Now wouldn’t an afterburner there also give an asymmetrical burning pattern, and heat fluxes greater than the structure could take? Damn, why hasn’t he picked up any of the propulsion people? Do the Americans have them all?

Major Marvy, bowie knife in his teeth and two Thompsons propped on either hip, as dumbfounded in the clearing as the rest of the attack party, is in no mood to talk. Instead he is sulking, and drinking vodka out of Džabajev’s bottomless canteen. But had any propulsion engineers assigned to the S-Gerät showed up at Garmisch, Marvy would have let him know. That’s the arrangement. Western intelligence, Russian trigger-fingers.

Oh, he smells Enzian… even now the black may be looking in out of the night. Tchitcherine lights a cigarette, greenbluelavender flare settling to yellow… he holds the flame longer than necessary, thinking let him. He won’t. I wouldn’t. Well… maybe I would… .

But it’s come a quantum-jump closer tonight. They are going to meet. It will be over the S-Gerät, real or fantasized, working or wasted—they will meet face to face. Then…

Meantime, who’s the mysterious Soviet intelligence agent that Marvy talked to? Paranoia for you here, Tchitcherine. Maybe Moscow’s been tipped to your vendetta. If they are gathering evidence for a court-martial, it won’t be any Central Asia this time. It’ll be Last Secretary to the embassy in Atlantis. You can negotiate narcotics arrests for all the drowned Russian sailors, expedite your own father’s visas to far Lemuria, to the sun-resorts of Sargasso where the bones come up to lie and bleach and mock the passing ships. And just before he rides out on the noon current, brochures tucked between ribs, traveler’s checks wadded in a skull-socket, tell him of his black son—tell him about the day with Enzian in the creeping edge of autumn, cold as the mortal cold of an orange kept under shaved ice on the terrace of the hotel in Barcelona, si me quieres escribir you already know where I’ll be staying… cold at the tip of your peeling-thumb, terminally-approaching cold… .

“Listen,” Marvy by now a little drunk and peevish, “when we gonna git those ’suckers?”

“It’s coming, you can be sure.”

“Butchyew don’t know the kinda pressure I’m gettin’ f’m Paris! F’m headquarters! It’s fantastic! There’s people in high places wanna wipe thim ’suckers out, now. All’s they got to do’s mash on a button ’n’ I never git to see no Mexican whores again’s long’s I live. Now you can see what these coons’re try’n’ t’do, somebody got to stop them ’fore they do, shit—”

“This intelligence man you saw—both our governments easily could have the same policy—”

“You ain’t got General Electric breathin’ over your shoulder, fella. Dillon, Reed… Standard Awl… shit… .”

“But that’s just what you folks need,” Bloody Chiclitz interjects. “Get some business people in there to run it right, instead of having the government run everything. Your left hand doesn’t know what your right hand’s doing! You know that?”