So the conferees at the Gross Suckling Conference here, as it will come to be known, sit around a map with their instruments, cigarettes and speculations. Sneer not. Here is one of the great deductive moments in postwar intelligence. Mexico is holding out for a weighting system to make vector lengths proportional to the actual number of firings along each one. Thomas Gwenhidwy, ever sensitive to events in geographical space, wants to take the 1944 Blizna firings (also eastward) into account, which would pull the arrow northward from 354°—and even closer to true north if the firings at London and Norwich from Walcheren and Staveren are also included.

Evidence and intuition—and maybe a residue of uncivilizable terror that lies inside us, every one—point to 000°: true North. What better direction to fire the 00000?

Trouble is, what good’s a bearing, even a mythic-symmetric bearing, without knowing where the Rocket was fired from to begin with? You have a razor-edge, 280 km long, sweeping east/west across the Zone’s pocked face, endlessly sweeping, obsessive, dithering, glittering, unbearable, never coming to rest….

Well, Under The Sign Of The Gross Suckling. Swaying full-color picture of a loathsomely fat drooling infant. In one puddinglike fist the Gross Suckling clutches a dripping hamhock (sorry pigs, nothing personal), with the other he reaches out for a human Mother’s Nipple that emerges out into the picture from the left-hand side, his gaze arrested by the approaching tit, his mouth open—a gleeful look, teeth pointed and itching, a glaze of FOODmunchmunchyesgobblemmm over his eyes. Der Grob Säugling, 23rd card of the Zone’s trumps major….

Roger likes to think of it as a snap of Jeremy as a child. Jeremy, who Knows All, has forgiven Jessica her time with Roger. He’s had an outing or two himself, and can understand, he’s of liberal mind, the War after all has taken down certain barriers, Victorianisms you might say (a tale brought to you by the same jokers who invented the famous Polyvinyl Chloride Raincoat) … and what’s this, Roger, he’s trying to impress you? his eyelids make high, amiable crescents as he leans forward (smaller chap than Roger thought) clutching his glass, sucking on the most tasteless Pipe Roger has ever seen, a reproduction in brier of Winston Churchill’s head for a bowl, no detail is spared, even a cigar in its mouth with a little hole drilled down it so that some of the smoke can actually seep out the end… it is a servicemen’s pub in Cuxhaven here, the place used to be a marine salvage yard, so the lonesome soldiers sit dreaming and drinking among all that nautical junk, not at the same level as in one’s usual outdoor café, no, some are up in tilted hatchways, or dangling in boatswain’s chairs, crow’s-nests, sitting over their bitter among the chain, tackle, strakework, black iron fittings. It’s night. Lanterns have been brought out to the tables. Soft little nocturnal waves hush on the shingle. Late waterfowl cry out over the lake.