They walk down past the snow-drifted kennel runs, Pointsman in Glastonburys and fawn-colored British warm, Mexico wearing a scarf Jessica’s lately knitted him whipping landward a scarlet dragon’s tongue—this day the coldest so far of the winter, 39 degrees of frost. Down to the cliffs, faces freezing, down to the deserted beach. Waves run up, slide away to leave great crescents of ice fine as skin and dazzling in the weak sunlight. The boots of the two men crunch through to sand or shingle. The very bottom of the year. They can hear the guns in Flanders today, all the way across the Channel on the wind. The Abbey’s ruin stands gray and crystal up on the cliff.

Last night, in the house at the edge of the stay-away town, Jessica, snuggling, afloat, just before sleep was to take them, whispered, “Roger… what about the girls?” That was all she said. But it brought Roger wide awake. And bone-tired as he was, he lay staring for another hour, wondering about the girls.

Now, knowing he ought to let it go, “Pointsman, what if Edwin Treacle is right? That it’s PK. What if Slothrop’s—not even consciously—making them fall where they do?”

“Well. You lot’d have something then, wouldn’t you.”

“But… why should he. If they are falling wherever he’s been—”

“Perhaps he hates women.”

“I’m serious.”

“Mexico. Are you actually worried?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I wondered if it might tie in, in any way, with your ultraparadoxical phase. Perhaps… I want to know what you’re really looking for.”

Above them now throb a flight of B-17s, bound somewhere uncommon today, well out of the usual corridors of flight. Behind these Fortresses the undersides of the cold clouds are blue, and their smooth billows are veined in blue—elsewhere touched with grayed-out pink or purple…. Wings and stabilizers are shadowed underneath in dark gray. The shadows softly feather lighter up around curves of fuselage or nacelle. Spinners emerge from hooded dark inside the cowlings, spinning props invisible, the light of the sky catching all vulnerable surfaces a uniform bleak gray. The planes drone along, stately, up in the zero sky, shedding frost as it builds, sowing the sky behind in white ice-furrows, their own color matching certain degrees of cloud, all the tiny windows and openings in soft blackness, the perspex nose shining back forever warped and streaming cloud and sun. Inside it is black obsidian.