Slothrop sat in the swaying car with thirty other cold and tattered souls, eyes all pupil, lips cratered with sores. They were singing, some of them. A lot of them kids. It is a Displaced Person’s song, and Slothrop will hear it often around the Zone, in the encampments, out on the road, in a dozen variations:

If you see a train this evening,

Far away against the sky,

Lie down in your wooden blanket,

Sleep, and let the train go by.

Trains have called us, every midnight,

From a thousand miles away,

Trains that pass through empty cities,

Trains that have no place to stay.

No one drives the locomotive,

No one tends the staring light,

Trains have never needed riders,

Trains belong to bitter night.

Railway stations stand deserted,

Rights-of-way lie clear and cold:

What we left them, trains inherit,

Trains go on, and we grow old.

Let them cry like cheated lovers,

Let their cries find only wind.

Trains are meant for night and ruin.

We are meant for song, and sin.

Pipes are passing around. Smoke hangs from the damp wood slats, is whipped out cracks into the night slipstream. Children wheeze in their sleep, the rachitic babies cry… now and then the mothers exchange a word. Slothrop huddles inside his paper misfortune.

The Swiss firm’s dossier on L. (for Laszlo) Jamf listed all his assets at the time he came to work in Zürich. Apparently he had sat—as token scientist—on the board of directors of the Grössli Chemical Corporation as late as 1924. Among stock options and pieces of this firm and that back in Germany—pieces to be gathered in over the next year or two by the octopus IG—was the record of a transaction between Jamf and Mr. Lyle Bland, of Boston, Massachusetts.

On the beam, Jackson. Lyle Bland is a name he knows, all right. And a name that also shows up often in the private records Jamf kept of his own business deals. Seems that Bland, during the early twenties, was heavily involved with the Hugo Stinnes operation in Germany. Stinnes, while he lasted, was the Wunderkind of European finance. Based out of the Ruhr, where his family had been coal barons for generations, young Stinnes built up a good-sized empire of steel, gas, electric and water power, streetcars and barge lines before he was 30. During the World War he worked closely with Walter Rathenau, who was ramrodding the whole economy then. After the war Stinnes managed to put the horizontal electrical trust of Siemens-Schuchert together with the coal and iron supplies of the Rheinelbe Union into a super-cartel that was both horizontal and vertical, and to buy into just about everything else—shipyards, steamship lines, hotels, restaurants, forests, pulp mills, newspapers—meantime also speculating in currency, buying foreign money with marks borrowed from the Reichsbank, driving the mark down and then paying off the loans at a fraction of the original figure. More than any one financier he was blamed for the Inflation. Those were the days when you carried marks around in wheelbarrows to your daily shopping and used them for toilet paper, assuming you had anything to shit. Stinnes’s foreign connections went all over the world—Brazil, the East Indies, the United States—businessmen like Lyle Bland found his growth rate irresistible. The theory going around at the time was that Stinnes was conspiring with Krupp, Thyssen, and others to ruin the mark and so get Germany out of paying her war debts.