Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter. "Personal density," Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, "is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth."

"Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now, It is the familiar "△t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now-what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved em-bankment. • • •

"Uh," he turns slackmouth to Närrisch, "what are we ..." "What are we what?" "What?" "You said, What are we .., then you stopped." "Oh. Gee, that was a funny thing to say."

— Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Page 509)