Gravity's Rainbow Read Online Free PDF Page B

delivery to make. . . .
    • • • • • • •
    Wind has shifted around to the southwest, and the barometer’s falling. The early afternoon
     is already dark as evening, under the massing rainclouds. Tyrone Slothrop is gonna
     be caught out in it, too. Today it’s been a long, idiot chase out to zero longitude,
     with the usual nothing to show. This one was supposed to be another premature airburst,
     the lumps of burning rocket showering down for miles around, most of it into the river,
     only one piece in any kind of shape and that well surrounded, by the time Slothrop
     arrived, with the tightest security he’s seen yet, and the least friendly. Soft, faded
     berets against the slate clouds, Mark III Stens set on automatic, 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