Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Temperatures, velocities, pressures, fin and body configurations, stabilities and
turbulences began to slip in, to replace what Leni had run away from. There were pine
and fir forests out the windows in the morning, instead of a sorrowful city courtyard.
Was he giving up the world, entering a monastic order?
One night he set fire to twenty pages of calculations. Integral signs weaved like
charmed cobras, comical curly
d
s marched along like hunchbacks through the fire-edge into billows of lace ash. But
that was his only relapse.
At first he helped out in the propulsion group. No one was specializing yet. That
came later, when the bureaus and paranoias moved in, and the organization charts became
plan-views of prison cells. Kurt Mondaugen, whose field was radio electronics, could
come up with solutions to cooling problems. Pökler found himself redesigning instrumentation
for measuring local pressures. That came in handy later at Peenemünde, when they often
had to lead over a hundred measuring tubes from a model no more than 4 or 5 centimeters’
diameter. Pökler helped in working out the Halbmodelle solution: bisecting the model
lengthwise and mounting it flat-side to the wall of the test chamber, bringing the
tubes through that way to all the manometers outside. A Berlin slum-dweller, he thought,
knew how to think in half-rations . . . but it was a rare moment of pride. No one
could really claim credit 100% for any idea, it was a corporate intelligence at work,
specialization hardly mattered, class lines even less. The social spectrum ran from
von Braun, the Prussian aristocrat, down to the likes of Pökler, who would eat an
apple in the street—yet they were all equally at the Rocket’s mercy: not only danger
from explosions or falling hardware, but also its dumbness, its dead weight, its obstinate
and palpable mystery. . . .
In those days, most of the funding and attention went to the propulsion group. Problem
was just to get something off the ground without having it blow up. There were minor
disasters—aluminum motor casings would burn through, some injector designs would set
up resonant combustion, in which the burning motor would try to shriek itself to pieces—and
then, in ’34, a major one. Dr. Wahmke decided to mix peroxide and alcohol together
before
injection into the thrust chamber, to see what would happen. The ignition flame backed
up through the conduit into the tank. The blast demolished the test stand, killing
Dr. Wahmke and two others. First blood, first sacrifice.
Kurt Mondaugen took it as a sign. One of these German mystics who grew up reading
Hesse, Stefan George, and Richard Wilhelm, ready to accept Hitler on the basis of
Demian-metaphysics, he seemed to look at fuel and oxidizer as paired opposites, male
and female principles uniting in the mystical egg of the combustion chamber: creation
and destruction, fire and water, chemical plus and chemical minus—
“Valency,” Pökler protested, “a condition of the outer shells, that’s all.”
“Think about it,” said Mondaugen.
There was also Fahringer, an aerodynamics man, who went out in the pine woods at Peenemünde
with his Zen bow and roll of pressed straw to practice breathing, draw and loosing,
over and over. It seemed rather rude at a time when his colleagues were being driven
insane by what they called “Folgsamkeitfaktor,” a problem with getting the Rocket’s
long axis to follow the tangent, at all points, to its trajectory. The Rocket for
this Fahringer was a fat Japanese arrow. It was necessary in some way to become one
with Rocket, trajectory, and target—“not to
will
it, but to surrender, to step out of the role of firer. The act is undivided. You
are both aggressor and victim, rocket and parabolic path and . . .” Pökler never knew
what the man was talking about. But Mondaugen understood. Mondaugen was the bodhisattva
here, returned from exile in the Kalahari and whatever light had found him there,
returned to the world of men and nations to carry on in a role he’d chosen deliberately,
but without ever explaining why. In Südwest he had kept no journals, written no letters
home. There had been an uprising by the Bondelswaartz in 1922, and general turmoil
in the country. His radio experiments interrupted, he sought refuge, along with a
few score other whites, in the villa of a local landowner named Foppl. The place was
a stronghold, cut off on all sides by deep ravines. After a few months of siege and
debauchery, “haunted by a profound disgust for everything European,” Mondaugen went
out alone into the bush, ended up living with the Ovatjimba, the aardvark people,
who are the poorest of the Hereros. They accepted him with no questions. He thought
of himself, there and here, as a radio transmitter of some kind, and believed that
whatever he was broadcasting at the time was at least no threat to them. In his electro-mysticism,
the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that
suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is
the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals—sense-data, feelings,
memories relocating—are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that
are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments
of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal
zero.
