“Uh, information?” Gee, this stuff tastes like Moxie… .

“Oh. Another one.” Giving Slothrop a sour look. “Life was simple before the first war. You wouldn’t remember. Drugs, sex, luxury items. Currency in those days was no more than a sideline, and the term ‘industrial espionage’ was unknown. But I’ve seen it change—oh, how it’s changed. The German inflation, that should’ve been my clue right there, zeros strung end to end from here to Berlin. I would have stern talks with myself. ‘Semyavin, it’s only a temporary lapse away from reality. A small aberration, nothing to worry about. Act as you always have—strength of character, good mental health. Courage, Semyavin! Soon all will be back to normal.’ But do you know what?”

“Let me guess.”

A tragic sigh. “Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?”

“I thought it was cigarettes.”

“You dream.” He brings out a list of Zürich cafés and gathering spots. Under Espionage, Industrial, Slothrop finds three. Ultra, Lichtspiel, and Sträggeli. They are on both banks of the Limmat, and widely spaced.

“Footwork,” folding the list in an oversize zoot-suit pocket.

“It’ll get easier. Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future.”

Begins a period of shuttling among the three cafés, sitting a few hours over coffee at each one, eating once a day, Zürich baloney and rösti at the People’s Kitchens… watching crowds of businessmen in blue suits, sun-black skiers who’ve spent the duration schussing miles of glacier and snow hearing nothing of campaigns or politics, reading nothing but thermometers and weathervanes, finding their atrocities in avalanches or toppling séracs, their victories in layers of good powder… ragged foreigners in oil-stained leather jackets and tattered fatigues, South Americans bundled in fur coats and shivering in the clear sunlight, elderly hypochondriacs who were caught out lounging at some spa when the War began and have been here since, women in long black dresses who don’t smile, men in soiled overcoats who do… and the mad, down from their fancy asylums on weekend furlough—oh, the mental cases of Switzerland: Slothrop is known to them, all right, among all the somber street faces and colors only he is wearing white, shoes zoot ’n’ hat, white as the cemetery mountains here… . He’s also the New Mark In Town. It’s difficult for him to sort out the first wave of corporate spies from the

LOONIES ON LEAVE!

(The Chorus line is divided not into the conventional Boys and Girls but into Keepers and Nuts, without regard to sex, though all four possibilities are represented on stage. Many are wearing sunglasses with black lenses and white rims, not so much to be fashionable as to suggest snow-blindness, the antiseptic white of the Clinic, perhaps even the darkness of the mind. But all seems happy, relaxed, informal… no sign of repression, not even a distinction in costume so that at first there is some problem telling Nuts from Keepers as they all burst in from the wings dancing and singing):