Penguin books

D D D D D D D

Imipolex G has proved to be nothing more—or less—sinister than a new plastic, an aromatic heterocyclic polymer, developed in 1939, years before its time, by one L. Jamf for IG Farben. It is stable at high temperatures, like up to 900°C., it combines good strength with a low power-loss factor. Structurally, it's a stiffened chain of aromatic rings, hexagons like the gold one that slides and taps above Hilary Bounce's navel, alternating here and there with what are known as heterocyclic rings.

The origins of Imipolex G are traceable back to early research done at du Pont. Plasticity has its grand tradition and main stream, which happens to flow by way of du Pont and their famous employee Carothers, known as The Great Synthesist. His classic study of large molecules spanned the decade of the twenties and brought us directly

to nylon, which not only is a delight to the fetishist and a convenience to the armed insurgent, but was also, at the time and well within the System, an announcement of Plasticity's central canon: that chemists were no longer to be at the mercy of Nature. They could decide now what properties they wanted a molecule to have, and then go ahead and build it. At du Pont, the next step after nylon was to introduce aromatic rings into the polyamide chain. Pretty soon a whole family of "aromatic polymers" had arisen: aromatic polyamides, polycarbonates, polyethers, polysulfanes. The target property most often seemed to be strength—first among Plasticity's virtuous triad of Strength, Stability and Whiteness (Kraft, Standfestigkeit, Weiße: how often these were taken for Nazi graffiti, and indeed how indistinguishable they commonly were on the rain-brightened walls, as the busses clashed gears in the next street over, and the trams creaked of metal, and the people were mostly silent in the rain, with the early evening darkened to the texture of smoke from a pipe, and the arms of young passersby not in the sleeves of their coats but inside somewhere, as if sheltering midgets, or ecstatically drifted away from the timetable into a tactile affair with linings more seductive even than the new nylon . . .). L. Jamf, among others, then proposed, logically, dialectically, taking the parental polyamide sections of the new chain, and looping them around into rings too, giant "heterocyclic" rings, to alternate with the aromatic rings. This principle was easily extended to other precursor molecules. A desired monomer of high molecular weight could be synthesized to order, bent into its heterocyclic ring, clasped, and strung in a chain along with the more "natural" benzene or aromatic rings. Such chains would be known as "aromatic heterocyclic polymers." One hypothetical chain that Jamf came up with, just before the war, was later modified into Imipolex G.

Jamf at the time was working for a Swiss outfit called Psycho-chemie AG, originally known as the Grössli Chemical Corporation, a spinoff from Sandoz (where, as every schoolchild knows, the legendary Dr. Hofmann made his important discovery). In the early '20s, Sandoz, Ciba, and Geigy had got together in a Swiss chemical cartel. Shortly after, Jamf's firm was also absorbed. Apparently, most of Grössli's contracts had been with Sandoz, anyway. As early as 1926 there were oral agreements between the Swiss cartel and IG Farben. When the Germans set up their cover company in Switzerland, IG Chemie, two years later, a majority of the Grössli stock was sold to them, and the company reconstituted as Psychochemie AG. The patent for Imipolex G was thus cross-filed for both the IG and for

Psychochemie. Shell Oil got into it through an agreement with Imperial Chemicals dated 1939. For some curious reason, Slothrop will discover, no agreements between ICI and the IG seem to be dated any later than '39. In this Imipolex agreement, Icy Eye could market the new plastic inside the Commonwealth in exchange for one pound and other good and valuable consideration. That's nice. Psychochemie AG is still around, still doing business at the same old address in the Schokoladestrasse, in that Zurich, Switzerland.

Slothrop swings the long keychain of his zoot, in some agitation. A few things are immediately obvious. There is even more being zeroed in on him from out there than he'd thought, even in his most paranoid spells. Imipolex G shows up on a mysterious "insulation device" on a rocket being fired with the help of a transmitter on the roof of the headquarters of Dutch Shell, who is co-licensee for marketing the Imipolex—a rocket whose propulsion system bears an uncanny resemblance to one developed by British Shell at around the same time . . . and oh, oh boy, it just occurs to Slothrop now where all the rocket intelligence is being gathered—into the office of who but Mr. Duncan Sandys, Churchill's own son-in-law, who works out of the Ministry of Supply located where but at Shell Mex House, for Christ's sake. . . .

Here Slothrop stages a brilliant Commando raid, along with faithful companion Blodgett Waxwing, on Shell Mex House itself—right into the heart of the Rocket's own branch office in London. Mowing down platoons of heavy security with his little Sten, kicking aside nubile and screaming WRAC secretaries (how else is there to react, even in play?), savagely looting files, throwing Molotov cocktails, the Zoot-suit Zanies at last crashing into the final sanctum with their trousers up around their armpits, smelling of singed hair, spilled blood, to find not Mr. Duncan Sandys cowering before their righteousness, nor open window, gypsy flight, scattered fortune cards, nor even a test of wills with the great Consortium itself—but only a rather dull room, business machines arrayed around the walls calmly blinking, files of cards pierced frail as sugar faces, frail as the last German walls standing without support after the bombs have been and now twisting high above, threatening to fold down out of the sky from the force of the wind that has blown the smoke away. . . . The smell of firearms is in the air, and there's not an office dame in sight. The machines chatter and ring to each other. It's time to snap down your brims, share a postviolence cigarette and think about escape ... do you remember the way in, all the twists and turns? No. You weren't looking. Any of these doors might open you to safety, but there may not be time. . . .

But Duncan Sandys is only a name, a function in this, "How high does it go?" is not even the right kind of question to be asking, because the organization charts have all been set up by Them, the titles and names filled in by Them, because

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Slothrop finds he has paused in front of the blue parts list that started all this. How high does it go . . . ahhhh. The treacherous question is not meant to apply to people after all, but to the hardware! Squinting, moving a finger carefully down the columns, Slothrop finds that Vor-richtung fur die Isolierung's Next Higher Assembly.

"S-Gerät, 11/00000."

If this number is the serial number of a rocket, as its form indicates, it must be a special model—Slothrop hasn't even heard of any with four zeroes, let alone five . . . nor an S-Gerät either, there's an I- and a J-Gerät, they're in the guidance . . . well, Document SG-1, which isn't supposed to exist, must cover that. ...

Out of the room: going noplace special, moving to a slow drumbeat in his stomach muscles see what happens, be ready. ... In the Casino restaurant, not the slightest impedance at all to getting in, no drop in temperature perceptible to his skin, Slothrop sits down at a table where somebody has left last Tuesday's London Times. Hmmm. Hasn't seen one of them in a while. . . . Leafing through, dum, dum, de-doo, yeah, the War's still on, Allies closing in east and west on Berlin, powdered eggs still going one and three a dozen, "Fallen Officers," MacGregor, Mucker-Maffick, Whitestreet, Personal Tributes . . . Meet Me in St. Louis showing at the Empire Cinema (recalls doing the penis-in-the-popcorn-box routine there with one Madelyn, who was less than—)—

Tantivy . . . Oh shit no, no wait—

"True charm . . . humble-mindedness . . . strength of character . . . fundamental Christian cleanness and goodness ... we all loved Oliver . . . his courage, kindness of heart and unfailing good humour were an inspiration to all of us ... died bravely in battle leading a gallant attempt to rescue members of his unit who were pinned down by German artillery ..." And signed by his most devoted comrade in arms, Theodore Bloat. Major Theodore Bloat now—

Staring out the window, staring at nothing, gripping a table knife so hard maybe some bones of his hand will break. It happens sometimes to lepers. Failure of feedback to the brain—no way to know how fiercely they may be making a fist. You know these lepers. Well—

Ten minutes later, back up in his room, he's lying face-down on the bed, feeling empty. Can't cry. Can't do anything.

They did it. Took his friend out to some deathtrap, probably let him fake an "honourable" death . . . and then just closed up bis file. . . .

It will occur to him later that maybe the whole story was a lie. They could've planted it easy enough in that London Times, couldn't they? Left the paper for Slothrop to find? But by the time he figures that one out, there'll be no turning around.

At noon Hilary Bounce comes in rubbing his eyes wearing a shit-eating grin. "How was your evening? Mine was remarkable."

