GRAVITY RAINBOW (51 page)

… rain sluices down off the tassels, cold and loud. Night. She feeds him boiled cabbage with an old heirloom of a spoon with a crest on it. They drink more of that wine. Shadows are soft verdigris. The rain has stopped. Somewhere kids go booting an empty gas can over the cobblestones.

Something comes flapping in out of the sky: talons scrabble along the top of the canopy. "What's that?" half awake and she's got the covers again, c'mon Geli…

"My owl," sez Geli. "Wernher. There's a candy bar in the top drawer of the chiffonier, Liebchen, would you mind feeding him?"

Liebchen indeed. Staggering off the bed, vertical for the first time all day, Slothrop removes a Baby Ruth from its wrapper, clears his throat, decides not to ask her how she came by it because he knows, and lobs the thing up on the canopy for that Wernher. Soon, lying together again, they hear peanuts crunching, and a clacking beak.

"Candy bars," Slothrop grouches. "What's the matter with him? Don't you know he's supposed to be out foraging, for live mice or some shit? You've turned him into a house owl."

"You're pretty lazy yourself." Baby fingers creeping down along his ribs.

"Well-I bet-cut it out-I bet that
Tchitcherine
doesn't have to get up and feed that owl."

She cools, the hand stopping where it is. "He loves Tchitcherine. He never comes to be fed, unless Tchitcherine's here."

Slothrop's turn to cool. More correctly, freeze. "Uh, but, you don't mean that Tchitcherine is actually, uh…"

"He was supposed to be," sighing.

"Oh. When?"

"This morning. He's late. It happens."

Slothrop's off the bed halfway across the room with a softoff, one sock on and the other in his teeth, head through one armhole of his undershirt, fly zipper jammed, yelling
shit.

"My brave Englishman," she drawls.

"Why didn't you bring this up earlier, Geli, huh?"

"Oh, come back. It's nighttime, he's with a woman someplace. He can't sleep alone."

"I hope you can."

"Hush. Come here. You can't go out with nothing on your feet. I'll give you a pair of his old boots and tell you all his secrets."

"Secrets?" Look out, Slothrop. "Why should I want to know-"

"You're not a war correspondent."

"Why does everybody keep saying that? Nobody believes me. Of course I'm a war correspondent." Shaking the brassard at her. "Can't you read? Sez 'War Correspondent.' I even have a mustache, here, don't I? Just like that Ernest Hemingway."

"Oh. Then I imagine you wouldn't be looking for Rocket Number 00000 after all. It was just a silly idea I had. I'm sorry."

Oh boy, am I gonna get out of
here,
sez Slothrop to himself, this is a badger game if I ever saw one, man. Who else would be interested in the one rocket out of 6000 that carried the Imipolex G device?

"And you couldn't care less about the Schwarzgerat, either," she keeps on. She keeps on.

"The what?"

"They also called it S-Gerat."

Next higher assembly, Slothrop, remember? Wernher, up on the canopy, is hooting. A signal to that Tchitcherine, no doubt.

Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

"Now how on earth," elaborately uncorking a fresh bottle of Nordhauser Schattensaft,
thoppp,
best Gary Grant imitation he can summon up with bowels so echoing tight, suavely refilling glasses, handing one to her, "would a sweet, young, thing, like you, know anything, about rocket,
hahd-weah?"

"I read Vaslav's mail," as if it's a dumb question, which it is.

"You shouldn't be blabbing to random strangers like this. If he finds out, he'll murder you."

"I like you. I like intrigue. I like playing."

"Maybe you like to get people in trouble."

"All right." Out with the lower lip.

"O.K., O.K., tell me about it. But I don't know if the
Guardian
will even be interested. My editors are a rather stuffy lot, you know."

Goose bumps crowd her bare little breasts. "I posed once for a rocket insignia. Perhaps you've seen it. A pretty young witch straddling an A4. Carrying her obsolete broom over her shoulder. I was voted the Sweetheart of 3/Art. Abt. (mot) 485."

"Are you a real witch?"

"I think I have tendencies. Have you been up to the Brocken yet?"

"Just hit town, actually."

"I've been up there every Walpurgisnacht since I had my first period. I'll take you, if you like."

"Tell me about this, this 'Schwarzgerat.' "

"I thought you weren't interested."

