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loonies on leave! (The Chorus line is divided not into the conventional Boys and Girls but into Keepers and Nuts, without regard to sex, though all four pos-; sibilitíes are represented on stage. Many are wearing sunglasses with black lenses and white rims, not so much to be fashionable as to suggest snow-blindness, the antiseptic white of the Clinic, perhaps even the darkness of the mind. But all seems happy, relaxed, informal ... no sign of repression, not even a distinction in costume so that at first there is some problem telling Nuts from Keepers as they all burst in from the wings dancing and singing): Here we come foax—ready or not! Put your mask on, and plot your plot, We're just laughin' and droolin', all—over the sleigh, Like a buncha happy midgets on a holiday! Oh we're the LOONIES ON LEAVE, and We haven't a care— Our brains at the cleaners, our souls at the Fair, Just freaks on a fur-lough, away from the blues, As daffy and sharp as—the taps on our shoes! Hey, we're passin' the hat for—your frowns and your tears, And the fears you thought'd never go'way— Oh take it from a loony, life's so dear and swoony, So just hug it and kiss it to-day! La-da-da, ya-ta ya-ta ta-ta &c . . . (They go on humming the tune behind what follows): First Nut (or maybe Keeper): Got an amazing deal for you here, American? I thought so, always tell a face from home, saaay, like your suit there, go far enough up the glacier 'n' nobody'd be able to see ya! Well yes now, I know how you feel about these street-vendors keep coming by, it's the old three-card monte on the sidewalk [trucks across the stage for a while, back and forth, waving his finger in the air, singing "Three-card monte on-the side, walk," over and over in the same obsessive monotone, for as many repetitions as he can get away with] and you can spot right away what's wrong, every one promises ya somethin' fer nothin', right? yes now oddly enough, that's the main objection engineers and scientists have always had to the idea of [lowering his voice] perpetual motion or as we like to call it Entropy Management—here, here's our card—well, sure, they've got a point. At least they had a point. Up till now. ... Second Nut or Keeper: Now you've heard about the two-hundred-mile-per-gallon carburetor, the razor edge that never gets dull, the eternal bootsole, the mange pill that's good to your glands, engine that'll run on sand, ornithopters and robobopsters—you heard me, got a little goatee made out of steel wool—jivey, that's fine, but here's one for yo' mind! Are you ready? It's Lightning-Latch, The Door That Opens You! Slothrop: Think I'll go take my nap now. ... Third N. or K.: Transmogrify common air into diamonds through Cataclysmic Carbon Dioxide Reducti-o-o-o-o-n-n-n. . . . If he were sensitive about such things, it'd all be pretty insulting, this first wave. It passes, gesturing, accusative, pleading. Slothrop manages to stay calm. There is a pause—then on come the real ones, slowly at first but gathering, gathering. Synthetic rubber or gasoline, electronic calculators, aniline dyes, acrylics, perfumes (stolen essences in vials in sample cases), sexual habits of a hundred selected board members, layouts of plants, codebooks, connections and payoffs, ask for it, they can get it. At last, one day at the Sträggeli, Slothrop eating on a bratwurst and hunk of bread he's been toting around all morning in a paper bag, suddenly from noplace appears one Mario Schweitar in a green frogged waistcoat, just popped out of the echoing cuckoo clock of Dubya Dubya Two here, the endless dark corridors at his back, with a change of luck for Slothrop. "Pssst, Joe," he begins, "hey, mister." "Not me," replies Slothrop with his mouth full. "You interested in some L.S.D.?" "That stands for pounds, shillings, and pence. You got the wrong cafe, Ace." "I think I've got the wrong country," Schweitar a little mournful. "I'm from Sandoz." "Aha, Sandoz!" cries Slothrop, and pulls out a chair for the fella. Turns out Schweitar is very tight indeed with Psychochemie AG, being one of those free-floating trouble-shooters around the Cartel, working for them on a per diem basis and spying on the side. "Well," Slothrop sez, "I'd sure like anything they got on L. Jamf, a-and on that Imipolex G." "Gaaah—" "Pardon me?" "That stuff. Forget it. It's not even our line. You ever try to develop a polymer when there's nothing but indole people around? With our giant parent to the north sending in ultimatums every day? Imipolex G is the company albatross, Yank. They have vice-presidents whose only job is to observe the ritual of going out every Sunday to spit on old Jamf's grave. You haven't spent much time with the indole crowd. They're very elitist. They see themselves at the end of a long European dialectic, generations of blighted grain, ergotism, witches on broomsticks, community orgies, cantons lost up there in folds of mountain that haven't known an unhallucinated day in the last 500 years—keepers of a tradition, aristocrats—"
"Up in the mountains, toward the Uetliberg." "You ever—" "What?"
"Did you ever meet him?" "Before my time. But I know that there's a lot of data on him in the classified files at Sandoz. It would be some job getting you what you want. ..." "Uh..." "Five hundred." "Five hundred what?" Swiss francs. Slothrop hasn't got 500 anything, unless it's worries. The money from Nice is almost gone. He heads toward Semyavin's, across the Gemüse-Brücke, deciding he'll walk everywhere from now on, chewing his white sausage and wondering when he'll see another. "First thing you want to do," Semyavin advises him, "is go to a pawnshop and raise a few francs on that, ah," pointing at the suit. Aw no, not the suit. Semyavin goes rummaging in a back room, comes out with a bundle of workmen's clothes. "You should start thinking more about your visibility. Come back tomorrow, I'll see what else I can find." White zoot in a bundle under his arm, a less visible Ian Scuffling goes back outside, down into the mediaeval