Penguin books

"You're her mother . . . what if they arrest you, what happens to her?"

"That's what they—Peter can't you see, they tuant a great swollen tit with some atrophied excuse for a human, bleating around somewhere in its shadows. How can I be human for her? Not her mother. 'Mother,' that's a civil-service category, Mothers work for Them! They're the policemen of the soul..." her face darkened, Judaized by the words she speaks, not because it's out loud but because she means it, and she's right. Against her faith, Sachsa can see the shallows of his own life, the bathtub stagnancy of those soirees where for years not even the faces changed . . . too many tepid years. . . .

"But I love you ..." she brushes hair back from his sweating forehead, they lie beneath a window through which street- and advertising-light blow constantly, lapping at their skins, at their roundings and shadows, with spectra colder than those of the astrologers' Moon. . .. "You don't have to be anything you aren't, Peter. I wouldn't be here if I didn't love who you are. ..."

Did she goad him into the street, was she the death of him? In his view from the other side, no. In love, words can be taken too many ways, that's all. But he does feel he was sent across, for some particular reason. . . .

And Use, vamping him with her dark eyes. She can say his name, but often, to flirt with him, she won't, or she'll call him Mama.

"No-no, that's Mama. I'm Peter. Remember? Peter."

"Mama."

Leni only gazes, a smile held between her lips almost, he must say, smug, allowing the mix-up in names to fall, to set up male reverberations she can't be ignorant of. If she doesn't want him out in the street, why does she only keep her silence at such moments?

"I was only glad she wasn't calling me Mama," Leni thought she'd explain. But that's too close to ideology, it's nothing he can be comfortable with yet. He doesn't know how to listen to talk like that as more than slogans strung together: hasn't learned to hear with the revolutionary heart, won't ever, in fact, be given enough time to gather a revolutionary heart from the bleak comradely love of the others, no, no time for it now, or for anything but one more breath, the rough breath of a man growing afraid in the street, not even enough time to lose his fear in the time-honored way, no, because here comes Schutzmann Joche, truncheon already in backswing, the section of Communist head moving into view for him stupidly, so unaware of him and his power . . . the Schutzmann's first clear shot all day . . . oh, his timing is perfect, he feels it in arm and out the club no longer flabby at his side but tensed back now around in a muscular curve, at the top of his swing, peak of potential energy ... far below that gray vein in the man's temple, frail as parchment, standing out so clear, twitching already with its next to last pulsebeat. . . and, SHIT! Oh—how—

How beautiful!

During the night, Sir Stephen vanishes from the Casino.

But not before telling Slothrop that his erections are of high interest to Fitzmaurice House.

Then in the morning Katje comes storming in madder than a wet hen, to tell Slothrop that Sir Stephen's gone. Suddenly everybody is telling Slothrop things, and he's barely awake. Rain rattles at the shutters and windows. Monday mornings, upset stomachs, good-bys ... he blinks out at the misted sea, the horizon mantled in gray, palms gleaming in the rain, heavy and wet and very green. It may be that the champagne is still with him—for ten extraordinary seconds there's nothing in his field but simple love for what he's seeing.

Then, perversely aware of it, he turns away, back into the room. Time to play with Katje, now. . . .

Her face is as pale as her hair. A rain-witch. Her hat brim makes a chic creamy green halo around her face.

"Well, he's gone then." Keenness of this order might work to provoke her. "It's too bad. Then again—maybe it's good."

"Never mind him. How much do you know, Slothrop?"

"What's that mean, never mind him? What do you do, just throw people away?"

"Do you want to find out?"

He stands twisting his mustache. "Tell me about it."

"You bastard. You've sabotaged the whole thing, with your clever little collegiate drinking game."

"What whole thing, Katje?"

"What did he tell you?" She moves a step closer. Slothrop watches her hands, thinking of army judo instructors he's seen. It occurs to him he's naked and also, hmm, seems to be getting a hardon here, look out, Slothrop. And nobody here to note it, or speculate why. . . .

"Sure didn't tell me you knew any of that judo. Must of taught you it in that Holland, huh? Sure—little things," singing in descending childish thirds, "give you away, you know. ..."

