GRAVITY RAINBOW (58 page)

When he brought it up later, she wasn't sure just what this is between Tchitcherine and the Africans, but whatever it is it's being carried on with high passion.

"It's hate, all right," she said. "Stupid, stupid. The war's over. It isn't politics or fuck-your-buddy, it's old-time, pure, personal hate."

"Enzian?"

"I think so."

They found the Brocken occupied both by American and by Russian troops. The mountain lay on what was to be the border of the Soviet zone of occupation. The brick and stucco ruins of the radio transmitter and a tourist hotel loomed up just outside the firelight. Only a couple of platoons here. Nobody higher than noncoms. The officers were all down in Bad Harzburg, Halberstadt, someplace comfortable, getting drunk or laid. There is a certain air of resentment up on the Brocken all right, but the boys like Geli and tolerate Slothrop, and luckiest of all, nobody seems to be connected with that Ordnance.

It's only a moment's safety, though. Major Marvy is gnashing about the Harz, sending thousands of canaries into cardiac episodes, dropping in yellow droves belly-up out of the trees as he marauds on by hollering
Git
that limey 'sucker I don't care how many men it takes I want a fucking
division
you hear me boy? Only a matter of time before he picks up the trail again. He's out of his mind. Slothrop's a little daffy, but not like this-this is really unhealthy, this Marvy persecution. Is it possible… yup, the thought has certainly occurred to him-that Marvy's in tight with those Rolls Roycers who were after him in Zurich? There may be no limit to their connections. Marvy is buddies with GE, that's Morgan money, there's Morgan money in

Harvard, and surely an interlock someplace with Lyle Bland… who
are
they, hey? why do they want Slothrop? He knows now for sure that Zwitter the mad Nazi scientist is one of them. And that kindly old Professor Glimpf was only waiting down in the Mittelwerke to pick up Slothrop if he showed. Jesus. If Slothrop hadn't snuck out after dark back down into Nordhausen to Geli's place, they'd have him locked up by now for sure, maybe beaten up, maybe dead.

Before they head back down the mountain, they manage to chisel six cigarettes and some K-rations off of the sentries. Geli knows a friend of a friend who stays out on a farm in the Goldene Aue, a ballooning enthusiast named Schnorp, who is heading toward Berlin.

"But I don't want to go to Berlin."

"You want to go where Marvy isn't, Liebchen."

Schnorp is beaming, eager enough for company, just back from a local PX with an armload of flat white boxes: merchandise he plans to move in Berlin. "No trouble," he tells Slothrop, "don't worry. I've done this trip hundreds of times. Nobody bothers a balloon."

He takes Slothrop out in back of the house, and here in the middle of a sloping green field is a wicker gondola beside a great heap of bright yellow and scarlet silk.

"Real unobtrusive getaway," Slothrop mutters. A gang of kids have appeared running out of an apple orchard to help them carry tin jerricans of grain alcohol out to the gondola. All shadows are being thrown uphill by the afternoon sun. Wind blows from the west. Slothrop gives Schnorp a light from his Zippo to get the burner going while kids straighten out the folds in the gasbag. Schnorp turns up the flame till it's shooting sideways and with a steady roar into the opening of the great silk bag. Children visible through the gap break up into wiggly heat waves. Slowly the balloon begins to expand. "Remember me," Geli calls above the rumbling of the burner. "Till I see you again…" Slothrop climbs in the gondola with Schnorp. The balloon rises a little off the ground and is caught by the wind. They start to move. Geli and the kids have taken hold of the gondola all around its gunwales, the bag still not all the way up but gathering speed, dragging them all as fast as their feet can move, giggling and cheering, uphill. Slothrop keeps as much out of the way as he can, letting Schnorp see that the flame's pointed into the bag and that lines to the basket are clear. At last the bag swings vertical, across the sun, the inside of it going a ri-

otous wreathing of yellow and scarlet heat. One by one the ground

crew fall away, waving good-by. The last to go is Geli in her white dress, hair brushed back over her ears into pigtails, her soft chin and

mouth and big serious eyes looking into Slothrop's for as long as she can before she has to let go. She kneels in the grass, blows a kiss. Slothrop feels his heart, out of control, inflate with love and rise quick as a balloon. It is taking him longer, the longer he's in the Zone, to remember to say
env quit being a sap.
What is this place doing to his brain?