"Glad to hear it." Slothrop is smiling. You're on my list too, pal. This smile asks from him more grace than anything in his languid American life ever has, up till now. Grace he always imagined himself short on. But it's working. He's surprised, and so grateful that he almost starts crying then. The best part of all is not that Bounce appears fooled by the smile, but that Slothrop knows now that it will work for him again. . . .

So he does make it to Nice, after a fast escape down the Corniche through the mountains fishtailing and rubber softly screeching at the sun-warmed abysses, tails all shaken back on the beach where he was thoughtful enough to lend his buddy Claude the assistant chef, about the same height and build, his own brand-new pseudo-Tahitian bathing trunks, and while they're all watching that Claude, find a black Citroen with the keys left in, nothing to it, folks—rolling into town in his white zoot, dark glasses, and a flopping Sydney Green-street Panama hat. He's not exactly inconspicuous among the crowds of military and the mamzelles already shifted into summer dresses, but he ditches the car off Place Garibaldi, heads for a bistro on the old-Nice side of La Porte Fausse and takes time to nab a roll and coffee before setting out to find the address Waxwing gave him. It turns out to be an ancient four-story hotel with early drunks lying in the hallways, eyelids like tiny loaves brushed with a last glaze of setting sun, and summertime dust in stately evolutions through the taupe light, summertime ease to the streets outside, April summertime as the great vortex of redeployment from Europe to Asia hoots past leaving many souls each night to cling a bit longer to the tranquillities here, this close to the drain-hole of Marseilles, this next-to-last stop on the paper cyclone that sweeps them back from Germany, down the river-valleys, beginning to drag some from Antwerp and the northern ports too now as the vortex grows more sure, as preferential paths are set up. . . . Just for the knife-edge, here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to

Slothrop the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky's light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now.

Too impatient to wait for the first star, Slothrop enters the hotel. The carpets are dusty, the place smells of alcohol and bleach. Sailors and girls come ambling through, together and separate, as Slothrop paranoids from door to door looking for one that might have something to tell him. Radios play in the heavy wood rooms. The stairwell doesn't appear to be plumb, but tilted at some peculiar angle, and the light running down the walls is of only two colors: earth and leaf. Up on the top floor Slothrop finally spots an old motherly femme de chambre on the way into a room carrying a change of linen, very white in the gloom.

"Why did you leave," the sad whisper ringing as if through a telephone receiver from someplace far away, "they wanted to help you. They wouldn't have done anything bad. . . ." Her hair is rolled up, George Washington style, all the way around. She gazes at 45° to Slothrop, a patient, parkbench chessplayer's gaze, very large, arching kindly nose and bright eyes: she is starch, sure-boned, the toes of her leather shoes turn up slightly, she's wearing red-and-white striped socks on enormous feet that give her the look of a helpful critter from one of the other worlds, the sort of elf who'd not only make shoes while you slept but also sweep up a little, have the pot on when you awoke, and maybe a fresh flower by the window—

"I beg your pardon?"

"There's still time."

"You don't understand. They've killed a friend of mine." But seeing it in the Times that way, so public . . . how could any of that be real, real enough to convince him Tantivy won't just come popping in the door some day, howdyfoax and a bashful smile . . . hey, Tantivy. Where were you?

"Where was I, Slothrop? That's a good one." His smile lighting the time again, and the world all free. . . .

He flashes Waxwing's card. The old woman breaks into an amazing smile, the two teeth left in her head beam under the night's new bulbs. She thumbs him upstairs and then gives him either the V-for-victory sign or some spell from distant countryside against the evil eye that sours the milk. Whichever it is, she is chuckling sarcastically.

Upstairs is a roof, a kind of penthouse in the middle. Three young

men with Apache sideburns and a young woman packing a braided leather sap are sitting in front of the entrance smoking a thin cigarette of ambiguous odor. "You are lost, mon ami."

"Uh, well," out with Waxwing's card again.

"Ah, bien. ..." They roll aside, and he passes into a bickering of canary-yellow Borsalini, corksoled comicbook shoes with enormous round toes, lotta that saddle-stitching in contrasting colors (such as orange on blue, and the perennial favorite, green on magenta), workaday groans of comforted annoyance commonly heard in public toilets, telephone traffic inside clouds of cigar smoke. Waxwing isn't in, but a colleague interrupts some loud dealing soon as he sees the card.

