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skipper with his periscope—although certain paths aren't available to you. They are available to others, but not to you. Chess. Your objective is not the King—there is no King—but momentary targets such as the Radiant Hour.

Bing in pops a kid with beanie spinning, hands Slothrop another message and spins off again. "The Radiant Hour is being held captive, if you want to see her on display to all interested customers be present at this address 11:30 a.m."—in the sky a white clockface drifts conveniently by, hmm only half an hour to gather together my rescue team. Rescue team will consist of Myrtle Miraculous flyin' in here in a shoulderpadded maroon dress, the curlers still up in her hair and a tough frown fer draggin' her outa Slumberland . . . next a Negro in a pearl-gray zoot and Inverness cape name of Maximilian, high square pomaded head and a superthin mustache come zooming here out of his "front" job, suave manager of the Club Oogabooga where Beacon Street aristocracy rubs elbows ev'ry night with Roxbury winos 'n' dopefiends, yeah hi Tyrone, heah Ah is! H'lo Moitle baby, hyeah, hyeah, hyeah! Whut's de big rush, mah man? Adjusting his carnation, lookin' round th' room, everybody's here now except for that Mar-eel but hark the familiar music-box theme yes it's that old-timery sweet Stephen Foster music and sure enough in through the balcony window now comes Marcel, a mechanical chessplayer dating back to the Second Empire, actually built a century ago for the great conjuror Robert-Houdin, very serious-looking French refugee kid, funny haircut with the ears perfectly outlined in hair that starts abruptly a quarter-inch strip of bare plastic skin away, black patent-shiny hair, hornrim glasses, a rather remote manner, unfortunately much too literal with humans (imagine what happened the first time Maximilian come hi-de-hoing in the door with one finger jivin' in the air sees metal-ebonite-and-plastic young Marcel sitting there and say, "Hey man gimme some skin, man!" well not only does Marcel give him a heavy time about skin, skin in all its implications, oh no that's only at the superficial level, next we get a long discourse on the concept of "give," that goes on for a while, then, then he starts in on "Man." That's really an exhaustive one. In fact Marcel isn't anywhere near finished with it yet). Still, his exquisite 19th-century brainwork—the human art it took to build which has been flat lost, lost as the dodo bird—has stood the Floundering Four in good stead on many, many go-rounds with the Paternal Peril.

But where inside Marcel is the midget Grandmaster, the little Jo-hann Allgeier? where's the pantograph, and the magnets? Nowhere.

Marcel really is a mechanical chessplayer. No fakery inside to give him any touch of humanity at all. Each of the FF is, in fact, gifted while at the same time flawed by his gift—unfit by it for human living. Myrtle Miraculous specializes in performing miracles. Stupendous feats, impossible for humans. She has lost respect for humans, they are clumsy, they fail, she does want to love them but love is the only miracle that's beyond her. Love is denied her forever. The others of her class are either homosexuals, fanatics about law 'n' order, off on strange religious excursions, or as intolerant of failure as herself, and though friends such as Mary Marvel and Wonder Woman keep inviting her to parties to meet eligible men, Myrtle knows it's no use. ... As for Maximilian, he has a natural sense of rhythm, which means all rhythms, up to and including the cosmic. So he will never be where the fathomless manhole awaits, where the safe falls from the high window shrieking like a bomb—he is a pilot through Earth's baddest minefields, if we only stay close to him, be where he is as much as we can—yet Maximilian's doom is never to go any further into danger than its dapperness, its skin-exciting first feel. . . .

Fine crew this is, getting set to go off after the Radiant—say what? what's Slothrop's own gift and Fatal Flaw? Aw, c'mon—uh, the Radiant Hour, collecting their equipment, Myrtle zooming to and fro materializing this and that:

The Golden Gate Bridge ("How about that one?" "Uh, let's see the other one, again? with the, you know, uh . . ." "The Brooklyn?" "—kind of old-fashioned looking—" "The Brooklyn Bridge?" "Yeah, that's it, with the pointed . . . whatever they are . . .").

The Brooklyn Bridge ("See, for a chase-scene, Myrtle, we ought to observe proportions—" "Do tell." "Now if we were gonna be in highspeed automobiles, well, sure, we might use the Golden Gate . . . but for zooming through the air now, we/need something older, more intimate, human—").

A pair of superlatively elegant Rolls Royces ("Quit fooling, Myrtle, we already agreed, didn't we? No automobiles . . .").

A small plastic baby's steering wheel ("Aw all right, I know you don't respect me as a leader but listen can't we be reasonable . . .").

