- Oedipa feels as if revelations are now multiplying "exponentially" all around her (4.1).
- She goes to see Mike Fallopian about the coincidence from The Courier's Tragedy, but they do not manage to trace it very far.
- Oedipa feels the need to make herself useful, and so she goes back and rereads Inverarity's will, though her deep ignorance of the issues it deals with makes it difficult.
- Thinking of Driblette's claim that he is like a projector at the center of a planetarium, she writes down in her notebook, "Shall I project a world?" (4.2).
- Knowing that Inverarity owned part of the Galactronics company, Yoyodyne, Oedipa decides to attend a stockholder's meeting.
- She finds the president, Clayton ("Bloody") Chiclitz leading all of the stockholders in various songs meant to glamorize Yoyodyne, and bemoaning the fact that so far they have not had the same success as many of their competitors.
- When the stockholders are organized into tour groups, Oedipa manages to get lost. She wanders through the plant until she happens on the desk of an engineer named Stanley Koteks, who is sketching the muted post horn on the back of an envelope when she approaches (the same symbol she saw in the women's restroom!).
- Oedipa says that "Kirby" sent her, just to see what happens, but then admits that she is a stockholder.
- When Koteks hears that she is a stockholder, he asks her to press the company to drop their patent clause that gives Yoyodyne the right to its employees' inventions.
- Oedipa decides to antagonize Koteks. She says that she didn't know people invented things anymore since everything is based around teamwork.
- Koteks says that teamwork "really is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the guiltlessness of the whole society" (4.14).
- As an example of a modern invention, he throws out the Nefastis Machine, which was built by a scientist at Berkeley named John Nefastis and contains "an honest-to-God Maxwell's Demon" (4.19).
- Koteks explains that Maxwell's Demon was a thought experiment conceived by the Scotch scientist James Clerk Maxwell.
- Maxwell postulated that given two chambers, a demon could theoretically sort fast molecules from slow ones. The difference in temperature would create energy and could be used to drive a heat engine.
- The thought experiment violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that things tend to disorder and uniformity, and instead posits the possibility of perpetual motion. Note that this is a very important metaphor in much of Pynchon's work. Check out the section on Maxwell's Demon in "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory" to find out more.
- Koteks begins to explain that Nefastis's experiment relies on some very bizarre pseudo-science in which a "sensitive" person stares at a picture of James Clerk Maxwell, which will somehow prompt the sorting of the air molecules.
- Oedipa thinks she is in the presence of madness.
- Oedipa then asks if she would make a good "sensitive," and Koteks says that he is sure Nefastis would let her try.
- Koteks throws out the address, "Box 573," but becomes suspicious when Oedipa thinks he is referring to a place in Berkeley (4.24). She guesses it is the new WASTE address, but she pronounces the acronym like a word and Koteks becomes even more suspicious.
- Oedipa begins to think of the muted post horn as the "WASTE symbol" and she goes to see Mike Fallopian at the Scope to discuss her suspicions (4.30).
- Fallopian says that he suspects Koteks is part of some disgruntled underground network, and he sympathizes with the engineers who were raised on the false "Myth of the American Inventor" (4.31).
- Fallopian and Metzger begin arguing about politics, and Oedipa thinks that "a pattern was beginning to emerge, having to do with the mail and how it was delivered" (4.32).
- Oedipa remembers a historical marker at the Fangoso Lagoons, which said that in 1853 a bunch of Wells Fargo men were massacred by mysterious men in black uniforms. The only witness was a post rider, and there was a cross etched in the dust by one of the victims.
- Oedipa wonders if it was a cross or the initial T, for Trystero.
- She tries calling Randolph Driblette to ask if he'd heard about the Wells Fargo incident when he had his actors dress in black, but there is no answer.
- She goes to Zapf's Used Books to pick up a copy of Jacobean Revenge Plays. When she goes to the line in which Trystero appears, she notes that some student wrote "Cf. variant, 1687 ed." next to it.
- Oedipa found that the play had originally come from a textbook published by the Lectern Press in Berkeley in 1957. She decides to travel to Berkeley to meet the publisher, and maybe try to see John Nefastis.
- Oedipa thinks that the reason she is getting so tangled up in things is because she is obsessed with "bringing something out of herself" (4.38).
- The next day, Oedipa goes to the Vesperhaven House, an old-folks home that Inverarity built near San Narciso, where she randomly happens across an old man named Mr. Thoth.
- The old man informs her that he was dreaming of his grandfather, who rode for the Pony Express.
- Oedipa thinks of the Wells Fargo massacre and asks if he was ever attacked.
- Mr. Thoth tells her that he was an Indian killer. He tries to sort out his dream and thinks that it was all mixed up with old Porky Pig cartoons from before the war. (Yes, this would seem to make Mr. Thoth something of an unreliable dude. It's not entirely clear when he is describing the dream versus the actual incident in which his grandfather was attacked.)
- Mr. Thoth tells her that once his grandfather was attacked by a group that made costumes from feathers and died them black using burned bones. He knew they weren't Indians because Indians never attacked at night, thinking they would be condemned to wander in the dark forever.
- Mr. Thoth tells her that he has a ring from one of them because his grandfather managed to cut off the man's finger.
- He pulls out the ring and Oedipa is shocked to see—once again—the WASTE symbol.
- Oedipa again goes to see Fallopian. He doesn't know much about the Wells Fargo incident, but he does think that she has found "an accidental correlation" (4.56).
- Oedipa "thought of how tenuous it was, like a long white hair, over a century long" (4.57).
- Some time later, Oedipa gets a phone call from Genghis Cohen, a renowned philatelist (stamp expert) that Metzger has hired to inventory and appraise Inverarity's stamp collection.
- Cohen tells her that there are some "irregularities" regarding Inverarity's collection (4.66).
- Oedipa goes to see Cohen at his apartment/office, where he offers her wine made of dandelions that he picked from a cemetery that was later removed for the East San Narciso Freeway.
- Oedipa immediately remembers Metzger's reference to the same cemetery and thinks that she has become sensitized to such correlations.
- But she worries that it's closer to mental illness than intuition, and she sees "how far it might be possible to get lost in this" (4.69).
- Cohen informs her that he has gotten in touch with an Expert Committee, and proceeds to show her a stamp with a very unusual watermark—the WASTE symbol. Again!
- He then pulls out an old German stamp, which happens to be a Thurn and Taxis symbol. He informs her that Thurn and Taxis was the European mail service from 1300 until 1867.
- Oedipa notices that their symbol is the post horn, but without the mute. For the first time, it becomes clear to her what the WASTE symbol might be.
- She remembers the line from the Wharfinger play, And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn (4.80).
- She thinks, "Whoever they were their aim was to mute the Thurn and Taxis post horn" (4.82).
- Cohen reveals to her that the two stamps are forgeries. She thinks that then they must be worthless, but he tells her that you would be "amazed how much you can sell an honest forgery for" (4.85).
- On the Pony Express stamp, she notices that behind the reader is a painstakingly engraved black feather, and there's even a letter transposition—U.S. Potsage.
- Oedipa immediately thinks of the transposition on her letter from Mucho—the Potsmaster.
- Cohen wonders if this tradition of postal fraud could date all the way back to the beginning of Thurn and Taxis.
- Oedipa begins to tell Cohen about all the coincidences, and he thinks that whoever they are, they must still be quite active. He suggests that they not tell the government, since he's sure they know more about it than Oedipa and Cohen.
- Oedipa continues questioning, but Cohen seems to withdraw.
- He pours more dandelion wine and Oedipa thinks of a world in which "their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine" (4.100).