He has become obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name written on it--if they're really set on getting him ("They" embracing possibilities far far beyond Nazi Germany) that's the surest way, doesn't cost them a thing to paint his name on every one, right?
It's nothing he can see or lay hands on--sudden gases, a violence upon the air and no trace afterword... a Word, spoken with no warming into your ear, and then silence forever. Beyond its invisibility, beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real horror, mocking, promising him death with German and precise confidence, laughing down all of Tantivy's quiet decencies... no, no bullet with fins, Ace... not the Word, the one Word that rips apart the day...
"You are a pirate," she'd whispered the last day--neither of them knew it was the last day--"you've come and taken me off on your pirate ship. A girl of good family and the usual repressions. You've raped me. And I'm the Red Bitch of the High Seas..." A lovely game. Pirate wished she'd thought it up sooner. Fucking the last (already the last) day's lighty away down afternoon to dusk, hours of fucking, too in love with it to uncouple, they noticed how the borrowed room rocked gently, the ceiling obligingly came down a foot, lamps swayed from their fittings, some fraction of the Thamside traffic provided salty cries over the water, and nautical bells...
She even tried, from what little calculus she'd picked up, to explain it to Franz as ∆t approaching zero, eternally approaching, the slices of time growing thinner and thinner, a succession of rooms each with walls more silver, transparent, as the pure light of zero comes nearer...
But he shook his head. "Not the same, Leni. The important thing is taking a function to its limit. ∆t is just a convenience, so that it can happen."
So as the mustache waxes, Slothrop waxes the mustache.
She was pleased once, to think of a peacock, courting, fanning his tail... she saw it in the colors that moved in the flame as it rose off the platform, scarlet, orange, iridescent green... there were Germans, even SS troops, who called the rocket Der Pfau . 'Pfau Zwei.' Ascending, programmed in a ritual of love... at Brennschluss it is done-- the Rocket's purely feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center of its target, has submitted. All the rest will happen according to laws of ballistics. The Rocket is helpless in it. Something else has taken over. Something beyond what was designed in.
Katje has understood the great airless arc as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her-- over its peak and down, plunging, burning toward a terminal orgasm... which is certainly nothing she can tell Slothrop.
From overhead, from a German camera-angle, it occurs to Webley Silvernail, this lab here is also a maze, i'n't it now... behaviorists run these aisles of tables and consoles just like rats 'n' mice. Reinforcement for them is not a pellet of food, but a successful experiment. But who watches from above, who notes their responses? Who hears the small animals in the cages as they mate, or nurse, or communicate through the gray quadrilles, or, as now, begin to sing... come out of their enclosures, in fact, grown to Webley Silvernail-size (though none of the lab people seem to be noticing) to dance him down the long aisles and metal apparatus, with conga drums and a peppy tropical orchestra taking up the very popular beat and melody of:
PAVLOVIA (BEGUINE)
"Sa-a-a-ay." It's just occurred to him. "Why are all you folks helping me like this? For free and all?"
"Who knows? We have to play the patterns. There must be a pattern you're in, right now."
"Uh..."
They busted her for witchery and she got death. Another of Slothrop's crazy kinfolks. When she was mentioned aloud at all it was with a shrug, too far away really to be a Family Disgrace--more of a curiosity. Slothrop grew up not quite knowing what to think about her. Witches were certainly not getting a fair shake in the thirties. They were depicted as hags who called you dearie, not exactly a wholesome lot. The movies had not prepared him for this Teutonic version here. Your kraut witch for example, has six toes on each foot and no hair at all on her cunt. That is how the witches look, anyhow, in the stairway murals inside the one-time Nazi transmitter tower up on the Brocken here, and governement murals are hardly places to go looking for irresponsible fantasy, right? But Geli thinks the hairless cunt derives from the women von Bayros drew. "Aw, you just don't wanna shave yours," crows Slothrop. "Ha! Ha! Some witch!"
The classic hustle is still famous, even today, for the cold purity of its execution: bring opium from India, introduce it into China--howdy Fong, this here's opium, opium, this is Fong--ah, so, me eatee!--no-ho-ho, Fong, you smokee, smokee, see? pretty soon Fong's coming back for more and more, so you create an inelastic demand for the shit, get China to make it illegal, then sucker China into a couple-three disastrous wars over the right of your merchants to sell opium, which by now you are describing as sacred. You win, China loses. Fantastic.
