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"Come here." Glimpf has collided with some kind of miniature train, just visible now in outline—it was used once to show visitors

from Berlin around the factory. They climb aboard the tractor in front, and Glimpf fiddles with switches.

Well here we go, all aboard, lights must've been all that Marvy cut, sparks are crackling out behind and there's even a little wind now. Good to be rolling.

Ev'ry little Nazi's shootin' pool or playin' potsy

On the Mittel-werk Ex-press!

All the funny Fascists just a-twirlin' their mustaches

Where we goin'? Can't you guess?

Headin' for the country just down the tracks,

Never heard o' shortages or in-come-tax,

Gonna be good-times, for Minnie and-Max,

On the Mittel-werk Ex-press!

Glimpf has switched on a headlamp. From side-tunnels booming by, figures in khaki stare. Whites of eyes give back the light for an instant before flicking past. A few people wave. Shouts go dopplering Hey-eyyy-y-y-y like car horns at the crossings going home at night on the Boston and Maine. . . . The Express is rolling at a fair clip. Damp wind rushes by in a whistle. In the lamp's backscatter, silhouettes of warhead sections can be made out, stacked on the two little flatcars the engine's towing. Local midgetry scuttle and cringe alongside the tracks, nearly out of the light. They think of the little train as their own, and feel hurt whenever the big people come to commandeer it. Some sit on stacks of crates, dangling their legs. Some practice handstands in the dark. Their eyes glow green and red. Some even swing from ropes secured to the overhead, in mock Kamikaze attacks on Glimpf and Slothrop, screaming, "Banzai, banzai," before vanishing with a giggle. It's all in play. They're really quite an amiable—

Right behind, loud as megaphones, in massed chorale:

There once was a fellow named Slattery "Oh, shit," sez Slothrop.

Who was fond of the course-gyro battery.

With that 50-volt shock,

What was left of his cock

Was all slimy and sloppy and spattery.

Ja, ja, ja, ja, In Prussia they never eat pussy, u.s.w.

"Can you get back and uncouple those cars?" Glimpf wants to know. "Reckon so. ..." But he seems to fumble at it for hours. Meantime:

There was a young fellow named Pope,

Who plugged into an oscilloscope.

The cyclical trace

Of their carnal embrace

Had a damn nearly infinite slope.

"Engineers," Glimpf mutters. Slothrop gets the cars uncoupled and the engine speeds up. Wind is tearing at all Irish pennants, collar-points, cuffs, buckles, and belts. Back behind them there's a tremendous crash and clank, and a few shouts in the dark.

"Think that stopped 'em?"

Right up their ass, in four-part harmony:

There was a young fellow named Yuri,

Fucked the nozzle right up its venturi.

He had woes without cease

From his local police,

And a hell of a time with the jury.

"O.—K., Jocko babes! Got that old phosphorus flare?"

"Stand by, good buddy!"

With only that warning, in blinding concussion the Icy Noctiluca breaks, floods through the white tunnel. For a minute or two nobody in here can see. There is only the hurtling on, through amazing perfect whiteness. Whiteness without heat, and blind inertia: Slothrop feels a terrible familiarity here, a center he has been skirting, avoiding as long as he can remember—never has he been as close as now to the true momentum of his time: faces and facts that have crowded his indenture to the Rocket, camouflage and distraction fall away for the white moment, the vain and blind tugging at his sleeves it's important . . . please . . . look at us . . . but it's already too late, it's only wind, only g-loads, and the blood of his eyes has begun to touch the whiteness back to ivory, to brushings of gold and a network of edges to the broken rock . . . and the hand that lifted him away sets him back in the Mittelwerke—

"Whoo-wee! There's 'at 'sucker now!"

Out of the flare, inside easy pistol range, emerges a lumbering diesel engine, pushing ahead of it the two cars Slothrop uncoupled, itself stuffed with bloodshot, disheveled, bloated Americans, and at an

apex, perched lopsided on their shoulders, Major Marvy himself, wearing a giant white Stetson, and clutching two .45 automatics.