afternoon of the Nieder-dorf, stone walls now developing like baking bread in the failing sun, oboy oboy he can see it now: gonna turn into another of them Tamara/Italo drills here, 'n' then he'll be in so deep he'll just never get out. . . . At the entrance to his street, in the wells of shadow, he notes a black Rolls parked, motor idling, its glass tinted and afternoon so dark he can't see inside. Nice car. First one he's seen in a while, should be no more than a curiosity, except for Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek. Zunnggg! diddilung, diddila-ta-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta-ta William Tell Overture here, back in the shadows, hope nobody was looking through that one-way glass—zoom, zoom, dodging around corners, scooting down alleys, no sound of pursuit but then it's the quietest engine on the road except for the King Tiger tank. . . . Forget that Hotel Nimbus, he reckons. His feet are already starting to bother him. He gets to the Luisenstrasse and the hockshop just before closing time, and manages to raise a little, baloney for a day or two maybe, on the zoot. So long zoot. This town sure closes up early. What does Slothrop do tonight for a bed? He has a moment's relapse into optimism: ducks in a restaurant and rings up the desk at the Hotel Nimbus. "Ah, yes," English English, "can you possibly tell me if the British chap who's been waiting in the foyer is still there, you know ..." In a minute on conies a pleasant, awkward voice with an are-you-there. Oh, so seraphic. Slothrop funks, hangs up, stands looking at all the people at dinner staring at him—blew it, blew it, now They know he's on to Them. There is the usual chance his paranoia's just out of hand again, but the coincidences are running too close. Besides, he knows the sound of Their calculated innocence by now, it's part of Their style. . . . Out again in the city: precision banks, churches, Gothic doorways drilling by ... he must avoid the hotel and the three cafes now, right, right. . . . The permanent Zürchers in early-evening blue stroll by. Blue as the city twilight, deepening blue. . . . The spies and dealers have all gone indoors. Semyavin's place is out, the Waxwing circle have been kind, no point bringing any heat down on them. How much weight do the Visitors have in this town? Can Slothrop risk checking in to another hotel? Probably not. It's getting cold. A wind is coming in now off the lake. He finds that he has drifted as far as the Odeon, one of the great world cafes, whose specialty is not listed anywhere—indeed has never been pinned down. Lenin, Trotsky, James Joyce, Dr. Einstein all sat out at these tables. Whatever it was they all had in common: whatever they'd come to this vantage to score . . . perhaps it had to do with the people somehow, with pedestrian mortality, restless crisscrossing of needs or desperations in one fateful piece of street. . . dialectics, matrices, archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across a table, to cheating and last hopes, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West's ancient curse. . . . Slothrop finds he has enough spare change for coffee. He goes sits inside, choosing a seat that'll face the entrance. Fifteen minutes and he's getting the spy-sign from a swarthy, curly-headed alien in a green suit a couple tables away. Another front-facer. On his table is an old newspaper that appears to be in Spanish. It is open to a peculiar political cartoon of a line of middle-aged men wearing dresses and wigs, inside the police station where a cop is holding a loaf of white ... no it's a baby, with a label on its diaper sez LA REVOLUCIÓN . . . oh, they're all claiming the infant revolution as their own, all these politicians bickering like a bunch of putative mothers, and somehow this cartoon here is supposed to be some kind of a touchstone, this fella in the green suit, who turns out to be an Argentine named Francisco Squalidozzi, is looking for a reaction . . . the key passage is at the very end of the line where the great Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones is saying, "Now I'm going to tell you, in verse, how I conceived her free from the stain of Original Sin.. . ," It is the Uriburu revolution of 1930. The paper is fifteen years old. There is no telling what Squalidozzi is expecting from Slothrop, but what he gets is pure ignorance. This seems to be acceptable, and presently the Argentine has loosened up enough to confide that he and a dozen colleagues, among them the international eccentric Graciela Imago Portales, hijacked an early-vintage German U-boat in Mar de Plata a few weeks ago, and have sailed it back across the Atlantic now, to seek political asylum in Germany, as soon as the War's over there. . . . "You say Germany? You gone goofy? It's a mess there, Jackson!" "Not nearly the mess we left back home," the sad Argentine replies. Long lines have appeared next to his mouth, lines learned from living next to thousands of horses, watching too many doomed colts and sunsets south of Rivadavia, where the true South begins. . . . "It's been a mess since the colonels took over. Now, with Perón on his way . . . our last hope was Acción Argentina," what's he talking about, Jesus I'm hungry, "... suppressed it a month after the coup . . . now everybody waits. Attending the street actions out of habit. No real hope. We decided to move before Perón got another portfolio. War, most likely. He already has the descamisados, this will give him the Army too you see . . . it's only a matter of time . . . we could have gone to Uruguay, waited him out—it's a tradition. But perhaps he will be in for a long time. Montevideo is swarming with failed exiles, and failed hopes. ..." "Yeah, but Germany—that's the last place you want to go." "Pero ché, no sós argentino. . . ."A long look away, down the engineered scars of Swiss avenues, looking for the South he left. Not the same Argentine, Slothrop, that that Bob Eberle's seen toasts to Tangerine raised in ev-ry bar across, now. . . . Squalidozzi