Gravity's Rainbow Read Online Free PDF

George
     Formby, if you can imagine such a thing,” but Bloat’s decided he’d rather not), an
     empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts
     of the amber left eye of a Weimaraner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate-blue
     veining in a distant cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset),
     rivets in the skin of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up
     girl . . . a few old Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2, a busted corkscrewing
     ukulele string, boxes of gummed paper stars in many colors, pieces of a flashlight,
     top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his blurry
     brass reflection, any number of reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down
     the hall—a dictionary of technical German, an F.O.
Special Handbook
or
Town Plan
—and usually, unless it’s been pinched or thrown away, a
News of the World
somewhere too—Slothrop’s a faithful reader.
    Tacked to the wall next to Slothrop’s desk is a map of London, which Bloat is now
     busy photographing with his tiny camera. The musette bag is open, and the cubicle
     begins to fill with the smell of ripe bananas. Should he light a fag to cover this?
     air doesn’t exactly stir in here, they’ll know someone’s been in. It takes him four
     exposures, click zippety click, my how very efficient at this he’s become—anyone nips
     in one simply drops camera into bag where banana-sandwich cushions fall, telltale
     sound and harmful G-loads alike.
    Too bad whoever’s funding this little caper won’t spring for color film. Bloat wonders
     if it mightn’t make a difference, though he knows of no one he can ask. The stars
     pasted up on Slothrop’s map cover the available spectrum, beginning with silver (labeled
     “Darlene”) sharing a constellation with Gladys, green, and Katharine, gold, and as
     the eye strays Alice, Delores, Shirley, a couple of Sallys—mostly red and blue through
     here—a cluster near Tower Hill, a violet density about Covent Garden, a nebular streaming
     on into Mayfair, Soho, and out to Wembley and up to Hampstead Heath—in every direction
     goes this glossy, multicolored, here and there peeling firmament, Carolines, Marias,
     Annes, Susans, Elizabeths.
    But perhaps the colors are only random, uncoded. Perhaps the girls are not even real.
     From Tantivy, over weeks of casual questions (
we know he’s your schoolmate but it’s too risky bringing him in
), Bloat’s only able to report that Slothrop began work on this map last autumn, about
     the time he started going out to look at rocket-bomb disasters for ACHTUNG—having
     evidently the time, in his travels among places of death, to devote to girl-chasing.
     If there’s a reason for putting up the paper stars every few days the man hasn’t explained
     it—it doesn’t seem to be for publicity, Tantivy’s the only one who even glances at
     the map and that’s more in the spirit of an amiable anthropologist—“Some sort of harmless
     Yank hobby,” he tells his friend Bloat. “Perhaps it’s to keep track of them all. He
     does lead rather a complicated social life,” thereupon going into the story of Lorraine
     and Judy, Charles the homosexual constable and the piano in the pantechnicon, or the
     bizarre masquerade involving Gloria and her nubile mother, a quid wager on the Blackpool-Preston
     North End game, a naughty version of “Silent Night,” and a providential fog. But none
     of these yarns, for the purposes of those Bloat reports to, are really very illuminating. . . .
    Well. He’s done now. Bag zipped, lamp off and moved back in place. Perhaps there’s
     time to catch Tantivy over at the Snipe and Shaft, time for a comradely pint. He moves
     back down the beaverboard maze, in the weak yellow light, against a tide of incoming
     girls in galoshes, aloof Bloat unsmiling, no time for slap-and-tickle here you see,
     he still has his day’s