Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

He gave up questioning orders long ago—even questioning his exile. The evidence linking him to the Bukharin conspiracy, whose particulars he has never heard, might somehow be true—the Trotskyite Bloc might have known of him, by reputation, used him in ways forever secret . . . forever secret: there are forms of innocence, he knows, that cannot conceive of what that means, much less accept it as he has. For it might, after all, be only another episode in some huge pathological dream of Stalin’s. At least he had physiology, something outside the party . . . those who had nothing but the party, who had built their whole lives upon it, only to be purged, must go through something very like death . . . and never to know anything for certain, never to have the precision of the laboratory . . . it’s been his own sanity, God knows, for twenty years. At least they can never— No, no they wouldn’t, there’s never been a case . . . unless it’s been hushed up, you’d never read it in the journals of course— Would Pointsman— He might. Yes.