GRAVITY RAINBOW (53 page)

point hung precise as the point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall. And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point? Don't jump at an infinite number of possible shapes. There's only one. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another. There's a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it… but they lie so close to Earth that from many places they can't be seen at all, and from different places inside the zone where they can be seen, they fall into completely different patterns…

Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep, which is where Slothrop wishes he were now-all the way back with Katje, even lost as he might feel again, even more vulnerable than now- even (because he still honestly misses her), preserved by accident, in ways he can't help seeing, accident whose own much colder honesty each lover has only the other to protect him from…
Could
he live like that? Would They ever agree to let him and Katje live like that? He's had nothing to say to anyone about her. It's not the gentlemanly reflex that made him edit, switch names, insert fantasies into the yarns he spun for Tantivy back in the ACHTUNG office, so much as the primitive fear of having a soul captured by a likeness of image or by a name… He wants to preserve what he can of her from Their several entropies, from Their softsoaping and Their money: maybe he thinks that if he can do it for her he can also do it for himself… although that's awful close to nobility for Slothrop and The Penis He Thought Was His Own.

In the sheet-metal ducting that snakes like a spine along the overhead, plant ventilation moans. Now and then it sounds like voices. Traffic from somewhere remote. It's not as if they were discussing Slothrop
directly,
understand. But he wishes he could hear it better…

Lakes of light, portages of darkness. The concrete facing of the tunnel has given way to whitewash over chunky fault-surfaces, phony-looking as the inside of an amusement-park cave. Entrances to cross-tunnels slip by like tuned pipes with an airflow at their mouths… once upon a time lathes did screech, playful machinists had shootouts with little brass squirt cans of cutting oil… knuckles were bloodied against grinding wheels, pores, creases and quicks were stabbed by the fine splinters of steel… tubeworks of alloy and glass contracted tinkling in air that felt like the dead of winter, and amber light raced in phalanx among the small neon bulbs. Once, all this did happen. It is hard down here in the Mittelwerke to live in the present for very long. The nostalgia you feel is not your own, but it's potent. All the objects have grown still, drowned, enfeebled with evening, terminal evening. Tough skins of oxides, some only a molecule thick, shroud the metal surfaces, fade out human reflection. Straw-colored drive belts of polyvinyl alcohol sag and release their last traces of industrial odor. Though found adrift and haunted, full of signs of recent human tenancy, this is not the legendary ship
Marie-Celeste
-it isn't bounded so neatly, these tracks underfoot run away fore and aft into all stilled Europe, and our flesh doesn't sweat and pimple here for the domestic mysteries, the attic horror of What Might Have Happened so much as for our knowledge of what likely
did happen
… it was always easy, in open and lonely places, to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are the urban fantods here, that come to get you when you are lost or isolate inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no time-traveling capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and the absence that fill a great railway shed after the capital has been evacuated, and the goat-god's city cousins wait for you at the edges of the light, playing the tunes they always played, but more audible now, because everything else has gone away or fallen silent… barn-swallow souls, fashioned of brown twilight, rise toward the white ceilings… they are unique to the Zone, they answer to the new Uncertainty. Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. The status of the name you miss, love, and search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence-some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty…

Post-A4 humanity is moving, hammering, and shouting among the tunnels. Slothrop will catch sight of badged civilians in khaki, helmet liners with GE stenciled on, sometimes getting a nod, eyeglasses flashing under a distant light bulb, most often ignored. Military working parties go at route-step bitching in and out, carrying crates. Slothrop is hungry and Yellow James is nowhere in sight. But there is nobody down here even going to say howdy to, much less feed, the free lance Ian Scuffling. No, wait, by golly here comes a delegation of girls in tight pink lab coats reaching just to the tops of bare thighs, tripping up the tunnel on stylish gold wedgies "Ah, so reizend ist!" too many to hug at once, "Hubsch, was?" now now ladies one at a time, they are

giggling and reaching to drape around his neck lush garlands of silvery B nuts and flange fittings, scarlet resistors and bright-yellow capacitors strung like little sausages, scraps of gasketry, miles of aluminum shavings as curly-bouncy 'n' bright as Shirley Temple's head-hey Hogan ya can keep yer hula girls-and where are they taking him here? into an empty Stollen, where they all commence a fabulous orgy, which goes on for days and days, full of poppies, play, singing, and carrying on.

