“Outase.” And glum faces on the others.

Slothrop’s got a hunch. “You expected der Fünffachnullpunkt,” he proposes to Enzian a little later, “the quintuple zero, right? Haa-aaah!” Gotcha, gotcha—

Throwing up his hands, “It’s insane. I don’t believe there is one.”

“Zero probability?”

“I think it will depend on the number of searchers. Are your people after it?”

“I don’t know. I only heard by accident. I don’t have any people.”

“Schwarzgerät, Schwarzkommando. Scuffling: suppose somewhere there were an alphabetical list, someone’s list, an input to some intelligence arm, say. Some country, doesn’t matter. But suppose that on this list, the two names, Blackinstrument, Blackcommand, just happened to be there, juxtaposed. That’s all, an alphabetical coincidence. We wouldn’t have to be real, and neither would it, correct?”

The marshes streak away, patched with light under the milk overcast. Negative shadows flicker white behind the edges of everything. “Well, this is all creepy enough here, Oberst,” sez Slothrop. “You’re not helping.”

Enzian is staring into Slothrop’s face, with something like a smile under his beard.

“O.K. Who is after it, then?” Being enigmatic, won’t answer—is this bird looking to be needled? “That Major Marvy,” opines Slothrop, “a-and that Tchitcherine, too!”

Ha! That did it. Like a salute, a boot-click, Enzian’s face snaps into perfect neutrality. “You would oblige me,” he begins, then settles for changing the subject. “You were down in the Mittelwerke. How did Marvy’s people seem to be getting along with the Russians?”

“Ace buddies, seemed like.”

“I have the feeling that the occupying Powers have just about reached agreement on a popular front against the Schwarzkommando. I don’t know who you are, or how your lines are drawn. But they’re trying to shut us down. I’m just back from Hamburg. We had trouble. It was made to look like a DP raid, but the British military government was behind it, and they had Russian cooperation.”

“I’m sorry. Can I help?”

“Don’t be reckless. Let’s all wait and see. All anyone knows about you is that you keep showing up.”

Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions of them, to sit in the branches of trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds, branches like dendrites of the Nervous System fattening, deep in twittering nerve-dusk, in preparation for some important message….

Later in Berlin, down in the cellar among fever-dreams with shit leaking out of him at gallons per hour, too weak to aim more than token kicks at the rats running by with eyes fixed earnestly noplace, trying to make believe they don’t have a newer and dearer status among the Berliners, at minimum points on his mental health chart, when the sun is gone so totally it might as well be for good, Slothrop’s dumb idling heart sez: The Schwarzgerät is no Grail, Ace, that’s not what the G in Imipolex G stands for. And you are no knightly hero. The best you can compare with is Tannhäuser, the Singing Nincompoop—you’ve been under one mountain at Nordhausen, been known to sing a song or two with uke accompaniment, and don’tcha feel you’re in a sucking marshland of sin out here, Slothrop? maybe not the same thing William Slothrop, vomiting a good part of 1630 away over the side of that Arbella, meant when he said “sin.”… But what you’ve done is put yourself on somebody else’s voyage—some Frau Holda, some Venus in some mountain—playing her, its, game… you know that in some irreducible way it’s an evil game. You play because you have nothing better to do, but that doesn’t make it right. And where is the Pope whose staff’s gonna bloom for you?