"What do you need?"

"Carte d'identité, passage to Zurich, Switzerland."

"Tomorrow."

"Place to sleep."

The man hands over a key to one of the rooms downstairs. "Do you have any money?"

"Not much. I don't know when I could—"

Count, squint, riffle, "Here."

"Uh..."

"It's all right, it's not a loan. It comes out of overhead. Now, don't go outside, don't get drunk, stay away from the girls who work here."

"Aw ..."

"See you tomorrow." Back to business.

Slothrop's night passes uncomfortably. There is no position he can manage to sleep in for more than ten minutes. The bugs sally out onto his body in skirmish parties not uncoordinated with his level of wake-fulness. Drunks come to the door, drunks and revenants.

" 'Rone, you've gotta let me in, it's Dumpster, Dumpster Vìllard."

"What's 'at—"

"It's really bad tonight. I'm sorry. I shouldn't impose this way, I'm more trouble than I'm worth . . . listen . . . I'm cold . . . I've been a long way. ..."

A sharp knock. "Dumpster—"

"No, no, it's Murray Smile, I was next to you in basic, company 84, remember? Our serial numbers are only two digits apart."

"I had to let... let Dumpster in ... where'd he go? Was I asleep?"

"Don't tell them I was here. I just came to tell you you don't have to go back."

"Really? Did they say it was all right?"

"It's all right."

"Yeah, but did they say it was?" Silence. "Hey? Murray?" Silence.

The wind is blowing in the ironwork very strong, and down in the street a vegetable crate bounces end over end, wooden, empty, dark. It must be four in the morning. "Got to get back, shit I'm late. ..."

"No." Only a whisper. . . . But it was her "no" that stayed with him.

"Whozat. Jenny? That you, Jenny?"

"Yes it's me. Oh love I'm so glad I found you."

"But I have to ..." Would They ever let her live with him at the Casino . . . ?

"No. I can't." But what's wrong with her voice?

"Jenny, I heard your block was hit, somebody told me, the day after New Year's ... a rocket. . . and I meant to go back and see if you were all right, but... I just didn 't. . . and then They took me to that Casino. ..."

"It's all right."'

"But not if I didn't—"

"Just don't go back to them."

And somewhere, dark fish hiding past angles of refraction in the flow tonight, are Katje and Tantivy, the two visitors he wants most to see. He tries to bend the voices that come to the door, bend them like notes on a harmonica, but it won't work. What he wants lies too deep... .

Just before dawn knocking comes very loud, hard as steel. Slothrop has the sense this time to keep quiet.

"Come on, open up."

"MPs, open up."

American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy. He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on the Tightness of what they planned to do ... he'd been told long ago to expect this sort of thing from Nazis, and especially from Japs—we were the ones who always played fair—but this pair outside the door now are as demoralizing as a close-up of John Wayne (the angle emphasizing how slanted his eyes are, funny you never noticed before) screaming "BANZAI!"

"Wait a minute Ray, there he goes—"

"Hopper! You asshole, come back here—"

"You'll never get me in a strait jacket agaaaaain. . . ." Hopper's voice goes fading around the corner as the MPs take off in pursuit.

It dawns on Slothrop, literally, through the yellowbrown window shade, that this is his first day Outside. His first free morning. He doesn't have to go back. Free? What's free? He falls asleep at last. A little before noon a young woman lets herself in with a passkey and leaves him the papers. He is now an English war correspondent named Ian Scuffling.

"This is the address of one of our people in Zurich. Waxwing wishes you good luck and asks what kept you so long."

"You mean he wants an answer?"

"He said you'd have to think about it."

"Sa-a-a-ay." It's just occurred to him. "Why are all you folks helping me like this? For free and all?"

"Who knows? We have to play the patterns. There must be a pattern you're in, right now."

"Uh . . ."

