Authors: Thomas Pynchon
His name fell on him like a thunderclap, and of course it wasn’t Prof.-Dr. Jamf after
all, but a colleague from down the hall who had pulled reveille duty that morning.
Ilse was brushing her hair, and smiling at him.
His daytime work had started to go better. Others were not so distant, and more apt
to look in his eyes. They’d met Ilse, and been charmed. If he saw anything else in
their faces, he ignored it.
Then one evening he returned from the Oie, a little drunk, a little anxious-elated
over a firing the next day, and found his cubicle empty. Ilse, her flowered bag, the
clothing she usually left strewn on the cot, had all vanished. Nothing left but a
wretched sheet of log paper (which Pökler found so useful for taming the terror of
exponential curves into the linear, the safe), the same kind she’d drawn pictures
of her Moonhouse on. “Papi, they want me back. Maybe they’ll let me see you again.
I hope so. I love you. Ilse.”
Kurt Mondaugen found Pökler lying on her cot breathing what he imagined were odors
of her hair on the pillow. For a while then he went a little insane, talked of killing
Weissmann, sabotaging the rocket program, quitting his job and seeking asylum in England. . . .
Mondaugen sat, and listened to all of it, touched Pökler once or twice, smoked his
pipe, till at last, at two or three in the morning, Pökler had talked through a number
of unreal options, cried, cursed, punched a hole into his neighbor’s cubicle, through
which he heard the man snoring on oblivious. Cooled by then to a vexed engineer-elitism—“They
are fools, they don’t even know what sine and cosine are and they’re trying to tell
me
”—he agreed that yes, he must wait, and let them do what they would do. . . .
“If I set up a meeting with Weissmann,” Mondaugen did suggest, “could you be graceful?
calm?”
“No. Not with him. . . . Not yet.”
“When you think you are ready, let me know.
When
you’re ready, you’ll know how to handle it.” Had he allowed himself a tone of command?
He must have seen how much Pökler needed to be at someone’s command. Leni had learned
to subdue her husband with her face, knew what cruel lines he expected of her mouth,
what tones of voice he needed . . . when she left him she left an unemployed servant
who’d go with the first master that called, just a
V
ICTIM
IN
A
V
ACUUM
!
Nur . . . ein . . . Op-fer!
Sehr ins Vakuum,
(“Won’t somebody take advantage of me?”)
Wird niemand ausnut-zen mich, auch?
(“Just a slave with nobody to slave for,”)
Nur ein Sklave, ohne Her-rin, (
ya
-ta ta-
ta
)
(“A-and who th’ heck wants ta be, free?”)
Wer zum Teufel die Freiheit, braucht?
(All together now, all you masochists out there, specially those of you don’t have
a partner tonight, alone with those fantasies that don’t look like they’ll ever come
true—want you just to join in here with your brothers and sisters, let each other
know you’re alive and sincere, try to break through the silences, try to reach through
and connect. . . . )
Aw, the sodium lights-aren’t, so bright in Berlin,
I go to the bars dear, but nobody’s in!
Oh, I’d much rather bee
In a Greek trage-dee,
Than be a VICTIM IN A VACUUM to-nite!
Days passed, much like one another to Pökler. Identical morning plunges into a routine
dreary as winter now. He learned to keep an outward calm, at least. Learned to feel
the gathering, the moving toward war that is unique to weapons programs. At first
it simulates depression or non-specific anxiety. There may be esophagal spasms and
unrecoverable dreams. You find you are writing notes to yourself, first thing in the
morning: calm, reasoned assurances to the screaming mental case inside—1. It is a
combination. 1.1 It is a scalar quantity. 1.2. Its negative aspects are distributed
isotropically. 2. It is not a conspiracy. 2.1 It is not a vector. 2.11 It is not aimed
at anybody. 2.12 It is not aimed at
me
. . . u.s.w. The coffee begins to taste more and more metallic. Each deadline is
now a crisis, each is more intense than the last. Behind this job-like-any-other-job
seems to lie something void, something terminal, something growing closer, each day,
to manifestation. . . . (“The new planet Pluto,” she had whispered long ago, lying
in the smelly dark, her long Asta Nielsen upper lip gibbous that night as the moon
that ruled her, “Pluto is in my sign now, held tight in its claws. It moves slowly,
so slowly and so far away . . . but it will burst out. It is the grim phoenix which
creates its own holocaust . . .
deliberate resurrection.
