The Orin–Hal phone call — "Hal sneezes twice. Pemulis taps his…"

At the endnote's kill-switch moment — Pemulis's fingers on the phone console's power unit, one beat before he cuts the samizdat disclosure off mid-word — the Hal-orbit narration reaches for a prosody term: the sabotage itself is scanned. A passing flicker, but the metrical lexicon saturating even the stage business is this theme's watermark on the narration.