V

V-1
See Rocket; V-1 Rocket

V-2
See Rocket; V-2 Rocket

"fraternity-boy reflex in a vacuum" 22; "if they can see through to your vacuum" 50; "Vacuum brings the secretion along through shining tubework" 78; "run not by any lust. . .but by vacuum" 149; "the stone-blue lights of the Vacuum" 239; "to miss grandeur, only to be in its vacuum, to be tugged slightly along by its slipstream" 324; "State he is building in the German vacuum" 337; "a stark circle of" 342; "vacuum cleaner" 374; "vacuuming by above" 380; "Victim in a Vacuum" 414-15; "all his vacuums" 432; "vacuum hours" 584; "At least she won't be leaving him in a vacuum" 629; "Is this how the Vacuum feels?" 659; "the great Vacuum in the sky" 697; "What if there is no Vacuum?" 697; "vacuum. . .gleaming in the Void" 699; "it's vacuum inside and out" 723; "a Vacuum in time" 726; "guns. . .like vacuum cleaners" 745; See also nihilism; Void; Zero

"Transylvanian Magyars, they know spells" 11; "Roger [...] hunched Dracula-style inside his Burberry" 37; "shining the light up from under his chin to highlight the vampire face he thinks he's making" 44; "his most famous compatriot [...] staff who swear they've seen [Rözsavölgyi] crawling headfirst down the north façade" 82; Bela Lugosi, 106; "wings of his cape reaching to enfold" 171; "dusty Dracularity, the West's ancient curse" 263; "Garlic bulbs? Wait--weren't they to keep away vampires?" 283; "Katje, the lovely little Queen of Transylvania" 283; "Slothrop puts the whip down and climbs on top, covering her with the wings of his cape" 397; "dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding" 521; "For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross" 540; "trying for a Russian accent, which comes out like Bela Lugosi" 557; "holding up the mandala, cross to vampire" 560; "a pregnant Lugosi pause" 561; Slothrop, 629; "it's your last taste of O-negative, Jackson, those fangs won't even begin to gum oatmeal" 632; "Buddy at the last minute decided to go see Dracula" 652; "vampire mosquitos" 692; "glass is a reluctant vampire" 711

van der Groov, Franz
108; ancestor of Katje; went to Mauritius and, with other Dutch settlers, wiped out Dodoes -considered them satanic because of their ugliness; 545; still haunting Pirate, 620; 621; cosmic windmill, 624

van der Groov, Hendrik
108; brother of Franz

Vanitas
268; Latin: emptiness

Vanya
155; "slavic" comrade of Leni's in KPD; 156; 158

Vanya, Dog
78; laboratory animal at White Visitation; 79; 90; 229

Vauxhall Bridge
Vauxhall, Crosses the River Thames in Vauxhall, borough of Lambeth, Greater London, England; "[Pirate's] driven out, away, east over Vauxhall Bridge" 11

V.C.s
The highest decoration for valor in the British armed forces, the Victoria Cross is awarded for extreme bravery in the face of the enemy. Instituted in 1856 by Queen Victoria at the request of her consort Prince Albert; 636

VD toilet
452; on Toiletship

VE-301 People's Receiver
451; on Toiletship

V.E. Day
9; Victory in Europe (May 8, 1945); "awful interface of" 80; 269; 274; 276; 288; 628

Veiled Prophet Ball
582; Mrs. Tracy preparing for

Verbindungsman
344; German: liaison officer, go-between; the IG salesmen; [IG Farben|Sasuly's IG Farben]

Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR)
400; German: "Society for Space Travel"; German amateur rocketeers club pre-WWII, from whose ranks came the rocket engineers for the Wehrmacht; 401; 582; See also Raketenflugplatz

Vereinigte Stahlwerke
587; German: "United Steelworks"; where Fibel worked; shares a patent with an English steel firm, for "an alloy used in the liquid-oxygen couplings for the line running aft to the S-Gerät in A-4 number 00000" 632; Sasuly's IG Farben

Vermeer, Jan (1632-75)
Dutch painter of mainly of interior genre subjects. His mastery of the soft play of daylight on varied shapes and surfaces, pictorial design, and his pure and individual color sense make him one of the masters of painting in the 17th century; "framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer" 109

Vermittlungsstelle W
630; handled IG's liaison with OKW, "under Drs. Dieckmann and Gorr"; Sasuly's IG Farben

Versailles, Treaty of
285; Treaty with Germany after its surrender in World War I, signed under protest by Germany on June 28, 1919. Its terms were justifiably harsh--e.g. Germany lost 13 percent of its territory (including all its colonies) and almost one-tenth of its population, and had to limit its army to 100,000. Germany was to be occupied for 15 years. The Treaty set up the League of Nations, created Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Lituania, and assured Austrian independence. The "ignominy of the Versailles Dictate" became the rallying cry of all nationalistic elements on the German Right.

