Austin Meakim’s Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow > Status Update

And how much of the pretty victim straining against her bonds does Ned Pointsman see in each dog that visits his test stands...and aren’t scalpel and probe as decorative, as fine extensions as whip and cane?

he can’t help this bit of rudeness, although the agreement among the seven owners was not to mark up The Book—it was too valuable for that sort of thing, they’d had to put in a guinea apiece.

Pointsman has been talking about paranoia and the “idea of the opposite.”

Last night, in the house at the edge of the stay-away town, Jessica, snuggling, afloat, just before sleep was to take them, whispered, “Roger... what about the girls?” That was all she said. But it brought Roger wide awake. And bone-tired as he was, he lay staring for another hour, wondering about the girls.

But if it’s in the air, right here, right now, then the rockets follow from it, 100% of the time. No exceptions. When we find it, we'll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul. There will be precious little room for any hope at all. You can see how important a discovery like that would be.

does desire grow directly or inversely as the real chance of sudden death—damn it, what cue, right in front of our eyes, that we haven’t the subtlety of heart to see?...

what does make the little doxies do it for free?
Are there fluctuations in the sexual market, in pornography or prostitutes, perhaps tying into prices on the Stock Exchange itself, that we clean-living lot know nothing about?

The points to the V-1: any doodle close enough to make him jump ought to be giving him an erection: the sound of the motor razzing louder and louder, then the cutoff and silence, suspense building up—then the explosion. Boing, a hardon. But oh, no. Slothrop instead only gets erections when this sequence happens in reverse. Explosion first, then the sound of approach: the V-2.

Helpfully, Slothrop has dated most of his stars. A star always comes before its corresponding rocket strike. The strike can come as quickly as two days, or as slowly as ten. The mean lag is about 4.5 days.

But, well, it’s a bit more than the distribution. The two patterns also happen to be identical. They match up square for square. The slides that Teddy Bloat’s been taking of Slothrop’s map have been projected onto Roger's, and the two images, girl-stars and rocket-strike circles, demonstrated to coincide.
(Called it again)