Now ordinarily, according to tradition in these matters, the little sucker would have been de-conditioned. Jamf would have, in Pavlovian terms, “extinguished” the hardon reflex he’d built up, before he let the baby go. Most likely he did. But as Ivan Petrovich himself said, “Not only must we speak of partial or of complete extinction of a conditioned reflex, but we must also realize that extinction can proceed beyond the point of reducing a reflex to zero. We cannot therefore judge the degree of extinction only by the magnitude of the reflex or its absence, since there can still be a silent extinction beyond the zero.” Italics are Mr. Pointsman’s.

Can a conditioned reflex survive in a man, dormant, over 20 or 30 years? Did Dr. Jamf extinguish only to zero—wait till the infant showed zero hardons in the presence of stimulus x, and then stop? Did he forget—or ignore—the “silent extinction beyond the zero”? If he ignored it, why? Did the National Research Council have anything to say about that?

When Slothrop was discovered, late in 1944, by “The White Visitation”—though many there have always known him as the famous Infant Tyrone—like the New World, different people thought they’d discovered different things.

Roger Mexico thinks it’s a statistical oddity. But he feels the foundations of that discipline trembling a bit now, deeper than oddity ought to drive. Odd, odd, odd—think of the word: such white finality in its closing clap of tongue. It implies moving past the tongue-stop—beyond the zero—and into the other realm. Of course you don’t move past. But you do realize, intellectually, that’s how you ought to be moving.

Rollo Groast thinks it’s precognition. “Slothrop is able to predict when a rocket will fall at a particular place. His survival to date is evidence he’s acted on advance information, and avoided the area at the time the rocket was supposed to fall.” Dr. Groast is not sure how, or even if, sex comes into it.

But Edwin Treacle, that most Freudian of psychical researchers, thinks Slothrop’s gift is psychokinesis. Slothrop is, with the force of his mind, causing the rockets to drop where they do. He may not be physically highballing them about the sky: but maybe he is fooling with the electrical signals inside the rocket’s guidance system. However he’s doing it, sex does come into Dr. Treacle’s theory. “He subconsciously needs to abolish all trace of the sexual Other, whom he symbolizes on his map, most significantly, as a star, that anal-sadistic emblem of classroom success which so permeates elementary education in America….”

It’s the map that spooks them all, the map Slothrop’s been keeping on his girls. The stars fall in a Poisson distribution, just like the rocket strikes on Roger Mexico’s map of the Robot Blitz.