“I keep forgetting to ask Thanatz whatever became of Gottfried. Thanatz was allowed to stay with the battery. But I was taken away: driven in a Hispano-Suiza with Blicero himself, out through the gray weather to a petrochemical plant that for days had stalked us in a wheel at our horizon, black and broken towers in the distance, clustered together, a flame that always burned at the top of one stack. It was the Castle: Blicero looked over, about to speak, and I said, ‘The Castle.’ The mouth smiled quickly, but absent: the wrinkled wolf-eyes had gone even beyond these domestic moments of telepathy, on into its animal north, to a persistence on the hard edge of death I can’t imagine, tough cells with the smallest possible flicker inside, running on nothing but ice, or less. He called me Katje. ‘You’ll see that your little trick won’t work again. Not now, Katje.’ I wasn’t frightened. It was madness I could understand, or else the hallucinating of the very old. The silver stork flew wings-down into our wind, brow low and legs back, Prussian occipital knot behind: on its shiny surfaces now appeared black swirls of limousines and staff cars in the driveway of the main office. I saw a light plane, a two-seater, at the edge of the parking lot. The faces of the men inside seemed familiar. I knew them from films, the power and the gravity were there—they were important men, but I only recognized one: Generaldirektor Smaragd, from Leverkusen. An elderly man who used a cane, a notorious spiritualist before the War, and, it seemed, even now. ‘Greta,’ he smiled, groping for my hand. ‘Ah, we’re all here.’ But his charm was shared by none of the others. They’d all been waiting for Blicero. A meeting of nobles in the Castle. They went into the board room. I was left with an assistant named Drohne, high forehead, graying hair, always fussing with his necktie. He’d seen every one of my films. We moved off into the machinery. Through the windows of the board room I saw them at a round conference table, with something in the center. It was gray, plastic, shining, light moving on its surfaces. ‘What is it?’ I asked, vamping Drohne. He took me out of earshot of the others. ‘I think it’s for the F-Gerät,’ he whispered.”

“F?” sez Slothrop, “F-Gerät, you sure of that?”

“Some letter.”

“S?”