ILLUMINATI ( PART II )

"And?"
"You passed. You didn't believe us— that was obvious— but you kept your eyes and ears open and
were willing to listen. If you were a right-winger, we would have done our pro-communist rap. The
idea is to find out if a new man or woman will listen, really listen, or just shut their minds at the first
really shocking idea."
"I'm listening, but not uncritically. For instance, if the Illuminati control America already, what's the
purpose of the assassinations?"
"Their grip on Washington is still pretty precarious. They've been able to socialize the economy. But
if they showed their hand now and went totalitarian all the way, there would be a revolution. Middlereaders
would rise up with right-wingers, and left-libertarians, and the Illuminati aren't powerful
enough to withstand that kind of massive revolution. But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud
eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution."
"What sort of tools?"
"More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No -knock laws. Stop and frisk
laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood
tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it
unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives.
Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws
in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the
people reason— or are manipulated into reasoning— that the entire populace must have its freedom
restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted.
Targets for assassination will be mavericks of left or right who are either not part of the Illuminati
conspiracy or have been marked as unreliable. The Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, for
example, were capable of mobilizing a somewhat libertarian left-right-black-white populist
movement. But the assassinations that have occurred so far are nothing compared to what will take
place. The next wave will be carried out by the Mafia, who will be paid in Illuminati gold."
"Not Moscow gold," said George with a smile.
"The puppets in the Kremlin have no idea that they and the puppets in the White House are working
for the same people. The Illuminati control all sorts of organizations and national governments
without any of them being aware that others are also controlled. Each group thinks it is competing
with the others, while actually each is playing its part in the Illuminati plan. Even the Morituri— the
six-person affinity groups which splintered from the SDS Weathermen, because the Weathermen
seemed too cautious— are under the control of the Illuminati. They think they're working to bring
down the government, but actually they are strengthening its hand. The Black Panthers are also
infiltrated. Everything is infiltrated. At present rate, within the next few years the Illuminati will have
the American people under tighter surveillance than Hitler had the Germans. And the beauty of it is,
the majority of the Americans will have been so frightened by Illuminati-backed terrorist incidents
that they will beg to be controlled as a masochist begs for the whip."
George shrugged. Hagbard sounded like a typical paranoid, but there was this submarine and the
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strange events of the past few days. "So the Illuminati are conspiring to tyrannize the world, is that
it? Do you trace them back to the First International?"
"No. They're what happened when the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century collided with
German mysticism. The correct name for the organization is Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria.
According to their own traditions they were founded or revived in seventeen seventy-six on May first
by a man named Adam Weishaupt. Weishaupt was an unfrocked Jesuit and a Mason. He taught that
religions and national governments had to be overthrown and the world ruled by an elite of
scientifically-minded materialistic atheists, to be held in trust for the masses of mankind who would
eventually rule themselves when enlightenment became universal. But this was only Weishaupt's
'Outer Doctrine.' There was also an 'Inner Doctrine,' which was that power is an end in itself, and that
Weishaupt and his closest followers would make use of the new knowledge being developed by
scientists and engineers to seize control of the world. Back in seventeen seventy-six, things were run
largely by the Church and the feudal nobility, with the capitalists slowly getting a bigger and bigger
piece of the pie. Weishaupt declared that these groups were obsolete, and it was time for an elite with
a monopoly on scientific and technological knowledge to seize power. Instead of eventually
producing a democratic society, as the 'Outer Doctrine' promised, the Ancient Illuminated Seers of
Bavaria would saddle mankind with a dictatorship that would last forever."
"Well, it would be logical enough that someone around that time would think of that," said George.
"And who more likely than a Mason who was an unfrocked Jesuit?"
"You recognize that what I tell you is relatively plausible," said Hagbard. "That's a good sign."
"A sign that it's plausible." laughed George.
"No, a sign that you're the kind of person I'm always looking for. Well, the Illuminati, after staying
above ground long enough to recruit a hard-core membership from Masons and freethinkers and to
establish international contacts, allowed it to seem that the Bavarian government had suppressed
them. Subsequently, the Illuminati launched their first experimental revolution, in France. Here they
suckered the middle class, whose true interests lay in laissez faire free enterprise, to follow the
Weishaupt slogan of 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' The catch, of course, is that where equality and
fraternity rule, there is no liberty. After the career of Napoleon, whose rise and fall was purely the
result of Illuminati manipulations, they started planting the seeds of European socialism, leading to
the revolutions of eighteen forty-eight, to Marxism, finally to the seizure of Russia, one-sixth of the
earth's land mass. Of course, they had to engineer a world war to make the Russian Revolution
possible, but by nineteen seventeen they had become quite good at that. World War Two was an
even more clever job and resulted in more gains for them."
"Another thing this explains," George said, "is why orthodox Marxism-Leninism, in spite of all its
ideals, always turns out to be not worth a shit. Why it's always betrayed the people wherever it
established itself. And it explains why there's such an inevitable quality about America's drift toward
totalitarianism."
"Right," said Hagbard. "America is the target now. They've got most of Europe and Asia. Once they
get America, they can come out into the open. The world will then be much as Orwell predicted in
Nineteen Eighty-four. They bumped him off after it was published, you know. The book hit a little
too close to home. He was obviously on to them— the references to Inner and Outer parties with
different teachings, O'Brien's speech about power being an end in itself— and they got him. Orwell,
you see, ran across them in Spain, where they were functioning quite openly at one point during the
Civil War. But artists also arrive at truth through their imaginations, if they let themselves wander
freely. They're more likely to arrive at the truth than more scientific-minded people."
"You've just tied two hundred years of world history up in a theory that would make me feel I should
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have myself committed if I accepted it," said George. "But I'm drawn to it, I admit. Partly
intuitively— I feel you are a person who is essentially sane and not paranoid. Partly because the
orthodox version of history that I was taught in school never made sense to me, and I know how
people can twist history to suit their beliefs, and therefore I assume that the history I've learned is
twisted. Partly because of the very wildness of the idea. If I learned one thing in the last few years,
it's that the crazier an idea is the more likely it is to be true. Still and all, given all those reasons for
believing you, I would like some further sign."
Hagbard nodded. "All right. A sign. So be it. First, a question for you. Assuming your boss, Joe
Malik, was on to something— assuming that the place he sent you did have something to do with
assassinations and might lead to the Illuminati: what would be likely to happen to Joe Malik?"
"I know what you're suggesting. I don't like to think about it."
"Don't think." Hagbard suddenly pulled a telephone from under the railing of the ship. "We can tap
into the Bell System through the Atlantic cable from here. Dial the New York area code and dial any
person in New York, any person who could give you up-to-date information on Joe Malik and on
Confrontation magazine. Don't tell me who you're dialing. Otherwise, you might suspect I had
someone on the ship impersonate the person you want to speak to."
Holding the phone so Hagbard couldn't see, George dialed a number. After a wait of about thirty
seconds, after numerous clicks and other strange sounds, George could hear a phone ringing. After a
moment, a voice said. "Hello."
"This is George Dorn," said George. "Who is this?"
"Well, who the hell did you think it was? You dialed my number."
"Oh, Christ," said George. "Look, I'm in a place where I don't trust the phones. I have to be sure I'm
really talking to you. So I want you to identify yourself without my telling you who you're supposed
to be. Do you understand?"
"Of course I understand. You don't have to use that grade school language. This is Peter Jackson,
George, as I presume you intended that it should be. Where the hell are you? Are you still in Mad
Dog?"
"I'm at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."
"Knowing your bad habits, I'm not surprised. Have you heard about what happened to us? Is that
why you're calling?"
"No. What happened?" George gripped the telephone tighter.
"The office was blown up by a bomb early this morning. And Joe has disappeared."
"Was Joe killed?"
"Not as far as we know. There weren't any bodies in the wreckage. How about you- are you okay?"
"I'm getting into an unbelievable story, Peter. It's so unbelievable that I'm not going to try to tell you
about it. Not till I get back. If you're still running a magazine there then."
"As of now there's still a magazine, and I'm running it from my apartment," said Peter. "I only hope
they don't decide to blow me up."
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"Who?"
"Whoever. You're still on assignment. And if this has anything to do with what you've been doing
down in Mad Dog, Texas, you're in trouble. Reporters are not supposed to go around getting their
boss's magazines bombed."
"You sound pretty cheerful, considering Joe might be dead."
"Joe is indestructible. By the way, George, who's paying for this call?"
"A wealthy friend, I think. He's got a corner on flax or something like that. More on him later. I'm
going to sign off now, Pete. Thanks for talking."
"Sure. Take care, baby."
George handed the phone to Hagbard. "Do you know what's happened to Joe? Do you know who
bombed Confrontation? You knew about this before I called. Your people are pretty handy with
explosives."
Hagbard shook his head. "All I know is, the pot is coming to a boil. Your editor, Joe Malik, was onto
the Illuminati. That's why he sent you to Mad Dog. As soon as you show your face down there, you
get busted and Malik's office is bombed. What do you think?"
"I think that what you've been telling me is the truth, or a version of it. I don't know whether to trust
you completely. But I've got my sign. If the Bavarian Illuminati don't exist, something does. So, then,
where do we go from here?"
Hagbard smiled. "Spoken like a true homo neophilus, George. Welcome to the tribe. We want to
recruit you, because you are so gullible. That is, gullible in the right way. You're skeptical about
conventional wisdom, but attracted to unorthodox ideas. An unfailing mark of homo neophilus. The
human race is not divided into the irrational and the rational, as some idealists think. All humans are
irrational, but there are two different kinds of irrationally— those who love old ideas and hate and
fear new ones, and those who despise old ideas and joyfully embrace new ones. Homo neophobus
and homo neophilus. Neophobus is the original human stock, the stock that hardly changed at all for
the first four million years of human history. Neophilus is the creative mutation that has been
popping up at regular intervals during the past million years, giving the race little forward pushes, the
kind you give a wheel to make it spin faster and faster. Neophilus makes a lot of mistakes, but he or
she moves. They live life the way it should be lived, ninety-nine percent mistakes and one percent
viable mutations. Everyone in my organization is neophilus, George. That's why we're so far ahead
of the rest of the human race. Concentrated neophilus influences, without any neophobe dilution. We
make a million mistakes, but we move so fast that none of them catch up with us. Before you get any
deeper, George, I'd like you to become one of us."
"Which means what?"
"Become a Legionnaire in the Legion of Dynamic Discord."
George laughed. "Now that sounds like a gas. But it's hard to believe that an organization with an
absurd name like that could build anything as serious as this submarine, or work for such a serious
end as foiling the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria."
Hagbard shook his head. "What's serious about a yellow submarine? It's right out of a rock song.
And everybody knows people who worry about the Bavarian Illuminati are crackpots. Will you join
the Legion— in whatever spirit you choose?"
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"Certainly," said George promptly.
Hagbard clapped him on the back. "Ah, you're our type, all right. Good. Back through the door you
came, then turn right and through the golden door."
"Is there someone lifting a lamp beside it?"
'There are no honest men on this voyage. Get along with you now." Hagbard's full lips curled in a
leer. "You're in for a treat."
("Every perversion," Smiling Jim screamed. "Men having sex with men. Women having sex with
women. Obscene desecrations of religious articles for deviant purposes. Even men and women
having sex with animals. Why, friends, the only thing they haven't gotten around to yet is people
copulating with fruits and vegetables, and I guess that'll be next. Some degenerate getting his kicks
with an apple!" The audience laughed at the wit.)
"You've got to run very fast to catch up with the sun. That's the way it is, when you're lost out here,"
the old woman said, stressing the last five words in a kind of childish singsong. . . . The woods were
incredibly thick and dark, but Barney Muldoon stumbled after her. . . . "It's getting darker and
darker," she said darkly, "but's always dark, when you're lost out here". . . . "Why do we have to
catch the Sun?" Barney asked, perplexed. "In search of more light," she cackled gleefully. "You
always need more light, when you're lost out here"....
Behind the golden door stood the lovely black receptionist. She had changed into a short red leather
skirt that left all of her long legs in view. Her hands rested lightly on her white plastic belt.
"Hi, Stella," said George. "Is that your name? Is it really Stella Maris?"
"Sure."
"No honest men on this voyage is right Hagbard was talking to me telepathically. He told me your
name."
"I told you my name when you boarded the sub. You must have forgotten. You've been through a lot.
And sad to say you'll be going through a lot more. I must ask you to remove your clothing. Just shed
it on the floor, please."
George unhesitatingly did as he was told. Total or partial nudity was required in lots of initiation
rituals; but a twinge of anxiety ran through him. He was trusting these people simply because they
hadn't done anything to him yet. But there was really no telling what kind of freaks they might be,
what kind of ritual torture or murder they might involve him in. Such fears were part of initiation
rituals, too.
Stella was grinning at him, eyebrows raised, as he dropped his shorts. He understood the meaning of
the grin, and he felt the blood rush hot as a blush to his penis, which grew thicker and heavier in an
instant. Being aware that he was standing nude with the start of an erection in front of this beautiful
and desirable woman, who was enjoying the spectacle, made him swell and harden still more.
"That's a good-looking tool you've got there. Nice and thick and pink and purple." Stella sauntered
over to him, reached out and touched her fingers to the underside of his cock, just where it met his
scrotum. He felt his balls draw up. Then her middle finger ran down the central cord, flicking the
underside of the head. George's penis rose to full staff in salute to her manual dexterity.
"The sexually responsive male," said Stella. "Good, good, good. Now you're ready for the next
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chamber. Right through that green door, if you please."
Naked, erect, regretfully leaving Stella behind, George walked through the door. These people were
too healthy and good-humored to be untrustworthy, he thought. He liked them and you ought to trust
your feelings.
But as the green door slammed shut behind him, his anxiety came back even stronger than before.
In the center of the room was a pyramid of seventeen steps, alternating red and white marble. The
room was large, with five walls that tapered together in a gothic arch thirty feet above the pentagonal
floor. Unlike the pyramid in the Mad Dog jail, this one had no huge eye goggling down at him.
Instead there was an enormous golden apple, a sphere of gold the height of a man with a foot-long
stem and a single leaf the size of an elephant's ear. Cut into the side of the apple was the word
KALLISTI in Greek letters. The walls of the room were draped with enormous gold curtains that
looked like they'd been stolen from a Cinerama theater, and the floor was covered with lush gold
carpet into which George's bare feet sank deeply.
This is different, George told himself to quiet his fear. These people are different. There's a
connection with the others, but they're different.
The lights went out. The golden apple was glowing in the dark like a harvest moon. KALLISTI was
etched in sharp black lines.
A voice that sounded like Hagbard boomed at him from all sides of the room: "There is no goddess
but Goddess, and she is your goddess."
This is actually an Elks Club ceremony, George thought. But there were strange, un-BPOE fumes
drifting into his nostrils. An unmistakable odor. High-priced incense these people use. An expensive
religion, or lodge, or whatever it is. But you can afford the best when you're a flax tycoon. Flax, huh?
Hard to see how a man could make such big money in the flax biz. Did you corner the market, or
what? Now, mutual funds, that was more down to earth than flax. I do believe I'm feeling the effects.
They shouldn't drug a man without his consent.
He found he was holding his penis, which had shrunk considerably. He gave it a reassuring pull.
