick bundles of measurement cabling.

“We’re done for,” Närrisch wheezes. It’s 150 yards to the measurement bunker, and
no cover but the shadows between the bulbs. All these birds gotta do is spray a pattern.