Moving into Stollen 20 and up, traffic grows heavier. This was the A4 part of the factory, which the Rocket shared with V-l and turboprop assemblies. Out of these Stollen, the 20s, 30s, and 40s, Rocket components were fed out crosswise into the two main assembly lines. As you walk deeper, you retrace the Rocket's becoming: superchargers, center sections, nose assemblies, power units, controls, tail sections… lotta these tail sections still around here, stacked alternately fins up/fins down, row on row identical, dimpled ripply metal surfaces. Slothrop moseys along looking at his face in them, watching it warp and slide by, just a big underground fun house here folks… Empty dollies with small metal wheels chain away back down the tunnel: they carry four-bladed arrowhead shapes that point at the ceiling-
oh.
Right-the pointed holders must've fit inside the expansion nozzles of the thrust chambers, sure enough here cornes a bunch of them,
big
fucking things tall as Slothrop, capital As painted in white near the burner cups… Overhead the fat and sinuous white-lagged pipes are lurking, and the steel lamps give no light out of their scorched skullcap reflectors… down the tunnel's centerline run Lally columns, slender, gray, the exposed threads locked in rust of long standing… blue shadows wash through the spare-parts cages, set on planking and I beams hung from damp and chimney-sized columns of brick… glass-wool insulation lies beside the tracks, heaped like snow…

Final assembly went on in Stollen 41. The cross-tunnel is 50 feet deep, to accommodate the finished Rocket. Sounds of carousing, of voices distinctly unbalanced, come welling up, reverberating off of the concrete. Personnel are weaving back up the main tunnel with a glassy and rubicund look to their faces. Slothrop squints down into this long pit, and makes out a crowd of Americans and Russians gathered around a huge oak beer barrel. A gnome-size German civilian with a red von Hindenburg mustache is dispensing steins of what looks to be mostly head. Ordnance smoke-puffs flicker on nearly every sleeve. The Americans are singing

rocket limericks

There once was a thing called a V-2,

To pilot which you did not need to-

You just pushed a button,

And it would leave nuttin'

But stiffs and big holes and debris, too.

The tune is known universally among American fraternity boys. But for some reason it is being sung here in German Storm Trooper style: notes clipping off sharp at the end of each line, then a pulse of silence before the attack on the next line.

[Refrain:] Ja, ja, ja, ja!

In Prussia they never eat pussy! There ain't hardly cats enough, There's garbage and that's enough, So waltz me around again, Russky!

Drunks are hanging from steel ladders and draped over catwalks. Beer fumes crawl in the long cavern, among pieces of olive-drab rocket, some upright, some lying on their sides.

There was a young fellow named Crockett,

Who had an affair with a rocket.

If you saw them out there

You'd be tempted to stare,

But if you ain't tried it, don't knock it!

Slothrop is hungry and thirsty. Despite the clear and present miasma of evil in Stollen 41, he starts looking for some way to go down there and maybe score some of that lunch. Turns out the only way down is by a cable, hooked to an overhead hoist. A fat cracker Pfc. lounges at the controls, sucking on a bottle of wine. "Go ahead, Jackson, I'll give you a good ride. They taught me how to run these in the WPA." Bracing his mustache in what he figures to be a stiff upper lip, Ian Scuffling climbs on, one foot through an eye-splice, the other hanging free. An electric motor whines, Slothrop lets go the last steel railing and clutches on to the cable as 50 feet of twilit space appears underneath him. Uh…

