Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Pssst?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Well now you’ve got me curious.”

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

  “I-I 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, disquietingly 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 Immachination)—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 comic
al 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!” Ölsch 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 Ölsch’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!”

  “Proceed, Hupla, with the intelligence that prompted your rather rude entrance.”

  “But—”

  “Hupla . . .” Puffing masterful clouds of cigar smoke.

  “It-it’s about the shape of the tunnels here, Master.”

  “Don’t flinch like that. I based that design on the double lightning-stroke, Hupla—the SS emblem.”

  “But it’s also a double integral sign! Did you know that?”

  “Ah. Yes: Summe, Summe, as Leibniz said. Well, isn’t that—”

  BLAM.

  All right. But Etzel Ölsch’s genius was to be fatally receptive to imagery associated with the Rocket. In the static space of the architect, he might’ve used a double integral now and then, early in his career, to find volumes under surfaces whose equations were known—masses, moments, centers of gravity. But it’s been years since he’s had to do with anything that basic. Most of his calculating these days is with marks and pfennigs, not functions of idealistic r and θ, naïve x and y. . . . But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled. . . . “Meters per second” will integrate to “meters.” The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall.

  In the guidance, this is what happened: a little pendulum was kept centered by a magnetic field. During launch, pulling gs, the pendulum would swing aft, off center. It had a coil attached to it. When the coil moved through the magnetic field, electric current flowed in the coil. As the pendulum was pushed off center by the acceleration of launch, current would flow—the more acceleration, the more flow. So the Rocket, on its own side of the flight, sensed acceleration first. Men, tracking it, sensed position or distance first. To get to distance from acceleration, the Rocket had to integrate twice—needed a moving coil, transformers, electrolytic cell, bridge of diodes, one tetrode (an extra grid to screen away capacitive coupling inside the tube), an elaborate dance of design precautions to get to what human eyes saw first of all—the distance along the flight path.

  There was that backward symmetry again, one that Pointsman missed, but Katje didn’t. “A life of its own,” she said. Slothrop remembers her reluctant smile, the Mediterranean afternoon, the peeling twist of a eucalyptus trunk, the same pink, in that weakening light, as the American officer’s trousers Slothrop wore once upon a time, and the acid, the pungent smell of the leaves. . . . The current, flowing in the coil, passed a Wheatstone bridge and charged up a capacitor. The charge was the time integral of the current flowing in the coil and bridge. Advanced versions of this so-called “IG” guidance integrated twice, so that the charge gathering on one side of the capacitor grew directly as the distance the Rocket had traveled. Before launch, the other side of the cell had been charged up to a level representing the distance to a particular point out in space. Brennschluss exactly here would make the Rocket go on to hit 1000 yards east of Waterloo Station. At the instant the charge (BiL) accumulating in flight equaled the preset charge (AiL) on the other side, the capacitor discharged. A switch closed, fuel cut off, burning ended. The Rocket was on its own.

  That is one meaning of the shape of the tunnels down here in the Mittelwerke. Another may be the ancient rune that stands for the yew tree, or Death. The double integral stood in Etzel Ölsch’s subconscious for the method of finding hidden centers, inertias unknown, as if monoliths had been left for him in the twilight, left behind by some corrupted idea of “Civilization,” in which eagles cast in concrete stand ten meters high at the corners of the stadiums where the people, a corrupted idea of “the People” are gathering, in which birds do not fly, in which imaginary centers far down inside the solid fatality of stone are thought of not as “heart,” “plexus,” “consciousness,” (the voice speaking here grows more ironic, closer to tears which are not all theatre, as the list goes on . . .) “Sanctuary,” “dream of motion,” “cyst of the eternal present,” or “Gravi
ty’s gray eminence among the councils of the living stone.” No, as none of these, but instead a point in space, a point hung precise as the point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall. And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point? Don’t jump at an infinite number of possible shapes. There’s only one. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another. There’s a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it . . . but they lie so close to Earth that from many places they can’t be seen at all, and from different places inside the zone where they can be seen, they fall into completely different patterns. . . .

  Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep, which is where Slothrop wishes he were now—all the way back with Katje, even lost as he might feel again, even more vulnerable than now—even (because he still honestly misses her), preserved by accident, in ways he can’t help seeing, accident whose own much colder honesty each lover has only the other to protect him from. . . . Could he live like that? Would They ever agree to let him and Katje live like that? He’s had nothing to say to anyone about her. It’s not the gentlemanly reflex that made him edit, switch names, insert fantasies into the yarns he spun for Tantivy back in the ACHTUNG office, so much as the primitive fear of having a soul captured by a likeness of image or by a name. . . . He wants to preserve what he can of her from Their several entropies, from Their softsoaping and Their money: maybe he thinks that if he can do it for her he can also do it for himself . . . although that’s awful close to nobility for Slothrop and The Penis He Thought Was His Own.