The United States Military (Waterhouse has decided) is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization. For the last couple of weeks he has been owned by the second group. They put him on a luxury liner too swift to be caught by U-boats—though this is a moot point since, as Waterhouse and a few other people know, Dönitz has declared defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic, and pulled his U-boats off the map until he can build the new generation, which will run on rocket fuel and need never come to the surface. In this way Waterhouse got to New York. From Penn Station he took trains to the Midwest, where he spent a week with his family and reassured them for the ten thousandth time that, because of what he knew, he could never be sent into actual combat.