She’s meant to go. The orders come from higher than she can reach. Her future is with the World’s own, and Roger’s only with this strange version of the War he still carries with him. He can’t move, poor dear, it won’t let him go. Still passive as he’d been under the rockets. Roger the victim. Jeremy the firer. “The War’s my mother,” he said the first day, and Jessica has wondered what ladies in black appeared in his dreams, what ash-white smiles, what shears to come snapping through the room, through their winter… so much of him she never got to know… so much unfit for Peace. Already she’s beginning to think of their time as a chain of explosions, craziness ganged to the rhythms of the War. Now he wants to go rescue Slothrop, another rocket-creature, a vampire whose sex life actually fed on the terror of that Rocket Blitz—ugh, creepy, creepy. They ought to lock him up, not set him free. Roger must care more about Slothrop than about her, they’re two of a kind, aren’t they, well—she hopes they’ll be happy together. They can sit and drink beer, tell rocket stories, scribble equations for each other. How jolly. At least she won’t be leaving him in a vacuum. He won’t be lonely, he’ll have something to occupy the time….

She has wandered away from him, down the beach. The sun is so bright today that the shadows by her Achilles tendon are drawn sharp and black as seams up the heel of a silk stocking. Her head, as always, is bent forward, away, the bare nape he’s never stopped loving, will never see again, unprotected as her beauty, her innocence of how forever in peril it moves through the World. She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as “pretty” … but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him. Was. He is losing more than single Jessica: he’s losing a full range of life, of being for the first time at ease in the Creation. Going back to winter now, drawing back into his single envelope. The effort it takes to extend any further is more than he can make alone.

He hadn’t thought he’d cry when she left. But he cried. Snot by the cubic yard, eyes like red carnations. Presently, every time his left foot hit the ground walking he’d get a jolt of pain through half his skull. Ah, this must be what they mean by the “pain of separation!” Pointsman kept showing up with armloads of work. Roger found himself unable to forget Jessica, and caring less about Slothrop.