Yeah! yeah what happened to Imipolex G, all that Jamf a-and that S-Gerät, s’posed to be a hardboiled private eye here, gonna go out all alone and beat the odds, avenge my friend that They killed, get my ID back and find that piece of mystery hardware but now aw it’s JUST LIKE—

LOOK-IN’ FAWR A NEEDLE IN A HAAAAY-STACK!

Sssss—searchinfrasomethin’ fulla moon-beams,

(Something) got ta have yoooou!

Feet whispering through weeds and meadow grass, humming along exactly the breathless, chin-up way Fred Astaire did, reflecting on his chances of ever finding Ginger Rogers again this side of their graceful mortality… .

Then, snapping back—no no, wait, you’re supposed to be planning soberly now, weighing your options, determining your goals at this critical turning point in your…

Ya—ta-ta, LOOKIN’ F’R A NEEDLE IN A—

Nonono come on, Jackson, quit fooling, you got to concentrate… . The S-Gerät now—O.K. if I can find that S-Gerät ’n’ how Jamf was hooked in, if I can find that out, yeah yeah Imipolex now…

—searchin’ for a (hmm) cellar full o’ saffron…

Aw…

At about which point, as if someone’s simple longing has made it appear, comes a single needle-stroke through the sky: the first star.

Let me be able to warn them in time.

They jump Slothrop among the trees, lean, bearded, black—they bring him in to the fires where someone is playing a thumb-harp whose soundbox is carved from a piece of German pine, whose reeds are cut from springs of a wrecked Volkswagen. Women in white cotton skirts printed with dark blue flowers, white blouses, braided aprons, and black kerchiefs are busy with pots and tinware. Some are wearing ostrich-egg-shell necklaces knife-hatched in red and blue. A great cut of beef drips from a wooden spit over a fire.

Enzian isn’t there, but Andreas Orukambe is, nervous as wire, wearing a navy pullover and army fatigue trousers. He remembers Slothrop. “Was ist los?”

Slothrop tells him. “Supposed to be here at midnight. Don’t know how many there are, but maybe you’d better clear out.”

“Maybe.” Andreas is smiling. “Have you eaten?”

The argument, go or stay, proceeds over supper. It is not the tactical decision-making Slothrop was taught in officer school. There seem to be other considerations, something the Zone-Hereros know about and Slothrop doesn’t.

“We have to go where we go,” Andreas explains to him later. “Where Mukuru wants us to go.”

“Oh. Oh, I thought you were out here looking for something, like everybody else. The 00000, what about that?”

“That is Mukuru’s. He hides it where he wants us to seek.”

“Look, I have a line on that S-Gerät.” He gives them Greta Erdmann’s story—the Heath, the gasoline works, the name Blicero—

That rings a bell. A gong, in fact. Everybody looks at everybody else. “Now,” Andreas very careful, “that was the name of the German who commanded the battery that used the S-Gerät?”

“I don’t know if they used it. Blicero took the woman to a factory where it was either put together, or a part of it was made, from some plastic called Imipolex G.”