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So was the Rocket's terrible passage reduced, literally, to bourgeois terms, terms of an equation such as that elegant blend of philosophy and hardware, abstract change and hinged pivots of real metals which describes motion under the aspect of yaw control: 
preserving, possessing, steering between Scylla and Charybdis the whole way to Brennschluss. If any of the young engineers saw correspondence between the deep conservatism of Feedback and the kinds of lives they were coming to lead in the very process of embracing it, it got lost, or disguised—none of them made the connection, at least not while alive: it took death to show it to Roland Feldspath, death with its very good chances for being Too Late, and a host of other souls feeling themselves, even now, Rocketlike, driving out toward the stone-blue lights of the Vacuum under a Control they cannot quite name . . . the illumination out here is surprisingly mild, mild as heavenly robes, a feeling of population and invisible force, fragments of "voices," glimpses into another order of being. . . . Afterward, Slothrop would be left not so much with any clear symbol or scheme to it as with some alkaline aftertaste of lament, an irreducible strangeness, a self-sufficiency nothing could get inside. . . . Yes, sort of German, these episodes here. Well, these days Slothrop is even dreaming in the language. Folks have been teaching him dialects, Plattdeutsch for the zone the British plan to occupy, Thur-ingian if the Russians happen not to drive as far as Nordhausen, where die central rocket works is located. Along with the language teachers come experts in ordnance, electronics, and aerodynamics, and a fellow from Shell International Petroleum named Hilary Bounce, who is going to teach him about propulsion. It seems that early in 1941, the British Ministry of Supply let a £10,000 research contract to Shell—wanted Shell to develop a rocket engine that would run on something besides cordite, which was being used in those days to blow up various sorts of people at the rate of oodles 'n' oodles of tons an hour, and couldn't be spared for rockets. A team ramrodded by one Isaac Lubbock set up a static-test facility at Langhurst near Horsham, and began to experiment with liquid oxygen and aviation fuel, running their first successful test in August of '42. Engineer Lubbock was a double first at Cambridge and the Father of British Liquid Oxygen Research, and what he didn't know about the sour stuff wasn't worth knowing. His chief assistant these days is Mr. Geoffrey Gollin, and it is to Gollin that Hilary Bounce reports. "Well, I'm an Esso man myself," Slothrop thinks he ought to mention. "My old short was a gasgobbler all right, but a gourmet. Any time it used that Shell I had to drop a whole bottle of that Bromo in the tank just to settle that poor fucking Terraplane's plumbing down." "Actually," the eyebrows of Captain Bounce, a 110% company man, going up and down earnestly to help him out, "we handled only the transport and storage end of things then. In those days, before the Japs and the Nazis you know, production and refining were up to the Dutch office, in The Hague." Slothrop, poor sap, is remembering Katje, lost Katje, saying the name of her city, whispering Dutch love-words as they moved down sea-mornings now another age, another dispensation. . . . Wait a minute. "That's Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij, N.V?" "Right." It's also the negative of a recco photograph of the city, darkbrown, festooned with water-spots, never enough time to let these dry out completely— "Are you blokes aware" they're trying to teach him English En- glish too, heaven knows why, and it keeps coming out like Gary Grant, "that Jerry—old Jerry, you know—has been in that The Hague there, shooting his bloody rockets at that London, a-and using, the . . . Royal Dutch Shell headquarters building, at the Josef Israelplein if I remember correctly, for a radio guidance transmitter? What bizarre shit is that, old man?" Bounce stares at him, jingling his gastric jewelry, not knowing what to make of Slothrop, exactly. "I mean," Slothrop now working himself into a fuss over something that only disturbs him, dimly, nothing to kick up a row over, is it? "doesn't it strike you as just a bit odd, you Shell chaps working on your liquid engine your side of the Channel you know, and their chaps firing their bloody things at you with your own . . . blasted . . . Shell transmitter tower, you see." "No, I can't see