"Aahh—" exasperated she rushes in, aims a chop at his head which he's able to dodge—goes diving in under her arm, lifts her in a fireman's carry, throws her against the bed and comes after her. She kicks a sharp heel at his cock, which is what she should've done in the first place. Her timing, in fact, is drastically off all through this, else she would likely be handing Slothrop's ass to him ... it may be that she wants her foot to miss, only scraping Slothrop along the leg as he swerves now, grabs her by the hair and twists an arm behind her, pushing her, face-down, on the bed. Her skirt is up over her ass, her thighs squirming underneath him, his penis in terrific erection.

"Listen, cunt, don't make me lose my temper with you, got no problems at all hitting women, I'm the Cagney of the French Riviera, so look out."

"I'll kill you—"

"What—and sabotage the whole thing?"

Katje turns her head and sinks her teeth in his forearm, up near the elbow where the Pentothal needles used to go in. "Ow, shit—" he lets go the arm he's been twisting, pulls down underwear, takes her by one hip and penetrates her from behind, reaching under to pinch nipples, paw at her clitoris, rake his nails along inside her thighs, Mister Tech-

nique here, not that it matters, they're both ready to come—Katje first, screaming into the pillow, Slothrop a second or two later. He lies on top of her, sweating, taking great breaths, watching her face turned ³/4 away, not even a profile, but the terrible Face That Is No Face, gone too abstract, unreachable: the notch of eye socket, but never the labile eye, only the anonymous curve of cheek, convexity of mouth, a noseless mask of the Other Order of Being, of Katje's being—the lifeless nonface that is the only face of hers he really knows, or will ever remember.

"Hey, Katje," 's all he sez.

"Mm." But here's only her old residual bitterness again, and they are not, after all, to be lovers in parachutes of sunlit voile, lapsing gently, hand in hand, down to anything meadowed or calm. Surprised?

She has moved away, releasing his cock into the cold room. "What's it like in London, Slothrop? When the rockets come down?"

"What?" After fucking he usually likes to lie around, just smoke a cigarette, think about food, "Uh, you don't know it's there till it's there. Gee, till after it's there. If it doesn't hit you, then you're O.K. till the next one. If you hear the explosion, you know you must be alive."

"That's how you know you're alive."

"Right." She sits up, pulling underpants back up and skirt back down, goes to the mirror, starts rearranging her hair. "Let's hear the boundary-layer temperatures. While you're getting dressed."

"Boundary-layer temperature T sub e, what is this? rises exponentially till Brennschluss, around 70 miles range, a-and then there's a sharp cusp, 1200 degrees, then it drops a little, minimum of 1050, till you get out of the atmosphere, then there's another cusp at 1080 degrees. Stays pretty steady till re-entry," blablabla. The bridge music here, bright with xylophones, is based on some old favorite that will comment, ironically but gently, on what is transpiring—a tune such as "School Days, School Days," or "Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine," or even "There'll Be a HOT TIME in the Old Town Tonite!" take your pick—slowing and fading to a glassed-in porch downstairs, Slothrop and Katje tête-à-tête, alone except for a number of musicians in the corner groaning and shaking their heads, plotting how to get César Flebotomo to pay them for a change. Bad gig, bad gig. . . . Rain bats against the glass, lemon and myrtle trees outside shake in the wind. Over croissants, strawberry jam, real butter, real coffee, she has him running through the flight profile in terms of wall temperature and Nusselt heart-transfer coefficients, computing in his head from Reynolds numbers she flashes him . . . equations of motion, damping,

restoring moments .. . methods of computing Brennschluss by IG and radio methods . . . equations, transformations . . .

"Now jet expansion angles. I'll give you an altitude, you tell me the angle."

"Katje, why don't you tell me the angle?"

She was pleased, once, to think of a peacock, courting, fanning his tail. . . she saw it in the colors that moved in the flame as it rose off the platform, scarlet, orange, iridescent green . . . there were Germans, even SS troops, who called the rocket Der Pfau. 'Pfau Zwei.' Ascending, programmed in a ritual of love ... at Brennschluss it is done—the Rocket's purely feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center of its target, has submitted. All the rest will happen according to laws of ballistics. The Rocket is helpless in it. Something else has taken over. Something beyond what was designed in.