wants to say: We of all magical precipitates out of Europe's groaning, clouded alembic, we are the thinnest, the most dangerous, the handiest to secular uses. . . . We tried to exterminate our Indians, like you: we wanted the closed white version of reality we got—but even into the smokiest labyrinths, the furthest stacked density of midday balcony or courtyard and gate, the land has never let us forget. . . . But what he asks aloud is: "Here—you look hungry. Have you eaten? I was about to go to supper. Would you do me the honor?" In the Kronenhalle they find a table upstairs. The evening rush is tapering off. Sausages and fondue: Slothrop's starving. "In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper. The pampas stretched as far as men could imagine, inexhaustible, fenceless. Wherever the gaucho could ride, that place belonged to him. But Buenos Aires sought hegemony over the provinces. All the neuroses about property gathered strength, and began to infect the countryside. Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us. Look at Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The tyrant Rosas has been dead a century, but his cult flourishes. Beneath the city streets, the warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and the networks of steel track, the Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a return to that first unscribbled serenity . . . that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky. ..." "But-but bobwire," Slothrop with his mouth full of that fondue, just gobblin' away, "that's progress—you, you can't have open range forever, you can't just stand in the way of progress—" yes, he is actually going to go on for half an hour, quoting Saturday-afternoon western movies dedicated to Property if anything is, at this foreigner who's springing for his meal. Squalidozzi, taking it for mild insanity instead of rudeness, only blinks once or twice. "In ordinary times," he wants to explain, "the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can't be reversed, not by ordinary means. Decentralizing, back toward anarchism, needs extraordinary times . . . this War—this incredible War—just for the moment has wiped out the proliferation of little states that's prevailed in Germany for a thousand years. Wiped it clean. Opened it." "Sure. For how long?" "It won't last. Of course not. But for a few months . . . perhaps there'll be peace by the autumn—discúlpeme, the spring, I still haven't got used to your hemisphere—for a moment of spring, perhaps. . . ." "Yeah but—what're you gonna do, take over land and try to hold it? They'll run you right off, podner." "No. Taking land is building more fences. We want to leave it open. We want it to grow, to change. In the openness of the German Zone, our hope is limitless." Then, as if struck on the forehead, a sudden fast glance, not at the door, but up at the ceiling—"So is our danger." The U-boat right now is cruising around somewhere off of Spain, staying submerged for much of the day, spending nights on the surface to charge batteries, sneaking in now and then to refuel. Squalidozzi won't go into the fueling arrangements in much detail, but there are apparently connections of many years' standing with the Republican underground—a community of grace, a gift of persistence. . . . Squali-dozzi is in Zurich now contacting governments that might be willing, for any number of reasons, to assist his anarchism-in-exile. He must get a message to Geneva by tomorrow: from there word is relayed to Spain and the submarine. But there are Peronist agents here in Zurich. He is being watched. He can't risk betraying the contact in Geneva. "I can help you out," Slothrop licking off his fingers, "but I'm short of cash and—" Squalidozzi names a sum that will pay off Mario Schweitar and keep Slothrop fed for months to come. "Half in front and I'm on the way." The Argentine hands over message, addresses, money, and springs for the check. They arrange to meet at the Kronenhalle in three days. "Good luck." "You too." A last sad look from Squalidozzi alone at his table. A toss of forelock, a fading of light. The plane is a battered DC-3, chosen for its affinity for moonlight, the kind expression on its windowed face, its darkness inside and outside. He wakes up curled among the cargo, metal darkness, engine vibration through his bones . . . red light filtering very faint back through a bulkhead from up forward. He crawls to a tiny window and looks out. Alps in the moonlight. Kind of small ones, though, not as spectacular as he figured on. Oh, well. . . . He settles back down on a soft excelsior bed, lighting up one of Squalidozzi's corktips thinking, Jeepers, not bad, guys just jump in the airplane, go where they want. . . why stop at Geneva? Sure, what about—well, that Spain? no wait, they're Fascists. South Sea Islands! hmm. Full of Japs and GIs. Well Africa's the Dark Continent, nothing there but natives, elephants, 'n' that Spencer Tracy. . . . "There's nowhere to go, Slothrop, nowhere." The figure is huddled against a crate, and shivering. Slothrop squints through the weak red light. It is the well-known frontispiece face of insouciant adventurer Richard Halliburton: but strangely altered. Down both the man's cheeks runs a terrible rash, palimpsested over older pockmarks, in whose symmetry Slothrop, had he a medical eye, could have read drug reaction. Richard Halliburton's jodhpurs are torn and soiled, his bright hair greasy now and hanging. He appears to be weeping silently, bending, a failed angel, over all these second-rate Alps, over all the night skiers far below, out on the slopes, crisscrossing industriously, purifying and perfecting their Fascist ideal of Action, Action, Action, once his own shining reason for being. No more. No more. Slothrop reaches, puts the cigarette out on the deck. How easy these angel-white wood shavings can go up. Lie here in this rattling and wrenched airplane, lie still as you can, damn fool, yup they've conned you—conned you again. Richard Halliburton, Lowell Thomas, Rover