“Hey Katje…” Making a long arm, hooking a finger on a spoke to stop the wheel. The ball drops in a compartment whose number they never see. Seeing the number is supposed to be the point. But in the game behind the game, it is not the point.

She shakes her head. He understands that it’s something back in Holland, before Arnhem—an impedance permanently wired into the circuit of themselves. How many ears smelling of Palmolive and Camay has he crooned songs into, outside-the-bowling-alley songs, behind-the-Moxie-billboard songs, Saturday-night open-me-another-quart songs, all saying, honey, it don’t matter where you’ve been, let’s not live in the past, right now’s all there is… .

Fine for back there. But not in here, tapping on her bare shoulder, peering in at her European darkness, bewildered with it, himself with his straight hair barely combable and shaven face without a wrinkle such a chaste intrusion in the Himmler-Spielsaal all crowded with German-Baroque perplexities of shape (a sacrament of hands in every last turn each hand must produce, because of what the hand was, had to become, to make it all come out exactly this way… all the cold, the trauma, the departing flesh that has ever touched it… .) In the twisted gilt playing-room his secret motions clarify for him, some. The odds They played here belonged to the past, the past only. Their odds were never probabilities, but frequencies already observed. It’s the past that makes demands here. It whispers, and reaches after, and, sneering disagreeably, gooses its victims.

When They chose numbers, red, black, odd, even, what did They mean by it? What Wheel did They set in motion?

Back in a room, early in Slothrop’s life, a room forbidden to him now, is something very bad. Something was done to him, and it may be that Katje knows what. Hasn’t he, in her “futureless look,” found some link to his own past, something that connects them closely as lovers? He sees her standing at the end of a passage in her life, without any next step to take—all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That’s all.

Naïve Slothrop never thought anybody’s life could end like that. Nothing so bleak. But by now it’s grown much less strange to him—he’s been snuggling up, masturbatorily scared-elated, to the disagreeable chance that exactly such Control might already have been put over him.

The Forbidden Wing. Oh, the hand of a terrible croupier is that touch on the sleeves of his dreams: all in his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to’ve been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel—where only destinations are important, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals: and where the House always does, of course, keep turning a profit… .

“You were in London,” she will presently whisper, turning back to her wheel and spinning it again, face averted, womanly twisting the night-streaked yarn of her past, “while they were coming down. I was in ’s Gravenhage”—fricatives sighing, the name spoken with exile’s lingering—“while they were going up. Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life. You haven’t even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable. Beyond them there’s so much more, so much none of us know…”