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

Fahringer
The rocket for this Fahringer was a fat Japanese arrow. It was necessary in someway to become one with rocket, trajectory, and target—“ not to Will it, but to surrender, to step out of the role of firer. The act is undivided. you are both aggressor and victim, rocket and parabolic path and…
Pokler never knew what the man was talking about. But mondaugen understood.

[Mondaugen] seemed to look at fuel and oxidizer as paired opposites, male and female principles uniting in the mystical egg of the combustion chamber: creation and destruction, fire, and water, chemical plus and chemical minus—

then in ‘34, a major one…
The blast demolished the test stand, killing Doctor Wahmke and two others. First blood, first sacrifice.

The social spectrum ran from Von Braun, the prussian aristocrat, down to the likes of Pokler, who would eat an apple in the street— yet they were all equally at the rockets mercy: not only danger from explosions or falling hardware, but also it’s dumbness, it’s dead weight, it’s obstinate and palpable mystery…

A Berlin slum dweller, he thought, knew how to think in half rations….

Was he giving up the world, entering a monastic order?
One night he set fire to 20 pages of calculations. Integral signs weaved like charmed cobras, comical curly d’s marched along like hunchbacks through the fire-edge into billows of lace ash. But that was his only relapse.

Later, as the A4 was going operational, as they found themselves with a real rocket in being, the struggles for power would begin in earnest. Pokler could see that. They were athletic, brainless men without vision, without imagination. But they had power, and it was hard for him not to think of them as superior, even while holding them in a certain contempt.

But others had the money, others gave the orders— trying to super impose their lust and bickering on something that had its own vitality, on a technologique they’d never begin to understand. As long as the rocket was in research and development, there was no need for them to believe in it.

The majors eyes always changed when he looked at Pokler: his slightly prissy face to relax into his own face when he was with Leni. The blank look of one who is taking another for granted.

The choice was between building what the Army wanted—practical hardware—or pushing on in chronic poverty, dreaming of expeditions to Venus.