His name fell on him like a thunderclap, and of course it wasn’t Prof.-Dr. Jamf after all, but a colleague from down the hall who had pulled reveille duty that morning. Ilse was brushing her hair, and smiling at him.

His daytime work had started to go better. Others were not so distant, and more apt to look in his eyes. They’d met Ilse, and been charmed. If he saw anything else in their faces, he ignored it.

Then one evening he returned from the Oie, a little drunk, a little anxious-elated over a firing the next day, and found his cubicle empty. Ilse, her flowered bag, the clothing she usually left strewn on the cot, had all vanished. Nothing left but a wretched sheet of log paper (which Pökler found so useful for taming the terror of exponential curves into the linear, the safe), the same kind she’d drawn pictures of her Moonhouse on. “Papi, they want me back. Maybe they’ll let me see you again. I hope so. I love you. Ilse.”

Kurt Mondaugen found Pökler lying on her cot breathing what he imagined were odors of her hair on the pillow. For a while then he went a little insane, talked of killing Weissmann, sabotaging the rocket program, quitting his job and seeking asylum in England…. Mondaugen sat, and listened to all of it, touched Pökler once or twice, smoked his pipe, till at last, at two or three in the morning, Pökler had talked through a number of unreal options, cried, cursed, punched a hole into his neighbor’s cubicle, through which he heard the man snoring on oblivious. Cooled by then to a vexed engineer-elitism—“They are fools, they don’t even know what sine and cosine are and they’re trying to tell me”—he agreed that yes, he must wait, and let them do what they would do….

“If I set up a meeting with Weissmann,” Mondaugen did suggest, “could you be graceful? calm?”

“No. Not with him…. Not yet.”

“When you think you are ready, let me know. When you’re ready, you’ll know how to handle it.” Had he allowed himself a tone of command? He must have seen how much Pökler needed to be at someone’s command. Leni had learned to subdue her husband with her face, knew what cruel lines he expected of her mouth, what tones of voice he needed… when she left him she left an unemployed servant who’d go with the first master that called, just a

VICTIM IN A VACUUM!

Nur… ein… Op-fer!

Sehr ins Vakuum,

(“Won’t somebody take advantage of me?”)

Wird niemand ausnut-zen mich, auch?

(“Just a slave with nobody to slave for,”)

Nur ein Sklave, ohne Her-rin, (ya-ta ta-ta)

(“A-and who th’ heck wants ta be, free?”)

Wer zum Teufel die Freiheit, braucht?