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"Fuck. Him again? He'll respond, all right."

"Well, that's what we're going up to Peenemünde today to find out."

"Oh, boy." Slothrop goes on to tell about the run-in at Potsdam, and how Geli thought Tchitcherine didn't care about Rocket hardware nearly so much as working out some plot against that Oberst Enzian. If the two marketeers are interested, they don't show it.

The talk has drifted on into that kind of slack, nameful recapitulating that Slothrop's mother Nalline loved to float away on in the afternoons—Helen Trent, Stella Dallas, Mary Noble Backstage Wife. . . .

"Tchitcherine is a complex man. It's almost as if ... he thinks of Enzian as ... another part of him—a black version of something inside himself. A something he needs to ... liquidate."

NÄRRISCH: Do you think there might be some . . . some political reason?

VON göll (shaking his head): I just don't know, Klaus. Ever since what happened in Central Asia—

NÄRRISCH: You mean—

VON GÖLL: Yes . . . the Kirghiz Light. You know, it's funny—he's never wanted to be thought of as an imperialist—

NÄRRISCH: None of them do. But there's the girl. . . .

VON GÖLL: Little Geli Tripping. The one who thinks she's a witch.

NÄRRISCH: But do you really think she means to go through with this—this plan of hers, to find Tchitcherine?

VON GÖLL: I think . . . They ... do. ...

NÄRRISCH: But Gerhardt, she is in love with him—

VON GÖLL: He hasn't been dating her, has he?

NÄRRISCH: You can't be implying—

"Say," splutters Slothrop, "what th' heck're you guys talkin' about, anyway?"

"Paranoia," Springer snaps reproachfully (as folks will snap when interrupted at a game they enjoy). "You wouldn't understand that."

"Well excuse me, got to go vomit now," a klassic komeback among charm-school washouts like our Tactful Tyrone here, and pretty advanced stuff on dry land, but not out here, where the Baltic is making it impossible not to be seasick. Chimps are all doing their vomiting huddled under a tarp. Slothrop joins at the rail a miserable lot of musicians and girls. They instruct him in fine points such as not vomiting into the wind, and timing it for when the ship rolls toward the sea, Frau Gnahb having expressed the hope that no one would get any

vomit on her ship with the kind of glacial smile Dr. Mabuse used to get, especially on a good day. She can be heard in the pilot house now, bellowing her sea chanty. "Oööööö," goes Slothrop over the side.

And this is how their desperate enterprise goes a-rollicking up the coast of Usedom, under a hazy summer sky. On shore, the green downs roll up in two gentle steps: above them is a chain of hills thick with pines and oaks. Little resort towns with white beaches and forlorn jetties wheel abeam rheumatically slow. Military-looking craft, probably Russian PT boats, will be seen now and then lying dead in the water. None challenge the Frau's passage. The sun is in and out, turning the decks a stark moment's yellow around everyone's shadow. There's a late time of day when all shadows are thrown along the same east-northeast bearing as the test rockets were always fired out to sea from Peenemünde. The exact clock time, which varies through the year, is known as Rocket Noon . . . and the sound that must at that moment fill the air for its devout can only be compared with a noontime siren the whole town believes in ... and guts resonate, hard as stone. . . .

Before you sight it, you can feel the place. Even draped over a gunwale, cheek against a fender smelling of tar, eyes tearing and insides sloshing as the sea. Even barren and scorched as Rossokovsky and the White Russian Army left it in the spring. It's a face. On the maps, it's a skull or a corroded face in profile, facing southwest: a small marshy lake for the eye-socket, nose-and-mouth cavity cutting in at the entrance to the Peene, just below the power station . . . the draftsmanship is a little like a Wilhelm Busch cartoon face, some old fool for mischievous boys to play tricks on. Tapping his tanks for grain alcohol, scratching great naughty words across fields of his fresh cement, or even sneaking in to set off a rocket in the middle of the night. . . .

