Among all there was to choose from, Wheel, myths, jungle animals, clowns, Ilse found her way to the Antarctic Panorama. Two or three boys hardly older than she wandered through the imitation wilderness, bundled up in sealskins, constructing cairns and planting flags in the August humidity. Watching them made Pökler sweat. A few “sled dogs” lay suffering in the shade of the dirty papier-mâché sastrugi, on plaster snow that had begun to crack. A hidden projector threw images of the aurora on a white scrim. Half a dozen stuffed penguins also dotted the landscape.

“So—you want to live at the South Pole. Have you given up so easily on”—Kot—idiot, that was a slip—“on the Moon?” He’d been good up till then about cross-examining. He couldn’t afford to know who she was. In the false Antarctic, in ignorance of what had attracted her there, uneasy and dripping sweat, he waited for her answer.

She, or They, let him off. “Oh,” with a shrug, “who wants to live on the Moon?” They never brought it up again.

Back at their hotel, they were handed the key by an eight-year-old desk clerk, rose in a whining elevator run by a uniformed child, to a room still warm from the day’s heat. She closed the door, took off her hat and scaled it over to her bed. Pökler collapsed on his own bed. She came over to take off his shoes.

“Papi,” gravely unlacing, “may I sleep next to you tonight?” One of her hands had come lightly to rest on the beginning of his bare calf. Their eyes met for half a second. A number of uncertainties shifted then for Pökler and locked into sense. To his shame, his first feeling was pride. He hadn’t known he was so vital to the program. Even in this initial moment, he was seeing it from Their side—every quirk goes in the dossier, gambler, foot-fetishist or soccer fan, it’s all important, it can all be used. Right now we have to keep them happy, or at least neutralize the foci of their unhappiness. You may not understand what their work really is, not at the level of the data, but you’re an administrator after all, a leader, your job is to get results… Pökler, now, has mentioned a “daughter.” Yes, yes we know it’s disgusting, one never can tell what they have locked up in there with those equations, but we must all put off our judgments for now, there’ll be time after the war to get back to the Pöklers and their dirty little secrets….