GRAVITY RAINBOW (74 page)

A late summer, a late, retrospective blooming… Birds flew everywhere, the sea warmed, the sun shone on into the evenings. Random children took your shirt cuff by mistake, and trudged along for minutes before discovering you were not their adult, and then wandered off with backward smiles. The Glass Mountain twinkled rose and white in the hot sun, the elf king and his queen made a royal progress every noon with a splendid retinue of dwarves and sprites, handing out cakes, ices and candies. At each intersection or square, bands played- marches, folk-dances, hot jazz, Hugo Wolf. Children went streaming like confetti. At the drinking fountains, where soda water sparkled deep inside the fanged mouths of dragons, of wild lions and tigers, the queues of children waited, each for his moment of danger, leaning halfway into the shadow, into the smell of wet cement and old water, into the mouth of the beast, to drink. In the sky, the tall ferris wheel spun. From Peenemunde they had come 280 kilometers, which was to be, coincidentally, the operational range of the A4.

Among all there was to choose from, Wheel, myths, jungle animals, clowns, Ilse found her way to the Antarctic Panorama. Two or three boys hardly older than she wandered through the imitation wilderness, bundled up in sealskins, constructing cairns and planting flags in the August humidity. Watching them made Pokier sweat. A few "sled dogs" lay suffering in the shade of the dirty papier-mache

sastrugi, on plaster snow that had begun to crack. A hidden projector threw images of the aurora on a white scrim. Half a dozen stuffed penguins also dotted the landscape.

"So-you want to live at the South Pole. Have you given up so easily on"-
Kot
-idiot, that was a slip-"on the Moon?" He'd been good up till then about cross-examining. He couldn't afford to know who she was. In the false Antarctic, in ignorance of what had attracted her there, uneasy and dripping sweat, he waited for her answer.

She, or They, let him off. "Oh," with a shrug, "who wants to live on the Moon?" They never brought it up again.

Back at their hotel, they were handed the key by an eight-year-old desk clerk, rose in a whining elevator run by a uniformed child, to a room still warm from the day's heat. She closed the door, took off her hat and scaled it over to her bed. Pokier collapsed on his own bed. She came over to take off his shoes.

"Papi," gravely unlacing, "may I sleep next to you tonight?" One of her hands had come lightly to rest on the beginning of his bare calf. Their eyes met for half a second. A number of uncertainties shifted then for Pokier and locked into sense. To his shame, his first feeling was pride. He hadn't known he was so vital to the program. Even in this initial moment, he was seeing it from Their side-every quirk goes in the dossier, gambler, foot-fetishist or soccer fan, it's all important, it can all be used. Right now we have to keep them happy, or at least neutralize the foci of their unhappiness. You may not understand what their work really is, not at the level of the data, but you're an administrator after all, a leader, your job is to get results… Polder, now, has mentioned a "daughter." Yes, yes we know it's disgusting, one never can tell what they have locked up in there with those equations, but we must all put off our judgments for now, there'll be time after the war to get back to the Poklers and their dirty little secrets…

He hit her upside the head with his open hand, a loud and terrible blow. That took care of his anger. Then, before she could cry or speak, he had dragged her up on the bed next to him, her dazed little hands already at the buttons of his trousers, her white frock already pulled above her waist. She had been wearing nothing at all underneath, nothing all day…
how I've wanted you,
she whispered as paternal plow found its way into filial furrow… and after hours of amazing incest they dressed in silence, and crept out into the leading edge of faintest flesh dawn, everything they would ever need packed inside her flowered bag, past sleeping children doomed to the end of summer, past monitors and railway guards, down at last to the water and the fishing

boats, to a fatherly old sea-dog in a braided captain's hat, who welcomed them aboard and stashed them below decks, where she snuggled down in the bunk as they got under way and sucked him for hours while the engine pounded, till the Captain called, "Come on up, and take a look at your new home!" Gray and green, through the mist, it was Denmark. "Yes, they're a free people here. Good luck to both of you!" The three of them, there on deck, stood hugging…