Said the voice, "There is no movement but the Discordian movement, and it is the Discordian
movement."
That would appear to be self-evident. George rolled his eyes and watched the giant, golden-glowing
apple wheel and spin above him.
"This is a most sacred and a most serious hour for Discordians. It is the hour when the great,
palpitating heart of Discordia throbs and swells, when She What Began It All prepares to ingest into
her heaving, chaotic bosom another Legionnaire of the Legion of Dynamic Discord. O minerval are
ye willing to make a commitment to Discordia?"
Embarrassed at being addressed directly, George let go of his wang. "Yes," he said, in a voice that
sounded muffled to him.
"Are ye a human being, and not a cabbage or something?"
George giggled. "Yes."
"That's too bad," the voice boomed. "Do ye wish to better yerself?"
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"Yes."
"How stupid. Are ye willing to become philosophically illuminated?"
Why that word, George wondered briefly. Why illuminated? But he said, "I suppose so."
"Very funny. Will ye dedicate yerself to the holy Discordian movement?"
George shrugged, "As long as it suits me."
There was a draft against his belly. Stella Maris, naked and gleaming, stepped out from behind the
pyramid. The soft glow from the golden apple illuminated the rich browns and blacks of her body.
George felt the blood charging back into his penis. This part was going to be OK. Stella walked
toward him With a slow, stately stride, gold bracelets sparkling and tinkling on her wrists. George
felt hunger, thirst, and a pressure as if a balloon were slowly being inflated in his bowels. His cock
rose, heartbeat by heartbeat. The muscles in his buttocks and thighs tightened, relaxed, and tightened
again.
Stella approached with gliding steps and danced around him in a circle, one hand reaching out to
brush his bare waist. He stepped forward and held out his hands to her. She danced away on tiptoes,
spinning, arms over her head, heavy conical breasts with black nipples tilted upward. For once
George understood why some men like big boobs.
His eyes moved to the globes of her buttocks, the long muscular shadows in her thighs and calves.
He stumbled toward her. She stopped suddenly, legs slightly apart forming an inverse with her patch
of very abundant hair at the Royal Arch, her hips swaying in a gentle circular motion. His tool pulled
him to her as if it were iron and she were magnetized; he looked down and saw that a little pearl of
fluid, gleaming gold in the light from the apple, had appeared in the eye. Polyphemus wanted very
much to get into the cave.
George walked up to her until the head of the serpent was buried in the bushy, prickly garden at the
bottom of her belly. He put his hands out and pressed them against the two cones, feeling her ribcage
rise and fall with heavy breathing. Her eyes were half closed and her lips slightly open. Her nostrils
flared wide.
She licked her lips and he felt her fingers lightly circling his cock, lightly brushing it with a friction
strong enough to gently electrify it. She stepped back a bit and pushed her finger into the moisture on
his tip. George put his hand into the tangle of her pubic hair, feeling the lips hot and swollen, feeling
her juices slathering his fingers. His middle finger slid into her cunt, and he pushed it in past the tight
opening all the way up to his knuckle. She gasped, and her whole body writhed around his finger in a
spiral motion. "Wow, God!" George whispered. "Goddess!" Stella answered fiercely. George
nodded. "Goddess," he said hoarsely, meaning Stella as much as the legendary Discordia.
She smiled and drew away from him. "Try to imagine that this is not me, Stella Maris, the youngest
daughter of Discordia. She is merely the vessel of Goddess. Her priestess. Think of Goddess. Think
of her entering me and acting through me. I am her now!" All the while she was stroking
Polyphemus gently but insistently. It was already ferocious as a stallion, but it seemed to be getting
more inflamed, if that were possible.
"I'm going to go off in your hand in a second," George moaned. He gripped her slender wrist to stop
her. "I've got to fuck you, whoever you are, woman or goddess. Please."
She stepped back from him, her tan palms turned toward him, her arms held away from her sides in a
receiving, accepting gesture. But she said, "Climb the steps now. Climb up to the apple." Her feet
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twinkling on the thick carpet, she ran backward away from him and disappeared behind the pyramid.
He climbed the seventeen steps, old one-eye still swollen and aching. The top of the pyramid was
broad and flat, and he stood facing the apple. He put a hand out and touched it, expecting cold metal,
surprised when the softly glowing texture felt warm as a human body to his touch. About half a foot
below the level of his waist he saw a dark, elliptical opening in the side of the apple, and a sinister
suspicion formed in his mind.
"You got it, George" said the booming voice that presided over his initiation. "Now you're supposed
to plant your seeds in the apple. Go to it, George. Give yourself to Goddess."
Shit man, George thought. What a silly idea! They get a guy turned on like this and then they expect
him to fuck a goddamn golden idol. He had a good mind to turn his back on the apple, sit down on
the top step of the pyramid and jack-off to show them what he thought of them.
"George, would we let you down? It's nice there in the apple. Come on, stick it in. Hurry up."
I am so gullible, thought George. But a hole is a hole. It's all friction. He stepped up to the apple and
gingerly placed the tip of his cock in the elliptical opening, half expecting to be sucked in by some
mechanical force, half fearing it would be chopped off by a miniature guillotine. But there was
nothing. His cock didn't even touch the edges of the hole. He took another small step, and put it
halfway in. Still nothing. Then something warm and wet and hairy squirmed up against the tip of his
cock. And, whatever it was, he felt it give as he reflexively pushed forward. He pushed some more
and it pushed back, and he slid into it. A cunt by all the high hidden Gods, a cunt!— and by the feel
it was almost surely Stella's.
George exhaled a deep sigh, planted his hands on the smooth surface of the apple to support himself
and began thrusting. The pumping from inside the apple was as fierce. The metal was warm against
his thighs and belly. Suddenly the pelvis inside slammed up against the hole, and a hollow scream
resounded from the inside of the apple. The echo effect made it seem to hang in the air, containing
all the agony, spasm, itch, twitch, moon madness, horror, and ecstasy of life from the ocean's birth to
now.
George's prick was stretched like the skin of a balloon about to burst. His lips drew back from his
teeth. The delicious electricity of orgasm was building in his groin, in the deepest roots of his penis,
in his quick. He was coming. He cried out as he fired his seed into the unseen cunt, into the apple,
into Goddess, into eternity.
There was a crash above. George's eyes opened. A nude male body at the end of a rope came hurtling
at him from the vaulted ceiling. It jerked to a stop with a horrible crack, its feet quivering above the
stem of the apple. Even as the leaps of ejaculation still racked George's body, the penis over his head
lifted and spurted thick white gobbets of come, like tiny doves, arcing out over George's uplifted,
horrified head to fall somewhere on the side of the pyramid. George stared at the face, canted to one
side, the neck broken, a hangman's knot behind the ear. It was his own face.
George went ape. He pulled his penis out of the apple and nearly fell backward down the stairs. He
ran down the seventeen steps and looked back. The dead figure was still hanging, through a trap in
the ceiling, directly above the apple. The penis had subsided. The body slowly rotated. Enormous
laughter boomed out in the room, sounding very much like Hagbard Celine.
"Our sympathies," said the voice. "You are now a legionnaire in the Legion of Dynamic Discord."
The hanging figure vanished soundlessly. There was no trapdoor in the ceiling. A colossal orchestra
somewhere began to play Pomp and Circumstance. Stella Maris came round from the back of the
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pyramid again, this time clothed from head to foot in a simple white robe. Her eyes shone. She was
carrying a silver tray with a steaming hot towel on it. She put the tray on the floor, knelt, and
wrapped George's relaxing dick in the towel. It felt delicious.
"You were beautiful," she whispered.
"Yeah, but— wow!" George looked up at the pyramid. The golden apple gleamed cheerfully.
"Get up off the floor," he said. "You're embarrassing me."
She stood up smiling at him, the broad grin of a woman whose lover has thoroughly satisfied her.
"I'm glad you liked it," said George, his wildly disparate emotions gradually coalescing as anger.
"What was the idea of that last little gag? To turn me off permanently on sex?"
Stella laughed. "George, admit it. Nothing could turn you off sex, right? So don't be such a bad
sport."
"Bad sport? That sick trick is your idea of sport? What a goddam rotten dirty motherfucking thing to
do to a man!"
"Motherfucking? No, that's for when we ordain deacons."
George shook his head angrily. She absolutely refused to be shamed. He was speechless.
"If you have any complaints, sweet man, take them to Episkopos Hagbard Celine of the Lief Erikson
Cabal," said Stella. She turned and started walking back toward the pyramid. "He's waiting for you
back the way you came. And there's a change of clothes in the next room."
"Wait a minute!" George called after her. "What the blazes does Kallisti mean?"
She was gone.
In the anteroom of the initiation chamber he found a green tunic and tight black trousers draped over
a costumer. He didn't want to put them on. It was probably some sort of uniform of this idiotic cult,
and he wanted no part of it. But there weren't any other clothes. There was also a beautiful pair of
black boots. Everything fit perfectly and comfortably. There was a full-length mirror on the wall and
he looked at himself and grudgingly admitted that the outfit was a gas. A tiny golden apple glinted
on the left side of his chest. The only thing was that his hair needed washing. It was getting stringy.
Through two more doors and he was facing Hagbard.
"You didn't like our little ceremony?" said Hagbard with exaggerated sympathy. "That's too bad. I
was so proud of it, especially the parts I lifted from William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade."
"It's sick," said George. "And putting the woman inside the apple so I couldn't have any kind of
personal sex with her, so I had to use her as a receptacle, as, as an object. You made it pornographic.
And sadistic pornography, at that."
"Dig, George," said Hagbard. "Thou art that. If there were no death, there would be no sex. If there
were no sex, there would be no death. And without sex, there would be no evolution toward
intelligence, no human race. Therefore death is necessary. Death is the price of orgasm. Only one
being on all this planet is sexless, intelligent and immortal. While you were pumping your seeds into
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the symbol of life, I showed you orgasm and death in one image and brought it home to you. And
you'll never forget it. It was a trip, George. Wasn't it a trip?"
George nodded reluctantly. "It was a trip."
"And you know— in your bones— a little more about life than you did before, right, George?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, thank you for joining the Legion of Dynamic Discord."
"You're welcome."
Hagbard beckoned George to the edge of the boat-shaped balcony. He pointed down. Far below in
the blue-green medium through which they seemed to be flying George could see rolling lands, hills,
winding riverbeds— and then, broken buildings. George gasped. Pyramids rose up below, as high as
the hills.
"This is one of the great port cities," Hagbard said. "Galleys from the Americas plied their trade to
and from this harbor for a thousand years."
"How long ago?"
'Ten thousand years," said Hagbard. "This was one of the last cities to go. Of course, their
civilization had declined quite a bit by then. Meanwhile, we've got a problem. The Illuminati are here
already."
A large, undulating, blue-gray shape appeared ahead of them, swam toward them, whirled and
matched their speed so it seemed to drift alongside. George felt another momentary leap of fright.
Was this another of Hagbard's tricks?
"What is that fish? How does it keep up with us?" George asked.
"It's a porpoise, not a fish, a mammal. And they can swim a lot faster than submarines can sail
underwater. We can keep up with them, though. They form a film around their bodies that enables
them to slide through the water without setting up any turbulence. I learned from them how to do it,
and I applied it to this sub. We can cross the Atlantic under water in less than a day."
A voice spoke from the control panel. "Better go transparent. You'll be within range of their
detectors when you've gone another ten miles."
"Right," said Hagbard. "We will maintain present course until further notice, so you'll know where
we are."
"I'll know," said the voice.
Hagbard slashed his hand through the air disgustedly. "You're so fucking superior."
"Who are you talking to?" said George.
"Howard."
The voice said, "I've never seen machines like this before. They look something like crabs. They've
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just about got the temple all dug up."
"When the Illuminati do something on their own, they go first class," said Hagbard.
"Who the hell is Howard?" said George.
"It's me. Out here. Hello, Mr. Human," said the voice. "I'm Howard."
Unbelieving, yet knowing quite well what was happening, George slowly turned his head. The
dolphin appeared to be looking at him.
"How does he talk to us?" said Hagbard.
"He's swimming alongside the prow of the submarine, which is where we pick up his voice. My
computer translates from Delphine to English A mike here in the control room sends our voices to
the computer which translates into Delphine and broadcasts the correct sounds through the water to
him."
"Lady-oh, oh de-you-day, a new human being has come my way," Howard sang. "He has swum into
my ken. I hope he's one of the friendly men."
"They sing a lot," said Hagbard. "Also recite poetry and make it up on the spot. A large part of their
culture is poetry. Poetics and athletics— and, of course, the two are very closely related. What they
do mostly is swim, hunt, and communicate with each other."
"But we do all with artful complexity and rare finesse," said Howard, looping the loop outside.
"Lead us to the enemy, Howard," said Hagbard.
Howard swam out in front of them, and as he did so, he sang:
Right on, right on, a-stream against the foe
The sallying schools of the Southern seas make their
course to go. Attack, attack, with noses sound as rock
No shark or squid can shake us loose or survive our dour shock.
"Epics," said Hagbard. "They're mad for epics. They have their whole story for the past forty
thousand years in epic form. No books, no writing— how could they handle pens with their fins, you
know? All memorization. Which is why they favor poetry. And their poems are marvelous, but you
must spend years studying their language before you know that. Our computer turns their works into
doggerel. It's the best it can do. When I have the time, I'll add some circuits that can really translate
poetry from one language to another. When the Porpoise Corpus is translated into human languages,
it will advance our culture by centuries or more. It will be as if we'd discovered the works of a whole
race of Shakespeares that had been writing for forty millennia."
"On the other hand," said Howard, "your civilizations may be demoralized by culture shock."
"Not likely," said Hagbard grumpily. "We've a few things to teach you, you know."
"And our psychotherapists can help you over the anguish of digesting our knowledge," said Howard.
"They have psychotherapists?" said George.
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"They invented psychoanalysis thousands of years ago as a means of passing the time on long
migrations. They have highly complex brains and symbol-systems. But their minds are unlike ours in
very important ways. They are all in one piece, so to speak. They lack the structural differentiation of
ego, superego, and id. There is no repression. They are fully aware, and accepting, of their most
primitive wishes. And conscious will, rather than parent-inculcated discipline, guides their actions.
There is no neurosis, no psychosis among them. Psychoanalysis for them is an imaginative poetic
exercise in autobiography, rather than a healing art. There are no difficulties of the mind that require
healing."
"Not quite true," said Howard. "There was a school of thought about twenty thousand years ago that
envied humans. They were called the Original Sinners, because they were like the first parents of
your human race who, according to some of your legends, envied the gods and suffered for it. They
taught that humans were superior because they could do many more things than dolphins. But they
despaired, and most ended up by committing suicide. They were the only neurotics in the long
history of porpoises. Our philosophers mostly hold that we live in beauty all the days of our lives, as
no human does. Our culture is simply what you might call a commentary on our natural
surroundings, whereas human culture is at war with nature. If any race is afflicted, it is yours. You
can do much, and what you can do, you must do. And, speaking of war, the enemy lies ahead."
In the distance George could make out what appeared to be a mighty city rising on hills surrounding
a deep depression which must have been a harbor when Atlantis was on the surface. The buildings
marched on and on as far as the eye could see. They were mostly low, but here and there a square
tower reared up. The sub was heading for the center of the ancient waterfront. George stared at the
buildings; he was able to see them better now. They were angular, very modern in appearance,
whereas the other city they'd flown— sailed— over had a mixed Greek-Egyptian-Mayan quality to
its architecture. Here there were no pyramids. But the tops of many of the structures were broken off,
and many others were heaps of rubble. Still, it was remarkable that a city which had sunk so many
thousands of feet to the bottom of the ocean in the course of what must have been an enormous
earthquake should be this well preserved. The buildings must be incredibly durable. If New York
went through a catastrophe like that there'd be nothing left of its glass-and-alloy skyscrapers.
There was one pyramid. It was much smaller than the towers around it. It gleamed a dull yellow.
Despite its lack of height, it seemed to dominate the harbor skyline, like a squat, powerful chieftain
in the center of a circle of tall, slender warriors. There was movement around its base.
"This is the city of Peos in the region of Poseida," said Hagbard, "and it was great in Atlantis for a
thousand years after the hour of the Dragon Star. It reminds me of Byzantium, which was a great city
for a thousand years after the fall of Rome. And that pyramid is the Temple of Tethys, goddess of the
Ocean Sea. It was seafaring that made Peos great. I .have a soft spot in my heart for those people."
Crawling around the base of the temple were strange sea creatures that looked like giant spiders.
Lights flashed from their heads and glinted on the sides of the temple. As the submarine swept
closer, George could see that the spiders were machines, each with a body the size of a tank. They
appeared to be excavating deep trenches around the base of the pyramid.
"Wonder where they had those built," muttered Hagbard. "Hard to keep innovations like that a
secret."
As he spoke, the spiders stopped whatever work they were doing around the pyramid. There was no
motion among them at all for a moment Then one of them rose up from the sea bottom, followed by
another, and another. They formed quickly into a V shape and started toward the submarine like a
pair of arms outstretched to seize it. They picked up speed as they came.
"They've detected us," Hagbard growled. "They weren't supposed to, but they have. It never pays to
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underestimate the Illuminati. All right, George. Button up your asshole. We're in for a fight."
At that moment but exactly two hours earlier on the clock, Rebecca Goodman awoke from a dream
about Saul and a Playboy bunny and something sinister. The phone was ringing (was there a pyramid
in the dream?—she tried to remember— something like that) and she reached groggily past the
mermaid statue and held the receiver to her ear. "Yes?" she said cautiously.
"Put your hand on your pussy and listen," said August Personage. "I'd like to lift your dress and—"
Rebecca hung up.
She suddenly remembered the hit when the needle went in, and all those wasted years. Saul had
saved her from that, and now Saul was gone and strange voices on the phone talked of sex the way
addicts talked of junk. "In the beginning of all things was Mummu, the spirit of pure Chaos. In the
beginning was the Word, and it was written by a baboon." Rebecca Goodman, twenty-five years old,
started to cry. If he's dead, she thought, these years have been wasted, too. Learning to love.
Learning that sex was more than another kind of junk. Learning that tenderness was more than a
word in the dictionary: that it was just what D. H. Lawrence said, not an embellishment on sex but
the center of the act. Learning what that poor guy on the phone could never guess, as most people in
this crazy country never guessed it. And then losing it, losing it to an aimless bullet fired from a
blind gun somewhere.
August Personage, about to leave the phone booth at the Automat on Fortieth Street and the Avenue
of the Americas, catches a flash of plastic on the floor. Bending, he picks up a pornographic tarot
card, which he quickly shoves into a pocket to be examined at leisure later.
It was the Five of Pentacles.
And, when the throne room was empty and the believers had departed in wonder and redoubled faith,
Hassan knelt and separated the two halves of the vessel which held the head of Ibn Azif. "Very
convincing screams," he commented, slipping the trapdoor beneath the plate; and Ibn Azif climbed
out, grinning at his own performance. His neck was thick, bull-like, undamaged, and quite solid.
THE FIFTH TRIP, OR GEBURAH
Swift-Kick, Inc
And, behold, thusly was the Law formulated:
IMPOSITION OF ORDER = ESCALATION OF CHAOS!
—Lord Omar Khayaam Ravenhurst,
"The Gospel According to Fred," The Honest Book of Truth
The lights flashed; the computer buzzed. Hagbard attached the electrodes.
On January 30, 1939, a silly little man in Berlin gave a silly little speech; among other things, he
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said: "And another thing I wish to say on this day which perhaps is memorable not only for us
Germans: in my life I have many times been a prophet and most of the times I have been laughed at.
During the period of my struggle for power, it was in the first case the Jews that laughed at my
prophecies that some day I would take over the leadership of the State and thereby of the whole folk
and that I would among other things solve also the Jewish problem. I believe that in the meantime
the hyenalike laughter of the Jews of Germany has been smothered in their throats. Today I want to
be a prophet once more: if the international-finance Jews inside and outside Europe should succeed
once more in plunging nations into another world war the consequence will be the annihilation of the
Jewish race in Europe." And so on. He was always saying things like that. By 1939 quite a few heads
here and there realized that the silly little man was also a murderous little monster, but only a very
small number even of these noticed that for the first time in his anti-Semitic diatribes he had used the
word Vernichtung—annihilation— and even they couldn't believe he meant what that implied. In
fact, outside of a small circle of friends, nobody guessed what the little man, Adolf Hitler, had
planned.
Outside that small— very small— circle of friends, others came in intimate contact with der Fuhrer
and never guessed what was in his mind. Hermann Rauschning, the Governor of Danzig, for
instance, was a devout Nazi until he began to get some hints of where Hitler's fancies were tending;
after fleeing to France, Rauschning wrote a book warning against his former leader. It was called The
Voice of Destruction and was very eloquent, but the most interesting passages in it were not
understood by Rauschning or by most of his readers. "Whoever sees in National Socialism nothing
but a political movement doesn't know much about it," Hitler told Rauschning, and this is in the
book, but Rauschning and his readers continued to see National Socialism as a particularly vile and
dangerous political movement and nothing more. "Creation is not yet completed," Hitler said again;
and Rauschning again recorded, without understanding. "The planet will undergo an upheaval which
you uninitiated people can't understand," der Fuhrer warned on another occasion; and, still another
time, he remarked that Nazism was, not only more than a political movement, but "more than a new
religion"; and Rauschning wrote it all and understood none of it. He even recorded the testimony of
Hitler's physician that the silly and murderous little man often awoke screaming from nightmares that
were truly extraordinary in their intensity and would shout, "It's HIM, it's HIM, HE'S come for me!"
Good old Hermann Rauschning, a German of the old school and not equipped to participate in the
New Germany of National Socialism, took all this as evidence of mental unbalance in Hitler....
All of them coming back, all of them. Hitler and Streicher and Goebbels and the powers behind them
what look like something you can't even imagine, guvnor....
You think they was human, the patient went on as the psychiatrist listened in astonishment, but wait
till you see them the second time. And they're coming—By the end of the month, they're coming....
Karl Haushofer was never tried at Nuremberg; ask most people to name the men chiefly responsible
for the Vernichtung (annihilation) decision, and his name will not be mentioned; even most histories
of Nazi Germany relegate him to footnotes. But strange stories are told about his many visits to
Tibet, Japan, and other parts of the Orient; his gift for prophecy and clairvoyance; the legend that he
belonged to a bizarre sect of dissident and most peculiar Buddhists, who had entrusted him with a
mission in the Western world so serious that he vowed to commit suicide if he did not succeed. If the
last yarn is true, Haushofer must have failed in his mission, for in March 1946 he killed his wife
Martha and then performed the Japanese suicide-rite of sepukku upon himself. His son, Albrecht, had
already been executed for his role in the "officer's plot" to assassinate Hitler. (Of his father, Albrecht
had written in a poem: "My father broke the seal/He did not feel the breath of the Evil One/He set It
free to roam the world!")
It was Karl Haushofer, clairvoyant, mystic, medium, Orientalist, and fanatic believer in the lost
continent of Thule, who introduced Hitler to the Illuminated Lodge in Munich, in 1923. Shortly
thereafter, Hitler made his first bid to seize power.
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No rational interpretation of the events of August 1968 in Chicago, satisfactory to all participants and
observers, has yet been produced. This suggests the need for value-free models, inspired by the
structural analysis in von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,
which will allow us to express what actually occurred functionally, without tainting our analysis with
bias or moral judgments. The model we will employ is that of two teams, an uphill motorcar race and
a downhill bicycle race, accidentally intersecting on the same hill. The Picasso statue in the Civic
Center will be regarded as "start" for the downhill motorcar race and "finish" for the uphill bicycle
race. Pontius Pilate, disguised as Sirhan Sirhan, fires the opening shot, thereby disqualifying Robert
F. Kennedy, for whom Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, as recorded in the most trustworthy
tabloids and scandal sheets.
THIS IS THE VOICE OF YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER MAN
SPEAKING. YOU MUST REALIZE THAT YOU ARE NOT JOSEPH WENDELL MALIK.
Hell's Angels on motorcycles do not fit the structure of the race at all, so they endlessly orbit around
the heroic statue of General Logan in Grant Park ("finish" for the uphill crucifixion racers) and can
be considered as isolated from the "action," which is, of course, America.
When Jesus falls the first time, this can be considered as a puncture and Simon operates an air pump
on his tires, but the threat to throw LSD in the water supply constitutes a "foul" and this team thereby
is driven back three squares by Mace, clubs, and the machine guns of the Capone mob unleashed
from another time track in the same multiverse. Willard Gibbs, far more than Einstein, created the
modern cosmos, and his concept of contingent or statistical reality, when cross-fertilized with the
Second Law of Thermodynamics by Shannon and Wiener, led to the definition of information as the
negative reciprocal of probability, making the clubbings of Jesus by Chicago cops just another of
those things that happens in this kind of quantum jump.
A centurion named Semper Cuni Linctus passes Simon in Grant Park looking for the uphill bike
race. "When we crucify a man," he mutters, "he should confounded well stay crucified." The three
Marys clutch handkerchiefs to their faces as the teargas and Zyklon B pours upward on the hill, to
the spot where the crosses and the statue of General Logan stand. . . . "Nor dashed a thousand kirn,"
croons Saint Toad looking through the door at Fission Chips. . . . Arthur Flegenheimer and Robert
Putney Drake ascend the chimney. . . . "You don't have to believe in Santa Claus," H. P. Lovecraft
explains. . . . "Ambrose," the Dutchman says to him imploringly.
"But it can't be," Joe Malik says, half weeping. "It can't be that crazy. Buildings wouldn't stand.
Planes wouldn't fly. Dams would collapse. Engineering colleges would be lunatic asylums."
"They aren't already?" Simon asks. "Have you read the latest data on the ecological catastrophe? You
have to face it, Joe. God is a crazy woman."
"There are no straight lines in curved space," Stella adds.
"But my mind is dying," Joe protests, shuddering.
Simon holds up an ear of corn and tells him urgently, "Osiris is a black god!"
(Sir Charles James Napier, bearded, long-haired and sixty-odd years old, General of Her Majesty's
Armies in India, met a most engaging scoundrel in January 1843 and immediately wrote to his
cronies in England about this remarkable person, whom he described as brave, clever, fabulously
wealthy, and totally unscrupulous. Since this curious fellow was also regarded as God by his
followers, who numbered over three million, he charged twenty rupees for permission to kiss his
hand, asked— and. got— the sexual favors of the wives or daughters of any True Believers who took
his fancy, and proved his divinity by brazenly and openly committing sins which any mortal would
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shrivel with shame to have acknowledged. He also proved, at the Battle of Miani, where he aided the
British against the rebellious Baluchi tribesmen, that he could fight like ten tigers. All in all, General
Napier concluded, a most unusual human being—Hasan Ali Shah Mahallat, forty-sixth Imam, or
living God, of the Ishmaelian sect of Islam, direct descendant of Hassan i Sabbah, and first Aga
Khan.)
Dear Joe:
I'm back in Czechago again, fabulous demesne of Crookbacked Richard, pigbaschard of
the world, etc., where the pollution comes up like thunder out of Gary across the lake,
etc., and the Padre and I are still working on the heads of the local Heads, etc., so I've
finally got tune to write you that long letter I promised.
The Law of Fives is all the farther that Weishaupt ever got, and Hagbard and John aren't
much interested in any further speculations along those lines. The 23/17 phenomenon is
entirely my discovery, except that William S. Burroughs has noted the 23 without
coming to any conclusions about it.
I'm writing this on a bench in Grant Park, near the place I got maced three years ago.
Nice symbolism.
A woman just came along from the Mothers March Against Polio. I gave her a quarter.
What a drag, just when I was trying to get my thoughts in order. When you come out
here, I'll be able to tell you more; this will obviously have to be somewhat sketchy.
Burroughs, anyway, encountered the 23 in Tangiers, when a ferryboat captain named
Clark remarked that he'd been sailing 23 years without an accident. That day, his ship
sunk, with all hands and feet aboard. Burroughs was thinking about it in the evening
when the radio newscast told him that an Eastern Airlines plane, New York to Miami,
had crashed. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the plane was Flight 23.
"If you want to know the extent of their control," Simon told Joe (speaking this time, not writing a
letter; they were driving to San Francisco after leaving Dillinger), "take a dollar bill out of your
wallet and look at it. Go ahead— do it now. I want to make a point." Joe took out his wallet and
looked for a single. (A year later, in the city Simon called Czechago in honor of the synchronous
invasions in August 1968, the KCUF convention is taking its first luncheon break after Smiling Jim's
sock-it-to-'em opening speech. Simon brushes against an usher, shouts, "Hey, you damned faggot,
keep your hands off my ass," and in the ensuing tumult Joe has no trouble slipping the AUM in the
punch.)
"Do I have to get a library card just to look at one book?" Carmel asks the librarian in the Main
Branch of the Las Vegas Library, after Maldonado had failed to produce any lead to a communist
agent.
"One of the most puzzling acts of Washington's Presidency," Professor Percival Petsdeloup tells an
American history class at Columbia, back in '68, "was his refusal to aid Tom Paine when Paine was
condemned to death in Paris" . . . Why puzzling? George Dorn thinks in the back of the class,
Washington was an Establishment fink. , . . "First of all, look at that face on the front," Simon says.
"It isn't Washington at all, it's Weishaupt. Compare it with any of the early, authentic pictures of
Washington and you'll see what I mean. And look at that cryptic half-smile on his face." (The same
smile Weishaupt wore when he finished the letter explaining to Paine why he couldn't help him;
sealed it with the Great Seal of the United States whose meaning only he knew; and settling back in
his chair, murmured to himself, "Jacques De Molay, thou art again avenged!")
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"What do you mean, I'm creating a disturbance? It was that faggot there, with his big mitts on my
ass."
("Well, I don't know which particular book, honey. Something that tells how the communists work.
You know, how a patriotic citizen can spot a commie spy ring if there's one in his neighborhood.
That kind of thing," Carmel explained.)
A swarm of men in blue shirts and white plastic helmets rushes down the steps at Forty-third Street
and UN Plaza, past the inscription reading, "They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their
spears into pruning hooks, neither shall they study war any more." Waving heavy wooden crosses
and shouting angry battle cries, the helmeted men surge into the crowd like a wave hitting a sand
castle. George sees them coming, and his heart skips a beat.
