Penguin books

"It's an arrangement," she tells him. "It's so unorganized out here. There have to be arrangements. You'll find out." Indeed he will—he'll find thousands of arrangements, for warmth, love, food, simple movement along roads, tracks and canals. Even G-5, living its fantasy of being the only government in Germany now, is just the arrangement for being victorious, is all. No more or less real than all these others so private, silent, and lost to History. Slothrop, though he doesn't know it yet, is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days. Not paranoia. Just how it is. Temporary alliances, knit and undone. He and Geli reach their arrangement hidden from the occupied streets by remnants of walls, in an old fourposter bed facing a dark pier glass. Out the roof that isn't there he can see a long tree-covered mountain ascending. Wine on her breath, nests of down in the hollows of her arms, thighs with the spring of saplings in wind. He's barely inside her before she comes, a fantasy about Tchitcherine in progress, clear and touchingly, across her face. This irritates Slothrop, but doesn't keep him from coming himself.

The foolishness begins immediately on detumescence, amusing questions like, what kind of word has gone out to keep everybody away from Geli but me? Or, is it that something about me reminds her of Tchitcherine, and if so, what? And, say, where's that Tchitcherine right now? He dozes off, is roused by her lips, fingers, dewy legs sliding along his. The sun jumps across their section of sky, gets eclipsed by a breast, is reflected out of her child's eyes . . . then clouds, rain for which she puts up a green tarp with tassels she's sewn on, canopy style

. . . rain sluices down off the tassels, cold and loud. Night. She feeds him boiled cabbage with an old heirloom of a spoon with a crest on it. They drink more of that wine. Shadows are soft verdigris. The rain has stopped. Somewhere kids go booting an empty gas can over the cobblestones.

Something comes flapping in out of the sky: talons scrabble along the top of the canopy. "What's that?" half awake and she's got the covers again, c'mon Geli. . . .

"My owl," sez Geli. "Wernher. There's a candy bar in the top drawer of the chiffonier, Liebchen, would you mind feeding him?"

Liebchen indeed. Staggering off the bed, vertical for the first time all day, Slothrop removes a Baby Ruth from its wrapper, clears his throat, decides not to ask her how she came by it because he knows, and lobs the thing up on the canopy for that Wernher. Soon, lying together again, they hear peanuts crunching, and a clacking beak.

"Candy bars," Slothrop grouches. "What's the matter with him? Don't you know he's supposed to be out foraging, for live mice or some shit? You've turned him into a house owl."

"You're pretty lazy yourself." Baby fingers creeping down along his ribs.

"Well—I bet—cut it out—I bet that Tchitcherine doesn't have to get up and feed that owl."

She cools, the hand stopping where it is. "He loves Tchitcherine. He never comes to be fed, unless Tchitcherine's here."

Slothrop's turn to cool. More correctly, freeze. "Uh, but, you don't mean that Tchitcherine is actually, uh . . ."

"He was supposed to be," sighing.

"Oh. When?"

"This morning. He's late. It happens."

Slothrop's off the bed halfway across the room with a softoff, one sock on and the other in his teeth, head through one armhole of his undershirt, fly zipper jammed, yelling shit.

"My brave Englishman," she drawls.

"Why didn't you bring this up earlier, Geli, huh?"

"Oh, come back. It's nighttime, he's with a woman someplace. He can't sleep alone."

"I hope you can."

"Hush. Come here. You can't go out with nothing on your feet. I'll give you a pair of his old boots and tell you all his secrets."

"Secrets?" Look out, Slothrop. "Why should I want to know—"

"You're not a war correspondent."

"Why does everybody keep saying that? Nobody believes me. Of course I'm a war correspondent." Shaking the brassard at her. "Can't you read? Sez 'War Correspondent.' I even have a mustache, here, don't I? Just like that Ernest Hemingway."

"Oh. Then I imagine you wouldn't be looking for Rocket Number 00000 after all. It was just a silly idea I had. I'm sorry."

Oh boy, am I gonna get out of here, sez Slothrop to himself, this is a badger game if I ever saw one, man. Who else would be interested in the one rocket out of 6000 that carried the Imipolex G device?

"And you couldn't care less about the Schwarzgerät, either," she keeps on. She keeps on.

"The what?"

"They also called it S-Gerät."

Next higher assembly, Slothrop, remember? Wernher, up on the canopy, is hooting. A signal to that Tchitcherine, no doubt.

Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

"Now how on earth," elaborately uncorking a fresh bottle of Nordhäuser Schattensaft, thoppp, best Gary Grant imitation he can summon up with bowels so echoing tight, suavely refilling glasses, handing one to her, "would a sweet, young, thing, like you, know anything, about rocket, hahd-weah?"

"I read Vaslav's mail," as if it's a dumb question, which it is.

"You shouldn't be blabbing to random strangers like this. If he finds out, he'll murder you."

"I like you. I like intrigue. I like playing."

"Maybe you like to get people in trouble."

"All right." Out with the lower lip.

"O.K., O.K., tell me about it. But I don't know if the Guardian will even be interested. My editors are a rather stuffy lot, you know."

Goose bumps crowd her bare little breasts. "I posed once for a rocket insignia. Perhaps you've seen it. A pretty young witch straddling an A4. Carrying her obsolete broom over her shoulder. I was voted the Sweetheart of 3/Art. Abt. (mot) 485."

"Are you a real witch?"

"I think I have tendencies. Have you been up to the Brocken yet?"

"Just hit town, actually."

"I've been up there every Walpurgisnacht since I had my first period. I'll take you, if you like."

"Tell me about this, this 'Schwarzgerät.' "

"I thought you weren't interested."

"How can I know if I'm interested or not if I don't even know what I'm supposed or not supposed to be interested in?"

"You must be a correspondent. You have a way with words."

Tchitcherine comes roaring through the window, a Nagant blazing in his fist. Tchitcherine lands in a parachute and fells Slothrop with one judo chop. Tchitcherine drives a Stalin tank right into the room, and blasts Slothrop with a 76 mm shell. Thanks for stalling him, Liebchen, he was a spy, well, cheerio, I'm off to Peenemünde and a nubile Polish wench with tits like vanilla ice cream, check you out later.

"I have to go, I think," Slothrop sez, "typewriter needs a new ribbon, gotta sharpen pencils, you know how it is—"

"I told you, he won't be here tonight."

"Why? Is he out after that Schwarzgerät, eh?"

"No. He hasn't heard the latest. The message came in from Stettin yesterday."

"In clear, of course."

"Why not?"

"Couldn't be very important."

"It's for sale."

"The message?"

"The S-Gerät, you pill. A man in Swinemünde can get it. Half a million Swiss francs, if you're in the market. He waits on the Strand-Promenade, every day till noon. He'll be wearing a white suit."

Oh yeah? "Blodgett Waxwing."

"It didn't give the name. But I don't think it's Waxwing. He sticks close to the Mediterranean."

"You get around."

"Waxwing is already a legend around the Zone. So is Tchitcherine. For all I know, so are you. What was your name?"

"Gary Grant. Ge-li, Ge-li, Ge-li. . . . Listen, Swinemünde, that's in that Soviet zone, ain't it."

"You sound like a German. Forget frontiers now. Forget subdivisions. There aren't any."

"There are soldiers."

"That's right." Staring at him. "But that's different."

"Oh."

"You'll learn. It's all been suspended. Vaslav calls it an 'interregnum.' You only have to flow along with it."

"Gonna flow outa here now, kid. Thanx for the info, and a tip of the Scuffling hat to ya—"

"Please stay." Curled on the bed, her eyes about to spill over with tears. Aw, shit, Slothrop you sucker . . . but she's just a little kid. . . . "Come here. . . ."

The minute he puts it in, though, she goes wicked and a little crazy, slashing at his legs, shoulders, and ass with chewed-down fingernails sharp as a saw. Considerate Slothrop is trying to hold off coming till she's ready when all of a sudden something heavy, feathered, and many-pointed comes crashing down onto the small of his back, bounces off triggering him and as it turns out Geli too ZONNGGG! eeeeee . . . oh, gee whiz. Wings flap and Wernher—for it is he—ascends into the darkness.

"Fucking bird," Slothrop screams, "he tries that again I'll give him a Baby Ruth right up his ass, boy—" it's a plot it's a plot it's Pavlovian conditioning! or something, "Tchitcherine trained him to do that, right?"

"Wrong! / trained him to do that." She's smiling at him so four-year-old happy and not holding a thing back, that Slothrop decides to believe everything she's been telling him.

"You are a witch." Paranoid that he is, he snuggles down under the counterpane with the long-legged sorceress, lights a cigarette, and despite endless Tchitcherines vaulting in over the roofless walls with arsenals of disaster all for him, even falls asleep, presently, in her bare and open arms.

