GRAVITY RAINBOW (90 page)

They have come halfway down the slope to a pump house, built into the earthworks, for the cold water that used to carry off the tremendous heat from the test firings. It is stripped now, hollow and dark inside. Slothrop isn't two steps over the doorsill when he walks into somebody.

"Beg your pardon," though it comes out less than calmly.

"Oh, that's all right." Russian accent. "I don't mind at all." He backs Slothrop outside again, oh, a
mean
looking junior sergeant here about 8 or 9 feet high.

"Well, now-" at which point Narrisch comes walking into them.

"Oh." Narrisch blinks at the sentry. "Sergeant, don't you hear that music? Why aren't you back at the Assembly Building, with your comrades? There are, I understand, a number of eager frauleins
entertaining
them," nudge nudge, "in a most enchanting state of deshabille, too."

"I suppose that's all perfectly divine," replies the sentry, "for
some
people."

"Kot..
." So much for tactics.

"And besides, this is out of
bounds,
you big sillies."

Sighing, Narrisch raises his bottle aloft, brings it down, or up,
thunk
on the sentry's nape, dislodging the man's helmet liner, is what happens. "Naughty," the Russian, somewhat nettled, stoops to retrieve his headgear.
"Really
I ought to put you
both
under apprehension."

"Enough chit-chat," snarls Slothrop, brandishing his glowing cigar and "Molotov cocktail." "Hand over that gun there, Ivan, or I turn you into a
human flare!"

"You're
mean,"
sulks the sentry, unslinging his Degtyarov a little too quickly-Slothrop dodges aside, aims his usual swift kick to the groin, which misses, but does knock loose the weapon, which Narrisch is thoughtful enough to dive for. "Beasts," whimpers the Russian, "oh, nasty, awful…" scampering off in to the night.

"Two minutes," Narrisch already inside the pump house. Slothrop grabs the automatic from him and follows at a run, accelerating down a sloping corridor. Their feet ring faster, sharper, on the concrete, down to a metal door: behind it they can hear Springer singing and babbling like a drunk. Slothrop pushes off his safety and Narrisch goes busting in. A pretty blonde auxiliary in black boots and steel-rimmed glasses is sitting here taking down shorthand notes of everything she hears from Springer, who leans happily grandiose against a cold-water pipe four feet high that runs the length of the room.

"Drop that pencil," orders Slothrop. "All right, where's that Major Zhdaev?"

"He's in conference. If you'd care to leave your name-"

"Dope," Narrisch screams, "they have given him some kind of
dope!
Gerhardt, Gerhardt, speak to me!"

Slothrop recognizes the symptoms. "It's that Sodium Amytal. It's O.K. Let's go."

"I expect the Major to be back any moment. They're upstairs in the guardroom, smoking. Is there a number where he can reach you?"

Slothrop has slid under one of Springer's arms, Narrisch under the other, when there's this loud hammering on the door.

"Smoking? Smoking what?"

"Oh." They hustle Springer out another door, which Slothrop bolts and wrassles a heavy filing cabinet up against, then they drag Springer up a flight of steps into a long, straight corridor, lit by six or seven bulbs, the spaces between which are very dark. Along either side, floor to ceiling, run thick bundles of measurement cabling.

"We're done for," Narrisch wheezes. It's 150 yards to the measurement bunker, and no cover but the shadows between the bulbs. All these birds gotta do is spray a pattern.

"She baffs at nothing, the heterospeed," cries Gerhardt von Goll.

"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." Narrisch 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 Schwarzphanomen."

"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 Schwarzphanomen 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 Narrisch 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 Goll 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, Narrisch 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.

"Narrisch, we're risking our ass for
this slob?"

But Narrisch 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," Narrisch 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.

Narrisch 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, Narrisch 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 Narrisch 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, Narrisch," 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 Peenemunde? 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 Narrisch. 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 Swinemunde?"

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.

Narrisch 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-Narrisch hasn't been to a movie since
Der Mude 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 Narrisch 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 Goll promised him glamour, jackpots, a flashy dame on his arm, say, why not on
both
arms?-after poor linear Peenemunde, who could blame him?