The wind is blowing in the ironwork very strong, and down in the street a vegetable crate bounces end over end, wooden, empty, dark. It must be four in the morning. “Got to get back, shit I’m late… .”

“No.” Only a whisper… . But it was her “no” that stayed with him.

“Whozat. Jenny? That you, Jenny?”

“Yes it’s me. Oh love I’m so glad I found you.”

“But I have to…” Would They ever let her live with him at the Casino…?

“No. I can’t.” But what’s wrong with her voice?

“Jenny, I heard your block was hit, somebody told me, the day after New Year’s… a rocket… and I meant to go back and see if you were all right, but… I just didn’t… and then They took me to that Casino… .”

“It’s all right.”

“But not if I didn’t—”

“Just don’t go back to them.”

And somewhere, dark fish hiding past angles of refraction in the flow tonight, are Katje and Tantivy, the two visitors he wants most to see. He tries to bend the voices that come to the door, bend them like notes on a harmonica, but it won’t work. What he wants lies too deep… .

Just before dawn knocking comes very loud, hard as steel. Slothrop has the sense this time to keep quiet.

“Come on, open up.”

“MPs, open up.”

American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy. He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on the rightness of what they planned to do… he’d been told long ago to expect this sort of thing from Nazis, and especially from Japs—we were the ones who always played fair—but this pair outside the door now are as demoralizing as a close-up of John Wayne (the angle emphasizing how slanted his eyes are, funny you never noticed before) screaming “BANZAI!”

“Wait a minute Ray, there he goes—”

“Hopper! You asshole, come back here—”

“You’ll never get me in a strait jacket agaaaaain… .” Hopper’s voice goes fading around the corner as the MPs take off in pursuit.

It dawns on Slothrop, literally, through the yellowbrown window shade, that this is his first day Outside. His first free morning. He doesn’t have to go back. Free? What’s free? He falls asleep at last. A little before noon a young woman lets herself in with a passkey and leaves him the papers. He is now an English war correspondent named Ian Scuffling.

“This is the address of one of our people in Zürich. Waxwing wishes you good luck and asks what kept you so long.”

“You mean he wants an answer?”

“He said you’d have to think about it.”

“Sa-a-a-ay.” It’s just occurred to him. “Why are all you folks helping me like this? For free and all?”