D D D D D D D

It's a Sunday-funnies dawn, very blue sky with gaudy pink clouds in it. Mud across the cobblestones is so slick it reflects light, so that you walk not streets but these long streaky cuts of raw meat, hock of werewolf, gammon of Beast. Tchitcherine has big feet. Geli had to stuff pieces of an old chemise in the toes of his boots so they'd fit Slothrop. Dodging constantly for jeeps, ten-ton lorries, Russians on horseback, he finally hitches a ride from an 18-year-old American first lieutenant in a gray Mercedes staff car with dents all over it. Slothrop frisks mustaches, flashes his armband, feeling defensive. The sun's already warm. There's a smell of evergreens on the mountains. This rail driving, who's attached to the tank company guarding the Mittelwerke, doesn't

think Slothrop should have any trouble getting inside. English SPOG have come and gone. Right now American Army Ordnance people are busy crating and shipping out parts and tools for a hundred A4s. A big hassle. "Trying to get it all out before the Russians come to take over." Interregnum. Civilians and bureaucrats show up every day, high-level tourists, to stare and go wow. "Guess nobody's seen 'em this big before. I don't know what it is. Like a burlesque crowd. Not gonna do anything, just here to look. Most of them bring cameras. Notice you didn't. We have them for rent at the main gate, if you're interested."

One of many hustles. Yellow James the cook has got him a swell little sandwich wagon, you can hear him in the tunnels calling, "Come an' get 'em! Hot 'n' cold and drippin' with greens!" And there'll be grease on the glasses of half these gobbling fools in another five minutes. Nick De Profundis, the company lounge lizard, has surprised everybody by changing, inside the phone booth of factory spaces here, to an energetic businessman, selling A4 souvenirs: small items that can be worked into keychains, money clips or a scatter-pin for that special gal back home, burner cups of brass off the combustion chambers, ball bearings from the servos, and this week the hep item seems to be SA 100 acorn diodes, cute little mixing valves looted out of the Tele-funken units, and the even rarer SA 102s, which of course fetch a higher price. And there's "Micro" Graham, who's let his sideburns grow and lurks in the Stollen where the gullible visitors stray: "Pssst."

"Pssst?"

"Forget it."

"Well now you've got me curious."

"Thought you looked like a sport. You taking the tour?"

"IT only stepped away for a second. Really, I'm going right

back "

"Finding it a little dull?" Oily Micro moves in on his mark. "Ever wonder to yourself: 'What really went on in here?'?"

The visitor who is willing to spend extravagant sums is rarely disappointed. Micro knows the secret doors to rock passages that lead through to Dora, the prison camp next to the Mittelwerke. Each member of the party is given his own electric lantern. There is hurried, basic instruction on what to do in case of any encounter with the dead. "Remember they were always on the defensive here. When the Americans liberated Dora, the prisoners who were still alive went on a rampage after the material—they looted, they ate and drank themselves sick. For others, Death came like the American Army, and liberated them spiritually. So they're apt to be on a spiritual rampage now.

Guard your thoughts. Use the natural balance of your mind against them. They'll be coming at you off-balance, remember."

A popular attraction is the elegant Raumwaffe spacesuit wardrobe, designed by famous military couturier Heini of Berlin. Not only are there turnouts dazzling enough to thrill even the juvenile leads of a space-operetta, down to the oddly-colored television images flickering across their toenails, but Heini has even thought of silks for the amusing little Space-Jockeys (Raum-Jockeier) with their electric whips, who will someday zoom about just outside the barrier-glow of the Raketen-Stadt, astride "horses" of polished meteorite all with the same stylized face (a high-contrast imago of the horse that follows you, emphasis on its demented eyes, its teeth, the darkness under its hindquarters . . .), with the propulsive gases blowing like farts out their tail ends—the juvenile leads giggle together at this naughty bathroom moment, and slowly, in what's hardly more than a sigh of gravity here, go bobbing, each radiant in a display of fluorescent plastics, back in to the Waltz, the strangely communal Waltz of the Future, a slightly, dis-quietingly grainy-dissonant chorale implied here in the whirling silence of faces, the bare shoulderblades slung so space-Viennese, so jaded with Tomorrow. ...

