Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

One night he set fire to twenty pages of calculations. Integral signs weaved like charmed cobras, comical curly ds marched along like hunchbacks through the fire-edge into billows of lace ash.

No one could really claim credit 100% for any idea, it was a corporate intelligence at work, specialization hardly mattered, class lines even less. The social spectrum ran from von Braun, the Prussian aristocrat, down to the likes of Pökler, who would eat an apple in the street—yet they were all equally at the Rocket’s mercy: not only danger from explosions or falling hardware, but also its dumbness, its dead weight, its obstinate and palpable mystery.

On the day that a 2000 m/sec exhaust became feasible, the A4 itself suddenly came in reach. The danger then lay in being seduced by approaches that were too sophisticated. No one was immune. Hardly a designer there, including Pökler, didn’t come up with at least one monster rig, some Gorgon’s head writhing with pipes, tubes, complicated folderol for controlling pressures, solenoids on top of pilot valves on auxiliary valves on backup valves—hundreds of pages on valve nomenclature were printed as appendices to these weird proposals, all promising huge pressure differences between the inside of the chamber and the nozzle exit—beautiful, as long as you didn’t care much about those millions of moving parts behaving together too reliably. But to get a dependable working motor, one the military could use in the field to kill people, the real engineering problem now was to keep things as simple as possible.

“The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide

“Who sent this new serpent to our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence—unless innocence be our age’s neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference—something

The new planet Pluto,” she had whispered long ago, lying in the smelly dark, her long Asta Nielsen upper lip gibbous that night as the moon that ruled her,

the thought purred on in his brain,

He should have throttled Weissmann where he sat, corrugations of skinny throat and Adam’s apple sliding under Pökler’s palms, thick eyeglasses sliding off as the weak little eyes go blearing helplessly after their final darkener.

A burned-out Königstiger tank guards the entrance, its paint scorched, treads mangled and blasted off of the drive sprocket, its dead monster 88 angled down to point at the gray river, hissing and spiculed with the rain.

Paint from some long-ago artist is still visible over the floor in wrinkled splashes of aged magenta, saffron, steel blue, reverse deformations of paintings whose whereabouts are unknown.

If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

The strewn night. Dogs, spooked and shivering, run behind walls whose tops are broken like fever charts. Somewhere a gas leak warps for a minute into the death and after-rain smells. Ranks of blackened window-sockets run high up the sides of gutted apartment buildings. Chunks of concrete are held aloft by iron reinforcing rod that curls like black spaghetti, whole enormous heaps wiggling ominously overhead at your least passing brush by. . . . The smooth-faced Custodian of the Night hovers behind neutral eyes and smile, coiled and pale over the city, humming its hoarse lullabies.

He takes a trail he thinks Säure led them along the other night—keeps losing it, wandering into windowless mazes, tangles of barbed wire holidayed by the deathstorms of last May, then into a strafed and pitted lorry-park he can’t find his way out of for half an hour, a rolling acre of rubber, grease, steel, and spilled petrol, pieces of vehicles pointing at sky or earth no differently than in a peacetime American junkyard, fused into odd, brown Saturday Evening Post faces, except that they are not folksy so much as downright sinister . . . yes it’s really the Saturday Evening Post, all right: they are the faces of the tricorned messengers coming in from out of the long pikes, down past the elms, Berkshire legends, travelers lost at the edge of the Evening. Come with a message. They unwrinkle, though, if you keep looking. They smooth out into timeless masks that speak their entire meaning, all of it right out on the surface.

“Do you find it a little schizoid,” aloud now to all the Achtfaden fronts and backs, “breaking a flight profile up into segments of responsibility? It was half bullet, half arrow. It demanded this, we didn’t. So. Perhaps you used a rifle, a radio, a typewriter. Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to. You are either alone absolutely, alone with your own death, or you take part in the larger enterprise, and you share in the deaths of others. Are we not all one? Which is your choice,” Fahringer now, buzzing and flat through the filters of memory, “the little cart, or the great one?”

Does no one recognize what enslavement gravity is till he reaches the interface of the thunder?

Black dumplings of smoke are floating up out of the stack of a white river steamer.

before he can stop her she’s pulled away, some quiet, awful cry in the back of her throat, and turned and begun to run, a desperate tattoo of high heels across the stone,

It’s as if Greta is now releasing all the pain she’s stored up over the past weeks onto her child’s naked bottom, the skin so finely grained that white centimeter markings and numerals are being left in mirror-image against the red stripes with each blow, crisscrossing, building up a skew matrix of pain on Bianca’s flesh. Tears go streaming down her inverted and reddening face, mixing with mascara, dripping onto the pale lizard surfaces of her mother’s shoes

Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the looking back, there is such noise and gravity. But we are conditioned to forget. So that the war may have more importance, yes, but still . . . isn’t the hidden machinery easier to see in the days leading up to the event? There are arrangements, things to be expedited . . . and often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant to.