Katje has understood the great airless arch as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her—over its peak and down, plunging, burning, toward a terminal orgasm . . . which is certainly nothing she can tell Slothrop.

They sit listening to gusts of rain that's nearly sleet. Winter gathers, breathes, deepens. A roulette ball goes rattling, somewhere back in another room. She's running. Why? Has he come too close again? He tries to remember if she always needed to talk this way, in draw-shots, rebounding first before she could touch him. Fine time to start asking. He's counter-conspiring in the dark, jimmying doors at random, no telling what'll come out. . . .

Dark basalt pushes up out of the sea. A vaporous scrim hangs across the headland and its châteaux, turning it all to a grainy antique postcard. He touches her hand, moves his fingers up her bare arm, reaching. . . .

"Hm?"

"Come on upstairs," sez Slothrop.

She may have hesitated, but so briefly that he didn't notice: "What have we been talking about all this time?"

"That A4 rocket."

She looks at him for a long time. At first he thinks she's about to laugh at him. Then it looks like she'll cry. He doesn't understand. "Oh, Slothrop. No. You don't want me. What they're after may, but you don't. No more than A4 wants London. But I don't think they know . . . about other selves . .. yours or the Rocket's . . . no. No more than you do. If you can't understand it now, at least remember. That's all I can do for you."

They go back up to her room again: cock, cunt, the Monday rain at the windows. . . . Slothrop spends the rest of the morning and early afternoon studying Professors Schiller on regenerative cooling, Wagner on combustion equations, Pauer and Beck on exhaust gases and burning efficiency. And a pornography of blueprints. At noon the rain stops. Katje is off on chores of her own. Slothrop passes a few hours downstairs in the bar, waiters who catch his eye smiling, holding up bottles of champagne, wiggling them invitingly—"No, merci, non. . . ." He's trying to memorize the organization charts at that Peene-münde.

As light begins to spill from the overcast sky, he and Katje are out taking a walk, an end-of-the-day stroll along the esplanade. Her hand is gloveless and icy in his, her narrow black coat making her taller, her long silences helping to thin her for him nearly to fog. . . . They stop, lean against a railing, he watching the midwinter sea, she the blind and chilly Casino poised behind them. Colorless clouds slide by, endlessly, in the sky.

"I was thinking of the time I came in on you. That afternoon." He can't quite bring himself to get specific out loud, but she knows he means the Himmler-Spielsaal.

She has looked around sharply. "So was I."

Their breaths are torn into phantoms out to sea. She has her hair combed high today in a pompadour, her fair eyebrows, plucked to wings, darkened, eyes rimmed in black, only the outboard few lashes missed and left blonde. Cloudlight comes slanting down across her face, taking away color, leaving little more than a formal snapshot, the kind that might appear on a passport. . . .

"A-and you were so far away then ... I couldn't reach you. . . ."

Then. Something like pity comes into her face and goes again. But her whisper is lethal and bright as sudden wire: "Maybe you'll find out. Maybe in one of their bombed-out cities, beside one of their rivers or forests, even one day in the rain, it will come to you. You'll remember the Himmler-Spielsaal, and the skirt I was wearing . . . memory will dance for you, and you can even make it my voice saying what I couldn't say then. Or now." Oh what is it she smiles here to him, only for that second? already gone. Back to the mask of no luck, no future—her face's rest state, preferred, easiest. . . .

They are standing among black curly skeletons of iron benches, on the empty curve of this esplanade, banked much more steeply than the waking will ever need: vertiginous, trying to spill them into the sea and be rid of this. The day has grown colder. Neither of them can stay

balanced for long, every few seconds one or the other must find a new footing. He reaches and turns up the collar of her coat, holds her cheeks then in his palms ... is he trying to bring back the color of flesh? He looks down, trying to see into her eyes, and is puzzled to find tears coming up to fill each one, soaking in among her lashes, mascara bleeding out in fine black swirls . . . translucent stones, trembling in their sockets. . . .

