It’s a simple procedure. The crotch of the velvet costume is torn away. Muffage decides to dispense with shaving the scrotum. He douses it first with iodine, then squeezes in turn each testicle against the red-veined and hairy bag, makes the incision quickly and cleanly through skin and surrounding membranes, popping the testicle itself out through the wound and welling blood, pulling it out with the left hand till the cords hard and soft are strung visible under the light. As if they are musical strings he might, a trifle moon-mad, strum here on the empty beach into appropriate music, his hand hesitates: but then, reluctantly bowing to duty, he severs them at the proper distances from the slippery stone, each incision then being bathed in disinfectant, and the two neat slits, side by side, finally sutured up again. The testicles are plopped into a bottle of alcohol.

“Souvenirs for Pointsman,” Muffage sighs, stripping off the surgical gloves. “Give that one another shot. It might be better if he sleeps through, and someone back in London explains this to him.”

Muffage starts up the motor, backs in a half-circle and slowly heads back up toward the road, the vast sea lying still behind.

Back at Putzi’s, Slothrop curls in a wide crisp-sheeted bed beside Solange, asleep and dreaming about Zwölfkinder, and Bianca smiling, he and she riding on the wheel, their compartment become a room, one he’s never seen, a room in a great complex of apartments big as a city, whose corridors can be driven or bicycled along like streets: trees lining them, and birds singing in the trees.

And “Solange,” oddly enough, is dreaming of Bianca too, though under a different aspect: it’s of her own child, Ilse, riding lost through the Zone on a long freight train that never seems to come to rest. She isn’t unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly, for her father. But Leni’s early dream for her is coming true. She will not be used. There is change, and departure: but there is also help when least looked for from the strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this drifting Humility, never quite to be extinguished, a few small chances for mercy….

Upstairs, one Möllner, valise full of his night’s treasures—an American major’s uniform and papers, and 2½ ounces of cocaine—explains to the shaggy American sailor that Herr von Göll is a very busy man, attending to business in the north, as far as he knows, and has not commissioned him to bring to Cuxhaven any kind of papers, no military discharges, passports—nothing. He’s sorry. Perhaps the sailor’s friend is mistaken. Perhaps, again, it’s only a temporary delay. One appreciates that forgeries take time.