Any wonder it's hard to feel much confidence in these idiots as they go up against Pernicious Pop each day? There's no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made—at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery. This is less a fighting team than nest full of snits, blues, crotchets and grudges, not a rare or

fabled bird in the lot. Its survival seems, after all, only a mutter of blind fortune groping through the heavy marbling of skies one Titanic-Night at a time. Which is why Slothrop now observes his coalition with hopes for success and hopes for disaster about equally high (and no, that doesn 't cancel out to apathy—it makes a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as knives). It does annoy him that he can be so divided, so perfectly unable to come down on one side or another. Those whom the old Puritan sermons denounced as "the glozing neuters of the world" have no easy rog d to haul down, Wear-the-Pantsers, just cause you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there! Energy inside is just as real, just as binding and inescapable, as energy that shows. When's the last time you felt intensely lukewarm? eh? Glozing neuters are just as human as heroes and villains. In many ways they have the most grief to put up with, don't they? Why don't you, right now, wherever you are, city folks or out in the country, snuggled in quilts or riding the bus, just turn to the Glozing Neuter nearest you, even your own reflection in the mirror, and . . . just. . . sing,

How-dy neighbor, how-dy pard! Ain't it lone-ly, say ain't it hard, Passin' by so silent, day-after-day, with-out, even a smile-or, a friendly word to say? Oh, let me Tell ya bud-dy, tell ya ace, Things're fal-lin', on their face— Maybe we should stick together part o' the way, and Skies'll be bright-er some day! Now ev'rybody—

As the 4 suit up, voices continue singing for a while, depending how much each one happens to care—Myrtle displaying generous expanses of nifty gam, and Maximilian leering up beneath the fast-talking young tomato's skirts, drawing bewildered giggles from adolescent Marcel, who may be a bit repressed.

"Now," Slothrop with a boobish, eager-to-please smile, "time for that Pause that Refreshes!" And he's into the icebox before Myrtle's "Oh, Jesus" has quite finished echoing . . . the light from the cold wee bulb turning his face to summernight blue, Broderick and Nalline's shadow-child, their unconfessed, their monster son, who was born with hydraulic clamps for hands that know only how to reach and grab . . . and a heart that gurgles audibly, like a funny fatman's stomach . . . but look how lost, how unarrested his face is, was that 1 1/2 seconds in the glow from the folksy old icebox humming along in Kelvinator-

Bostonian dialect, Why cummawn in, T'rone, it's nice and friendly heeah in my stummick, gawt lawtsa nice things, like Mawxies, 'n' big Baby Rooths. . . ." Walking now in among miles-down-the-sky shelves and food-mountains or food-cities of Iceboxland (but look out, it can get pretty Fascist in here, behind the candy-colored sweet stuff is ther-modynamic elitism at its clearest—bulbs can be replaced with candles and the radios fall silent, but the Grid's big function in this System is iceboxery: freezing back the tumultuous cycles of the day to preserve this odorless small world, this cube of changelessness), climbing over the celery ridges where the lettered cheese glasses loom high and glossy in the middle distance, slippin' on the butter dish, piggin' on the watermelon down to the rind, feelin' yellow and bright as you skirt the bananas, gazing down at verdigris reaches of mold across the crusted terrain of an old, no longer identifiable casserole—bananas! who-who's been putting bananas—

In-the-re-frig er a-tor! O no-no-no, no-no-no!

Chiquita Banana sez we shouldn't! Somethin' awful'll happen! Who would do that? It couldn't be Mom, and Hogan's in love with Chiquita Banana, Tyrone's come in the room plenty of times found his brother with banana label glued on his erect cock for ready reference, lost in masturbatory fantasies of nailing this cute but older Latin lady while she's wearing her hat, gigantic fruit-market hat and a big saucy smile ;Ay, ay, how passionate you Yankees are! . . . a-and it couldn't've been Pop, no Pop wouldn't, but if it (is it getting cold in here?) wasn't any of us, then (what's happening to the Spike Jones record of "Right in the Führer's Face" playing back out in the living room, why's the sound fading?). . . unless I did it without knowing (look around, something's squeaking on its hinges) and maybe that means I'm going crazy (what's this brightening the bulblight, what's—) SLAM well whoever it is that's been wantonly disregarding United Fruit's radio commercials has also just closed young Tyrone in that icebox, and now he'll have to count on Myrtle to get him out. Embarrassing as heck.

"Good thinking, boss man."

"Gee, M.M., I don't know what happened. ..."

"Do you ever? Grab on to my cape."

Whoosh—

"Whew. Well," sez Slothrop, "uh, are we all... ?"

