Picking up the telephone, Vince called the manager of the apartment building. ‘My wife Julie -- I mean my ex-wife did she take another apartment last night?' If he could locate her he could perhaps have breakfast with her and that would be cheering. He listened hopefully.

‘No, Mr Strikerock.' A pause. ‘Not according to our records.'

Aw hell, Vince thought, and hung up.

What was marriage, anyhow? An arrangement of sharing things, such as right now being able to discuss the meaning of der Alte giving an eight a.m. speech and getting someone else -- his wife -- to fix breakfast while he prepared to go to his job at Karp u. Sohnen Werke's Detroit branch. Yes, it meant an arrangement in which one could get another person to do certain things one didn't like to do, such as cooking meals; he hated having to eat food which he had prepared himself. Single, he would eat at the building's cafeteria; he foresaw that, based on past experience. Mary, Jean, Laura, now Julie; four marriages and the last the shortest.

He was going downhill. Maybe, god forbid, he was a latent queer.

On the TV, der Alte uttered, ‘ ... and paramilitary activity recalls the Days of Barbarism and hence is doubly to be renounced.'

Days of Barbarism -- that was the sweet-talk for the Nazi Period of the middle part of the previous century, now gone nearly a century but still vividly, if distortedly, recalled. So der Alte had taken to the airwaves to denounce the Sons of Job, the latest nut organization of a quasi-religious nature flapping about in the streets, proclaiming a purification of national ethnic life, etc., or whatever it was they proclaimed.

In other words, stiff legislation to bar persons from public life who were odd -- those born specially, due to the years of radiation fall-out from bomb testing, in particular from the vicious People's China blasts.

That would mean Julie, Vince conjectured, since she's sterile.