Waves crash and drag at the stones of the beach. The harbor has broken out in whitecaps, so brilliant they can't be gathering their light from this drab sky. Here it is again, that identical-looking Other World—is he gonna have this to worry about, now? What th'—lookít these trees—each long frond hanging, stung, dizzying, in laborious drypoint against the sky, each so perfectly placed. . . .

She has moved her thighs and the points of her hips up to touch him, through her coat—it might still, after all, be to help bring him back—her breath a white scarf, her tear-trails, winter-lit, ice. She feels warm. But it's not enough. Never was—nope, he understands all right, she's been meaning to go for a long time. Braced for the wind the whitecaps imply, or for the tilt of the pavement, they hold each other. He kisses her eyes, feels his cock again begin to swell with good old, bad old—old, anyhow—lust.

Out at sea a single clarinet begins to play, a droll melody joined in on after a few bars by guitars and mandolins. Birds huddle bright-eyed on the beach. Katje's heart lightens, a little, at the sound. Slothrop doesn't yet have the European reflexes to clarinets, he still thinks of Benny Goodman and not of clowns or circuses—but wait . . . aren't these kazoos coming? Yeah, a lotta kazoos! A Kazoo Band!

Late that night, back in her room, she wears a red gown of heavy silk. Two tall candles burn an indefinite distance behind her. He feels the change. After making love she lies propped on an elbow watching him, breathing deep, dark nipples riding with the swell, as buoys ride on the white sea. But a patina has formed on her eyes: he can't even see her accustomed retreat, this last time, dimmed, graceful, to the corner of some inner room. . . .

"Katje."

"Sshh," raking dreamy fingernails down the morning, over the Cote d'Azur toward Italy. Slothrop wants to sing, decides to, but then can't think of anything that'd work. He reaches an arm, without wetting his fingers snuffs the candles. She kisses the pain. It hurts even more. He falls asleep in her arms. When he wakes she is gone, completely, most of her never-worn clothes still in the closet, blisters and a

little wax on his fingers, and one cigarette, stubbed out before its time in an exasperated fishhook. . . . She never wasted cigarettes. She must have sat, smoking, watching him while he slept . . . until something, he'll never be asking her what, triggered her, made it impossible to stay till cigarette's end. He straightens it out, finishes it, no point wasting smokes is there, with a war on. ...

D D D D D D D

"Ordinarily in our behavior, we react not singly, but complexly, to fit the ever present contents of our environment. In old people," Pavlov was lecturing at the age of 83, "the matter is altogether different. Concentrating on one stimulus we exclude by negative induction other collateral and simultaneous stimuli because they often do not suit the circumstances, are not complementary reactions in the given setting."

Thus [Pointsman never shows these excursions of his to anyone], reaching for some flower on my table,

I know the cool mosaic of my room

Begin its slow, inhibitory dissolve Around the bloom, the stimulus, the need

That brighter burns, as brightness, quickly sucked

From objects all around, now concentrates

(Yet less than blinding), focuses to flame.

Whilst there yet, in the room's hypnotic evening,

The others lurk—the books, the instruments,

The old man's clothes, an old gorodki stick,

Glazed now but with their presences. Their spirits,

Or memories I kept of where they were,

Are canceled, for this moment, by the flame:

The reach toward the frail and waiting flower ...

And so, one of them—pen, or empty glass—

Is knocked from where it was, perhaps to roll

Beyond the blank frontiers of memory ... Yet this, be clear, is no "senile distraction,"

But concentrating, such as younger men Can easily and laughing dodge, their world Presenting too much more than one mean loss— And out here, eighty-three, the cortex slack, Excitatory processes eased to cinders

By Inhibition's tweaking, callused fingers,

Each time my room begins its blur I feel

I've looked in on some city's practice blackout

(Such as must come, should Germany keep on

That road of madness). Each light, winking out. . .

Except at last for one bright, stubborn bloom

The Wardens cannot quench. Or not this time.

