“I know.”

“Th-they think I don’t care, any more. ‘You can observe without passion.’ Bastards… No I didn’t mean that… . Slothrop, we’re all such mechanical men. Doing our jobs. That’s all we are. Listen—how do you think I feel? When you’re off with her after every lesson. I’m an impotent man—all I have to look forward to is a book, Slothrop. A report to write…”

“Hey, Ace—”

“Don’t get angry. I’m harmless. Go ahead hit me, I’ll only fall over and bounce right up again. Watch.” He demonstrates. “I care about you, both of you. I do care, believe me, Slothrop.”

“O.K. Tell me what’s going on.”

“I care!”

“Fine, fine…”

“My ‘function’ is to observe you. That’s my function. You like my function? You like it? Your ‘function’ … is, learn the rocket, inch by inch. I have… to send in a daily log of your progress. And that’s all I know.”

But that’s not all. He’s holding something back, something deep, and fool Slothrop is too drunk to get at it with any kind of style. “Me and Katje too? You looking through the keyhole?”

Sniffling, “What difference’s it make? I’m the perfect man for it. Perfect. I can’t even masturbate half the time… no nasty jissom getting all over their reports, you know. Wouldn’t want that. Just a neuter, just a recording eye… . They’re so cruel. I don’t think they even know, really… . They aren’t even sadists… . There’s just no passion at all… .”

Slothrop puts a hand on his shoulder. The suit padding shifts and bunches over the warm bone beneath it. He doesn’t know what to say, what to do: himself, he feels empty, and wants to sleep… . But Sir Stephen is on his knees, just about, quaking at the edge of it, to tell Slothrop a terrible secret, a fatal confidence concerning:

THE PENIS HE THOUGHT WAS HIS OWN

(lead tenor): ’Twas the penis, he thought-was, his own—

Just a big playful boy of a bone…

With a stout purple head,

Sticking up from the bed,

Where the girlies all played Telephone—

(bass): Te-le-phone… .

(inner voices): But They came through the hole in the night,

(bass): And They sweet-talked it clear out of sight—

(inner voices): Out of sight…

(tenor): Now he sighs all alone,

With a heartbroken moan,

For the pe-nis, he thought-was, his, owwwwn!

(inner voices): Was, his, own!

The figures out to sea have been attending, growing now even more windy and remote as the light goes cold and out… . They are so difficult to reach across to—difficult to grasp. Carroll Eventyr, trying to confirm the Lübeck angel, learned how difficult—he and his control Peter Sachsa both, floundering in the swamp between the worlds. Later on, in London, came the visit from that most ubiquitous of double agents, Sammy Hilbert-Spaess, whom everyone had thought in Stockholm, or was it Paraguay?

“Here then,” the kindly scombroid face scanning Eventyr, quick as a fire-control dish antenna and even less mercy, “I thought I’d—”