that it makes—what are you getting at? Surely they'd simply have picked the tallest building they could find that's in a direct line from their firing sites to London." "Yes, and at the right distance too, don't forget that—exactly twelve kilometers from the firing site. Hey? That's exactly what I mean." Wait, oh wait. Is that what he means? "Well, I'd never thought of it that way." Neither have I, Jackson. Oh, me neither folks. . . . Hilary Bounce and his Puzzled Smile. Another innocent, a low-key enthusiast like Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. But: Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. "I hope I haven't said anything wrong." "Whyzat?" "You look—" Bounce aspirating what he means to be a warm little laugh, "worried." Worried, all right. By the jaws and teeth of some Creature, some Presence so large that nobody else can see it—there! that's that monster I was telling you about. —That's no monster, stupid, that's clouds! —No, can't you see? It's his feet— Well, Slothrop can feel this beast in the sky: its visible claws and scales are being mistaken for clouds and other plausibilities ... or else everyone has agreed to call them other names when Slothrop is listening. ... "It's only a 'wild coincidence,' Slothrop." He will learn to hear quote marks in the speech of others. It is a bookish kind of reflex, maybe he's genetically predisposed—all those earlier Slothrops packing Bibles around the blue hilltops as part of their gear, memorizing chapter and verse the structures of Arks, Temples, Visionary Thrones—all the materials and dimensions. Data behind which always, nearer or farther, was the numinous certainty of God. Well, what more appropriate way for Tyrone to Get It one cold morning than this: It's a blueprint of a German parts list, reproduced so crummy he can hardly read the words—"Vorrichtung fur die Isolierung, 0011-5565/43," now what's this? He knows the number by heart, it's the original contract number for the A4 rocket as a whole. What's an "insulation device" doing with the Aggregat's contract number? And a DE rating too, the highest Nazi priority there is? Not good. Either a clerk at OKW fucked up, which is not unheard-of, or else he just didn't know the number, and put the rocket's in as the next best thing. Claim, part and work numbers all have the same flagnote, which directs Slothrop to a Document SG-1. Flagnote on the flagnote sez "Geheime Kommandosache! This is a state secret, in the meaning of §35R5138." "Say," he greets General Wìvern nipping in through the door, "like to get ahold of a copy of that Document SG-1." "Haw, haw," replies the General. "So would our chaps, I imagine." "Quit fooling." Every piece of Allied intelligence on the A4, however classified, gets stuffed into a secret funnel back in London and all comes out in Slothrop's fancy cell at the Casino. So far they've held back nothing. "Slothrop, there are no'SG'documents." First impulse is to rattle the parts list in the man's face, but today he is the shrewd Yankee foxing the redcoats. "Oh. Well, maybe I read it wrong," making believe look around the paper-littered room, "maybe it was a '56' or something, jeepers it was just here. . . ." The General goes away again. Leaving Slothrop with a puzzle, kind of a, well not an obsession really . . . not yet . . . Opposite the parts listing, over in the Materials column now, here's "Imipolex G." Oh really. Insulation device made of Imipolex G eh? He kicks around the room looking for his handbook of German trade names. Nothing even close to it there ... he locates next a master materials list for the A4 and all its support equipment, and there's sure no Imipolex G in that either. Scales and claws, and footfalls no one else seems to hear. ... "Something wrong?" Hilary Bounce again, with his nose in the doorway. "It's about this liquid oxygen, need some more of that specific impulse data, there." "Specific ... do you mean specific thrust?" "Oops, thrust, thrust," English English to the rescue, Bounce diverted: "For LOX and alcohol it's about 200. What more do you need to know?" "But didn't you chaps use petrol at Langhurst?" "Among other things, yes." "Well it's about those other things. Don't you know there's a war on? You can't be proprietary about stuff like that." "But all our company reports are back in London. Perhaps my next time out—" "Shit, this red tape. I need it now, Cap'n!" He goes around assuming they've assigned him a limitless Need To Know, and Bounce confirms it: "I could send back by teletype, I suppose. ..."
