Penguin books

wide as a Fortress's wings, we had our military secrets, we fooled the fat old colonels right and left but stand-down time must come to all, yikes! I must run sweet Roger really it's been dreamy. . . .

He would fall at her knees smelling of glycerine and rose-water, he would lick sand and salt from her ATS brogans, offer her his freedom, his next 50 years' pay from a good steady job, his poor throbbing brain. But it's too late. We're at Peace. The paranoia, the danger, the tuneless whistling of busy Death next door, are all put to sleep, back in the War, back with her Roger Mexico Years. The day the rockets stopped falling, it began to end for Roger and Jessica. As it grew clear, day after safe day, that no more would fall ever again, the new world crept into and over her like spring—not so much the changes she felt in air and light, in the crowds at Woolworth's, as a bad cinema spring, full of paper leaves and cotton-wool blossoms and phony lighting . . . no, never again will she stand at their kitchen sink with a china cup squeaking in her fingers, its small crying-child sound defenseless, meekly resonating BLOWN OUT OF ATTENTION AS THE ROCKET FELL smashing to a clatter of points white and blue across the floor. . . .

Those death-rockets now are in the past. This time she'll be on the firing end, she and Jeremy—isn't that how it was always meant to be? firing them out to sea: no death, only the spectacle, fire and roar, the excitement without the killing, isn't that what she prayed for? back in the fading house, derequisitioned now, occupied again by human extensions of ball-fringe, dog pictures, Victorian chairs, secret piles of News of the World in the upstairs closet.

She's meant to go. The orders come from higher than she can reach. Her future is with the World's own, and Roger's only with this strange version of the War he still carries with him. He can't move, poor dear, it won't let him go. Still passive as he'd been under the rockets. Roger the victim. Jeremy the firer. "The War's my mother," he said the first day, and Jessica has wondered what ladies in black appeared in his dreams, what ash-white smiles, what shears to come snapping through the room, through their winter ... so much of him she never got to know ... so much unfit for Peace. Already she's beginning to think of their time as a chain of explosions, craziness ganged to the rhythms of the War. Now he wants to go rescue Slothrop, another rocket-creature, a vampire whose sex life actually fed on the terror of that Rocket Blitz—ugh, creepy, creepy. They ought to lock him up, not set him free. Roger must care more about Slothrop

than about her, they're two of a kind, aren't they, well—she hopes they'll be happy together. They can sit and drink beer, tell rocket stories, scribble equations for each other. How jolly. At least she won't be leaving him in a vacuum. He won't be lonely, he'll have something to occupy the time. . . .

She has wandered away from him, down the beach. The sun is so bright today that the shadows by her Achilles tendon are drawn sharp and black as seams up the heel of a silk stocking. Her head, as always, is bent forward, away, the bare nape he's never stopped loving, will never see again, unprotected as her beauty, her innocence of how forever in peril it moves through the World. She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as "pretty" . . . but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him. Was. He is losing more than single Jessica: he's losing a full range of life, of being for the first time at ease in the Creation. Going back to winter now, drawing back into his single envelope. The effort it takes to extend any further is more than he can make alone.

He hadn't thought he'd cry when she left. But he cried. Snot by the cubic yard, eyes like red carnations. Presently, every time his left foot hit the ground walking he'd get a jolt of pain through half his skull. Ah, this must be what they mean by the "pain of separation!" Pointsman kept showing up with armloads of work. Roger found himself unable to forget Jessica, and caring less about Slothrop.

But one day Milton Gloaming popped in to deliver him from his unmoving. Gloaming was just back from a jaunt through the Zone. He'd found himself on a task force with one Josef Schleim, a defector of secondary brilliance, who had once worked for the IG out of Dr. Reithinger's office, VOWI—the Statistical Department of NW7. There, Schleim had been assigned to the American desk, gathering for the IG economic intelligence, through subsidiaries and licensees like Chemnyco, General Aniline and Film, Ansco, Winthrop. In '36 he came to England to work for Imperial Chemicals, in a status that was never to be free from ambiguities. He'd heard of Slothrop, yes indeed . . . recalled him from the old days. When Lyle Bland went out on his last transmural journey, there'd been Green Reports flapping through the IG offices for weeks, Geheime Kommandosache, rumors coupling and uncoupling like coal-tar molecules under pressure, all to do with who was likely to take over the Slothrop surveillance, now that Bland was gone.

