Gravity's Rainbow Read online

  They all talk effectiveness, an American heresy, perhaps overmuch at “The White Visitation.” Loudest of all, usually, is Mr. Pointsman, often using for ammo statistics provided him by Roger Mexico. By the time of the Normandy landing, Pointsman’s season of despair was well upon him. He came to understand that the great continental pincers was to be, after all, a success. That this war, this State he’d come to feel himself a citizen of, was to be adjourned and reconstituted as a peace—and that, professionally speaking, he’d hardly got a thing out of it. With funding available for all manner of radars, magic torpedoes, aircraft and missiles, where was Pointsman in the scheme of things? He’d had a moment’s stewardship, that was all: his Abreaction Research Facility (ARF), early on snaring himself a dozen underlings, dog trainer from the variety stage, veterinary student or two, even a major prize, the refugee Dr. Porkyevitch, who worked with Pavlov himself at the Koltushy institute, back before the purge trials. Together the ARF team receive, number, weigh, classify by Hippocratic temperament, cage, and presently experiment on as many as a dozen fresh dogs a week. And there are one’s colleagues, co-owners of The Book, all now—all those left of the original seven—working in hospitals handling the battle-fatigued and shell-shocked back from across the Channel, and the bomb- or rocket-happy this side. They get to watch more abreactions, during these days of heavy V-bombardment, than doctors of an earlier day were apt to see in several lifetimes, and they are able to suggest ever new lines of inquiry. P.W.E. allows a stingy dribble of money, desperate paper whispering down the corporate lattice, enough to get by on, enough that ARF remains a colony to the metropolitan war, but not enough for nationhood. . . . Mexico’s statisticians chart for it drops of saliva, body weights, voltages, sound levels, metronome frequencies, bromide dosages, number of afferent nerves cut, percentages of brain tissue removed, dates and hours of numbing, deafening, blinding, castration. Support even comes from Psi Section, a colony dégagé and docile, with no secular aspirations at all.

  Old Brigadier Pudding can live with this spiritualist gang well enough, he’s tendencies himself in that direction. But Ned Pointsman, with his constant scheming after more money—Pudding can only stare back at the man, try to be civil. Not as tall as his father, certainly not as wholesome looking. Father was M.O. in Thunder Prodd’s regiment, caught a bit of shrapnel in the thigh at Polygon Wood, lay silent for seven hours before they, without a word before, in that mud, that terrible smell, in, yes Polygon Wood . . . or was that—who was the ginger-haired chap who slept with his hat on? ahhh, come back. Now Polygon Wood . . . but it’s fluttering away. Fallen trees, dead, smooth gray, swirlinggrainoftreelikefrozensmoke . . . ginger . . . thunder . . . no use, no bleeding use, it’s gone, another gone, another, oh dear . . .

  The old Brigadier’s age is uncertain, though he must be pushing 80—reactivated in 1940, set down in a new space not only of battlefield—where the front each day or hour changes like a noose, like the gold-lit borders of consciousness (perhaps, though it oughtn’t to get too sinister here, exactly like them . . . better, then, “like a noose”)—but also of the War-state itself, its very structure. Pudding finds himself wondering, at times aloud and in the presence of subordinates, what enemy disliked him enough to assign him to Political Warfare. One is supposed to be operating in concert—yet too often in amazing dissonance—with other named areas of the War, colonies of that Mother City mapped wherever the enterprise is systematic death: P.W.E. laps over onto the Ministry of Information, the BBC European Service, the Special Operations Executive, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the F.O. Political Intelligence Department at Fitzmaurice House. Among others. When the Americans came in, their OSS, OWI, and Army Psychological Warfare Department had also to be coordinated with. Presently there arose the joint, SHAEF Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), reporting direct to Eisenhower, and to hold it all together a London Propaganda Coordinating Council, which has no real power at all.

  Who can find his way about this lush maze of initials, arrows solid and dotted, boxes big and small, names printed and memorized? Not Ernest Pudding—that’s for the New Chaps with their little green antennas out for the usable emanations of power, versed in American politics (knowing the difference between the New Dealers of OWI and the eastern and moneyed Republicans behind OSS), keeping brain-dossiers on latencies, weaknesses, tea-taking habits, erogenous zones of all, all who might someday be useful.

  Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being. The newer geometries confuse him. His greatest triumph on the battlefield came in 1917, in the gassy, Armageddonite filth of the Ypres salient, where he conquered a bight of no man’s land some 40 yards at its deepest, with a wastage of only 70% of his unit. He was pensioned off around the beginning of the Great Depression—went to sit in the study of an empty house in Devon, surrounded by photos of old comrades, none of whose gazes quite met one’s own, there to go at a spot of combinatorial analysis, that favorite pastime of retired Army officers, with a rattling intense devotion.