Okay. Now there is a party tonight over on the Cap, chez Raoul de la Perlimpinpin, young madcap heir of the Limoges fireworks magnate Georges ("Poudre") de la Perlimpinpin—if "party" is the word for something that's been going on nonstop ever since this piece of France was liberated. Slothrop is allowed—under the usual surveillance—to drop in to RaouPs whenever the mood strikes him. It's a giddy, shiftless crowd out there—they drift in from all corners of Allied Europe, linked by some network of family, venery and a history of other such parties whose complexity his head's never quite been able to fit around. Here and there faces will go by, old American faces from Harvard or from SHAEF, names he's lost—they are revenants, maybe accidental, maybe . . . It is to this party that Michele has seduced Hilary Bounce, and for which Slothrop, soon as his reply from London has come nattering through, in clear, on Bounce's machine, now proceeds to dude himself up for. He'll read the information through later. Singing, With my face shined up-like a microphone And uh Sta-Comb on my hair, I'm just as suave-as, an ice-cream cone, say, I'm Mis-ter Debo-nair. . . . and turned out in a green French suit of wicked cut with a subtle pur
DDDDDDD
Turns out that some merrymaker has earlier put a hundred grams of hashish in the Hollandaise. Word of this has got around. There has been a big run on broccoli. Roasts lie growing cold on the room-long buffet tables. A third of the company are already asleep, mostly on the floor. It is necessary to thread one's way among bodies to get to where anything's happening. What's happening is not clear. There are the usual tight little groups out in the gardens, dealing. Not much spectacle tonight. A homosexual triangle has fizzed over into pinches and recriminations, so as to block the door to the bathroom. Young officers are outside vomiting among the zinnias. Couples are wandering. Girls abound, velvet-bowed, voile-sleeved, underfed, broad-shouldered and permed, talking in half a dozen languages, sometimes brown from the sun here, others pale as Death's Vicar from more eastern parts of the War. Eager young chaps with patent-leather hair rush about trying to vamp the ladies, while older heads with no hair at all prefer to wait, putting out only minimal effort, eyes and mouths across the rooms, talking business in the meantime. One end of the salon is occupied by a dance band and an emaciated crooner with wavy hair and very red eyes, who is singing: julia (fox-trot) Ju-lia, Would you think me pe-cul-iar, If I should fool ya, In-to givin' me—just-a-little-kiss? Jool-yaaahh, No one else could love you tru-lier, How I'd worship and bejewel ya, If you'd on-ly give-me just-a-little-kiss! Ahh J¾o/-yaaahhhh— My poor heart grows un-ru-lier, No one oolier or droolier, Could I be longing for— What's more— Ju-lia,
I would shout hallelujah, To have my Jool-yaaahh, In-my-arms forevermore. Saxophony and Park Lane kind of tune, perfect for certain states of mind. Slothrop sees Hilary Bounce, clearly a victim of the hallucinogenic Hollandaise, nodded out on a great pouf with Michele, who's been fondling his IG Farben trinket for the past two or three hours. Slothrop waves, but neither one notices him. Dopers and drinkers struggle together without shame at the buffet and in the kitchens, ransacking the closets, licking out the bottoms of casseroles. A nude bathing party passes through on the way down the sea-steps to the beach. Our host, that Raoul, is roaming around in a ten-gallon hat, Tom Mix shirt and brace of sixguns with a Percheron horse by the bridle. The horse is leaving turds on the Bokhara rug, also on the odd supine guest. It is all out of shape, no focus to it until a sarcastic flourish from the band, and here comes the meanest customer Slothrop has seen outside of a Frankenstein movie—wearing a white zoot suit with reet pleats and a long gold keychain that swings in flashing loops as he crosses the room with a scowl for everybody, in something of a hurry but taking the time to scan faces and bodies, head going side to side, methodical, a little ominous. He stops at last in front of Slothrop, who's putting together a Shirley Temple for himself. "You." A finger the size of a corncob, an inch from Slothrop's nose. "You