Slothrop, poor sap, is remembering Katje, lost Katje, saying the name of her city, whispering Dutch love-words as they moved down sea-mornings now another age, another dispensation… . Wait a minute. “That’s Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij, N.V.?”

“Right.”

It’s also the negative of a recco photograph of the city, darkbrown, festooned with water-spots, never enough time to let these dry out completely—

“Are you blokes aware,” they’re trying to teach him English English too, heaven knows why, and it keeps coming out like Cary Grant, “that Jerry—old Jerry, you know—has been in that The Hague there, shooting his bloody rockets at that London, a-and using, the… Royal Dutch Shell headquarters building, at the Josef Israelplein if I remember correctly, for a radio guidance transmitter? What bizarre shit is that, old man?”

Bounce stares at him, jingling his gastric jewelry, not knowing what to make of Slothrop, exactly.

“I mean,” Slothrop now working himself into a fuss over something that only disturbs him, dimly, nothing to kick up a row over, is it? “doesn’t it strike you as just a bit odd, you Shell chaps working on your liquid engine your side of the Channel you know, and their chaps firing their bloody things at you with your own… blasted… Shell transmitter tower, you see.”

“No, I can’t see that it makes—what are you getting at? Surely they’d simply have picked the tallest building they could find that’s in a direct line from their firing sites to London.”

“Yes, and at the right distance too, don’t forget that—exactly twelve kilometers from the firing site. Hey? That’s exactly what I mean.” Wait, oh wait. Is that what he means?

“Well, I’d never thought of it that way.”

Neither have I, Jackson. Oh, me neither folks… .

Hilary Bounce and his Puzzled Smile. Another innocent, a low-key enthusiast like Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. But:

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.

“I hope I haven’t said anything wrong.”

“Whyzat?”

“You look—” Bounce aspirating what he means to be a warm little laugh, “worried.”

Worried, all right. By the jaws and teeth of some Creature, some Presence so large that nobody else can see it—there! that’s that monster I was telling you about.—That’s no monster, stupid, that’s clouds!—No, can’t you see? It’s his feet— Well, Slothrop can feel this beast in the sky: its visible claws and scales are being mistaken for clouds and other plausibilities… or else everyone has agreed to call them other names when Slothrop is listening… .

“It’s only a ‘wild coincidence,’ Slothrop.”

He will learn to hear quote marks in the speech of others. It is a bookish kind of reflex, maybe he’s genetically predisposed—all those earlier Slothrops packing Bibles around the blue hilltops as part of their gear, memorizing chapter and verse the structures of Arks, Temples, Visionary Thrones—all the materials and dimensions. Data behind which always, nearer or farther, was the numinous certainty of God.

Well, what more appropriate way for Tyrone to Get It one cold morning than this: