AtDDtA1: Unsettling Shriek

[Dave Monroe]

   "As the vital gas continued to stream in unsettling shriek from the
valve overhead, and the airship to plunge ever more rapidly Earthward
...."  (AtD, Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 11)


Cf. ...

   "A screaming comes across the sky." (GR, Pt. I, p. 3)

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/3928/pns3.html

http://www.english.ilstu.edu/351/hypertext97/hutley/pynchon/first.htm

"She made the mistake of looking at herself in the full-length mirror,
saw a beach ball with feet, and laughed so violently she fell over,
taking a can of hair spray on the sink with her. The can hit the
floor, something broke, and with a great outsurge of pressure the
stuff commenced atomizing, propelling the can swiftly about the
bathroom. Metzger rushed in to find Oedipa rolling around, trying to
get back on her feet, amid a great sticky miasma of fragrant lacquer.
'Oh, for Pete's sake,' he said in his Baby Igor voice. The can,
hissing malignantly, bounced off the toilet and whizzed by Metzger's
right ear, missing by maybe a quarter of an inch. Metzger hit the deck
and cowered with Oedipa as the can continued its high-speed caroming;
from the other room came a slow, deep crescendo of naval bombardment,
machine-gun, howitzer and small-arms fire, screams and chopped-off
prayers of dying infantry. She looked up past his eyelids, into the
staring ceiling light, her field of vision cut across by wild,
flashing overflights of the can, whose pressure seemed inexhaustible.
She was scared but nowhere near sober. The can knew where it was
going, she sensed, or something fast enough, God or a digital machine,
might have computed in advance the complex web of its travel; but she
wasn't fast enough, and knew only that it might hit them at any
moment, at whatever clip it was doing, a hundred miles an hour.
"Metzger," she moaned, and sank her teeth into his upper arm, through
the sharkskin. Everything smelled like hair spray. The can collided
with a mirror and bounced away, leaving a silvery, reticulated bloom
of glass to hang a second before it all fell jingling into the sink;
zoomed over to the enclosed shower, where it crashed into and totally
destroyed a panel of frosted glass; thence around the three tile
walls, up to the ceiling, past the light, over the two prostrate
bodies, amid its own whoosh and the buzzing, distorted uproar from the
TV set. She could imagine no end to it; yet presently the can did give
up in mid-flight and fall to the floor, about a foot from Oedipa's
nose. She lay watching it." (Lot 49, Ch. 2, pp. 24-5)

http://amb.cult.bg/american/6/pynchon/lot2.htm

http://www.innternet.de/~peter.patti/thomaspynchon-thecryingoflot49.htm