“Wait a minute,” sez Slothrop, “I think I’ve been asleep or something.” His feet are cold. This Marvy is really fat. Pants bloused into shiny combat boots, roll of fat hanging over a web belt where he keeps his sunglasses and .45, hornrims, hair slicked back, eyes like safety valves that pop out at you whenever—as now—the pressure in his head gets too high.

Marvy hitched a lift on a P-47 from Paris far as Kassel, got coupled onto this train here west of Heiligenstadt. He’s headed for the Mittel-werke, like Ian Scuffling. Needs to coordinate with some Project Hermes people from General Electric. Sure makes him nervous, those niggers next door. “Hey, ought to be a good story for you people. Warn the folks back home.”

“Are they GIs?”

“Shit no. Kraut. South-West African. Something. You mean you don’t know about that? Come on. Aw. Limey intelligence sure ain’t too intelligent, hahah, no offense understand. I thought the whole world knew.” Follows a lurid tale—which sounds like something SHAEF made up, Goebbels’s less than giddy imagination reaching no further than Alpine Redoubts and such—of Hitler’s scheme for setting up a Nazi empire in black Africa, which fell through after Old Blood ’n’ Guts handed Rommel’s ass to him in the desert.” ‘Here’s yer ass, General.’ ‘Ach du lieber! Mein Arsch! YAH—hahaha…’” clutching comically at the seat of his own large trousers. Well, the black cadres had no more future in Africa, stayed on in Germany as governments-in-exile without even official recognition, drifted somehow into the ordnance branch of the German Army, and pretty soon learned how to be rocket technicians. Now they were just running loose. Wild. Haven’t been interned as P/Ws, far as Marvy knows they haven’t even been disarmed. “Not enough we have to worry about Russkys, frogs, limeys—hey, beg pardon, buddy. Now we got not just niggers you see, but kraut niggers. Well, Jesus. V-E Day just about everyplace you had a rocket, you had you a nigger. Never any all-boogie batteries, understand. Even the krauts couldn’t be that daffy! One battery, that’s 81 men, plus all your support, your launch-control, power, propellants, your surveying—champ, that’d sure be one heap o’ niggers all in one place. But are they still all scattered out, like they were? You find out, you got you a scoop, friend. Cause if they’re gettin’ together now, oh dat’s bi-i-i-g trouble! There’s at least two dozen in that car—right down there, look. A-and they’re headin’ for Nordhausen, pal!” a fat finger-poke in the chest with each word, “hah? Whatcha think they have in mind? You know what I think? They have a plan. Yeah. I think it’s rockets. Don’t ask me how, it’s just something I feel here, in m’heart. A-and you know, that’s awful dangerous. You can’t trust them— With rockets? They’re a childlike race. Brains are smaller.”

“But our patience,” suggests a calm voice now out of the darkness, “our patience is enormous, though perhaps not unlimited.” So saying, a tall African with a full imperial beard steps up grabs the fat American, who has time to utter one short yell before being flung bodily over the side. Slothrop and the African watch the Major bounce down the embankment behind them, arms and legs flying, out of sight. Firs crowd the hills. A crescent moon has risen over one ragged crest.