"And when you turn the bill over, the first thing you see is the Illuminati pyramid. You'll notice it
says seventeen seventy-six on it, but our government was founded in seventeen eighty-eight.
Supposedly, the seventeen seventy-six is there because that's when the Declaration of Independence
was signed. The real reason is that seventeen seventy-six is the year Weishaupt revived the
Illuminati. And why do you suppose the pyramid has seventy-two segments in thirteen layers?"
Simon asks in nineteen sixty-nine. . . . "Misunderstanding, my eye! When a guy gropes my butt that
way I understand exactly what he wants," Simon shouts in nineteen seventy. . . . George nudges
Peter Jackson. "God's Lightning," he says. The plastic hats gleam in the sunlight, more of them
jostling down the stairs, a banner, red letters on a white background unfurling above: "AMERICA:
LOVE IT OR WE'LL STOMP YOU. . . . "Christ on rollerskates," Peter says, "now watch the cops
do a vanishing act." . . . Dillinger settles down cross-legged in a five-sided chamber under the UN
meditation room. He curls into the lotus posture with an ease that would appear unusual in an
American in his late sixties were there anyone to witness it.
"Seventy-two is the cabalistic number for the Holy Unspeakable Name of God, used in all black
magic, and thirteen is the number in a coven," Simon explains. "That's why." The Volkswagen purrs
toward San Francisco.
Carmel comes down the steps of the Las Vegas Public Library, a copy of J. Edgar Hoover's Masters
of Deceit under his arm, an anticipatory smirk on his face, and Simon is finally ejected from the
Sheraton-Chicago shouting, "Faggots! I think you're all a bunch of faggots!"
"And here's one of their jokes," Simon adds. "Over the eagle's head, do you dig that Star of David?
They put that one in— one single six-pointed Jewish star, made up of all the five-pointed stars— just
so some right-wing cranks could find it and proclaim it as proof that the Elders of Zion control the
Treasury and the Federal Reserve."
Overlooking the crowd in UN Plaza, Zev Hirsch, New York State Commander of God's Lightning,
watches his thick-shouldered troops, swinging their wooden crosses like tomahawks, drive back the
lily-livered peaceniks. There is an obstacle. A blue line of policemen has formed between the men of
God's Lightning and their prey. Over the cops' shoulders, the peaceniks are screeching dirty words at
their plastic-hatted enemies. Zev's eyes scan the crowd. He catches the eye of a red-faced cop with
gold braid on his cap. Zev gives the Police Captain a questioning look. The Captain winks. A minute
later the Captain makes a small gesture with his left hand. Immediately, the line of police vanishes,
as if melted in the bright spring sun that beats down on the plaza. The battalion of God's Lightning
falls upon their anguished, outraged, and astonished victims. Zev Hirsch laughs. This is a lot more
fun than the old days in the Jewish Defense League. All the servants are drunk. And the rain
continues.
At an outdoor cafe in Jerusalem two white-haired old men wearing black are drinking coffee
together. They try to mask their emotions from the people around them, but their eyes are wild with
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excitement. They are staring at an inside page of a Yiddish newspaper, reading two ads in Yiddish, a
large, quarter-page announcement of the greatest rock festival of all time to be held near Ingolstadt,
Bavaria— bands of all nations, people of all nations, to be known as Woodstock Europa. On the
same page is the paper's personals column, and the watery eyes of the two old men are re-reading
for the fifth time the statement, in Yiddish, "In thanks to St. Jude for favors granted.—A. W."
One old man points at the page with a trembling finger. "It is coming," he says in German.
The other one nods, a beatific smile on his withered face. "Jawohl. It is coming very soon. Der Tag.
Soon we must to Bavaria go. Ewige Blumenkraft!"
Carlo put the gun on the table between us. "This is it, George," he said. "Are you a revolutionary, or
are you just on an ego trip playing at being a revolutionary? Can you take the gun?"
I wiped my eyes. The Passaic was flowing below me, a steady stream of garbage from the Paterson
falls down to Newark and the Atlantic Ocean. Like the garbage that was my contemptible, cowardly
soul. . . . The God's Lightning troopers fan out, clubbing each person wearing an I WON'T DIE FOR
FERNANDO POO button. Blood dances in the air, fragile red bubbles, before the tomblike slab of
the UN building. . . . Dillinger's breathing slows down. He stares at the ruby eye atop the 13-step
pyramid hidden in the UN building, and he thinks of pentagons.
"I'm a God's Lightning," Carlo said. "This is no joke, baby, I'm going to do the whole bit." His
intense eyes burned into mine as the switchblade came out of his pocket. "Motherfuckin' commie,"
he screamed suddenly, leaping up so quickly that the chair fell over behind him. "You're not getting
off with a beating this time. I'm gonna cut your balls off and take them home as a souvenir." He
slashed forward with the knife, deflecting his swing at the last minute. "Made you jump, you longhaired
faggotty freak. I wonder if you have any balls to cut off. Well, I'll find out." He inched
forward, the knife weaving snakelike patterns in the air.
"Look," I said desperately, "I know you're only playacting."
"You don't know nothing, baby. Maybe I'm FBI or CIA. Maybe this is just an excuse to get you to go
for the gun so I can kill you and claim self-defense. Life isn't all demonstrations and play-acting,
George. There comes a time when it gets serious." He lunged again with the knife, and I stumbled
clumsily backward. "Are you going to take the gun or am I going to cut your balls off and tell the
Group you're no fucking good and we couldn't use you?"
He was totally mad and I was totally sane. Is that a more flattering way of telling it, instead of the
truth, that he was brave and I was yellow?
"Listen," I said, "I know you won't really stab me and you know I won't really shoot you-—"
"Shit on you know and I know," Carlo hit me in the chest with his free hand, hard. "I'm a God's
Lightning, really a God's Lightning. I'm gonna do the whole scene. This is a test, but the test is for
real." He hit me again, jarring my balance, then slapped my face, twice, rapidly, back and forth like a
windshield wiper. "I always said you longhaired commie freaks don't have no guts. You can't even
fight back. You can't even feel angry, can you? You just feel sorry for yourself, right?"
It was too damned true. A nerve twinged deep down inside at the unfairness of it, of his ability to see
into me more than I usually dared see into myself; and at last I grabbed the gun from the table,
screaming, "You sadistic Stalinist son-of-a-bitch!"
"And look at the eagle," Simon says. "Look real close. That ain't really no olive branch in his left
claw, baby.
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That's our old friend Maria Juana. You never really looked at a dollar bill before, did you?
"And the real symbolism of the pyramid is alchemical, of course. The traditional code represents the
three kinds of sex by a cube, a pyramid, and a sphere. The cube is that travesty we call 'normal sex,
in which the two nervous systems never actually merge at the orgasm, like the two parallel sides of
the cube. The pyramid is the two coming together and joining, the magical-telepathic orgasm. The
sphere is the Tantric ritual, endlessly prolonged, with no orgasm at all. The alchemists used that
code for over two thousand years. The Rosicrucians among the founding fathers used the pyramid as
a symbol of their kind of sex magic. Aleister Crowley used that symbol the same way, more recently.
The eye on the pyramid is the two minds meeting. Neurological interlock. The opening of the Eye of
Shiva. Ewige Schlangekraft—the eternal serpent power. The joining of the Rose and Cross, vagina
and penis, into Rose-Cross. The astral leap. Mind escaping from physiology."
The AUM was supposed to work almost instantly, according to what the scientists at ELF had told
Hagbard, so Joe approached the first man who had sampled the punch and started a conversation.
"Nice talk Smiling Jim gave," he said earnestly. (I rammed the gun into Carlo's gut and saw him go
white about the lips. "No, don't worry," I said, smiling. "I'm not using it on you. But when I come
back there'll be a dead pig on the streets somewhere in Morningside Heights." He started to speak,
and I jabbed downward with the gun, grinning as he gasped for air. "Comrade," I added.) "Yeah,
Smiling Jim was born with a silver tongue," the other man said.
"A silver tongue," Joe agreed solemnly, then added, holding out his hand, "by the way, I'm Jim
Mallison from the New York delegation."
"Knew by your accent," the other said shrewdly. "I'm Clem Cotex from down Little Rock." They
shook. "Pleasure to meet you."
"Too bad about that kid that got thrown out," Joe said, lowering his voice. "It looked to me like that
usher really was— you know— touching him."
Cotex looked surprised for a moment, but then shook his head in doubt. "Can't tell nowadays,
especially in big cities. Do you really think an Andy Frain usher could be a— fairy?"
"Like you said, nowadays in big cities . . ." Joe shrugged. "I'm just saying that it looked like it to me.
Of course, maybe the usher isn't one. Maybe he's just a cheap thief who was trying to pick the kid's
pocket. A lot of that goes on these days, too." Cotex involuntarily reached back to check his own
wallet, and Joe went on blandly. "But I wouldn't rule out the other, not by a long shot. What sort of
man would want to be an usher at a KCUF meeting, if you stop and think about it? You must have
observed how many homosexuals there are in our organization."
"What?" Cotex's eyes bulged.
"You haven't noticed it?" Joe smiled loftily. "There are very few of us who are really Christians.
Most of the membership are just a little bit lavender, know what I mean? I think it's one of our
biggest problems, and we ought to bring it out into the open and discuss it frankly. Clear the air,
right? For instance, take the way Smiling Jim always puts his arm around your shoulder when he
talks to you—"
Cotex interrupted, "Hey, mister, you're pretty darn bright. Just now hit me like a flash— some of the
men here, when Smiling Jim showed those beaver shots to prove how bad some magazines are
getting, they really shuddered. They didn't just disapprove— it really honest-to-Pete revolted them.
What kind of man actually finds a naked lady disgusting?"
Go, baby, go, Joe thought. The AUM is working. He quickly derailed the conversation. "Another
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thing that bothers me. Why don't we ever challenge the spherical earth theory?"
"Huh?"
"Look," Joe said. "If all the scientists and eggheads and commies and liberals are pushing it in our
schools all the time, there must be something a little fishy about it. Did you ever stop to think that
there's no way— just no way at all— to reconcile a spherical earth with the story of the Flood, or
Joshua's miracle, or Jesus standing on the pinnacle of the Temple and seeing all the kingdoms of the
earth? And I ask you, man to man, in all your travels have you ever seen the curvature anywhere?
Every place I've been is flat. Are we going to trust the Bible and the evidence of our own senses, or
are we going to listen to a bunch of agnostics and atheists in laboratory smocks?"
"But the earth's shadow on the moon during an eclipse . . ."
Joe took a dime out of his pocket and held it up. 'This casts a circular shadow, but it's flat, not
spherical."
Cotex stared into space for a long moment, while Joe waited with suppressed excitement. "You know
something?" Cotex said finally, "all the Bible miracles and our own travels and the shadow on the
moon would make sense if the earth was shaped like a carrot and all the continents were on the flat
end—"
Praise be to Simon's god, Bugs Bunny, Joe thought elatedly. It's happening— he's not only gullible—
he's creative.
I followed the cop— the pig, I corrected myself— out of the cafeteria. I was so keyed up that it was a
Trip. The blue of his uniform, the neon signs, even the green of the lampposts, all were coming in
super bright. That was adrenalin. My mouth was dry— dehydration. All the classic flight-fight
symptoms. The activation syndrome, Skinner calls it. I let the cop— the pig— get half a block ahead
and reached in my pocket for the revolver.
"Come on, George!" Malik shouted. George didn't want to move. His heart was thumping, his arms
and legs trembling so hard he knew they'd be useless to him in a fight. But he just didn't want to
move. He'd had enough of running from these motherfuckers.
But he couldn't help himself. As the men in blue shirts and white helmets came on, the crowd surged
away from them, and George had to move back with the crowd or be knocked down and trampled.
"Come on, George." It was Pete Jackson at his side now, with a good, hard grip on his arm, tugging
him.
"Goddam it, why do we have to run away from them?" George said, stumbling backward.
Peter was smiling faintly. "Don't you read your Mao, George? Enemy attacks, we retreat. Let the
Morituri fanatics stand and get creamed."
I couldn't do it. My hand held the gun, but I couldn't take it out and hold it in front of me any more
than I could take out my penis and wave it around. I was sure, even though the street was empty
except for me and the pig, that a dozen people would jump out of doorways yelling, "Look, he took it
out of his pants."
Just like right now, when Hagbard said, "Button up your asshole. We're in for a fight," I stood frozen
like I stood frozen on the embankment above the Passaic.
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"Are you on an ego trip playing at being a revolutionary?" Carlo asked.
And Mavis: "All the militant radicals in your crowd ever do is take out the Molotov cocktail diagram
that they carefully clipped from The New York Review of Books, hang it on the bathroom door, and
jack-off in connection with it."
Howard sang:
The foe is attacking, their ships coming near, Now is the time to fight without fear! Now
is the time to look death in the eye Before we submit, we'll fight till we die!
This time I got the gun out of my pocket— standing there, looking down at the Passaic— and raised
it to my forehead. If I didn't have the courage for homicide, Jesus knows I have despair enough for a
hundred suicides. And I only have to do it once. Just once, and then oblivion. I cock the firing pin.
(More play-acting, George? Or will you really do it?) I'll do it, damn you, damn all of you. I pull the
trigger and fall, with the explosion, into blackness.
(AUM was a product of the scientists at ELF— the Erisian Liberation Front— and shared by them
with the JAMs. An extract of hemp, boosted with RNA, the "learning" molecule, it also had small
traces of the famous "Frisco Speedball"— heroin, cocaine, and LSD. The effect seemed to be that the
heroin stilled anxiety, the RNA stimulated creativity, the hemp and acid opened the mind to joy, and
the cocaine was there to fit the Law of Fives. The delicate balance created no hallucinations, no
sense of "high"— just a sudden spurt in what Hagbard Celine liked to call "constructive gullibility.")
It was one of those sudden shifts of movement that occur in a mob scene. Instead of pushing George
and Peter back, the crowd between them and the white helmets were parting. A slender man fell
heavily against George, anguish in his eyes. There was a terrible thump, and the man fell to the
ground.
George saw the dark brown wooden cross before he saw the man who wielded it. There was blood
and hair at the end of the crossarm. The God's Lightning man was dark, broad and muscular, with a
blue shadow on his cheeks. He looked Italian or Spanish— he looked, in fact, a lot like Carlo. His
eyes were wide and his mouth was open and he was breathing heavily. The expression was neither
rage nor sadistic joy— just the unthinking panting alertness of a man doing a difficult and fatiguing
job. He bent over the fallen slender man and raised the cross.
"All right!" snapped Peter Jackson. He pushed George aside. There was a silly-looking yellow
plastic water pistol in his hand. He squirted the oblivious God's Lightning man in the back of the
neck. The man screamed, arched backward, the cross flying end over end into the air. He fell on his
back and lay screaming and writhing.
"Come on now, motherfucker!" Pete snarled as he dragged George into the crowd, broken-field
running toward Forty-second Street.
"An hour and a half to go," Hagbard says, finally beginning to show suppressed tension. George
checks his watch— it's exactly 10:30 P.M., Ingolstadt time. The Plastic Canoe is wailing KRISHNA
KRISHNA HARE HARE.
( Under the noon sun, two days earlier, Carmel speeds in his jeep away from Las Vegas.)
