“Hey, Katje,” ’s all he sez.

“Mm.” But here’s only her old residual bitterness again, and they are not, after all, to be lovers in parachutes of sunlit voile, lapsing gently, hand in hand, down to anything meadowed or calm. Surprised?

She has moved away, releasing his cock into the cold room. “What’s it like in London, Slothrop? When the rockets come down?”

“What?” After fucking he usually likes to lie around, just smoke a cigarette, think about food, “Uh, you don’t know it’s there till it’s there. Gee, till after it’s there. If it doesn’t hit you, then you’re O.K. till the next one. If you hear the explosion, you know you must be alive.”

“That’s how you know you’re alive.”

“Right.” She sits up, pulling underpants back up and skirt back down, goes to the mirror, starts rearranging her hair. “Let’s hear the boundary-layer temperatures. While you’re getting dressed.”

“Boundary-layer temperature T sub e, what is this? rises exponentially till Brennschluss, around 70 miles range, a-and then there’s a sharp cusp, 1200 degrees, then it drops a little, minimum of 1050, till you get out of the atmosphere, then there’s another cusp at 1080 degrees. Stays pretty steady till re-entry,” blablabla. The bridge music here, bright with xylophones, is based on some old favorite that will comment, ironically but gently, on what is transpiring—a tune such as “School Days, School Days,” or “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine,” or even “There’ll Be a HOT TIME in the Old Town Tonite!” take your pick—slowing and fading to a glassed-in porch downstairs, Slothrop and Katje tête-à-tête, alone except for a number of musicians in the corner groaning and shaking their heads, plotting how to get César Flebótomo to pay them for a change. Bad gig, bad gig… . Rain bats against the glass, lemon and myrtle trees outside shake in the wind. Over croissants, strawberry jam, real butter, real coffee, she has him running through the flight profile in terms of wall temperature and Nusselt heart-transfer coefficients, computing in his head from Reynolds numbers she flashes him… equations of motion, damping, restoring moments… methods of computing Brennschluss by IG and radio methods… equations, transformations…

“Now jet expansion angles. I’ll give you an altitude, you tell me the angle.”

“Katje, why don’t you tell me the angle?”

She was pleased, once, to think of a peacock, courting, fanning his tail… she saw it in the colors that moved in the flame as it rose off the platform, scarlet, orange, iridescent green… there were Germans, even SS troops, who called the rocket Der Pfau. ‘Pfau Zwei.’ Ascending, programmed in a ritual of love… at Brennschluss it is done—the Rocket’s purely feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center of its target, has submitted. All the rest will happen according to laws of ballistics. The Rocket is helpless in it. Something else has taken over. Something beyond what was designed in.

Katje has understood the great airless arc as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her—over its peak and down, plunging, burning, toward a terminal orgasm… which is certainly nothing she can tell Slothrop.