• • • • • • •
They come out into the last of the twilight. Just a sleepy summer evening in Peenemünde. A flight of ducks passes overhead, going west. No Russians around. A single bulb burns over the entrance to the cargo shed. Otto and his girl wander hand in hand along the dock. An ape comes scampering up to take Otto’s free hand. To north and south the Baltic keeps unrolling low white waves. “What’s happening,” asks the clarinet player. “Have a banana,” tuba player with his mouth full has a good-sized bunch stowed in the bell of his ax.
Night is down by the time they get started. They head inland, Springer’s crashout party, along the railroad tracks. Pine trees tower to either side of the cinder embankment. Ahead fat pinto rabbits scurry, only their white patches visible, no reason to suppose rabbits is what they are. Otto’s friend Hilde comes gracefully down out of the woods with his cap that she’s filled to the brim with round berries, dusty blue, sweet. The musicians are packing vodka bottles in every available pocket. That’s tonight’s meal, and Hilde kneeling alone at the berry bushes has whispered grace for them all. In the marshes now you can hear the first peepers start up, and the high-frequency squeals of a bat out hunting, and some wind in the upper trees. Also, from farther away, a shot or two.
“Are they firing at my apes?” Haftung chatters. “That’s 2000 marks apiece. How am I ever going to get that back?”
A family of mice go dashing across the tracks, and right over Slothrop’s feet. “I was expecting just a big cemetery. I guess not.”
“When we came we only cleared out what we needed to,” Närrisch recalls. “Most of it stayed—the forest, the life . . . there are probably still deer up in there, someplace. Big fellows with dark antlers. And the birds—snipes, coots, wild geese—the noise from the testing drove them out to sea, but they’d always come back in when it was quiet again.”
Before they reach even the airfield they have to scatter twice into the woods, first for a security patrol, then for a steam-engine come puffing up from Peenemünde-East, its headlight cutting through a fine nighthaze, some troops with automatics hanging on to steps and ladders. Steel grinding and creaking by in the night, the men shooting the breeze as they pass, no feeling of tension to it. “They might be after us anyway,” Närrisch whispers. “Come on.”
Through a patch of woods, and then cautiously out onto the open airfield. A sharp sickle of moon has risen. Apes scuttle along in the bonelight, arms dangling. It’s a nervous passage. Everybody’s a perfect target, there’s no cover except for airplanes strafed where they stood into relics—rusted stringers, burned paint, gullwings driven back into the earth. Lights from the old Luftwaffe complex glow to the south. Trucks purr now and then along the road at the far edge of the airfield. There’s singing from the barracks, and someplace a radio. The evening news from somewhere. Too far to hear the words or even the language, only the studious monotone: the news, Slothrop, going on without you. . . .
They make it across the tarmac to the road, and crouch in a drainage ditch, listening for traffic. Suddenly, to their left, yellow runway lights come on, a double row of them chaining to the sea, brightness bouncing up and down a couple-three times before it settles in. “Somebody coming in,” Slothrop guesses.
“More likely going out,” snaps Närrisch. “We’d better hurry.”
Back in the pine woods now, heading up a road of packed dirt toward Test Stand VII, they start to pick up stray girls and chimpanzees. Pine smells wrap them: old needles lie at the margins of the road. Downhill, lights appear as the trees begin thinning out, then the test-stand area comes in view. The assembly building is something like a hundred feet high—it blocks out the stars. There’s a tall bright band where sliding doors are open, and light scatters outside. Närrisch grabs Slothrop’s arm. “It looks like the major’s car. And the motor’s running.” Lotta searchlights, too, set up on fences topped with barbed wire—also what look like a division of security roaming around.
“Guess this is it,” Slothrop a little nervous.
“Ssh.” Sound of a plane, a single-engine fighter, circling to make its approach low over the pines. “Not much time.” Närrisch gathers the others around and issues his orders. Girls are to go in from the front, singing, dancing, vamping the woman-hungry barbarians. Otto will try to knock out the car, Haftung will get everybody rounded up and ready to rendezvous with the boat.
