When Slothrop has cigarettes he’s an easy mark, when somebody has food they share it—sometimes a batch of vodka if there’s an army concentration nearby, the GI cans can be looted for all kinds of useful produce, potato peels, melon rinds, pieces of candy bars for sugar, no telling what’s going to go into these DP stills, what you end up drinking is the throwaway fraction of some occupying power. Slothrop drifts in and out of dozens of these quiet, hungry, scuffling migrations, each time getting hard Benzedrine jitters off of the faces—there aren’t any he can really ignore, is the problem, they’re all too strong, like faces of a racetrack crowd, each one urging No, me—look at me, be touched, reach for your camera, your weapon, your cock… . He’s stripped all the insignia off Tchitcherine’s uniform, trying for less visibility, but very few people seem to care much about insignia… .

Much of the time he’s alone. He’ll come on farmhouses, deserted in the night, and will sleep in the hay, or if there’s a mattress (not often) in a bed. Wake to sun glittering off some small lake surrounded by green salted with blossoms of thyme or mustard, a salad hillside, sweeping up to pines in the mist. Sapling tomato-frames and purple foxgloves in the yards, huge birds’ nests built up under the eaves of the thatched roofs, bird-choruses in the morning, and soon, one day, as the summer turns ponderously in the sky, the clang of cranes, on the move.

At a farmhouse in a river valley far south of Rostock, he comes in to shelter out of the midday rain, falls asleep in a rocking-chair on the porch, and dreams about Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, his friend from long ago. He has come back, after all and against the odds. It’s somewhere out in the country, English country, quilted in darkened green and amazingly bright straw-yellow, of very old standing rocks on high places, of early indenture to death and taxes, of country girls who walk out at night to stand naked on the tor and sing. Members of Tantivy’s family and many friends have come, all in a mood of quiet celebrating, because of Tantivy’s return. Everybody understands it’s only a visit: that he will be “here” only in a conditional way. At some point it will fall apart, from thinking about it too much. There is a space of lawn cleared for dancing, with a village band and many of the women dressed in white. After a spell of confusion about the day’s schedule of events, the meeting takes place—it seems to be underground, not exactly a grave or crypt, nothing sinister, crowded with relatives and friends around Tantivy who looks so real, so untouched by time, very clear and full of color… “Why, Slothrop.”

“Oh—where’ve you been, gate?”

“‘Here.’”

“‘“Here”’?”

“Yes, like that, you’ve got it—once or twice removed like that, but I walked in the same streets as you, read the same news, was narrowed to the same spectrum of colors… .”