  It occurred to him to focus his hobby on the European balance of power, because of whose long pathology he had once labored, deeply, all hope of waking lost, in the nightmare of Flanders. He started in on a mammoth work entitled Things That Can Happen in European Politics. Begin, of course, with England. “First,” he wrote, “Bereshith, as it were: Ramsay MacDonald can die.” By the time he went through resulting party alignments and possible permutations of cabinet posts, Ramsay MacDonald had died. “Never make it,” he found himself muttering at the beginning of each day’s work—“it’s changing out from under me. Oh, dodgy—very dodgy.”

  When it had changed as far as German bombs falling on England, Brigadier Pudding gave up his obsession and again volunteered his services to his country. Had he known at the time it would mean “The White Visitation” . . . not that he’d expected a combat assignment you know, but wasn’t there something mentioned about intelligence work? Instead he found a disused hospital for the mad, a few token lunatics, an enormous pack of stolen dogs, cliques of spiritualists, vaudeville entertainers, wireless technicians, Couéists, Ouspenskians, Skinnerites, lobotomy enthusiasts, Dale Carnegie zealots, all exiled by the outbreak of war from pet schemes and manias damned, had the peace prolonged itself, to differing degrees of failure—but their hopes now focusing on Brigadier Pudding and possibilities for funding: more hope than Prewar, that underdeveloped province, ever offered. Pudding could only respond by adopting rather an Old Testament style with everyone, including the dogs, and remaining secretly baffled and hurt by what he imagined as treachery high inside Staff.

  Snowlight comes in through tall, many-paned windows, a dark day, a light burning only here and there among the brown offices. Subalterns encrypt, blindfolded subjects call Zener-deck guesses to hidden microphones: “Waves . . . Waves . . . Cross . . . Star . . .” While someone from Psi Section records them from a speaker down in the cold basement. Secretaries in woolen shawls and rubber galoshes shiver with the winter cold being inhaled through the madhouse’s many crevices, their typewriter keys chattery as their pearlies. Maud Chilkes, who looks from the rear rather like Cecil Beaton’s photograph of Margot Asquith, sits dreaming of a bun and a cup of tea.

  In the ARF wing, the stolen dogs sleep, scratch, recall shadowy smells of humans who may have loved them, listen undrooling to Ned Pointsman’s oscillators and metronomes. The drawn shades allow only mild passages of light from outdoors. Technicians are moving behind the thick observation window, but their robes, greenish and submarine through the glass, flutter more slowly, less brightly. . . . A numbness has taken over, or a felt darkening. The metronome at 80 per second breaks out in wooden echoes, and Dog Vanya, bound atop the test stand, begins to salivate. All other sounds are damped severely: the beams underpinning the lab smothered in sand-filled rooms, sandbags, straw, uniforms of dead men occupying the spaces betwe
en the windowless walls . . . where the country bedlamites sat around, scowling, sniffing nitrous oxide, giggling, weeping at an E-major chord modulating to a G-sharp minor, now are cubical deserts, sand-rooms, keeping the metronome sovereign here in the lab, behind the iron doors, closed hermetically.

  The duct of Dog Vanya’s submaxillary gland was long ago carried out the bottom of his chin through an incision and sutured in place, leading saliva outside to the collecting funnel, fixed there with the traditional orange Pavlovian Cement of rosin, iron oxide and beeswax. Vacuum brings the secretion along through shining tubework to displace a column of light red oil, moving to the right along a scale marked off in “drops”—an arbitrary unit, probably not the same as the actually fallen drops of 1905, of St. Petersburg. But the number of drops, for this lab and Dog Vanya and the metronome at 80, is each time predictable.

  Now that he has moved into “equivalent” phase, the first of the transmarginal phases, a membrane, hardly noticeable, stretches between Dog Vanya and the outside. Inside and outside remain just as they were, but the interface—the cortex of Dog Vanya’s brain—is changing, in any number of ways, and that is the really peculiar thing about these transmarginal events. It no longer matters now how loudly the metronome ticks. A stronger stimulus no longer gets a stronger response. The same number of drops flow or fall. The man comes and removes the metronome to the farthest corner of this muffled room. It is placed inside a box, beneath a pillow with the machine-sewn legend Memories of Brighton, but the drops do not fall off . . . then played into a microphone and amplifier so that each tick fills the room up like a shout, but the drops do not increase. Every time, the clear saliva pushes the red line over only to the same mark, the same number of drops. . . .

  Webley Silvernail and Rollo Groast go sneaky-Peteing away down the corridors, nipping into people’s offices to see if there are any smokable fag-ends to be looted. Most offices right now are empty: all personnel with the patience or masochism for it are going through a bit of ritual with the doddering Brigadier.

