There is a certain paragraph that caught my fancy on page 460.

"You come in--just hit town, here in the heart of downtown Peenemunde, hey, whatcha do for fun around here? hauling your provincial valise with a few shirts, a copy of the Handbuch, perhaps Cranz's Lehrbuch der Ballistik. You have memorized Ackeret...some Volta Congress papers. But the terror will not go away. This is faster than sound, than the words she spoke across the room so full of sunlight, the jazz band on the radio when you could not sleep, the hoarse Heils among the pale generators and from the executive-crammed galleries overhead..." (there's more good stuff but I'm not typing it all up)

I really think this paragraph is beautiful and effective. It does a bunch of things. For one, it shows the engineers as people. Scared of their own creation, scared because they know what it is. It shows them scared just like Slothrop...because there's no sound to warn the victim. It also takes the V-2 and connects it to the entire world. Pynchon does this in a very clever way. First, he connects the discovery to the personal engineer...to the engineer as a human who talks to girls, who listens to the jazz. Pynchon adds a reminder that these people are stressed people, who cannot sleep at night. Then he moves into Nazi Germany using the perspective of the engineer. It's really well done. I love the image that the V-2 somehow transcends all those things...because it is faster than sound. It is bigger than the creators, bigger than Germany.