“These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth—I know I presume—you must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules—it is they after all which dictate temperatures, pressures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers… .

“You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?

“You think you know, you cling to your beliefs. But sooner or later you will have to let them go… .”

A silence, which prolongs itself. There is some shifting in the seats around the table, but the sets of little fingers stay in touch.

“Herr Rathenau? Could you tell me one thing?” It is Heinz Rippenstoss, the irrepressible Nazi wag and gadabout. The sitters begin to giggle, and Peter Sachsa to return to his room. “Is God really Jewish?”

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

Pumm, Easterling, Dromfond, Lamplighter, Spectro are stars on the doctor’s holiday tree. Shining down on this holiest of nights. Each is a cold announcement of dead ends, suns that will refuse to stand, but flee south, ever south, leaving us to north-without-end. But Kevin Spectro is brightest, most distant of all. And the crowds they swarm in Knightsbridge, and the wireless carols drone, and the Underground’s a mob-scene, but Pointsman’s all alone. But he’s got his Xmas present, fa la la, he won’t have to settle for any Spam-tin dog this year mates, he’s got his own miracle and human child, grown to manhood but carrying, someplace on the Slothropian cortex now a bit of Psychology’s own childhood, yes pure history, inert, encysted, unmoved by jazz, depression, war—a survival, if you will, of a piece of the late Dr. Jamf himself, past death, past the reckoning of the, the old central chamber you know… .

He has no one to ask, no one to tell. My heart, he feels, my heart floods now with such virility and hope… . News from the Riviera is splendid. Experiments here begin to run smoothly for a change. From some dark overlap, a general appropriation or sinking fund someplace, Brigadier Pudding has even improved the funding for ARF. Does he feel Pointsman’s power too? Is he buying some insurance?