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precious nylons one by one to find a pair that hasn't laddered, each struck flashing by the light through the winter trellis outside… nasal hep American-girl voices singing out of the grooves of some disc up through the thorn needle of Allison's mother's radiogram… snuggling for warmth, blackout curtains over all the windows, no light but the coal of their last cigarette, an English firefly, bobbing at her whim in cursive writing that trails a bit behind, words he can't read…
    "What happened?" Silence from Slothrop. "Your two Wrens…
    when they saw you…" then he notices that Slothrop, instead of going on with his story, has given himself up to shivering. Has been shivering, in fact, for some time. It's cold in here, but not that cold. "Slothrop-"
    "I don't know. Jesus." It's interesting, though. It's the weirdest feeling. He can't stop. He turns his Ike jacket collar up, tucks hands inside sleeves, and sits that way for a while.
    Presently, after a pause, cigarette in motion, "You can't hear them when they come in."
    Tantivy knows which "they." His eyes shift away. There is silence for a bit.
    "Of course you can't, they go faster than sound."
    "Yes but-that's not it," words are bursting out between the pulses of shivering-"the other kind, those V-ls, you can hear them. Right? Maybe you have a chance to get out of the way. But these things explode first, a-and then you hear them coming in. Except that, if you're dead, you don't hear them."
    "Same in the infantry. You know that. You never hear the one that gets you."
    "Uh, but-":
    "Think of it as a very large bullet, Slothrop. With fins."
    "Jesus," teeth chattering, "you're such a comfort."
    Tantivy, leaning anxiously through the smell of hops and the brown gloom, more worried now about Slothrop's shaking than any specter of his own, has nothing but established channels he happens to know of to try and conjure it away. "Why not see if we can get you out to where some of them have hit…"
    "What for? Come on, Tantivy, they're completely destroyed. Aren't they?"
    "I don't know. I doubt even the Germans know. But it's the best chance we'll have to one-up that lot over in T.I. Isn't it."
    Which is how Slothrop got into investigating V-bomb "incidents." Aftermaths. Each morning-at first-someone in Civil Defence routed ACHTUNG a list of yesterday's hits. It would come round to Slothrop last, he'd detach its pencil-smeared buck slip, go draw the same aging Humber from the motor pool, and make his rounds, a Saint George after the fact, going out to poke about for droppings of the Beast, fragments of German hardware that wouldn't exist, writing empty summaries into his notebooks-work-therapy. As inputs to ACHTUNG got faster, often he'd show up in time to help the search crews-following restless-muscled RAF dogs into the plaster smell,
    the gas leaking, the leaning long splinters and sagging mesh, the prone and noseless caryatids, rust already at nails and naked threadsurfaces, the powdery wipe of Nothing's hand across wallpaper awhisper with peacocks spreading their fans down deep lawns to Georgian houses long ago, to safe groves of holm oak… among the calls for silence following to where some exposed hand or brightness of skin waited them, survivor or casualty. When he couldn't help he stayed clear, praying, at first, conventionally to God, first time since the other Blitz, for life to win out. But too many were dying, and presently, seeing no point, he stopped.
    Yesterday happened to be a good day. They found a child, alive, a little girl, half-suffocated under a Morrison shelter. Waiting for the stretcher, Slothrop held her small hand, gone purple with the cold. Dogs barked in the street. When she opened her eyes and saw him her first words were, "Any gum, chum?" Trapped there for two days, gum-less-all he had for her was a Thayer's Slippery Elm. He felt like an idiot. Before they took her off she brought his hand over to kiss anyway, her mouth and cheek in the flare lamps