"Who am I going to meet at the Norton Cabal?"" Joe asks. "Judge Crater? Amelia Earhart? Nothing
would surprise me now."
"A few real together people," Simon replies. "But no one like that. But you'll have to die, really die,
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 141 von 470
man, before you're illuminated." He smiles gently. "Aside from death and resurrection, you won't
find anything you'd call 'supernatural' with this bunch. Not even a whiff of old Chicago-style
Satanism."
"God," Joe says, "was that only a week ago?"
"Yep," Simon grins, gunning his VW around a Chevrolet with Oregon license plates, "It's still
nineteen sixty-nine, even if you seem to have lived several years since we met at the anarchist
caucus." His eyes are amused as he half turns to glance at Joe.
"I suppose that means you know what's been happening in my dreams. I'm getting the flash forwards
already."
"Always happens after a good dirty Black Mass with pot mixed in the incense," Simon says. "What
sort of thing you getting? Is it happening when you're awake yet?"
"No, only in my dreams." Joe pauses, thinking. "I only know it's the real article because the dreams
are so vivid. One set has to do with some kind of pro-censorship rally at the Sheraton-Chicago hotel,
I think about a year from now. There's another set that seems farther in the future— five or six
years— where I'm impersonating a doctor for some reason. And a third group of images comes to
me, now and then, that seems to be the set of a Frankenstein movie, except that the extras are all
hippies and there seems to be a rock festival going on."
"Does it bother you?"
"A little. I'm used to waking up in the morning with the future ahead of me, not behind me and ahead
of me both."
"You'll get used to it. You're just beginning to contact what old Weishaupt called 'die
Morgensheutegesternwelf— the tomorrow-today-yesterday world. It gave Goethe the idea for Faust,
just like Weishaupt's 'Ewige Blumenkraft' slogan inspired Goethe's 'Ewige Weibliche.' I'll tell you
what," Simon suggested, "You might try wearing three wristwatches, like Bucky Fuller does— one
showing the time where you're at, one showing the tune where you're going, and one showing the
time at some arbitrary place like Greenwich Mean Time or your home town. It'll help you get used to
relativity. Meanwhile, never whistle while you're pissing. And you might repeat to yourself, when
you get disoriented, Fuller's sentence, 'I seem to be a verb.'"
They drove in silence for a while, and Joe pondered on being a verb. Hell, he thought, I have enough
trouble understanding what Fuller means when he says God is a verb. Simon let him mull it over, and
began humming again: "Rameses the Second is dead, my love/He's walking the fields where the
BLESSED liiiiive. . . ." Joe realized he was starting to doze . . . and all the faces at the luncheon
table looked at him in astonishment. "No, seriously," he said. "Anthropologists are too timid to say it
out in the open, in public, but corner one of them in private and ask him."
Every detail was clear: it was the same room in the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel, and the faces were the
same. (I've been here before and said this before.)
"The rain dances of the Indians work. The rain always comes. So why isn't it possible that their gods
are real and ours isn't? Have you ever prayed to Jesus for something and really gotten it?" There is
a long silence and finally an old tight-faced woman smiles youthfully and declares, "Young man, I'm
going to try it. How do 1 meet an Indian in Chicago?"
Like tomahawks the crosses of God's Lightning rose and fell on the slender man's defenseless skull.
They'd found their injured comrade lying on the street twisting and moaning beside his erstwhile
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victim. A couple of them hauled the wounded God's Lightning man away, while the rest took their
revenge on the unconscious peace demonstrator.
("You, Luke," says Yeshua ben Yosef, "don't write that down.")
Space-time, then, may be slanted or kiltered when you're lost out here: Fernando Poo looks through
his glass at a new island, not guessing that it will be named after himself, not imagining that someday
Simon Moon will write "In Fourteen Hundred and Seventy Two, Fernando Poo discovered Fernando
Poo," and Hagbard says, "Truth is a tiger," while Timothy Leary does a Crown Point Pavanne out of
San Luis Obispo Jail and four billion years earlier one squink says to another, "I've solved the
ecology problem on this new planet." The other squink, partner to the first (they own Swift Kick Inc.,
the shoddiest contractors in the Milky Way) says "How?" The first squink laughs coarsely. "Every
organism produced will be programmed with a Death Trip. It'll give them a rather gloomy outlook, I
admit, especially the more conscious ones, but it will sure minimize costs for us." Swift Kick Inc. cut
the edges every other way they could think, and Earth emerged as the Horrible Example invoked in
all classes on planetary design throughout the galaxy.
When Burroughs told me that, I flipped, because I was 23 that year and lived on Clark
Street. Besides, I immediately saw the application to the Law of Fives: 2 + 3 = 5 and
Clark has 5 letters.
I was mulling this over when I happened to notice the shipwreck in Pound's Canto 23.
That's the only shipwreck mentioned in the whole 800-page poem, in spite of all the
nautical voyages described. Canto 23 also contains the line, "with the sun in a golden
cup," which Yeats says inspired his own lines, "the golden apples of the sun, the silver
apples of the moon."
Golden apples, of course, brought me back to Eris, and I realized I was onto something
hot.
Then I tried adding the Illuminati Five to 23, and I got 28. The average menstrual period
of Woman. The lunar cycle. Back to the silver apples of the moon— and I'm Moon. Of
course, Pound and Yeats both have five letters in their names.
If this be schizophrenia, I said with a P. Henry twist (one better than an O. Henry twist),
make the most of it!
I looked deeper.
Through a bullhorn, a police captain began to shout,
CLEAR THE PLAZA CLEAR THE PLAZA.
The first reports of the annihilation camps were passed on to the OSS by a Swiss businessman
evaluated as being one of the most trustworthy informants on affairs in Nazi Europe. The State
Department decided that the stories were not confirmed. That was early in 1943. By autumn of that
year, more urgent reports from the same source transmitted still through the OSS forced a major
policy conference. It was again decided that the reports were not true. As winter began, the English
government asked for another conference to discuss similar reports from their own intelligence
networks and from the government of Rumania. The delegates met in Bermuda for a warm, sunny
weekend, and decided that the reports were not true; they returned to their work refreshed and
tanned. The death trains continued to roll. Early in 1944, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the
Treasury, was reached by dissenters in the State Department, examined the evidence, and forced a
meeting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Shaken by the assertions in Morgenthau's
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documents, Roosevelt pledged that he would act at once. He never did. It was said later that the State
Department convinced him, once again, of their own analysis: the reports simply were not true.
When Mr. Hitler said Ver-nichtung he had not really meant Vemichtung. An author, Ben Hecht, then
placed an ad in the New York Times, presenting the evidence to the public; a group of prominent
rabbis attacked him for alarming Jews unnecessarily and undermining confidence in America's Chief
Executive during wartime. Finally, late that year, American and Russian troops began liberating the
camps, and General Eisenhower insisted that news photographers take detailed movies which were
released to the whole world. In the interval between the first suppressed report by the Swiss
businessman and the liberation of the first camp, six million people had died.
"That's what we call a Bavarian Fire Drill," Simon explained to Joe. (It was another time; he was
driving another Volkswagen. In fact, it was the night of April 23 and they were going to meet Tobias
Knight at the UN building.) "It was one official named Winifred who'd been transferred from the
Justice Department to a key State Department desk where every bit of evidence passed for
evaluation. But the same principles apply everywhere. For instance— we're half an hour early for the
meeting anyhow—I'll give you an illustration right now." They were approaching the corner of
Forty-third Street and Third Avenue and Simon had observed that the streetlight was changing to red.
As he stopped the car, he opened the door and said to Joe, "Follow me."
Puzzled, Joe got out as Simon ran to the car behind them, beat on the hood with his hand and shouted
"Bavarian Fire Drill! Out!" He made vigorous but ambiguous motions with his hands and ran to the
car next back. Joe saw the first subject look dubiously at his companion and then open the door and
get out, obediently trailing behind Simon's urgent and somber figure.
"Bavarian Fire Drill! Out!" Simon was already shouting at the third car back.
As Joe trotted along, occasionally adding his own voice to persuade the more dubious drivers, every
car gradually emptied and people formed a neat line heading back toward Lexington Avenue. Simon
then ducked between two cars and began jogging toward the front of the line at Third Avenue again,
shouting to everybody, "Complete circle! Stay in line!" Obediently, everyone followed in a great
circle back to their own cars, reentering from the side opposite to that from which they had left.
Simon and Joe climbed back into the VW, the light changed, and they sped ahead.
"You see?" Simon asked. "Use words they've been conditioned to since childhood— 'fire drill,' 'stay
in line,' like that— and never look back to see if they're obeying. They'll follow. Well, that's the way
the Illuminati guaranteed that the Final Solution wouldn't be interrupted. Winifred, one guy who had
been around long enough to have an impressive title, and his scrawl 'Evaluation: dubious' on the
bottom of each memo . . . and six million died. Hilarious, isn't it?"
And Joe remembered from the little book by Hagbard Celine, Never Whistle While You're Pissing
(privately printed, and distributed only to members of the JAMs and the Legion of Dynamic
Discord): "The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian
society but also of its weakness."
(On November 23, 1970, the body of Stanislaus Oedipuski, forty-six, of West living Park Road, was
found floating in the Chicago river. Death, according to the police laboratory, did not result from
drowning but from beating about the head and shoulders with a square-ended object. The first
inquiries by homicide detectives revealed that Oedipuski had been a member of God's Lightning and
the theory was formed that a conflict between the dead man and his former colleagues might have
resulted in his being snuffed with their Wooden crosses. Further investigation revealed that
Oedipuski had been a construction worker and until very recently well liked on his job, behaving in a
normal, down -to-earth manner, bitching about the government, cursing the lazy bums on Welfare,
hating niggers, shouting obscene remarks at good-looking dolls who passed construction sites and—
when the odds were safely above the 8-to-l level— joining other middle-aged workers in attacking
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and beating young men with long hair, peace buttons, or other un-American stigmata. Then, about a
month before, all that had changed. He began bitching about the bosses as well as the government—
almost sounding like a communist at times; when somebody else cussed the crumb-bums on
Welfare, Stan remarked thoughtfully, "Well, you know, our union keeps them from getting jobs,
fellows, so what else can they do but go on Welfare? Steal?" He even said once, when some of the
guys were good-humoredly giving the finger and making other gallant noises and signals toward a
passing eighteen-year-old girl, "Hey, you know, that might really be embarrassing and scaring her . .
. !" Worse yet, his own hair begun to grow surprisingly long in the back, and his wife told friends
that he didn't look at TV much anymore but instead sat in a chair most evenings reading books. The
police found that was indeed true, and his small library— gathered in less
than a month— was remarkable indeed, featuring works on astronomy, sociology, Oriental
mysticism, Darwin's Origin of the Species, detective novels by Raymond Chandler, Alice in
Wonderland, and a college-level text on number theory with the section on primes heavily marked
with notes in the margin; the gallant, and now pathetic, tracks of a mind that was beginning to grow
after four decades of stagnation, and then had been abruptly stomped. Most mysterious of all was the
card found in the dead man's pocket, which although waterlogged, could still be read. One side said
THERE IS NO ENEMY ANYWHERE
and the other side, even more mysteriously, was inscribed:
The police might have tried to decipher this, but then they discovered that Oedipuski had resigned
from God's Lightning— giving his fellow members a lecture on tolerance in the process— the night
before his death. That closed the case, definitely. Homicide did not investigate murders clearly
connected with God's Lightning, since the Red Squad had its own personal accommodation with that
burgeoning organization. "Poor motherfucker," a detective said, looking at Oedipuski's photographs;
and closed the file forever. Nobody ever reopened it, or traced the change in the dead man back to
his attendance at the meeting, one month before, of KCUF at the Sheraton-Chicago, where the punch
was spiked with AUM.)
In the act of conception, of course, the father contributes 23 chromosomes and the
mother contributes another 23. In the / Ching, hexagram 23 has connotations of
"sinking" or "breaking apart," shades of the unfortunate Captain Clarks. . . .
Another woman just came by, collecting for the Mothers March against Muscular
Dystrophy. I gave her a quarter. Where was I? Oh, yes: James Joyce had five letters in
both his front name and his hind name, so he was worth looking into. A Portrait of the
Artist has five chapters, all well and good, but Ulysses has 18 chapters, a stumper, until I
remembered that 5 + 18 = 23. How about Finnegans Wake? Alas, that has 17 chapters,
and I was bogged down for a while.
Trying another angle, I wondered if Frank Sullivan, the poor cluck who got shot instead
of John at the Biograph Theatre that night, could have lingered until after midnight,
dying on July 23 instead of July
22 as usually stated. I looked it up in Toland's book, The Dillinger Days. Poor Frank,
sad to say, died before midnight, but Toland included an interesting detail, which I told
you that night at the Seminary bar:
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23 people died of heat prostration that day in Chicago. He added something else: 17
people had died of heat prostration the day before. Why did he mention that? I'm sure he
doesn't know— but there it was again, 23 and 17. Maybe something important is going
to happen in the year 2317? I couldn't check that, of course (you can't navigate precisely
in the Morgensheutegesternwelt), so I went back to 1723, and struck golden apples. That
was the year Adam Smith and Adam Weishaupt were both born (and Smith published
The Wealth of Nations the same year Weishaupt revived the Illuminati: 1776.)
Well, 2 + 3 = 5, fitting the Law of Fives, but 1+7 = 8, fitting nothing. Where did that
leave me? Eight, I reflected, is the number of letters in Kallisti, back to the golden apple
again, and 8 is also 23, hot damn. Naturally, it came as no surprise when the 8
defendants in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, which grew out of our little Convention
Week Carnival, were tried on the 23rd floor of the Federal Building, amid a flurry of
synchronicity- a Hoffman among the defendants, a Hoffman as judge; the Illuminati
pyramid, or Great Seal of the U.S. right inside the door of the building, and a Scale
getting worse abuse than the other defendants; five-letter names and proliferating—
Abbie, Davis, Foran, Scale, Jerry Rubin (twice), and the clincher, Clark (Ramsey, not
Captain) who was torpedoed and sunk by the judge before he could testify.
I got interested in Dutch Shultz because he died on October 23. A cluster of
synchronicity, that man: he ordered the shooting of Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll (remember
Mad Dog, Texas); Coll was shot on 23rd Street, when he was 23 years old; and Charlie
Workman, who allegedly shot Schultz, served 23 years in prison for it (although rumor
has it that Mendy Weiss— two five-letter names, again— did the real shooting.) Does
17 come in? You bet Shultz was first sentenced to prison at the age of 17.
Around this time I bought Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, thinking the plot
might parallel some Illuminati operations. Imagine how I felt when Chapter Two began,
"23 hours and 17 minutes ago, a flying saucer landed in Iowa . . ."
And, in New York, Peter Jackson is trying to get the next issue of Confrontation out on time—
although the office is still a shambles, the editor and star researcher have disappeared, the best
reporter has gone ape and claims to be at the bottom of the Atlantic with a wax tycoon, and the
police are hounding Peter to find out why the first two detectives assigned to the case can't be
located. Sitting in his apartment (now the magazine's office) in his shut and shorts, Peter dials his
phone with one hand, adding another crushed cigarette to the pile in the ashtray with the other.