Rolling out over Stollen 41, heads milling far below, beer foam bobbing like torches in the shadows-suddenly the motor cuts off and he's falling like a rock. Oh fuck, "Too young!" he screams, voice pitched way too high so it comes out like a teenager on the radio,

which ordinarily would be embarrassing, but here's the concrete floor rushing up at him, he can see every shuttering mark, every dark crystal of Thuringian sand he's going to be splashed over-not even a body nearby to get him off with only multiple fractures… With about ten feet to go the Pfc. puts on the brakes. Maniacal laughter from above and behind. The cable, brought up taut, sings under Slothrop's hand till he loses his grip on it, falls, and is carried gently upside down and hanging by the foot, in among funseekers around the beer keg who, used to this form of arrival by now, only continue their singing:

There was a young fellow named Hector,

Who was fond of a launcher-erector.

But the squishes and pops

Of acute pressure drops

Wrecked Hector's hydraulic connector.

Each young American in turn getting to his feet (optional), raising his tankard, and singing about different ways of Doing It with the A4 or its related hardware. Slothrop does not know that they are singing to him, and neither do they. He eyes the inverted scene with a certain unease: with his brain approaching the frontiers of red-out, there comes to him the peculiar notion that it's Lyle Bland who has hold of his ankle here. So he is borne stately into the fringes of the party. "Hey!" observes a crewcut youth, "i-it's
Tarzan
or something! Ha! Ha!" Haifa dozen Ordnance people, juiced and roaring happily, grab for Slothrop. After a lot of twisting and shoving, the foot is freed from its wire loop. The hoist whines back the way it came, to its prankish operator and the next fool he can talk into riding it.

There once was a fellow named Moorehead,

Who had an affair with a warhead.

His wife moved away

The very next day-

She
was
always kind of a sorehead.

The Russians are drinking relentlessly and in silence, shuffling boots, frowning, maybe trying to translate these limericks. It isn't clear whether the Americans are here on Russian sufferance or vice versa. Somebody presses on Slothrop a shell-case, ice cold, foaming down the sides. "Gee, we weren't expecting the English too. Some party, huh? Stick around-he'll be along in a minute."

"Who's that." Thousands of these luminous worms are wriggling all over Slothrop's field of vision, and his foot is beginning to prickle

awake again. Oh, this beer here is
cold,
cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it's all-hahhhh. His nose comes up drowned in foam, his mustache white and bubbly too. All at once comes shouting from the edges of the company. "Here he is, here he is!" "Give him a beer!" "Hi there, Major, babes, sir!"

There was a technician named Urban,

Who had an affair with a turbine.

"It's much nicer," he said,

"Than a woman in bed,

And it's sure as hell cheaper than bourbon!"

"What's happening," inquires Slothrop through the head of another beer just materialized in his hand.

"It's Major Marvy. This is his going-away party." Marvy's Mothers are all singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," now. Which nobody can deny if they know what's good for them, is the impression one cannot help receiving…

"Uh, where's he going?"

"Away."

"Thought he was here to see that GE."

"Sure, who do ya think's pickin' up the tab f'r this?"

Marvy here by subterranean light is even less engaging than he was in the moonlight on top of that boxcar. The rolls of fat, bulging eyes and glistening teeth are grayer here, screened more coarsely. A strip of adhesive tape plastered athletically over the bridge of his nose, and a purple, yellow, and green decoration around one eye testify to his rapid journey down the railroad embankment the other night. He is shaking hands with his well-wishers, booming male endearments, paying special attention to the Russians-"Well,
bet you've
spiked
that
with a little vodka! Hah?" moving on "Vlad, fella, how's yer ass!" The Russians do not appear to understand, which leaves them only the fanged smile, the Easter-egg eyes, to make sense of. Slothrop is just snorting foam out of his nose when Marvy spots him, and those eyes bug out in earnest.

"There
he is," in a great roar, indicating Slothrop with a trembling finger, "by God the limey sonofabitch go
git
him, boys!" Go
git him,
boys? Slothrop continuing to gaze a moment here at this finger, illuminated in cute flourishes and curlicues of cherubic fat.