Gravity's Rainbow Read Online Free Page B

beast—” the wire is snapped, the transmission
     ends, the balloon rises into the teal-blue daybreak. Teams come down from the Cavendish
     Laboratory, to string the Heath with huge magnets, electric-arc terminals, black iron
     control panels full of gauges and cranks, the Army shows up in full battle gear with
     bombs full of the latest deadly gas—the Adenoid is blasted, electric-shocked, poisoned,
     changes color and shape here and there, yellow fat-nodes appear high over the trees . . .
     before the flash-powder cameras of the Press, a hideous green pseudopod crawls toward
     the cordon of troops and suddenly
sshhlop!
wipes out an entire observation post with a deluge of some disgusting orange mucus
     in which the unfortunate men are
digested
—not screaming but actually laughing,
enjoying
themselves. . . .
    Pirate/Osmo’s mission is to establish liaison with the Adenoid. The situation is now
     stable, the Adenoid occupies all of St. James’s, the historic buildings are no more,
     Government offices have been relocated, but so dispersed that communication among
     them is highly uncertain—postmen are being snatched off of their rounds by stiff-pimpled
     Adenoid tentacles of fluorescent beige, telegraph wires are apt to go down at any
     whim of the Adenoid. Each morning Lord Blatherard Osmo must put on his bowler, and
     take his briefcase out to the Adenoid to make his daily
démarche.
It is taking up so much of his time he’s begun to neglect Novi Pazar, and F.O. is
     worried. In the thirties balance-of-power thinking was still quite strong, the diplomats
     were all down with Balkanosis, spies with foreign hybrid names lurked in all the stations
     of the Ottoman rump, code messages in a dozen Slavic tongues were being tattooed on
     bare upper lips over which the operatives then grew mustaches, to be shaved off only
     by authorized crypto officers and skin then grafted over the messages by the Firm’s
     plastic surgeons . . . their lips were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally
     white, by which they all knew each other.
    Novi Pazar, anyhow, was still a
croix mystique
on the palm of Europe, and F.O. finally decided to go to the Firm for help. The Firm
     knew just the man.
    Every day, for 2½ years, Pirate went out to visit the St. James Adenoid. It nearly
     drove him crazy. Though he was able to develop a pidgin by which he and the Adenoid
     could communicate, unfortunately he wasn’t nasally equipped to make the sounds too
     well, and it got to be an awful chore. As the two of them snuffled back and forth,
     alienists in black seven-button suits, admirers of Dr. Freud the Adenoid clearly had
     no use for, stood on stepladders up against its loathsome grayish flank shoveling
     the new wonderdrug cocaine—bringing
hods
full of the white substance, in relays, up the ladders to smear on the throbbing
     gland-creature, and into the germ toxins bubbling nastily inside its crypts, with
     no visible effects at all (though who knows how that
Adenoid
felt, eh?).
    But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar.
     Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca
     pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of
     the Firm. Months passed, World War II started, years passed, nothing was heard from
     Novi Pazar. Pirate Prentice had saved Europe from the Balkan Armageddon the old men
     dreamed of, giddy in their beds with its grandeur—though not from World War II, of
     course. But by then, the Firm was allowing Pirate only tiny homeopathic doses of peace,
     just enough to keep his defenses up, but not enough for it to poison him.
    • • • • • • •
    Teddy Bloat’s on his lunch hour, but lunch today’ll be, ack, a soggy banana sandwich
     in wax paper, which he’s packing inside his stylish kangaroohide musette bag and threaded
     around the odd necessities—midget spy-camera, jar