Authors: Thomas Pynchon
A good ship, a good crew, Merry Xmas and turn to. Horst Achtfaden, late of the Elektromechanische
Werke, Karlshagen (another cover name for the testing station at Peenemünde), has
really no time for naval nostalgia. With the technical spies of three or four nations
after him, he has had the disastrous luck to’ve been picked up by the Schwarzkommando,
who for all he knows now constitute a nation of their own. They have interned him
in the Chiefs’ Head. He has watched voluptuous Gerda and her Fur Boa go through the
same number 178 times (he has jimmied the coin box and figured a way to override it)
since they put him in here, and the thrill is gone. What do they want? Why are they
occupying a derelict in the middle of the Kiel Canal? Why don’t the British
do
something about this?
Look at it this way, Achtfaden. This Toiletship here’s a wind tunnel’s all it is.
If tensor analysis is good enough for turbulence, it ought to be good enough for history.
There ought to be nodes, critical points . . . there ought to be super-derivatives
of the crowded and insatiate flow that can be set equal to zero and these critical
points found. . . . 1904 was one of them—1904 was when Admiral Rozhdestvenski sailed
his fleet halfway around the world to relieve Port Arthur, which put your present
captor Enzian on the planet, it was the year the Germans all but wiped out the Hereros,
which gave Enzian some peculiar ideas about survival, it was the year the American
Food and Drug people took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola, which gave us an alcoholic
and death-oriented generation of Yanks ideally equipped to fight WW II, and it was
the year Ludwig Prandtl proposed the boundary layer, which really got aerodynamics
into business and put you right here, right now. 1904, Achtfaden. Ha, ha!
That’s
a better joke on you than any singed asshole, all right. Lotta good it does
you.
You can’t swim upstream, not under the present dispensation anyhow, all you can do
is attach the number to it and
suffer
, Horst, fella. Or, if you can tear yourself away from Gerda and her Fur Boa, here’s
a thought—find a non-dimensional coefficient for yourself. This is a wind-tunnel you’re
in, remember? You’re an aerodynamics man. So—
Coefficients, ja, ja. . . . Achtfaden flings himself disconsolately on the scarlet
VD toilet way down at the very end of the row. He knows about coefficients. In Aachen
once, for a while, he and his colleagues could stand in the forward watchtower: look
out into the country of the barbarians through Hermann and Wieselsberger’s tiny window.
Terrific compressions, diamond shadows writhing like snakes. Often the sting was bigger
than the model itself—the very need to measure interfered with the observations. That
should have been a clue right there. No one wrote then about supersonic flow. It was
surrounded by myth, and by a pure, primitive terror. Professor Wagner of Darmstadt
predicted that at speeds above Mach 5, air would liquefy. Should pitch and roll frequencies
happen to be equal, the resonance would throw the projectile into violent oscillations.
It would corkscrew to destruction. “Lunar motion,” we called it. “Bingen pencils”
we would call the helical contrails in the sky. Terrified. The Schlieren shadows danced.
At Peenemünde the test section measured 40 x 40 cm, about the size of a tabloid page.
“They pray not only for their daily bread,” Stresemann had said, “but also for their
daily illusion.” We, staring through the thick glass, had our Daily Shock—the only
paper many of us read.
You come in—just hit town, here in the heart of downtown Peenemünde, hey, whatcha
do for fun around here? hauling your provincial valise with a few shirts, a copy of
the
Handbuch
, perhaps Cranz’s
Lehrbuch der Ballistik.
You have memorized Ackeret, Busemann, von Kármán and Moore, some Volta Congress papers.
But the terror will not go away. This is faster than
sound
, than the words she spoke across the room so full of sunlight, the jazz band on the
radio when you could not sleep, the hoarse
Heils
among the pale generators and from the executive-crammed galleries overhead . . .
the Gomerians whistling from the high ravines (terrific falls, steepness, whistling
straight down the precipice to a toy village lying centuries, miles below . . .) as
you sat out on the counter of the KdF ship alone, apart from the maypole dancing on
the white deck, the tanned bodies full of beer and song, paunches in sunsuits, and
you listened to Ur-Spanish, whistled not voiced, from the mountains around Chipuda . . .