This was toward the beginning of the great struggle for the IG's

intelligence machinery. The economic department of the foreign office and the foreign department of the economic office were both after it. So were the military, in particular the Wehrwirtschaftstab, a section of the General Staff that maintained OKW's liaison with industry. The IG's own liaison with OKW was handled by Vermittlungsstelle W, under Drs. Dieckmann and Gorr. The picture was farther confused by the usual duplicate Nazi Party offices, Abwehr-Organizations, set up throughout German industry after 1933. The Nazis' watchdog over the IG was called "Abteilung A" and was set up in the same office building as—in fact, it appeared perfectly congruent with—the IG's own Army liaison group, Vermittlungsstelle W. But Technology, alas, braid-crowned and gold-thighed maiden, always comes up for grabs like this. Most likely the bitching and bickering of Army vs. Party was what finally drove Schleim over the hill, more than any moral feelings about Hitler. In any case, he remembers the Slothrop surveillance being assigned to a newly created "Sparte IV" under Vermittlungsstelle W. Sparte I was handling nitrogen and gasoline, II dyes, chemicals, buna rubber, pharmaceuticals, III film and fibers. IV handled Slothrop and nothing else, except—Schleim had heard tell—one or two miscellaneous patents acquired through some dealings with IG Chemie in Switzerland. An analgesic whose name he couldn't recall, and a new plastic, some name like Mipolam . . . "Polimex," or something. . . .

"Sounds like that would've come under Sparte II," was Gloaming's only comment at the time.

"A few directors were upset," Schleim agreed. "Ter Meer was a Draufgänger—he and Hörlein both, go-ahead fellows. They might have got it back."

"Did the Party assign an Abwehr man to this Sparte IV?"

"They must have, but I don't know if he was SD or SS. There were so many of them around. I can remember some sort of rather thin chap with thick eyeglasses coming out of the office there once or twice. But he wore civilian clothes. Couldn't tell you his name."

Well now what'n the bloody 'ell. . . .

"Suveillance?" Roger is fidgeting heavily, with his hair, his necktie, ears, nose, knuckles, "IG Farben had Slothrop under surveillance? Before the War? What for, Gloaming."

"Odd, isn't it?" Cheerio boing out the door without another word, leaving Roger alone with a most disagreeable light beginning to grow, the leading edge of a revelation, blinding, crescent, at the periphery of his brain. IG Farben, eh? Mr. Pointsman has been chumming, almost

exclusively these days, with upper echelon from ICI. ICI has cartel arrangements with Farben. The bastard. Why, he must have known about Slothrop all along. The Jamf business was only a front for . . . well say what the hell is going on here?

Halfway up to London (Pointsman has repossessed the Jaguar, so Roger's on a motorcycle from the PISCES pool, which consists now only of the cycle and one Morris with virtually no clutch) it occurs to him that Gloaming was sent around deliberately by Pointsman, as some obscure tactic in this Nayland Smith campaign he seems to be into (Pointsman owns a matched set of all the books in Sax Rohmer's great Manichaean saga, and is apt these days to pop in at any time, usually while Roger is sleeping or trying to take a quiet shit, and actually stand there, in front of the toilet, reading aloud a pertinent text). Nothing is beyond Pointsman, he's worse than old Pudding was, no shame at all. He would use anyone—Gloaming, Katje Borgesius, Pirate Prentice, no one is (Jessica) exempt from his (Jessica?) Machiavellian—

Jessica. Oh. Yes ofcourseofcourse Mexico you fucking idiot... no wonder the 137th gave him the runaround. No wonder her orders came from Too High. He had even, lamb frolicking about the spit, asked Pointsman to see what he could do. . . . Fool. Fool.

