“Frieda.” A voice calling from the blue shadow behind a wall. Grunting, smiling, the pig stands her ground—look who I brought home. Soon a thin freckled man, blond, nearly bald, steps out into the sun. Glancing at Slothrop, nervous, he reaches to scratch Frieda between the ears. “I am Pökler. Thank you for bringing her back.”

“No, no—she brought me.”

“Yes.”

Pökler is living in the basement of the town hall. He has some coffee heating on a driftwood fire in the stove.

“Do you play chess?”

Frieda kibitzes. Slothrop, who tends to play more by superstition than strategy, is obsessed with protecting his knights, Springer and Springer—willing to lose anything else, thinking no more than a move or two ahead if that, he alternates long lethargic backing and filling with bursts of idiot razzle-dazzle that have Pökler frowning, but not with worry. About the time Slothrop loses his queen, “Sa-a-a-y, waita-minute, did you say Pökler?”

Zip the man is out with a Luger as big as a house—really fast guy—with the muzzle pointing right at Slothrop’s head. For a moment Slothrop, in his pig suit, thinks that Pökler thinks that he, Slothrop, has been fooling around with Frieda the Pig, and that there is about to be a shotgun, or Luger, wedding here—in fact the phrase unto thee I pledge my trough has just arrived in his brain when he realizes that what Pökler’s actually saying is, “You’d better leave. Only two more moves and I’d’ve had you anyway.”

“Lemme at least tell you my story,” blithering fast as he can the Zürich information with Pökler’s name on it, the Russian-American-Herero search for the S-Gerät, wondering meantime, in parallel sort of, if that Oberst Enzian wasn’t right about going native in the Zone— beginning to get ideas, fixed and slightly, ah, erotic notions about Destiny are you Slothrop? eh? tracing back the route Frieda the pig brought him along, trying to remember forks where they might have turned another way… .

“The Schwarzgerät.” Pökler shakes his head. “I don’t know what it was. I was never that interested. Is that really all you’re after?”

Slothrop thinks that over. Their coffee cups take sunlight from the window and bounce it back up to the ceiling, bobbing ellipses of blue light. “Don’t know. Except for this kind of personal tie-in with Imipolex G… .”

“It’s an aromatic polyimide,” Pökler putting the gun back in his shirt.

“Tell me about it,” sez Slothrop.

Well, but not before he has told something of his Ilse and her summer returns, enough for Slothrop to be taken again by the nape and pushed against Bianca’s dead flesh… . Ilse, fathered on Greta Erdmann’s silver and passive image, Bianca, conceived during the filming of the very scene that was in his thoughts as Pökler pumped in the fatal charge of sperm—how could they not be the same child?

She’s still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible as a glass of gray lemonade in a twilit room… still she is there, cool and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams.