What’s this? What’re the antagonists doing here—infiltrating their own audience? Well, they’re not, really. It’s somebody else’s audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside-hours life of the Rocket-capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.

Maximilian is way down in the bottom of the orchestra pit posing as the C-melody saxophone player, complete with Closet Intellectual Book, The Wisdom of the Great Kamikaze Pilots, with illustrations by Walt Disney—screaming, hairy-nosed, front teeth in white dihedral, slant-eyed (long, elaborate curlicued shapes) round black licorice dog-nosed Japs, zoomin’ through ev’ry page! and any time he’s not playing that saxophone, you can be sure Maximilian will be, to the casual observer, immersed in this diffuse, though rewarding, work. Myrtle meantime is back in the candycane control room, manning the switchboard and ready to swoop in at any time to save the others, who are sure (through their own folly if nothing else) to be in deep trouble soon. And Slothrop himself lurks in the Transvestites’ Toilet, in the smoke, the crowds, the buzzing fluorescent lights, piss hot as melted butter, making notes of all the dealing going on among the stalls, bowls ’n’ urinals (you’ve got to look butch but not that butch and another thing no metal showing at any vital spots, she’ll knock off ten marks for every one she sees, and the only bonuses she gives are spelled out here: blood drawn on first try, that’s an extra 20—) wondering if the cigarette-pack message got through and if they’ll come in person or if Pop’ll send a hit man to try for a first-round KO.

Well, there is the heart of it: the monumental yellow structure, out there in the slum-suburban night, the never-sleeping percolation of life and enterprise through its shell, Outside and Inside interpiercing one another too fast, too finely labyrinthine, for either category to have much hegemony any more. The nonstop revue crosses its stage, crowding and thinning, surprising and jerking tears in an endless ratchet:

THE LOW-FREQUENCY LISTENER

The German U-boats communicated on a wave length of 28,000 meters, which is down around 10 kc. A half-wave antenna for that’d halfta be 9 miles high, or long, and even folded here and there it is still some antenna. It is located at Magdeburg. So is the headquarters of the German branch of Jehovah’s Witnesses. So, for a time, is Slothrop, attempting to get through to the Argentine anarchist U-boat, now in unknown waters. The reason why is no longer clear to him. He was either visited again in some way by Squalidozzi, or he came upon Squalidozzi one day by accident, or he found, in some lint-picking attentionless search through pockets, rags or bedroll, the message he was given, back at the green edge of Aries, at the Café l’Éclipse long ago in Geneva. All he knows is that finding Squalidozzi, right now, is his overriding need.

The Keeper of the Antenna is a Jehovah’s witness named Rohr. He’s just out of the Ravensbrück camp after being in since ’36 (or ’37, he can’t remember). With that much camp time in, he’s politically reliable enough for the local G-5 to put him, nights, in control of the network of longest wavelength in the Zone. Although this could be accidental, more likely there is some eccentric justice lately begun to operate out here which it would behoove Slothrop to look into. There are rumors of a War Crimes Tribunal under way in Nürnberg. No one Slothrop has listened to is clear who’s trying whom for what, but remember that these are mostly brains ravaged by antisocial and mindless pleasures.