Things in Germany by then, as everyone knows, were very bad. Margherita was terrified of being “found out.” She heard Gestapo in every puff of air that slipped in, among any of a thousand windways of dilapidation.

Morituri grew to look forward so to these daily meetings. His wife and daughters clear on the other side of the world, himself exiled in a country that bewildered and oppressed him. He needed the passing zoogoers’ civility, the guidebook words. He knows he stared back, every bit as curious. In their European slickness, they all fascinated him: the white-plumed old ladies in the lying-out chairs, the veterans of the Great War like serene hippopotamuses soaking in the steel baths, their effeminate secretaries chattering shrill as monkeys across the Sprudelstrasse, while far down the arches of lindens and chestnuts you could hear the endless roar of carbon dioxide at the bubbling spring, coming out of solution in great shuddering spheres

Almost directly overhead, thunder suddenly breaks in a blinding egg of sound.

Behind Procalowski the clinometer bob goes to and fro with his ship’s rolling: a pendulum in a dream. Stormlight has turned the lines of his face black, black as his eyes, black as the watchcap cocked so tough and salty aslant the furrows of his forehead.

In a little square, market stalls are set up, wood frames and old, stained canvas shimmering when the breeze passes through. Russian soldiers lean against posts or benches talking to girls in dirndls and white knee-socks, all nearly still as statues. Market wagons stand unhitched with tongues tilted to the ground and floors covered with burlap and straw and traces of produce. Dogs sniff among the mud negatives of tank treads.

Women with empty string bags hurry by light as ghosts. A lone sapling in the street sings with a blockful of birds you can’t see.

“Be compassionate. But don’t make up fantasies about them. Despise me, exalt them, but remember, we define each other. Elite and preterite, we move through a cosmic design of darkness and light, and in all humility, I am one of the very few who can comprehend it in toto. Consider honestly therefore, young man, which side you would rather be on.

the idle and hungry of Swinemünde look on, whitefaced as patient livestock. But their bodies are only implied: wire racks for prewar suits and frocks, too ancient, too glossy with dirt, with passage.

Haftung, brushing hair that grows only in memory across the top of his head, rushes over

The talk has drifted on into that kind of slack, nameful recapitulating

Charred helpless latticework: what was wooden now only settles, without strength. Green human shapes flash in the ruins. The scale is very confusing, along here. The troops look larger than they should. A zoo? a shooting gallery? Why, some of both. Frau Gnahb wallows in closer to land, proceeds up the marshy shoreline at half speed. Signs of occupation increase: lorry-parks, tents, a corral teeming with horses pied, sorrel, snow-white, red as blood. Wild summer ducks up exploding, wet and showery, out of green reeds—they swing aft over the boat and descend in its wake, where they bob quacking in two-foot excursions. High in the sunlight, a white-tailed eagle is soaring. Smooth-lipped bomb and shell craters hold blue sea water. Barracks have had their roofs blown away: spinal and ribwise and sunwhite the bones of these creatures that must have held in their time half the Jonahs of falling Europe. But trees, beech and pine, have begun to grow in again where spaces were cleared and leveled for housing or offices—up through cracks in the pavement, everywhere life may gain purchase, up rushes green summer ’45, and the forests are still growing dense on the upland.

Out the slats of the car, the sky is darkening, the clouds turning orange, tangerine, tropical.

Otto is earnestly explaining his views on the Mother Conspiracy. It’s not often a sympathetic girl will listen. The Mothers get together once a year, in secret, at these giant conventions, and exchange information. Recipes, games, key phrases to use on their children. “What did yours use to say when she wanted to make you feel guilty?” “‘I’ve worked my fingers to the bone!’” sez the girl. “Right! And she used to cook those horrible casseroles, w-with the potatoes, and onions—” “And ham! Little pieces of ham—” “You see, you see? That can’t be accidental! They have a contest, for Mother of the Year, breast-feeding, diaper-changing, they time them, casserole competitions, ja—then, toward the end, they actually begin to use the children. The State Prosecutor comes out on stage. ‘In a moment, Albrecht, we are going to bring your mother on. Here is a Luger, fully loaded. The State will guarantee you absolute immunity from prosecution. Do whatever you wish to do—anything at all. Good luck, my boy.’ The pistols are loaded with blanks, natürlich, but the unfortunate child does not know this. Only the mothers who get shot at qualify for the finals. Here they bring in psychiatrists, and judges sit with stopwatches to see how quickly the children will crack. ‘Now then, Olga, wasn’t it nice of Mutti to break up your affair with that long-haired poet?’ ‘We understand your mother and you are, ah, quite close, Hermann. Remember the time she caught you masturbating into her glove? Eh?’ Hos...