He arrives at Twelfth House on Gallaho Mews in a homicidal state of mind. Bicycle thieves run down the back streets, old pros wheeling them three abreast at a good pace. Young men with natty mustaches preen in the windows. Children loot the dustbins. Courtyard corners are drifted with official papers, the shed skin of a Beast at large. A tree has inexplicably withered in the street to a shingly black corpse. A fly lands belly-up on the front fender of Roger's motorcycle, thrashes ten seconds, folds its veined and sensitive wings, and dies. Quick as that. First one Roger has ever seen. P-47s fly over in squadron box formations, four checkmarks apiece RedWhiteBlueYellow on the un-amended form of the whitish sky, squadron after squadron: it is either some military review, or another war. A plasterer is busy around the corner, smoothing over a bomb-scarred wall, plaster heaped on his hawk luscious as cream cheese, using an unfamiliar trowel inherited from a dead friend, still, these first days, digging holes like an apprentice, the shiny knife-edge not yet broken to his hand, the curl of it a bit more than his own strength could have ever brought it to ... Henry was a larger bloke. . . . The fly, who was not dead, unfolds its wings and zooms off to fool somebody else.

All right Pointsman stomping into Twelfth House, rattling the

corkboards down the seven hallways and flights, receptionists making long arms for the telephone dammit now where are you—

Not in his office. But Géza Rózsavölgyi is, and tries to give Roger a hard time. "You are ma-láng a spec-tacle oîyour-self, young man."

"Shurrup you Transylvanian twit," snarls Roger, "I'm looking for the boss, see, one funny move out of you and it's your last taste of O-negative, Jackson, those fangs won't even be able to gum oatmeal when I'm through wiv you—" Alarmed Rózsavölgyi, retreating around the water cooler, tries to pick up a swivel chair to defend himself with. The seat falls off, and Rózsavölgyi is left with only the base, which happens, embarrassingly, to be shaped like a cross.

"Where is he," Mexican standoff, Roger gritting his teeth do not succumb to hysteria, it is a counter-productive luxury you cannot, in your present great vulnerability, afford. . . . "Come on you sod, tell me or you'll never see the inside of a coffin again—"

In runs a short but spunky secretary, bit of a chubbette here, and commences belting Roger in the shins with the excess-profits tax records from 1940 to '44 of an English steel firm which happened to share a pattent with Vereinigte Stahlwerke for an alloy used in the liquid-oxygen couplings for the line running aft to the S-Gerät in A4 number 00000. But Roger's shins are not set up for this kind of information. The secretary's glasses fall off. "Miss Müller-Hochleben," reading her nametag, "you look beastly without your glasses. Put ssem back on, at vunce!" this comic Nazi routine being inspired by her surname.

"I can't find them," German accent all right, "I don't see too well."

"Well, we'll see if we can't help you here—ah! what's this? Miss Müller-Hochleben!"

"Ja. ..."

"What do they look like, these eyeglasses?"

"They are white—"

"With clever little rhinestones all around the rims, Fräulein? eh?"

"Ja, ja, und mit—"

"And running down all the earpieces too, a-and feathers?"

"Ostrich feathers. ..."

"Male ostrich feathers, dyed a stunning peacock blue, sprouting off the edges?"

"That is my eyeglasses, ja," sez the groping secretary, "where are they, please?"

"Right here!'' bringing his foot down CRUNCH, smashing them to bright arctic gatherings all over Pointsman's rug.

"l-say," offers Rózsavölgyi from a far corner: the one corner of the room, by the way, which is not brightly lit, yes kind of an optic anomaly here, just a straight, square room, no odd-shaped polyhedrons in Twelfth House . . . and still, this strange, unaccountable prism of shadow in the corner . . . more than one visitor has popped in to find Mr. Pointsman not at his desk where he ought to be but standing in the shadow-corner—most disturbingly facing into it. . . . Rózsavölgyi is not himself that fond of the Corner, he's tried it a few times but only came out shaking his head: "Mis-ter Pointsman, I-don't like it in there, at all. What poss-ible kind, of a thrill can an-yone get, from such an un-wholesome experience. Eh?" raising one crookedly wistful eyebrow. Pointsman had only looked apologetic, not for himself but to something for Rózsavölgyi, and said gently, "This is one spot in the room where I feel alive," well bet your ass one or two memos went up toward Ministerial level over that one. If they reached the Minister himself, it was probably as office entertainment. "Oh yes, yes," shaking his wise old head of sheep's wool, high, almost Slavic cheekbones crinkling his eyes up into an inattentive but polite laughter, "yes Pointsman's famous Corner, yes . . . wouldn't be surprised if it was haunted, eh?" Reflex laughs from the underlings present, though only grim smiles from the overlings. "Get the S.P.R. in, to have a look," giggles someone with a cigar. "The poor bloke will think he's back in the War again." "Hear, hear," and, "That's a good one, all right," ring through the layering smoke. Practical jokes are all the rage among these particular underlings, a kind of class tradition.