bet," Slothrop dropping a maraschino cherry on the rug then squashing it as he takes a step backward, "I'm the man all right. Sure. What is it? Anything." "Come on." They proceed outside to a eucalyptus grove, where Jean-Claude Gongue, notorious white slaver of Marseilles, is busy white-slaving. "Hey you," hollering into the trees, "you wanna be a white slave, huh?" "Shit no," answers some invisible girl, "I wanna be a green slave!" "Magenta!" yells somebody from up in an olive tree. "Vermilion!" "Think I'll take up dealing dope," sez Jean-Claude. "Look," Slothrop's friend producing a kraft-paper envelope that even in the gloom Slothrop can tell is fat with American Army yellow-seal scrip, "I want you to hold this for me, till I ask for it back. It looks like Italo is going to get here before Tamara, and I'm not sure which one—" "At this rate, Tamara's gonna get here before tonight," Slothrop interjects in a Groucho Marx voice. "Don't try to undermine my confidence in you," advises the Large One. "You're the man." "Right," Slothrop tucking envelope inside pocket. "Say, where'd you get that zoot you're wearing, there?" "What's your size?" "42, medium." "You shall have one," and so saying he rumbles off back inside. "A-and a sharp keychain!" Slothrop calls after. What th' heck's going on? He wanders around asking a question or two. The fella turns out to be Blodgett Waxwing, well-known escapee from the Caserne Martier in Paris, the worst stockade in the ETO. Waxwing's specialty is phonying documents of various sorts—PX ration cards, passports, Soldbücher—whilst dealing in Army hardware also as a sideline. He has been AWOL off and on since the Battle of the Bulge, and with a death rap for that over his head he still goes into U.S. Army bases at night to the canteens to watch the movies—provided they're westerns, he loves those shit-kickers, the sound of hoofbeats through a metal speaker across a hundred yards of oildrums and deuce 'n' a half ruts in the foreign earth makes his heart stir as if a breeze blew there, he's got some of his many contacts to run him off a master schedule of every movie playing in every occupation town in the Theatre, and he's been known to hot-wire a general's jeep just to travel up to that Poitiers for the evening to see a good old Bob Steele or Johnny Mack Brown. His picture may hang prominently in all the guardrooms and be engraved in thousands of snowdrops' brains, but he has seen The Return of Jack Slade twenty-seven times. The story here tonight is a typical WWII romantic intrigue, just another evening at Raoul's place, involving a future opium shipment's being used by Tamara as security against a loan from Italo, who in turn owes Waxwing for a Sherman tank his friend Theophile is trying to smuggle into Palestine but must raise a few thousand pounds for purposes of bribing across the border, and so has put the tank up as collateral to borrow from Tamara, who is using part of her loan from Italo to pay him. But meantime the opium deal doesn't look like it's going to come through, because the middleman hasn't been heard from in several weeks, along with the money Tamara fronted him, which she got from Raoul de la Perlimpinpin through Waxwing, who is now being pressured by Raoul for the money because Italo, deciding the tank belongs to Tamara now, showed up last night and took it away to an Undisclosed Location as payment on his loan, thus causing Raoul to panic. Something like that. Slothrop's tail is being made indecent propositions by two of the homosexuals who've been fighting in the bathroom. Bounce and Michele are nowhere in sight, and neither's that Waxwing. Raoul is talking earnestly to his horse. Slothrop is just settling down next to a girl in a prewar Worth frock and with a face like Tenniel's Alice, same forehead, nose, hair, when from outside comes this most godawful clanking, snarling, crunching of wood, girls come running terrified out of the eucalyptus trees and into the house and right behind them what comes crashing now into the pallid lights of the garden but— why the Sherman Tank itself! headlights burning like the eyes of King Kong, treads spewing grass and pieces of flagstone as it manoeuvres around and comes to a halt. Its 75 mm cannon swivels until it's pointing through the French windows right down into the room. "An-toine!" a young lady focusing in on the gigantic muzzle, "for heaven's sake, not now. ..." A hatch flies open and Tamara—Slothrop guesses: wasn't Italo supposed to have the tank?