“Tits ’n’ ass,” mutter the girls, “tits ’n’ ass. That’s all we are around here.”
“Ah, shaddap,” snarls G. M. B. Haftung, which is his usual way of dealing with the help.
“Meanwhile,” continues Närrisch, “Slothrop and I will go in after Springer. When we have him, we’ll try to get them to shoot. That will be your signal to run like hell.”
“Oh, definitely some shooting,” sez Slothrop, “a-and how about this?” He has just had a brilliant idea: fake Molotov cocktails, a switch on Säure Bummer’s old routine. He holds up a vodka bottle, pointing and grinning.
“But that stuff won’t even hardly burn.”
“But they’ll think it’s gasoline,” beginning to pluck ostrich feathers from the costume of the nearest girl. “And just imagine how secure it will make us feel.”
“Felix,” the clarinet player asks the tuba player, “what have we fallen among?” Felix is eating a banana, and living for the moment. Presently he has wandered off in the woods with the rest of the band, where they can be heard moving around in circles, tootling and blatting at each other. Hilde and Slothrop are making Phony Phirebombs, the other girls have taken off, Zitz und Arsch, downslope.
“So we’ll present a plausible threat,” Närrisch whispers, “we’ll need matches. Who’s got matches?”
“Not me.”
“Me either.”
“Gee, my lighter’s out of flints.”
“Kot,” Närrisch throwing up his hands, “Kot,” walking off into the trees, where he collides with Felix and his tuba. “You don’t have any matches either.”
“I have a Zippo,” replies Felix, “and two Corona Coronas, from the American officer’s club in—”
A minute later. Närrisch and Slothrop, hands each cupped around the coal of one of Havana’s finest, are sneaky-Peteing like two cats in a cartoon off toward Test Stand VII, with vodka-bottle bombs stuck in their belts and ostrich-feather wicks trailing behind in the sea breeze. The plan is to climb the pine-topped sand-and-scrub embankment around the test stand, and come in on the Assembly Building from behind.
Now Närrisch here’s a guidance man, a guidance man is he. And ev’ry day at Rocket Noon, there’s death, and revelry. . . . But Närrisch has managed, in his time, to avoid nearly all of it.
In fact, no two people have been so ill-equipped to approach a holy Center since the days of Tchitcherine and Džaqyp Qulan, hauling ass over the steppe, into the North, to find their Kirghiz Light. That’s about ten years’ gap. Giving this pastime about the same vulnerability to record-breakers as baseball, a sport also well-spidered with white suggestions of the sinister.
Holy-Center-Approaching is soon to be the number one Zonal pastime. Its balmy heyday is nearly on it. Soon more champions, adepts, magicians of all ranks and orders will be in the field than ever before in the history of the game. The sun will rule all enterprise, if it be honest and sporting. The Gauss curve will herniate toward the excellent. And tankers the likes of Närrisch and Slothrop here will have already been weeded out.
Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter. “Personal density,” Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, “is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.”
“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “Δt” considered as a dep
endent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you’re doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment. . . .
“Uh,” he turns slackmouth to Närrisch, “what are we . . .”
“What are we what?”
“What?”
“You said, ‘What are we . . . ,’ then you stopped.”
“Oh. Gee, that was a funny thing to say.”
