But where inside Marcel is the midget Grandmaster, the little Johann Allgeier? where’s the pantograph, and the magnets? Nowhere. Marcel really is a mechanical chessplayer. No fakery inside to give him any touch of humanity at all. Each of the FF is, in fact, gifted while at the same time flawed by his gift—unfit by it for human living. Myrtle Miraculous specializes in performing miracles. Stupendous feats, impossible for humans. She has lost respect for humans, they are clumsy, they fail, she does want to love them but love is the only miracle that’s beyond her. Love is denied her forever. The others of her class are either homosexuals, fanatics about law ’n’ order, off on strange religious excursions, or as intolerant of failure as herself, and though friends such as Mary Marvel and Wonder Woman keep inviting her to parties to meet eligible men, Myrtle knows it’s no use…. As for Maximilian, he has a natural sense of rhythm, which means all rhythms, up to and including the cosmic. So he will never be where the fathomless manhole awaits, where the safe falls from the high window shrieking like a bomb—he is a pilot through Earth’s baddest minefields, if we only stay close to him, be where he is as much as we can—yet Maximilian’s doom is never to go any further into danger than its dapperness, its skin-exciting first feel….

Fine crew this is, getting set to go off after the Radiant—say what? what’s Slothrop’s own gift and Fatal Flaw? Aw, c’mon—uh, the Radiant Hour, collecting their equipment, Myrtle zooming to and fro materializing this and that:

The Golden Gate Bridge (“How about that one?” “Uh, let’s see the other one, again? with the, you know, uh…” “The Brooklyn?” “—kind of old-fashioned looking—” “The Brooklyn Bridge?” “Yeah, that’s it, with the pointed… whatever they are…”).

The Brooklyn Bridge (“See, for a chase-scene, Myrtle, we ought to observe proportions—” “Do tell.” “Now if we were gonna be in highspeed automobiles, well, sure, we might use the Golden Gate… but for zooming through the air now, we need something older, more intimate, human—”).

A pair of superlatively elegant Rolls Royces (“Quit fooling, Myrtle, we already agreed, didn’t we? No automobiles…”).

A small plastic baby’s steering wheel (“Aw all right, I know you don’t respect me as a leader but listen can’t we be reasonable…”).