Then come—the Space Helmets! At first you may be alarmed, on noticing that they appear to be fashioned from skulls. At least the upper dome of this unpleasant headgear is certainly the skull of some manlike creature built to a larger scale. . . . Perhaps Titans lived under this mountain, and their skulls got harvested like giant mushrooms. . . . The eye-sockets are fitted with quartz lenses. Filters may be slipped in. Nasal bone and upper teeth have been replaced by a metal breathing apparatus, full of slots and grating. Corresponding to the jaw is a built-up section, almost a facial codpiece, of iron and ebonite, perhaps housing a radio unit, thrusting forward in black fatality. For an extra few marks you are allowed to slip one of these helmets on. Once inside these yellow caverns, looking out now through neutral-density orbits, the sound of your breath hissing up and around the bone spaces, what you thought was a balanced mind is little help. The compartment the Schwarzkommando were quartered in is no longer an amusing travelogue of native savages taking on ways of the 21st century. The milk calabashes appear only to be made from some plastic. On the spot where tradition sez Enzian had his Illumination, in the course of a wet dream where he coupled with a slender white rocket, there is the dark stain, miraculously still wet, and a smell you understand is meant to be that of semen—but it is really closer to

soap, or bleach. The wall-paintings lose their intended primitive crudeness and take on primitive spatiality, depth and brilliance—transform, indeed, to dioramas on the theme "The Promise of Space Travel." Lit sharply by carbide light which hisses and smells like the bad breath of someone quite familiar to you, the view commands your stare. After a few minutes it becomes possible to make out actual movement down there, even at the immense distances implied by the scale: yes, we're hanging now down the last limb of our trajectory in to the Raketen-Stadt, a difficult night of magnetic storm behind us, eddy currents still shimmering through all our steel like raindrops that cling to vehicle windows . . . yes, it is a City: vegetable "Ho-ly!"s and "Isn't that something! "s go away echoing as we crowd about the bloom of window in this salt underground. . . . Strangely, these are not the symmetries we were programmed to expect, not the fins, the streamlined corners, pylons, or simple solid geometries of the official vision at all—that's for the ribbon clerks back on the Tour, in the numbered Stollen. No, this Rocket-City, so whitely lit against the calm dimness of space, is set up deliberately To Avoid Symmetry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror (from the Preamble to the Articles of Immachina-tion)—but tourists have to connect the look of it back to things they remember from their times and planet—back to the wine bottle smashed in the basin, the bristlecone pines outracing Death for millennia, concrete roads abandoned years ago, hairdos of the late 1930s, indole molecules, especially polymerized indoles, as in Imipolex G—

Wait—which one of them was thinking that? Monitors, get a fix on it, hurry up—

But the target slips away. "They handle their own security down inside," the young rail is telling Slothrop, "we're here for Surface Guard only. Our responsibility ends at Stollen Number Zero, Power and Light. It's really a pretty soft racket for us." Life is good, and nobody's looking forward much to redeployment. There are fräuleins for screwing, cooking, and doing your laundry. He can put Slothrop on to champagne, furs, cameras, cigarettes. . . . Can't just be interested in rockets, can he, that's crazy. He's right.

One of the sweetest fruits of victory, after sleep and looting, must be the chance to ignore no-parking signs. There are struck Ps in circles up all over the place, nailed on trees, wired on girderwork, but the main tunnel entrances are pretty well blocked with vehicles by the time the dimpled Mercedes arrives. "Shit," hollers the young tanker, turns off his engine and leaves the German short at no particular angle

on the broad muddy apron. Leaving keys in the car too, Slothrop's learning to notice items like this. . . .

The entrance to the tunnel is shaped like a parabola. The Albert Speer Touch. Somebody during the thirties was big on parabolas anyhow, and Albert Speer was in charge of the New German Architecture then, and later he went on to become Minister of Munitions, and nominal chief customer for the A4. This parabola here happens to be the inspiration of a Speer disciple named Etzel Ölsch. He had noted this parabola shape around on Autobahn overpasses, sports stadiums u.s.w., and thought it was the most contemporary thing he'd ever seen. Imagine his astonishment on finding that the parabola was also the shape of the path intended for the rocket through space. (What he actually said was, "Oh, that's nice.") It was his mother who'd named him after Attila the Hun, and nobody ever found out why. His parabola has a high loft to it, and the railroad tracks run in underneath, steel into shadows. Battened cloth camouflage furls back at the edges. The mountain goes sloping away above, rock cropping out here and there among the bushes and the trees.

