One night, on the wall of a public shithouse stinking and ripe with typhoid, he finds among initials, dates, hasty pictures of penises and mouths open to receive them, Werewolf stencils of the dark man with the high shoulders and the Homburg hat, an official slogan: WILLST DU V-2, DANN ARBEITE. If you want the V-2, then work. Good Evening Tyrone Slothrop… no, no, wait, it’s O.K., over on the other wall they’ve also painted WILLST DU V-4, DANN ARBEITE. Lucky. The brimming voices recede, the joke clarifies, he is only back with Goebbels and the man’s inability to let a good thing be. But it had taken an effort to walk around and look at that other wall. Anything could’ve been back there. It was dusk. Plowed fields, power lines, ditches and distant windbreaks went for miles. He felt brave and in control. But then another message caught his eye:

ROCKETMAN WAS HERE

His first thought was that he’d written it himself and forgot. Odd that that should’ve been his first thought, but it was. Might be he was starting to implicate himself, some yesterday version of himself, in the Combination against who he was right then. In its sluggish coma, the albatross stirred.

Past Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them, some more powerful than others, had been going over every sundown to the furious host. They were the fifth-columnists, well inside his head, waiting the moment to deliver him to the four other divisions outside, closing in….

So, next to the other graffiti, with a piece of rock, he scratches this sign:

Slothrop besieged. Only after he’d left it half a dozen more places did it dawn on him that what he was really drawing was the A4 rocket, seen from below. By which time he had become tuned to other fourfold expressions—variations on Frans Van der Groov’s cosmic windmill—swastikas, gymnastic symbols FFFF in a circle symmetrically upside down and backward, Frisch Fromm Frölich Frei over neat doorways in quiet streets, and crossroads, where you can sit and listen in to traffic from the Other Side, hearing about the future (no serial time over there: events are all there in the same eternal moment and so certain messages don’t always “make sense” back here: they lack historical structure, they sound fanciful, or insane).