“Now they’ll wait.”

“No,” Schnorp cupping an ear, “they’ve cut the motor. They’re in here with us.” The swaddled silence goes on for a minute or two, but sure enough:

There once was a fellow named Schroeder,

Who buggered the vane servomotor.

He soon grew a prong

On the end of his schlong,

And hired himself a promoter.

Schnorp is fiddling with the flame, a rose-gray nimbus, trying for less visibility, but not too much loss of altitude. They float in their own wan sphere of light, without coordinates. Outcrops of granite smash blindly upward like fists into the cloud, trying to find the balloon. The plane is somewhere, with its own course and speed. There is no action the balloon can take. Binary decisions have lost meaning in here. The cloud presses in, suffocating. It condenses in fat drops on top of the pies. Suddenly, raucous and hungover:

There was a young man from Decatur,

Who slept with a LOX generator.

His balls and his prick

Froze solid real quick,

And his asshole a little bit later.

Curtains of vapor drift back to reveal the Americans, volplaning along well inside ten meters and only a little faster than the balloon.

“Now!” Schnorp yells, heaving a pie at the exposed engine. Slothrop’s misses and splatters all over the windscreen in front of the pilot. By which time Schnorp has commenced flinging ballast bags at the engine, leaving one stuck between two of the cylinders. The Americans, taken by surprise, reach in confusion for sidearms, grenades, machine guns, whatever it is your Ordnance types carry around in the way of light armament. But they have glided on past, and now the fog closes in again. There are a few shots.

“Shit, man, if they hit that bag—”

“Shh. I think we got the wire from the booster magneto.” Off in the middle of the cloud can be heard the nagging whicker of an engine refusing to start. Linkage squeaks desperately.

“Oh, fuck!” A muffled scream, far away. The intermittent whining grows fainter until there is silence. Schnorp is lying on his back, slurping pie, laughing bitterly. Half of his inventory’s been thrown away, and Slothrop feels a little guilty.

“No, no. Stop worrying. This is like the very earliest days of the mercantile system. We’re back to that again. A second chance. Passages are long and hazardous. Loss in transit is a part of life. You have had a glimpse of the Ur-Markt.”

When the clouds fall away a few minutes later, they find themselves floating quietly under the sun, shrouds dripping, gasbag still shiny with the moist cloud. No sign at all of Marvy’s plane. Schnorp adjusts the flame. They begin to rise.

Toward sundown, Schnorp gets thoughtful. “Look. You can see the edge of it. At this latitude the earth’s shadow races across Germany at 650 miles an hour, the speed of a jet aircraft.” The cloud-sheet has broken up into little fog-banklets the color of boiled shrimp. The balloon goes drifting, over countryside whose green patchwork the twilight is now urging toward black: the thread of a little river flaming in the late sun, the intricate-angled pattern of another roofless town.