Low, burned-out buildings now, ash images of camouflage nets burned onto the concrete (they had only a minute to glow, like a burger's silk mantle—to light this coastal indoors, this engineers' parlor full of stodgy shapes and neutral tones . . . didn't it only flare? no need to put right, nothing monitory, no new levels to be reached . . . but who would that be, watching so civil and mild over the modeltop? face all in these chromo sunset colors, eyes inside blackrim lenses which, like the flaring nets, now are seen to have served as camouflage for who but the Bicycle Rider in the Sky, the black and fatal Edwardian silhouette on the luminous breast of sky, of today's Rocket Noon, two circular explosions inside the rush hour, in the death-scene of the

sky's light. How the rider twirls up there, terminal and serene. In the Tarot he is known as The Fool, but around the Zone here they call him Slick. It's 1945. Still early, still innocent. Some of it is).

Charred helpless latticework: what was wooden now only settles, without strength. Green human shapes flash in the ruins. The scale is very confusing, along here. The troops look larger than they should. A zoo? a shooting gallery? Why, some of both. Frau Gnahb wallows in closer to land, proceeds up the marshy shoreline at half speed. Signs of occupation increase: lorry-parks, tents, a corral teeming with horses pied, sorrel, snow-white, red as blood. Wild summer ducks up exploding, wet and showery, out of green reeds—they swing aft over the boat and descend in its wake, where they bob quacking in two-foot excursions. High in the sunlight, a white-tailed eagle is soaring. Smooth-lipped bomb and shell craters hold blue sea water. Barracks have had their roofs blown away: spinal and ribwise and sunwhite the bones of these creatures that must have held in their time half the Jonahs of falling Europe. But trees, beech and pine, have begun to grow in again where spaces were cleared and leveled for housing or offices—up through cracks in the pavement, everywhere life may gain purchase, up rushes green summer '45, and the forests are still growing dense on the upland.

Passing now the great blackened remains of the Development Works, most of it strewn at ground level. In series, some ripped and broken, others largely hidden by the dunes, Närrisch reverently telling them one by one, come the concrete masses of the test stands, stations of the cross, VI, V, III, IV, II, IX, VIII, I, finally the Rocket's own, from which it stood and flew at last, VII and X. Trees that once screened these from the sea now are only stalks of charcoal.

Pulling around the northern curve of the peninsula, test-stand wall and earthworks receding—moving now past Peenemünde-West, the Luftwaffe's old territory. Far away to starboard, the cliffs of the Greifs-walder Oie shimmer through the blue haze. Concrete launching-ramps used to test the V-l or buzzbomb point at the sea. Runways pocked with craters, heaped with rubble and wrecked Messerschmitts swing by, down the peninsula: over the skull's arc, south again toward the Peene, there—above the rolling hills, miles off the port bow, the red brick tower of the cathedral in Wolgast, and closer in the half-dozen stacks of the power station, smokeless over Peenemünde, have survived the lethal compression-loads of March. . . . White swans drift in the reeds, and pheasants fly over the tall pines inland. A truck motor snarls somewhere into life.

Frau Gnahb brings her boat around in a tight turn, through an inlet, to the dock. The summer calm lies over everything: rolling-stock inert on its tracks, one soldier sitting against an orange-topped oil drum trying to play an accordion. Maybe only fooling around. Otto lets go of his chorus girl's hand. His mother cuts the engines, and he steps broadly to the dock and jogs along, making fast. Then there's a brief pause: Diesel fumes, marsh birds, quiet idleness. . . .

Somebody's staff car, racketing around the corner of a cargo shed, slides to a stop, bouncing forth out of its rear door a major even fatter than Duane Marvy, but with a kindlier and dimly Oriental face. Gray hair like sheep's wool comes twisting down all around his head. "Ah! von Göll!" arms outstretched, wrinkled eyes shiny with—is it real tears? "von Göll, my dear friend!"

"Major Zhdaev," Springer nods ambling over the brow, as behind the major now this truckload of troops in fatigues seems to be pulling up here, kind of odd they should be toting those submachine guns and carbines just for some stevedoring. . . .

Right. Before anyone can move, they've leaped out and made a cordon around Zhdaev and the Springer, pieces at the ready. "Do not be alarmed," Zhdaev waving and beaming, strolling backward to the car with his arm around the Springer, "we are detaining your friend for a bit. You may proceed with your work and go. We'll see that he gets safely back to Swinemünde."

"What the devil," Frau Gnahb comes growling out of the pilot house. Haftung shows up, twitching, putting hands in various pockets and taking them out again: "Who are they arresting? What about my contract? Will anything happen to us?" The staff car pulls away. Enlisted men begin filing on board.