“In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid?” said Pökler.
“Yes, that’s good,” Mondaugen smiled.
Closest to the zero among them all, perhaps, was the African Enzian, the protégé of
Major Weissmann. At the Versuchsanstalt, behind his back, he was known as Weissmann’s
Monster, probably less out of racism than at the picture the two of them made, Enzian
towering a foot over Weissmann, who was balding, scholarly, peering up at the African
through eyeglass lenses thick as bottles, skipping now and then to keep up as they
stalked over the asphalt and through the labs and offices, Enzian dominating every
room and landscape of those early Rocket days. . . . Pökler’s clearest memory of him
is his first, in the testing room at Kummersdorf, surrounded by electric colors—green
nitrogen bottles, a thick tangle of red, yellow and blue plumbing, Enzian’s own copper
face with the same kind of serenity that now and then drifted into Mondaugen’s—watching
in one of the mirrors the image of a rocket engine beyond the safety partition: in
the stale air of that room snapping with last-minute anxieties, nicotine craving,
unreasonable prayer, Enzian was
at peace. . . .
Pökler moved to Peenemünde in 1937, along with some 90 others. They were invading
Gravity itself, and a beachhead had to be laid down. Never in his life, not even as
a laborer in Berlin, did Pökler work so hard. The vanguard spent the spring and summer
converting a little island, the Greifswalder Oie, into a testing station: resurfacing
road, stringing cable and telephone line, putting up living quarters, latrines and
storage sheds, excavating bunkers, mixing concrete, endlessly stevedoring in crates
of tools, bags of cement, drums of fuel. They used an ancient ferryboat for cargo
runs between the mainland and the Oie. Pökler remembers the worn red plush and scratched
lacquer inside the dim cabins, the neglected brightwork, the asthmatic cry of her
steam-whistle, odors of sweat, cigarette smoke and Diesel fuel, the trembling of arm
and leg muscles, the tired joking, the exhaustion toward the end of each day, his
own new calluses struck to gold by the late sun. . . .
The sea was mostly calm and blue that summer, but in the autumn the weather turned.
Rain swept in from the north, the temperature plunged, wind tore into storage tents,
giant waves boomed all night long. The water was white for fifty meters out from shore.
Spray feathered landward off the curls of the big breakers. Pökler, billeted at a
fisherman’s cottage, came in from his evening walks behind a fine mask of salt. Lot’s
wife. What disaster had he dared to look back on? He knew.
He reverted that season to childhood, to the wounded dog. During those wet and solitary
walks he brooded about Leni: he concocted scenarios in which they would meet again,
in some elegant or dramatic setting—ministry, theatre lobby—two or three jeweled and
beautiful women hanging to him, generals and industrialists springing to light his
American cigarettes and listening to his offhand solutions to problems Leni would
only vaguely understand. The most satisfying of these fantasies would come while Pökler
was on the toilet—he’d tap his feet, fanfares would whisper through his lips as he
felt that pleasant anticipation. . . .
But the burden of his poor Berlin self lingered. He had spoken to it, listened, probed,
and yet it would not dissolve or flee, it persisted, beggar in all the doorways of
his life, beseeching silently with eyes, with hands quite sure of their guiltmaking
craft. Busywork at Peenemünde and good company at Herr Halliger’s inn on the Oie—all
marking time till good firing weather—and Pökler more vulnerable than he’d ever been.
