Right behind, loud as megaphones, in massed chorale:

There once was a fellow named Slattery

“Oh, shit,” sez Slothrop.

Who was fond of the course-gyro battery.

With that 50-volt shock,

What was left of his cock

Was all slimy and sloppy and spattery.

Ja, ja, ja, ja,

In Prussia they never eat pussy, u.s.w.

“Can you get back and uncouple those cars?” Glimpf wants to know.

“Reckon so… .” But he seems to fumble at it for hours. Meantime:

There was a young fellow named Pope,

Who plugged into an oscilloscope.

The cyclical trace

Of their carnal embrace

Had a damn nearly infinite slope.

“Engineers,” Glimpf mutters. Slothrop gets the cars uncoupled and the engine speeds up. Wind is tearing at all Irish pennants, collar-points, cuffs, buckles, and belts. Back behind them there’s a tremendous crash and clank, and a few shouts in the dark.

“Think that stopped ’em?”

Right up their ass, in four-part harmony:

There was a young fellow named Yuri,

Fucked the nozzle right up its venturi.

He had woes without cease

From his local police,

And a hell of a time with the jury.

“O.—K., Jocko babes! Got that old phosphorus flare?”

“Stand by, good buddy!”

With only that warning, in blinding concussion the Icy Noctiluca breaks, floods through the white tunnel. For a minute or two nobody in here can see. There is only the hurtling on, through amazing perfect whiteness. Whiteness without heat, and blind inertia: Slothrop feels a terrible familiarity here, a center he has been skirting, avoiding as long as he can remember—never has he been as close as now to the true momentum of his time: faces and facts that have crowded his indenture to the Rocket, camouflage and distraction fall away for the white moment, the vain and blind tugging at his sleeves it’s important… please… look at us… but it’s already too late, it’s only wind, only g-loads, and the blood of his eyes has begun to touch the whiteness back to ivory, to brushings of gold and a network of edges to the broken rock… and the hand that lifted him away sets him back in the Mittelwerke—

“Whoo-wee! There’s ’at ’sucker now!”

Out of the flare, inside easy pistol range, emerges a lumbering diesel engine, pushing ahead of it the two cars Slothrop uncoupled, itself stuffed with bloodshot, disheveled, bloated Americans, and at an apex, perched lopsided on their shoulders, Major Marvy himself, wearing a giant white Stetson, and clutching two .45 automatics.

Slothrop ducks down behind a cylindrical object at the rear of the tractor. Marvy starts shooting, wildly, inspired by hideous laughter from the others. Slothrop happens to notice now that what he’s chosen to hide behind, actually, seems to be another warhead. If the Amatol charges are still in—say, Professor, could the shock wave from a .45 bullet at this range succeed in detonating this warhead here if it struck the casing? e-even if there was no fuze installed? Well, Tyrone, now that would depend on many things: muzzle velocity, wall thickness and composition—