"Shit," ponders Närrisch.

"You think it's a bust?"

"I think Tchitcherine is responding with interest. Just as you said."

"Aw, now—"

"No, no," hand on sleeve, "he's right. You're harmless."

"Thanks."

"I warned him, but he laughed. 'Another leap, Närrisch. I have to keep leaping, don't I?' "

"Well what do you want to do now, cut him loose?"

There is some excitement amidships. The Russians have thrown back a tarp to reveal the chimps, who are covered with vomit, and have also broken into the vodka. Haftung blinks and shudders. Wolfgang is

on his back, sucking at a gurgling bottle he is clutching with his feet. Some of the chimps are docile, others are looking for a fight.

"Somehow . . ." Slothrop does wish the man would quit talking this way, "I owe him—that much."

"Well I don't," Slothrop dodging a sudden plume of yellow chimpanzee vomit. "He ought to be able to take care of himself."

"His talk's grandiose enough. But he's not paranoid in his heart—in this line of work, that's a disaster."

One of the chimps now bites a Soviet corporal in the leg. The corporal screams, unslinging his Tokarev and firing from the hip, by which time the chimp has leaped for a halyard. A dozen more of the critters, many carrying vodka bottles, head en masse for the gangplank. "Don't let them get away," Haftung hollers. The trombone player sticks his head sleepily out a hatch to ask what's happening and has his face walked over by three sets of pink-soled feet before grasping the situation. Girls, spangles aflame in the afternoon sun, feathers all quivering, are being chased forward and aft by drooling Red Army personnel. Frau Gnahb pulls on her steam whistle, thereby spooking the rest of the chimps, who join the stampede to shore. "Catch them," Haftung pleads, "somebody." Slothrop finds himself between Otto and Närrisch, being pushed ashore over the brow by soldiers chasing after chimps or girls, or trying to wrangle the cargo ashore. Among splashes, cursing, and girlish shrieks from the other side of the boat, chorus girls and musicians keep appearing and wandering back and forth. It is difficult to perceive just what the fuck is happening here.

"Listen." Frau Gnahb leaning over the side.

Slothrop notices a canny squint. "You have a plan."

"You want to pull a diversionary feint."

"What? What?"

"Chimps, musicians, dancing girls. Decoys all over. While the three of you sneak in and grab Der Springer."

"We can hide," Närrisch looking around gangster-eyed. "No-body'll notice. Ja, ja! The boat can take off, as if we were on board!"

"Not me," sez Slothrop.

"Ha! Ha!" sez Frau Gnahb.

"Ha! Ha!" sez Närrisch.

"I'll lie to at the northeast corner," this madmother continues, "in the channel between the little island and that triangular part that's built up on the foreshore."

"Test Stand X."

"Catchy name. I think there'll be enough of a tide by then. Light a fire. Otto! Cast me off now."

"Zu Befehl, Mutti!"

Slothrop and Närrisch go dash behind a cargo shed, find a boxcar, and hide inside. Nobody notices. Chimps are running by in several directions. The soldiers chasing them seem by now to be really pissed off. Someplace the clarinet player is blowing scales on his instrument. The boat's motor sputters up into a growl, and screws go churning away. A while later, Otto and his girl come climb in the boxcar, out of breath.

"Well, Närrisch," Slothrop might as well ask, "where'd they take him, do you think? eh?"

"From what I could see, Block Four and that whole complex to the south were deserted. My guess is the assembly building near Test Stand VII. Under that big ellipse. There are underground tunnels and rooms—ideal for a headquarters. Looks like most of it survived pretty well, even though Rossokovsky had orders to level the place."

"You got a piece?" Närrisch shakes his head no. "Me neither. What kind of a black-market operator are you, anyway? no piece."

"I used to be in inertial guidance. You expect me to revert?"

"W-well what are we supposed to use, then? Our wits?"

Out the slats of the car, the sky is darkening, the clouds turning orange, tangerine, tropical. Otto and his girl are murmuring in one corner. "Scrub that one," Närrisch with sour mouth. "Five minutes away from his mother, he's a Casanova."