—uh—emerges shrieking to denounce Raoul, Waxwing, Italo, Theophile, and the middleman on the opium deal. "But now," she screams, "I have you all! One coup de foudre!" The hatch drops—oh, Jesus—there's the sound of a 3-inch shell being loaded into its breech. Girls start to scream and make for the exits. Dopers are looking around, blinking, smiling, saying yes in a number of ways. Raoul tries to mount his horse and make his escape, but misses the saddle and slides all the way over, falling into a tub of black-market Jell-o, raspberry flavor, with whipped cream on top. "Aw, no . . ." Slothrop having about decided to make a flanking run for the tank when YYYBLAAANNNGGG! the cannon lets loose an enormous roar, flame shooting three feet into the room, shock wave driving eardrums in to middle of brain, blowing everybody against the far walls. A drape has caught fire. Slothrop, tripping over partygoers, can't hear anything, knows his head hurts, keeps running through the smoke at the tank—leaps on, goes to undog the hatch and is nearly knocked off by Tamara popping up to holler at everybody again. After a struggle which shouldn't be without its erotic moments, for Tamara is a swell enough looking twist with some fine moves, Slothrop manages to get her in a come-along and drag her down off of the tank. But loud noise and all, look—he doesn't seem to have an erection. Hmm. This is a datum London never got, because nobody was looking. Turns out the projectile, a dud, has only torn holes in several walls, and demolished a large allegorical painting of Virtue and Vice in an unnatural act. Virtue had one of those dim faraway smiles. Vice was scratching his shaggy head, a little bewildered. The burning drape's been put out with champagne. Raoul is in tears, thankful for his life, wringing Slothrop's hands and kissing his cheeks, leaving trails of Jell-o wherever he touches. Tamara is escorted away by Raoul's bodyguards. Slothrop has just disengaged himself and is wiping the Jell-o off of his suit when there is a heavy touch on his shoulder. "You were right. You are the man." "That's nothing." Errol Flynn frisks his mustache. "I saved a dame from an octopus not so long ago, how about that?" "With one difference," sez Blodgett Waxwing. "This really happened tonight. But that octopus didn't." "How do you know?" "I know a lot. Not everything, but a few things you don't. Listen Slothrop—you'll be needing a friend, and sooner than you think. Don't come here to the villa—it may be too hot by then—but if you can make it as far as Nice—" he hands over a business card, embossed with a chess knight and an address on Rue Rossini. "I'll take the envelope back. Here's your suit. Thanks, brother." He's gone. His talent is just to fade when he wants to. The zoot suit is in a box tied with a purple ribbon. Keychain's there too. They both belonged to a kid who used to live in East Los Angeles, named Ricky Gutierrez. During the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, young Gutierrez was set upon by a carload of Anglo vigilantes from Whittier, beaten up while the L.A. police watched and called out advice, then arrested for disturbing the peace. The judge was allowing zoot-suiters to choose between jail and the Army. Gutierrez joined up, was wounded on Saipan, developed gangrene, had to have his arm amputated, is home now, married to a girl who works in the kitchen at a taco place in San Gabriel, can't find any work himself, drinks a lot during the day. . . . But his old zoot, and those of thousands of others busted that summer, hanging empty on the backs of all the Mexican L.A. doors, got bought up and have found their way over here, into the market, no harm turning a little profit, is there, they'd only have hung there in the fat smoke and the baby smell, in the rooms with shades pulled down against the white sun beating, day after day, on the dried palm trees and muddy culverts, inside these fly-ridden and empty rooms. ... Yüklə 3,05 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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