"You say what," Roger has been screaming for a while.

"I-say," sez Rózsavölgyi, again.

"You say, 'I say'? Is that it? Then you should have said, 'I say, "I say." ' "

"I did."

"No, no—you said, 'I say,' once, is what you—"

"A-ha! But I said it again. I-said it... twice."

"But that was after I asked you the question—you can't tell me the two 'I say's were both part of the same statement," unless, "that's asking me to be unreasonably," unless it's really true that, "credulous, and around you that's a form of," that we're the same person, and that the whole exchange was ONE SINGLE THOUGHT yaaaggghhh and that means, "insanity, Rózsavölgyi—"

"My glasses," snivels Fräulein Müller-Hochleben, now crawling around the room, Mexico scattering the glass splinters with his shoe so that now and then the unfortunate girl will cut a hand or a knee,

beginning to trail dark little feathers of blood for inches at a time, eventually—assuming she were to last long enough—dotting in Pointsman's rug like the train of a Beardsley gown.

"You're doing fine, Miss Müller-Hochleben!" cries Roger encouragingly, "and as for you, you—" but is stopped on noticing how Rózsavölgyi now is nearly invisible in the shadow, and how the whites of his eyes are actually glowing white, jittering around in the air, winking-out-coming-back ... it is costing Rózsavölgyi an effort to stay in this shadow-corner. It is not, at all, his sort of place. For one thing, the rest of the room seems to be at more of a distance, as through the view-finder on a camera. And the walls—they don't appear to be ... well, solid, actually. They flow: a coarse, a viscous passage, rippling like a standing piece of silk or nylon, the color watery gray but now and then with a surprise island in the flow, some color absolutely foreign to this room: saffron spindles, palm-green ovals, magenta firths running comblike into jagged comicbook-orange chunks of island as the wounded fighter-plane circles, jettisons the tanks, then the silver canopy, sets the flaps to just above a stall, wheels up as the blue (suddenly, such a violent blue!) rushes in just before impact throttle closed uhhnnhb! oh shit the reef, we're going to smash up on the—oh. Oh, there's no reef? We-we're safe? We are! Mangoes, I see mangoes on that tree over there! a-and there's a girl—there's a lotta girls! Lookit, they're all gorgeous, their tits point straight out, and they're all swingin' those grass skirts, playin' ukuleles and singing (though why are the voices so hard and tough, so nasally like the voices of an American chorus line?)—

White man welcome ta Puke-a-hook-a-look-i I-i-i-island!

One taste o' my pa-paya and y'll never wanna go a-waaaay!

Moon like a yel-low ba-na-na,

Hangin' over, my ca-ba-na,

And lotsa hula, hula games to play—

Oh the stars are fallin' over Puke-a-hook-a-look-i Island,

And the lava down the mountain's runnin' scrump-shus as a

cherry pie—

Even Sweet Leilani in the Little Grass Shack Loves a coconut monkey and a missionary snack, Looky-looky, sugar cookie, you're on Puke-a-hook-a-look-i

I-i-i-island!

O-boy, o-boy—go-ing to nail me, one, of those lit-Ûe is-hnd love-lies, spend, the rest. . . of my life, eat-ing pa-pay-as, Jra-grant as the cunt, of young paradise—

When paradise was young. The pilot is turning to Rózsavölgyi, who is still strapped in safety harness behind him. The face is covered with helmet, goggles that reflect too much light, oxygen mask—a face of metal, leather, isinglass. But now the pilot is raising the goggles, slowly, and whose eyes are these, so familiar, smiling hello, I know you, don't you know me? Don't you really know me?

Rózsavölgyi screams and backs out of the corner, shivering, blinded now in the overhead lights. Fräulein Müller-Hochleben is crawling around and around in the same circle, faster and faster, nearly a blur, croaking hysterically. Both have reached the exact level Roger's subtle psychological campaign here was intended to work them up to. Quietly but firmly: "Right. Now for the last time, where is Mr. Pointsman?"

"Mossmoon's office," they reply, in unison.