As for Närrisch, he’s too locked in to business. He has never seen this great Ellipse any other way but the way he was meant to. Greta Erdmann, on the contrary, saw the rust-colored eminences here bow, exactly as they did once, in expectancy, faces hooded, smooth cowlings of Nothing . . . each time Thanatz brought the whip down on her skin, she was taken, off on another penetration toward the Center: each lash, a little farther in . . . till someday, she knows, she will have that first glimpse of it, and from then on it will be an absolute need, a ruling target . . . wh-wh-wh-whack the boneblack trestling of water towers above, bent to the great rim, visible above the trees in light that’s bleak and bruise-purple as Peenemünde sunsets in the chill slow firing-weather . . . a long look from the top of some known Low Country dike into a sky flowing so even and yellowed a brown that the sun could be anywhere behind it, and the crosses of the turning windmills could be spoke-blurs of the terrible Rider himself, Slothrop’s Rider, his two explosions up there, his celestial cyclist—
No, but even That only flickers now briefly across a bit of Slothropian lobe-terrain, and melts into its surface, vanishing. So here passes for him one more negligence . . . and likewise groweth his Preterition sure. . . . There is no good reason to hope for any turn, any surprise I-see-it, not from Slothrop. Here he is, scaling the walls of an honest ceremonial plexus, set down on a good enough vision of what’s shadowless noon and what isn’t. But oh, Egg the flying Rocket hatched from, navel of the 50-meter radio sky, all proper ghosts of place—forgive him his numbness, his glozing neutrality. Forgive the fist that doesn’t tighten in his chest, the heart that can’t stiffen in any greeting. . . . Forgive him as you forgave Tchitcherine at the Kirghiz Light. . . . Better days are coming.
Slothrop is listening to faraway peripatetic tuba and clarinet being joined in on now by trombone and tenor sax, trying to pick up a tune . . . and to the bursts of laughter from soldiers and girls . . . sounds like a party down there . . . maybe even some stag dames . . . “Say, why don’t we, uh . . . what was your—” Närrisch, leather scarecrow, trying to ignore Slothrop’s behavior, has decided to dismantle his firebomb: he uncorks the vodka and waves it under his nose before taking a belt. He beams, cynical, salesmanwise, up at Slothrop. “Here.” A silence under the white wall.
“Oh, yes I was thinking it was gasoline, but then it’s fake, so it’s really vodka, right?”
But just over the embankment, down in the arena, what might that have been just now, waiting in this broken moonlight, camouflage paint from fins to point crazed into jigsaw . . . is it, then, really never to find you again? Not even in your worst times of night, with pencil words on your page only Δt from the things they stand for? And inside the victim is twitching, fingering beads, touching wood, avoiding any Operational Word. Will it really never come to take you, now?
Near the water towers, they have started to climb, up toward the rim. Sand leaks into their shoes and hisses away down the slope. At the top, back through the trees, they get a quick look at the lighted runway, the fighter now landed, surrounded by groundcrew shadows fueling, servicing, turning her around. Down the peninsula lights glow in patches, curves, zigzags, but over on this side, from the old Development Works south, it’s pitch black.
They push through pine branches and down again, into the Egg, sacked of its German hardware, long converted to a Russian motor pool. The corner of the huge Assembly Building, as they come down, rises to face them across a hundred yards of jeeps and lorries. Down to the right is a three- or four-level test frame with a round, kind of quonset top, and underneath the frame is a long pit shaped like a shallow V. “Cooling duct,” according to Närrisch. “They’re probably under there. We have to go in through here.”
They have come halfway down the slope to a pump house, built into the earthworks, for the cold water that used to carry off the tremendous heat from the test firings. It is stripped now, hollow and dark inside. Slothrop isn’t two steps over the doorsill when he walks into somebody.
“Beg your pardon,” though it comes out less than calmly.
“Oh, that’s all right.” Russian accent. “I don’t mind at all.” He backs Slothrop outside again, oh, a mean looking junior sergeant here about 8 or 9 feet high.
“Well, now—” at which point Närrisch comes walking into them.
“Oh.” Närrisch blinks at the sentry. “Sergeant, don’t you hear that music? Why aren’t you back at the Assembly Building, with your comrades? There are, I understand, a number of eager fräuleins entertaining them,” nudge nudge, “in a most enchanting state of deshabille, too.”
“I suppose that’s all perfectly divine,” replies the sentry, “for some people.”
“Kot . . .” So much for tactics.
“And besides, this is out of bounds, you big sillies.”
Sighing, Närrisch raises his bottle aloft, brings it down, or up, thunk on the sentry’s nape, dislodging the man’s helmet liner, is what happens. “Naughty,” the Russian, somewhat nettled, stoops to retrieve his headgear. “Really I ought to put you both under apprehension.”
