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

“ no, it wasn’t supposed to. It’s supposed to fly in a big curve,” motioning with his hand, the parabola trailing behind encompassing testing stands, assembly buildings, drawing them together as the crosses priests make in the air quarter and divide the staring congregations behind them…

So, as usual, Pokler chose silence. Had he chosen something else, back while there was time, they all might have saved themselves. Even left the country. Now, too late, when at last he wanted to act, there was nothing to act on.

Weissman was one of the people who had driven mondaugen, finally, away to live in the bush. But they had found a rapprochement here, among the rockets, either for sunblasted holyman reasons it was not for Pokler to understand or because of some deeper connection which had always been there…

He looked slantwise into her face, all his emptiness echoing. The vacuum of his life threatened to be broken in one strong inrush of love. He tried to maintain it with seals of suspicion, looking for a resemblance to the face he’d last seen years ago over her mother’s shoulder, eyes still puffy from sleep, angled down across Leni’s raincoated back, growing out a door he’d thought closed for good—

There has been this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries— since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air. And now Pokler was about to be given proof that these techniques had been extended past images on film, to human lives.

But to get a dependable working motor, one the military could use in the field to kill people, the real engineering problem now was to keep things as simple as possible.

They were getting exhaust velocity of 1800 m/s, but the value they were aiming for was 2000. They called it the magic number, and they meant it literally. As some gamblers on the stock market know when to place stop orders, feeling by instinct, not on the printed numbers, but the rates of change, knowing from first and second derivatives in their skin when to come in, stay or go,

Something was out to get him, something here, among the paper. The fear of extinction named Pokler knew it was the rocket, beckoning him in. If he also knew that in something like this extinction he could be free of his loneliness and his failure, still he wasn’t quite convinced…

They were invading gravity itself, and a beachhead had to be laid down.

Closest to the zero among them all, perhaps, was the African Enzian, the protégé of major Weissmann… he was known as Weissmann‘s monster, probably less out of racism then at the picture the two of them made,