GRAVITY RAINBOW Read Online Free PDF

mustaches mouthwide covering enormous upper lips, humorless-no chance for any American lieutenant to get a look, not today.
    ACHTUNG, anyhow, is the poor relative of Allied intelligence. At least this time Slothrop's not alone, he's had the cold comfort of seeing his opposite number from T.I., and shortly after that even the man's section chief, come fussing onto the scene in a '37 Wolseley Wasp, both turned back too. Ha! Neither of them returning Slothrop's amiable nod. Tough shit, fellas. But shrewd Tyrone hangs around, distributing Lucky Strikes, long enough to find at least what's up with this Unlucky Strike, here.
    What it is is a graphite cylinder, about six inches long and two in diameter, all but a few flakes of its Army-green paint charred away. Only piece that survived the burst. Evidently it was meant to. There seem to be papers stashed inside. Sergeant-major burned his hand picking it up and was heard to holler Oh fuck, causing laughter among the lower paygrades. Everybody was waiting around for a Captain Prentice from S.O.E. (those prickly bastards take their time about everything), who does presently show up. Slothrop gets a glimpse- windburned face, big mean mother. Prentice takes the cylinder, drives away, and that's that.
    In which case, Slothrop reckons, ACHTUNG can, a bit wearily, submit its fifty-millionth interbranch request to that S.O.E., asking for some report on the cylinder's contents, and, as usual, be ignored. It's O.K., he's not bitter. S.O.E. ignores everybody, and everybody ignores ACHTUNG. A-and what does it matter, anyhow? It's his last rocket for a while. Hopefully for good.
    This morning in his IN basket were orders sending him TDY some hospital out in the East End. No explanation beyond an attached carbon copy of a note to ACHTUNG requesting his reassignment "as part of the P.W.E. Testing Programme." Testing? P.W.E. is Political Warfare Executive, he looked that up. Some more of that Minnesota Multiphasic shit, no doubt. But it will be a change from this rocket-hunting routine, which is beginning to get a little old.
    Once upon a time Slothrop cared. No kidding. He thinks he did, anyway. A lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry now. He can remember the first Blitz only as a long spell of good luck. Nothing that Luftwaffe dropped came near him. But this last summer they started in with those buzzbombs. You'd be walking on the street, in bed just dozing off suddenly here comes this farting sound over the rooftops-if it just keeps on, rising to a peak and passing over why that's fine, then it's somebody else's worry… but if the engine cuts off, look out Jackson-it's begun its dive, sloshing the fuel aft, away from the engine burner, and you've got 10 seconds to get under something. Well, it wasn't really too bad. After a while you adjusted-found yourself making small bets, a shilling or two, with Tantivy Mucker-Maffick at the next desk, about where the next doodle would hit…
    But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn't adjust to the bastards. No way. For the first time, he was surprised to find that he was really scared. Began drinking heavier, sleeping less, chain-smoking, feeling in some way he'd been taken for a sucker. Christ, it wasn't supposed to keep on like this…
    "I say Slothrop, you've already got one in your mouth-"
    "Nervous," Slothrop lighting up anyway.
    "Well not mine" Tantivy pleads.
    "Two at a time, see?" making them point down like comicbook fangs. The lieutenants stare at each other through the beery shadows, with the day deepening outside the high cold windows of the Snipe and Shaft, and Tantivy about to laugh or snort oh God across the wood Atlantic of their table.
    Atlantics aplenty there've been these three years, often rougher than the one William, the first transatlantic Slothrop, crossed many ancestors ago. Barbarities of dress and speech, lapses in behavior-one horrible evening drunken Slothrop, Tantivy's guest at the