"That Radiant Hour's probably light-years away by now," sez Myrt, "and you have a snot icicle hanging outa your nose." Marcel

springs to the controls of the mobile building, keys in to Central Control a request for omnidirectional top-speed clearance, which sometimes comes through and sometimes not, depending on a secret process among the granters of permission, a process it is one of the 4's ongoing mandates to discover and impart to the world. This time they get Slow Crawl, Suburban Vectors, lowest traffic status in the Raketen-Stadt, invoked only once in recorded history, against a homosexual child-murdering Indian liked to wipe off his organ afterwards on the Flag and so on—"Shit!" hollers Maximilian at Slothrop, "Slow Crawl, Suburban Vectors! whut th' fuck we s'posed to do man, swim or some shit?"

"Uh, Myrtle ..." Slothrop approaches gold-snooded M.M. a little deferent, "uh, do you think you could ..." Jesus they run through this same routine every time—doesn't Myrtle wish Sniveling Slothrop would cut this wishy-washy malarkey 'n' be a man fer once! She lights a cigarette, lets it droop from one corner of her mouth, juts out the opposite hip and sighs, "On the beam," exasperated already with this creep—

And Los! the miracle is done, they're now zipping along the corridor-streets of the Raketen-Stadt like some long-necked sea monster. Little kids boil up like ants on the webby arches of viaducts high over the city dripping stone like Spanish moss petrified in mid-collapse, kids up over the airy railings and onto the friendly back of the sleek city-cruising monster. They climb window to window, too full of grace ever to fall. Some of them, naturally, are spies: that honey-curled little cutie in the blue checked pinafore and blue knee-socks, up there under the gargoyle at the window listening in to Maximilian, who began drinking heavily as soon as the building started to move, and is now carrying on a long denunciation of Marcel under the thin scholarly disguise of trying to determine if the Gallic Genius can truly be said to have any "soul." Young lady under gargoyle is taking it all down in shorthand. These are valuable data for the psychological warfare effort.

For the first time now it becomes apparent that the 4 and the Father-conspiracy do not entirely fill their world. Their struggle is not the only, or even the ultimate one. Indeed, not only are there many other struggles, but there are also spectators, watching, as spectators will do, hundreds of thousands of them, sitting around this dingy yellow amphitheatre, seat after seat plunging down in rows and tiers endless miles, down to the great arena, brown-yellow lights, food scattered on the stone slopes up higher, broken buns, peanut shells, bones, bottles

half-filled with green or orange sweet, fires in small wind-refuges, set in angles where seats have been chiseled away, shallow depressions in the stone and a bed of cherry embers where old women are cooking hashes of the scavenged bits and crumbles and gristly lumps of food, heating them in thin frying pans of gray oil-water bubbling, as the faces of children gather around to wait for food, and in the wind the dark young man, the slippery young knife who waits for your maid outside the iron gate each Sunday, who takes her away to a park, a stranger's automobile and a shape of love you can never imagine, stands now with his hair untended in the wind, his head averted from the fire, feeling the cold, the mountain cold, at his temples and high under his jaw . . . while beside other fires the women gossip, one craning over now and then to look miles downward at the stage, to see if a new episode's come on yet—crowds of students running by dark as ravens, coats draped around shoulders, back out into a murky sector of seats which traditionally are never entered (being reserved for the Ancestors), their voices fading still very intense, dramatic, trying to sound good or at least acceptable. The women go on, playing cards, smoking, eating. See if you can borrow a blanket from Rose's fire over there, it's gonna be cold tonight. Hey—and a pack of Armies while you're out—and come right back, hear me? Of course the cigarette machine turns out to be Marcel, who else, in another of his clever mechanical disguises, and inside one pack is a message for one of the spectators. "I'm sure you wouldn't want Them to know about the summer of 1945. Meet me in the Male Transvestites' Toilet, level L16/39C, station Metatron, quadrant Fire, stall Malkuth. You know what time. The usual Hour. Don't be late."

What's this? What're the antagonists doing here—infiltrating their own audience? Well, they're not, really. It's somebody else's audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside-hours life of the Rocket-capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.

