“Yes yes but—” giving Slothrop a most odd look, “I mean I’m not quite sure I really see, you know, the point to it all. How does one win?”

Ha! How does one win, indeed. “One doesn’t win,” easing into it, thinking of Tantivy, one small impromptu counter-conspiracy here, “one loses. One by one. Whoever’s left is the winner.”

“It sounds rather negative.”

“Garçon.” Drinks here are always on the house for Slothrop—They are springing for it, he imagines. “Some of that champagne! Wantcha to just keep it coming, and any time we run out, go get more, comprendez?” Any number of slack-jawed subalterns, hearing the magic word, drift over and take seats while Slothrop explains the rules.

“I’m not sure—” Dodson-Truck begins.

“Baloney. Come on, do you good to get outa that chess rut.”

“Right, right,” agree the others.

Dodson-Truck stays in his seat, a bit tense.

“Bigger glasses,” Slothrop hollers at the waiter. “How about those beer mugs over there! Yeah! They’d be just fine.” The waiter unblasts a jeroboam of Veuve Clicquot Brut, and fills everybody up.

“Well, the Prince o’ Wales,” Slothrop commences, “has lost his tails, and number three has found them. Wales, tails, three sir!”

“Not I, sir,” replies Dodson-Truck, kind of defensive about it.

“Who, sir?”

“Five, sir.”

“Say what?” inquires Five, a Highlander in parade trews, with a sly look.

“You fucked up,” commands princely Slothrop, “so you got to drink up. All the way now, ’n’ no stopping to breathe or anything.”

On it goes. Slothrop loses Prince position to Four, and all the numbers change. The Scot is first to drop, making mistakes at first deliberate but soon inevitable. Jeroboams come and go, fat, green, tattered gray foil at the necks giving back the bar’s electric radiance. Corks grow straighter, less mushroomy, dates of degorgement move further into the war years as the company gets drunker. The Scot has rolled chuckling from his chair, remaining ambulatory for some ten feet, where he goes to sleep against a potted palm. At once another junior officer slides beaming into his place. The word has osmosed out into the Casino, and there is presently a throng of kibitzers gathered around the table, waiting for casualties. Ice is being hauled in by the giant block, fern-faulted inside, breathing white off of its faces, to be sledged and chipped into a great wet tub for the procession of bottles being run up from the cellar now in relays. It soon becomes necessary for the harassed waiters to stack empty tankards in pyramids and pour fountain-style from the top, the bubble-shot cascades provoking cheers from the crowd. Some joker is sure to reach in and grab one of the mugs on the bottom, sending the whole arrangement swaying, everybody else jumping to salvage what they can before it all comes down, crashing, soaking uniforms and shoes—so that it can be set up all over again. The game has switched to Rotating Prince, where each number called out immediately becomes Prince, and all the numbers shift accordingly. By this time it is impossible to tell who’s making mistakes and who isn’t. Arguments arise. Half the room are singing a vulgar song: