Gravity's Rainbow (91 page)

“She baffs at nothing, the heterospeed,” cries Gerhardt von Göll.

“Try to walk,” Slothrop scared shit, “come on, man, it’s our
ass!
” Smashing echoes after them down the tunnel. A muffled burst of automatic fire. And
another. All at once, two faint pools of light ahead, Zhdaev materializes, on the
way back to his office. He has a friend with him, who smiles when he sees Slothrop
40 yards away, a big steel smile. Slothrop lets go of Springer and runs up into the
next light, piece at the ready. The Russians are blinking at him in a puzzled way.
“Tchitcherine! Hey.”

They stand facing, each at his lit circle. Slothrop recalls that he has the drop on
them. He smiles in half-apology, tips the muzzle at them, moves closer. Zhdaev and
Tchitcherine, after a discussion which seems unnecessarily long, decide they will
raise their hands.

“Rocketman!”

“Howdy.”

“What are you doing in a Fascist uniform like that?”

“You’re right. Think I’ll join that Red Army, instead.” Närrisch leaves Springer sagging
against a row of sleek rubber and silver-mesh cables, and comes up to help disarm
the two Russians. Troops back down the tunnel are still busy busting the door down.

“You guys want to undress, here? Say Tchitcherine, how’d you like that hashish, by
the way?”

“Well,” taking off his trousers, “we were all up there in the
budka
just now smoking some . . . Rocketman, your timing is fantastic. Zhdaev, isn’t he
something?”

Slothrop slides out of his tux. “Just see you don’t get a hardon here now, fella.”

“I’m serious. It’s your Schwarzphänomen.”

“Quit fooling.”

“You don’t even know about it. It choreographs you. Mine’s always trying to
destroy
me. We should be exchanging
those
, instead of uniforms.”

The disguise business grows complicated. Zhdaev’s jacket with the gold-starred
pogoni
on the shoulders gets draped around the Springer, who is now humming everyone a Kurt
Weill medley. Zhdaev puts on Springer’s white suit, and then him and Tchitcherine
get tied up with their own belts, a-and neckties. “Now—the idea,” Slothrop explains,
“being that you, Tchitcherine, will be posing as me, and the major there—” At which
point the door back down the tunnel comes blasting open, two figures with wicked Suomi
subs, drums on them as big as that Gene Krupa’s, come flying through. Slothrop stands
in the light in Tchitcherine’s uniform, and waves dramatically, pointing at the two
hogtied officers. “Make it good,” he mutters to Tchitcherine, “I’m trusting you now,
but look out I have a great passive vocabulary, I’ll know what you’re saying.”

It’s O.K. with Tchitcherine, but confusing. “I’m supposed to be who, now?”

“Oh, shit. . . look, just tell them to go check out the pump house up there, it’s
urgent.” Slothrop gestures and lip-synchs while Tchitcherine talks. It seems to work.
The two actually salute, and go back through the door they just shot down.

“Those apes,” Tchitcherine shakes his head. “Those
black apes!
How did you know, Rocketman? Of course you didn’t, but the Schwarzphänomen did. A
great touch. Two of them, looking at me through the window. And I thought—well, you
know: I thought just about what you thought I’d think. . . .”

But by this time Slothrop is way out of earshot. Springer by now is able to stumble
at a fast walk. They get as far as the measurement bunker without running into anybody.
Out a door of bulletproof glass, behind their own reflections, is the old test frame,
windows broken out, camouflage in German Expressionist ripples streaming gray and
black all over it. The two soldiers are sure enough up there poking around that pump
house, finding nothing. Presently they disappear inside again, and Närrisch opens
the door. “Hurry.” They edge outside, into the arena.

It takes a while to get back up the slope and into the woods. Otto and Hilde show
up. They’ve finessed Zhdaev’s car and driver out of a rotor arm. So there are four
of them now to try and lift warbling pay-load Gerhardt von Göll up these few crummy
feet of sand embankment here, gotta be the most ill-designed propulsion system this
test stand has seen in a while. Otto and Hilde tug at Springer’s arms, Närrisch and
Slothrop push from the ass end. About halfway up Springer blows a tremendous fart
that echoes for minutes across the historic ellipse, like now to do for you folks
my anal impression of the A4. . . .

“Oh, fuck you,” Slothrop snarls.

“An erect green steed of planetoid and bone,” nods the Springer in reply.

Music and chatter back by the Assembly Building have all died away now, and an unpleasant
calm has replaced them. Up over the top at last and into the woods, where Springer
rests his forehead against a tree trunk and commences vomiting violently.

“Närrisch, we’re risking our ass for
this slob
?”

But Närrisch is busy helping squeeze his friend’s stomach. “Gerhardt, are you all
right? What can I do?”

“Beautiful,” chokes Springer, vomit trickling down his chin. “Ahh. Feels great!”

