“Ha!” cries Marvy, dribbling champagne, eyeballs bulging. “You’re dreaming all right, old buddy! You sell those kids to Cecil B. De Mille it’s f’damn sure they ain’t goam be singin’. He’ll use them little ’suckers for galley slaves! Yaah-ha-ha—yeah they’ll be chained to th’ oars, just haulin’ ass, rowin’ old Henry Wilcoxon away into th’ sunset to fight them Greeks or Persians or somebody.”

“Galley slaves?” Chiclitz roars. “Never, by God. For De Mille, young fur-henchmen can’t be rowing!”

Out at the edge of town are the remains of an A4 battery, left where it stood as the troops fled south, trying to escape British and Russian pincers. Marvy and Chiclitz are going to have a look, and Slothrop is welcome to come along. But first there is the matter of Duane Marvy’s Atomic Chili, which turns out to be a test of manhood. The champagne bottle is there within easy reach, but drinking from it will be taken as a sign of weakness. Once Slothrop would have been suckered in, but now he doesn’t even have to think it over. While the two Americans, blinded, noses on fire and leaking incredible quantities of snot, undergo what the authoritative A Cheapskate’s Guide to the Zone aptly describes as “a Götterdämmerung of the mucous membranes,” Slothrop sits guzzling champagne like soda pop, nodding, smiling, and mumbling da, da now and then for authenticity’s sake.

They ride out to the site in a green, grinning Ford staff car. Marvy soon as he slides behind the wheel turns into a fanged dipsomaniac— eeeeerrrrr leaving rubber enough to condom a division, zero to 70 before the echo’s died, trying to run down bicyclists right ’n’ left, stampeding the livestock, whilst Bloody Chiclitz, whooping happily, a champagne bottle in each fist, urges him on—Marvy bellowing “San Antonya Rose,” his fav’rite song, Chiclitz screaming out the window admonitions like “Fuck not with the Kid, lest instead of fucker thou become fuckee,” which takes a while and draws only a few bewildered Fascist salutes from old ladies and little children at the roadside.

The site is a charred patch becoming green with new weeds, inside a copse of beech and some alder. Camouflaged metal stands silent across a ghostly crowd of late dandelions, gray heads nodding together waiting for the luminous wind that will break them toward the sea, over to Denmark, out to all points of the Zone. Everything’s been stripped. The vehicles are back to the hollow design envelopes of their earliest specs, though there’s still a faint odor of petrol and grease. Forget-me-nots are growing violent blue violent yellow among the snarl of cables and hoses. Swallows have built a nest inside the control car, and a spider has begun filling in the web of the Meillerwagen boom with her own. “Shit,” sez Major Marvy. “Fuckin’ Rooskies done stole everthing, no offense, comrade.” They go kicking through green and purple weeds, rusted food tins, old sawdust and chips of wood. Surveying stakes, each with a tatter of white nailed on top, still chain away toward the guide-beam transmitter 12 kilometers away. Eastward. So it must’ve been the Russians they were trying to stop… .