They soar up over a stand of firs. Geli and the children go dwindling to shadow-strokes on the green lawn. The hills fall away, flatten out. Soon, looking back, Slothrop can see Nordhausen: Cathedral, Rathaus, Church of St. Blasius… the roofless quarter where he found Geli…

Schnorp nudges and points. After a while Slothrop makes out a convoy of four olive-drab vehicles dusting along toward the farm in a hurry. Marvy's Mothers, by the looks of things. And Slothrop hanging from this gaudy beach ball. Well, all right-

"I'm bad luck," Slothrop hollers over a little later. They've found a steady course now northeastward, and are huddling close to the alcohol flame, collars turned up, with a gradient of must be 50° between the wind at their backs and the warmth in front. "I should've mentioned that. You don't even know me, and here we're flying into that Russian zone."

Schnorp, his hair blown like holidays of hay, does a wistful German thing with his upper lip: "There are no zones," he sez, which is also a line of Geli's. "No zones but the Zone."

Before too long Slothrop has begun checking out these boxes here that Schnorp brought along. There are a dozen of them, and each contains a deep, golden custard pie, which will fetch a fantastic price in Berlin. "Wow," cries Slothrop, "holy shit. Surely I hallucinate," and other such eager junior sidekick talk.

"You ought to have a PX card." A sales pitch.

"Right now I can't afford a ration stamp for an ant's jockstrap," replies Slothrop, forthrightly.

"Well, I'll split this one pie here with you," Schnorp reckons after a time, "because I'm getting kind of hungry."

"Oboy, oboy."

Well, Slothrop is just chowing on that pie! enjoying himself, licking custard off of his hands, when he happens to notice off in the sky, back toward Nordhausen, this funny dark object, the size of a dot. "Uh-"

Schnorp looks around, "Kot!" comes up with a brass telescope and braces it blazing on the gunwale. "Kot, Kot-no markings."

"I wonder.

Out of air so blue you can take it between your fingers, rub, and bring them back blue, they watch the dot slowly grow into a rusty old reconnaissance plane. Presently they can hear its engine, snarling and sputtering. Then, as they watch, it banks and starts a pass.

Along the wind between them, faintly, comes the singing of Furies:

There was a young man named McGuire, Who was fond of the pitch amplifier. But a number of shorts Left him covered with warts, And set half the bedroom on fire.

Ja, ja, ja, ja! In Prussia they never eat pussy-

The plane buzzes by a yard or two away, showing its underbelly. It is a monster, about to give birth. Out of a little access opening peers a red face in leather helmet and goggles. "You limey 'sucker," going past, "we fixin' to hand your
ass
to
you.
"

Without planning to, Slothrop has picked up a pie. "Fuck you." He flings it, perfect shot, the plane peeling slowly past and
blop
gets Marvy right in the face. Yeah. Gloved hands paw at the mess. The Major's pink tongue appears. Custard drips into the wind, yellow droplets fall in long arcs toward earth. The hatch closes as the recon plane slides away, slow-rolls, circles and heads back. Schnorp and Slothrop heft pies and wait.

"There's no cowling around that engine," Schnorp has noticed, "so we'll aim for that." Now they can see the dorsal side of the plane, its cockpit jammed to capacity with beer-sodden Americans, singing:

There once was a fellow named Ritter,

Who slept with a guidance transmitter.

It shriveled his cock,

Which fell off in his sock,

And made him exceedingly bitter.

A hundred yards and closing fast. Schnorp grabs Slothrop's arm and points off to starboard. Providence has contrived to put in their way a big white slope of cloud, and the wind is bringing them swiftly into it; the seething critter puts out white tentacles, beckoning hurry… hurry… and they are inside then, inside its wet and icy reprieve…

"Now they'll wait."

"No," Schnorp cupping an ear, "they've cut the motor. They're in here with us." The swaddled silence goes on for a minute or two, but sure enough:

There once was a fellow named Schroeder, Who buggered the vane servomotor. He soon grew a prong On the end of his schlong,

And hired himself a promoter.

