Each time, each turning, his own blood and heart are stroked, beaten, brought jubilantly high, and triggered to the icy noctiluca, to flare and fusing Thermite as he begins to expand, an uncontainable light, as the walls of the chamber turn a blood glow, orange, then white and begin to slip, to flow like wax, what there is of labyrinth collapsing in rings outward, hero and horror, engineer and Ariadne consumed, molten inside the light of himself, the mad exploding of himself… .

Years ago. Dreams he hardly remembers. The intermediaries come long since between himself and his final beast. They would deny him even the little perversity of being in love with his death… .

But now with Slothrop in it—sudden angel, thermodynamic surprise, whatever he is… will it change now? Might Pointsman get to have a go at the Minotaur after all?

Slothrop ought to be on the Riviera by now, warm, fed, well-fucked. But out in this late English winter the dogs, thrown over, are still ranging the back-streets and mews, sniffing the dustbins, skidding on carpets of snow, fighting, fleeing, shivering in their wet pools of Prussian blue… seeking to avoid what cannot be smelled or seen, what announces itself with the roar of a predator so absolute they sink to the snow whining and roll over to give It their soft and open bellies… .

Has Pointsman renounced them in favor of one untried human subject? Don’t think he hasn’t doubts as to the validity of this scheme, at least. Let Vicar de la Nuit worry about its “rightness,” he’s the staff chaplain. But… what about the dogs? Pointsman knows them. He’s deftly picked the locks of their awareness. They have no secrets. He can drive them mad, and with bromides in adequate doses he can bring them back. But Slothrop…

So the Pavlovian dithers about his office, feeling restless and old. He should sleep but he can’t. It has to be more than the simple conditioning of a child, once upon a time. How can he’ve been a doctor this long and not developed reflexes for certain conditions? He knows better: he knows it is more. Spectro is dead, and Slothrop (sentiments d’emprise, old man, softly now) was with his Darlene, only a few blocks from St. Veronica’s, two days before.

When one event happens after another with this awful regularity, of course you don’t automatically assume that it’s cause-and-effect. But you do look for some mechanism to make sense of it. You probe, you design a modest experiment… . He owes Spectro that much. Even if the American’s not legally a murderer, he is sick. The etiology ought to be traced, the treatment found.

There is to this enterprise, Pointsman knows, a danger of seduction. Because of the symmetry… . He’s been led before, you know, down the garden path by symmetry: in certain test results… in assuming that a mechanism must imply its mirror image—“irradiation,” for example, and “reciprocal induction” … and who’d ever said that either had to exist? Perhaps it will be so this time, too. But how it haunts him, the symmetry of these two secret weapons, Outside, out in the Blitz, the sounds of V-1 and V-2, one the reverse of the other… . Pavlov showed how mirror-images Inside could be confused. Ideas of the opposite. But what new pathology lies Outside now? What sickness to events—to History itself—can create symmetrical opposites like these robot weapons?