He wrote a long tract about it presently, called On Preterition. It had to be published in England, and is among the first books to’ve been not only banned but also ceremonially burned in Boston. Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these “second Sheep,” without whom there’d be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. And it got worse. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. Right? How William avoided being burned for heresy, nobody knows. He must’ve had connections. They did finally 86 him out of Massachusetts Bay Colony—he thought about Rhode Island for a while but decided he wasn’t that keen on antinomians either. So finally he sailed back to Old England, not in disgrace so much as despondency, and that’s where he died, among memories of the blue hills, green maizefields, get-togethers over hemp and tobacco with the Indians, young women in upper rooms with their aprons lifted, pretty faces, hair spilling on the wood floors while underneath in the stables horses kicked and drunks hollered, the starts in the very early mornings when the backs of his herd glowed like pearl, the long, stony and surprising road to Boston, the rain on the Connecticut River, the snuffling good-nights of a hundred pigs among the new stars and long grass still warm from the sun, settling down to sleep… .

Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back—maybe that anarchist he met in Zürich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up… . Such are the vistas of thought that open up in Slothrop’s head as he tags along after Ludwig. Is he drifting, or being led? The only control in the picture right now is the damned lemming. If she exists. The kid shows Slothrop photos he’s packing in his wallet: Ursula, eyes bright and shy, peeking out from under a pile of cabbage leaves… Ursula in a cage decked with a giant ribbon and swastika’d seal, first prize in a Hitler Youth pet show… Ursula and the family cat, watching each other carefully across a tiled stretch of floor… Ursula, front paws dangling and eyes drowsy, hanging out the pocket of Ludwig’s Nazi cub-scout uniform. Some part of her is always blurred, too quick for the shutter. Even knowing when she was a baby what they’d be in for someday, still Ludwig has always loved her. He may be thinking that love can stop it from happening.