But does the Polish undertaker in the rowboat care about busting this code, about secret organizations or recognizable subcultures? No, he doesn’t. The reason he is seeking these people out is that he thinks it will help him in his job. Can you dig that, gates? He wants to know how people behave before and after lightning bolts, so he’ll know better how to handle bereaved families.

“You are perverting a great discovery to the uses of commerce,” sez Thanatz, stepping ashore. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” He is no more than five minutes into the empty town at the edge of the marsh when nockle KKAHH-UHNN! nocklenockle nockle an enormous blast of light and sound hits the water back where the undertaker, peeved at what he takes to be no gratitude, is hauling away.

“Oh,” comes his faint voice. “Oh, ho. Oh-ho-ho-ho!”

“Nobody lives here but us.” A solid figure, a whispering silhouette, charcoal-colored, has materialized in Thanatz’s path. “We do not harm visitors. But it would be better if you took another way.”

They are 175s—homosexual prison-camp inmates. They have come north from the Dora camp at Nordhausen, north till the land ended, and have set up an all-male community between this marsh and the Oder estuary. Ordinarily, this would be Thanatz’s notion of paradise, except that none of the men can bear to be out of Dora—Dora was home, and they are homesick. Their “liberation” was a banishment. So here in a new location they have made up a hypothetical SS chain of command—no longer restricted to what Destiny allotted then for jailers, they have now managed to come up with some really mean ass imaginary Nazi playmates, Schutzhäftlingsführer to Blockführer, and chosen an internal hierarchy for themselves too: Lager and Blockältester, Kapo, Vorarbeiter, Stubendienst, Läufer (who is a runner or messenger, but also happens to be the German name for a chess bishop… if you have seen him, running across the wet meadows in very early morning, with his red vestments furling and fluttering darkened almost to tree-bark color among the watery downs, you will have some notion of his real purpose here inside the community—he is carrier of holy strategies, memoranda of conscience, and when he approaches over the reedy flats of morning you are taken by your bowed nape and brushed with the sidebands of a Great Moment—for the Läufer is the most sacred here, it is he who takes messages out to the ruinous interface between the visible Lager and the invisible SS).

At the top of the complex is Schutzhäftlingsführer Blicero. The name has found its way this far east, as if carrying on the man’s retreat for him, past the last stand in the Lüneburg Heath. He is the Zone’s worst specter. He is malignant, he pervades the lengthening summer nights. Like a cankered root he is changing, growing toward winter, growing whiter, toward the idleness and the famine. Who else could the 175s have chosen for their very highest oppressor? His power is absolute. And don’t think he isn’t really waiting, out by the shelled and rusty gasworks, under the winding staircases, behind the tanks and towers, waiting for the dawn’s first carmine-skirted runner with news of how the night went. The night is his dearest interest, so he must be told.