Authors: Thomas Pynchon
“Secrets?” Look out, Slothrop. “Why should I want to know—”
“You’re not a war correspondent.”
“Why does everybody keep saying that? Nobody believes me. Of course I’m a war correspondent.”
Shaking the brassard at her. “Can’t you read? Sez ‘War Correspondent.’ I even have
a mustache, here, don’t I? Just like that Ernest Hemingway.”
“Oh. Then I imagine you wouldn’t be looking for Rocket Number 00000 after all. It
was just a silly idea I had. I’m sorry.”
Oh boy, am I gonna get out of
here
, sez Slothrop to himself, this is a badger game if I ever saw one, man. Who else
would be interested in the one rocket out of 6000 that carried the Imipolex G device?
“And you couldn’t care less about the Schwarzgerät, either,” she keeps on. She keeps
on.
“The what?”
“They also called it S-Gerät.”
Next higher assembly, Slothrop, remember? Wernher, up on the canopy, is hooting. A
signal to that Tchitcherine, no doubt.
Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they
keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
“Now how on earth,” elaborately uncorking a fresh bottle of Nordhäuser Schattensaft,
thoppp
, best Cary Grant imitation he can summon up with bowels so echoing tight, suavely
refilling glasses, handing one to her, “would a sweet, young, thing, like you, know
anything, about rocket,
hahd-
weah
?
”
“I read Vaslav’s mail,” as if it’s a dumb question, which it is.
“You shouldn’t be blabbing to random strangers like this. If he finds out, he’ll murder
you.”
“I like you. I like intrigue. I like playing.”
“Maybe you like to get people in trouble.”
“All right.” Out with the lower lip.
“O.K., O.K., tell me about it. But I don’t know if the
Guardian
will even be interested. My editors are a rather stuffy lot, you know.”
Goose bumps crowd her bare little breasts. “I posed once for a rocket insignia. Perhaps
you’ve seen it. A pretty young witch straddling an A4. Carrying her obsolete broom
over her shoulder. I was voted the Sweetheart of 3/Art. Abt. (mot) 485.”
“Are you a real witch?”
“I think I have tendencies. Have you been up to the Brocken yet?”
“Just hit town, actually.”
“I’ve been up there every Walpurgisnacht since I had my first period. I’ll take you,
if you like.”
“Tell me about this, this ‘Schwarzgerät.’”
“I thought you weren’t interested.”
“How can I know if I’m interested or not if I don’t even know what I’m supposed or
not supposed to be interested
in?
”
“You must be a correspondent. You have a way with words.”
Tchitcherine comes roaring through the window, a Nagant blazing in his fist. Tchitcherine
lands in a parachute and fells Slothrop with one judo chop. Tchitcherine drives a
Stalin tank right into the room, and blasts Slothrop with a 76 mm shell. Thanks for
stalling him, Liebchen, he was a spy, well, cheerio, I’m off to Peenemünde and a nubile
Polish wench with tits like vanilla ice cream, check you out later.
“I have to go, I think,” Slothrop sez, “typewriter needs a new ribbon, gotta sharpen
pencils, you know how it is—”
“I told you, he won’t be here tonight.”
“Why? Is he out after that
Schwarzgerät
, eh?”
“No. He hasn’t heard the latest. The message came in from Stettin yesterday.”
“In clear, of course.”
“Why not?”
“Couldn’t be very important.”
“It’s for sale.”
“The message?”
“The S-Gerät, you pill. A man in Swinemünde can get it. Half a million Swiss francs,
if you’re in the market. He waits on the Strand-Promenade, every day till noon. He’ll
be wearing a white suit.”
Oh yeah? “Blodgett Waxwing.”
“It didn’t give the name. But I don’t think it’s Waxwing. He sticks close to the Mediterranean.”
“You get around.”
“Waxwing is already a legend around the Zone. So is Tchitcherine. For all I know,
so are you. What was your name?”
“Cary Grant. Ge-li, Ge-li, Ge-li. . . . Listen, Swinemünde, that’s in that Soviet
zone, ain’t it.”
“You sound like a German. Forget frontiers now. Forget subdivisions. There aren’t
any.”
“There are soldiers.”
“That’s right.” Staring at him. “But that’s different.”
“Oh.”
“You’ll learn. It’s all been suspended. Vaslav calls it an ‘interregnum.’ You only
have to flow along with it.”