VIAM
273; Vsesoyuzniy Institut Aviatsionnykh Materialov = "Soviet Institute of Aviation Materials" - responsible for development of new alloys &c., formed in 1932, in Moscow

Vichy traitors
34; After Germany conquered France, the government of the unoccupied southern zone was moved from Bordeaux (to which it had retreated in June 1941 after the German victory) to Vichy in central France. Convinced that Germany would win the war, the Vichy government unanimously settled on a policy of collaboration with the Germans. When the Germans occupied all of France after the Anglo-American landings in North Africa in November of 1942, the facade of the Vichy government was maintained. The Vichy police (the Milice) was headed by Darnand, who held extreme right-wing and anti-semetic views. The Milice greatly aided the Nazis in exposing the French resistance and hunting down Jews. After French liberation in 1944, thousands of the "Vichy traitors" were summarily executed.

Vikings
549; "the Pig-Hero who, sometime back in the 10th century, routed a Viking invasion" 567;

Villard, Dumpster
65; buddy of Slothrop's who appears in "toilet adventure" 65; in Slothrop's dream, 255

Vincentesque invaders
170; "nasty little fangs achop"

Virginia
544; "a girl back in the Midlands" with whom Pirate was involved, "and for their child who never came to pass"

Vishinsky, Andrey Yanuaryevich (1883-1954)
Soviet statesman, diplomat, and lawyer who was Stalin's chief prosecutor during the Great Purge trials in Moscow in the 1930s. A member of the Mensheviks, he joined the Communist Party in 1920. By 1940 he was a member of party's Central Committee and deputy commissar of foreign affairs; "Molotov isn't telling Vishinsky" 611

Vistula
Vistula River is the largest river of Poland and of the Baltic Sea's drainage basin. Rising in the Beskid mountains of southern Poland, its length is 651 miles (1,047 kilometres) with a drainage basin of approximately 75,100 square miles (194,500 square kilometres). It is a waterway of great importance to the nations of eastern Europe; "was under Soviet interdiction to the [Anubis]" 489

Vlachs
European people constituting the major element in the populations of Romania and Moldova, as well as smaller groups located throughout the Balkan Peninsula; 549

Vlasta
732; female CW (Continuous Wave: radio waves which are radiated from an antenna) operator with Enzian and Schwarzkommando

"'Bert is fine,' he says, and steps back into the void" 73; "'"The White Visitation" is fine,' she said, and stepped into the void ..." 106; Nora's void, 150; "white abyss" 151; "before his birth...the void long before he ought to be remembering" 219; "the silences here are retreats of sound" 336; "Announcing the void" 470; "out into some void" 488; "surrender [...] to the void" 578; "a few good [...] voids" 587; "cessation of noise" 694; sound-shadow, 695-96, 711; "vacuum [...] gleaming in the Void" 699; "hearing the pauses instead of the notes" 713; See also nihilism; Sound-Shadow; vacuum; Zero

230; A type of German Army division formed in the Autumn of 1944 following heavy regular Army losses on both war fronts. The name itself was intended to build morale, appealing at once to nationalism (Volk) and Germany's older military traditions (Grenadier). These divisions typically economized on personnel and emphasized defensive over offensive strength. They were organized around small cadres of hardened veteran soldiers, NCOs and officers and then bulked out with anything the Replacement Army could get its hands on.

Volkswagen
328; plant in Hannover; "thumb-harp [...] whose reeds are cut from springs of a wrecked" 562; "black Managerial" 755;

Volta Congress
452;

Vorsetzer rolls
550;

VOWI
630: Sasuly: "IG's central office in Berlin for collecting foreign intelligence was the statistical section (known as 'VOWI') of NW7, under the direction of the itinerant satistician Reithinger"

VTsK NTA
352; Vsesoyhzhyy Tsentral'nyy Komitet Novogo Tyurkskogo Alfavita; Tchitcherine attends "first plenary session" of, where he gets a "Weird Letter Assignment"