Throwing a manuscript onto a basket marked "Ready for Printer," he crosses off "lead article— The
Youngest Student Ever Admitted to Columbia Tells Why He Dropped Out by L. L. Durrutti" from a
list on the pad before him. His pencil moves down to the bottom, "Book Review," as he listens to the
phone ring. Finally, he hears the click of a lifted receiver and a rich, flutey voice says, "Epicene
Wildeblood here."
"Got your book review ready, Eppy?"
"Have it tomorrow, dear boy. Can't be any faster, honestly!"
'Tomorrow will do," Peter says writing call again—A.M. next to "Book Review."
"It's a dreadfully long monster of a book," Wildeblood says pettishly, "and I certainly won't have
time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent— no sense
of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off
into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring
subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and
Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the
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authors— whom I've never heard of— have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures
into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be sure I won't waste time
reading such rubbish, but I'll have a perfectly devastating review ready for you by tomorrow noon."
"Well, we don't expect you to read every book you review," Peter says mollifyingly, "just so long as
you can be entertaining about them."
"The Foot Fetishist Liberation Front will be participating in the rally at the UN building," Joe Malik
said, as George and Peter and he were affixing their black armbands.
"Christ," Jackson said disgustedly.
"We can't afford to take that attitude," Joe said severely. "The only hope for the Left at this time is
coalition politics. We can't exclude anybody who wants to join us."
"I've got nothing against faggots personally," Peter begins ("Gays," Joe says patiently). "I've got
nothing against Gays personally," Peter goes on, "but they are a bringdown at rallies. They just give
God's Lightning more evidence to say we're all a bunch of fruits. But, OK, realism is realism, there
are a lot of them, and they swell our ranks, and all that, but, Jesus, Joe. These toe freaks are a splinter
within a splinter. They're microscopic."
"Don't call them toe freaks," Joe says. "They don't like that."
A woman from the Mothers March Against Psoriasis just came by with another
collection box. I gave her a quarter, too. The marching mothers are going to strip Moon
of his bread if this keeps up.
Where was I? I meant to add, in relation to the Dutch Shultz shooting that Marty
Krompier, who ran the policy racket in Harlem, was also shot on October 23, 1935. The
police asked him if there was a connection with phlegmatic Flegenheimer's demise and
he said, "It's got to be one of them coincidences." I wonder how he emphasized that—
"one of them coincidences" or "one of them coincidences"? How much did he know?
That brings me to the 40 enigma. As pointed out, 1 + 7 = 8, the number of letters in
Kallisti. 8 x 5 = 40.
More interestingly, without invoking the mystic 5, we still arrive at 40 by adding 17 +
23. What, then, is the significance of 40? I've run through various associations—Jesus
had his 40 days in the desert, Ali Baba had his 40 thieves, Buddhists have their 40
meditations, the solar system is almost exactly 40 astronomical units in radius (Pluto yoyos
a bit)—but I have no definite theory yet . . .
The color television set in the Three Lions Pub in the Tudor Hotel at Forty-second Street and Second
Avenue shows the white-helmeted men carrying wooden crosses fall back as the blue-helmeted men
carrying billy clubs move forward. The CBS camera pans over the plaza. There are five bodies on
the ground scattered like flotsam tossed on a beach by a receding wave. Four of them are moving,
making slow efforts to get up. The fifth is not moving at all.
George said, "I think that's the guy we saw getting clubbed. My God, I hope he isn't dead."
Joe Malik said, "If he is dead, it may get people to demand that something be done about God's
Lightning."
Peter Jackson laughed mirthlessly. "You still think some honky peacenik getting killed is going to
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make people indignant. Don't you understand, nobody in this country cares what happens to a peace
freak. You're in the same boat with the niggers now, you silly sons-of-bitches."
Carlos looked up in astonishment as I burst into the room, still wet from the Passaic, and threw the
gun at his feet, screaming, "You silly sons-of-bitches, you can't even make bombs without blowing
yourselves up, and when you buy a gun the motherfucker is defective and misfires. You can't expel
me—I quit!" You silly sons-of-bitches...
"You silly sons-of-bitches!" Simon shouted. Joe woke as the VW swerved amid a flurry of Hell's
Angels bike roaring by. He was back in "real" time again— but the word had quotes around it, in his
mind, now, and it always would.
"Wow," he said, "I was in Chicago again, and then at that rock festival . . . and then I was in
somebody else's lifeline. . . ."
"Goddam Harley-Davidsons," Simon mutters as the last Angel thunders by. "When fifty or sixty of
them swarm by like that, it's as bad as trying to drive on the sidewalk in Times Square at high noon
without hitting a pedestrian."
"Later-for-that," Joe said, conscious of his growing ease in using Simon's own language. "This
tomorrow-today-yesterday time is beginning to get under my skin. It's happening more and more
often. . . ."
Simon sighed, "You want words to put around it. You can't accept it until it has labels dangling off it,
like a new suit. OK. And your favorite word-game is science. Fine, right on! Tomorrow we'll drop by
the Main Library and you can look up the English science journal Nature for Summer nineteen sixtysix.
There's an article in there by the University College physicist F. R. Stannard about what he calls
the Faustian Universe. He tells how the behavior of K-mesons can't be explained assuming a oneway
time-track, but fits into a neat pattern if you assume our universe overlaps another where time
runs in the opposite direction. He calls it the Faustian universe, but I'll bet he has no idea that Goethe
wrote Faust after experiencing that universe directly, just as you're doing lately. Incidentally,
Stannard points out that everything in physics is symmetrical, except our present concept of one-way
time. Once you admit two -way time traffic, you've got a completely symmetrical universe. Fits the
Occamite's demand for simplicity. Stannard'll give you lots of words, man. Meanwhile, just settle for
what Abdul Alhazred wrote in the Necronomicon: 'Past, present, future: all are one in Yog-Sothoth.'
Or what Weishaupt wrote in his Konigen, Kirchen und Dummheit: 'There is but one Eye and it is all
eyes; one Mind and it is all minds; one time and it is Now.' Grok?" Joe nods dubiously, faintly
hearing the music:
RAMA RAMA RAMA HAAAAARE
Two big rhinoceroses, three big rhinoceroses ...
Dillinger made contact with the mind of Richard Belz, forty-three-year-old professor of physics at
Queens College, as Belz was being loaded into an ambulance to be taken to Bellevue Hospital where
X rays would reveal severe skull fractures. Shit, Dillinger thought, why does somebody have to be
half dead before I can reach him? Then he concentrated on his message: Two universes flowing in
opposite directions. Two together form a third entity which is synergetically more than the sum of its
two parts. Thus two always leads to three. Two and Three. Duality and trinity. Every unity is a
duality and a trinity. A pentagon. Sheer energy, no matter involved. From the pentagon depend five
more pentagons, like the petals of a flower. A white rose. Five petals and a center: six. Two times
three. The flower interlocks with another flower just like it, forming a polyhedron made of
pentagons. Each such polyhedron could have common surfaces with other polyhedrons, forming
infinite latticework based on the pentagonal unit. They would be immortal. Self-sustaining. Not
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computers. Beyond computers. Gods. All space for their habitation. Infinitely complex.
The howl of a siren reached the unconscious ears of Professor Belz. Consciousness is present in the
living body, even in one that is apparently unconscious. Unconsciousness is not the absence of
consciousness, but its temporary immobility. It is not a state resembling death. It is not like death at
all. Once the necessary complexity of brain-cell interconnections is reached, substantial energy
relationships are set up. These can exist independently of the material base that brought them into
being.
All of this, of course, is merely visual structural metaphor for interactions on the energy level that
cannot be visualized. The siren howled.
In the Three Lions pub, George said to Peter, "What was in that water pistol?"
"Sulphuric acid."
"Acid is just the first stage," said Simon. "Like matter is the first stage of life and consciousness.
Acid launches you. But once you're out there, if the mission is successful, you jettison the first stage
and you're traveling free of gravity. Which means free of matter. Acid dissolves the barriers which
prevent the maximum possible complexity of energy relationships from building up in the brain. At
Norton Cabal, we'll show you how to pilot the second stage."
(Waving their crosses over their heads and howling incoherently, the men of God's Lightning formed
wavering ranks and marched around the territory they had conquered. Zev Hirsch and Frank Ochuk
carried the banner that read "LOVE IT OR WE'LL STOMP YOU.")
Howard sang:
The tribes of the porpoise are fearless and strong Our land is the ocean, our banner's a
song Our weapon is speed and our noses like rock No foe can withstand our terrible
shock.
A cloud of porpoise bodies swam out from somewhere behind Hagbard's submarine. Through the
pale blue-green medium which Hagbard's TV cameras made out of water, they seemed to fly toward
the distant spiderlike ships of the Illuminati.
"What's happening?" said George. "Where's Howard?"
"Howard is leading them," said Hagbard. He flipped a toggle on the railing of the balcony on which
they stood in the center of a globe that looked like a bubble of air at the bottom of the Atlantic
Ocean. "War room, get missiles ready. We may have to back up the porpoise attack."
"Da, tovarish Celine," came a voice.
The porpoises were too far away to be seen now. George discovered that he was not afraid. The
whole thing was too much like watching a science-fiction movie. There was too much illusion
involved in this submarine of Hagbard's. If he were able to realize, in his glands and nerves, that he
was in a vulnerable metal ship thousands of feet below the surface of the Atlantic, under such
enormous pressure that the slightest stress could crack the hull and send water bursting in that would
crush them to death, then he might be afraid. If he were really able to accept the fact that those little
distant globes with waving legs appended to them were undersea craft manned by people who
intended to destroy the vessel he was in, then he could be afraid. Actually, if he could not see as
much as he was seeing, but only feel and sense things and be told what was happening, as in the
average airplane flight, then he would be afraid. As it was, the 120,000-year-old city of Peos looked
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like a tabletop model. And though he might intellectually accept Hagbard's statement that they were
over the lost continent of Atlantis, in his bones he didn't believe in Atlantis. As a result, he didn't
believe in any of the rest of this, either.
Suddenly Howard was outside their bubble. Or some other porpoise. That was another thing that
made this hard to accept. Talking porpoises.
"Ready for destruction of enemy ships," said Howard.
Hagbard shook his head. "I wish we could communicate with them. I wish I could give them a
chance to surrender. But they wouldn't listen. And they have communications systems on their ships
that I can't get through to." He turned to George. "They use a type of insulated telepathy to
communicate. The very thing that tipped off Sheriff Jim Cartwright that you were in a hotel room in
Mad Dog smoking Weishaupt's Wonder Weed."
"You don't want them too close when they go." said Howard.
"Are your people out of the way?" said Hagbard.
(Five big rhinoceroses, six big rhinoceroses...)
"Of course. Quit this hesitating. This is no time to be a humanitarian."
"The sea is crueler than the land," said Hagbard, "sometimes."
"The sea is cleaner than the land," said Howard. "There's no hate. Just death when and as needed.
These people have been your enemies for twenty thousand years."
"I'm not that old," said Hagbard, "and I have very few enemies."
"If you wait any longer you'll endanger the submarine and my people."
George looked out at the red and white striped globes which were moving toward them through the
blue-green water. They were much larger now and closer. Whatever was propelling them wasn't
visible. Hagbard reached out a brown finger, let it rest on a white button on the railing in front of
him, then pressed it decisively.
There was a bright flash of light, dimmed slightly by the medium through which it traveled, on the
surface of each of the globes. It was like watching fireworks through tinted glasses. Next, the globes
crumbled as if they were ping-pong balls being struck by invisible sledge hammers.
'That's all there is to it," said Hagbard quietly.
The air around George seemed to vibrate, and the floor under him shook. Suddenly he was terrified.
Feeling the shock wave from the simultaneous explosions out there in the water made it real. A
relatively thin metal shell was all that protected him from total annihilation. And nobody would ever
hear from him or know what happened to him.
Large, glittering objects drifted down through the water from one of the nearby Illuminati spider
ships. They vanished among the streets of the city that George now knew was real. The buildings in
the area near the explosion of the Illuminati ships looked more ruined than they had before. The
ocean bottom was churned up in brown clouds. Down into the brown clouds drifted the crushed
spider ships. George looked for the Temple of Tethys. It stood, intact, in the distance.
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"Did you see those statues fall out of the lead ship?" said Hagbard. "I'm claiming them." He hit the
switch on the railing. "Prepare for salvage operation."
They dropped down among buildings deeply buried in sediment, and at the bottom of their television
globe George saw two huge claws reach out, seemingly from nowhere— actually he guessed, from
the underside of the submarine— and pick up four gleaming gold statues that lay half-buried in the
mud.
Suddenly a bell rang and a red flash lit up the interior of the bubble. "We're under attack again," said
Hagbard. Oh, no, George thought. Not when I'm starting to believe that all this is real. I won't be able
to stand it. Here goes Dorn doing his world-famous coward act again. . . . Hagbard pointed. A white
globe hovered like an underwater moon above a distant range of mountains. On its pale surface a red
emblem was painted, a glaring eye inside a triangle.
"Give me missile visibility," said Hagbard, flicking a switch. Between the white globe and the Lief
Erickson four orange lights appeared in the water rushing toward them.
"It just doesn't pay to underestimate them— ever," said Hagbard. "First it turns out they can detect
me when they shouldn't have equipment good enough to do that, now I find that not only do they
have small craft in the vicinity, they've got the Zwack herself coming after me. And the Zwack is
firing underwater missiles at me, though I'm supposed to be indetectable. I think we might be in
trouble, George."
George wanted to close his eyes, but he also didn't want to show fear in front of Hagbard. He
wondered what death at the bottom of the Atlantic would feel like. Probably something like being
under a pile driver. The water would hit them, engulf them, and it wouldn't be like any ordinary
water— it would be like liquid steel, every drop striking with the force of a ten-ton truck, prying cell
apart from cell and crushing each cell individually, reducing the body to a protoplasmic dishrag. He
remembered reading about the disappearance of an atomic submarine called the Thresher back in the
'60s, and he recalled that the New York Times had speculated that death by drowning in water under
extreme pressure would be exceedingly painful, though brief. Every nerve individually being
crushed. The spinal cord crushed everywhere along its length. The brain squeezed to death, bursting,
rupturing, bleeding into the steel-hard water. The human form would doubtless be unrecognizable in
minutes. George thought of every bug he had ever stepped on, and bugs made him think of the spider
ships. That's what we did to them. And I define them as enemies only on Hagbard's say so. Carlo was
right. I can't kill.
Hagbard hesitated, didn't he? Yes, but he did it. Any man who can cause a death like that to be
visited upon other men is a monster. No, not a monster, only too human. But not my kind of human.
Shit, George, he's your kind of human, all right. You're just a coward. Cowardice doth make
consciences for us all.
Hagbard called out, "Howard, where the hell are you?"
The torpedo shape appeared on the right side of the bubble. "Over here, Hagbard. We've got more
mines ready. We can go after those missiles with mines like we did the spider ships. Think that
would work?"
"It's dangerous," said Hagbard, "because the missiles might explode on contact with the metal and
electronic equipment in the mines."
"We're willing to try," said Howard, and without another word he swam away.
"Wait a minute," Hagbard said. "I don't like this. There's too much danger to the porpoises." He
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turned to George and shook his head. "I'm not risking a goddamned thing, and they stand to be blown
to bits. It's not right. I'm not that important."