and Motor Boys, jaundiced stacks of National Geographies up in Hogan's room must've all lied to him, and there was no one then, not even a colonial ghost in the attic, to tell him different. . . . Bump, skid, slew, pancake landing, fucking washouts from kiteflying school, gray Swiss dawn light through little windows and every joint, muscle, and bone in Slothrop is sore. It's time to punch back in. He gets off of the plane without incident, mingling into a yawning, sour flock of early passengers, delivery agents, airfield workers. Coin-trin in the early morning. Shocking green hills one side, brown city on the other. Pavements are slick and wet. Clouds blow slowly in the sky. Mont Blanc sez hi, lake sez howdy too, Slothrop buys 20 cigarettes and a local paper, asks directions, gets in a tram that comes and with cold air through doors and windows to wake him up goes rolling into the City of Peace. He's to meet his Argentine contact at the Cafe 1'Éclipse, well off the trolley lines, down a cobblestone street and into a tiny square surrounded by vegetable and fruit stalls under beige awnings, shops, other cafes, window-boxes, clean hosed sidewalks. Dogs go running in and out of the alleys. Slothrop sits with coffee, croissants, and newspaper. Presently the overcast burns off. The sun throws shadows across the square nearly to where he's sitting with all antennas out. Nobody seems to be watching. He waits. Shadows retreat, sun climbs then begins to fall, at last his man shows up, exactly as described: suit of Buenos Aires daytime black, mustache, goldrim glasses, and whistling an old tango by Juan d'Arienzo. Slothrop makes a show of searching all his pockets, comes up with the foreign bill Squalidozzi told him to use: frowns at it, gets up, goes over. Como no, señor, no problem changing a 50-peso note—offering a seat, coming out with currency, notebooks, cards, pretty soon the tabletop's littered with pieces of paper that eventually get sorted back into pockets so that the man has Squalidozzi's message and Slothrop has one to bring back to Squalidozzi. And that's that. Back to Zurich on an afternoon train, sleeping most of the way. He gets off at Schlieren, some ungodly dark hour, just in case They're watching the Bahnhof in town, hitches a ride in as far as the St. Peter-hofstatt. Its great clock hangs over him and empty acres of streets in what he now reads as dumb malignity. It connects to Ivy League quadrangles in his distant youth, clock-towers lit so dim the hour could never be read, and a temptation, never so strong though as now, to surrender to the darkening year, to embrace what he can of real terror to the hour without a name (unless it's ... no ... NO . . .): it was vanity, vanity as his Puritan forerunners had known it, bones and heart alert to Nothing, Nothing underneath the college saxophones melding sweetly, white blazers lipsticked about the lapels, smoke from nervous Fatimas, Castile soap vaporizing off of shining hair, and mint kisses, and dewed carnations. It was being come for just before dawn by pranksters younger than he, dragged from bed, blindfolded, Hey Reinhardt, led out into the autumnal cold, shadows and leaves underfoot, and the moment then of doubt, the real possibility that they are something else—that none of it was real before this moment: only elaborate theatre to fool you. But now the screen has gone dark, and there is absolutely no more time left. The agents are here for you at last. . . . What better place than Zurich to find vanity again? It's Reformation country, Zwingli's town, the man at the end of the encyclopedia, and stone reminders are everywhere. Spies and big business, in their element, move tirelessly among the grave markers. Be assured there are ex-young men, here in this very city, faces Slothrop used to pass in the quads, who got initiated at Harvard into the Puritan Mysteries: who took oaths in dead earnest to respect and to act always in the name of Vanitas, Emptiness, their ruler . . . who now according to life-plan such-and-such have come here to Switzerland to work for Allen Dulles and his "intelligence" network, which operates these days under the title "Office of Strategic Services." But to initiates OSS is also a secret acronym: as a mantra for times of immediate crisis they have been taught to speak inwardly oss . . . oss, the late, corrupt, Dark-age Latin word for bone. . . . Next day, when Slothrop meets Mario Schweitar at the Sträggeli to front him half his fee, he asks also for the location of Jamf's grave. And that's where they arrange to close the deal, up in the mountains. Squalidozzi doesn't show up at the Kronenhalle, or the Odeon, or anyplace Slothrop will think to look in the days that follow. Disappearances, in Zurich, are not unheard of. But Slothrop will keep going back, just in case. The message is in Spanish, he can't make out more than a word or two, but he'll hold on to it, there might be a chance to pass it on. And, well, the anarchist persuasion appeals to him a little. Back when Shays fought the federal troops across Massachusetts, there were Slothrop Regulators patrolling Berkshire for the rebels, wearing sprigs of hemlock in their hats so you could tell them from the Government soldiers. Federals stuck a tatter of white paper in theirs. Slothrops in those days were not yet so much involved with paper, and the wholesale slaughtering of trees. They were still for the living green, against the dead white. Later they lost, or traded away, knowledge of which side they'd been on. Tyrone here has inherited most of their bland ignorance on the subject. Back behind him now, wind blows through Jamf's crypt. Slothrop's been camped here these past few nights, nearly out of money, waiting for word from Schweitar. Out of the wind, huddled inside a couple of Swiss army blankets he managed to promote, he's even been able to sleep. Right on top of Mister Imipolex. The first night he was afraid to fall asleep, afraid of a visit from Jamf, whose German-scientist mind would be battered by Death to only the most brute