Mossmoon's office is a roller-skate ride away from Whitehall, and guarded by room after room of sentinel girls, each of them wearing a frock of a radically different color from the others (and this goes on for a while, so you can imagine what 3-sigma colors these are to begin with, if that many can be so "radically different," you know, like that— oh, colors such as lizard, evening star, pale Atlantis to name a few), and whom Roger romances, bribes, threatens, double-talks and (sigh) yes punches his way through till finally "Mossmoon," pounding on this gigantic oak door, carved like the stone doorways of certain temples, "Pointsman, the jig's up! In the name of whatever marginal decency enables you to get through the day without being shot dead by the odd armed stranger, open this door." This is quite a long speech, and the door actually opens halfway through, but Roger finishes it up anyhow. He's looking into a room of incandescent lemon-lime subdued drastically, almost to the milky point of absinthe-and-water, a room warmer than this tableful of faces really deserves, but perhaps it's Roger's entrance that deepens the color a bit now as he runs and jumps up on the polished table, over the polished head of a director of a steel company, skidding 20 feet down the waxed surface to confront the man at the end, who sits with a debonair (well, snotty) smile on his face. "Moss-moon, I'm on to you." Has he actually come inside, in among the hoods, eye-slits, gold paraphernalia, the incense and the thighbone scepter?

"That's not Mossmoon," Mr. Pointsman clearing his throat as he speaks, "Mexico do come down off the table won't you . . . gentlemen, one of my old PISCES colleagues, brilliant but rather unstable, as you may've noted—oh, Mexico, really—"

Roger has unbuttoned his fly, taken his cock out, and is now busy pissing on the shiny table, the papers, in the ashtrays and pretty soon on these poker-faced men themselves, who, although executive material all right, men of hair-trigger minds, are still not quite willing to admit that this is happening, you know, in any world that really touches, at too many points, the one they're accustomed to ... and actually the fall of warm piss is quite pleasant as it sweeps by, across ten-guinea cravats, creative-looking little beards, up into a liver-spotted nostril, across a pair of Army-issue steel-rim eyeglasses, slashing up and down starched fronts, Phi Beta Kappa keys, Legions of Honour, Orders of Lenin, Iron Crosses, V.C.s, retirement watchchains, Dewey-for-President lapel pins, half-exposed service revolvers, and even a sawed-off shotgun under the shoulder there. . . .

"Pointsman," the cock, stubborn, annoyed, bucks like an airship among purple clouds (very dense purple, as pile velvet that color) at nightfall when the sea-breeze promises a difficult landing, "I've saved you for last. But—goodness, I don't seem to have any urine left, here. Not even a drop. I'm so sorry. Nothing left for you at all. Do you understand? If it means giving my life" the words have just come out, and maybe Roger's exaggerating, but maybe not, "there will be nothing anywhere for you. What you get, I'll take. If you go higher in this, I'll come and get you, and take you back down. Wherever you go. Even should you find a spare moment of rest, with an understanding woman in a quiet room, I'll be at the window. I'll always be just outside. You will never cancel me. If you come out, I'll go in, and the room will be defiled for you, haunted, and you'll have to find another. If you stay inside I'll come in anyway—I'll stalk you room to room till I corner you in the last. You'll have the last room, Pointsman, and you'll have to live in it the rest of your scum, prostituted life."

Pointsman won't look at him. Won't meet his eyes. That's what Roger wanted. The security police show up as an anticlimax, although aficionados of the chase scene, those who cannot look at the Taj Mahal, the Uffizi, the Statue of Liberty without thinking chase scene, chase scene, wow yeah Douglas Fairbanks scampering across that moon minaret there—these enthusiasts may find interest in the following:

Roger dives under the table to button his fly and the zealous flatties leap at each other over the top of the table, colliding and cursing, but Roger has gone scuttling down the horsehide, hobnailed, pinstriped, Mom's-argyle-socked sublevel of these conspirators above, a precarious passage, any one foot could kick untelegraphed and wipe

him out—till he arrives back at the bald steel-magnate, reaches up, grabs him by the necktie or the cock, whichever it's easiest to get a hold on, and drags the man down under the table.

"Right. Now, we're going to get out of here, and you're my hostage, get it?" He emerges dragging the livid executive by his necktie or cock, pulling him like a child's sleigh strangling and apoplectic out the door, past the modally unusual rainbow of sentinel-ladies now intimidated-looking at least, sirens already wailing in the street MANIAC