The weekly briefings at "The White Visitation" are all but abandoned. Hardly anyone sees the old Brigadier about these days. There is evidence of a budgetary insecurity begun to filter in among the cherub-crusted halls and nooks of the PISCES facility.

"The old man's funking," cries Myron Grunton, none too stable himself these days. The Slothrop group are gathered for their regular meeting in the ARE wing. "He'll shoot down the whole scheme, all it'll take is one bad night. ..."

A degree of well-bred panic can be observed among those present. In the background, laboratory assistants move about cleaning up dog shit and calibrating instruments. Rats and mice, white and black and a few shades of gray, run clattering on their wheels in a hundred cages.

Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears unruffled and strong. His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Savile Row serenity, suppressed waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather rakishly notched lapels. In this parched and fallow time, he gushes affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he speaks, soothing: "There's no danger."

"No danger?" screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off again muttering and growling.

"Slothrop's knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!"

"The whole thing's falling apart, Pointsman!"

"Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of the scheme, and there've been embarrassing inquiries down from Duncan Sandys—"

"That's the EM.'s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!"

"We've already begun to run into a deficit—"

"Funding," IF you can keep your head, "is available, and will be coming in before long . . . certainly before we run into any serious trouble. Sir Stephen, far from being 'knocked out,' is quite happily at work in Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home there should any of you wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active on the program, and Mr.

Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we are budgeted well into fiscal '46 before anything like a deficit begins to rear its head."

"Your Interested Parties again?" sez Rollo Groast.

"Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted with you day before yesterday," Edwin Treacle mentions now. "Clive and I took an organic chemistry course or two together back at Manchester. Is ICI one of our, ah, sponsors, Pointsman?"

"No," smoothly, "Mossmoon, actually, is working out of Malet Street these days. I'm afraid we were up to nothing more sinister than a bit of routine coordination over this Schwarzkommando business."

"The hell you were. I happen to know Clive's at ICI, managing some sort of polymer research."

They stare at each other. One is lying, or bluffing, or both are, or all of the above. But whatever it is Pointsman has a slight advantage. By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all conies down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires—on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It's work, that's all it is, and there's no room for any extrahuman anxieties—they only weaken, ef-feminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter. "I do wish ICI would finance part of this," Pointsman smiles.

"Lame, lame," mutters the younger Dr. Groast.

"What's it matter?" cries Aaron Throwster. "If the old man gets moody at the wrong time this whole show can prang."

"Brigadier Pudding will not go back on any of his commitments," Pointsman very steady, calm, "we have made arrangements with him. The details aren't important."

They never are, in these meetings of his. Treacle has been comfortably sidetracked onto the Mossmoon Issue, Rollo Groast's carping asides never get as far as serious opposition, and are useful in presenting the appearance of open discussion, as are Throwster's episodes of hysteria for distracting the others. ... So the gathering breaks up, the conspirators head off for coffee, wives, whisky, sleep, indifference. Webley Silvernail stays behind to secure his audiovisual gear and loot the ashtrays. Dog Vanya, back for the moment in an ordinary state of mind if not of kidneys (which are vulnerable after a while to bromide

therapy), has been allowed a short break from the test stand, and he goes sniffing now over to the cage of Rat Ilya. Ilya puts his muzzle against the galvanized wire, and the two pause this way, nose to nose, life and life. . . . Silvernail, puffing on a hook-shaped stub, lugging a 16 mm projector, leaves ARF by way of a long row of cages, exercise wheels strobing under the fluorescent lights. Careful youse guys, here comes da screw. Aw he's O.K. Looie, he's a regular guy. The others laugh. Den what's he doin' in here, huh? The long white lights buzz overhead. Gray-smocked assistants chat, smoke, linger at various routines. Look out, Lefty, dey're comin' fer you dis time. Watch dis, chuckles Mouse Alexei, when he picks me up I'm gonna shit, right'n his hand! Better not hey, ya know what happened ta Slug, don'tcha? Dey fried him when he did dat, man, da foist time he fucked up run-nin' dat maze. A hundrit volts. Dey said it wuz a "accident." Yeah . . . sure it wuz!