“I can help you out,” Slothrop licking off his fingers, “but I’m short of cash and—”

Squalidozzi names a sum that will pay off Mario Schweitar and keep Slothrop fed for months to come.

“Half in front and I’m on the way.”

The Argentine hands over message, addresses, money, and springs for the check. They arrange to meet at the Kronenhalle in three days. “Good luck.”

“You too.”

A last sad look from Squalidozzi alone at his table. A toss of forelock, a fading of light.

The plane is a battered DC-3, chosen for its affinity for moonlight, the kind expression on its windowed face, its darkness inside and outside. He wakes up curled among the cargo, metal darkness, engine vibration through his bones… red light filtering very faint back through a bulkhead from up forward. He crawls to a tiny window and looks out. Alps in the moonlight. Kind of small ones, though, not as spectacular as he figured on. Oh, well… . He settles back down on a soft excelsior bed, lighting up one of Squalidozzi’s corktips thinking, Jeepers, not bad, guys just jump in the airplane, go where they want… why stop at Geneva? Sure, what about—well, that Spain? no wait, they’re Fascists. South Sea Islands! hmm. Full of Japs and GIs. Well Africa’s the Dark Continent, nothing there but natives, elephants, ’n’ that Spencer Tracy… .

“There’s nowhere to go, Slothrop, nowhere.” The figure is huddled against a crate, and shivering. Slothrop squints through the weak red light. It is the well-known frontispiece face of insouciant adventurer Richard Halliburton: but strangely altered. Down both the man’s cheeks runs a terrible rash, palimpsested over older pockmarks, in whose symmetry Slothrop, had he a medical eye, could have read drug reaction. Richard Halliburton’s jodhpurs are torn and soiled, his bright hair greasy now and hanging. He appears to be weeping silently, bending, a failed angel, over all these second-rate Alps, over all the night skiers far below, out on the slopes, crisscrossing industriously, purifying and perfecting their Fascist ideal of Action, Action, Action, once his own shining reason for being. No more. No more.

Slothrop reaches, puts the cigarette out on the deck. How easy these angel-white wood shavings can go up. Lie here in this rattling and wrenched airplane, lie still as you can, damn fool, yup they’ve conned you—conned you again. Richard Halliburton, Lowell Thomas, Rover and Motor Boys, jaundiced stacks of National Geographics up in Hogan’s room must’ve all lied to him, and there was no one then, not even a colonial ghost in the attic, to tell him different… .

Bump, skid, slew, pancake landing, fucking washouts from kite-flying school, gray Swiss dawn light through little windows and every joint, muscle, and bone in Slothrop is sore. It’s time to punch back in.

He gets off of the plane without incident, mingling into a yawning, sour flock of early passengers, delivery agents, airfield workers. Cointrin in the early morning. Shocking green hills one side, brown city on the other. Pavements are slick and wet. Clouds blow slowly in the sky. Mont Blanc sez hi, lake sez howdy too, Slothrop buys 20 cigarettes and a local paper, asks directions, gets in a tram that comes and with cold air through doors and windows to wake him up goes rolling into the City of Peace.