Maximilian is way down in the bottom of the orchestra pit posing as the C-melody saxophone player, complete with Closet Intellectual Book, The Wisdom of the Great Kamikaze Pilots, with illustrations by Walt Disney—screaming, hairy-nosed, front teeth in white dihedral, slant-eyed (long, elaborate curlicued shapes) round black licorice dog-nosed Japs, zoomin' through ev'ry page! and any time he's not playing that saxophone, you can be sure Maximilian will be, to the casual observer, immersed in this diffuse, though rewarding, work. Myrtle meantime is back in the candycane control room, manning the switch-

board and ready to swoop in at any time to save the others, who are sure (through their own folly if nothing else) to be in deep trouble soon. And Slothrop himself lurks in the Transvestites' Toilet, in the smoke, the crowds, the buzzing fluorescent lights, piss hot as melted butter, making notes of all the dealing going on among the stalls, bowls 'n' urinals (you've got to look butch but not that butch and another thing no metal showing at any vital spots, she'll knock off ten marks for every one she sees, and the only bonuses she gives are spelled out here: blood drawn on first try, that's an extra 20—) wondering if the cigarette-pack message got through and if they'll come in person or if Pop'll send a hit man to try for a first-round KO.

Well, there is the heart of it: the monumental yellow structure, out there in the slum-suburban night, the never-sleeping percolation of life and enterprise through its shell, Outside and Inside interpiercing one another too fast, too finely labyrinthine, for either category to have much hegemony any more. The nonstop revue crosses its stage, crowding and thinning, surprising and jerking tears in an endless ratchet:

the low-frequency listener

The German U-boats communicated on a wave length of 28,000 meters, which is down around 10 kc. A half-wave antenna for that'd halfta be 9 miles high, or long, and even folded here and there it is still some antenna. It is located at Magdeburg. So is the headquarters of the German branch of Jehovah's Witnesses. So, for a time, is Slothrop, attempting to get through to the Argentine anarchist U-boat, now in unknown waters. The reason why is no longer clear to him. He was either visited again in some way by Squalidozzi, or he came upon Squalidozzi one day by accident, or he found, in some lint-picking at-tentionless search through pockets, rags or bedroll, the message he was given, back at the green edge of Aries, at the Cafe 1'Eclipse long ago in Geneva. All he knows is that finding Squalidozzi, right now, is his overriding need.

The Keeper of the Antenna is a Jehovah's witness named Rohr. He's just out of the Ravensbrück camp after being in since '36 (or '37, he can't remember). With that much camp time in, he's politically reliable enough for the local G-5 to put him, nights, in control of the network of longest wavelength in the Zone. Although this could be accidental, more likely there is some eccentric justice lately begun to operate out here which it would behoove Slothrop to look into. There are rumors of a War Crimes Tribunal under way in Nürnberg. No one

Slothrop has listened to is clear who's trying whom for what, but remember that these are mostly brains ravaged by antisocial and mindless pleasures.

But the only people—if any—apt to be communicating these days on 28,000 meters (the distance from Test Stand VII at Peenemünde to the Hafenstraße in Greifswald, where Slothrop in early August may see a particular newspaper photo), except for freak Argentine anarchists, are the undenazified Nazis still wandering around in unaccounted-for submarines holding their own secret shipboard tribunals against enemies of the Reich. So the closest thing in the Zone to an early Christian is put on to listen for news of unauthorized crucifixions.

"Someone the other night was dying," Rohr tells him, "I don't know if he was inside the Zone or out at sea. He wanted a priest. Should I have got on and told him about priests? Would he've found any comfort in that? It's so painful sometimes. We're really trying to be Christians. . . ."

"My folks were Congregationalist," Slothrop offers, "I think." It's getting harder to remember either of them, as Broderick progresses into Pernicious Pop and Nalline into ssshhhghhh .. . (into what? What was that word? Whatever it is, the harder he chases, the faster it goes away).

mom slothrop's letter to ambassador kennedy

Well hi Joe how've ya been. Listen: Jew-zeppy—we're getting edgy about our youngest again. Would you try bothering a few of those jolly old London connections just once more? (Promise!!) Even if it's old news it'll be good news for Poppy and I. I still remember what you said when the awful word about the PT boat came in, before you knew how Jack was. I'll never forget your words then. It's every parent's dream, Joe, that it is.

Oh, and Hozay (whoops, don't mind that, the pen just skidded as you can see! Naughty Nalline's on her third martini, we'll have you know). Poppy and I heard your wonderful speech at the GE plant over in Pittsfield the other week. You're in the groove, Mister K! How true! we've got to modernize in Massachusetts, or it'll just keep getting worse and worse. They're supposed to be taking a strike vote here next week. Wasn't the WLB set up to prevent just that? It isn't starting to break down, is it, Joe? Sometimes, you know these fine Boston Sundays, when the sky over the Hill is broken into clouds, the way white bread appears through a crust you hold at your thumbs and split apart.

