Moving into Stollen 20 and up, traffic grows heavier. This was the A4 part of the factory, which the Rocket shared with V-1 and turboprop assemblies. Out of these Stollen, the 20s, 30s, and 40s, Rocket components were fed out crosswise into the two main assembly lines. As you walk deeper, you retrace the Rocket’s becoming: superchargers, center sections, nose assemblies, power units, controls, tail sections… lotta these tail sections still around here, stacked alternately fins up/fins down, row on row identical, dimpled ripply metal surfaces. Slothrop moseys along looking at his face in them, watching it warp and slide by, just a big underground fun house here folks… . Empty dollies with small metal wheels chain away back down the tunnel: they carry four-bladed arrowhead shapes that point at the ceiling—oh. Right—the pointed holders must’ve fit inside the expansion nozzles of the thrust chambers, sure enough here comes a bunch of them, big fucking things tall as Slothrop, capital As painted in white near the burner cups… . Overhead the fat and sinuous white-lagged pipes are lurking, and the steel lamps give no light out of their scorched skullcap reflectors… down the tunnel’s centerline run Lally columns, slender, gray, the exposed threads locked in rust of long standing… blue shadows wash through the spare-parts cages, set on planking and I beams hung from damp and chimney-sized columns of brick… glass-wool insulation lies beside the tracks, heaped like snow… .

Final assembly went on in Stollen 41. The cross-tunnel is 50 feet deep, to accommodate the finished Rocket. Sounds of carousing, of voices distinctly unbalanced, come welling up, reverberating off of the concrete. Personnel are weaving back up the main tunnel with a glassy and rubicund look to their faces. Slothrop squints down into this long pit, and makes out a crowd of Americans and Russians gathered around a huge oak beer barrel. A gnome-size German civilian with a red von Hindenburg mustache is dispensing steins of what looks to be mostly head. Ordnance smoke-puffs flicker on nearly every sleeve. The Americans are singing

ROCKET LIMERICKS

There once was a thing called a V-2,

To pilot which you did not need to—

You just pushed a button,

And it would leave nuttin’

But stiffs and big holes and debris, too.

The tune is known universally among American fraternity boys. But for some reason it is being sung here in German Storm Trooper style: notes clipping off sharp at the end of each line, then a pulse of silence before the attack on the next line.

[Refrain:] Ja, ja, ja, ja!

In Prussia they never eat pussy!

There ain’t hardly cats enough,

There’s garbage and that’s enough,

So waltz me around again, Russky!

Drunks are hanging from steel ladders and draped over catwalks. Beer fumes crawl in the long cavern, among pieces of olive-drab rocket, some upright, some lying on their sides.

There was a young fellow named Crockett,

Who had an affair with a rocket.

If you saw them out there