Slothrop ducks down behind a cylindrical object at the rear of the tractor. Marvy starts shooting, wildly, inspired by hideous laughter from the others. Slothrop happens to notice now that what he's chosen to hide behind, actually, seems to be another warhead. If the Amatol charges are still in—say, Professor, could the shock wave from a .45 bullet at this range succeed in detonating this warhead here if it struck the casing? e-even if there was no fuze installed? Well, Tyrone, now that would depend on many things: muzzle velocity, wall thickness and composition—

Counting at least on a pulled arm muscle and hernia, Slothrop manages to tip and heave the warhead off onto the track while Marvy's bullets go whanging and crashing all over the tunnel. It bounces and comes to rest tilted against one of the rails. Good.

The flare has begun to die. Shadows are reoccupying the mouths of the Stollen. The cars ahead of Marvy hit the obstacle a solid WHONK! doubling up in an inverted V—diesel brakes screech in panic yi-i-i-i-ke as the big engine derails, slews, begins to tip, Americans grabbing frantically for handholds, each other, empty air. Then Slothrop and Glimpf are around the last curve of the integral sign, and there is another huge crash behind them, screaming that prolongs, echoing, as they see now the entrance ahead, growing parabola of green mountainslopes, and sunlight. . . .

"Did you have a car when you came?" inquires the twinkling Glimpf.

"What?" Slothrop recalls the keys still in that Mercedes. "Oh "

Glimpf eases on the brakes as they coast out under the parabola into daylight, and roll to a smooth and respectable stop. They flip salutes at the B Company sentries and proceed to hijack the Mercedes, which is right where that rail left it.

Out on the road, Glimpf gestures them north, watching Slothrop's driving with a leery eye. They wind snarling up into the Harz, in and out of mountain shadows, pine and fir odors enveloping them, screeching around curves and sometimes nearly off of the road. Slothrop has the inborn gift of selecting the wrong gear for all occasions, and anyhow he's jittery, eye in the mirror and out the back of his head aswarm with souped-up personnel carriers and squadrons of howling Thunderbolts. Coming around a blind corner, using the whole width of the pavement to make it—a sharp road-racing trick he happens to know—they nearly buy it from a descending American

Army deuce-and-a-half, the words fucking idiot clearly visible on the mouth of the driver as they barely scoot past, heartbeats slamming low in their throats, mud from the truck's rear tires slapping over them in a great wing that shakes the rig and blots out half the windshield.

The sun is well past its zenith when they pull up, finally, below a forested dome with a small dilapidated castle on top, hundreds of doves, white teardrops, dripping from its battlements. The green breath of the woods has sharpened, grown colder.

They climb a switchbacking path strewn with rocks, among dark firs toward the castle in the sunlight, jagged and brown above as a chunk of bread left out for all its generations of birds.

"This is where you're staying?"

"I used to work here. I think Zwitter might still be around." There wasn't enough room in the Mittelwerke for many of the smaller assembly jobs. Control systems mainly. So they were put together in beerhalls, shops, schools, castles, farmhouses all around Nordhausen here, any indoor lab space the guidance people could find. Glimpf's colleague Zwitter is from the T.H. in Munich. "The usual Bavarian approach to electronics." Glimpf begins to frown. "He's bearable, I suppose." Whatever mysterious injustices spring from a Bavarian approach to electronics now remove Glimpf's twinkle, and keep him occupied in surly introspection the rest of the way up.

Mass liquid cooing, damped in white fluff, greets them as they slip in a side entrance to the castle. Floors are dirty and littered with bottles and scraps of papers. Some of the papers are stamped with the magenta GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE. Birds fly in and out of broken windows. Thin beams of light come in from chinks and erosions. Dust motes, fanned by the doves' wings, never stop billowing here. Walls are hung with dim portraits of nobles in big white Frederick the Great hairdos, ladies with smooth faces and oval eyes in low-necked dresses whose yards of silk spill out into the dust and wingbeats of the dark rooms. There is dove shit all over the place.