Along come chimps, musicians, dancing girls. Drifting in to rendezvous. Over the last
dune and down to the packed cinder triangle of Test Stand X, and the sea. The musicians
for a while play a kind of march tune. Past the foreshore, the tide has left them
a strip of sand. But Frau Gnahb is nowhere in sight. Haftung is holding hands with
an ape. Felix shakes spit out of his tuba. A honey-haired chorus girl, whose name
he never does get, puts her arms around Slothrop. “I’m scared.”

“Me too.” He hugs her.

All hell breaks loose—sirens whoop-whooping, searchlights starting to probe the woods
up above, truck motors and shouted commands. The crashout party move off the cinders,
and crouch in marsh grass.

“We’ve collected one automatic and two sidearms,” Närrisch whispers. “They’ll be coming
at us from the south. It’ll only take one of us to go back up and hold them.” He nods
and begins checking his hardware.

“You’re crazy,” hisses Slothrop, “they’ll kill you.” Commotion now from over by Test
Stand VII. Headlights are appearing, one after another, along the road up there.

Närrisch taps Springer on the chin. It isn’t clear if Springer knows who he is. “Lebe
wohl,” anyway, Springer. . . . Nagants stuck in overcoat pockets, automatic cradled
in his arms, Närrisch takes off at a crouching run along the beach, and doesn’t look
back.

“Where’s the boat?” Haftung in a white panic. Ducks, alarmed, are quacking at each
other down here. Wind moves in the grass. When searchlights move by, pine trunks uphill
flare, deeply shining, terrible . . . and at everyone’s back, the Baltic shakes and
streams.

Shots from uphill—then, maybe from Närrisch in reply, a burst of automatic fire. Otto
is holding his Hilde close. “Anybody read Morse Code?” the girl next to Slothrop wants
to know, “because there’s been a light going over there, see, at the tip of that little
island? for a few minutes now.” It’s three dots, dot, dot, three more dots. Over and
over.

“Hmm, SEES,” ponders Felix.

“Maybe they’re not dots,” sez the tenor-sax player, “maybe they’re
dashes.
”

“That’s funny,” sez Otto, “that would spell OTTO.”

“That’s your name,” sez Hilde.

“Mother!” screams Otto, running out in the water and waving at the blinking light.
Felix commences booming tuba notes across the water, and the rest of the band joins
in. Reed shadows come stabbing across the sand, as the spotlights swoop down. A boat
engine roars into hearing. “Here she comes,” Otto jumping up and down in the marsh.

“Hey, Närrisch,” Slothrop squinting, trying to find him back there in light that was
always too weak, “come on. Fall back.” No answer. But more shooting.

Running-lights off, the boat comes barreling in at flank speed, Frau Gnahb has decided
to ram Peenemünde? no, now she puts everything full astern—bearings shriek, screw-foam
geysers, the boat slews around to a stop.

“Get on board,” she bellows.

Slothrop’s been hollering for Närrisch. Frau Gnahb leans on her steam-whistle. But
no answer. “Shit, I’ve got to get him—” Felix and Otto grab Slothrop from behind,
drag him back to the boat kicking and cursing. “They’ll kill him, you assholes, lemme
go—” Dark shapes come spilling over the dune between here and Test Stand VII, orange
flickers at their midsections, the sound of rifle fire following a second later.

“They will kill
us.
” Otto heaves Slothrop up over the side, and tumbles in after. Spotlights find and
skewer them now. The firing is louder—nipples and spatters in the water, slugs hammering
into the boat.

“Everybody here?” the Frau’s fangs bared in a grin. “Fine, fine!” A last ape reaches
up, Haftung catches his hand, and he dangles, feet in the water, for several yards
as they light out, all ahead full, till he can finally clamber up and over. Gunfire
follows out to sea, out of range, at last out of earshot.

“Hey Felix,” sez the tenor sax player, “you think there’s any gigs in Swinemünde?”

John Dillinger, at the end, found a few seconds’ strange mercy in the movie images
that hadn’t quite yet faded from his eyeballs—Clark Gable going off unregenerate to
fry in the chair, voices gentle out of the deathrow steel
so long, Blackie
 . . . turning down a reprieve from his longtime friend now Governor of New York William
Powell, skinny chinless condescending jerk, Gable just wanting to get it over with,
“Die like ya live—all of a sudden, don’t drag it out—” even as bitchy little Melvin
Purvis, staked outside the Biograph Theatre, lit up the fatal cigar and felt already
between his lips the penis of official commendation—and federal cowards at the signal
took Dillinger with their faggots’ precision . . . there was still for the doomed
man some shift of personality in effect—the way you’ve felt for a little while afterward
in the real muscles of your face and voice, that you
were
Gable, the ironic eyebrows, the proud, shining, snakelike head—to help Dillinger
through the bushwhacking, and a little easier into death.