Otto is earnestly explaining his views on the Mother Conspiracy. It's not often a sympathetic girl will listen. The Mothers get together once a year, in secret, at these giant conventions, and exchange information. Recipes, games, key phrases to use on their children. "What did yours use to say when she wanted to make you feel guilty?"

" 'I've worked my fingers to the bone!' " sez the girl.

"Right! And she used to cook those horrible casseroles, w-with the potatoes, and onions—"

"And ham! Little pieces of ham—"

"You see, you see? That can't be accidental! They have a contest, for Mother of the Year, breast-feeding, diaper-changing, they time them, casserole competitions, ja—then, toward the end, they actually begin to use the children. The State Prosecutor comes out on stage. 'In a moment, Albrecht, we are going to bring your mother on. Here is a Luger, fully loaded. The State will guarantee you absolute immunity from prosecution. Do whatever you wish to do—anything at all. Good luck, my boy.' The pistols are loaded with blanks, natürlich, but the unfortunate child does not know this. Only the mothers who get shot at qualify for the finals. Here they bring in psychiatrists, and judges sit with stopwatches to see how quickly the children will crack. 'Now then, Olga, wasn't it nice of Mutti to break up your affair with that long-haired poet?' 'We understand your mother and you are, ah, quite close, Hermann. Remember the time she caught you masturbating into her glove? Eh?' Hospital attendants stand by to drag the children off, drooling, screaming, having clonic convulsions. Finally there is only one Mother left on stage. They put the traditional flowered hat on her head, and hand her the orb and scepter, which in this case are a gilded pot roast and a whip, and the orchestra plays Tristan und Isolde."

D D D D D D D

They come out into the last of the twilight. Just a sleepy summer evening in Peenemünde. A flight of ducks passes overhead, going west. No Russians around. A single bulb burns over the entrance to the cargo shed. Otto and his girl wander hand in hand along the dock. An ape comes scampering up to take Otto's free hand. To north and south the Baltic keeps unrolling low white waves. "What's happening," asks the clarinet player. "Have a banana," tuba player with his mouth full has a good-sized bunch stowed in the bell of his ax.

Night is down by the time they get started. They head inland, Springer's crashout party, along the railroad tracks. Pine trees tower to either side of the cinder embankment. Ahead fat pinto rabbits scurry, only their white patches visible, no reason to suppose rabbits is what they are. Otto's friend Hilde comes gracefully down out of the woods with his cap that she's filled to the brim with round berries, dusty blue, sweet. The musicians are packing vodka bottles in every available pocket. That's tonight's meal, and Hilde kneeling alone at the berry bushes has whispered grace for them all. In the marshes now you can hear the first peepers start up, and the high-frequency squeals of a bat out hunting, and some wind in the upper trees. Also, from farther away, a shot or two.

"Are they firing at my apes?" Haftung chatters. "That's 2000 marks apiece. How am I ever going to get that back?"

A family of mice go dashing across the tracks, and right over Slothrop's feet. "I was expecting just a big cemetery. I guess not."

"When we came we only cleared out what we needed to," Närrisch recalls. "Most of it stayed—the forest, the life . . . there are probably still deer up in there, someplace. Big fellows with dark antlers. And the birds—snipes, coots, wild geese—the noise from the testing drove them out to sea, but they'd always come back in when it was quiet again."

Before they reach even the airfield they have to scatter twice into the woods, first for a security patrol, then for a steam-engine come puffing up from Peenemünde-East, its headlight cutting through a fine nighthaze, some troops with automatics hanging on to steps and ladders. Steel grinding and creaking by in the night, the men shooting the breeze as they pass, no feeling of tension to it. "They might be after us anyway," Närrisch whispers. "Come on."

Through a patch of woods, and then cautiously out onto the open airfield. A sharp sickle of moon has risen. Apes scuttle along in the bonelight, arms dangling. It's a nervous passage. Everybody's a perfect target, there's no cover except for airplanes strafed where they stood into relics—rusted stringers, burned paint, gullwings driven back into the earth. Lights from the old Luftwaffe complex glow to the south. Trucks purr now and then along the road at the far edge of the airfield. There's singing from the barracks, and someplace a radio. The evening news from somewhere. Too far to hear the words or even the language, only the studious monotone: the news, Slothrop, going on without you. ...

