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cold as frost, the city around them at once a big desolate icebox, stale-smelling and no surprises inside ever again. At which point she smiled, very faintly, and he knew that's what he'd been waiting for, wow, a Shirley Temple smile, as if this exactly canceled all they'd found her down in the middle of. What a damn fool thing. He hangs at the bottom of his blood's avalanche, 300 years of western swamp-Yankees, and can't manage but some nervous truce with their Providence. A detente. Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity. That he finds, as weeks wear on, no least fragment of any rocket, preaches how indivisible is the act of death… Slothrop's Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.
    He has become obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name written on it-if they're really set on getting him ("They" embracing possibilities far far beyond Nazi Germany) that's the surest way, doesn't cost them a thing to paint his name on every one, right?
    "Yes, well, that can be useful," Tantivy watching him funny, "can't it, especially in combat to, you know, pretend something like that. Jolly useful. Call it 'operational paranoia' or something. But-"
    "Who's pretending?" lighting a cigarette, shaking his forelock through the smoke, "jeepers, Tantivy, listen, I don't want to upset you but… I mean I'm four years overdue's what it is, it could happen any
    time, the next second, right, just suddenly… shit… just zero, just
    nothing… and…"
    It's nothing he can see or lay hands on-sudden gases, a violence upon the air and no trace afterward… a Word, spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence forever. Beyond its invisibility, beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real horror, mocking, promising him death with German and precise confidence, laughing down all of Tantivy's quiet decencies… no, no bullet with fins, Ace… not the Word, the one Word that rips apart the day…
    It was Friday evening, last September, just off work, heading for the Bond Street Underground station, his mind on the weekend ahead and his two Wrens, that Norma and that Marjorie, whom he must each keep from learning about the other, just as he was reaching to pick his nose, suddenly in the sky, miles behind his back and up the river mementomori a sharp crack and a heavy explosion, rolling right behind, almost like a clap of thunder. But not quite. Seconds later, this time from in front of him, it happened again: loud and clear, all over the city. Bracketed. Not a buzzbomb, not that Luftwaffe. "Not thunder either," he puzzled, out loud.
    "Some bloody gas main," a lady with a lunchbox, puffy-eyed from the day, elbowing him in the back as she passed.
    "No it's the Germans," her friend with rolled blonde fringes under a checked kerchief doing some monster routine here, raising her hands at Slothrop, "coming to get him, they especially love fat, plump Americans-" in a minute she'll be reaching out to pinch his cheek and wobble it back and forth.
    "Hi, glamorpuss," Slothrop said. Her name was Cynthia. He managed to get a telephone number before she was waving ta-ta, borne again into the rush-hour crowds.
    It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thousand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more than the day's breath, more than dark strength-it is an imperial presence that lives and moves. People were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses were grinding off, hundreds of them, down the long concrete viaducts smeared with years' pitiless use and no pleasure, into haze-gray, grease-black, red lead and pale aluminum, between scrap heaps that towered high as blocks of flats, down side-shoving curves into roads clogged with Army convoys, other tall busses and canvas lorries, bicycles and cars, everyone here with different destinations and beginnings, all flowing,