Slothrop presents his sooper dooper SHAEF pass, signed off by Ike and even more authentic, by the colonel heading up the American "Special Mission V-2" out of Paris. A Waxwing specialty of the house. B Company, 47th Armored Infantry, 5th Armored Division appears to be up to something besides security for this place. Slothrop is shrugged on through. There is a lot of moseying, drawling, and country humor around here. Somebody must've been picking his nose. A couple days later Slothrop will find a dried piece of snot on the card, a crystal brown visa for Nordhausen.

In past the white-topped guard towers. Transformers buzz through the spring morning. Someplace chains rattle and a tailgate drops. Between ruts, high places, ridges of mud are beginning to dry out in the sun, to lighten and crumble. Nearby the loud wake-up yawn and stretch of a train whistle cuts loose. In past a heap of bright metal spheres in daylight, with a comical sign PLEEZ NO SQUEEZ-A DA OXYGEN-A UNIT, EH? how long, how long you sfacim-a dis country. . . . In under parabola and parable, straight into the mountain, sunlight gone, into the cold, the dark, the long echoes of the Mittelwerke.

There is that not-so-rare personality disorder known as Tannhäuserism. Some of us love to be taken under mountains, and not always with horny expectations—Venus, Frau Holda, her sexual delights—no, many come, actually, for the gnomes, the critters smaller

than you, for the sepulchral way time stretches along your hooded strolls down here, quietly through courtyards that go for miles, with no anxiety about getting lost ... no one stares, no one is waiting to judge you . . . out of the public eye . . . even a Minnesinger needs to be alone . . . long cloudy-day indoor walks . . . the comfort of a closed place, where everyone is in complete agreement about Death.

Slothrop knows this place. Not so much from maps he had to study at the Casino as knowing it in the way you know someone is there. . . .

Plant generators are still supplying power. Rarely a bare bulb will hollow out a region of light. As darkness is mined and transported from place to place like marble, so the light bulb is the chisel that delivers it from its inertia, and has become one of the great secret ikons of the Humility, the multitudes who are passed over by God and History. When the Dora prisoners went on their rampage, the light bulbs in the rocket works were the first to go: before food, before the delights to be looted out of the medical lockers and the hospital pharmacy in Stollen Number 1, these breakable, socketless (in Germany the word for electric socket is also the word for Mother—so, motherless too) images were what the "liberated" had to take. . . .

The basic layout of the plant was another inspiration of Etzel Ölsch, a Nazi inspiration like the parabola, but again also a symbol belonging to the Rocket. Picture the letters SS each stretched lengthwise a bit. These are the two main tunnels, driven well over a mile into the mountain. Or picture a ladder with a slight S-shaped ripple in it, lying flat: 44 runglike Stollen or cross-tunnels, linking the two main ones. A couple hundred feet of rock mountain, at the deepest, press down overhead.

But the shape is more than an elongated SS. Apprentice Hupla comes running in one day to tell the architect. "Master!" he's yelling, "Master!" Olsch has taken up quarters in the Mittelwerke, insulated from the factory down a few private drifts that don't appear on any map of the place. He's getting into a grandiose idea of what an architect's life should be down here, insisting now on the title "Master" from all his helpers. That isn't his only eccentricity, either. Last three designs he proposed to the Führer all were visually in the groove, beautifully New German, except that none of the buildings will stay up. They look normal enough, but they are designed to fall down, like fat men at the opera falling asleep into someone's lap, shortly after the last rivet is driven, the last forms removed from the newly set allegorical statue. This is Olsch's "deathwish" problem here, as the little

helpers call it: it rates a lot of gossip in the commissary at meals, and beside the coffee urns out on the gloomy stone loading docks. . . . It's well after sunset now, each desk in this vaulted, almost outdoor bay has its own incandescent light on. The gnomes sit out here, at night, with only their bulbs shining conditionally, precariously ... it all might go dark so easily, in the next second. . . . Each gnome works in front of his drawing board. They're working late. There's a deadline— it's not clear if they're working overtime to meet it, or if they have already failed and are here as punishment. Back in his office, Etzel Ölsch can be heard singing. Tasteless, low beer-hall songs. Now he is lighting a cigar. Both he and the gnome Apprentice Hupla who's just run in know that this is an exploding cigar, put in his humidor as a revolutionary gesture by persons unknown but so without power that it doesn't matter—"Wait, Master, don't light it—Master, put it out, please, it's an exploding cigar!"