  “That old-man has, no-shame,” Géza Rózsavölgyi, another refugee (and violently anti-Soviet, which creates a certain strain with ARF) flicking his hands up Brigadier Puddingward in gay despair, the lilting Hungarian gypsy-whisper bashing like tambourines all around the room, provoking, in one way or another, everyone here except for the aged Brigadier himself, who just goes rambling on from the pulpit of what was a private chapel once, back there on the maniac side of the 18th century, and is now a launching platform for “The Weekly Briefings,” a most amazing volley of senile observations, office paranoia, gossip about the War which might or might not include violations of security, reminiscences of Flanders . . . the coal boxes in the sky coming straight down on you with a roar . . . the drumfire so milky and luminous on his birthday night . . . the wet surfaces in the shell craters for miles giving back one bleak autumn sky . . . what Haig, in the richness of his wit, once said at mess about Lieutenant Sassoon’s refusal to fight . . . the gunners in springtime, in their flowing green robes . . . roadsides of poor rotting horses just before apricot sunrise . . . the twelve spokes of a stranded artillery piece—a mud clock, a mud zodiac, clogged and crusted as it stood in the sun its many shades of brown. The mud of Flanders gathered into the curd-clumped, mildly jellied textures of human shit, piled, duckboarded, trenched and shell-pocked leagues of shit in all directions, not even the poor blackened stump of a tree—and the old blithering gab-artist tries to shake the cherrywood pulpit here, as if that had been the worst part of the whole Passchendaele horror, that absence of vertical interest. . . . On he goes, gabbing, gabbing, recipes for preparing beets in a hundred tasty ways, or such cucurbitaceous improbabilities as Ernest Pudding’s Gourd Surprise—yes, there is something sadistic about recipes with “Surprise” in the title, chap who’s hungry wants to just eat you know, not be Surprised really, just wants to bite into the (sigh) the old potato, and be reasonably sure there’s nothing inside but potato you see, certainly not some clever nutmeg “Surprise!”, some mashed pulp all magenta with pomegranates or something . . . well but this is just the doubtful sort of joke that Brigadier Pudding loves to play: how he’s chuckled, as unsuspecting dinner-guests go knifing into his notorious Toad-in-the-Hole, through the honest Yorkshire batter into—ugh! what is it? a beet rissolé? a stuffed beet rissolé? or perhaps today some lovely pureed samphire, reeking of the sea (which he obtains once a week from the same fat fishmonger’s son wheeling his bicycle, puffing, up the chalkwhite cliff)—none of these odd, odd vegetable rissoles do resemble any ordinary “Toad,” but rather the depraved, half-sentient creatures that Young Chaps from Kings Road have Affairs With in limericks—Pudding has thousands of these recipes and no shame about sharing any of them with the lot at PISCES, along with, later in the weekly soliloquy, a line or two, eight bars, from “Would You Rather Be a Colonel with an Eagle on Your Shoulder, or a Private with a Chicken on Your Knee?” then perhaps a lengthy recitation of all his funding difficulties, all, dating back to long before the emergence of even the Electra House group . . . letter-feuds he has carried on in the Times with critics of Haig. . . .

  And they all sit there, in front of the very high, blacked, lead-crossed windows, allowing him his folly, the dog people skulking over in one corner, passing notes and leaning to whisper (they plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up), the Psi Section lot clear over the other side of the room—as if we have a parliament of some kind here . . . everyone for years has occupied his own unique pew-seat and angle in to the ravings of reddish and liver-spotted Brigadier Pudding—with the other persuasions-in-exile spread between these two wings: the balance of power, if any power existed at “The White Visitation.”

  Dr. Rózsavölgyi feels that there well might, if the fellows “play their cards right.” The only issue now is survival—on through the awful interface of V-E Day, on into the bright new Postwar with senses and memories intact. PISCES must not be allowed to go down under the hammer with the rest of the bawling herd. There must arise, and damned soon, able to draw them into a phalanx, a concentrated point of light, some leader or program powerful enough to last them across who knows how many years of Postwar. Dr. Rózsavölgyi tends to favor a powerful program over a powerful leader. Maybe because this is 1945. It was widely believed in those days that behind the War—all the death, savagery, and destruction—lay the Führer-principle. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma . . . that its rationalization should proceed while we had the time and resources. . . .

  Isn’t that what’s really at stake for Dr. Rózsavölgyi here in this latest scheme, centered on the figure of Lieutenant Slothrop? All the psychological tests in the subject’s dossier, clear back to his college days, indicate a diseased personality. “Rosie” slaps the file with his hand for emphasis. The staff table shudders. “For exam-ple: his Minneso-ta, Mul-tipha-sic Personality Inventory is tremen-dously lopsi-ded, always in fa-vor of, the psycho-pathic, and, the unwhole-some.”

  But the Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit is not fond of the MMPI. “Rosie, are there scales for measuring interpersonal traits?” Hawk’s nose probing, probing, eyes lowered in politic meekness, “Human values? Trust, honesty, love? Is there—forgive me the special pleading—a religious scale, by any chance?”

  No way, padre: the MMPI was developed about 1943. In the very heart of the War. Allport and Vernon’s Study of Values, the Bernreuter Inventory as revised by Flanagan in ’35—tests from before the War—seem to Paul de la Nuit more humane. All the MMPI appears to test for is whether a man will be a good or bad soldier.

  “Soldiers are much in demand these days, Reverend Doctor,” murmurs Mr. Pointsman.

  “I only hope that we won’t put too much emphasis on
his MMPI scores. It seems to me very narrow. It omits large areas of the human personality.”