They make it across the tarmac to the road, and crouch in a drainage ditch, listening for traffic. Suddenly, to their left, yellow runway lights come on, a double row of them chaining to the sea, brightness bouncing up and down a couple-three times before it settles in. "Somebody coming in," Slothrop guesses.

"More likely going out," snaps Närrisch. "We'd better hurry."

Back in the pine woods now, heading up a road of packed dirt toward Test Stand VII, they start to pick up stray girls and chimpanzees. Pine smells wrap them: old needles lie at the margins of the road. Downhill, lights appear as the trees begin thinning out, then the test-stand area comes in view. The assembly building is something like a hundred feet high—it blocks out the stars. There's a tall bright band where sliding doors are open, and light scatters outside. Närrisch grabs Slothrop's arm. "It looks like the major's car. And the motor's running." Lotta searchlights, too, set up on fences topped with barbed wire—also what look like a division of security roaming around.

"Guess this is it," Slothrop a little nervous.

"Ssh." Sound of a plane, a single-engine fighter, circling to make its approach low over the pines. "Not much time." Närrisch gathers the others around and issues his orders. Girls are to go in from the front, singing, dancing, vamping the woman-hungry barbarians. Otto will try to knock out the car, Haftung will get everybody rounded up and ready to rendezvous with the boat.

"Tits 'n' ass," mutter the girls, "tits 'n' ass. That's all we are around here."

"Ah, shaddap," snarls G. M. B. Haftung, which is his usual way of dealing with the help.

"Meanwhile," continues Närrisch, "Slothrop and I will go in after Springer. When we have him, we'll try to get them to shoot. That will be your signal to run like hell."

"Oh, definitely some shooting," sez Slothrop, "a-and how about this?" He has just had a brilliant idea: fake Molotov cocktails, a switch on Säure Bummer's old routine. He holds up a vodka bottle, pointing and grinning.

"But that stuff won't even hardly burn."

"But they'll think it's gasoline," beginning to pluck ostrich feathers from the costume of the nearest girl. "And just imagine how secure it will make us feel."

"Felix," the clarinet player asks the tuba player, "what have we fallen among?" Felix is eating a banana, and living for the moment. Presently he has wandered off in the woods with the rest of the band, where they can be heard moving around in circles, tootling and blat-ting at each other. Hilde and Slothrop are making Phony Phirebombs, the other girls have taken off, Zitz und Arsch, downslope.

"So we'll present a plausible threat," Närrisch whispers, "we'll need matches. Who's got matches?"

"Not me."

"Me either."

"Gee, my lighter's out of flints."

"Kot," Närrisch throwing up his hands, "Kot," walking off into the trees, where he collides with Felix and his tuba. "You don't have any matches either."

"I have a Zippo," replies Felix, "and two Corona Coronas, from the American officer's club in—"

A minute later, Närrisch and Slothrop, hands each cupped around the coal of one of Havana's finest, are sneaky-Peteing like two cats in a cartoon off toward Test Stand VII, with vodka-bottle bombs stuck in their belts and ostrich-feather wicks trailing behind in the sea breeze.

The plan is to climb the pine-topped sand-and-scrub embankment around the test stand, and come in on the Assembly Building from behind.

Now Närrisch here's a guidance man, a guidance man is he. And ev'ry day at Rocket Noon, there's death, and revelry. . . . But Närrisch has managed, in his time, to avoid nearly all of it.

In fact, no two people have been so ill-equipped to approach a holy Center since the days of Tchitcherine and Džaqyp Qulan, hauling ass over the steppe, into the North, to find their Kirghiz Light. That's about ten years' gap. Giving this pastime about the same vulnerability to record-breakers as baseball, a sport also well-spidered with white suggestions of the sinister.

Holy-Center-Approaching is soon to be the number one Zonal pastime. Its balmy heyday is nearly on it. Soon more champions, adepts, magicians of all ranks and orders will be in the field than ever before in the history of the game. The sun will rule all enterprise, if it be honest and sporting. The Gauss curve will herniate toward the excellent. And tankers the likes of Närrisch and Slothrop here will have already been weeded out.

Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter. "Personal density," Kurt Mondaugen in his Peene-münde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, "is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth."

"Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "At" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment. . . .