“Real unobtrusive getaway,” Slothrop mutters. A gang of kids have appeared running out of an apple orchard to help them carry tin jerricans of grain alcohol out to the gondola. All shadows are being thrown uphill by the afternoon sun. Wind blows from the west. Slothrop gives Schnorp a light from his Zippo to get the burner going while kids straighten out the folds in the gasbag. Schnorp turns up the flame till it’s shooting sideways and with a steady roar into the opening of the great silk bag. Children visible through the gap break up into wiggly heat waves. Slowly the balloon begins to expand. “Remember me,” Geli calls above the rumbling of the burner. “Till I see you again…” Slothrop climbs in the gondola with Schnorp. The balloon rises a little off the ground and is caught by the wind. They start to move. Geli and the kids have taken hold of the gondola all around its gunwales, the bag still not all the way up but gathering speed, dragging them all as fast as their feet can move, giggling and cheering, uphill. Slothrop keeps as much out of the way as he can, letting Schnorp see that the flame’s pointed into the bag and that lines to the basket are clear. At last the bag swings vertical, across the sun, the inside of it going a riotous wreathing of yellow and scarlet heat. One by one the ground crew fall away, waving good-by. The last to go is Geli in her white dress, hair brushed back over her ears into pigtails, her soft chin and mouth and big serious eyes looking into Slothrop’s for as long as she can before she has to let go. She kneels in the grass, blows a kiss. Slothrop feels his heart, out of control, inflate with love and rise quick as a balloon. It is taking him longer, the longer he’s in the Zone, to remember to say aw quit being a sap. What is this place doing to his brain?

They soar up over a stand of firs. Geli and the children go dwindling to shadow-strokes on the green lawn. The hills fall away, flatten out. Soon, looking back, Slothrop can see Nordhausen: Cathedral, Rathaus, Church of St. Blasius… the roofless quarter where he found Geli… .

Schnorp nudges and points. After a while Slothrop makes out a convoy of four olive-drab vehicles dusting along toward the farm in a hurry. Marvy’s Mothers, by the looks of things. And Slothrop hanging from this gaudy beach ball. Well, all right—

“I’m bad luck,” Slothrop hollers over a little later. They’ve found a steady course now northeastward, and are huddling close to the alcohol flame, collars turned up, with a gradient of must be 50° between the wind at their backs and the warmth in front. “I should’ve mentioned that. You don’t even know me, and here we’re flying into that Russian zone.”

Schnorp, his hair blown like holidays of hay, does a wistful German thing with his upper lip: “There are no zones,” he sez, which is also a line of Geli’s. “No zones but the Zone.”