No. What Polder did was choose to believe she wanted comfort that night, wanted not to be alone. Despite Their game, Their palpable evil, though he had no more reason to trust "Use" than he trusted Them, by an act not of faith, not of courage but of conservation, he chose to believe that. Even in peacetime, with unlimited resources, he couldn't have proven her identity, not beyond the knife-edge of zero tolerance his precision eye needed. The years Ilse would have spent between Berlin and Peenemunde were so hopelessly tangled, for all of Germany, that no real chain of events could have been established for sure, not even Pokler's hunch that somewhere in the State's oversize paper brain a specific perversity had been assigned him and dutifully stored. For every government agency, the Nazi Party set up a duplicate. Committees fissioned, merged, generated spontaneously, disappeared. No one would show a man his dossier-

It was not, in fact, even clear to him that he had made a choice. But it was in those humming moments in the room smelling of a summer day, whose light no one had lit yet, with her round straw hat a frail moon on the bedspread, lights of the Wheel slowly pouring red and green over and over outside in the dark, and a group of schoolboys singing in the street a refrain from before their time, their sold-out and cruelly handled time-Juch-heierasas-sa! o tempo-tempo-ra!- that board and pieces and patterns at least all did come clear for him, and Pokier knew that while he played, this would have to be Use- truly his child, truly as he could make her. It was the real moment of conception, in which, years too late, he became her father.

Through the rest of the furlough, they strolled about Zwolfkinder, always hand in hand. Lanterns swaying from the trunks of elephants' heads on top of tall pillars lit their way… over spidery bridges looking down at snow-leopards, apes, hyenas… along the miniature railway, between the corrugated pipe legs of steel-mesh dinosaurs, down to the patch of African desert where every two hours exactly the treacherous natives attacked an encampment of General von Trotha's brave men in blue, all the parts played by exuberant boys, and a great patriotic favorite with children of all ages… up on the giant Wheel so

naked, so void of grace, there for only the clear mission: to lift and to frighten…

On their last night-though he didn't know it, for they would take her as abruptly and invisibly as before-they stood looking in again at stuffed penguins and false snow, and around them the artificial aurora flickered.

"Next year," squeezing her hand, "we'll come back here, if you like."

"Oh yes. Every year, Papi."

Next day she was gone, taken back into the coming war, leaving Pokier alone in a country of children, to go back to Peenemunde after all, alone…

So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one about a year older, each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only continuity has been her name, and Zwolfkinder, and Pokler's love- love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child… what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a year (no more, the engineer thought, than in a wind-tunnel, or an oscillograph whose turning drum you could speed or slow at will…)?

Outside the Peenemunde wind-tunnel, Pokier has come to stand at night, next to the great sphere, 40 feet high, listening to the laboring pumps as they evacuate the air from the white sphere, five minutes of growing void-then one terrific gasp: 20 seconds of supersonic flow… then the fall of the shutter, and the pumps starting up again… he has listened, and taken it to imply his own cycle of shuttered love, growing empty over the year for two weeks in August, engineered with the same care. He has smiled, and drunk toasts, and traded barracks humor with Major Weissmann, while all the time, behind the music and the giggling, he could hear the flesh of pieces moved in darkness and winter across the marshes and mountain chains of the board… watched run after run the Halbmodelle results out of the wind tunnel, showing how the net normal force would be distributed over the Rocket's length, for hundreds of different Mach numbers- seen the true profile of the Rocket warped and travestied, a rocket of wax, humped like a dolphin at around caliber 2, necking down toward the tail which was then stretched up, impossibly, in a high point with a lower shoulder aft of it-and seen how his own face might be plotted, not in light but in net forces acting upon it from the flow of Reich and

coercion and love it moved through… and known that it must suffer the same degradation, as death will warp face to skull…

In '43, because he was away at Zwolfkinder, Pokier missed the British air raid on Peenemunde. Returning to the station, as soon as he came in sight of the "foreign workers' " quarters at Trassenheide razed and smashed, bodies still being dug from the wreckage, a terrible suspicion began, and would not be put down. Weissmann was
saving
him for something: some unique destiny. Somehow the man had known the British would bomb that night, known even in '39, and so arranged the tradition of an August furlough, year after year but all toward protecting Pokier from the one bad night. Not quite balanced… a bit paranoid, yes, yes… but the thought purred on in his brain, and he felt himself turning to stone.