Schnorp is fiddling with the flame, a rose-gray nimbus, trying for less visibility, but not too much loss of altitude. They float in their own wan sphere of light, without coordinates. Outcrops of granite smash blindly upward like fists into the cloud, trying to find the balloon. The plane is somewhere, with its own course and speed. There is no action the balloon can take. Binary decisions have lost meaning in here. The cloud presses in, suffocating. It condenses in fat drops on top of the pies. Suddenly, raucous and hungover:

There was a young man from Decatur,

Who slept with a LOX generator.

His balls and his prick

Froze solid real quick,

And his asshole a little bit later.

Curtains of vapor drift back to reveal the Americans, volplaning along well inside ten meters and only a little faster than the balloon.

"Now!" Schnorp yells, heaving a pie at the exposed engine. Slothrop's misses and splatters all over the windscreen in front of the pilot. By which time Schnorp has commenced flinging ballast bags at the engine, leaving one stuck between two of the cylinders. The Americans, taken by surprise, reach in confusion for sidearms, grenades, machine guns, whatever it is your Ordnance types carry around in the way of light armament. But they have glided on past, and now the fog closes in again. There are a few shots.

"Shit, man, if they hit that bag-"

"Shh. I think we got the wire from the booster magneto." Off in the middle of the cloud can be heard the nagging whicker of an engine refusing to start. Linkage squeaks desperately.

"Oh, fuck!" A muffled scream, far away. The intermittent whining grows fainter until there is silence. Schnorp is lying on his back, slurp-

ing pie, laughing bitterly. Half of his inventory's been thrown away, and Slothrop feels a little guilty.

"No, no. Stop worrying. This is like the very earliest days of the mercantile system. We're back to that again. A second chance. Passages are long and hazardous. Loss in transit is a part of life. You have had a glimpse of the Ur-Markt."

When the clouds fall away a few minutes later, they find themselves floating quietly under the sun, shrouds dripping, gasbag still shiny with the moist cloud. No sign at all of Marvy's plane. Schnorp adjusts the flame. They begin to rise.

Toward sundown, Schnorp gets thoughtful. "Look. You can see the edge of it. At this latitude the earth's shadow races across Germany at 650 miles an hour, the speed of a jet aircraft." The cloud-sheet has broken up into little fog-banklets the color of boiled shrimp. The balloon goes drifting, over countryside whose green patchwork the twilight is now urging toward black: the thread of a little river flaming in the late sun, the intricate-angled pattern of another roofless town.

The sunset is red and yellow, like the balloon. On the horizon the mild sphere goes warping down, a peach on a china plate. "The farther south you go," Schnorp continues, "the faster the shadow sweeps, till you reach the equator: a thousand miles an hour. Fantastic. It breaks through the speed of sound somewhere over southern France- around the latitude of Carcassonne."

The wind is bundling them on, north by east. "Southern France," Slothrop remembers then. "Yeah. That's where / broke through the speed of sound…"

The Zone is in full summer: souls are found quiescent behind the pieces of wall, fast asleep down curled in shell-craters, out screwing under the culverts with gray shirttails hoisted, adrift dreaming in the middles of fields. Dreaming of food, oblivion, alternate histories…

The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise. Cows-big lummoxes splotched black and white, harnessed now for the plowing because German horses in the Zone are all but extinct-will drudge with straight faces right on into minefields, sown back in the winter.

The godawful blasts go drumming over the farmland, horns, hide and hamburger come showering down all over the place, and the dented bells lie quiet in the clover. Horses might have known to keep clear- but the Germans wasted their horses, squandered the race, herding them into the worst of it, the swarms of steel, the rheumatic marshes, the unblanketed winter chills of our late Fronts. A few might have found safety with the Russians, who still care for horses. You hear them often in the evenings. Their campfires send up rays for miles from behind the stands of beech, through northern-summer haze that's almost dry, only enough of it to give a knife's edge to the firelight, a dozen accordions and concertinas all going at once in shaggy chords with a reed-ringing to it, and the songs full of plaintive
stvyehs
and
znyis
with voices of the girl auxiliaries clearest of all. The horses whicker and move in the rustling grass. The men and women are kind, resourceful, fanatical-they are the most joyous of the Zone's survivors.