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Inside St. Veronica’s hospital they sit together, just off the war-neurosis ward, these habitual evenings. The autoclave simmers its fine clutter of steel bones. Steam drifts into the glare of the gooseneck lamp, now and then becoming very bright, and the shadows of the men’s gestures may pass through it, knife-edged, swooping very fast. But both faces are usually reserved, kept well back, in the annulus of night.

Out of the blackness of the ward, a half-open file drawer of pain each bed a folder, come cries, struck cries, as from cold metal. Kevin Spectro will take his syringe and spike away a dozen times tonight, into the dark, to sedate Fox (his generic term for any patient—run three times around the building without thinking of a fox and you can cure anything). Pointsman will sit each time waiting for their talking to resume, glad to rest these moments in the half-darkness, the worn gold-leaf letters shining from the spines of books, the fragrant coffee mess besieged by roaches, the winter rain in the downspout just outside the window… .

“You’re not looking any better.”

“Ah, it’s the old bastard again, he’s got me down. This fighting, Spectro, every day, I don’t…” pouting downward at his eyeglasses that he’s wiping on his shirt, “there’s more to damned Pudding than I can see, he’s always springing his… senile little surprises… .”

“It’s his age. Really.”

“Oh, that I can deal with. But he’s so damned—such a bastard, he never sleeps, he plots—”

“Not senility, no, I meant the position he’s working from. Pointsman? You don’t have the priorities he does quite yet, do you? You can’t take the chances he can. You’ve treated them that age, surely you know that strange… smugness… .”

Pointsman’s own Fox waits, out in the city, a prize of war. In here the tiny office space is the cave of an oracle: steam drifting, sybilline cries arriving out of the darkness… Abreactions of the Lord of the Night… .

“I don’t like it, Pointsman. Since you did ask.”

“Why not.” Silence. “Unethical?”

“For pity’s sake, is this ethical?” raising an arm then toward the exit into the ward, almost a Fascist salute. “No, I’m only trying to think of ways to justify it, experimentally. I can’t. It’s only one man.”

“It’s Slothrop. You know what he is. Even Mexico thinks… oh, the usual. Precognition. Psychokinesis. They have their own problems, that lot… . But suppose you had the chance to study a truly classical case of… some pathology, a perfect mechanism… .”

One night Spectro asked: “If he hadn’t been one of Laszlo Jamf’s subjects, would you be all this keen on him?”

“Of course I would.”

“Hmm.”

Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out… a few feet of film run backwards… the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound—then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning… a ghost in the sky… .