But she's already left. Slothrop looks around the place: in the daylight it's mean and anonymous. Even the roaches must be uncomfortable here. ... Is he off so quickly, like Katje on her wheel, off on a ratchet of rooms like this, to be in each one only long enough to gather wind or despair enough to move on to the next, but no way backward now, ever again? No time even to get to know the Rue Rossini, which faces holler from the windows, where's a good place to eat, what's the name of the song everybody's whistling these premature summer days. ...

A week later he's in Zurich, after a long passage by train. While the metal creatures in their solitude, days of snug and stable fog, pass the hours at mime, at playing molecules, imitating industrial synthesis as they are broken up, put together, coupled and recoupled, he dozes in and out of a hallucination of Alps, fogs, abysses, tunnels, bone-deep la-borings up impossible grades, cowbells in the darkness, in the morning green banks, smells of wet pasture, always out the windows an unshaven work crew on the way to repair some stretch of track, long waits in marshaling-yards whose rails run like layers of an onion cut end to end, gray and desolate places, nights of whistles, coupling, crashes, sidings, staring cows on the evening hillsides, army convoys waiting at the crossings as the train puffs by, never a clear sense of nationality anywhere, nor even of belligerent sides, only the War, a single damaged landscape, in which "neutral Switzerland" is a rather stuffy convention, observed but with as much sarcasm as "liberated France" or "totalitarian Germany," "Fascist Spain," and others. ...

The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges of. ...

He checks in to the Hotel Nimbus, in an obscure street in the Niederdorf or cabaret section of Zurich. The room's in an attic, and is reached by ladder. There's also a ladder outside the window, so he reckons it'll be O.K. When night comes down he goes out looking for the local Waxwing rep, finds him farther up the Limmatquai, under a bridge, in rooms full of Swiss watches, clocks and altimeters. He's a Russian named Semyavin. Outside boats hoot on the river and the lake. Somebody upstairs is practicing on a piano: stumbling, sweet lieder. Semyavin pours gentian brandy into cups of tea he's just brewed. "First thing you have to understand is the way everything here is specialized. If it's watches, you go to one cafe. If it's women, you go to another. Furs are subdivided into Sable, Ermine, Mink, and Others. Same with dope: Stimulants, Depressants, Psychomimetics. . . . What is it you're after?"

"Uh, information?" Gee, this stuff tastes like Moxie. ...

"Oh. Another one." Giving Slothrop a sour look. "Life was simple before the first war. You wouldn't remember. Drugs, sex, luxury items. Currency in those days was no more than a sideline, and the term 'industrial espionage' was unknown. But I've seen it change— oh, how it's changed. The German inflation, that should've been my clue right there, zeros strung end to end from here to Berlin. I would have stern talks with myself. 'Semyavin, it's only a temporary lapse away from reality. A small aberration, nothing to worry about. Act as you always have—strength of character, good mental health. Courage, Semyavin! Soon all will be back to normal.' But do you know what?"

"Let me guess."

A tragic sigh. "Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?"

"I thought it was cigarettes."

"You dream." He brings out a list of Zurich cafes and gathering spots. Under Espionage, Industrial, Slothrop finds three. Ultra, Licht-spiel, and Sträggeli. They are on both banks of the Limmat, and widely spaced.

"Footwork," folding the list in an oversize zoot-suit pocket.

"It'll get easier. Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future."

Begins a period of shuttling among the three cafes, sitting a few hours over coffee at each one, eating once a day, Zurich baloney and rösti at the People's Kitchens . . . watching crowds of businessmen in blue suits, sun-black skiers who've spent the duration schussing miles of glacier and snow hearing nothing of campaigns or politics, reading nothing but thermometers and weathervanes, finding their atrocities in avalanches or toppling séracs, their victories in layers of good powder . . . ragged foreigners in oil-stained leather jackets and tattered fatigues, South Americans bundled in fur coats and shivering in the clear sunlight, elderly hypochondriacs who were caught out lounging at some spa when the War began and have been here since, women in long black dresses who don't smile, men in soiled overcoats who do ... and the mad, down from their fancy asylums on weekend furlough—oh, the mental cases of Switzerland: Slothrop is known to them, all right, among all the somber street faces and colors only he is wearing white, shoes zoot 'n' hat, white as the cemetery mountains here. . . . He's also the New Mark In Town. It's difficult for him to sort out the first wave of corporate spies from the