reflexes, no way to appeal to the dumb and grinning evil of the shell that was left . . . voices twittering with moonlight around his image, as step by step he, It, the Repressed, approaches. . . . -waitaminute up out of sleep, face naked, turning to the foreign gravestones, the what? what was it . . . back again, almost to it, up again . . . up, and back, that way, most of the early night. There's no visit. It seems Jamf is only dead. Slothrop woke next morning feeling, in spite of an empty stomach and a runny nose, better than he had in months. Seemed like he'd passed a test, not somebody else's test, but one of his own, for a change. The city below him, bathed now in a partial light, is a necropolis of church spires and weathercocks, white castle-keep towers, broad buildings with mansard roofs and windows glimmering by thousands. This forenoon the mountains are as translucent as ice. Later in the day they will be blue heaps of wrinkled satin. The lake is mirror-smooth but mountains and houses reflected down there remain strangely blurred, with edges fine and combed as rain: a dream of Atlantis, of the Suggenthal. Toy villages, desolate city of painted alabaster. . . . Slothrop hunkers down here in the cold curve of a mountain trail, packing and lobbing idle snowballs, not much to do around here but smoke the last butt of what for all he knows is the last Lucky Strike in all Switzerland. . . . Footfalls down the trail. Clinking galoshes. It is Mario Schweitar's delivery boy, with a big fat envelope. Slothrop pays him, chisels a cigarette and some matches, and they part. Back at the crypt Slothrop relights a small pile of kindling and pine boughs, warms up his hands, and begins to thumb through the data. The absence of Jamf surrounds him like an odor, one he knows but can't quite name, an aura that threatens to go epileptic any second. The information is here—not as much as he wanted (aw, how much was that?) but more than he hoped, being one of those practical Yankees. In the weeks ahead, in those very few moments he'll be allowed to wallow in his past, he may even have time to wish he hadn't read any of it. . . . D D O D D D D Mr. Pointsman has decided to spend Whitsun by the sea. Feeling a bit megalo these days, nothing to worry about really, never gets worse than, oh perhaps the impression, whilst zooming along through the corridors of "The White Visitation," that all the others seem to be frozen in attitudes of unmistakable parkinsonism, with himself the only alert, unpalsied one remaining. It is peacetime again now, no room for the pigeons in Trafalgar Square on V-E Night, everyone at the facility that day mad drunk and hugging and kissing, except for the Blavatskian wing of Psi Section, who were off on a White Lotos Day pilgrimage to 19 Avenue Road, St. John's Wood. Now there's time again for holidays. Though Pointsman does feel a certain obligation to go relax, there is also, of course, The Crisis. A leader must show self-possession, up to and including a holiday mood, in the midst of Crisis. There's now been no word of Slothrop for nearly a month, since the fumbling asses in military intelligence lost him in Zurich. Pointsman is a bit browned-off with the Firm. His clever strategy appears to've failed. In first discussions with Clive Mossmoon and the others, it seemed foolproof: to let Slothrop escape from the Casino Hermann Goering, and then rely on Secret Service to keep him under surveillance instead of PISCES. An economy move. The surveillance bill is the most excruciating thorn in the crown of funding problems he seems condemned to wear for the duration of this project. Damned funding is going to be his downfall, if Slothrop doesn't drive him insane first. Pointsman has blundered. Hasn't even the Tennysonian comfort of saying "someone" has blundered. No, it was he and he alone who au- thorized the Anglo-American team of Harvey Speed and Floyd Per-doo to investigate a random sample of Slothropian sex adventures. Budget was available, and what harm could it do? They went off practically skipping, obsessive as Munchkins, out into the erotic Poisson. Don Giovanni's map of Europe—640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey but, but, but—in Spain! in Spain, 1003!—is Slothrop's map of London, and the two gumshoes become so infected with the prevailing fondness out here for mindless pleasures that they presently are passing whole afternoons sitting out in restaurant gardens dawdling over chrysanthemum salads and mutton casseroles, or larking at the fruit monger's—"Hey Speed, look, canteloupes! I haven't seen one of them since the Third Term—wow, smell this one, it's beautiful! Say, how about a canteloupe, Speed? Huh? Come on." "Excellent idea, Perdoo, excellent." "Uh . . . Oh, well you pick out the one you want, okay?" "The one?" "Yeah. This is the one," turning it to show him as the faces of threatened girls are roughly turned by villains, "that / picked out, see?" "But but I thought we were both going to—" gesturing feebly toward what he still cannot quite accept as Perdoo's melon, in whose intaglio net now, as among craters of the pale moon, a face is indeed emerging, the face of a captive woman with eyes cast downward, lids above as smooth as Persian ceilings. . . . "Well, no, I usually, uh—" this is embarrassing for Perdoo, it's like being called on to, to justify eating an apple, or even popping a grape into your mouth—"just, well, sort of, eat them . . . whole, you know," chuckling in what he hopes is a friendly way, to indicate politely the social oddness of this discussion— —but the chuckle is taken the wrong way by Speed: taken as evidence of mental instability in this slightly bucktoothed and angular American, who is dancing now from stoop to English stoop, lank as a street-puppet in the wind. Shaking his head, he nevertheless selects his own whole canteloupe, realizes he's been left to pay the bill, which is exorbitant, and goes skipping off after Perdoo, hippety hop both of them, tra-la-la-la slam right into another dead end: "Jenny? No—no Jenny