“Enough chit-chat,” snarls Slothrop, brandishing his glowing cigar and “Molotov cocktail.” “Hand over that gun there, Ivan, or I turn you into a human flare!”
“You’re mean,” sulks the sentry, unslinging his Degtyarov a little too quickly—Slothrop dodges aside, aims his usual swift kick to the groin, which misses, but does knock loose the weapon, which Närrisch is thoughtful enough to dive for. “Beasts,” whimpers the Russian, “oh, nasty, awful . . .” scampering off into the night.
“Two minutes,” Närrisch already inside the pump house. Slothrop grabs the automatic from him and follows at a run, accelerating down a sloping corridor. Their feet ring faster, sharper, on the concrete, down to a metal door: behind it they can hear Springer singing and babbling like a drunk. Slothrop pushes off his safety and Närrisch goes busting in. A pretty blonde auxiliary in black boots and steel-rimmed glasses is sitting here taking down shorthand notes of everything she hears from Springer, who leans happily grandiose against a cold-water pipe four feet high that runs the length of the room.
“Drop that pencil,” orders Slothrop. “All right, where’s that Major Zhdaev?”
“He’s in conference. If you’d care to leave your name—”
“Dope,” Närrisch screams, “they have given him some kind of dope! Gerhardt, Gerhardt, speak to me!”
Slothrop recognizes the symptoms. “It’s that Sodium Amytal. It’s O.K. Let’s go.”
“I expect the Major to be back any moment. They’re upstairs in the guardroom, smoking. Is there a number where he can reach you?”
Slothrop has slid under one of Springer’s arms, Närrisch under the other, when there’s this loud hammering on the door.
“Smoking? Smoking what?”
“This way, Slothrop.”
“Oh.” They hustle Springer out another door, which Slothrop bolts and wrassles a heavy filing cabinet up against, then they drag Springer up a flight of steps into a long, straight corridor, lit by six or seven bulbs, the spaces between which are very dark. Along either side, floor to ceiling, run thick bundles of measurement cabling.
“We’re done for,” Närrisch
wheezes. It’s 150 yards to the measurement bunker, and no cover but the shadows between the bulbs. All these birds gotta do is spray a pattern.
“She baffs at nothing, the heterospeed,” cries Gerhardt von Göll.
“Try to walk,” Slothrop scared shit, “come on, man, it’s our ass!” Smashing echoes after them down the tunnel. A muffled burst of automatic fire. And another. All at once, two faint pools of light ahead, Zhdaev materializes, on the way back to his office. He has a friend with him, who smiles when he sees Slothrop 40 yards away, a big steel smile. Slothrop lets go of Springer and runs up into the next light, piece at the ready. The Russians are blinking at him in a puzzled way. “Tchitcherine! Hey.”
They stand facing, each at his lit circle. Slothrop recalls that he has the drop on them. He smiles in half-apology, tips the muzzle at them, moves closer. Zhdaev and Tchitcherine, after a discussion which seems unnecessarily long, decide they will raise their hands.
“Rocketman!”
“Howdy.”
“What are you doing in a Fascist uniform like that?”
“You’re right. Think I’ll join that Red Army, instead.” Närrisch leaves Springer sagging against a row of sleek rubber and silver-mesh cables, and comes up to help disarm the two Russians. Troops back down the tunnel are still busy busting the door down.
“You guys want to undress, here? Say Tchitcherine, how’d you like that hashish, by the way?”
“Well,” taking off his trousers, “we were all up there in the budka just now smoking some . . . Rocketman, your timing is fantastic. Zhdaev, isn’t he something?”
Slothrop slides out of his tux. “Just see you don’t get a hardon here now, fella.”
“I’m serious. It’s your Schwarzphänomen.”
“Quit fooling.”
“You don’t even know about it. It choreographs you. Mine’s always trying to destroy me. We should be exchanging those, instead of uniforms.”
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