“Souvenirs for Pointsman,” Muffage sighs, stripping off the surgical gloves. “Give that one another shot. It might be better if he sleeps through, and someone back in London explains this to him.”

Muffage starts up the motor, backs in a half-circle and slowly heads back up toward the road, the vast sea lying still behind.

Back at Putzi’s, Slothrop curls in a wide crisp-sheeted bed beside Solange, asleep and dreaming about Zwölfkinder, and Bianca smiling, he and she riding on the wheel, their compartment become a room, one he’s never seen, a room in a great complex of apartments big as a city, whose corridors can be driven or bicycled along like streets: trees lining them, and birds singing in the trees.

And “Solange,” oddly enough, is dreaming of Bianca too, though under a different aspect: it’s of her own child, Ilse, riding lost through the Zone on a long freight train that never seems to come to rest. She isn’t unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly, for her father. But Leni’s early dream for her is coming true. She will not be used. There is change, and departure: but there is also help when least looked for from the strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this drifting Humility, never quite to be extinguished, a few small chances for mercy… .

Upstairs, one Möllner, valise full of his night’s treasures—an American major’s uniform and papers, and 2½ ounces of cocaine—explains to the shaggy American sailor that Herr von Göll is a very busy man, attending to business in the north, as far as he knows, and has not commissioned him to bring to Cuxhaven any kind of papers, no military discharges, passports—nothing. He’s sorry. Perhaps the sailor’s friend is mistaken. Perhaps, again, it’s only a temporary delay. One appreciates that forgeries take time.

Bodine watches him leave, unaware of what’s inside that valise. Albert Krypton has drunken himself unconscious. Shirley comes wandering in, bright-eyed and restless, wearing a black garter belt and stockings. “Hmm,” she sez, with a certain look.

“Hmm,” sez Seaman Bodine.

“And anyway, it was only ten cents at the Battle of the Bulge.”

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

So: he has traced Weissmann’s battery from Holland, across the salt marshes and lupine and bones of cows, to find this. Lucky he’s not superstitious. He’d be taking it for a prophetic vision. There is of course a perfectly rational explanation, but Tchitcherine has never read Martín Fierro.

He watches from his temporary command post in a copse of junipers on a low hill. Through the binoculars he sees two men, one white, one black, holding guitars. Townspeople are gathered in a circle, but these Tchitcherine can crop out, leaving in his elliptical field a scene with the same structure as the male-female singing contest in the middle of a flat grassland in Central Asia well over a decade ago—a coming-together of opposites that signaled then his own approach to the Kirghiz Light. What does it signal this time?