Four-color Plasticman goes oozing out of a keyhole, around a corner and up through piping that leads to a sink in the mad Nazi scientist’s lab, out of whose faucet Plas’s head now, blank carapaced eyes and unplastic jaw, is just emerging. “Yeah. Who’re you, Ace?”

Sir Stephen introduces himself, freckles roused by the sun, eying the comic book curiously. “I gather this isn’t a study period.”

“Is he cleared?”

“He’s cleared,” Katje smiling/shrugging at Dodson-Truck.

“Taking a break from that Telefunken radio control. That ‘Hawaii I.’ You know anything about that?”

“Only enough to wonder where they got the name from.”

“The name?”

“There’s a poetry to it, engineer’s poetry… it suggests Haverie—average, you know—certainly you have the two lobes, don’t you, symmetrical about the rocket’s intended azimuth… hauen, too—smashing someone with a hoe or a club…” off on a voyage of his own here, smiling at no one in particular, bringing in the popular wartime expression ab-hauen, quarterstaff technique, peasant humor, phallic comedy dating back to the ancient Greeks… . Slothrop’s first impulse is to get back to what that Plas is into, but something about the man, despite obvious membership in the plot, keeps him listening… an innocence, maybe a try at being friendly in the only way he has available, sharing what engages and runs him, a love for the Word.

“Well, it might be just Axis propaganda. Something to do with that Pearl Harbor.”

Sir Stephen considers this, seeming pleased. Did They choose him because of all those word-smitten Puritans dangling off of Slothrop’s family tree? Were They trying to seduce his brain now, his reading eye too? There are times when Slothrop actually can find a clutch mechanism between him and Their iron-cased engine far away up a power train whose shape and design he has to guess at, a clutch he can disengage, feeling then all his inertia of motion, his real helplessness… it is not exactly unpleasant, either. Odd thing. He is almost sure that whatever They want, it won’t mean risking his life, or even too much of his comfort. But he can’t fit any of it into a pattern, there’s no way to connect somebody like Dodson-Truck with somebody like Katje… .

Seductress-and-patsy, all right, that’s not so bad a game. There’s very little pretending. He doesn’t blame her: the real enemy’s somewhere back in that London, and this is her job. She can be versatile, gay, and kind, and he’d rather be warm here with her than freezing back under the Blitz. But now and then… too insubstantial to get a fix on, there’ll be in her face a look, something not in her control, that depresses him, that he’s even dreamed about and so found amplified there to honest fright: the terrible chance that she might have been conned too. As much a victim as he is—an unlucky, an unaccountably futureless look… .

One gray afternoon in where but the Himmler-Spielsaal, where else, he surprises her alone by a roulette wheel. She’s standing, head bent, gracefully hipshot, playing croupier. An employee of the House. She wears a white peasant blouse and a rainbow-striped dirndl skirt of satin, which shimmers underneath the skylight. The ball’s tattoo, against the moving spokes, gathers a long, scratchy resonance here in the muraled space. She doesn’t turn till Slothrop is beside her. To her breathing there is a grave slow-beating tremor: she nudges at the shutters of his heart, opening to him brief flashes of an autumn country he has only suspected, only feared, outside him, inside her… .