“Hoorah!” cry the others. Well taken, Osbie.

Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck sits by the window, cleaning a Sten. Outside, blowing over its dorsal and summer stillness, London today can feel advance chills of Austerity. There isn’t a word in Sir Stephen’s head right now. He is completely involved with the weapon. He no longer thinks about his wife, Nora, although she’s out there, in some room, still surrounded by her planetary psychics, and aimed herself now toward a peculiar fate. In recent weeks, in true messianic style, it has come clear to her that her real identity is, literally, the Force of Gravity. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History… . Her wheeling freaks, her seers, teleporters, astral travelers and tragic human interfaces all know of her visitation, but none see any way for her to turn. She must prove herself now—find deeper forms of renunciation, deeper than Sabbatai Zvi’s apostasy before the Sublime Porte. It is a situation not without its chances for a good practical joke now and then—poor Nora will be suckered into séances that wouldn’t fool your great-aunt, visits from the likes of Ronald Cherrycoke in a Jesus Christ getup, whistling down the wires into a hidden ultraviolet baby spot where he will start fluorescing in most questionable taste, blithering odd bits of Gospel together, reaching down from his crucified altitudes to actually cop feels of Nora’s girdled behind… highly offended, she will flee into hallways full of clammy invisible hands—poltergeists will back toilets up on her, ladylike turds will bob at her virgin vertex, and screaming ugh, ass dripping, girdle around her knees, she will go staggering into her own drawing-room to find no refuge even there, no, someone will have caused to materialize for her a lesbian elephant soixante-neuf, slimy trunks pistoning symmetrically in and out of juicy elephant vulvas, and when she turns to escape this horrid exhibition she’ll find some playful ghost has latched the door behind her, and another’s just about to sock her in the face with a cold Yorkshire pudding… .

In Pirate’s maisonette, everyone is singing now a counterforce traveling song, with Thomas Gwenhidwy, who has not fallen to the dialectic curse of Pointsman’s Book after all, accompanying on what seems to be a rosewood crwth:

They’ve been sleeping on your shoulder,

They’ve been crying in your beer,

And They’ve sung you all Their sad lullabies,

And you thought They wanted sympathy and didn’t care for souls,

And They never were about to put you wise.

But I’m telling you today,

That it ain’t the only way,

And there’s shit you won’t be eating any more—

They’ve been paying you to love it,

But the time has come to shove it,

And it isn’t a resistance, it’s a war.

“It’s a war,” Roger sings, driving into Cuxhaven, wondering offhand how Jessica has cut her hair for Jeremy, and how that insufferable prig would look with a thrust chamber wrapped around his head, “it’s a war…”