Närrisch now, huddled inside a broken few meters of concrete drainage pipe, after
doubling back under the wall of Test Stand VII, bracing curled now in the smell of
old storm water, trying not to breathe loud enough to smack echoes into any betrayal—Närrisch
hasn’t been to a movie since
Der Müde Tod.
That’s so long ago he’s forgotten its ending, the last Rilke-elegiac shot of weary
Death leading the two lovers away hand in hand through the forget-me-nots. No help
at all from that quarter. Tonight Närrisch is down to the last tommygun of his career,
foreign and overheated . . . and blisters on his hands he won’t have to worry about
tomorrow. No sources of mercy available beyond the hard weapon, the burning fingers—a
cruel way to go out for a good guidance man who always put in fair time for fair wages. . . .
He had other offers . . . could’ve gone east with the Institute Rabe, or west to America
and $6 a day—but Gerhardt von Göll promised him glamour, jackpots, a flashy dame on
his arm, say, why not on
both
arms?—after poor linear Peenemünde, who could blame him?

It wasn’t ever necessary to see around the entire Plan . . . really that’s asking
too much of anyone . . . not true? This S-Gerät strategy he’s going out of his way
to die for tonight, what does he know of the Springer’s
full
intentions in the affair? It is reasonable to Närrisch that he, being smaller, he
should be the sacrifice, if it helps Springer survive, even survive another day . . .
wartime thinking, ja, ja . . . but too late to change. . . .

Did the S-Gerät program at Nordhausen in its time ever hint that so many individuals,
nations, firms, communities of interest would come after the fact? Of course he was
flattered then at being chosen to work on the modification to the guidance, minor
as it was . . . hardly worth the special treatment . . . still, it was his first high
historical moment and he sourly figured it to be his last, up until meeting with Springer’s
recruiting team, back during the rainier part of June. . . . Conferences in cafés
and entrances to churchyards around Braunschweig (stucco arches, vines dripping onto
thin collars) without an umbrella but with that light, belled hope inside—a field,
crowded with lines of force, to expand, to fill, to keep him in good health and spirits . . .
Berlin! The Chicago Cabaret! “Cocaine—or cards?” (an old movie line the gunsels loved
to use that summer) . . . the
Big Time!

But the ringing bright thing inside brought him here, instead: here, down in a pipe,
to only a handful more of minutes. . . .

The idea was always to carry along a fixed quantity, A. Sometimes you’d use a Wien
bridge, tuned to a certain frequency A
_t
, whistling, heavy with omen, inside the electric corridors . . . while outside, according
to the tradition in these matters, somewhere a quantity B would be gathering, building,
as the Rocket gathered speed. So, up till assigned Brennschluss velocity,
electric-shocked as any rat into following this very narrow mazeway of clear space—yes,
radio signals from the ground would enter the Rocket body, and by reflex—literally
by electric signal traveling a reflex arc—the control surfaces twitch, to steer you
back on course the instant you’d begin to wander off (how could you’ve kept from lapsing,
up here, into that radiant inattention, so caught up in the wind, the sheer altitude . . .
the unimaginable fires at your feet?) . . . so, for that tightly steered passage,
all was carried on in the sharpest, most painful
anticipation
, with B always growing, as palpably cresting as the assault of a tidal wave that
stills every small creature and hones the air down to a cold stir. . . . Your quantity
A—shining, constant A, carried as they must have once packed far overland at night
the Grail, in their oldtime and military bleakness of humor . . . and one morning
a wide upper lip steelwool gray with the
one day’s growth
, the fatal, the terrible sign, he shaved smooth every day, it meant that this
was
the Last Day—and, too, with only the grim sixth sense, as much faith as clear reception,
that the B of Many Subscripts just over the electric horizon was really growing closer,
perhaps this time as “B
_iw
,” the precession angle of the gyro, moving invisibly but
felt
, terrifically arousing, over the metal frame toward angle A
_iw
(which is how they have set you the contacts: to close, you must see, at that exact
angle). Or as “B
_iL
,” another integrating, not of gyro rate but of the raw current flow itself, bled
from the moving coil inside the poles, the “fettered” pendulum . . . they thought
this way, Design Group, in terms of captivity, prohibition . . . there was an attitude
toward one’s hardware more brutal and soldierly than most engineers’ got the chance
to be. . . . They felt quite the roughshod elite, Driwelling, and Schmeil, with the
fluorescent lights shining on his bared forehead night after night. . . . Inside their
brains they shared an old, old electro-decor—variable capacitors of glass, kerosene
for a dielectric, brass plates and ebonite covers, Zeiss galvanometers with thousands
of fine-threaded adjusting screws, Siemens milliammeters set on slate surfaces, terminals
designated by Roman numerals, Standard Ohms of manganese wire in oil, the old Gülcher
Thermosäule that operated on heating gas, put out 4 volts, nickel and antimony, asbestos
funnels on top, mica tubing. . . .