here. ..." "A Jennifer, perhaps? Genevieve?" "Ginny" (it could've been misspelled), "Virginia?" "If you gentlemen are looking for a good time—" Her grin, her red, maniacally good-morning-and-I-mean-good! grin, is wide enough to hold them both right, shivering, smiling, here, and she's old enough to be their Mother—their joint Mother, combining the worst traits of Mrs. Perdoo and Mrs. Speed—in fact she is turning now into just that, even as they watch. These wrecked seas are full of temptresses—it's watery and wanton out here all right. As the two gawking soft-boiled shamuses are drawn along into her aura, winking right here in the street, brassy with henna-glare, with passion-flowers on rayon—just before the last stumbling surrender into the lunacy of her purple eyes, they allow themselves, for the sinful tickle of it, a last thought of the project they're supposed to be here on—Slothropian Episodic Zone, Weekly Historical Observations (SEZ WHO)—a thought that comes running out in the guise of a clown, a vulgar, loose-ends clown bespangled with wordless jokes about body juices, bald-headed, an amazing fall of nose-hair out both nostrils which he has put into braids and tied with acid-green bows—a scrabbling dash now out past sandbags and falling curtain, trying to get back his breath, to garble to them in a high unpleasant screech: "No Jenny. No Sally W No Cybele. No Angela. No Catherine. No Lucy. No Gretchen. When are you going to see it? When are you going to see it?" No "Darlene" either. That came in yesterday. They traced the name as far as the residence of a Mrs. Quoad. But the flashy young divorcee never, she declared, even knew that English children were named "Darlene." She was dreadfully sorry. Mrs. Quoad spent her days lounging about a rather pedicured Mayfair address, and both investigators felt relieved to be out of the neighborhood. . . .
That is to say, Pointsman avoids the matter—as reflexively as he would any nightmare. Should this one turn out not to be a fantasy but real, well. . . "The data, so far, are incomplete." This ought to be prominently stressed in all statements. "We admit that the early data seem to show," remember, act sincere, "a number of cases where the names on Slothrop's map do not appear to have counterparts in the body of fact we've been able to establish along his time-line here in London. Es- tablish so far, that is. These are mostly all first names, you see, the, the Xs without the Ys so to speak, ranks without files. Diíficult to know how far into one 'far enough' really is. "And what if many—even if most—of the Slothropian stars are proved, some distant day, to refer to sexual fantasies instead of real events? This would hardly invalidate our approach, any more than it did young Sigmund Freud's, back there in old Vienna, facing a similar violation of probability—all those Papi-has-raped-me stories, which might have been lies evidentially, but were certainly the truth clinically. You must realize: we are concerned, at PISCES, with a rather strictly defined, clinical version of truth. We seek no wider agency in this." So far, it is Pointsman's burden alone. The solitude of a Führer: he feels himself growing strong in the rays of this dark companion to his public star now on the rise . . . but he doesn't want to share it, no not just yet. . . . Meetings of the staff, his staff, grow worse and worse than useless. They bog down into endless arguments about trivia—whether or not to rename PISCES now that the Surrender has been Expedited, what sort of letterhead, if any, to adopt. The representative from Shell Mex House, Mr. Dennis Joint, wants to put the program under Special Projectiles Operations Group (SPOG), as an adjunct of the British rocket-scavenging effort, Operation Backfire, which is based out of Cuxhaven on the North Sea. Every other day brings a fresh attempt, from some quarter, to reconstitute or even dissolve PISCES. Pointsman is finding it much easier of late to slip into a 1'état c'est moí frame of mind—who else is doing anything? isn 't he holding it all together, often with nothing beyond his own raw will . . . ? Shell Mex House, naturally, is frantic about Slothrop's disappearance. Here's a man running loose who knows everything it's possible to know—not only about the A4, but about what Great Britain knows about the A4. Zurich teems with Soviet agents. What if they've already got Slothrop? They took Peenemünde in the spring, it appears now they will be given the central rocket works at Nordhausen, another of the dealings at Yalta. ... At least three agencies, VIAM, TsAGI, and NISO, plus engineers working out of other commissariats, are even now in Soviet-occupied Germany with lists of personnel and equipment to be taken east. Inside the SHAEF sphere of influence, American Army Ordnance, and a host of competing research teams, are all busy collecting everything in sight. They've already rounded up von Braun and 500 others, and interned them at Gar-misch. What if they get hold of Slothrop? There have also been, aggravating the Crisis, defections: Rollo
So. A holiday by the sea. For political reasons, the party is made up of Pointsman, Mexico, Mexico's girl, Dennis Joint, and Katje Borgesius. Pointsman wears rope-soled shoes, his prewar bowler, and a rare smile. The weather is not ideal. An overcast, a wind that will be chilly by mid-afternoon. A smell of ozone blows up from the Dodgem cars out of the gray steel girderwork along the promenade, along with smells of shellfish on the barrows, and of salt sea. The pebbled beach is crowded with families: shoeless fathers in lounge suits and high white collars, mothers in blouses and skirts startled out of war-long camphor sleep, kids running all over in sunsuits, nappies, rompers, short pants, knee socks, Eton hats. There are ice cream, sweets, Cokes, cockles, oysters and shrimps with salt and sauce. The pinball machines writhe under the handling of fanatical servicemen and their girls, throwing body-english, cursing, groaning as the bright balls drum down the wood obstacle courses through