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.

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.

Fantastic pastry carts come by, big as pantechnicons: one has to go inside, search the numberless shelves, each revealing treats gooier and sweeter than the last . . . chefs stand by with ice-cream scoops at the ready, awaiting only a word from the saccharomaniac client to swiftly mold and rush baked Alaskas of any size and flavor to the ovens . . . there are boats of baklava stuffed with Bavarian cream, topped with curls of bittersweet chocolate, broken almonds, cherries as big as ping-pong balls, and popcorn in melted marshmallows and butter, and thousands of kinds of fudge, from liquorice to divinity, being slapped out on the flat stone tables, and taffy-pulling, all by hand, that sometimes extends around corners, out windows, back in another corridor—er,

Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to have meaning.

Much of the time he’s alone. He’ll come on farmhouses, deserted in the night, and will sleep in the hay, or if there’s a mattress (not often) in a bed. Wake to sun glittering off some small lake surrounded by green salted with blossoms of thyme or mustard, a salad hillside, sweeping up to pines in the mist. Sapling tomato-frames and purple foxgloves in the yards, huge birds’ nests built up under the eaves of the thatched roofs, bird-choruses in the morning, and soon, one day, as the summer turns ponderously in the sky, the clang of cranes, on the move.

As he moves on he finds these farms haunted, but amiably. The oakwork creaks in the night, honest and wooden. Unmilked cows low painfully in distant fields, others come in and get drunk on fermented silage, barging around into the fences and piles of hay where Slothrop dreams, uttering moos with drunken umlauts on them.

William argued holiness for these “second Sheep,” without whom there’d be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. And it got worse. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too.

Back home he owns a toy factory in Nutley, New Jersey. Who can ever forget the enormously successful Juicy Jap, the doll that you fill with ketchup then bayonet through any of several access slots, whereupon it flies to pieces, 82 of them, realistically squishy plastic, all over the room? or-or Shufflin’ Sam, the game of skill where you have to shoot the Negro before he gets back over the fence with the watermelon, a challenge to the reflexes of boys and girls of all ages?

Everything’s been stripped. The vehicles are back to the hollow design envelopes of their earliest specs, though there’s still a faint odor of petrol and grease. Forget-me-nots are growing violent blue violent yellow among the snarl of cables and hoses. Swallows have built a nest inside the control car, and a spider has begun filling in the web of the Meillerwagen boom with her own.

She’s still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible as a glass of gray lemonade in a twilit room . . . still she is there, cool and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams.

There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe—Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia—were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails.

The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth’s soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here—kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken . . . plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert . . . but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition . . . to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste.

Walking at a brisk pace, but out of step, across the lorry-scarred spaces of the old Krupp works here, Doctors Muffage and Spontoon look anything but conspiratorial. You take them immediately for what they seem: a tiny beachhead of London respectability here in benighted Cuxhaven—tourists in this semicivilized colony of sulfa shaken into the wells of blood, syrettes and tourniquets, junkie M.O.s and sadistic corpsmen, a colony they were spared for the Duration, thank heaven, Muffage’s brother being highly placed in a certain Ministry, Spontoon having been technically disqualified because of a strange hysterical stigma, shaped like the ace of spades and nearly the same color, which would appear on his left cheek at moments of high stress, accompanied by severe migraine.

Then comes a chorus for ukuleles and kazoos and so on while everyone dances, black neckerchiefs whipping about like the mustaches of epileptic villains,

“This is some kind of a plot, right?” Slothrop sucking saliva from velvet pile. “Everything is some kind of a plot, man,” Bodine laughing. “And yes but, the arrows are pointing all different ways,” Solange illustrating with a dance of hands, red-pointed fingervectors. Which is Slothrop’s first news, out loud, that the Zone can sustain many other plots besides those polarized upon himself . . . that these are the els and busses of an enormous transit system here in the Raketenstadt, more tangled even than Boston’s—and that by riding each branch the proper distance, knowing when to transfer, keeping some state of minimum grace though it might often look like he’s headed the wrong way, this network of all plots may yet carry him to freedom.

Wrists weak from steam and comfort gathered skillfully behind his back before he can even get mad enough to start yelling at them—cold steel, ratcheting like a phone number being dialed late at night, with no hope in hell of any answer ever.

“You’re regarded as ‘useful,’” Mravenko said. They looked at each other, then, for a long time. It was a death sentence. Usefulness out here ends as quickly as a communiqué.

I’ve got Ginger Groupers jamming my switchboard and my mailbox day and night—” “Mm, I’d like to jam your male box, Clivey—”