By contrast, Zwitter's laboratory upstairs is brightly lit, well-ordered, crammed with blown glass, work tables, lights of many colors, speckled boxes, green folders—a mad Nazi scientist lab! Plas-ticman, where are you?

There's only Zwitter: stocky, dark hair parted down the middle, eyeglass lenses thick as the windows of a bathysphere, the fluorescent hydras, eels, and rays of control equations swimming seas behind them. . . .

But when they see Slothrop, there is immediate clearing there, and glazed barriers come down. Hmm, T.S., what's this? Who are these people? What's happened to the apples in old Glimpf's cheeks? What's a Nazi guidance expert doing this side of the fence at Garmisch, with his lab intact?

OH . . . thur's . . .

Nazis in the woodwork,

Fascists in the walls,

Little Japs with bucktooth grins

A-gonna grab yew bah th' balls.

Whin this war is over,

How happy Ah will be,

Gearin' up fer thim Rooskies

And Go-round Number Three. ...

D D D D D D D

In the days when the white engineers were disputing the attributes of the feeder system that was to be, one of them came to Enzian of Bleicheröde and said, "We cannot agree on the chamber pressure. Our calculations show that a working pressure of 40 atü would be the most desirable. But all the data we know of are grouped around a value of only some 10 atü."

"Then clearly," replied the Nguarorerue, "you must listen to the data."

"But that would not be the most perfect or efficient value," protested the German.

"Proud man," said the Nguarorerue. "What are these data, if not direct revelation? Where have they come from, if not from the Rocket which is to be? How do you presume to compare a number you have only derived on paper with a number that is the Rocket's own? Avoid pride, and design to some compromise value."

—from Tales of the Schwarzkommando, collected by Steve Edelman

In the mountains around Nordhausen and Bleicheröde, down in abandoned mine shafts, live the Schwarzkommando. These days it's no longer a military tide: they are a people now, Zone-Hereros, in exile for two generations from South-West Africa. Early Rhenish missionaries began to bring them back to the Metropolis, that great dull zoo, as specimens of a possibly doomed race. They were gently experi-

merited with: exposed to cathedrals, Wagnerian soirees, Jaeger underwear, trying to get them interested in their souls. Others were taken back to Germany as servants, by soldiers who went to put down the great Herero rising of 1904-1906. But only after 1933 did most of the present-day leadership arrive, as part of a scheme—never openly admitted by the Nazi party—for setting up black juntas, shadow-states for the eventual takeover of British and French colonies in black Africa, on the model of Germany's plan for the Maghreb. Südwest by then was a protectorate administered by the Union of South Africa, but the real power was still with the old German colonial families, and they cooperated.

There are several underground communities now near Nord-hausen/Bleicheröde. Around here they are known collectively as the Erdschweinhöhle. This is a Herero joke, a bitter one. Among the Ovatjimba, the poorest of the Hereros, with no cattle or villages of their own, the totem animal was the Erdschwein or aardvark. They took their name from him, never ate his flesh, dug their food from the earth, just as he does. Considered outcasts, they lived on the veld, in the open. You were likely to come across them at night, their fires flaring bravely against the wind, out of rifle range from the iron tracks: there seemed no other force than that to give them locus out in that emptiness. You knew what they feared—not what they wanted, or what moved them. And you had business upcountry, at the mines: so, presently, as the sputtering lights slipped behind, so did all further need to think of them. . . .

But as you swung away, who was the woman alone in the earth, planted up to her shoulders in the aardvark hole, a gazing head rooted to the desert plane, with an upsweep of mountains far behind her, darkly folded, far away in the evening? She can feel the incredible pressure, miles of horizontal sand and clay, against her belly. Down the trail wait the luminous ghosts of her four stillborn children, fat worms lying with no chances of comfort among the wild onions, one by one, crying for milk more sacred than what is tasted and blessed in the village calabashes. In preterite line they have pointed her here, to be in touch with Earth's gift for genesis. The woman feels power flood in through every gate: a river between her thighs, light leaping at the ends of fingers and toes. It is sure and nourishing as sleep. It is a warmth. The more the daylight fades, the further she submits—to the dark, to the descent of water from the air. She is a seed in the Earth. The holy aardvark has dug her bed.

