Episode 26 (374-385) (236-244)

21. März 1945

Slothrop erlebt den Frühlingsanfang 1945 an der Riviera. Es wird - historisch korrekt - von Wernher von Brauns Verletzung berichtet, der sich am 18.3.45 bei einem Autounfall den Arm gebrochen hatte (Weisenburger, p. 125). Auf die Nähe dieses Geburtstages (23.3.1912) zum Frühlingspunkt wird noch an anderer Stelle im Roman verwiesen. ( Episode 35, p. 361).

“Slothrop’s own image of the plot against him has grown. Earlier the conspiracy was monolithic, all-potent, nothing he could ever touch. Until that drinking game, and that scene with that Katje (...) And then, well, he is lately beginning to find his way into one particular state of consciousness, not a dream certainly, perhaps what used to be called a “reverie”, though one .where the colors are more primaries than pastels — and at such times it seems he has touched, and stayed touching, for a while, a soul we know, a voice that has more than once spoken through research-facility medium Carrol Eventyr: the late Roland Feldspath again, long-co-opted expert on control systems, guidance equations, feedback situations for this Aeronautical Establishment and that. Seems that, for personal reasons, Roland has remained hovering over this Slothropian space, through sunlight whose energy he barely feels and through storms that tickle his back with static electricity has Roland been whispering from eight kilometers, the savage height, stationed as he has been along one of the last Parabolas—flight paths that must never be taken—working as one of the invisible Interdictors of the stratosphere now, bureaucratized hopelessly on that side as ever on this, he keeps his astral meathooks in as well can be expected, curled in the “sky” so tense with all the frustrations of trying to reach across, with the impotence of certain dreamers who try to wake or talk and cannot, who struggle against weights and probes of cranial pain that it seems could not be borne waking, he waits, not necessarily for the aimless entrances of boobs like Slothrop here—
Roland shivers. Is this the one? This? to be figurehead for the latest passage? Oh dear. God have mercy: what storms, what monsters of the Aether could this Slothrop ever charm away for anyone?
Well, Roland must make the best of it, that’s all. If they get this far, he has to show them what he knows about Control. That's one of his death’s secret missions. (...) Ask the Germans especially. Oh, it is a real sad story, how shoddily their Schwärmerei for Control was used by the folks in power. Paranoid Systems of History (...) has even suggested (...) that the whole German Inflation was created deliberately, simply to drive young enthusiasts of the Cybernetic Tradition into Control work (...) If any of the young engineers saw correspondence between the deep conservatism of Feedback and the kinds of lives they were coming to lead in the very process of embracing it, it got lost, or disguised—none of them made the connection, at least not while alive: it took death to show it to Roland Feldspath, death with its very good chances for being Too Late, and a host of other souls feeling themselves, even now, Rocketlike, driving out toward the stone-blue lights of the vacuum under a Control they cannot quite name … the illumination out here is surprisingly mild, mild as heavenly robes, a feeling of population and invisible forces, fragments of “voices,” glimpses into another order of being. ” (238-9)

239 Maxwell’s Demon