Smoke seeped from the earth, charred trees fell, as he watched, at no more than a breath from the direction of the sea. Powdered dust rose up at every footfall, turning clothes white, faces to masks of dust. The farther up the peninsula, the less damage. A strange gradient of death and wreckage, south to north, in which the poorest and most helpless got it worst-as, indeed, the gradient was to run east to west, in London a year later when the rockets began to fall. Most of the casualties had been among "foreign workers," a euphemism for civilian prisoners brought in from countries under German occupation. The wind tunnel and the measuring house were untouched, the pre-production works only slightly damaged. Pokier's colleagues were outside Scientist Housing, which had been hit-phantoms moving in morning fog still not burned off, washing up in buckets of beer because the water was still out. They stared at Pokier, failing, enough of them, to keep accusation out of their faces.

"I wish I could have missed this."

"Dr. Thiel is dead."

"How was fairyland, Pokier?"

"I'm sorry," he said. It wasn't his fault. The others were silent: some watching, some still in shock from the night.

Mondaugen showed up then. "We're exhausted. Could you come with me to Pre-production? A lot has to be sorted out, we need a hand." They shuffled along, each in his own dust-cloud. "It was terrible," Mondaugen said. "All of us have been under some strain."

"They sounded like
I'd
done it."

"You feeling guilty because you weren't here?"

"I'm wondering why I wasn't here. That's all."

"Because you were in Zwolfkinder," replied the enlightened one. "Don't invent complications."

He tried not to. That was Weissmann's job, wasn't it, Weissmann was the sadist, he had responsibility for coming up with new game-variations, building toward a maximum cruelty in which Polder would be unlaid to nerves vessels and tendons, every last convolution of brain flattened out in the radiance of the black candles, nowhere to shelter, entirely his master's possession… the moment in which he is defined to himself at last… This is what Pokier could feel waiting now, a room he'd never seen, a ceremony he couldn't memorize in advance…

There were false alarms. Polder was almost sure once during the winter, during the test series at Blizna. They had moved east into Poland, to fire over land. The shots from Peenemunde were all out to sea, and there'd been no way to observe the re-entry of the A4. Blizna was almost exclusively an SS project: part of Maj.-Gen. Kammler's empire-building. The Rocket at that point was plagued by an airburst problem in its terminal phase-the vehicle blew apart before reaching the target. Everyone had an idea. It might be an overpressure in the liquid-oxygen tank. Perhaps, because the Rocket coming down was lighter by 10 tons of fuel and oxidizer, the shift in the center of gravity was making it unstable. Or perhaps the insulation on the alcohol tank was at fault, somehow allowing residual fuel to be burned on re-entry. This was Polder's reason for being there. By then he was no longer in the propulsion group, or even working as a designer-he was in the Materials office, expediting the procurement of various plastics for insulation, shock absorption, gasketry-exciting stuff. The orders to Blizna were strange enough to be Weissmann's work: the day Pokier went out to sit in the Polish meadows at the exact spot where the Rocket was supposed to come down, he was certain.

Green rye and low hills for miles all around: Pokier was by a small trench, in the Sarnaki target area, pointing his binoculars south toward Blizna like everybody else: waiting. Erwartung in the crosshairs, with the just-sprung rye blowing, its gentler nap being brushed up by the wind… look down at this countryside, down through Rocket-miles of morning space: the many shades of forest green, Polish farmhouses white and brown, dark eels of rivers catching the sun at their curves… and at the very center down there, in the holy X, Pokier, crucified, invisible at first look, but in a moment…
now
beginning to resolve as the fall gathers momentum-

But how can he believe in its reality up there? Insects whine, the sun is almost warm, he can gaze off at the red earth and millions of blowing stalks, and fall nearly into a light trance: in shirtsleeves, with his bony knees pointing up, the gray suit jacket wrinkled years beyond last pressing bundled under his ass to soak up the dew. The others he came out with are dotted here about Ground Zero, blithe Nazi buttercups-binoculars sway from slate-colored horsehide straps around their necks, the Askania crew fuss with their equipment, and one of the SS liaison men (Weissmann isn't here) keeps looking at his watch, then at the sky, then the watch, the crystal becoming, in brief flashes on/off, a nacreous circle binding together the hour and the fleecy sky.