“And she didn’t say where.”

“Only ‘the Heath.’ See if you can find her husband. Miklos Thanatz. He may have seen the actual firing, if there was one. Something out of the ordinary went on about then, but I never got to find out what.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s O.K. Maybe you can tell me something now.” He brings out the mandala he found. “What’s it mean?”

Andreas sets it on the ground, turns it till the K points northwest. “Klar,” touching each letter, “Entlüftung, these are the female letters. North letters. In our villages the women lived in huts on the northern half of the circle, the men on the south. The village itself was a mandala. Klar is fertilization and birth, Entlüftung is the breath, the soul. Zündung and Vorstufe are the male signs, the activities, fire and preparation or building. And in the center, here, Hauptstufe. It is the pen where we kept the sacred cattle. The souls of the ancestors. All the same here. Birth, soul, fire, building. Male and female, together.

“The four fins of the Rocket made a cross, another mandala. Number one pointed the way it would fly. Two for pitch, three for yaw and roll, four for pitch. Each opposite pair of vanes worked together, and moved in opposite senses. Opposites together. You can see how we might feel it speak to us, even if we don’t set one up on its fins and worship it. But it was waiting for us when we came north to Germany so long ago… even confused and uprooted as we were then, we knew that our destiny was tied up with its own. That we had been passed over by von Trotha’s army so that we would find the Aggregat.”

Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes it will work like the mantra that Enzian told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over), mba-kayere… a spell against Marvy tonight, against Tchitcherine. A mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night… .

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

The Schwarzkommando have got to Achtfaden, but Tchitcherine has been to Närrisch. It cost him Der Springer and three enlisted men in sick bay with deep bites. One severed artery. Närrisch trying to go out Audie Murphy style. A knight for a bishop—Närrisch under narco-hypnosis raved about the Holy Circle and the Rocketfin Cross. But the blacks don’t know what else Närrisch knew:

(a) there was a radio link from the ground to the S-Gerät but not the other way round,

(b) there was an interference problem between a servo-actuator and a special oxygen line running aft to the device from the main tank,

(c) Weissmann not only coordinated the S-Gerät project at Nordhausen, but also commanded the battery that fired Rocket 00000.

Total espionage. Bit by bit this mosaic is growing. Tchitcherine, bureauless, carries it around in his brain. Every chip and scrap belongs. More precious than Ravenna, something goes erecting against this starch-colored sky… .

Radio link + oxygen = afterburner of some kind. Ordinarily it would. But Närrisch also spoke of an asymmetry, a load inside near vane 3 that complicated roll and yaw control almost impossibly.