Bottles roll clanking on the floor, under the bonnet a hung-up tappet or two chatters its story of discomfort. Wild mustard whips past down the center of the Autobahn, perfectly two-tone, just yellow and green, a fateful river seen only by the two kinds of rippling light. Roger sings to a girl in Cuxhaven who still carries Jessica’s name:

I dream that I have found us both again,

With spring so many strangers’ lives away,

And we, so free,

Out walking by the sea,

With someone else’s paper words to say… .

They took us at the gates of green return,

Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why—

Do children meet again?

Does any trace remain,

Along the superhighways of July?

Driving now suddenly into such a bright gold bearding of slope and field that he nearly forgets to steer around the banked curve… .

A week before she left, she came out to “The White Visitation” for the last time. Except for the negligible rump of PISCES, the place was a loony bin again. The barrage-balloon cables lay rusting across the sodden meadows, going to flakes, to ions and earth—tendons that sang in the violent nights, among the sirens wailing in thirds smooth as distant wind, among the drumbeats of bombs, now lying slack, old, in hard twists of metal ash. Forget-me-nots boil everywhere underfoot, and ants crowd, bustling with a sense of kingdom. Commas, brimstones, painted ladies coast on the thermoclines along the cliffs. Jessica has cut fringes since Roger saw her last, and is going through the usual anxiety—“It looks utterly horrible, you don’t have to say it… .”

“It’s utterly swoony,” sez Roger, “I love it.”

“You’re making fun.”

“Jess, why are we talking about haircuts for God’s sake?”

While somewhere, out beyond the Channel, a barrier difficult as the wall of Death to a novice medium, Leftenant Slothrop, corrupted, given up on, creeps over the face of the Zone. Roger doesn’t want to give him up: Roger wants to do what’s right. “I just can’t leave the poor twit out there, can I? They’re trying to destroy him—”

But, “Roger,” she’d smile, “it’s spring. We’re at peace.”

No, we’re not. It’s another bit of propaganda. Something the P.W.E. planted. Now gentlemen as you’ve seen from the studies our optimum time is 8 May, just before the traditional Whitsun exodus, schools letting out, weather projections for an excellent growing season, coal requirements beginning their seasonal decline, giving us a few months’ grace to get our Ruhr interests back on their feet—no, he sees only the same flows of power, the same impoverishments he’s been thrashing around in since ’39. His girl is about to be taken away to Germany, when she ought to be demobbed like everyone else. No channel upward that will show either of them any hope of escape. There’s something still on, don’t call it a “war” if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate’s gone down a point or two, beer in cans is back at last and there were a lot of people in Trafalgar Square one night not so long ago… but Their enterprise goes on.