He gets back to the Casino near midnight, her hour, tramping upstairs leaving wet footprints behind, loud as a washing machine—stops at her door, rain pattering onto the carpet, afraid even to knock. Has she been taken too? Who’s waiting behind the door and what machinery have They brought with Them? But she’s heard him, and opens with a dimpled, chiding smile for being so wet. “Tyrone, I missed you.”

He shrugs, convulsive, helpless, showering both of them. “It’s the only place I knew to come.” Her smile slowly unpurses. Gingerly he steps across the sill then, not sure if it’s door or high window, into her deep room.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

Good mornings of good old lust, early shutters open to the sea, winds coming in with the heavy brushing of palm leaves, the wheezing break to surface and sun of porpoises out in the harbor.

“Oh,” Katje groans, somewhere under a pile of their batistes and brocade, “Slothrop, you pig.”

“Oink, oink, oink,” sez Slothrop cheerfully. Seaglare dances up on the ceiling, smoke curls from black-market cigarettes. Given the precisions of light these mornings, there are forms of grace to be found in the rising of the smoke, meander, furl, delicate fade to clarity… .

At certain hours the harbor blue will be reflected up on the whitewashed sea-façade, and the tall windows will be shuttered again. Wave images will flicker there in a luminous net. By then Slothrop will be up, in British uniform, gobbling down croissants and coffee, already busy at a refresher course in technical German, or trying to dope out the theory of arrow-stable trajectories, or tracing nearly with the end of his nose some German circuit schematic whose resistors look like coils, and the coils like resistors—“What bizarre shit,” once he got hep to it, “why would they go and switch it around like that? Trying to camouflage it, or what?”

“Recall your ancient German runes,” suggests Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck, who is from the Foreign Office P.I.D. and speaks 33 languages including English with a strong Oxonian blither to it.

“My what?”

“Oh,” lips compressing, some kind of brain nausea here, “that coil symbol there happens to be very like the Old Norse rune for ‘S,’ sôl, which means ‘sun.’ The Old High German name for it is sigil.”

“Funny way to draw that sun,” it seems to Slothrop.

“Indeed. The Goths, much earlier, had used a circle with a dot in the center. This broken line evidently dates from a time of discontinuities, tribal fragmenting perhaps, alienation—whatever’s analogous, in a social sense, to the development of an independent ego by the very young child, you see… .”

Well, no, Slothrop doesn’t see, not exactly. He hears this sort of thing from Dodson-Truck nearly every time they get together. The man just materialized one day, out on the beach in a black suit, shoulders starred with dandruff from thinning carrot hair, coming into view against the white face of the Casino, which trembled over him as he approached. Slothrop was reading a Plasticman comic. Katje was dozing in the sun, face-up. But when his footpads reached her hearing, she turned on one elbow to wave hello. The peer flung himself at full length, Attitude 8.11, Torpor, Undergraduate. “So this is Lieutenant Slothrop.”