“Reveille you hammerheads,” Marvy’s screaming, “don’t let that ’sucker git away!” A sergeant with a boy’s face and gray hair, dozing with a grease gun cradled against him, wakes up crying, “Krauts!” lets loose a deafening burst from his weapon straight into the beer barrel, which destroys the bottom half and sends a great gush of wet amber and foam surging among the pursuing Americans, half of whom promptly slip and go down on their ass. Slothrop reaches the other end of the Stollen with a good lead, and goes sprinting up a ladder there, taking rungs two at a time. Shots— Terrific blasts in this soundbox. Either Marvy’s Mothers are too drunk, or the darkness is saving him. He hits the top out of breath.

In the other main tunnel now, Slothrop falls into a jog down the long mile to the outside, trying not to wonder if he has the wind to make it. He hasn’t gone 200 feet when the vanguard comes clambering up off of that ladder behind him. He dodges into what must be a paint shop, skids on a patch of wet Wehrmacht green, and goes down, proceeding through big splashes of black, white, and red before coming to rest against the combat boots of an elderly man in a tweed suit, with white, water-buffalo mustaches. “Gruss Gott.”

“Say, I think they’re trying to kill me back there. Is there someplace—”

The old man winks, motions Slothrop through the Stollen and on into the other main tunnel. Slothrop notices a pair of coveralls streaked with paint, and thinks to grab them. Past four more Stollen, then a sharp right. It’s a metal storage area. “Watch this.” The old man goes chuckling down the long shop among blue racks of cold-rolled sheets, heaps of aluminum ingots, sheafs of 3712 bar stock, 1624, 723… . “This is going to be good.”

“Not that way, man, that’s the one they’re coming down.” But this oversize elf already has set about hitching cable from a hoist overhead to a tall bundle of Monel bars. Slothrop climbs into those coveralls, combs his pompadour down over his forehead, takes out a pocketknife and saws off pieces of mustache on both sides.

“You look like Hitler now. Now they will really want to kill you!” German humor. He introduces himself as Glimpf, Professor of Mathematics of the Technische Hochschule, Darmstadt, Scientific Advisor to the Allied Military Government, which takes a while. “Now—we bring them this way.”

I am in the hands of a raving maniac—“Why not just hide out in here, till they forget it?” But here comes dim shouts up-tunnel now: “All clear in 37 and 38, Chuckie babes!” “O.K., old hoss, you guys take odds we’ll take evens.” They are not going to forget it, they are making a tunnel-by-tunnel search instead. It’s peacetime, they can’t shoot you in peacetime… but they’re drunk… oh boy. Slothrop is scared shitless.

“What do we do?”

“You will be the expert in idiomatic English. Say something provocative.”