Gomera was the last piece of land Columbus touched before America. Did he hear them
too, that last night? Did they have a message for him? A warning? Could he understand
the prescient goatherds in the dark, up in the Canarian holly and the faya, gone dead
green in the last sunset of Europe?
In aerodynamics, because you’ve only got the thing on paper at first, you use dimensionless
coefficients: ratios of this to that—centimeters, grams, seconds neatly all canceling
out above and below. This allows you to use models, arrange an airflow to measure
what you’re interested in, and scale the wind-tunnel results all the way up to reality,
without running into too many unknowns, because these coefficients are good for
all
dimensions. Traditionally they are named after people—Reynolds, Prandtl, Péclet,
Nusselt, Mach—and the question here is, how about an Achtfaden number? How’s chances
for that?
Not good. The parameters breed like mosquitoes in the bayou, faster than he can knock
them off. Hunger, compromise, money, paranoia, memory, comfort, guilt. Guilt gets
a minus sign around Achtfaden though, even if it is becoming quite a commodity in
the Zone. Remittance men from all over the world will come to Heidelberg before long,
to major in guilt. There will be bars and nightclubs catering especially to guilt
enthusiasts. Extermination camps will be turned into tourist attractions, foreigners
with cameras will come piling through in droves, tickled and shivering with guilt.
Sorry—not for Achtfaden here, shrugging at all his mirror-to-mirror replications chaining
out to port and starboard—he only worked with it up to the point where the air was
too thin to make a difference. What it did after that was none of his responsibility.
Ask Weichensteller, ask Flaum, and Fibel—they were the reentry people. Ask the guidance
section, they pointed it where it was going. . . .
“Do you find it a little schizoid,” aloud now to all the Achtfaden fronts and backs,
“breaking a flight profile up into segments of responsibility? It was half bullet,
half arrow.
It
demanded this, we didn’t. So. Perhaps you used a rifle, a radio, a typewriter. Some
typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4
could have ever hoped to. You are either alone absolutely, alone with your own death,
or you take part in the larger enterprise, and you share in the deaths of others.
Are we not all one? Which is your choice,” Fahringer now, buzzing and flat through
the filters of memory, “the little cart, or the great one?” mad Fahringer, the only
one of the Peenemünde club who refused to wear the exclusive pheasant-feather badge
in his hatband because he couldn’t bring himself to kill, who could be seen evenings
on the beach sitting in full lotos position staring into the setting sun, and who
was first at Peenemünde to fall to the SS, taken away one noon into the fog, his lab
coat a flag of surrender, presently obscured by the black uniforms, leather and metal
of his escort. Leaving behind a few joss sticks, a copy of the
Chinesische Blätter für Wissenschaft und Kunst
, pictures of a wife and children no one had known about . . . was Peenemünde his
mountain, his cell and fasting? Had
he
found his way free of guilt, fashionable guilt?
“
Atmen . . . atmen
. . . not only to breathe, but also the soul, the breath of God . . .” one of the
few times Achtfaden can remember talking with him alone, directly, “
atmen
is a genuinely Aryan verb. Now tell me about the speed of the exhaust jet.”
“What do you want to know? 6500 feet per second.”
“Tell me how it changes.”
“It remains nearly constant, through the burning.”
“And yet the relative airspeed changes drastically, doesn’t it? Zero up to Mach 6.
Can’t you see what’s happening?”
“No, Fahringer.”
“The Rocket creating its own great wind . . . no wind without both, Rocket and atmosphere . . .
but inside the venturi, breath—furious and blazing breath—always flows at the same
unchanging speed . . . can’t you really see?”
Gibberish. Or else a
koan
that Achtfaden isn’t equipped to master, a transcendent puzzle that could lead him
to some moment of light . . . almost as good as:
—What is it that flies?
—Los!
Rising from the Wasserkuppe, rivers Ullster and Haune tilting around into map-shapes,
green valleys and mountains, the four he has left below gathering up the white shock
cords, only one looking up, shading his eyes—Bert Fibel? but what does the name matter,
from this vantage? Achtfaden goes looking for the thunderstorm—
under, through the thunder
playing to a martial tune inside his head—crowding soon in gray cliffs to the right,
the strokes of lightning banging all the mountains blue, the cockpit briefly filled
with the light . . . right at the edge. Right here, at the interface, the air will
be rising. You follow the edge of the storm, with another sense—the flight-sense,
located nowhere, filling all your nerves . . . as long as you stay always right at
the edge between fair lowlands and the madness of Donar it does not fail you, whatever
it is that flies, this carrying drive toward—
is
it freedom? Does no one recognize what enslavement gravity is till he reaches the
interface of the thunder?