ka-chungs, flashing lights, thudding flippers. The donkeys hee-haw and shit, the children walk in it and their parents scream. Men sag in striped canvas chairs talking business, sports, sex, but most usually politics. An organ grinder plays Rossini's overture to La Gazza Ladra (which, as we shall see later, in Berlin, marks a high point in music which everybody ignored, preferring Beethoven, who never got further than statements of intention), and here without snaredrums or the sonority of brasses the piece is mellow, full of hope, promising lavender twilights, stainless steel pavilions and everyone elevated at last to aristocracy, and love without payment of any kind. . . . It was Pointsman's plan today not to talk shop, but to let the conversation flow more or less organically. Wait for others to betray themselves. But there is shyness, or constraint, among them all. Talk is minimal. Dennis Joint is watching Katje with a horny smile, with now and then a suspicious stare for Roger Mexico. Mexico meantime has his troubles with Jessica—more and more often these days—and at the moment the two aren't even looking at each other. Katje Borgesius has her eyes far out to sea, and there is no telling what is going on with this one. In some dim way, Pointsman, though he can't see that she has any leverage at all, is still afraid of her. There is still a lot he doesn't know. Perhaps what's bothering him most right now is her connection, if any, with Pirate Prentice. Prentice has been down to "The White Visitation" several times asking rather pointed questions about her. When PISCES recently opened its new branch office in London (which some wag, probably that young imbecile Webley Silvernail, has already dubbed "Twelfth House") Prentice began hanging heavily around up there, romancing secretaries, trying for a peep into this file or that... . What's up? What afterlife have the Firm found, this side of V-E Day? What does Prentice want. . . what's his price? Is he in love with La Borgesius here? Is it possible for this woman to be in love? Love? Oh, it's enough to make you scream. What would her idea of love be. ... "Mexico," grabbing the young statistician's arm. "Eh?" Roger interrupted eying a lovely looks a bit like Rita Hay-worth in a one-piece floral number with straps that X across her lean back. ... "Mexico, I think I am hallucinating." "Oh, really? You think you are? What are you seeing?" "Mexico, I see ... I see. . . . What do you mean, what am I seeing, you nit? It's what I'm hearing." "Well, what are you hearing, then." A touch of peevishness to Roger now. "Right now I'm hearing you, saying, 'What are you hearing, then.' And I don't like it!" "Why not." "Because: unpleasant as this hallucination is, I find I still much prefer it to the sound of your voice." Now this is odd behavior from anybody, but from usually correct Mr. Pointsman, it is enough to stop this mutually-paranoid party in their tracks. Nearby is a Wheel of Fortune, with Lucky Strike packs, kewpie dolls and candy bars stuffed among the spokes. "I say, what d'you think?" blond, hale-fellow Dennis Joint nudges Katje with an elbow as broad as a knee. In his profession he has learned to make instant evaluations of those with whom he deals. He judges old Katje here to be a jolly girl, out for a spot of fun. Yes, leadership material here, definitely. "Hasn't he gone a bit mental suddenly?" Trying to keep his voice down, grinning in athletic paranoia vaguely over in the peculiar Pavlovian's direction—not right at him you understand, eye contact might be suicidal folly given his state of mind. . . . Meantime, Jessica has gone into her Fay Wray number. This is a kind of protective paralysis, akin to your own response when the moray eel jumps you from the ceiling. But this is for the Fist of the Ape, for the lights of electric New York white-waying into the room you thought was safe, could never be penetrated . . . for the coarse black hair, the tendons of need, of tragic love. . . . "Yeah well," as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his definitive 18-volume study of King Kong, "you know, he did love her, folks." Proceeding from this thesis, it appears that Prettyplace has left nothing out, every shot including out-takes raked through for every last bit of symbolism, exhaustive biographies of everyone connected with the film, extras, grips, lab people .. . even interviews with King Kong Kult-ists, who to be eligible for membership must have seen the movie at least 100 times and be prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam. . . . And yet, and yet: there is Murphy's Law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian restatement of Gödel's Theorem—when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us. . . something will. So the permutations 'n' combinations of Pudding's Things That Can Happen in European Politics for 1931, the year of Gödel's Theorem, don't give Hitler an outside chance. So, when laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born. Even as determinist a piece of hardware as the A4 rocket will begin spontaneously generating items like the "S-Gerät" Slothrop thinks he's chasing like a grail. And so, too, the legend of the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer from the tallest erection in the world has come, in the fullness of time, to generate its own children, running around inside Germany even now—the Schwarzkommando, whom Mitchell Prettyplace, even, could not anticipate. At PISCES it is widely believed that the Schwarzkommando have been summoned, in the way demons may be gathered in, called up to the light of day and earth by the now defunct Operation Black Wing. You can bet Psi Section was giggling about this for a while. Who could have guessed there'd be real black rocket troops? That a story made up to scare last year's enemy should prove to be literally true—and no way now to stuff them back in the bottle or even say the spell backward: no one ever knew the complete spell—different people knew different parts of it, that's what teamwork