This evening he is orbiting someplace near the Grosser Stern. It is long after curfew. Odors of woodsmoke and decay hang over the city. Among pulverized heads of stone margraves and electors, reconnoitering a likely-looking cabbage patch, all of a sudden Slothrop picks up the scent of an unmistakable not it can't be yes it is it's a REEFER! A-and it's burning someplace close by. Goldshot green of the Rif's slant fields here, vapor-blossoms resinous and summery, charm his snoot through bushes and matted grass, under the blasted trees and whatever sits in their branches.
...Black runs all through the transcript: the recurring color black. Slothrop never mentioned Enzian by name, nor the Schwarzkommando. But he did talk about the Schwarzgerät. And he also coupled "schwarz-" with some strange nouns, in the German fragments that came through. Blackwoman, Blackrocket, Blackdream... The new coinages seem to be made unconsciously. Is there a single root, deeper than anyone has probed, from which Slothrop's Blackwords only appear to flower sepearately? Or has he by way of the language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting more hopelessly apart form named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words...
...In general, though the test results grew more and more hopeful. It was impossible not to think of the Rocket without thinking of Schicksal, of growing toward a shape predestined and perhaps a little otherworldly.
'What is it?' I asked, vamping Drohne. He took me out of earshot of the others. 'I think it's for the F-Gerät,' he whispered."
"F?" sez Slothrop, "F-Gerät, you sure of that?"
"Some letter."
"S?"
Both of them on the run. That's what she wants. But Slothrop only wants to lie still with her heartbeat awhile... isn't that every paranoid's wish? to perfect methods of immobility? But they're coming, house to house, looking for their deserter, and it's Slothrop who has to go, she who has to stay.
Rocks near the site of the miracle have since been the objects of yearly pilgrimages. But Felipe's particular rock embodies also an intellectual system, for he believes (as do M. F. Beal and others) in a form of mineral consciousness not too much different from that of plants and animals, except for the time scale. Rock's time scale is a lot more stretched out. "We're talking frames per century," Felipe like everybody else here lately has been using a bit of movie language, "per millennium!" Colossal.
Remember The Password In The Zone This Week Is FASTER--THAN, THE-SPEEDOFLIGHT Speeding Up Your Voice Exponentially--Linear Exceptions Made Only In The Case of Upper Respiratory Complaints, at each "end," understand, a very large transfer of energy: breaking upward into this world, a controlled burning--breaking downard again, an uncontrolled explosion... this lack of symmetry leads to speculating that a presence, analgous to the Aether, flows through time, as the Aether flows through space. The assumption of a Vacuum in time tended to cut us off from another. But an Aether sea to bear us world-to-world might bring us back a continuity, show us a kinder universe, more easygoing...
COUNTDOWN
The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w., was invented by Fritz Lang in 1929 for the Ufa film Die Frau im Mond. He put it into the launch scene to heighten the suspense. "It is another of my damned 'touches,'" Fritz Lang said.
"At the Creation," explains Kabbalist spokesman Steve Edelman, "God sent out a pulse of energy into the void. It presently branched and sorted into ten distinct spheres or aspects, corresponding to the numbers 1-10. These are known as the Sephiroth. To return to God, the soul must negotiate each of the Sephiroth, from ten back to one. Armed with magic and faith, Kabbalists have set out to conquer the Sephiroth. Many Kabbalist secrets have to do with making the trip successfully.
"Now the Sephiroth fall into a pattern, which is called the Tree of Life. It is also the body of God. Drawn among the ten spheres are 22 paths. Each path corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and also to one of the cards called 'Major Arcana' in the Tarot. So although the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel.
"Some Sephiroth are active or masculine, others are passive or feminine. But the Tree itself is a unity, rooted exactly at the Bodenplatte. It is the axis of a particular Earth, a new dispensation, brought into being by the Great Firing."
"But but with a new axis, a newly spinning Earth," it occurs to the visitor, "what happens to astrology?"
"The signs change, idiot," snaps Edelman, reaching for this family-size jar of Thorazine. He has become such a habitual user of this tranquilizing drug that his complexion has deepened to an alarming slate-purple.