Marathe and Steeply: the Entertainment named
Neither man seemed able to look at anything but the vista below. […] Their speaking without looking at one another, facing both the same direction—this gave their conversing an air of careless intimacy, as of old friends at the cartridge-viewer together, or a long-married couple.
Context
The spectator posture reaches even the two men debating the Entertainment. Marathe and Steeply, transfixed by the mesmerizing desert vista, end up side by side facing the same direction, unable to look away — and the book names the resemblance itself: they sit "as of old friends at the cartridge-viewer together." The scene of two spies discussing a lethal spectacle is quietly staged as an act of spectation, the vista working on them as a soft version of what the cartridge does hard. It's a small self-aware seam — the theme noting that the viewing posture is the human default, the shape a conversation falls into the moment there's something large enough to stare at.