The sad fact, lacerating his heart, laying open his emptiness, is that Jessica believes Them. “The War” was the condition she needed for being with Roger. “Peace” allows her to leave him. His resources, next to Theirs, are too meager. He has no words, no technically splendid embrace, no screaming fit that can ever hold her. Old Beaver, not surprisingly, will be doing air-defense liaison over there, so they’ll be together in romantic Cuxhaven. Ta-ta mad Roger, it’s been grand, a wartime fling, when we came it was utterly incendiary, your arms open wide as a Fortress’s wings, we had our military secrets, we fooled the fat old colonels right and left but stand-down time must come to all, yikes! I must run sweet Roger really it’s been dreamy… .

He would fall at her knees smelling of glycerine and rose-water, he would lick sand and salt from her ATS brogans, offer her his freedom, his next 50 years’ pay from a good steady job, his poor throbbing brain. But it’s too late. We’re at Peace. The paranoia, the danger, the tuneless whistling of busy Death next door, are all put to sleep, back in the War, back with her Roger Mexico Years. The day the rockets stopped falling, it began to end for Roger and Jessica. As it grew clear, day after safe day, that no more would fall ever again, the new world crept into and over her like spring—not so much the changes she felt in air and light, in the crowds at Woolworth’s, as a bad cinema spring, full of paper leaves and cotton-wool blossoms and phony lighting… no, never again will she stand at their kitchen sink with a china cup squeaking in her fingers, its small crying-child sound defenseless, meekly resonating BLOWN OUT OF ATTENTION AS THE ROCKET FELL smashing to a clatter of points white and blue across the floor… .

Those death-rockets now are in the past. This time she’ll be on the firing end, she and Jeremy—isn’t that how it was always meant to be? firing them out to sea: no death, only the spectacle, fire and roar, the excitement without the killing, isn’t that what she prayed for? back in the fading house, derequisitioned now, occupied again by human extensions of ball-fringe, dog pictures, Victorian chairs, secret piles of News of the World in the upstairs closet.

She’s meant to go. The orders come from higher than she can reach. Her future is with the World’s own, and Roger’s only with this strange version of the War he still carries with him. He can’t move, poor dear, it won’t let him go. Still passive as he’d been under the rockets. Roger the victim. Jeremy the firer. “The War’s my mother,” he said the first day, and Jessica has wondered what ladies in black appeared in his dreams, what ash-white smiles, what shears to come snapping through the room, through their winter… so much of him she never got to know… so much unfit for Peace. Already she’s beginning to think of their time as a chain of explosions, craziness ganged to the rhythms of the War. Now he wants to go rescue Slothrop, another rocket-creature, a vampire whose sex life actually fed on the terror of that Rocket Blitz—ugh, creepy, creepy. They ought to lock him up, not set him free. Roger must care more about Slothrop than about her, they’re two of a kind, aren’t they, well—she hopes they’ll be happy together. They can sit and drink beer, tell rocket stories, scribble equations for each other. How jolly. At least she won’t be leaving him in a vacuum. He won’t be lonely, he’ll have something to occupy the time… .