“You’re a what?” roars the colonel, pulling leaves from the chrysanthemum with his teeth. “What kind of Nazi foolishness is that, eh?”

“Well, thank you,” Slothrop backing out of the room, saluting again.

“This is incredible!” the echo following him down the corridors to the Himmler-Spielsaal. “It’s Nazi!”

Deserted in noon’s lull, here are resonant reaches of mahogany, green baize, hanging loops of maroon velvet. Long-handled wood money rakes lie fanned out on the tables. Little silver bells with ebony handles are turned mouth-down on the russet veneer. Around the tables, Empire chairs are lined up precise and playerless. But some are taller than the rest. These are no longer quite outward and visible signs of a game of chance. There is another enterprise here, more real than that, less merciful, and systematically hidden from the likes of Slothrop. Who sits in the taller chairs? Do They have names? What lies on Their smooth baize surfaces?

Brass-colored light seeps in from overhead. Murals line the great room: pneumatic gods and goddesses, pastel swains and shepherdesses, misty foliage, fluttering scarves… . Everywhere curlicued gilt festoonery drips—from moldings, chandeliers, pillars, window frames… scarred parquetry gleams under the skylight… From the ceiling, to within a few feet of the tabletops, hang long chains, with hooks at the ends. What hangs from these hooks?

For a minute here, Slothrop, in his English uniform, is alone with the paraphernalia of an order whose presence among the ordinary debris of waking he has only lately begun to suspect.

There may, for a moment, have been some golden, vaguely rootlike or manlike figure beginning to form among the brown and bright cream shadows and light here. But Slothrop isn’t to be let off quite so easy. Shortly, unpleasantly so, it will come to him that everything in this room is really being used for something different. Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us. Never. Two orders of being, looking identical… but, but…

Oh, THE WORLD OVER THERE, it’s

So hard to explain!

Just-like, a dream’s-got, lost in yer brain!

Dancin’ like a fool through that Forbid-den Wing,

Waitin’ fer th’ light to start shiver-ing—well,

Who ev-ver said ya couldn’t move that way,

Who ev-ver said ya couldn’t try?

If-ya find-there’s-a-lit-tle-pain,

Ya can al-ways-go-back-a-gain, cause

Ya don’t-ev-er-real-ly-say, good-by!

Why here? Why should the rainbow edges of what is almost on him be rippling most intense here in this amply coded room? say why should walking in here be almost the same as entering the Forbidden itself—here are the same long rooms, rooms of old paralysis and evil distillery, of condensations and residues you are afraid to smell from forgotten corruptions, rooms full of upright gray-feathered statues with wings spread, indistinct faces in dust—rooms full of dust that will cloud the shapes of inhabitants around the corners or deeper inside, that will settle on their black formal lapels, that will soften to sugar the white faces, white shirt fronts, gems and gowns, white hands that move too quickly to be seen… what game do They deal? What passes are these, so blurred, so old and perfect?