In the sheet-metal ducting that snakes like a spine along the overhead, plant ventilation moans. Now and then it sounds like voices. Traffic from somewhere remote. It’s not as if they were discussing Slothrop directly, understand. But he wishes he could hear it better. . . .
Lakes of light, portages of darkness. The concrete facing of the tunnel has given way to whitewash over chunky fault-surfaces, phony-looking as the inside of an amusement-park cave. Entrances to cross-tunnels slip by like tuned pipes with an airflow at their mouths . . . once upon a time lathes did screech, playful machinists had shootouts with little brass squirt cans of cutting oil . . . knuckles were bloodied against grinding wheels, pores, creases and quicks were stabbed by the fine splinters of steel . . . tubeworks of alloy and glass contracted tinkling in air that felt like the dead of winter, and amber light raced in phalanx among the small neon bulbs. Once, all this did happen. It is hard down here in the Mittelwerke to live in the present for very long. The nostalgia you feel is not your own, but it’s potent. All the objects have grown still, drowned, enfeebled with evening, terminal evening. Tough skins of oxides, some only a molecule thick, shroud the metal surfaces, fade out human reflection. Straw-colored drive belts of polyvinyl alcohol sag and release their last traces of industrial odor. Though found adrift and haunted, full of signs of recent human tenancy, this is not the legendary ship Marie-Celeste—it isn’t bounded so neatly, these tracks underfoot run away fore and aft into all stilled Europe, and our flesh doesn’t sweat and pimple here for the domestic mysteries, the attic horror of What Might Have Happened so much as for our knowledge of what likely did happen . . . it was always easy, in open and lonely places, to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are the urban fantods here, that come to get you when you are lost or isolate inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no time-traveling capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and the absence that fill a great railway shed after the capital has been evacuated, and the goat-god’s city cousins wait for you at the edges of the light, playing the tunes they always played, but more audible now, because everything else has gone away or fallen silent . . . barn-swallow souls, fashioned of brown twilight, rise toward the white ceilings . . . they are unique to the Zone, they answer to the new Uncertainty. Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. The status of the name you miss, love, and search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence—some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty. . . .
Post-A4 humanity is moving, hammering, and shouting among the tunnels. Slothrop will catch sight of badged civilians in khaki, helmet liners with GE stenciled on, sometimes getting a nod, eyeglasses flashing under a distant light bulb, most often ignored. Military working parties go at route-step bitching in and out, carrying crates. Slothrop is hungry and Yellow James is nowhere in sight. But there is nobody down here even going to say howdy to, much less feed, the free lance Ian Scuffling. No, wait, by golly here comes a delegation of girls in tight pink lab coats reaching just to the tops of bare thighs, tripping up the tunnel on stylish gold wedgies “Ah, so reizend ist!” too many to hug at once, “Hübsch, was?” now now ladies one at a time, they are giggling and reaching to drape around his neck lush garlands of silvery B nuts and flange fittings, scarlet resistors and bright-yellow capacitors strung like little sausages, scraps of gasketry, miles of aluminum shavings as curly-bouncy ’n’ bright as Shirley Temple’s head—hey Hogan ya can keep yer hula girls—and where are they taking him here? into an empty Stollen, where they all commence a fabulous orgy, which goes on for days and days, full of poppies, play, singing, and carrying on.
