Eschaton debacle (pp. 340–343)

As the game collapses into real child-on-child violence — Ingersoll beaten down and "still getting hit," Kittenplan ramming a boy's face into the fence, Lord airborne toward a monitor screen — the one adult present does nothing. The stillness is the point: a professional observer logs and does not intervene, because intervention blows the cover and the intelligence is worth more than any single afternoon's casualties. Troeltsch, "the only upperclass spectator who doesn’t seem utterly silently engrossed," is also the only one who clocks the car at all — "looking for the first time at the idling sedan by West House’s dumpsters and asking if anybody knew anybody who drove a Nunhagen-Aspirin-adverting Ford" — and even he reads it as a trivia question, not a threat. Only at the climax does the surveillance briefly surface: "The idling Ford reveals a sudden face at the driver’s-side window," the watcher becoming visible for exactly the instant the chaos peaks — and the narration never looks back at it. The whole debacle has been an intelligence take, gathered by a body trained to hold still.