Here we come foax—ready or not!

Put your mask on, and plot your plot,

We’re just laughin’ and droolin’, all—over the sleigh,

Like a buncha happy midgets on a holiday!

Oh we’re the LOONIES ON LEAVE, and

We haven’t a care—

Our brains at the cleaners, our souls at the Fair,

Just freaks on a fur-lough, away from the blues,

As daffy and sharp as—the taps on our shoes!

Hey, we’re passin’ the hat for—your frowns and your tears,

And the fears you thought’d never go ’way—

Oh take it from a loony, life’s so dear and swoony,

So just hug it and kiss it to-day!

La-da-da, ya-ta ya-ta ta-ta &c… (They go on humming the tune behind what follows):

First Nut (or maybe Keeper): Got an amazing deal for you here, American? I thought so, always tell a face from home, saaay, like your suit there, go far enough up the glacier ’n’ nobody’d be able to see ya! Well yes now, I know how you feel about these street-vendors keep coming by, it’s the old three-card monte on the sidewalk [trucks across the stage for a while, back and forth, waving his finger in the air, singing “Three-card monte on-the side, walk,” over and over in the same obsessive monotone, for as many repetitions as he can get away with] and you can spot right away what’s wrong, every one promises ya somethin’ fer nothin’, right? yes now oddly enough, that’s the main objection engineers and scientists have always had to the idea of [lowering his voice] perpetual motion or as we like to call it Entropy Management—here, here’s our card—well, sure, they’ve got a point. At least they had a point. Up till now… .

Second Nut or Keeper: Now you’ve heard about the two-hundred-mile-per-gallon carburetor, the razor edge that never gets dull, the eternal bootsole, the mange pill that’s good to your glands, engine that’ll run on sand, ornithopters and robobopsters—you heard me, got a little goatee made out of steel wool—jivey, that’s fine, but here’s one for yo’ mind! Are you ready? It’s Lightning-Latch, The Door That Opens You!

Slothrop: Think I’ll go take my nap now… .

Third N. or K.: Transmogrify common air into diamonds through Cataclysmic Carbon Dioxide Reducti-o-o-o-o-n-n-n… .

If he were sensitive about such things, it’d all be pretty insulting, this first wave. It passes, gesturing, accusative, pleading. Slothrop manages to stay calm. There is a pause—then on come the real ones, slowly at first but gathering, gathering. Synthetic rubber or gasoline, electronic calculators, aniline dyes, acrylics, perfumes (stolen essences in vials in sample cases), sexual habits of a hundred selected board members, layouts of plants, codebooks, connections and payoffs, ask for it, they can get it.

At last, one day at the Sträggeli, Slothrop eating on a bratwurst and hunk of bread he’s been toting around all morning in a paper bag, suddenly from noplace appears one Mario Schweitar in a green frogged waistcoat, just popped out of the echoing cuckoo clock of Dubya Dubya Two here, the endless dark corridors at his back, with a change of luck for Slothrop. “Pssst, Joe,” he begins, “hey, mister.”