Staged. Under control. No grace, no interventions by God. Some are calling it the
planet of National Socialism, Brunhübner and that crowd, all trying to suck up to
Hitler now. They don’t know they are telling the
literal truth. . . .
Are you awake? Franz. . . . “)
As war drew closer, the game of priorities and politicking grew more earnest, Army
vs. Luftwaffe, the Weapons Department vs. the Ministry of Munitions, the SS, given
their aspirations, vs. everybody else, and even a simmering discontent that was to
grow over the next few years into a palace revolt against von Braun, because of his
youth and a number of test failures—though heaven knew, there were always enough of
those, they were the raw material of all testing-station politics. . . . In general,
though, the test results grew more and more hopeful. It was impossible not to think
of the Rocket without thinking of
Schicksal
, of growing toward a shape predestined and perhaps a little otherworldly. The crews
launched an uncontrolled series of A5s, bringing some of them down by parachute, reaching
a height of five miles and nearly to the speed of sound. Though the guidance people
had still a long way to go, they had by this point switched over to vanes made of
graphite, brought the yaw oscillations down to five degrees or so, and grown measurably
happier about the Rocket’s stability.
At some point during the winter, Pökler came to feel that he could handle a meeting
with Weissmann. He found the SS man on guard behind eyeglasses like Wagnerian shields,
ready for unacceptable maxima—anger, accusation, a moment of office-violence. It was
like meeting a stranger. They had not spoken since the days at Kummersdorf, at the
old Raketenflugplatz. In this quarter-hour at Peenemünde, Pökler smiled more than
he had in the year previous: spoke of his admiration for Poehlmann’s work in devising
a cooling system for the propulsion.
“What about the hot spots?” Weissmann asked. It was a reasonable question, but also
an
intimacy.
It came to Pökler that the man didn’t give a damn about heating problems. This was
a game, as Mondaugen had warned—ritualized as jiu-jitsu. “We’ve got heat-flow densities,”
Pökler feeling as he usually did when he sang, “on the order of three million kcal/m
2
h °C. Regenerative cooling is the best interim solution right now, but Poehlmann has
a new approach”—showing him with chalk and slate, trying for the professional manner—“he
feels that if we use a film of alcohol on the
inside
of the chamber, we can reduce the heat transfer by a considerable amount.”
“You’ll be injecting it.”
“Correct.”
“How much fuel is that going to reroute? How’s it going to affect the engine efficiency?”
Pökler had the figures. “Right now injection is a plumber’s nightmare, but with the
delivery schedules as they are—”
“What about the two-stage combustion process?”
“Gives us more volume, better turbulence, but there’s also a non-isotropic pressure
drop, which cuts into our efficiency. . . . We’re trying any number of approaches.
If we could depend on better funding—”
“Ah. Not my department. We could do with a more generous budget ourselves.” They both
laughed then, gentleman scientists under a stingy bureaucracy, suffering together.
Pökler understood that he had been negotiating for his child and for Leni: that the
questions and answers were not exactly code for something else, but in the way of
an evaluation of Pökler personally. He was expected to behave a certain way—not just
to play a role, but to live it. Any deviations into jealousy, metaphysics, vagueness
would be picked up immediately: he would either be corrected back on course, or allowed
to fall. Through winter and spring the sessions with Weissmann became routine. Pökler
grew into his new disguise—Prematurely Aged Adolescent Whiz—often finding that it
could indeed take him over, keeping him longer at reference books and firing data,
speaking lines for him he could never have planned in advance: gentle, scholarly,
rocket-obsessed language that surprised him.
In late August he had his second visit. It should have been “Ilse returned,” but Pökler
wasn’t sure. As before, she showed up alone, unannounced—ran to him, kissed him, called
him Papi. But . . .
But her hair, for one thing, was definitely dark brown, and cut differently. Her eyes
were longer, set differently, her complexion less fair. It seemed she’d grown a foot
taller. But at that age, they shoot up overnight, don’t they? If it
was
“that age. . . .” Even as Pökler embraced her, the perverse whispering began. Is
it the same one? Have they sent you a different child? Why didn’t you look closer
last time, Pökler?
This time he asked how long they were going to let her stay.
“They’ll tell me. And I’ll try to let you know.” And would there be time for him to
recalibrate from his little squirrel who dreamed of living on the Moon to this dark,
long-legged, Southern creature, whose awkwardness and need of a father were so touching,
so clear even to Pökler, at this their second (or was it first, or third?) meeting?
Hardly any news of Leni. They had been separated, Ilse said, during the winter. She’d
heard a rumor that her mother had been moved to a different camp. So, so. Present
a pawn, withdraw the queen: Weissmann, waiting to see how Pökler would react. This
time he had gone too far: Pökler laced up his shoes and calmly enough went out looking
for the SS man, cornered him in his office, denounced him before a panel of kindly,
dim governmental figures, the speech eloquently climaxing as he threw chessboard and
pieces all into Weissmann’s arrogantly blinking face. . . . Pökler’s impetuous, yes,
a rebel—but Generaldirektor it’s his kind of fire and honesty we
need—
The child had suddenly come into his arms, to kiss him again. For free. Pökler forgot
his troubles and held her to his heart for a long time, without speaking. . . .
But that night in the cubicle, only breathing—no moon-wishes this year—from her cot,
he was awake wondering, one daughter one impostor? same daughter twice? two impostors?
Beginning to work out the combinations for a third visit, a fourth. . . . Weissmann,
those behind him, had thousands of these children available. As the years passed,
as they grew more nubile, would Pökler even come to fall in love with one—would she
reach the king’s row that way and become a queen-substitute for lost, for forgotten
Leni? The Opponent knew that Pökler’s suspicion would always be stronger than any
fears about real incest. . . . They could make up new rules, to complicate the game
indefinitely. How could any man as empty as Pökler felt that night ever be flexible
enough for that?
Kot
—it was ridiculous—hadn’t he seen her go by from every angle in their old city rooms?
Carried, asleep, crying, crawling, laughing, hungry. Often he had come home too tired
to make it to the bed, and had lain on the floor with his head under the one wood
table, curled, beaten, wondering if he could even sleep. The first time Ilse noticed,
she crawled over and sat staring at him for a long time. She had never seen him still,
horizontal, with his eyes shut. . . . He drifted toward sleep. Ilse leaned over and
bit him in the leg, as she bit crusts of bread, cigarettes, shoes, anything that might
be food.—I’m your father.—You’re inert and edible. Pökler screamed and rolled out
of the way. Ilse began to cry. He was too tired to want to think about discipline.
It was Leni finally who calmed her down.
He knew all Ilse’s cryings, her first attempts at words, the colors of her shit, the
sounds and shapes that brought her tranquillity. He ought to know if this child was
his own or not. But he didn’t. Too much had happened between. Too much history and
dream. . . .
Next morning his group leader handed Pökler a furlough chit, and a paycheck with a
vacation bonus. No travel restrictions, but a time limit of two weeks. Translation:
Will you come back? He packed some things, and they got on the train for Stettin.
The sheds and assembly buildings, the concrete monoliths and steel gantries that were
the map of his life flared backward, shadowing into great purplish chunks, isolated
across the marshland one from another, in parallax away. Would he dare not to come
back? Could he think so far ahead?
He’d left their destination up to Ilse. She chose Zwölfkinder. It was the end of summer,
nearly the end of peacetime. The children knew what was coming. Playing refugee, they
crowded the railway carriages, quieter, more solemn than Pökler had expected. He had
to keep fighting an urge to start babbling each time Ilse’s eyes turned from the window
toward his own. He saw the same thing in all their eyes: he was strange to them, to
her, and growing stranger, and he knew of no way to reverse it. . . .
In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses. In developing
an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven invaluable.
Games, fairy-tales, legends from history, all the paraphernalia of make-believe can
be adapted and even embodied in a physical place, such as at Zwölfkinder. Over the
years it had become a children’s resort, almost a spa. If you were an adult, you couldn’t
get inside the city limits without a child escort. There was a child mayor, a child
city council of twelve. Children picked up the papers, fruit peelings and bottles
you left in the street, children gave you guided tours through the Tierpark, the Hoard
of the Nibelungen, cautioning you to silence during the impressive re-enactment of
Bismarck’s elevation, at the spring equinox of 1871, to prince and imperial chancellor . . .
child police reprimanded you if you were caught alone, without your child accompanying.
Whoever carried on the real business of the town—it could not have been children—they
were well hidden.