“Uh, Myrtle…” Slothrop approaches gold-snooded M.M. a little deferent, “uh, do you think you could…” Jesus they run through this same routine every time—doesn’t Myrtle wish Sniveling Slothrop would cut this wishy-washy malarkey ’n’ be a man fer once! She lights a cigarette, lets it droop from one corner of her mouth, juts out the opposite hip and sighs, “On the beam,” exasperated already with this creep—

And Los! the miracle is done, they’re now zipping along the corridor-streets of the Raketen-Stadt like some long-necked sea monster. Little kids boil up like ants on the webby arches of viaducts high over the city dripping stone like Spanish moss petrified in mid-collapse, kids up over the airy railings and onto the friendly back of the sleek city-cruising monster. They climb window to window, too full of grace ever to fall. Some of them, naturally, are spies: that honey-curled little cutie in the blue checked pinafore and blue knee-socks, up there under the gargoyle at the window listening in to Maximilian, who began drinking heavily as soon as the building started to move, and is now carrying on a long denunciation of Marcel under the thin scholarly disguise of trying to determine if the Gallic Genius can truly be said to have any “soul.” Young lady under gargoyle is taking it all down in shorthand. These are valuable data for the psychological warfare effort.

For the first time now it becomes apparent that the 4 and the Father-conspiracy do not entirely fill their world. Their struggle is not the only, or even the ultimate one. Indeed, not only are there many other struggles, but there are also spectators, watching, as spectators will do, hundreds of thousands of them, sitting around this dingy yellow amphitheatre, seat after seat plunging down in rows and tiers endless miles, down to the great arena, brown-yellow lights, food scattered on the stone slopes up higher, broken buns, peanut shells, bones, bottles half-filled with green or orange sweet, fires in small wind-refuges, set in angles where seats have been chiseled away, shallow depressions in the stone and a bed of cherry embers where old women are cooking hashes of the scavenged bits and crumbles and gristly lumps of food, heating them in thin frying pans of gray oil-water bubbling, as the faces of children gather around to wait for food, and in the wind the dark young man, the slippery young knife who waits for your maid outside the iron gate each Sunday, who takes her away to a park, a stranger’s automobile and a shape of love you can never imagine, stands now with his hair untended in the wind, his head averted from the fire, feeling the cold, the mountain cold, at his temples and high under his jaw… while beside other fires the women gossip, one craning over now and then to look miles downward at the stage, to see if a new episode’s come on yet—crowds of students running by dark as ravens, coats draped around shoulders, back out into a murky sector of seats which traditionally are never entered (being reserved for the Ancestors), their voices fading still very intense, dramatic, trying to sound good or at least acceptable. The women go on, playing cards, smoking, eating. See if you can borrow a blanket from Rose’s fire over there, it’s gonna be cold tonight. Hey—and a pack of Armies while you’re out—and come right back, hear me? Of course the cigarette machine turns out to be Marcel, who else, in another of his clever mechanical disguises, and inside one pack is a message for one of the spectators. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want Them to know about the summer of 1945. Meet me in the Male Transvestites’ Toilet, level L16/39C, station Metatron, quadrant Fire, stall Malkuth. You know what time. The usual Hour. Don’t be late.”