Episode 1 of Beyond The Zero is set on Monday December 18, 1944 in London, England at the maisonette of Pirate Prentice and Teddy Bloat, "not far from the Chelsea Embankment."1
Captain Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice is asleep and dreaming about the evacuation of London and its futility - 'The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre.'2 When Pirate awakes he finds Teddy Bloat on the verge of falling out of an upstairs balcony. Pirate, having undergone instruction at the Special Operations Executive, thereby training him to act quickly, saves Bloat as he begins to fall by kicking his bed underneath him to cushion his fall. Pirate, who is famous for his Banana Breakfasts has, owing to the shortage of bananas in World War II, constructed a greenhouse to cultivate them on his roof.
After urinating and putting on a woollen robe, he steps outside, the cold weather hurting his dental fillings, and climbs up to the roof. After a short period on the rooftop he sees a vapour trail in a vertical formation in the distance, indicating to him that it cannot be an aeroplane but must instead be 'the new, and still Most Secret, German rocket bomb'3; the V-2. Pirate either thinks or says aloud the phrase 'incoming mail'3, indicating both the rocket and, more literally, an inbound message. Pirate observes that the vapour trail abruptly stops at the point called 'Brennschluss'3, the end of burning; the point when the rocket's trajectory begins to be guided solely by gravity.
Pirate considers warning people about the incoming V-2 but decides against it and continues to pick his bananas. At this point he contemplates that, should the rocket strike nearby, he will only ever hear it if he survives owing to the fact that the V-2 travels faster than the speed of sound. However, he muses, if the rocket should hit you exactly, 'for a split second you'd have to feel the very point [...] strike the top of the skull.'4 Pirate then carries his bananas down the ladder.
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references
- ^Weisenburger, Steven, A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 16
- ^Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity's Rainbow (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 3
- ^ [1][2][3] Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, p. 6
- ^Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, p. 7
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