GRAVITY RAINBOW (80 page)

You come in-just hit town, here in the heart of downtown Peenemunde, 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 Karman 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, Peclet, 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 Peenemunde 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 Peenemunde 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 Blatter fiir Wissenschaft und Kunst,
pictures of a wife and children no one had known about… was Peenemunde 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 Schwarzgerat. 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-Gerat 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 'Sporri' 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 'Sporri' 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 Acht-

faden'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-Gerat."

"Narrisch. Klaus Narrisch." A new parameter for his self-coefficient now: betrayal.

As he leaves the
Rucksichtslos,
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?

They have set out by barge along the Spree-Oder Canal, headed at last for Swinemunde, Slothrop to see what Geli Tripping's clew will lead him to in the way of a Schwarzgerat, Margherita to rendezvous with a yachtful of refugees from the Lublin regime, among whom ought to be her daughter Bianca. Stretches of the canal are still blocked-in the night Russian demolition crews can be heard blasting away the wrecks with TNT-but Slothrop and Greta can summon, like dreamers, draft shallow enough to clear whatever the War has left in their way. Off and on it rains. The sky will begin to cloud up about noon, turning the color of wet cement-then wind, sharpening, colder, then rain that must be often at the edge of sleet, blowing at them head-on up the canal. They shelter under tarps, among bales and barrels, tar, wood and straw smells. When the nights are clear, peepers-and-frogs nights, star-streaks and shadows at canalside will set travelers' eyes to jittering. Willows line the banks. At midnight coils of fog rise to dim out even the glow of the bargee's pipe, far away up, or down, the dreaming convoy. These nights, fragrant and grained as

pipesmoke, are tranquil and good for sleep. The Berlin madness is behind, Greta'seems less afraid, perhaps all they needed was to be on the move…

But one afternoon, sliding down the long mild slope of the Oder toward the Baltic Sea, they catch sight of a little red and white resort town, wiped through in broad smudges by the War, and she clutches to Slothrop's arm.

"I've been here…"

"Yeah?"

"Just before the Polish invasion… I was here with Sigmund… at the spa…"

On shore, behind cranes and steel railings, rise fronts of what were restaurants, small factories, hotels, burned now, windowless, powdered with their own substance. The name of the town is Bad Karma. Rain from earlier in the day has streaked the walls, the pinnacles of waste and the coarse-cobbled lanes. Children and old men stand on shore waiting to take lines and warp the barges in. Black dumplings of smoke are floating up out of the stack of a white river steamer. Shipfitters are slamming inside its hull. Greta stares at it. A pulse is visible in her throat. She shakes her head. "I thought it was Bianca's ship, but it isn't."

In close to the quay, they swing ashore, grabbing on to an iron ladder held in the old stone by rusted bolts, each one staining the wall downward in a wet sienna fan. On Margherita's jacket a pink gardenia has begun to shake. It isn't the wind. She keeps saying, "I have to see…"

Old men are leaning on railings, smoking pipes, watching Greta or looking out at the river. They wear gray clothes, wide-bottom trousers, wide-brim hats with rounded crowns. The market square is busy and neat: tram tracks gleam, there's a smell of fresh hosing down. In the ruins lilacs bleed their color, their surplus life out over the broken stone and brick.

Except for a few figures in black, sitting out in the sun, the Spa itself is deserted. Margherita by now is spooked as badly as she ever was in Berlin. Slothrop tags along, in his Rocketman turnout, feeling burdened. The Sprudelhof is bounded on one side by a sand-colored arcade: sand columns and brown shadows. A strip just in front is planted to cypresses. Fountains in massive stone bowls are leaping: jets 20 feet high, whose shadows across the smooth paving of the courtyard are thick and nervous.

But who's that, standing so rigid by the central spring? And why

has Margherita turned to stone? The sun is out, there are others watching, but even Slothrop now is bristling along his back and flanks, chills flung one on the fading cluster of another, up under each side of his jaw… the woman is wearing a black coat, a crepe scarf covering her hair, the flesh of thick calves showing through her black stockings as nearly purple, she is only leaning over the waters in a very fixed way and watching them as they try to approach… but the
smile…
across ten meters of swept courtyard, the smile growing confident in the very white face, all the malaise of a Europe dead and gone gathered here in the eyes black as her clothing, black and lighdess.
She knows them.
Greta has turned, and tries to hide her face in Slothrop's shoulder. "By the well," is she whispering this? "at sundown, that woman in black…"