When are you going to see it? Pointsman sees it immediately. But he “sees” it in the way you would walking into your bedroom to be jumped on, out of a bit of penumbra on your ceiling, by a gigantic moray eel, its teeth in full imbecile death-smile, breathing, in its fall onto your open face, a long human sound that you know, horribly, to be a sexual sigh… .

That is to say, Pointsman avoids the matter—as reflexively as he would any nightmare. Should this one turn out not to be a fantasy but real, well…

“The data, so far, are incomplete.” This ought to be prominently stressed in all statements. “We admit that the early data seem to show,” remember, act sincere, “a number of cases where the names on Slothrop’s map do not appear to have counterparts in the body of fact we’ve been able to establish along his time-line here in London. Establish so far, that is. These are mostly all first names, you see, the, the Xs without the Ys so to speak, ranks without files. Difficult to know how far into one ‘far enough’ really is.

“And what if many—even if most—of the Slothropian stars are proved, some distant day, to refer to sexual fantasies instead of real events? This would hardly invalidate our approach, any more than it did young Sigmund Freud’s, back there in old Vienna, facing a similar violation of probability—all those Papi-has-raped-me stories, which might have been lies evidentially, but were certainly the truth clinically. You must realize: we are concerned, at PISCES, with a rather strictly defined, clinical version of truth. We seek no wider agency in this.”

So far, it is Pointsman’s burden alone. The solitude of a Führer: he feels himself growing strong in the rays of this dark companion to his public star now on the rise… but he doesn’t want to share it, no not just yet… .

Meetings of the staff, his staff, grow worse and worse than useless. They bog down into endless arguments about trivia—whether or not to rename PISCES now that the Surrender has been Expedited, what sort of letterhead, if any, to adopt. The representative from Shell Mex House, Mr. Dennis Joint, wants to put the program under Special Projectiles Operations Group (SPOG), as an adjunct of the British rocket-scavenging effort, Operation Backfire, which is based out of Cuxhaven on the North Sea. Every other day brings a fresh attempt, from some quarter, to reconstitute or even dissolve PISCES. Pointsman is finding it much easier of late to slip into a l’état c’est moi frame of mind—who else is doing anything? isn’t he holding it all together, often with nothing beyond his own raw will…?

Shell Mex House, naturally, is frantic about Slothrop’s disappearance. Here’s a man running loose who knows everything it’s possible to know—not only about the A4, but about what Great Britain knows about the A4. Zürich teems with Soviet agents. What if they’ve already got Slothrop? They took Peenemünde in the spring, it appears now they will be given the central rocket works at Nordhausen, another of the dealings at Yalta… . At least three agencies, VIAM, TsAGI, and NISO, plus engineers working out of other commissariats, are even now in Soviet-occupied Germany with lists of personnel and equipment to be taken east. Inside the SHAEF sphere of influence, American Army Ordnance, and a host of competing research teams, are all busy collecting everything in sight. They’ve already rounded up von Braun and 500 others, and interned them at Garmisch. What if they get hold of Slothrop?