The Eschaton debacle — "Hal, who in his day never…"
Hal, who in his day never wore the beanie, and usually portrayed some marginal nation somewhere out in the nuclear boondocks, finds himself more intrigued by Penn’s map/ territory faux pas than upset by it, or even amused.
Context
Hal in the Gatorade pavilion, a few hits into the duBois he took "without even thinking about it." Where Pemulis rages, Hal spectates: the map/territory question interests him as pure abstraction, detached from any stake in the game — an early flicker of the anhedonic distance that p. 693 will render as "The world becomes a map of the world." (The "map/ territory" spacing is carried as found.)