Back in Südwest, the Erdschweinhöhle was a powerful symbol

of fertility and life. But here in the Zone, its real status is not so clear.

Inside the Schwarzkommando there are forces, at present, who have opted for sterility and death. The struggle is mostly in silence, in the night, in the nauseas and crampings of pregnancies or miscarriages. But it is political struggle. No one is more troubled with it than Enzian. He is Nguarorerue here. The word doesn't mean "leader" exactly, but "one who has been proven."

Enzian is also known, though not to his face, as Otyikondo, the Halfbreed. His father was a European. Not that it makes him unique among the Erdschweinhöhlers here: there's German, Slavic and Gypsy blood mixed in by now too. Over the couple of generations, moved by accelerations unknown in the days before the Empire, they have been growing an identity that few can see as ever taking final shape. The Rocket will have a final shape, but not its people. Eanda and oruzo have lost their force out here—the bloodlines of mother and father were left behind, in Südwest. Many of the early emigrants had even gone over to the faith of the Rhenish Missionary Society long before they left. In each village, as noon flared the shadows in tightly to their owners, in that moment of terror and refuge, the omuhona took from his sacred bag, soul after converted soul, the leather cord kept there since the individual's birth, and untied the birth-knot. Untied, it was another soul dead to the tribe. So today, in the Erdschweinhöhle, the Empty Ones each carry one knotless strip of leather: it is a bit of the old symbolism they have found useful.

They call themselves Otukungurua. Yes, old Africa hands, it ought to be "Omakungurua," but they are always careful—perhaps it's less healthy than care—to point out that oma- applies only to the living and human. Otu- is for the inanimate and the rising, and this is how they imagine themselves. Revolutionaries of the Zero, they mean to carry on what began among the old Hereros after the 1904 rebellion failed. They want a negative birth rate. The program is racial suicide. They would finish the extermination the Germans began in 1904.

A generation earlier, the declining number of live Herero births was a topic of medical interest throughout southern Africa. The whites looked on as anxiously as they would have at an outbreak of rinderpest among the cattle. How provoking, to watch one's subject population dwindling like this, year after year. What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's the fun if they're all going to die off?

Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers

for the construction or the mining—wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together

and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. . . . Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets. . . .

Some of the more rational men of medicine attributed the Herero birth decline to a deficiency of Vitamin E in the diet—others to poor chances of fertilization given the peculiarly long and narrow uterus of the Herero female. But underneath all this reasonable talk, this scientific speculating, no white Afrikaner could quite put down the way it felt. . . . Something sinister was moving out in the veld: he was beginning to look at their faces, especially those of the women, lined beyond the thorn fences, and he knew beyond logical proof: there was a tribal mind at work out here, and it had chosen to commit suicide. . . . Puzzling. Perhaps we weren't as fair as we might have been, perhaps we did take their cattle and their lands away . . . and then the work-camps of course, the barbed wire and the stockades. . . . Perhaps they feel it is a world they no longer want to live in. Typical of them, though, giving up, crawling away to die . . . why won't they even negotiate? We could work out a solution, some solution. . . .

It was a simple choice for the Hereros, between two kinds of death: tribal death, or Christian death. Tribal death made sense. Christian death made none at all. It seemed an exercise they did not need. But to the Europeans, conned by their own Baby Jesus Con Game, what they were witnessing among these Hereros was a mystery potent as that of the elephant graveyard, or the lemmings rushing into the sea.

