“I’ll show you something,” she sez, which is why they are now awake at this ungodly hour, side by side, holding hands, very still as the sun begins to clear the horizon. “Now watch,” Geli whispers: “out there.”

As the sunlight strikes their backs, coming in nearly flat on, it begins developing on the pearl cloudbank: two gigantic shadows, thrown miles overland, past Clausthal-Zelterfeld, past Seesen and Goslar, across where the river Leine would be, and reaching toward Weser… . “By golly,” Slothrop a little bit nervous, “it’s the Specter.” You got it up around Greylock in the Berkshires too. Around these parts it is known as the Brockengespenst.

God-shadows. Slothrop raises an arm. His fingers are cities, his biceps is a province—of course he raises an arm. Isn’t it expected of him? The arm-shadow trails rainbows behind as it moves reaching eastward for a grab at Göttingen. Not ordinary shadows, either—three-dimensional ones, cast out on the German dawn, yes and Titans had to live in these mountains, or under them… . Impossibly out of scale. Never to be carried by a river. Never to look to a horizon and think that it might go on forever. No trees to climb, no long journeys to take… only their deep images are left, haloed shells lying prone above the fogs men move in… .

Geli kicks a leg out straight as a dancer, and tilts her head to the side. Slothrop raises his middle finger to the west, the headlong finger darkening three miles of cloud per second. Geli grabs for Slothrop’s cock. Slothrop leans to bite Geli’s tit. They are enormous, dancing the floor of the whole visible sky. He reaches underneath her dress. She twines a leg around one of his. The spectra wash red to indigo, tidal, immense, at all their edges. Under the clouds out there it’s as still, and lost, as Atlantis.

But the Brockengespenstphänomen is confined to dawn’s slender interface, and soon the shadows have come shrinking back to their owners.

“Say, did that Tchitcherine ever—”

“Tchitcherine’s too busy for this.”

“Oh, and I’m some kind of a drone or something.”

“You’re different.”

“We-e-e-ll… he ought to see it.”

She looks at him curiously, but doesn’t ask why—her teeth halt on her lower lip, and the warum (varoom, a Plasticman sound) hovers trapped in her mouth. Just as well. Slothrop doesn’t know why. He’s no help to anybody who’s fixing to interrogate. Last night he and Geli blundered onto a Schwarzkommando picket outside one of the old mine entrances. The Hereros threw questions at him for an hour. Oh, just wandering about you know, looking for a bit of the odd, what we call “human interest,” fascinating of course, we’re always interested in what you chaps are up to… . Geli snickering in the darkness. They must have known her. They didn’t ask her anything.

When he brought it up later, she wasn’t sure just what this is between Tchitcherine and the Africans, but whatever it is it’s being carried on with high passion.