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surprised to find that he was
     really scared. Began drinking heavier, sleeping less, chain-smoking, feeling in some
     way he’d been taken for a sucker. Christ, it wasn’t supposed to keep on like
this
. . . .
    “I say Slothrop, you’ve already got one in your mouth—”
    “Nervous,” Slothrop lighting up anyway.
    “Well not
mine
,” Tantivy pleads.
    “Two at a time, see?” making them point down like comicbook fangs. The lieutenants
     stare at each other through the beery shadows, with the day deepening outside the
     high cold windows of the Snipe and Shaft, and Tantivy about to laugh or snort oh God
     across the wood Atlantic of their table.
    Atlantics aplenty there’ve been these three years, often rougher than the one William,
     the first transatlantic Slothrop, crossed many ancestors ago. Barbarities of dress
     and speech, lapses in behavior—one horrible evening drunken Slothrop, Tantivy’s guest
     at the Junior Athenaeum, got them both 86’d feinting with the beak of a stuffed owl
     after the jugular of DeCoverley Pox whilst Pox, at bay on a billiard table, attempted
     to ram a cue ball down Slothrop’s throat. This sort of thing goes on dismayingly often:
     yet kindness is a sturdy enough ship for these oceans, Tantivy always there blushing
     or smiling and Slothrop surprised at how, when it’s really counted, Tantivy hasn’t
     ever let him down.
    He knows he can spill what’s on his mind. It hasn’t much to do with today’s amorous
     report on Norma (dimply Cedar Rapids subdeb legs), Marjorie (tall, elegant, a build
     out of the chorus line at the Windmill) and the strange events Saturday night at the
     Frick Frack Club in Soho, a haunt of low reputation with moving spotlights of many
     pastel hues, OFF LIMITS and NO JITTERBUG DANCING signs laid on to satisfy the many sorts of police, military and civilian, whatever
     “civilian” means nowadays, who look in from time to time, and where against all chance,
     through some horrible secret plot, Slothrop, who was to meet one, walks in sees who
     but
both
, lined up in a row, the angle deliberately just for him, over the blue wool shoulder
     of an engineman 3rd class, under the bare lovely armpit of a lindyhopping girl swung
     and posed, skin stained lavender by the shifting light just there, and then, paranoia
     flooding up, the two faces beginning to turn his way. . . .
    Both young ladies happen to be silver stars on Slothrop’s map. He must’ve been feeling
     silvery both times—shiny, jingling. The stars he pastes up are colored only to go
     with how he feels that day, blue on up to golden. Never to rank a single one—how can
     he? Nobody sees the map but Tantivy, and Christ they’re
all
beautiful . . . in leaf or flower around his wintering city, in teashops, in the
     queues babushkaed and coatwrapped, sighing, sneezing, all lisle legs on the curbstones,
     hitchhiking, typing or filing with pompadours sprouting yellow pencils, he finds them—dames,
     tomatoes, sweater girls—yes it is a little obsessive maybe but . . . “I know there
     is wilde love and joy enough in the world,” preached Thomas Hooker, “as there are
     wilde Thyme, and other herbes; but we would have garden love, and garden joy, of Gods
     owne planting.” How Slothrop’s garden grows. Teems with virgin’s-bower, with forget-me-nots,
     with rue—and all over the place, purple and yellow as hickeys, a prevalence of love-in-idleness.
    He likes to tell them about fireflies. English girls don’t know about fireflies, which
     is about all Slothrop knows for sure about English girls.
    The map does puzzle Tantivy. It cannot be put down to the usual loud-mouthed American
     ass-banditry, except as a fraternity-boy reflex in a vacuum, a reflex Slothrop can’t
     help, barking on into an empty lab, into a wormholing of echoing hallways, long after
     the need has vanished and the brothers gone to WW II and their chances for death.
     Slothrop really doesn’t