“So did that Wyatt’s,” explains Slothrop.

“So did John Wilkes Booth’s,” replies the general. “Eh?”

Slothrop ponders. “He was a bad guy.”

“Precisely. Why don’t you twist the ends up?”

“You mean English style. Well, I tried that. It must be the weather or something, the old duster just keeps droopin’ down again, a-and I need to bite those ends off. It’s really annoying.”

“It’s disgusting,” sez Wivern. “Next time I come round I shall bring you some wax for it. They make it with a bitter taste to discourage, ah, end-chewers, you know.”

So as the mustache waxes, Slothrop waxes the mustache. Every day there’s something new like this. Katje’s always there, slipped by Them into his bed like nickels under the pillow for his deciduous Americanism, innocent incisors ’n’ Momworshiping molars just left in a clattering trail back down these days at the Casino. For some odd reason he finds himself with hardons right after study sessions. Hm, that’s peculiar. There is nothing specially erotic about reading manuals hastily translated from the German—brokenly mimeographed, even a few salvaged by the Polish underground from the latrines at the training site at Blizna, stained with genuine SS shit and piss… or memorizing conversion factors, inches to centimeters, horsepower to Pferdestärke, drawing from memory schematics and isometrics of the snarled maze of fuel, oxidizer, steam, peroxide and permanganate lines, valves, vents, chambers—what’s sexy about that? still he emerges from each lesson with great hardon, tremendous pressure inside… some of that temporary insanity, he reckons, and goes looking for Katje, hands to crabwalk his back and silk stockings squealing against his hipbones… .

During the lessons he will often look over and catch Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck consulting a stopwatch and taking notes. Jeepers. He wonders what that’s all about. Never occurs to him it might have to do with these mysterious erections. The man’s personality was chosen—or designed—to sidetrack suspicions before they have a chance to gather speed. Winter sunlight hitting half his face like a migraine, trouser cuffs out of press, wet and sandy because he’s up every morning at six to walk along the strand, Sir Stephen makes perfectly accessible his disguise, if not his function in the conspiracy. For all Slothrop knows he’s an agronomist, a brain surgeon, a concert oboist—in that London you saw all levels of command seething with these multidimensional geniuses. But as with Katje, there hangs about Dodson-Truck’s well-informed zeal an unmistakable aura of the employee and loser… .

One day Slothrop gets a chance to check this out. Seems Dodson-Truck is a chess fanatic. Down in the bar one afternoon he gets around to asking Slothrop if he plays.

“Nope,” lying, “not even checkers.”

“Damn. I’ve hardly had time till now for a good game.”

“I do know a game,” has something of Tantivy been sheltering inside all this time? “a drinking game, it’s called Prince, maybe the English even invented it, cause you have those princes, right? and we don’t, not that that’s wrong understand, but everybody takes a number, a-and you start off the Prince of Wales has lost his tails, no offense now, the numbers going clockwise around the table, and number two has found them, clockwise from that Prince, or whatever number he wants to call out actually, he, that’s the Prince, six or anything, see, you pick a Prince first, he starts it off, then that number two, or whoever that Prince called, sez, but first he goes, the Prince does, Wales, tails, two sir, after saying that about how that Prince of Wales has lost his tails, and number two answers, not I, sir—”