“Please stay.” Curled on the bed, her eyes about to spill over with tears. Aw, shit, Slothrop you sucker… but she’s just a little kid… . “Come here… .”

The minute he puts it in, though, she goes wicked and a little crazy, slashing at his legs, shoulders, and ass with chewed-down fingernails sharp as a saw. Considerate Slothrop is trying to hold off coming till she’s ready when all of a sudden something heavy, feathered, and many-pointed comes crashing down onto the small of his back, bounces off triggering him and as it turns out Geli too ZONNGGG! eeeeee… oh, gee whiz. Wings flap and Wernher—for it is he—ascends into the darkness.

“Fucking bird,” Slothrop screams, “he tries that again I’ll give him a Baby Ruth right up his ass, boy—” it’s a plot it’s a plot it’s Pavlovian conditioning! or something, “Tchitcherine trained him to do that, right?”

“Wrong! I trained him to do that.” She’s smiling at him so four-year-old happy and not holding a thing back, that Slothrop decides to believe everything she’s been telling him.

“You are a witch.” Paranoid that he is, he snuggles down under the counterpane with the long-legged sorceress, lights a cigarette, and despite endless Tchitcherines vaulting in over the roofless walls with arsenals of disaster all for him, even falls asleep, presently, in her bare and open arms.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

It’s a Sunday-funnies dawn, very blue sky with gaudy pink clouds in it. Mud across the cobblestones is so slick it reflects light, so that you walk not streets but these long streaky cuts of raw meat, hock of werewolf, gammon of Beast. Tchitcherine has big feet. Geli had to stuff pieces of an old chemise in the toes of his boots so they’d fit Slothrop. Dodging constantly for jeeps, ten-ton lorries, Russians on horseback, he finally hitches a ride from an 18-year-old American first lieutenant in a gray Mercedes staff car with dents all over it. Slothrop frisks mustaches, flashes his armband, feeling defensive. The sun’s already warm. There’s a smell of evergreens on the mountains. This rail driving, who’s attached to the tank company guarding the Mittelwerke, doesn’t think Slothrop should have any trouble getting inside. English SPOG have come and gone. Right now American Army Ordnance people are busy crating and shipping out parts and tools for a hundred A4s. A big hassle. “Trying to get it all out before the Russians come to take over.” Interregnum. Civilians and bureaucrats show up every day, high-level tourists, to stare and go wow. “Guess nobody’s seen ’em this big before. I don’t know what it is. Like a burlesque crowd. Not gonna do anything, just here to look. Most of them bring cameras. Notice you didn’t. We have them for rent at the main gate, if you’re interested.”

One of many hustles. Yellow James the cook has got him a swell little sandwich wagon, you can hear him in the tunnels calling, “Come an’ get ’em! Hot ’n’ cold and drippin’ with greens!” And there’ll be grease on the glasses of half these gobbling fools in another five minutes. Nick De Profundis, the company lounge lizard, has surprised everybody by changing, inside the phone booth of factory spaces here, to an energetic businessman, selling A4 souvenirs: small items that can be worked into keychains, money clips or a scatter-pin for that special gal back home, burner cups of brass off the combustion chambers, ball bearings from the servos, and this week the hep item seems to be SA 100 acorn diodes, cute little mixing valves looted out of the Telefunken units, and the even rarer SA 102s, which of course fetch a higher price. And there’s “Micro” Graham, who’s let his sideburns grow and lurks in the Stollen where the gullible visitors stray: “Pssst.”