Gravity's Rainbow Read Online Free PDF Page A

of mustache wax, tin of licorice,
     menthol and capsicum Meloids for a Mellow Voice, goldrim prescription sunglasses General
     MacArthur style, twin silver hairbrushes each in the shape of the flaming SHAEF sword,
     which Mother had Garrard’s make up for him and which he considers exquisite.
    His objective this dripping winter noon is a gray stone town house, neither large
     nor historic enough to figure in any guidebook, set back just out of sight of Grosvenor
     Square, somewhat off the official war-routes and corridors about the capital. When
     the typewriters happen to pause (8:20 and other mythical hours), and there are no
     flights of American bombers in the sky, and the motor traffic’s not too heavy in Oxford
     Street, you can hear winter birds cheeping outside, busy at the feeders the girls
     have put up.
    Flagstones are slippery with mist. It is the dark, hard, tobacco-starved, headachy,
     sour-stomach middle of the day, a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death
     and some of them even know it, many about now are already into the second or third
     pint or highball glass, which produces a certain desperate aura here. But Bloat, going
     in the sandbagged entrance (provisional pyramids erected to gratify curious gods’
     offspring indeed), can’t feel a bit of it: he’s too busy running through plausible
     excuses should he happen to get caught, not that he will, you know. . . .
    Girl at the main desk, gumpopping, good-natured bespectacled ATS, waves him on upstairs.
     Damp woolen aides on the way to staff meetings, W.C.s, an hour or two of earnest drinking,
     nod, not really seeing him, he’s a well-known face, what’s’isname’s mate, Oxford chums
     aren’t they, that lieutenant works down the hall at ACHTUNG. . . .
    The old house has been subdivided by the slummakers of war. ACHTUNG is Allied Clearing
     House, Technical Units, Northern Germany. It’s a stale-smoke paper warren, at the
     moment nearly deserted, its black typewriters tall as grave markers. The floor is
     filthy lino, there are no windows: the electric light is yellow, cheap, merciless.
     Bloat looks into the office assigned to his old Jesus College friend, Lt. Oliver (“Tantivy”)
     Mucker-Maffick. No one’s about. Tantivy and the Yank are both at lunch. Good. Out
     wiv the old camera then, on with the gooseneck lamp, now aim the reflector just so . . .
    There must be cubicles like this all over the ETO: only the three dingy scuffed-cream
     fiberboard walls and no ceiling of its own. Tantivy shares it with an American colleague,
     Lt. Tyrone Slothrop. Their desks are at right angles, so there’s no eye contact but
     by squeaking around some 90°. Tantivy’s desk is neat, Slothrop’s is a godawful mess.
     It hasn’t been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen
     roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the
     bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings,
     dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash,
     very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library
     paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo
     flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches,
     pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope
     and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer’s Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by
     Slothrop’s mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string,
     chalk . . . above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone
     numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele
     chords to a dozen songs including “Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland” (“He does
     have some rather snappy arrangements,” Tantivy reports, “he’s a sort of American