Trudi, the blonde, and Magda, the sultry Bavarian, have spent the day looting a stash of Wagnerian opera costumes. There is a pointed helmet with horns, a full cape of green velvet, a pair of buckskin trousers.

“Saaaay,” sez Slothrop, “that rig looks pretty sharp!”

“They’re for you,” Magda smiles.

“Aw… no. You’d get a better deal at the Tauschzentrale….”

But Säure insists. “Haven’t you ever noticed, when you’re this Blitzed and you want somebody to show up, they always do?”

The girls are moving the coal of the reefer about, watching its reflection in the shiny helmet changing shapes, depths, grades of color… hmm. It occurs to Slothrop here that without those horns on it, why this helmet would look just like the nose assembly of the Rocket. And if he could find a few triangular scraps of leather, figure a way to sew them on to Tchitcherine’s boots… yeah, a-and on the back of the cape put a big, scarlet, capital R— It is as pregnant a moment as when Tonto, after the legendary ambush, attempts to—

“Raketemensch!” screams Säure, grabbing the helmet and unscrewing the horns off of it. Names by themselves may be empty, but the act of naming…

“You had the same idea?” Oh, strange. Säure carefully reaches up and places the helmet on Slothrop’s head. Ceremonially the girls drape the cape around his shoulders. Troll scouting parties have already sent runners back to inform their people.

“Good. Now listen, Rocketman, I’m in a bit of trouble.”

“Hah?” Slothrop has been imagining a full-scale Rocketman Hype, in which the people bring him food, wine and maidens in a four-color dispensation in which there is a lot of skipping and singing “La, la, la, la,” and beefsteaks blossoming from these strafed lindens, and roast turkeys thudding down like soft hail on Berlin, sweet potatoes a-and melted marshmallows, bubbling up out of the ground….

“Do you have any armies?” Trudi wants to know. Slothrop, or Rocketman, hands over half a withered pack.

The reefer keeps coming around: darts and stabs through this root shelter. Everybody forgets what it is they’ve been talking about. There’s the smell of earth. Bugs rush through, aerating. Magda has lit one of Slothrop’s cigarettes for him and he tastes raspberry lipstick. Lipstick? Who’s got lipstick these days? What are all these people here into, anyway?

Berlin is dark enough for stars, the accustomed stars but never so clearly arranged. It is possible also to make up your own constellations. “Oh,” Säure recalls, “I had this problem…”

“I’m really hungry,” it occurs to Slothrop.

Trudi is telling Magda about her boy friend Gustav, who wants to live inside the piano. “All you could see was his feet sticking out, he kept saying, ‘You all hate me, you hate this piano!’” They’re giggling now.

“Plucking on the strings,” sez Magda, “right? He’s so paranoid.”