Though they don't admit it, the Empty Ones now exiled in the Zone, Europeanized in language and thought, split off from the old tribal unity, have found the why of it just as mysterious. But they've

seized it, as a sick woman will seize a charm. They calculate no cycles, no returns, they are in love with the glamour of a whole people's suicide—the pose, the stoicism, and the bravery. These Otukungurua are prophets of masturbating, specialists in abortion and sterilization, pitchmen for acts oral and anal, pedal and digital, sodomistical and zoophiliac—their approach and their game is pleasure: they are spieling earnestly and well, and Erdschweinhöhlers are listening.

The Empty Ones can guarantee a day when the last Zone-Herero will die, a final zero to a collective history fully lived. It has appeal.

There is no outright struggle for power. It is all seduction and counterseductíon, advertising and pornography, and the history of the Zone-Hereros is being decided in bed.

Vectors in the night underground, all trying to flee a center, a force, which appears to be the Rocket: some immachination, whether of journey or of destiny, which is able to gather violent political oppo-sites together in the Erdschweinhöhle as it gathers fuel and oxidizer in its thrust chamber: metered, helmsmanlike, for the sake of its scheduled parabola.

Enzian sits this evening under his mountain, behind him another day of schemes, expediting, newly invented paperwork—forms he manages to destroy or fold, Japanese style, before the day's end, into gazelles, orchids, hunter-hawks. As the Rocket grows toward its working shape and fullness, so does he evolve, himself, into a new configuration. He feels it. It's something else to worry about. Late last night, among the blueprints, Christian and Mieczislav looked up, abruptly smiled, and fell silent. A transparent reverence. They study the drawings as if they were his own, and revelations. This is not flattering to him.

What Enzian wants to create will have no history. It will never need a design change. Time, as time is known to the other nations, will wither away inside this new one. The Erdschweinhöhle will not be bound, like the Rocket, to time. The people will find the Center again, the Center without time, the journey without hysteresis, where every departure is a return to the same place, the only place. . . .

He has thus himself found a strange rapprochement with the Empty Ones: in particular with Josef Ombindi of Hannover. The Eternal Center can easily be seen as the Final Zero. Names and methods vary, but the movement toward stillness is the same. It has led to

strange passages between the two men. "You know," Ombindi's eyes

rolled the other way, looking up at a mirror-image of Enzian that only

he can see, "there's . . . well, something you ordinarily wouldn't think of as erotic—but it's really the most erode thing there is."

"Really," grins Enzian, flirting. "I can't think of what that would be. Give me a clue."

"It's a non-repeatable act."

"Firing a rocket?"

"No, because there's always another rocket. But there's nothing— well, never mind."

"Ha! Nothing to follow it with, that's what you were going to say."

"Suppose I give you another clue."

"All right." But Enzian has already guessed: it's there in the way he holds his jaw and is just about to laugh. . . .

"It embraces all the Deviations in one single act." Enzian sighs, irritated, but does not call him on this use of "Deviations." Bringing up the past is part of Ombindi's game. "Homosexuality, for example." No rise. "Sadism and masochism. Onanism? Necrophilia. . . ."

"All those in the same act?"

All those, and more. Both know by now that what's under discussion is the act of suicide, which also includes bestiality ("Think how sweet," runs the pitch, "to show mercy, sexual mercy to that hurt and crying animal"), pedophilia ("It is widely reported that just at the edge you grow glaringly younger"), lesbianism ("Yes, for as the wind blows through all the emptying compartments the two shadow-women at last can creep out of their chambers in the dying shell, at the last ashen shoreline, to meet and embrace . . ."), coprophilia and urolagnia ("The final convulsions . . ."), fetishism ("A wide choice of death-fetishes, naturally . . ."). Naturally. The two of them sit there, passing a cigarette back and forth, till it's smoked down to a very small stub. Is it idle talk, or is Ombindi really trying to hustle Enzian here? Enzian's got to be sure before he moves. If he comes out sez, "This is a hustle, right?" and turns out it isn't, well— But the alternative is so strange, that Enzian is, in some way, being

sold on suicide

Well I don't care-for, th' things I eat, Can't stand that boogie-woogie beat— But I'm sold, on, suicide!