his drowned features trickle between his fingers — Here’s me forgetting to properly explain: when the Indy left Tinian she had one supernumerary officer on board, Lieutenant Claude Evenrude of the Army Air Force Materiel Command. As I came up the companionway, Captain McVay saluted me from his bridge — he was an uptight asshole if ever I saw one, full of his own scrambled eggs — they were all like that, full up with the stupid battle stars they’d won withstanding the Divine Wind offa Okinawa, and mighty impressed by the turn of speed they’d put on crossing the Pacific so’s to deliver their precious plywood crate and the canister that had been welded to the bulkhead in the magazine officer’s cabin. The Los Alamos boys who rode shotgun on that canister sat in there the whole time and the dumb swabs would swirl their mops along the decks outside and speculate, Gee, I wonder what’s so special, maybe it’s gold bullion, or Rita Hayworth’s scented panties. . Me, I coulda used a dead horse so’s I coulda scored some liquor before I went aboard, but there was nothing doing so I had the sweats. I latched on to this doctor, and he gave me sack room, but the Chief said I’d to work my passage by weeding out green bananas and otherwise censoring the crew’s letters. . I was right, Busner thinks, about the compulsion to write everything down: it’s inevitably a form of censorship. Without it I can finally hear what people are actually saying — hear every single unvarnished word. He looks at Roger, whose face is lacquered with the realisation of. . his own insignificance — a gone spade. But Lesley, Zack acknowledges, Lesley was right as welclass="underline" Hofmann must have been God-inspired when he synthesised Lysergic acid. . The bomb goes boom — the babies go boomier . . And so we see in-fin-ity in a dried cornflake stuck to the lino . . Wrongie was Ronnie when he burred, Atoms don’t explode out of hatrrred — but they da-doo-ron-Ronnie, ’cause atoms are us, and we’re hatred . . The hundredth train of the day stamps down on the worn striped ticking of suburbia and the house rocks and rolls, alerting Zack to a fact: Hardly any time must’ve passed at all!