Leaving Slothrop in his city-reflexes and Harvard crew sox—both happening to be red-ring manacles, comicbook irons (though the comic book was virtually uncirculated, found by chance near nightfall by a hopper at a Berkshire sandbank. The name of the hero—or being—was Sundial. The frames never enclosed him—or it—for long enough to tell. Sundial, flashing in, flashing out again, came from “across the wind,” by which readers understood “across some flow, more or less sheet and vertical: a wall in constant motion”—over there was a different world, where Sundial took care of business they would never understand).

Distant, yes these are pretty distant. Sure they are. Too much closer and it begins to hurt to bring her back. But there is this Eurydice-obsession, this bringing back out of … though how much easier just to leave her there, in fetid carbide and dead-canary soups of breath and come out and have comfort enough to try only for a reasonable fascimile—“Why bring her back? Why try? It’s only the difference between the real boxtop and the one you draw for Them.” No. How can he believe that? It’s what They want him to believe, but how can he? No difference between a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole economy’s based on that … but she must be more than an image, a product, a promise to pay….

Of all her putative fathers—Max Schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, Franz Pökler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that Alpdrücken Night, on the other—Bianca is closest, this last possible moment below decks here behind the ravening jackal, closest to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, never threatened along any rookwise row or diagonal all night, you whose interdiction from her mother’s water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying sure I know them, omitted, chuckling count me in, unable, thinking probably some hooker … She favors you, most of all. You’ll never get to see her. So somebody has to tell you.

□□□□□□□

Halfway up the ladder, Slothrop is startled by a bright set of teeth, beaming out of a dark hatchway. “I was watching. I hope you don’t mind.” Seems to be that Nip again, who introduces himself now as Ensign Morituri, of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

“Yeah, I…” why is Slothrop drawling this way? “saw ya watching… last night too, mister….”

“You think I am a voyeur. Yes you do. But it isn’t that. There is no thrill, I mean. But when I watch people, I feel less alone.”

“W’l hell, Ensign… why don’tcha just… join in? They’re always lookin’ fer… company.”

“Oh, my goodness,” grinning one of them big polyhedral Jap grins, like they do, “then I would feel more alone.”