Free Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Army-colored
     skirt under graceful as a wing, all with the blast still reverberating.
    He thinks he can see a solemn gnarled something, deeper or changing faster than clouds,
     rising to the north. Will she snuggle now cutely against him, ask him to protect her?
     He didn’t even believe she’d get in the car, rocket or no rocket, accordingly now
     puts Pointsman’s Jaguar somehow into reverse instead of low, yes, backs over the bicycle,
     rendering it in a great crunch useless for anything but scrap.
    “I’m in your power,” she cries.
“Utterly.”
    “Hmm,” Roger at length finding his gear, dancing among the pedals rrrn, snarl, off
     to London. But Jessica’s not in his power.
    And the war, well, she
is
Roger’s mother, she’s leached at all the soft, the vulnerable inclusions of hope
     and praise scattered, beneath the mica-dazzle, through Roger’s mineral, grave-marker
     self, washed it all moaning away on her gray tide. Six years now, always just in sight,
     just where he can see her. He’s forgotten his first corpse, or when he first saw someone
     living die. That’s how long it’s been going on. Most of his life, it seems. The city
     he visits nowadays is Death’s antechamber: where all the paperwork’s done, the contracts
     signed, the days numbered. Nothing of the grand, garden, adventurous capital his childhood
     knew. He’s become the Dour Young Man of “The White Visitation,” the spider hitching
     together his web of numbers. It’s an open secret that he doesn’t get on with the rest
     of his section. How can he? They’re all wild talents—clairvoyants and mad magicians,
     telekinetics, astral travelers, gatherers of light. Roger’s only a statistician. Never
     had a prophetic dream, never sent or got a telepathic message, never touched the Other
     World directly. If anything’s there it will show in the experimental data won’t it,
     in the numbers . . . but that’s as close or clear as he’ll ever get. Any wonder he’s
     a bit short with Psi Section, all the definitely 3-sigma lot up and down his basement
     corridor? Jesus Christ, wouldn’t you be?
    That one clear need of theirs, so patent, exasperates him. . . .
His
need too, all right. But how are you ever going to put anything “psychical” on a
     scientific basis with your mortality always goading, just outside the chi-square calculations,
     in between the flips of the Zener cards and the silences among the medium’s thick,
     straining utterances? In his mellower moments he thinks that continuing to try makes
     him brave. But most of the time he’s cursing himself for not working in fire control,
     or graphing Standardized Kill Rates Per Ton for the bomber groups . . .
anything
but this thankless meddling into the affairs of invulnerable Death. . . .
    They have drawn near a glow over the rooftops. Fire Service vehicles come roaring
     by them, heading the same direction. It is an oppressive region of brick streets and
     silent walls.
    Roger brakes for a crowd of sappers, firefighters, neighbors in dark coats over white
     nightclothes, old ladies who have a special place in their night-thoughts for the
     Fire Service
no please you’re not going to use that great Hose on me . . . oh no . . . aren’t you
     even going to take off those horrid rubber boots . . . yesyes that’s
—
    Soldiers stand every few yards, a loose cordon, unmoving, a bit supernatural. The
     Battle of Britain was hardly so formal. But these new robot bombs bring with them
     chances for public terror no one has sounded. Jessica notes a coal-black Packard up
     a side street, filled with dark-suited civilians. Their white collars rigid in the
     shadows.
    “Who’re they?”
    He shrugs: “they” is good enough. “Not a friendly lot.”
    “Look who’s talking.” But their smile is old, habitual. There was a time when his
     job had her a bit mental: lovely little scrapbooks on the flying bombs, how sweet. . . .
     And his