His cold and womanless nights, the card and chess games, the all-male beer-drinking
sessions, the nightmares he had to find his own way up out of because there was no
other hand now to shake him awake, nobody to hold him when the shadows came on the
window shade—all caught up with him that November, and maybe he allowed it to. A protective
reflex. Because something scary was happening. Because once or twice, deep in the
ephedrine predawns nodding ja, ja, stimmt, ja, for some design you were carrying not
in but
on
your head and could feel bobbing, out past your side-vision, bobbing and balanced
almost—he would become aware of a drifting-away . . . some assumption of Pökler into
the calculations, drawings, graphs, and even what raw hardware there was . . . each
time, soon as it happened, he would panic, and draw back into the redoubt of waking
Pökler, heart pounding, hands and feet aching, his breath catching in a small voiced
hunh
— Something was out to get him, something here, among the paper. The fear of extinction
named Pökler knew it was the Rocket, beckoning him in. If he also knew that in something
like this extinction he could be free of his loneliness and his failure, still he
wasn’t quite convinced. . . . So he hunted, as a servo valve with a noisy input will,
across the Zero, between the two desires, personal identity and impersonal salvation.
Mondaugen saw it all. He could see into Pökler’s heart. In his compassion, not surprisingly,
he had no free advice for his friend. Pökler would have to find his own way to his
zero signal, his true course.
By ’38 the Peenemünde facility was taking shape, and Pökler moved over to the mainland.
With hardly more to go on than Stodda’s treatise on steam turbines, and helpful data
now and then from universities at Hannover, Darmstadt, Leipzig and Dresden, the propulsion
group were testing a rocket engine of 1½ tons’ thrust, 10 atmospheres’ combustion
pressure, and 60 seconds’ duration. They were getting exhaust velocities of 1800 meters
per second, but the value they were aiming for was 2000. They called it the magic
number, and they meant it literally. As some gamblers on the stock market know when
to place stop orders, feeling by instinct not the printed numbers but the
rates of change
, knowing from first and second derivatives in their skin when to come in, stay or
go, so there are engineering reflexes tuned always to know, at any moment, what, given
the resources, can be embodied in working hardware—what is “feasible.” On the day
that a 2000 m/sec exhaust became feasible, the A4 itself suddenly came in reach. The
danger then lay in being seduced by approaches that were too sophisticated. No one
was immune. Hardly a designer there, including Pökler, didn’t come up with at least
one monster rig, some Gorgon’s head writhing with pipes, tubes, complicated folderol
for controlling pressures, solenoids on top of pilot valves on auxiliary valves on
backup valves—hundreds of pages on valve nomenclature were printed as appendices to
these weird proposals, all promising huge pressure differences between the inside
of the chamber and the nozzle exit—beautiful, as long as you didn’t care much about
those millions of moving parts behaving together too reliably. But to get a dependable
working motor, one the military could use in the field to kill people, the real engineering
problem now was to keep things as simple as possible.
The model currently being fired was the A3, christened not with champagne, but with
flasks of liquid oxygen by the playful technicians. Emphasis had begun to shift from
propulsion to guidance. Telemetry on the flight tests was still primitive. Thermometers
and barometers were sealed in a watertight compartment with a movie camera. During
flights the camera photographed the needles swinging on the gauges. After the flight
the film was recovered, and the data played back. Engineers sat around looking at
movies of dials. Meantime Heinkels were also dropping iron models of the Rocket from
20,000 feet. The fall was photographed by Askania cinetheodolite rigs on the ground.
In the daily rushes you would watch the frames at around 3000 feet, where the model
broke through the speed of sound. There has been this strange connection between the
German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for
at least two centuries—since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the
same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air. And now
Pökler was about to be given proof that these techniques had been extended past images
on film, to human lives.
He had returned to his quarters about sundown, too tired or preoccupied to be much
affected by the furnace of colors in the flower gardens, the daily changes to the
skyline of the Station, even the absence of noise today from the testing stands. He
smelled the ocean, and could almost imagine himself as someone who lives year-round
at a seaside resort, but seldom gets to the beach. Now and then, over in Peenemünde-West,
a fighter plane took off or landed, the motors softened by distance to tranquil purring.
A late sea-breeze flickered. He had no warning other than a smile from a colleague
who lived a few cubicles away and was coming down the barracks stairs as Pökler was
going up. He entered his own cubicle and saw her sitting on the bed, her toes pointed
in next to a flowered carpetbag, skirt pulled over her knees and eyes anxiously, fatally,
looking into his.