“Mexico,” grabbing the young statistician’s arm.

“Eh?” Roger interrupted eying a lovely looks a bit like Rita Hayworth in a one-piece floral number with straps that X across her lean back… .

“Mexico, I think I am hallucinating.”

“Oh, really? You think you are? What are you seeing?”

“Mexico, I see… I see… . What do you mean, what am I seeing, you nit? It’s what I’m hearing.”

“Well, what are you hearing, then.” A touch of peevishness to Roger now.

“Right now I’m hearing you, saying, ‘What are you hearing, then.’ And I don’t like it!”

“Why not.”

“Because: unpleasant as this hallucination is, I find I still much prefer it to the sound of your voice.”

Now this is odd behavior from anybody, but from usually correct Mr. Pointsman, it is enough to stop this mutually-paranoid party in their tracks. Nearby is a Wheel of Fortune, with Lucky Strike packs, kewpie dolls and candy bars stuffed among the spokes.

“I say, what d’you think?” blond, hale-fellow Dennis Joint nudges Katje with an elbow as broad as a knee. In his profession he has learned to make instant evaluations of those with whom he deals. He judges old Katje here to be a jolly girl, out for a spot of fun. Yes, leadership material here, definitely. “Hasn’t he gone a bit mental suddenly?” Trying to keep his voice down, grinning in athletic paranoia vaguely over in the peculiar Pavlovian’s direction—not right at him you understand, eye contact might be suicidal folly given his state of mind… .

Meantime, Jessica has gone into her Fay Wray number. This is a kind of protective paralysis, akin to your own response when the moray eel jumps you from the ceiling. But this is for the Fist of the Ape, for the lights of electric New York white-waying into the room you thought was safe, could never be penetrated… for the coarse black hair, the tendons of need, of tragic love… .

“Yeah well,” as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his definitive 18-volume study of King Kong, “you know, he did love her, folks.” Proceeding from this thesis, it appears that Prettyplace has left nothing out, every shot including out-takes raked through for every last bit of symbolism, exhaustive biographies of everyone connected with the film, extras, grips, lab people… even interviews with King Kong Kultists, who to be eligible for membership must have seen the movie at least 100 times and be prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam… . And yet, and yet: there is Murphy’s Law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian restatement of Gödel’s Theorem—when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us… something will. So the permutations ’n’ combinations of Pudding’s Things That Can Happen in European Politics for 1931, the year of Gödel’s Theorem, don’t give Hitler an outside chance. So, when laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born. Even as determinist a piece of hardware as the A4 rocket will begin spontaneously generating items like the “S-Gerät” Slothrop thinks he’s chasing like a grail. And so, too, the legend of the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer from the tallest erection in the world has come, in the fullness of time, to generate its own children, running around inside Germany even now—the Schwarzkommando, whom Mitchell Prettyplace, even, could not anticipate.