is. . . . By the time it occurs to them to look back through the Most Secret documentation sur- rounding Operation Black Wing, to try and get some idea of how this all might've happened, they will find, curiously, that certain critical documents are either missing or have been updated past the end of the Operation, and that it is impossible at this late date to reconstruct the spell at all, though there will be the usual elegant and bad-poetic speculation. Even earlier speculation will be lopped and tranquilized. Nothing will remain, for example, of the tentative findings of Freudian Edwin Treacle and his lot, who toward the end even found themselves at odds with their own minority, the psychoanalytic wing of Psi Section. It began as a search for some measurable basis for the common experience of being haunted by the dead. After a while colleagues began to put in chits requesting they be transferred out. Un-pleasantries such as "It's beginning to sound like the Tavistock Institute around here" began muttering up and down the basement halls. Palace revolts, many of them conceived in ornamentally splendid flashes of paranoia, brought locksmiths and welders in by droves, led to mysterious shortages of office supplies, even of water and heat. . . none of which kept Treacle and lot from carrying on in a Freudian, not to mention Jungian frame of mind. Word of the Schwarzkom-mando's real existence reached them a week before V-E Day. Individual events, who really said what to whom, have been lost in the frenzy of accusation, crying, nervous breakdowns, and areas of bad taste that followed. Someone remembers Gavin Trefoil, face as blue as Krishna, running through the topiary trees stark naked, and Treacle chasing him with an ax, screaming "Giant ape? I'll show you a giant ape all right!" Indeed he would show the critter to many of us, though we would not look. In his innocence he saw no reason why co-workers on an office project should not practice self-criticism with the same rigor as revolutionary cells do. He had not meant to offend sensibilities, only to show the others, decent fellows all, that their feelings about blackness were tied to feelings about shit, and feelings about shit to feelings about putrefaction and death. It seemed to him so clear . . . why wouldn't they listen? Why wouldn't they admit that their repressions had, in a sense that Europe in the last weary stages of its perversion of magic has lost, had incarnated real and living men, likely (according to the best intelligence) in possession of real and living weapons, as the dead father who never slept with you, Penelope, returns night after night to your bed, trying to snuggle in behind you ... or as your unborn child wakes you, crying in the night and you feel its ghost-lips at your breast. . . they are real, they are living, as you pretend to scream inside the Fist of the Ape . . . but looking over now at the much more likely candidate, cream-skinned Katje under the Wheel of Fortune, who is herself getting ready now to bolt down the beach and into the relative calm of the switchback railway. Pointsman is hallucinating. He has lost control. Pointsman is supposed to have absolute control over Katje. Where does this leave her? In a control that is out of control. Not even back in the leather and pain of gemütlich Captain Blicero's world has she felt as terrified as now. Roger Mexico is taking it personally, oh-I-say, only trying to help. . . . What the somewhat disconnected Mr. Pointsman has been hearing all this time is a voice, strangely familiar, a voice he once imagined a face in a well-known news photograph from the War to have: "Here is what you have to do. You need Mexico now, more than ever. Your winter anxieties about the End of History seem now all well comforted to rest, part of your biography now like any old bad dream. But like Lord Acton always sez, History is not woven by innocent hands. Mexico's girl friend there is a threat to your whole enterprise. He will do anything to hold on. Scowling and even cursing him she will nevertheless seduce him away, into a civilian fogbank in which you will lose him and never find him—not unless you act now, Pointsman. Operation Backfire is sending ATS girls out to the Zone now. Rocket girls: secretarial and even minor technical duties at the Cuxhaven test range. You have only to drop a word to SPOG, through Dennis Joint here, and Jessica Swanlake is out of your way. Mexico may complain for a while, but all the more reason for him, given the proper direction, to Lose Himself In His Work, eh? Remember the eloquent words of Sir Dennis Nayland Smith to young Alan Sterling, whose fiancee is in the clutches of the insidious yellow Adversary: 'I have been through the sort of fires which are burning you now, Sterling, and I have always found that work was the best ointment for the burns.' And we both know what Nayland Smith represents, mm? don't we."
This strange outburst does not reassure Pointsman's companions. They begin to edge away, in definite alarm. "We should find a doctor," murmurs Dennis Joint, winking at Katje like a blond crewcut Groucho Marx. Jessica, forgetting her sulk, takes Roger's arm. "You see, you see," the voice starts up again, "she feels that she's protecting him, against you. How many chances does one get to be a synthesis, Pointsman? East and West, together in the same bloke? You can not only be Nayland Smith, giving a young lad in a íiink wholesome advice about the virtues of work, but you also, at the same time, get to be Fu Manchu! eh? the one who has the young lady in his power! How's that? Protagonist and antagonist in one. I'd jump at it, if I were you." Pointsman is about to retort something like, "But you're not me," only he sees how the others all seem to be goggling at him. "Oh, ha, ha," he sez instead. "Talking to myself, here. Little—sort of—eccentricity, heh, heh." "Yang and Yin," whispers the Voice, "Yang and Yin. ..." Yüklə 3,05 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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