“Octopi,” Spectro wheedles, “are docile under surgery. They can survive massive removals of brain tissue. Their unconditioned response to prey is very reliable—show them a crab, WHAM! out wiv the old tentacle, home to poisoning and supper. And, Pointsman, they don’t bark.”

“Oh, but. No… tanks, pumps, filtering, special food… that may be fine up in Cambridge, that lot, but everyone here’s so damned tightfisted, it’s the damned Rundstedt offensive, has to be… . P.W.E. won’t fund anything now unless it pays off tactically, immediately—last week you know, if not sooner. No an octopus is much too elaborate, not even Pudding would buy it, no not even old delusions-of-grandeur himself.”

“No limit to the things you can teach them.”

“Spectro, you’re not the devil.” Looking closer, “Are you? You know we’re set for sound stimuli, the whole thrust of this Slothrop scheme has to be auditory, the reversal is auditory… . I’ve seen an octopus brain or two in my time, mate, and don’t think I haven’t noticed those great blooming optic lobes. Eh? You’re trying to palm off a visual creature on me. What’s there to see when the damned things come down?”

“The glow.”

“Eh?”

“A fiery red ball. Falling like a meteor.”

“Rot.”

“Gwenhidwy saw one the other night, over Deptford.”

“What I want,” Pointsman leaning now into the central radiance of the lamp, his white face more vulnerable than his voice, whispering across the burning spire of a hypodermic set upright on the desk, “what I really need, is not a dog, not an octopus, but one of your fine Foxes. Damn it. One, little, Fox!”

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

Something’s stalking through the city of Smoke—gathering up slender girls, fair and smooth as dolls, by the handful. Their piteous cries… their dollful and piteous cries … the face of one is suddenly very close, and down! over the staring eyes come cream lids with stiff lashes, slamming loudly shut, the long reverberating of lead counterweights tumble inside her head as Jessica’s own lids now come flying open. She surfaces in time to hear the last echoes blowing away on the heels of the blast, austere and keen, a winter sound… . Roger wakes up briefly too, mutters something like “Fucking madness,” and nods back to sleep.

She reaches out, blind little hand grazing the ticking clock, the worn-plush stomach of her panda Michael, an empty milk bottle holding scarlet blossoms from a spurge in a garden a mile down the road: reaches to where her cigarettes ought to be but aren’t. Halfway out now from under the covers, she hangs, between the two worlds, a white, athletic tension in this cold room. Oh, well… she leaves him in their warm burrow, moves shivering vuhvuhvuh in grainy darkness over winter-tight floorboards, slick as ice to her bare soles.

Her cigarettes are on the parlor floor, left among pillows in front of the fire. Roger’s clothing is scattered all about. Puffing on a cigarette, squinting with one eye for the smoke, she tidies up, folding his trousers, hanging up his shirt. Then wanders to the window, lifts the blackout curtain, tries to see out through frost gathering on the panes, out into the snow tracked over by foxes, rabbits, long-lost dogs, and winter birds but no humans. Empty canals of snow thread away into trees and town whose name they still don’t know. She cups the cigarettes in her palm, leery of showing a light though blackout was lifted weeks and weeks ago, already part of another time and world. Late lorry motors rush north and south in the night, and airplanes fill the sky then drain away east to some kind of quiet.