. . . You know, don't you? Golden clouds? Sometimes I think—ah, Joe, I think they're pieces of the Heavenly City falling down. I'm sorry— didn't mean this to get so gloomy all so sudden, it's just. . . but it isn 't beginning to fall apart, is it, my old fellow Harvard-parent? Sometimes things aren't very clear, that's all. Things look like they're going against us, and though it always turns out fine at the end, and we can always look back and say oh of course it had to happen that way, otherwise so-and-so wouldn't have happened—still, -while it's happening, in my heart I keep getting this terrible fear, this empty place, and it's very hard at such times really to believe in a Plan with a shape bigger than I can see. . . .

Oh, anyway. Grumpy old thoughts away! Shoo! Martini Number Four, comin' up!

Jack's a fine boy. Really I love Jack like Hogan and Tyrone, just like a son, my own son. I even love him like I don't love my sons, ha-ha! (she croaks) but then I'm a wicked old babe, you know that. No hope for the likes of me. ...

on the phrase "Ass backwards"

"Something I have never understood about your language, Yankee pig." Säure has been calling him "Yankee pig" all day now, a hilarious joke he will not leave alone, often getting no further than "Yank—" before collapsing into some horrible twanging phthisic wheeze of a laugh, coughing up alarming ropy lungers of many colors and marbling effects—green, for example, old-statue green at leafy dusk.

"Sure," replies Slothrop, "you wanna learn English, me teachee you English. Ask me anything, kraut." It is exactly the kind of blanket offer that's always getting Slothrop in trouble.

"Why do you speak of certain reversals—machinery connected wrong, for instance, as being 'ass backwards'? I can't understand that. Ass usually is backwards, right? You ought to be saying 'ass forwards,' if backwards is what you mean."

"Uh," sez Slothrop.

"This is only one of many American Mysteries," Säure sighs, "I wish somebody could clear up for me. Not you, obviously."

Säure got a lotta gall picking on other people's language like this. One night, back when he was a second-story man, he had the incredible luck to break into the affluent home of Minne Khlaetsch, an astrologer of the Hamburg School, who was, congenitally it seems, unable to pronounce, even perceive, umlauts over vowels. That night

she was just coming on to what would prove to be an overdose of Hi-eropon, when Säure, who back in those days was a curly-haired and good-looking kid, surprised her in her own bedroom with his hand around an ivory chess Läufer with a sarcastic smile on its face, and filled with good raw Peruvian cocaine still full of the Earth—"Don't call for help," advises Säure flashing his phony acid bottle, "or that pretty face goes flowing off of its bones like vanilla pudding." But Minne calls his bluff, starts hollering for help to all the ladies of the same age in her building who feel that same motherly help-help-but-make-sure-there's-time-for-him-to-rape-me ambivalence about nubile cat burglars. What she means to scream is "Hübsch Räuber! Hübsch Räuber!" which means "Cute-looking robber! Cute-looking robber!" But she can't pronounce those umlauts. So it comes out "Hub-schrauber! Hubschrauber!" which means "Helicopter! Helicopter!" well, it's 1920-something, and nobody in earshot even knows what the word means, Liftscrewer, what's that?—nobody except one finger-biting paranoid aerodynamics student in a tenement courtyard far away, who heard the scream late in Berlin night, over tramclashing, rifle shots in another quarter, a harmonica novice who has been trying to play "Deutschland, Deutschland Úber Alles" for the past four hours, over and over missing notes, fucking up the time, the breathing ü . . . berall... es ... indie ... ie ... then longlong pause, oh come on asshole, you can find it—Welt sour, ach, immediately corrected . . . through all this to him comes the cry Hubschrauber, lift-screwer, a helix through cork air over wine of Earth falling bright, yes he knows exactly—and can this cry be a prophecy? a warning (the sky full of them, gray police in the hatchways with ray-guns cradled like codpieces beneath each whirling screw we see you from above there is nowhere to go it's your last alley, your last stormcellar) to stay inside and not interfere? He stays inside and does not interfere. He goes on to become "Spörri" of Horst Achtfaden's confession to the Schwarzkommando. But he didn't go to see what Minne was hollering about that night. She would Ve OD'd except for her boy friend Wimpe, an up-and-coming IG salesman covering the Eastern Territory, who'd blown into town after unexpectedly dumping all of his Oneirine samples on a party of American tourists back in hilltop Transylvania looking for a new kind of thrills—it's me Liebchen, didn't expect to be back so—but then he saw the sprawled satin creature, read pupil-size and skin-tint, swiftly went to his leather case for stimulant and syringe. That and an ice-filled bathtub got her back O.K.