"How can I know if I'm interested or not if I don't even know what I'm supposed or not supposed to be interested
in?"

"You must be a correspondent. You have a way with words."

Tchitcherine comes roaring through the window, a Nagant blazing in his fist. Tchitcherine lands in a parachute and fells Slothrop with one judo chop. Tchitcherine drives a Stalin tank right into the room, and blasts Slothrop with a 76 mm shell. Thanks for stalling him, Liebchen, he was a spy, well, cheerio, I'm off to Peenemunde and a nubile Polish wench with tits like vanilla ice cream, check you out later.

"I have to go, I think," Slothrop sez, "typewriter needs a new ribbon, gotta sharpen pencils, you know how it is-"

"I told you, he won't be here tonight."

"Why? Is he out after that
Schwarzgerat,
eh?"

"No. He hasn't heard the latest. The message came in from Stettin yesterday."

"In clear, of course."

"Why not?"

"Couldn't be very important."

"It's for sale."

"The message?"

"The S-Gerat, you pill. A man in Swinemunde can get it. Half a million Swiss francs, if you're in the market. He waits on the Strand-Promenade, every day till noon. He'll be wearing a white suit."

Oh yeah? "Blodgett Waxwing."

"It didn't give the name. But I don't think it's Waxwing. He sticks close to the Mediterranean."

"You get around."

"Waxwing is already a legend around the
Zone.
So is Tchitcherine. For all I know, so are you. What was your name?"

"Gary Grant. Ge-li, Ge-li, Ge-li… Listen, Swinemunde, that's in that Soviet zone, ain't it."

"You sound like a German. Forget frontiers now. Forget subdivisions. There aren't any."

"There are soldiers."

"That's right." Staring at him. "But that's different."

"Oh."

"You'll learn. It's all been suspended. Vaslav calls it an 'interregnum.' You only have to flow along with it."

"Gonna flow outa here now, kid. Thanx for the info, and a tip of the Scuffling hat to ya-"

"Please stay." Curled on the bed, her eyes about to spill over with tears. Aw, shit, Slothrop you sucker… but she's just a little kid… "Come here…"

The minute he puts it in, though, she goes wicked and a little crazy, slashing at his legs, shoulders, and ass with chewed-down fingernails sharp as a saw. Considerate Slothrop is trying to hold off coming till she's ready when all of a sudden something heavy, feathered, and many-pointed comes crashing down onto the small of his back, bounces off triggering him and as it turns out Geli too ZONNGGG! eeeeee… oh, gee whiz. Wings flap and Wernher-for it is he-ascends into the darkness.

"Fucking bird," Slothrop screams, "he tries that again I'll give him a Baby Ruth right up his ass, boy-" it's a plot it's a plot it's
Pavlovian
conditioning!
or something, "Tchitcherine trained him to do that, right?"

"Wrong! / trained him to do that." She's smiling at him so four-year-old happy and not holding a thing back, that Slothrop decides to believe everything she's been telling him.

"You are a witch." Paranoid that he is, he snuggles down under the counterpane with the long-legged sorceress, lights a cigarette, and despite endless Tchitcherines vaulting in over the roofless walls with arsenals of disaster all for him, even falls asleep, presently, in her bare and open arms.

It's a Sunday-funnies dawn, very blue sky with gaudy pink clouds in it. Mud across the cobblestones is so slick it reflects light, so that you walk not streets but these long streaky cuts of raw meat, hock of werewolf, gammon of Beast. Tchitcherine has big feet. Geli had to stuff pieces of an old chemise in the toes of his boots so they'd fit Slothrop. Dodging constantly for jeeps, ten-ton lorries, Russians on horseback, he finally hitches a ride from an 18-year-old American first lieutenant in a gray Mercedes staff car with dents all over it. Slothrop frisks mustaches, flashes his armband, feeling defensive. The sun's already warm. There's a smell of evergreens on the mountains. This rail driving, who's attached to the tank company guarding the Mittelwerke, doesn't

think Slothrop should have any trouble getting inside. English SPOG have come and gone. Right now American Army Ordnance people are busy crating and shipping out parts and tools for a hundred A4s. A big hassle. "Trying to get it all out before the Russians come to take over." Interregnum. Civilians and bureaucrats show up every day, high-level tourists, to stare and go wow. "Guess nobody's seen 'em this big before. I don't know what it is. Like a burlesque crowd. Not gonna do anything, just here to look. Most of them bring cameras. Notice you didn't. We have them for rent at the main gate, if you're interested."

