“Now,” Slothrop with a boobish, eager-to-please smile, “time for that Pause that Refreshes!” And he’s into the icebox before Myrtle’s “Oh, Jesus” has quite finished echoing… the light from the cold wee bulb turning his face to summernight blue, Broderick and Nalline’s shadow-child, their unconfessed, their monster son, who was born with hydraulic clamps for hands that know only how to reach and grab… and a heart that gurgles audibly, like a funny fatman’s stomach… but look how lost, how unarrested his face is, was, that 1½ seconds in the glow from the folksy old icebox humming along in Kelvinator-Bostonian dialect, “Why cummawn in, T’rone, it’s nice and friendly heeah in my stummick, gawt lawtsa nice things, like Mawxies, ’n’ big Baby Rooths… .” Walking now in among miles-down-the-sky shelves and food-mountains or food-cities of Iceboxland (but look out, it can get pretty Fascist in here, behind the candy-colored sweet stuff is thermodynamic elitism at its clearest—bulbs can be replaced with candles and the radios fall silent, but the Grid’s big function in this System is iceboxery: freezing back the tumultuous cycles of the day to preserve this odorless small world, this cube of changelessness), climbing over the celery ridges where the lettered cheese glasses loom high and glossy in the middle distance, slippin’ on the butter dish, piggin’ on the watermelon down to the rind, feelin’ yellow and bright as you skirt the bananas, gazing down at verdigris reaches of mold across the crusted terrain of an old, no longer identifiable casserole—bananas! who-who’s been putting bananas—

In-the-re-frig er a-tor!

O no-no-no, no-no-no!

Chiquita Banana sez we shouldn’t! Somethin’ awful’ll happen! Who would do that? It couldn’t be Mom, and Hogan’s in love with Chiquita Banana, Tyrone’s come in the room plenty of times found his brother with banana label glued on his erect cock for ready reference, lost in masturbatory fantasies of nailing this cute but older Latin lady while she’s wearing her hat, gigantic fruit-market hat and a big saucy smile ¡Ay, ay, how passionate you Yankees are! … a-and it couldn’t’ve been Pop, no Pop wouldn’t, but if it (is it getting cold in here?) wasn’t any of us, then (what’s happening to the Spike Jones record of “Right in the Führer’s Face” playing back out in the living room, why’s the sound fading?) … unless I did it without knowing (look around, something’s squeaking on its hinges) and maybe that means I’m going crazy (what’s this brightening the bulblight, what’s—) SLAM well whoever it is that’s been wantonly disregarding United Fruit’s radio commercials has also just closed young Tyrone in that icebox, and now he’ll have to count on Myrtle to get him out. Embarrassing as heck.

“Good thinking, boss man.”

“Gee, M.M., I don’t know what happened… .”

“Do you ever? Grab on to my cape.”

Whoosh—

“Whew. Well,” sez Slothrop, “uh, are we all…?”

“That Radiant Hour’s probably light-years away by now,” sez Myrt, “and you have a snot icicle hanging outa your nose.” Marcel springs to the controls of the mobile building, keys in to Central Control a request for omnidirectional top-speed clearance, which sometimes comes through and sometimes not, depending on a secret process among the granters of permission, a process it is one of the 4’s ongoing mandates to discover and impart to the world. This time they get Slow Crawl, Suburban Vectors, lowest traffic status in the Raketen-Stadt, invoked only once in recorded history, against a homosexual child-murdering Indian liked to wipe off his organ afterwards on the Flag and so on—“Shit!” hollers Maximilian at Slothrop, “Slow Crawl, Suburban Vectors! whut th’ fuck we s’posed to do man, swim or some shit?”