“You can go home.”

Tchitcherine has been watching the other two. He sees now that they are in American uniform, and probably haven’t understood a word. He holds out his empty hands, his sunburned wrists, for a last application of steel. Ripov, in the act of turning to leave, appears surprised. “Oh. No, no. You have thirty days’ survivor’s leave. You have survived, Vaslav. You’re to report to TsAGI when you get back to Moscow, that’s all. There’ll be another assignment. We’ll be taking German rocket personnel out to the desert. To Central Asia. I imagine they’ll need an old Central Asia hand out there.”

Tchitcherine understands that in his dialectic, his own life’s unfolding, to return to Central Asia is, operationally, to die.

They have gone. The woman’s iron face, at the very last, did not turn back. He is alone in a gutted room, with the plastic family toothbrushes still in their holders on the wall, melted, strung downward in tendrils of many colors, bristles pointing to every black plane and corner and soot-blinded window.

□□□□□□□

The dearest nation of all is one that will survive no longer than you and I, a common movement at the mercy of death and time: the ad hoc adventure.

—Resolutions of the Gross Suckling Conference

North? What searcher has ever been directed north? What you’re supposed to be looking for lies south—those dusky natives, right? For danger and enterprise they send you west, for visions, east. But what’s north?

The escape route of the Anubis.

The Kirghiz Light.

The Herero country of death.

Ensign Morituri, Carroll Eventyr, Thomas Gwenhidwy, and Roger Mexico are sitting at a table on the redbrick terrace of Der Grob Säugling, an inn by the edge of a little blue Holstein lake. The sun makes the water sparkle. The housetops are red, the steeples are white. Everything is miniature, neat, gently pastoral, locked into the rise and fall of seasons. Contrasting wood x s on closed doors. The brink of autumn. A cow sez moo. The milkmaid farts at the milk pail, which echoes with a very slight clang, and the geese honk or hiss. The four envoys drink watered Moselle and talk mandalas.

The Rocket was fired southward, westward, eastward. But not northward—not so far. Fired south, at Antwerp, the bearing was about 173°. East, during testing at Peenemünde, 072°. Fired west, at London, about 260°. Working it out with the parallel rulers, the missing (or, if you want, “resultant”) bearing comes out to something like 354°. This would be the firing implied by all the others, a ghost-firing which, in the logic of mandalas, either has occurred, most-secretly, or will occur.