Moving into Stollen 20 and up, traffic grows heavier. This was the A4 part of the factory, which the Rocket shared with V-1 and turboprop assemblies. Out of these Stollen, the 20s, 30s, and 40s, Rocket components were fed out crosswise into the two main assembly lines. As you walk deeper, you retrace the Rocket’s becoming: superchargers, center sections, nose assemblies, power units, controls, tail sections . . . lotta these tail sections still around here, stacked alternately fins up/fins down, row on row identical, dimpled ripply metal surfaces. Slothrop moseys along looking at his face in them, watching it warp and slide by, just a big underground fun house here folks. . . . Empty dollies with small metal wheels chain away back down the tunnel: they carry four-bladed arrowhead shapes that point at the ceiling—oh. Right—the pointed holders must’ve fit inside the expansion nozzles of the thrust chambers, sure enough here comes a bunch of them, big fucking things tall as Slothrop, capital As painted in white near the burner cups. . . . Overhead the fat and sinuous white-lagged pipes are lurking, and the steel lamps give no light out of their scorched skullcap reflectors . . . down the tunnel’s centerline run Lally columns, slender, gray, the exposed threads locked in rust of long standing . . . blue shadows wash through the spare-parts cages, set on planking and I beams hung from damp and chimney-sized columns of brick . . . glass-wool insulation lies beside the tracks, heaped like snow. . . .
Final assembly went on in Stollen 41. The cross-tunnel is 50 feet deep, to accommodate the finished Rocket. Sounds of carousing, of voices distinctly unbalanced, come welling up, reverberating off of the concrete. Personnel are weaving back up the main tunnel with a glassy and rubicund look to their faces. Slothrop squints down into this long pit, and makes out a crowd of Americans and Russians gathered around a huge oak beer barrel. A gnome-size German civilian with a red von Hindenburg mustache is dispensing steins of what looks to be mostly head. Ordnance smoke-puffs flicker on nearly every sleeve. The Americans are singing
ROCKET LIMERICKS
There once was a thing called a V-2,
To pilot which you did not need to—
You just pushed a button,
And it would leave nuttin’
But stiffs and big holes and debris, too.
The tune is known universally among American fraternity boys. But for some reason it is being sung here in German Storm Trooper style: notes clipping off sharp at the end of each line, then a pulse of silence before the attack on the next line.
[Refrain:] Ja, ja, ja, ja!
In Prussia they never eat pussy!
There ain’t hardly cats enough,
There’s garbage and that’s enough,
So waltz me around again, Russky!
Drunks are hanging from steel ladders and draped over catwalks. Beer fumes crawl in the long cavern, among pieces of olive-drab rocket, some upright, some lying on their sides.
There was a young fellow named Crockett,
Who had an affair with a rocket.
If you saw them out there
You’d be tempted to stare,
But if you ain’t tried it, don’t knock it!
Slothrop is hungry and thirsty. Despite the clear and present miasma of evil in Stollen 41, he starts looking for some way to go down there and maybe score some of that lunch. Turns out the only way down is by a cable, hooked to an overhead hoist. A fat cracker Pfc. lounges at the controls, sucking on a bottle of wine. “Go ahead, Jackson, I’ll give you a good ride. They taught me how to run these in the WPA.” Bracing his mustache in what he figures to be a stiff upper lip, Ian Scuffling climbs on, one foot through an eye-splice, the other hanging free. An electric motor whines, Slothrop lets go the last steel railing and clutches on to the cable as 50 feet of twilit space appears underneath him. Uh . . .
Rolling out over Stollen 41, heads milling far below, beer foam bobbing like torches in the shadows—suddenly the motor cuts off and he’s falling like a rock. Oh fuck, “Too young!” he screams, voice pitched way too high so it comes out like a teenage
r on the radio, which ordinarily would be embarrassing, but here’s the concrete floor rushing up at him, he can see every shuttering mark, every dark crystal of Thuringian sand he’s going to be splashed over—not even a body nearby to get him off with only multiple fractures. . . . With about ten feet to go the Pfc. puts on the brakes. Maniacal laughter from above and behind. The cable, brought up taut, sings under Slothrop’s hand till he loses his grip on it, falls, and is carried gently upside down and hanging by the foot, in among funseekers around the beer keg who, used to this form of arrival by now, only continue their singing:
There was a young fellow named Hector,
Who was fond of a launcher-erector.
But the squishes and pops
Of acute pressure drops
Wrecked Hector’s hydraulic connector.
