He likes to tell them about fireflies. English girls don’t know about fireflies, which is about all Slothrop knows for sure about English girls.

The map does puzzle Tantivy. It cannot be put down to the usual loud-mouthed American ass-banditry, except as a fraternity-boy reflex in a vacuum, a reflex Slothrop can’t help, barking on into an empty lab, into a wormholing of echoing hallways, long after the need has vanished and the brothers gone to WW II and their chances for death. Slothrop really doesn’t like to talk about his girls: Tantivy has to steer him diplomatically, even now. At first Slothrop, quaintly gentlemanly, didn’t talk at all, till he found out how shy Tantivy was. It dawned on him then that Tantivy was looking to be fixed up. At about the same time, Tantivy began to see the extent of Slothrop’s isolation. He seemed to have no one else in London, beyond a multitude of girls he seldom saw again, to talk to about anything.

Still Slothrop keeps his map up daily, boobishly conscientious. At its best, it does celebrate a flow, a passing from which—among the sudden demolitions from the sky, mysterious orders arriving out of the dark laborings of nights that for himself are only idle—he can save a moment here or there, the days again growing colder, frost in the morning, the feeling of Jennifer’s breasts inside cold sweater’s wool held to warm a bit in a coal-smoke hallway he’ll never know the daytime despondency of… cup of Bovril a fraction down from boiling searing his bare knee as Irene, naked as he is in a block of glass sunlight, holds up precious nylons one by one to find a pair that hasn’t laddered, each struck flashing by the light through the winter trellis outside… nasal hep American-girl voices singing out of the grooves of some disc up through the thorn needle of Allison’s mother’s radiogram… snuggling for warmth, blackout curtains over all the windows, no light but the coal of their last cigarette, an English firefly, bobbing at her whim in cursive writing that trails a bit behind, words he can’t read… .

“What happened?” Silence from Slothrop. “Your two Wrens… when they saw you…” then he notices that Slothrop, instead of going on with his story, has given himself up to shivering. Has been shivering, in fact, for some time. It’s cold in here, but not that cold. “Slothrop—”

“I don’t know. Jesus.” It’s interesting, though. It’s the weirdest feeling. He can’t stop. He turns his Ike jacket collar up, tucks hands inside sleeves, and sits that way for a while.

Presently, after a pause, cigarette in motion, “You can’t hear them when they come in.”

Tantivy knows which “they.” His eyes shift away. There is silence for a bit.

“Of course you can’t, they go faster than sound.”

“Yes but—that’s not it,” words are bursting out between the pulses of shivering—“the other kind, those V-ls, you can hear them. Right? Maybe you have a chance to get out of the way. But these things explode first, a-and then you hear them coming in. Except that, if you’re dead, you don’t hear them.”