Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

Here are the objectives. To make the run over tracks that may end abruptly at riverside or in carbonized trainyard, over roads even the unpaved alternates to which are patrolled now by Russian and British and American troops in a hardening occupation, a fear of winter bleaching the men all more formal, into braces of Attention they ignored during the summer, closer adherence now to the paperwork as colors of trees and brush begin their change, as purple blurs out over miles of heath, and nights come sooner. To have to stay out in the rains of early Virgo: the children who stowed away on the trek against all orders are down now with coughs and fevers, sniffling at night, hoarse little voices inside oversize uniform jackets. To brew tea for them from fennel, betony, Whitsun roses, sunflowers, mallow leaves—to loot sulfa drugs and penicillin. To avoid raising road-dust when the sun has dried the ruts and crowns again by noon. To sleep in the fields. To hide the rocket sections under haystacks, behind the single wall of a gutted railroad shed, among rainy willows down beside the river beds. To disperse at any alarm, or often at random, just for drill—to flow like a net, down out of the Harz, up the ravines, sleeping in the dry glazed spaces of deserted spas (official pain, official death watching all night from the porcelain eyes of statues), digging in nights’ perimeters, smelling pine needles boots and trench-shovels have crushed. . . . To keep faith that it is not trek this...