One of many hustles. Yellow James the cook has got him a swell little sandwich wagon, you can hear him in the tunnels calling, "Come an' get 'em! Hot 'n' cold and drippin' with greens!" And there'll be grease on the glasses of half these gobbling fools in another five minutes. Nick De Profundis, the company lounge lizard, has surprised everybody by changing, inside the phone booth of factory spaces here, to an energetic businessman, selling A4 souvenirs: small items that can be worked into keychains, money clips or a scatter-pin for that special gal back home, burner cups of brass off the combustion chambers, ball bearings from the servos, and this week the hep item seems to be SA 100 acorn diodes, cute little mixing valves looted out of the Tele-funken units, and the even rarer SA 102s, which of course fetch a higher price. And there's "Micro" Graham, who's let his sideburns grow and lurks in the Stollen where the gullible visitors stray: "Pssst."

"Pssst?"

"Forget it."

"Well now you've got me curious."

"Thought you looked like a sport. You taking the tour?"

"IT only stepped away for a second. Really, I'm going right

back____________________ "

"Finding it a little dull?" Oily Micro moves in on his mark. "Ever wonder to yourself: 'What
really
went on in here?'?"

The visitor who is willing to spend extravagant sums is rarely disappointed. Micro knows the secret doors to rock passages that lead through to Dora, the prison camp next to the Mittelwerke. Each member of the party is given his own electric lantern. There is hurried, basic instruction on what to do in case of any encounter with the dead. "Remember they were always on the defensive here. When the Americans liberated Dora, the prisoners who were still alive went on a rampage after the material-they looted, they ate and drank themselves sick. For others, Death came like the American Army, and liberated them spiritually. So they're apt to be on a spiritual rampage now.

Guard your thoughts. Use the natural balance of your mind against them. They'll be coming at you off-balance, remember."

A popular attraction is the elegant Raumwaffe spacesuit wardrobe, designed by famous military couturier Heini of Berlin. Not only are there turnouts dazzling enough to thrill even the juvenile leads of a space-operetta, down to the oddly-colored television images flickering across their toenails, but Heini has even thought of silks for the amusing little Space-Jockeys (Raum-Jockeier) with their electric whips, who will someday zoom about just outside the barrier-glow of the Raketen-Stadt, astride "horses" of polished meteorite all with the same stylized face (a high-contrast imago of the horse that follows you, emphasis on its demented eyes, its teeth, the darkness under its hindquarters…), with the propulsive gases blowing like farts out their tail ends-the juvenile leads giggle together at this naughty bathroom moment, and slowly, in what's hardly more than a sigh of gravity here, go bobbing, each radiant in a display of fluorescent plastics, back in to the Waltz, the strangely communal Waltz of the Future, a slightly, dis-quietingly grainy-dissonant chorale implied here in the whirling silence of faces, the bare shoulderblades slung so space-Viennese, so jaded with Tomorrow…

Then come-the Space Helmets! At first you may be alarmed, on noticing that they appear to be fashioned from skulls. At least the upper dome of this unpleasant headgear is certainly the skull of some manlike creature built to a larger scale… Perhaps Titans lived under this mountain, and their skulls got harvested like giant mushrooms… The eye-sockets are fitted with quartz lenses. Filters may be slipped in. Nasal bone and upper teeth have been replaced by a metal breathing apparatus, full of slots and grating. Corresponding to the jaw is a built-up section, almost a facial codpiece, of iron and ebonite, perhaps housing a radio unit, thrusting forward in black fatality. For an extra few marks you are allowed to slip one of these helmets on. Once inside
these
yellow caverns, looking out now through neutral-density orbits, the sound of your breath hissing up and around the bone spaces, what you thought was a balanced mind is little help. The compartment the Schwarzkommando were quartered in is no longer an amusing travelogue of native savages taking on ways of the 21st century. The milk calabashes appear only to be made from some plastic. On the spot where tradition sez Enzian had his Illumination, in the course of a wet dream where he coupled with a slender white rocket, there is the dark stain, miraculously still wet, and a smell you understand is meant to be that of semen-but it is really closer to