As he edges downward, shaking, rung by rung, feeling prickles back into his arm. How can he go down? How can he go up? He tries to concentrate on the pain. His feet strike steel plate finally. Blindness. He moves to starboard, colliding at every step with shin-high edges, sharp projections… I don’t want to… how can I… reach down behind… bare hands… what if…

A sudden whine to his right—something mechanical—he jumps, breath sucking very cold between teeth, nerves in back and arms off and on, skittering… he reaches a cylindrical barrier… might be the generator… stoops and begins to— His hand closes on stiff taffeta. He jerks it away, tries to get up, slams his head against something sharp… he wants to crawl back toward the ladder, but has lost all sense of direction now… he squats, turning in a circle, slowly… let it end letitend…. But his hands, pawing the deck, return to slippery satin.

“No.” Yes: hooks and eyes. He breaks a fingernail, trying to lose them but they follow… lacing that moves, snake-sure, entangling, binding each finger….

“No…” He rises to a crouch, moves forward into something hanging from the overhead. Icy little thighs in wet silk swing against his face. They smell of the sea. He turns away, only to be lashed across the cheek by long wet hair. No matter which way he tries to move now… cold nipples… the deep cleft of her buttocks, perfume and shit and the smell of brine… and the smell of… of…

When the lights come back on, Slothrop is on his knees, breathing carefully. He knows he will have to open his eyes. The compartment reeks now with suppressed light—with mortal possibilities for light—as the body, in times of great sadness, will feel its real chances for pain: real and terrible and only just under the threshold…. The brown paper bundle is two inches from his knee, wedged behind the generator. But it’s what’s dancing dead-white and scarlet at the edges of his sight… and are the ladders back up and out really as empty as they look?

Back on the Frau’s boat, Springer is out with a bottle of champagne courtesy of the Anubis, untwisting the bright wires and firing the cork in a farewell salvo. Slothrop’s hands are shaking and he spills most of his. Antoni and Stefania watch from the bridge as the two vessels pull apart, Baltic sky visible through the backs of their eyes. Her white hair in filaments of foam, her cheeks sculptured fog… cloudman, fogwife, they dwindle, aloof, silent, back into the heart of the storm.

The Frau heads south, along the other coast of Rügen, into the straits by way of the Bug. The storm keeps pace, as night comes down. “We’ll put in at Stralsund,” her scrawled face streaming with lube-green shadow, yellow light, as the oil-lantern sways in the pilot house.