Each young American in turn getting to his feet (optional), raising his tankard, and singing about different ways of Doing It with the A4 or its related hardware. Slothrop does not know that they are singing to him, and neither do they. He eyes the inverted scene with a certain unease: with his brain approaching the frontiers of red-out, there comes to him the peculiar notion that it’s Lyle Bland who has hold of his ankle here. So he is borne stately into the fringes of the party. “Hey!” observes a crewcut youth, “i-it’s Tarzan or something! Ha! Ha!” Half a dozen Ordnance people, juiced and roaring happily, grab for Slothrop. After a lot of twisting and shoving, the foot is freed from its wire loop. The hoist whines back the way it came, to its prankish operator and the next fool he can talk into riding it.
There once was a fellow named Moorehead,
Who had an affair with a warhead.
His wife moved away
The very next day—
She was always kind of a sorehead.
The Russians are drinking relentlessly and in silence, shuffling boots, frowning, maybe trying to translate these limericks. It isn’t clear whether the Americans are here on Russian sufferance or vice versa. Somebody presses on Slothrop a shell-case, ice cold, foaming down the sides. “Gee, we weren’t expecting the English too. Some party, huh? Stick around—he’ll be along in a minute.”
“Who’s that.” Thousands of these luminous worms are wriggling all over Slothrop’s field of vision, and his foot is beginning to prickle awake again. Oh, this beer here is cold, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it’s all—hahhhh. His nose comes up drowned in foam, his mustache white and bubbly too. All at once comes shouting from the edges of the company. “Here he is, here he is!” “Give him a beer!” “Hi there, Major, babes, sir!”
There was a technician named Urban,
Who had an affair with a turbine.
“It’s much nicer,” he said,
“Than a woman in bed,
And it’s sure as hell cheaper than bourbon!”
“What’s happening,” inquires Slothrop through the head of another beer just materialized in his hand.
“It’s Major Marvy. This is his going-away party.” Marvy’s Mothers are all singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” now. Which nobody can deny if they know what’s good for them, is the impression one cannot help receiving. . . .
“Uh, where’s he going?”
“Away.”
“Thought he was here to see that GE.”
“Sure, who do ya think’s pickin’ up the tab f’r this?”
Marvy here by subterranean light is even less engaging than he was in the moonlight on top of that boxcar. The rolls of fat, bulging eyes and glistening teeth are grayer here, screened more coarsely. A strip of adhesive tape plastered athletically over the bridge of his nose, and a purple, yellow, and green decoration around one eye testify to his rapid journey down the railroad embankment the other night. He is shaking hands with his well-wishers, booming male endearments, paying special attention to the Russians—“Well, bet you’ve spiked that with a little vodka! Hah?” moving on “Vlad, fella, how’s yer ass!” The Russians do not appear to understand, which leaves them only the fanged smile, the Easter-egg eyes, to make sense of. Slothrop is just snorting foam out of his nose when Marvy spots him, and those eyes bug out in earnest.
“There he is,” in a great roar, indicating Slothrop with a trembling finger, “by God the limey sonofabitch go git him, boys!” Go git him, boys? Slothrop continuing to gaze a moment here at this finger, illuminated in cute flourishes and curlicues of cherubic fat.
“There, there, my man,” begins Ian Scuffling, by which point hostile faces have begun to close in. Hmm. . . . Oh, that’s right, escape—he sloshes beer at the head nearest, heaves the empty shell case at another, finds a gap in the crowd, slithers through and flees, across florid faces of drunks asleep, vaulting khaki paunches festooned with splashes of vomit, away down the deep cross-tunnel, among the pieces of Rocket.
