V.

You weren't past seventeen,

Parasol-pretty for me;

Ah, could we but return to that season of light,

With our puppy-love soaring like a gay summer kite,

When it wasn't yet time to think of autumn, or night;

Down by the summertime sea.”

(Here Eigenvalue made his single interruption: "They spoke in German? English? Did Mondaugen know English then?" Forestalling a nervous outburst by Stencil: "I only think it strange that he should remember an unremarkable conversation, let alone in that much detail, thirty-four years later. A conversation meaning nothing to Mondaugen, but everything to Stencil."

Stencil silenced, puffed his pipe and watched the psychodontist, a quirk to one side of his mouth revealed now and again, enigmatic, through the white fumes. Finally: "Stencil called it serendipity, not he. Do you understand? Of course you do. But you want to hear him say it."

"I understand only," Eigenvalue drawled, "that your attitude toward V. must have more sides to it than you're ready to admit. It's what the psychoanalysts used to call ambivalence, what we now call simply a heterodont configuration."

Stencil made no answer; Eigenvalue shrugged and let him continue.)

In the evening a roasted veal was set out on a long table in the dining hall. Guests fell upon it drunkenly, tearing away choice pieces of flesh with their hands, staining what clothes they wore with gravy and grease. Mondaugen was feeling his usual reluctance to return to work. He padded along crimson-carpeted passageways, mirrored, unpopulated, ill-lit, without echoes. He was, tonight, a bit upset and depressed without being able to say exactly why. Perhaps because he'd begun to detect the same desperation in Foppl's siege party as there'd been in Munich during Fasching; but without any clear reason, for here after all was abundance not depression, luxury not a daily struggle for life; above all, possibly, breasts and buttocks that could be pinched.

Somehow he'd wandered by Hedwig's room. Her door was open. She sat before her vanity mirror making up her eyes. "Come in," she called, "don't stand there leering."

"Your little eyes look so antiquated."

"Herr Foppl has ordered all the ladies to dress and make up as they would have done in 1904." She giggled. "I wasn't even born in 1904, so I really shouldn't be wearing anything." She sighed. "But after all the trouble I'd gone to to pluck my eyebrows to look like Dietrich's. Now I must draw them in again like great dark wings, and point them at either end; and so much mascara!" She pouted, "Pray no one breaks my heart, Kurt, for tears would ruin these old-fashioned eyes."

"Oh, you have a heart then."

"Please, Kurt, I said don't make me cry. Come: you may help me arrange my hair."

When he lifted the heavy, pale locks from her nape he saw two parallel rings of recently chafed skin running round the neck, about two inches apart. If surprise was communicated through her hair by any movement his hands may have made, Hedwig gave no sign. Together they put up her hair in an elaborate curly bun, securing it with a black satin band. Round her neck, to cover each abrasion, she wound a thin string of little onyx beads, letting three more loops or so drop progressively looser down between her breasts,

He bent to kiss one shoulder. "No," she moaned, then went berserk; picked up a flacon of Cologne water, inverted it on his head, arose from her vanity hitting Mondaugen in the jaw with the shoulder he'd been trying to kiss. He, felled, lost consciousness for a fraction of a minute, woke to see her cakewalking out the door, singing Auf dem Zippel-Zappel-Zeppelin, a tune popular at the turn of the century.

He staggered to the corridor: she'd vanished. Feeling rather a sexual failure, Mondaugen set out for his turret and oscillograph, and the comforts of Science, which are glacial and few.

He got as far as a decorative grotto, located in the very guts of the house. There Weissmann, in full uniform, lunged at him from behind a stalagmite. "Upington!" he screamed.

"Ah?" inquired Mondaugen, blinking.

"You're a cool one. Professional traitors are always so cool." His mouth remaining open, Weissmann sniffed the air. "Oh, my. Don't we smell nice." His eyeglasses blazed.

Mondaugen, still groggy and enveloped in a miasma of cologne, wanted only to sleep. He tried to push past the piqued lieutenant, who barred his path with the butt end of a sjambok.

"Whom have you been in contact with at Upington?"

"Upington."

"It has to be, it's the nearest large town in the Union. You can't expect English operatives to give up the comforts of civilization."

"I don't know anyone in the Union."

"Careful how you answer, Mondaugen."

It finally came to him that Weissmann was talking about the sferic experiment. "It can't transmit," he yelled. "If you knew anything at all you'd see that immediately. It's for receiving only, stupid."