Footfalls down the trail. Clinking galoshes. It is Mario Schweitar’s delivery boy, with a big fat envelope. Slothrop pays him, chisels a cigarette and some matches, and they part. Back at the crypt Slothrop relights a small pile of kindling and pine boughs, warms up his hands, and begins to thumb through the data. The absence of Jamf surrounds him like an odor, one he knows but can’t quite name, an aura that threatens to go epileptic any second. The information is here—not as much as he wanted (aw, how much was that?) but more than he hoped, being one of those practical Yankees. In the weeks ahead, in those very few moments he’ll be allowed to wallow in his past, he may even have time to wish he hadn’t read any of it… .

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Mr. Pointsman has decided to spend Whitsun by the sea. Feeling a bit megalo these days, nothing to worry about really, never gets worse than, oh perhaps the impression, whilst zooming along through the corridors of “The White Visitation,” that all the others seem to be frozen in attitudes of unmistakable parkinsonism, with himself the only alert, unpalsied one remaining. It is peacetime again now, no room for the pigeons in Trafalgar Square on V-E Night, everyone at the facility that day mad drunk and hugging and kissing, except for the Blavatskian wing of Psi Section, who were off on a White Lotos Day pilgrimage to 19 Avenue Road, St. John’s Wood.

Now there’s time again for holidays. Though Pointsman does feel a certain obligation to go relax, there is also, of course, The Crisis. A leader must show self-possession, up to and including a holiday mood, in the midst of Crisis.

There’s now been no word of Slothrop for nearly a month, since the fumbling asses in military intelligence lost him in Zürich. Pointsman is a bit browned-off with the Firm. His clever strategy appears to’ve failed. In first discussions with Clive Mossmoon and the others, it seemed foolproof: to let Slothrop escape from the Casino Hermann Goering, and then rely on Secret Service to keep him under surveillance instead of PISCES. An economy move. The surveillance bill is the most excruciating thorn in the crown of funding problems he seems condemned to wear for the duration of this project. Damned funding is going to be his downfall, if Slothrop doesn’t drive him insane first.

Pointsman has blundered. Hasn’t even the Tennysonian comfort of saying “someone” has blundered. No, it was he and he alone who authorized the Anglo-American team of Harvey Speed and Floyd Perdoo to investigate a random sample of Slothropian sex adventures. Budget was available, and what harm could it do? They went off practically skipping, obsessive as Munchkins, out into the erotic Poisson. Don Giovanni’s map of Europe—640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey but, but, but—in Spain! in Spain, 1003!—is Slothrop’s map of London, and the two gumshoes become so infected with the prevailing fondness out here for mindless pleasures that they presently are passing whole afternoons sitting out in restaurant gardens dawdling over chrysanthemum salads and mutton casseroles, or larking at the fruit monger’s—“Hey Speed, look, canteloupes! I haven’t seen one of them since the Third Term—wow, smell this one, it’s beautiful! Say, how about a canteloupe, Speed? Huh? Come on.”