“Reveille you hammerheads,” Marvy’s screaming, “don’t let that ’sucker git away!” A sergeant with a boy’s face and gray hair, dozing with a grease gun cradled against him, wakes up crying, “Krauts!” lets loose a deafening burst from his weapon straight into the beer barrel, which destroys the bottom half and sends a great gush of wet amber and foam surging among the pursuing Americans, half of whom promptly slip and go down on their ass. Slothrop reaches the other end of the Stollen with a good lead, and goes sprinting up a ladder there, taking rungs two at a time. Shots— Terrific blasts in this soundbox. Either Marvy’s Mothers are too drunk, or the darkness is saving him. He hits the top out of breath.
In the other main tunnel now, Slothrop falls into a jog down the long mile to the outside, trying not to wonder if he has the wind to make it. He hasn’t gone 200 feet when the vanguard comes clambering up off of that ladder behind him. He dodges into what must be a paint shop, skids on a patch of wet Wehrmacht green, and goes down, proceeding through big splashes of black, white, and red before coming to rest against the combat boots of an elderly man in a tweed suit, with white, water-buffalo mustaches. “Gruss Gott.”
“Say, I think they’re trying to kill me back there. Is there someplace—”
The old man winks, motions Slothrop through the Stollen and on into the other main tunnel. Slothrop notices a pair of coveralls streaked with paint, and thinks to grab them. Past four more Stollen, then a sharp right. It’s a metal storage area. “Watch this.” The old man goes chuckling down the long shop among blue racks of cold-rolled sheets, heaps of aluminum ingots, sheafs of 3712 bar stock, 1624, 723. . . . “This is going to be good.”
“Not that way, man, that’s the one they’re coming down.” But this oversize elf already has set about hitching cable from a hoist overhead to a tall bundle of Monel bars. Slothrop climbs into those coveralls, combs his pompadour down over his forehead, takes out a pocketknife and saws off pieces of mustache on both sides.
“You look like Hitler now. Now they will really want to kill you!” German humor. He introduces himself as Glimpf, Professor of Mathematics of the Technische Hochschule, Darmstadt, Scientific Advisor to the Allied Military Government, which takes a while. “Now—we bring them this way.”
I am in the hands of a raving maniac—“Why not just hide out in here, till they forget it?” But here comes dim shouts up-tunnel now: “All clear in 37 and 38, Chuckie babes!” “O.K., old hoss, you guys take odds we’ll take evens.” They are not going to forget it, they are making a tunnel-by-tunnel search instead. It’s peacetime, they can’t shoot you in peacetime . . . but they’re drunk . . . oh boy. Slothrop is scared shitless.
“What do we do?”
“You will be the expert in idiomatic English. Say something provocative.”
Slothrop sticks his head out in the long tunnel and hollers, in his most English accent, “Major Marvy sucks!”
“Up this way!” Sounds of galloping GI boots, nailheads smacking the concrete an
d a lot of other ominous metal too going snick . . . snick . . .
“Now,” beams mischievous Glimpf, setting the hoist in motion.
A fresh thought occurs to Slothrop. He puts his head back out and hollers “Major Marvy sucks NIGGERS!”
“I think we should hurry,” sez Glimpf.
“Aw, I just thought of a good one about his mother.” Slack has been disappearing inch by inch from the bight of cable between the hoist and the bar stock, which Glimpf has rigged to topple across the doorway, hopefully about the time the Americans show up.
Slothrop and Glimpf light out through the opposite exit. About the time they reach the first curve in the tunnel, all the lights go out. The ventilation whines on. The phantom voices inside it gain confidence from the dark.
The bundle of Monel falls with a great crash. Slothrop touches rock wall, and uses the wall then for guidance through this absolute blackness. Glimpf is still someplace in the middle of the tunnel, on the tracks. He is not breathing hard, but he is chuckling to himself. Behind are the hollow staggerings of the pursuit, but no light yet. There is a soft clang and sharp “Himmel” from the old professor. Sounds of yelling have grown louder and now here are the first flashlights, and it’s time to get out of the bathtub—
“What’s happening? For Christ’s sake . . .”
“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.
Gravity's Rainbow Page 42