“I don’t know how long they kept me there. I slept, I woke. Men appeared and vanished. Time had lost meaning. One morning I was outside the factory, naked, in the rain. Nothing grew there. Something had been deposited in a great fan that went on for miles. Some tarry kind of waste. I had to walk all the way back to the firing site. They were all gone. Thanatz had left a note, asking me to try to get to Swinemünde. Something must have happened at the site. There was a silence in that clearing I’d felt only once before. Once, in Mexico. The year I was in America. We were very deep in the jungle. We came on a flight of stone steps, covered with vines, fungus, centuries of decay. The others climbed to the top, but I couldn’t. It was the same as the day with Thanatz, in the pine forest. I felt a silence waiting for me up there. Not for them, but for me alone… my own personal silence….”

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Up on the bridge of the Anubis, the storm paws loudly on the glass, great wet flippers falling at random in out of the night whap! the living shape visible just for the rainbow edge of the sound—it takes a certain kind of maniac, at least a Polish cavalry officer, to stand in this pose behind such brittle thin separation, and stare each blow full in its muscularity. Behind Procalowski the clinometer bob goes to and fro with his ship’s rolling: a pendulum in a dream. Stormlight has turned the lines of his face black, black as his eyes, black as the watchcap cocked so tough and salty aslant the furrows of his forehead. Light clusters, clear, deep, on the face of the radio gear… fans up softly off the dial of the pelorus… spills out portholes onto the white river. Inexplicably, the afternoon has been going on for longer than it should. Daylight has been declining for too many hours. Corposants have begun to flicker now in the rigging. The storm yanks at rope and cable, the cloudy night goes white and loud, in huge spasms. Procalowski smokes a cigar and studies charts of the Oder Haff.

All this light. Are the Russian lookouts watching from shore, waiting in the rain? Is this arm of the passage being kept in grease-pencil, X by dutiful X, across some field of Russian plastic, inside where cobwebs whiten the German windows nobody needs to stand at, where phosphor grass ripples across the A-scopes and the play you feel through the hand-crank in the invisible teeth is the difference between hit and miss…. Vaslav—is the pip you see there even a ship? In the Zone, in these days, there is endless simulation—standing waves in the water, large drone-birds, so well-known as to have nicknames among the operators, wayward balloons, flotsam from other theatres of war (Brazilian oildrums, whisky cases stenciled for Fort-Lamy), observers from other galaxies, episodes of smoke, moments of high albedo—your real targets are hard to come by. Too much confusion out here for most replacements and late draftees. Only the older scope hands can still maintain a sense of the appropriate: over the watches of their Durations, jittering electric green for what must have seemed, at first, forever, they have come to understand distribution… they have learned a visual mercy.