No time to work out puzzles. Here come the Schwarzkommando. Achtfaden has wasted too
much time with luscious Gerda, with memories. Here they come clattering down the ladders,
fast oogabooga talk he can’t even guess at, it’s a linguistic wilderness here, and
he’s afraid. What do they want? Why won’t they leave him in peace—they have their
victory, what do they want with poor Achtfaden?
They want the Schwarzgerät. When Enzian actually pronounces the word aloud, it’s already
redundant. It was there in his bearing, the line of his mouth. The others back him,
rifles slung, half a dozen African faces, mobbing the mirrors with their darkness,
their vein-heavy red-white-and-blue eyes.
“I only was assigned to part of it. It was trivial. Really.”
“Aerodynamics isn’t trivial,” Enzian calm, unsmiling.
“There were others from Gessner’s section. Mechanical design. I always worked out
of Prof.-Dr. Kurzweg’s shop.”
“Who were the others?”
“I don’t remember.”
“So.”
“Don’t hit me. Why should I hide anything? It’s the truth. They kept us cut off. I
didn’t know anybody at Nordhausen. Just a few in my own work section. I swear it.
The S-Gerät people were all strangers to me. Until that first day we all met with
Major Weissmann, I’d never seen any of them. No one used real names. We were given
code-names. Characters from a movie, somebody said. The other aerodynamics people
were ‘Spörri’ and ‘Hawasch.’ I was called ‘Wenk.’”
“What was your job?”
“Weight control. All they wanted from me was the shift in CG for a device of a given
weight. The weight was classified top secret. Forty-something kilos. 45? 46?”
“Station numbers,” raps Andreas from over Enzian’s shoulder.
“I can’t remember. It was in the tail section. I do remember the load was asymmetrical
about the longitudinal axis. Toward Vane III. That was the vane used for yaw control—”
“We know that.”
“You’d have to talk to ‘Spörri’ or ‘Hawasch.’ They’d be the ones who worked that problem
out. Talk to Guidance.”
Why did I say—
“Why did you say that?”
“No, no, it wasn’t my
job
, that’s all, guidance, warhead, propulsion . . . ask them. Ask the others.”
“You meant something else. Who worked on guidance?”
“I told you, I didn’t know any of their names.” The dust-covered cafeteria in the
last days. The machinery in the adjoining halls, that once battered eardrums pitiless
as a cold-chisel day and night, is silenced. The Roman numerals on the time clocks
stare from the walls of the bays, among the glass windowpanes. Telephone jacks on
black rubber cords dangle from brackets overhead, each connection hanging over its
own desk, all the desks perfectly empty, covered with salt-dust sifted from the ceiling,
no phones to plug in, no more words to be said. . . . The face of his friend across
the table, the drawn and sleepless face now too pointed, too lipless, that once vomited
beer on Achtfaden’s hiking boots, whispering now, “I couldn’t go with von Braun . . .
not to the Americans, it would only just keep on the same way . . . I want it really
to be over, that’s all . . . good-by, ‘Wenk.’”
“Stuff him down the waste lines,” Andreas suggests. They are all so black, so sure. . . .
I must be the last one . . . somebody’s sure to have him by now . . . what can these
Africans do with a name . . . they could have got it from anybody. . . .
“He was a friend. We knew each other before the war, at Darmstadt.”
“We’re not going to hurt him. We’re not going to hurt you. We want the S-Gerät.”
“Närrisch. Klaus Närrisch.” A new parameter for his self-coefficient now: betrayal.
As he leaves the
Rücksichtslos
, Achtfaden can hear behind him, metallic, broadcasting from another world, ripped
by static, a radio voice. “Oberst Enzian. M’okamanga. M’okamanga. M’okamanga.” There
is urgency and gravity in the word. He stands by the canalside, among steel wreckage
and old men in the dusk, waiting for a direction to go. But where is the electric
voice now that will ever call for him?