"You are risking something," said George, trying to control the quaver in his voice. "Those missiles
will destroy us if the dolphins don't stop them."
At that moment, there were four blinding flashes where the orange lights had been. George gripped
the railing, sensing that the shock wave of these explosions would be worse than that caused by the
destruction of the spider ships. It came. George had been readying himself for it, but unable to tell
when it would come, and it still took him by surprise. Everything shook violently. Then the bottom
dropped out of his stomach, as if the submarine had suddenly leaped up. George grabbed the railing
with both arms, clinging to it as the only solid thing near him. "O God, we're gonna be killed!" he
cried.
'They got the missiles," Hagbard said. "That gives us a fighting chance. Laser crew, attempt to
puncture the Zwack. Fire at will.
Howard reappeared outside the bubble. "How did your people do?" Hagbard asked him.
"All four of them were killed," said Howard. "The missiles exploded when they approached them,
just as you predicted."
George, who was standing up straight now, thankful that Hagbard had simply ignored his episode of
terror, said, "They were killed saving our lives. I'm sorry it happened, Howard."
"Laser-beam firing, Hagbard," a voice announced. There was a pause. "I think we hit them."
"You needn't be sorry," said Howard. "We neither look forward to death in fear nor back upon it in
sorrow. Especially when someone has died doing something worthwhile. Death is the end of one
illusion and the beginning of another."
"What other illusion?" asked George. "When you're dead, you're dead, right?"
"Energy can neither be created nor destroyed," said Hagbard. "Death itself is an illusion."
These people were talking like some of the Zen students and acid mystics George had known. If I
could feel that way, he thought, I wouldn't be such a goddamned coward. Howard and Hagbard must
be enlightened. I've got to become enlightened. I can't stand living this way any more. Whatever it
took, acid alone wasn't the answer. George had tried acid already, and he knew that, while the
experience might be wholly remarkable, for him it left little residue in terms of changed attitudes or
behavior. Of course, if you thought your attitudes and behavior should change, you mimicked other
acidheads.
"I'll try to find out what's happening to the Zwack," said Howard, and swam away.
"The porpoises do not fear death, they do not avoid suffering, they are not assailed by conflicts
between intellect and feeling and they are not worried about being ignorant of things. In other words,
they have not decided that they know the difference between good and evil, and in consequence they
do not consider themselves sinners. Understand?"
"Very few humans consider themselves sinners nowadays," said George. "But everyone is afraid of
death."
"All human beings consider themselves sinners. It's just about the deepest, oldest, and most universal
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human hangup there is. In fact, it's almost impossible to speak of it in terms that don't confirm it. To
say that human beings have a universal hangup, as I just did, is to restate the belief that all men are
sinners in different languages. In that sense, the Book of Genesis— which was written by early
Semitic opponents of the Illuminati— is quite right. To arrive at a cultural turning point where you
decide that all human conduct can be classified in one of two categories, good and evil, is what
creates all sin— plus anxiety, hatred, guilt, depression, all the peculiarly human emotions. And, of
course, such a classification is the very antithesis of creativity. To the creative mind there is no right
or wrong. Every action is an experiment, and every experiment yields its fruit in knowledge. To the
moralist, every action can be judged as right or wrong— and, mind you, in advance— without
knowing what its consequences are going to be— depending upon the mental disposition of the
actor. Thus the men who burned Giordano Bruno at the stake knew they were doing good, even
though the consequence of their actions was to deprive the world of a great scientist."
"If you can never be sure whether what you are doing is good or bad," said George, "aren't you liable
to be pretty Hamlet-like?" He was feeling much better now, much less afraid, even though the enemy
was still presumably out there trying to kill him. Maybe he was getting darshan from Hagbard.
"What's so bad about being Hamlet-like?" said Hagbard. "Anyway, the answer is no, because you
only become hesitant when you believe there is such a thing as good and evil, and that your action
may be one or the other, and you're not sure which. That was the whole point about Hamlet, if you
remember the play. It was his conscience that made him indecisive."
"So he should have murdered a whole lot of people in the first act?"
Hagbard laughed. "Not necessarily. He might have decisively killed his uncle at the earliest
opportunity, thus saving the lives of everyone else. Or he might have said, 'Hey, am I really obligated
to avenge my father's death?' and done nothing. He was due to succeed to the throne anyway. If he
had just bided his time everyone would have been a lot better off, there would have been no deaths,
and the Norwegians would not have conquered the Danes, as they did in the last scene of the last act.
Though being Norwegian myself I would hardly begrudge Fortinbras his triumph."
At that moment Howard appeared again outside their bubble. 'The Zwack is retreating. Your laser
beam punctured the outer shell, causing a leak in the fuel-storage cells and putting excessive stress
on the pressure-resisting system. They were forced to climb to higher levels, which put them so far
away from you that they're now heading south toward the tip of Africa."
Hagbard expelled a great sigh of relief. "That means they're heading for their home base. They'll
enter a tunnel in the Persian Gulf which will bring them into the great underground Sea of Valusia,
which is deepest beneath the Himalayas. That was the first base they established. They were
preparing it even before the fall of High Atlantis. It's devilishly well defended. One day we'll
penetrate it though."
The thing that puzzled Joe most after his illuminization was John Dillinger's penis. The rumors about
the Smithsonian Institute, he knew, were true: even though any casual phone-caller would get a flat
denial from Institute officials, certain high-placed government people could provide a dispensation
and the relic would be shown, in the legendary alcohol bottle, all legendary 23 inches of it. But if
John was alive, it wasn't his, and, if it wasn't his, whose was it?
"Frank Sullivan's," Simon said, when Joe finally asked him.
"And who the hell was Frank Sullivan to have a tool like that?"
But Simon only answered, "I don't know. Just some guy who looked like John."
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Atlantis also bothered Joe, after he saw it the first time Hagbard took him for a ride in the Lief
Erikson. It was all too pat, too plausible, too good to be true, especially the ruins of cities like Peos,
with their architecture that obviously combined Egyptian and Mayan elements.
"Science has been flying on instruments, like a pilot in a fog, ever since nineteen hundred," he said
casually to Hagbard on the return trip to New York. (This was in '72, according to his later
recollections. Fall of '72— almost two years exactly after the test of AUM in Chicago.)
"You've been reading Bucky Fuller," was Hagbard's cool reply. "Or was it Korzybski?"
"Never mind who I've been reading," Joe said directly. "The thought in my head is that I never saw
Atlantis, any more than I ever saw Marilyn Monroe. I saw moving pictures which you told me were
television reception of cameras outside your sub. And I saw moving pictures of what Hollywood
assured me was a real woman, even though she looked more like a design by Petty or Vargas. In the
Marilyn Monroe case, it is reasonable to believe what I am told: I don't believe a robot that good has
been built yet. But Atlantis ... I know special-effects men who could build a city like that on a
tabletop, and have dinosaurs walking through it. And your cameras trained on it."
"You suspect me of trickery?" Hagbard asked raising his eyebrows.
"Trickery is your metier," Joe said bluntly. "You are the Beethoven, the Rockefeller, the
Michelangelo of deception. The Shakespeare of the gypsy switch, the two -headed nickel, and the
rabbit in the hat. What little liver pills are to Carter, lies are to you. You dwell in a world of
trapdoors, sliding panels, and Hindu ropetricks. Do I suspect you? Since I met you, I suspect
everybody."
"I'm glad to hear it," Hagbard grinned. "You are well on your way to paranoia. Take this card and
keep it in your wallet. When you begin to understand it, you'll be ready for your next promotion. Just
remember: ifs not true unless it makes you laugh. That is the one and sole and infallible test of all
ideas that will ever be presented to you." And be handed Joe a card saying
THERE IS NO FRIEND ANYWHERE
Burroughs, incidentally, although he discovered the 23 synchronicity principle, is
unaware of the correlation with 17. This makes it even more interesting that his date for
the invasion of earth by the Nova Mob (in Nova Express) is September 17, 1899. When I
asked him how he picked that date, he said it just came to him out of the air.
Damn. I was just interrupted by another woman, collecting for the Mothers March
Against Hernia. I only gave her a dime.
W, the 23rd letter, keeps popping up in all this. Note: Weishaupt, Washington, William
S. Burroughs, Charlie Workman, Mendy Weiss, Len Weinglass in the Conspiracy Trial,
and others who will quickly come to mind. Even more interesting, the first physicist to
apply the concept of synchronicity to physics, after Jung published the theory, was
Wolfgang Pauli.
Another suggestive letter-number transformation: Adam Weishaupt (A.W.) is 1-23, and
George Washington (G.W.) is 7-23. Spot the hidden 17 in there? But, perhaps, I grow
too imaginative, even whimsical. . . .
There was a click. George turned. All the time he'd been in the control center with Hagbard, he had
never looked back at the door through which he had come. He was surprised to see that it looked like
an opening in thin air— or thin water. On either side of the doorway was blue-green water and a dark
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horizon which was actually the ocean bottom. Then, in the center, the doorway itself and a golden
light silhouetting the figure of a beautiful woman.
Mavis strode onto the balcony, pulling the door shut behind her. She was wearing forest-green tights
with white patent leather boots and a wide white belt. Her small but well-shaped breasts jiggled
naturally under her blouse. George found himself thinking back to the scene on the beach. That was
only this morning, and what time was it anyway? What time where? Back in Florida it was probably
two or three in the afternoon. Which would make it one P.M. in Mad Dog, Texas. And probably
about six out here in the Atlantic. Did time zones extend beneath the water? He supposed they did.
On the other hand, if you were at the North Pole, you could skip around the Pole and be in a different
time zone every few seconds. And cross the International Date Line every five minutes if you wanted
to. Which would not, he reminded himself, make it possible to travel hi time. But if he could go back
to this morning and replay Mavis's demand for sex, this time he would respond! He now wanted her
desperately.
Well and good, but why did she say he was not a schmuck, why did she imply admiration for him
because he would not fuck her? If he had fucked her because she asked him and he felt he should but
without wanting to, he would have been a pure and simple schmuck. But he could have pronged her
simply because she would have been nice to fuck, regardless of whether she would have admired
him or despised him. But that was their game—Mavis's and Hagbard's game of saying I do what I
want to do, and I don't give a damn what you think. George cared a great deal about what other
people thought, so not fucking Mavis at the time was at least honest, even if he was beginning to see
some merit in the Discordian (he supposed it was Discordian) attitude of super self-sufficiency.
Mavis smiled at him. "Well, George, had your baptism of fire?"
George shrugged. "Well, there was the Mad Dog jail. And I've been in a few other bad scenes." For
instance, there was the time I held a pistol to my head and pulled the trigger.
She'd sucked his cock, he'd watched her in manic masturbation, but he was desperate to get inside
her, all the way, up the womb, riding her ovarian trolley to the wonderful land of fuck, as Henry
Miller said. What the hell was so special about Mavis's cunt? Especially after that induction
ceremony scene. Hell, Stella Marls seemed like a less neurotic woman and was certainly a classic
lay. After Stella Maris, who needed Mavis?
A sudden question struck him. How did he know he'd laid Stella? It could have been Mavis inside
that golden apple. It could have been some woman he'd never met. He was pretty sure it was a
woman, unless it was a goat or a cow or a sheep. Best not put that kind of joke past Hagbard either.
But even if it was a woman, why visualize Stella or Mavis or somebody like them? It was probably
some diseased old Etruscan whore that Hagbard kept around for religious purposes. Some Sibyl.
Some wop witch. Maybe it was Hagbard's rotten old Sicilian mother with no teeth, a black shawl,
and three kinds of VD. No, it was Hagbard's father who was Sicilian. His mother was Norwegian.
"What color were they?" he said suddenly to Hagbard.
"Who?"
'The Atlanteans."
"Oh." Hagbard nodded. "They were covered with fur over most of their bodies, like any normal ape.
At least, the High Atlanteans were. A mutation occurred around the time of the Hour of the Evil
Eye— the catastrophe that destroyed High Atlantis. Later Atlanteans, like modern humans, were
hairless. Those of the oldest Atlantean ancestry tend to be rather furry." George couldn't help looking
down at Hagbard's hand as it rested on the railing. It was covered with thick black hair.
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"All right," said Hagbard, "it's time to head back to our North American base. Howard? You out
there?"
The long, streamlined shape performed a somersault on their right. "What's happening, Hagbard?"
"Have some of your people keep an eye on things here. We've got work to do on land. And—
Howard, as long as I live I will be in debt to your people for the four who died to save me."
"Haven't you and the Lief Erickson saved us from several kinds of deaths planned for us by the shore
people?" said Howard. "We'll keep watch over Atlantis for you. And the seas in general, and that
which Atlantis has spawned. Hail and farewell, Hagbard and other friends—
"The sea is wide and the sea is deep But warm as blood through it there rolls A tide of
friendship that will keep us close in Ocean's blackest holes."
He was gone. "Lift off," Hagbard called. George felt the surge of the sub's colossal engines, and they
were sailing high above the hills and valleys of Atlantis. With the special lighting of Hagbard's
television screen system, it seemed much like flying in a jet plane over one of the continents above
the ocean's surface.
"Too bad we don't have time to get deeper into Atlantis," said Hagbard. "There are many mighty
cities to see. Though of course none of them can approach the cities that existed before the Hour of
the Evil Eye."
"How many of these Atlantean civilizations were there?" asked George.
"Basically, two. One leading up to the Hour, and one afterward. Before the Hour, there was a
civilization of about a million human beings on this continent. Technically, they were further
advanced than the human race is today. They had atomic power, space travel, genetic technology and
much else. This civilization was struck a death blow in the Hour of the Evil Eye. Two-thirds of them
were killed —almost half the human population of the planet at that time. After the Hour, something
made it impossible for them to make a comeback. The cities that came through the first catastrophe
relatively undamaged were destroyed in later disasters. The inhabitants of Atlantis were reduced to
savagery in a generation. Part of the continent sank under the sea, which was the beginning of the
process that ended when all of Atlantis was under water, as it is today."
"Was this the earthquakes and tidal waves that you always read about?" George asked.
"No," said Hagbard with a curious closed expression. "It was manmade. High Atlantis was destroyed
in a kind of war. Probably a civil war, since there was no other power on the planet that could have
matched them."
"Anyway, if there'd been a victor, they'd still be around now," said George.
"They are," said Mavis. "The victors are still around. Only they're not what you might visualize. Not
a conquering nation. And we are the descendants of the defeated."
"Now," said Hagbard, "I'm going to show you something I promised when we first met. It has to do
with the catastrophe I've been talking about. Look there."
The submarine had risen high above the continent, and it was possible to see landscapes stretching
for hundreds of miles. Looking in the direction in which Hagbard pointed, George saw a vast
expanse of black, glazed plain. Out of its center jutted something white and pointed, like a canine
tooth.
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"It is said of them that they even controlled the comets in their courses." said Hagbard. He pointed
again.
The submarine sailed closer to the jutting white object It was a four-sided white pyramid.
"Don't say it," said Mavis, giving him a warning look, and George remembered the tattoo he had
seen between her breasts. He looked down again. They were above the pyramid now and George
could see the side that had been hidden from him as they approached. He saw what he had halffeared,
half-expected to see: a blood-red design in the shape of a baleful eye.
