You’d be tempted to stare,

But if you ain’t tried it, don’t knock it!

Slothrop is hungry and thirsty. Despite the clear and present miasma of evil in Stollen 41, he starts looking for some way to go down there and maybe score some of that lunch. Turns out the only way down is by a cable, hooked to an overhead hoist. A fat cracker Pfc. lounges at the controls, sucking on a bottle of wine. “Go ahead, Jackson, I’ll give you a good ride. They taught me how to run these in the WPA.” Bracing his mustache in what he figures to be a stiff upper lip, Ian Scuffling climbs on, one foot through an eye-splice, the other hanging free. An electric motor whines, Slothrop lets go the last steel railing and clutches on to the cable as 50 feet of twilit space appears underneath him. Uh…

Rolling out over Stollen 41, heads milling far below, beer foam bobbing like torches in the shadows—suddenly the motor cuts off and he’s falling like a rock. Oh fuck, “Too young!” he screams, voice pitched way too high so it comes out like a teenager on the radio, which ordinarily would be embarrassing, but here’s the concrete floor rushing up at him, he can see every shuttering mark, every dark crystal of Thuringian sand he’s going to be splashed over—not even a body nearby to get him off with only multiple fractures… . With about ten feet to go the Pfc. puts on the brakes. Maniacal laughter from above and behind. The cable, brought up taut, sings under Slothrop’s hand till he loses his grip on it, falls, and is carried gently upside down and hanging by the foot, in among funseekers around the beer keg who, used to this form of arrival by now, only continue their singing:

There was a young fellow named Hector,

Who was fond of a launcher-erector.

But the squishes and pops

Of acute pressure drops

Wrecked Hector’s hydraulic connector.

Each young American in turn getting to his feet (optional), raising his tankard, and singing about different ways of Doing It with the A4 or its related hardware. Slothrop does not know that they are singing to him, and neither do they. He eyes the inverted scene with a certain unease: with his brain approaching the frontiers of red-out, there comes to him the peculiar notion that it’s Lyle Bland who has hold of his ankle here. So he is borne stately into the fringes of the party. “Hey!” observes a crewcut youth, “i-it’s Tarzan or something! Ha! Ha!” Half a dozen Ordnance people, juiced and roaring happily, grab for Slothrop. After a lot of twisting and shoving, the foot is freed from its wire loop. The hoist whines back the way it came, to its prankish operator and the next fool he can talk into riding it.

There once was a fellow named Moorehead,

Who had an affair with a warhead.

His wife moved away

The very next day—