“Gonna flow outa here now, kid. Thanx for the info, and a tip of the Scuffling hat
to ya—”
“Please stay.” Curled on the bed, her eyes about to spill over with tears. Aw, shit,
Slothrop you sucker . . . but she’s just a little kid. . . . “Come here. . . .”
The minute he puts it in, though, she goes wicked and a little crazy, slashing at
his legs, shoulders, and ass with chewed-down fingernails sharp as a saw. Considerate
Slothrop is trying to hold off coming till she’s ready when all of a sudden something
heavy, feathered, and many-pointed comes crashing down onto the small of his back,
bounces off triggering him and as it turns out Geli too ZONNGGG! eeeeee . . . oh,
gee whiz. Wings flap and Wernher—for it is he—ascends into the darkness.
“Fucking bird,” Slothrop screams, “he tries that again I’ll give him a Baby Ruth right
up his ass, boy—” it’s a plot it’s a plot it’s
Pavlovian conditioning!
or something, “Tchitcherine trained him to do that, right?”
“Wrong!
I
trained him to do that.” She’s smiling at him so four-year-old happy and not holding
a thing back, that Slothrop decides to believe everything she’s been telling him.
“You are a witch.” Paranoid that he is, he snuggles down under the counterpane with
the long-legged sorceress, lights a cigarette, and despite endless Tchitcherines vaulting
in over the roofless walls with arsenals of disaster all for him, even falls asleep,
presently, in her bare and open arms.
• • • • • • •
It’s a Sunday-funnies dawn, very blue sky with gaudy pink clouds in it. Mud across
the cobblestones is so slick it reflects light, so that you walk not streets but these
long streaky cuts of raw meat, hock of werewolf, gammon of Beast. Tchitcherine has
big feet. Geli had to stuff pieces of an old chemise in the toes of his boots so they’d
fit Slothrop. Dodging constantly for jeeps, ten-ton lorries, Russians on horseback,
he finally hitches a ride from an 18-year-old American first lieutenant in a gray
Mercedes staff car with dents all over it. Slothrop frisks mustaches, flashes his
armband, feeling defensive. The sun’s already warm. There’s a smell of evergreens
on the mountains. This rail driving, who’s attached to the tank company guarding the
Mittelwerke, doesn’t think Slothrop should have any trouble getting inside. English
SPOG have come and gone. Right now American Army Ordnance people are busy crating
and shipping out parts and tools for a hundred A4s. A big hassle. “Trying to get it
all out before the Russians come to take over.” Interregnum. Civilians and bureaucrats
show up every day, high-level tourists, to stare and go wow. “Guess nobody’s seen
’em this big before. I don’t know what it is. Like a burlesque crowd. Not gonna do
anything, just here to look. Most of them bring cameras. Notice you didn’t. We have
them for rent at the main gate, if you’re interested.”
One of many hustles. Yellow James the cook has got him a swell little sandwich wagon,
you can hear him in the tunnels calling, “Come an’ get ’em! Hot ’n’ cold and drippin’
with greens!” And there’ll be grease on the glasses of half these gobbling fools in
another five minutes. Nick De Profundis, the company lounge lizard, has surprised
everybody by changing, inside the phone booth of factory spaces here, to an energetic
businessman, selling A4 souvenirs: small items that can be worked into keychains,
money clips or a scatter-pin for that special gal back home, burner cups of brass
off the combustion chambers, ball bearings from the servos, and this week the hep
item seems to be SA 100 acorn diodes, cute little mixing valves looted out of the
Telefunken units, and the even rarer SA 102s, which of course fetch a higher price.
And there’s “Micro” Graham, who’s let his sideburns grow and lurks in the Stollen
where the gullible visitors stray: “Pssst.”
“Pssst?”
“Forget it.”
“Well now you’ve got me curious.”
“Thought you looked like a sport. You taking the tour?”
“I-I only stepped away for a second. Really, I’m going right back. . . .”
“Finding it a little dull?” Oily Micro moves in on his mark. “Ever wonder to yourself:
‘What
really
went on in here?’?”
The visitor who is willing to spend extravagant sums is rarely disappointed. Micro
knows the secret doors to rock passages that lead through to Dora, the prison camp
next to the Mittelwerke. Each member of the party is given his own electric lantern.
There is hurried, basic instruction on what to do in case of any encounter with the
dead. “Remember they were always on the defensive here. When the Americans liberated
Dora, the prisoners who were still alive went on a rampage after the material—they
looted, they ate and drank themselves sick. For others, Death came like the American
Army, and liberated them spiritually. So they’re apt to be on a spiritual rampage
now. Guard your thoughts. Use the natural balance of your mind against them. They’ll
be coming at you off-balance, remember.”
A popular attraction is the elegant Raumwaffe spacesuit wardrobe, designed by famous
military couturier Heini of Berlin. Not only are there turnouts dazzling enough to
thrill even the juvenile leads of a space-operetta, down to the oddly-colored television
images flickering across their toenails, but Heini has even thought of silks for the
amusing little Space-Jockeys (Raum-Jockeier) with their electric whips, who will someday
zoom about just outside the barrier-glow of the Raketen-Stadt, astride “horses” of
polished meteorite all with the same stylized face (a high-contrast imago of the horse
that follows you, emphasis on its demented eyes, its teeth, the darkness under its
hindquarters . . .), with the propulsive gases blowing like farts out their tail ends—the
juvenile leads giggle together at this naughty bathroom moment, and slowly, in what’s
hardly more than a sigh of gravity here, go bobbing, each radiant in a display of
fluorescent plastics, back in to the Waltz, the strangely communal Waltz of the Future,
a slightly, disquietingly grainy-dissonant chorale implied here in the whirling silence
of faces, the bare shoulderblades slung so space-Viennese, so jaded with Tomorrow. . . .
Then come—the Space Helmets! At first you may be alarmed, on noticing that they appear
to be fashioned from skulls. At least the upper dome of this unpleasant headgear is
certainly the skull of some manlike creature built to a larger scale. . . . Perhaps
Titans lived under this mountain, and their skulls got harvested like giant mushrooms. . . .
The eye-sockets are fitted with quartz lenses. Filters may be slipped in. Nasal bone
and upper teeth have been replaced by a metal breathing apparatus, full of slots and
grating. Corresponding to the jaw is a built-up section, almost a facial codpiece,
of iron and ebonite, perhaps housing a radio unit, thrusting forward in black fatality.
For an extra few marks you are allowed to slip one of these helmets on. Once inside
these
yellow caverns, looking out now through neutral-density orbits, the sound of your
breath hissing up and around the bone spaces, what you thought was a balanced mind
is little help. The compartment the Schwarzkommando were quartered in is no longer
an amusing travelogue of native savages taking on ways of the 21st century. The milk
calabashes appear only to be made from some plastic. On the spot where tradition sez
Enzian had his Illumination, in the course of a wet dream where he coupled with a
slender white rocket, there is the dark stain, miraculously still wet, and a smell
you understand is meant to be that of semen—but it is really closer to soap, or bleach.
The wall-paintings lose their intended primitive crudeness and take on primitive spatiality,
depth and brilliance—transform, indeed, to dioramas on the theme “The Promise of Space
Travel.” Lit sharply by carbide light which hisses and smells like the bad breath
of someone quite familiar to you, the view commands your stare. After a few minutes
it becomes possible to make out actual movement down there, even at the immense distances
implied by the scale: yes, we’re hanging now down the last limb of our trajectory
in to the Raketen-Stadt, a difficult night of magnetic storm behind us, eddy currents
still shimmering through all our steel like raindrops that cling to vehicle windows . . .
yes, it is a City: vegetable “Ho-
ly!
”s and “Isn’t that something!”s go away echoing as we crowd about the bloom of window
in this salt underground. . . . Strangely, these are not the symmetries we were programmed
to expect, not the fins, the streamlined corners, pylons, or simple solid geometries
of the official vision at all—
that’s
for the ribbon clerks back on the Tour, in the numbered Stollen. No, this Rocket-City,
so whitely lit against the calm dimness of space, is set up deliberately To Avoid
Symmetry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror (from the Preamble to the Articles of
Immachination)—but tourists have to connect the look of it back to things they remember
from their times and planet—back to the wine bottle smashed in the basin, the bristlecone
pines outracing Death for millennia, concrete roads abandoned years ago, hairdos of
the late 1930s, indole molecules, especially
polymerized
indoles, as in Imipolex G—
Wait—which one of them was thinking that? Monitors, get a fix on it,
hurry up—
But the target slips away. “They handle their own security down inside,” the young
rail is telling Slothrop, “we’re here for Surface Guard only. Our responsibility ends
at Stollen Number Zero, Power and Light. It’s really a pretty soft racket for us.”
Life is good, and nobody’s looking forward much to redeployment. There are fräuleins
for screwing, cooking, and doing your laundry. He can put Slothrop on to champagne,
furs, cameras, cigarettes. . . . Can’t just be interested in rockets, can he, that’s
crazy. He’s right.