"The Pyramid of the Eye," Hagbard said. "It stood in the center of the capital of High Atlantis. It was
built in the last days of that civilization by the founders of the world's first religion. It doesn't look
very big from up here, but it's five times the size of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, which was
modeled after it. It's made of an imperishable ceramic substance which repels even ocean sediment.
As if the builders knew that to last it would have to survive tens of thousands of years of ocean
burial. And maybe— depending on who they were— they did know that. Or maybe they just built
well in those days. Peos, as you saw, was a pretty durable city, and that was built after High Atlantis
fell, by the second civilization I spoke of. That second civilization reached a level somewhat more
advanced than that of the Greeks and Romans, but it was nothing like its predecessor. And some
malevolent force seemed bent on destroying it, too, and it was destroyed, about ten thousand years
ago. Of that civilization we have the evidence of ruins. But of High Atlantis we have only records
and legends dug up from the later civilization— and, of course, poetry from the Porpoise Corpus.
This is the only artifact, this pyramid. But its existence and durability prove that as long ago as ten
Egypts, a race of men existed whose technology was far advanced beyond what we know today. So
advanced that it took twenty thousand years for that civilization's successor culture to disappear
completely. The men who destroyed High Atlantis did their best to make it disappear. But they
couldn't quite manage it. The Pyramid of the Eye, for instance, is indestructible. Though it's probable
that they didn't want to destroy it."
Mavis nodded somberly. "That is their most sacred shrine."
"In other words," said George, "you're telling me that the people who destroyed Atlantis still exist.
Do they have the powers they had then?"
"Substantially, yes," said Hagbard.
"Is this the Illuminati you told me about?"
"Illuminati, or Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria is one of the names they have used, yes."
"So they didn't start in seventeen seventy-six— they go a long way back before that, right?"
"Right," said Mavis.
"Then why did you lie to me about their history? And why the hell haven't they taken over the world
by now, if they're all that powerful? When our ancestors were savages, they could have dominated
them completely."
Hagbard replied, "I lied to you because the human mind can only accept a little of the truth at a time.
Also, initiation into Discordianism has stages. The answer to the other question is complicated. But
I'll try to give it to you simply. There are five reasons. First, there are organizations like the
Discordians which are almost as powerful and which know almost as much as the Illuminati and
which are able to thwart them. Second, the Illuminati are too small a group to enjoy the creative
cross-fertilization necessary to progress of any kind, and they have been unable to advance much
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beyond the technological level they reached thirty thousand years ago. Like Chinese Mandarins.
Third, the Illuminati are hamstrung in their actions by the superstitious beliefs that set them apart
from the other Atlanteans. As I told you, they're the world's first religion. Fourth, the Illuminati are
too sophisticated, ruthless and decadent to want to take over the world— it amuses them to play with
world. Fifth, the Illuminati do rule the world and everything that happens, happens by their
sufferance."
"Those reasons contradict each other," said George.
"That's the nature of logical thought. AH propositions are true in some sense, false in some sense and
meaningless in some sense." Hagbard didn't smile.
The submarine had described a great arc as they talked and now the Pyramid of the Eye was far
behind them. The eye itself, since it faced eastward, was no longer visible. Below, George could see
the ruins of several small cities at the edges of tall cliffs that fell away into darker depths— cliffs that
doubtless had been the seacoast of Atlantis at one time.
Hagbard said, "I've got a job for you, George. You're going to like it, and you're going to want to do
it, but it is going to make you shit a brick. We'll talk about it when we get to Chesapeake Base. Now,
though, let's go down into the hold and have a look at our acquisitions." He flicked a switch.
"FUCKUP, get your finger out of your ass and drive this thing for a while."
"I'll see the statues later," said Mavis. "I've got other things to do just now."
George followed Hagbard down carpeted staircases and halls paneled in glowing, polished oak. At
last they came to a large hall which was apparently paved with marble flagstones. A group of men
and women wearing horizontally striped nautical shirts similar to Hagbard's were clustered around
four tall statues in the center of the room. When Hagbard entered the room they stopped talking and
stepped away to give him a clear look at the sculptures. The floor was covered with puddles of water
and the statues themselves were dripping.
"No wiping them dry," Hagbard said. "Every molecule is precious just as it is, and the less disturbed
the better." He stepped closer to the nearest one and looked at it for a long moment. "What do you
say about a thing like this? It's beyond exquisite. Can you imagine what their art was like before the
disaster? And to think the Unbroken Circle destroyed every trace of it, except for that crude, stupid
pyramid."
"Which is the greatest piece of ceramic technology in the history of the human race," said one of the
women. George looked around for Stella Maris, but she wasn't there.
"Where's Stella?" he asked Hagbard.
"Upstairs minding the store. She'll see them later."
The sculptures were unlike the work of any culture George knew, which was to be expected, after all.
They were at once realistic, fanciful and abstractly intellectual. They bore resemblance to Egyptian
and Mayan, Classical Greek, Chinese and Gothic, combined with a surprisingly modern-looking
note. There were some qualities in the statues that were totally unique, though, qualities doubtless
lost by the civilizations to which Atlantis was ancestral, but that might have been found in known
world art, had there been other civilizations to preserve and emphasize them. This, George realized,
was the Ur-Art; and looking at the statues was like hearing a sentence in the first language spoken by
men.
An elderly sailor pointed at the statue farthest from where they were standing. "Look at that beatific
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smile. A woman thought of that statue, I'll bet. That's every woman's dream— to be totally selfsufficient."
"Some of the time, Joshua," said the Oriental woman who had spoken before, "but not all of the time.
Now what I prefer is that." She pointed to another statue.
Hagbard laughed. "You think that's just nice, healthy oragenitalism, Tsu-Hsi. But the child in the
woman's arms is the Son Without a Father, the Self-Begotten, and the couple at the base represent
the Unbroken Circle of Gruad. Usually it's a serpent with its tail in its mouth, but in some of the
earlier representations the couple in oral intercourse symbolizes sterile lust. The Unloved Mother has
her foot on the man's head to indicate that she conquers lust. The whole sculpture is the product of
the foulest cult to come out of Atlantis. They originated human sacrifice. First they practiced
castration, but then they escalated to killing men instead of just cutting off their balls. Later, when
women were subjugated, the sacrifice became a virgin female, supposedly to give her to the Unloved
Ones while she was still pure."
"That halo around the child's head looks like the peace symbol," said George.
"Peace symbol, my ass," said Hagbard. "That's the oldest symbol of evil there is. Of course, in the
cult of the Unbroken Circle it was a symbol of good, but that's the same difference."
"They can't have been so vicious if they produced that statue," said the Oriental woman stubbornly.
"Could you deduce the Spanish Inquisition from a painting of the manger at Bethlehem?" said
Hagbard. "Don't be naive, Miss Mao." He turned to George, "The value of any one of these statues is
beyond calculation. But not many people know that. I'm sending you to one who does—Robert
Putney Drake. One of the finest art connoisseurs in the world, and the head of the American branch
of the world crime syndicate. You're going to see him with a gift from me— these four statues. The
Illuminati were planning to buy his support with gold from the Temple of Tethys. I'm going to get to
him first."
"If they only needed four statues, why were they trying to raise the whole temple?" George asked.
"I think they wanted to remove the temple to Agharti, their stronghold under the Himalayas, for
safekeeping. I haven't been any closer to the Temple of Tethys than we were today, but I suspect it's
a treasure-house of evidence of High Atlantis. As such, it would be something the Illuminati would
want to remove. Until now there was no reason to, because no one had access to the sea bottom other
than the Illuminati. Now I can get around down here just as well, better in fact, than they can, and
pretty soon others will be following. Several nations and many groups of private persons are
exploring the undersea world. It's time for the Illuminati to finish taking away whatever tells of High
Atlantis."
"Will they destroy that city we saw? And what about the Pyramid of the Eye?"
Hagbard shook his head. "They'd be willing to let later Atlantean ruins to be found. That wouldn't
say anything about their existence. As for the Pyramid of the Eye, I suspect they have a real problem
with that. They can't destroy it, and even if they could they wouldn't want to. But it's a dead
giveaway to the existence of a supercivilization in the past."
"Well," said George, not at all wanting to meet the head of the American crime syndicate, "what we
ought to do is go back and raise the Temple of Tethys ourselves, before the Illuminati grab it."
"Good grief," said Miss Mao. "This happens to be the most critical moment in the history of this
civilization. We don't have time to fiddle-fuck around with archeology."
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"He's just a legionnaire," said Hagbard. "Though after this mission he'll know the Fairest and become
a deacon. He'll understand more then. George, I want you to act as a go-between for the Discordian
movement and the Syndicate. You're going to bring these four statues to Robert Putney Drake and
tell him there are more where they came from. Ask Drake to stop working for the Illuminati, to take
the heat off our people, wherever he's after them, and to drop the assassination project the Illuminati
have been working on with him. And as an earnest of good faith, he's to snuff twenty-four Illuminati
agents for us in the next twenty-four hours. Their names will be contained in a sealed envelope
which you'll give him."
FIVES. SEX. HERE is WISDOM. The mumble of the breast is the mutter of man.
State's Attorney Milo A. Flanagan stood on the roof of the high rise condominium on Lake Shore
Drive in which he lived, scanning blue-gray Lake Michigan with powerful binoculars. It was April
24, and Project Tethys should be completed. At any moment Flanagan expected to sight what would
look like another Great Lakes freighter heading for the Chicago River locks. Only this one would be
carrying a dismantled Atlantean temple crated in its hold. The ship would be recognizable by a red
triangle painted on the funnel.
After being inspected by Flanagan (whose name in the Order was Brother Johann Beghard) and after
his report had been sent on to Vigilance Lodge, the North American command center, the crated
temple would be moved downriver to Saint Louis, where, by prior agreement with the President of
the United States, it would be trucked overland to Fort Knox under the guard of the U.S. Army. The
President didn't know with whom he was dealing. The CIA had informed him that the source of the
artifacts was the Livonian Nationalist Movement, now behind the Iron Curtain, and that the crates
would contain Livonian art treasures. Certain high officers in the CIA did know the real nature of the
organization which the U.S. was helping, because they were members of it. Of course, the Syndicate
(without even a cover story) was keeping three-quarters of its gold in with the government store at
Fort Knox these days. "Where could you find a safer place?" Robert Putney Drake once asked.
But the freighter was behind schedule. The wind battered at Flanagan, whipping his wavy white hair
and the well-tailored jacket sleeves and trouser legs. The goddamned Chicago wind. Flanagan had
been fighting it all his life. It had made him the man he was.
Police Sergeant Otto Waterhouse emerged from the doorway to the roof. Waterhouse was a member
of Flanagan's personal staff, which meant he was on the Police Department payroll, the Syndicate
payroll, and another payroll that regularly deposited a fixed sum in the account of Herr Otto
Wasserhaus in a Bavarian bank. Waterhouse was a six-and-a-half-foot-tall black man who had made
a career for himself in the Chicago Police Department by being more willing and eager to harass,
torture, maim, and kill members of his race than the average Mississippi sheriff. Flanagan had early
spotted Waterhouse's ice-cold, self-hating love affair with death, and had attached him to his staff.
"A message from CFR communications center in New York," said Waterhouse. "The word has come
through from Ingolstadt that Project Tethys was aborted."
Flanagan lowered his binoculars and turned to look at Waterhouse. The State's Attorney's florid face
with its bushy pepper-and-salt eyebrows was shrewd and distinguished, the sort of face people vote
for, especially in Chicago. It was a face that had once belonged to a kid who had run with the
Hamburgers in Chicago's South Side Irish ghetto and bashed out the brains of black men with
cobblestones for the fun of it. It was a face that had come from that primitive beginning to knowing
about ten-thousand-year-old sunken temples, spider ships, and international conspiracies. It was
stamped indelibly with the lines of Milo A. Flanagan's ancestors, the ancestors of the Gauls, Britons,
Scots, Picts, Welsh, and Irish. Around the time the Temple of Tethys was sinking into the sea, they
had been driven forth on orders from Agharti from that thick ancient forest that is now the desert
country of Outer Mongolia. But Flanagan was only a Fourth-degree Illuminatus and not fully
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instructed in the history. Though he did not display much emotion there were blue-white flames of
murderous madness burning deep in his eyes. Water-house was one of the few people in Chicago
who could meet Flanagan's baleful stare head-on.
"How did it happen?" Flanagan asked.
"They were attacked by porpoises and an invisible submarine. The spider craft were all blown to bits.
The Zwack came in and counterattacked, was damaged by a laser beam and forced to disengage."
"How did they find out we had spider ships at the temple site?"
"Maybe the porpoises told them."
Flanagan looked at Waterhouse coldly and thoughtfully. "Maybe it leaked at this end, Otto. There are
JAMs active in this town, more here than anywhere in the country right now. Dillinger has been
spotted twice in the last week. By Gruad, how I'd like to be the one to really get him, once and for
all! What would Hoover's ghost say then, huh, Otto?" Flanagan grinned, one of his rare genuine
smiles, exposing prominent canine teeth. "We know there's a JAM cult center somewhere on the
North Side. Someone's been stealing hosts from my brother's church for the past ten years— even at
times when I've had as many as thirty men staked out there. And my brother says that there have
been more cases of demonic possession in his parish in the last five years than in all of Chicago in all
its previous history. One of our sensitives has reported emanations of the Old Woman in this area at
least once a month during the past year. It's long past time we found them. They could be reading our
minds, Otto. That could be the leak. Why haven't we got a fix on them?"
Waterhouse, who only a few years ago had known nothing more unconventional than how to turn a
homicide into "killed while resisting arrest," looked back calmly at Flanagan and said, "We need ten
sensitives of the fifth grade to form the pentacle, and we've only got seven."
Flanagan shook his head. "There are seventeen fifth graders in Europe, eight in Africa, and twentythree
scattered around the rest of the world. You'd think they could spare us three for a week. That's
all it would take."
Waterhouse said, "Maybe you've got enemies in the higher circle. Maybe somebody wants to see us
get it."
"Why the hell do you say things like that, Waterhouse?"
"Just to fuck you up, man."
Eight floors below, in an apartment which was regularly used for black masses, a North Clark street
hippie named Skip Lynch opened his eyes and looked at Simon Moon and Padre Pederastia. "Time's
getting very short," he said. "We've got to finish off Flanagan soon."
"It can't be too soon for me," said Padre Pederastia. "If Daddy hadn't favored him so outrageously
he'd be the priest today and I'd be State's Attorney."
Simon nodded. "But then we'd be snuffing you instead of Milo. Anyway, I believe George Dorn will
be taking care of the problem for us right now."
Squinks? It all began with the squinks- and that sentence is more true than you will realize until long
after this mission is over, Mr. Muldoon.
It was the night of February 2, 1776, and it was dark and windy in Ingolstadt; in fact, Adam
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Weishaupt's study looked like a set for a Frankenstein movie, with its windows rattling and candles
flickering, and old Adam himself casting terrifying shadows as he paced back and forth with his
peculiar lurching gait. At least the shadows were terrifying to him, because he was flying high on the
new hemp extract that Kolmer had brought back from his last visit to Baghdad. To calm himself, he
was repeating his English vocabulary-building drill, working on the new words for that week.
"Tomahawk . . . Succotash . . . Squink. Squink?" He laughed out loud. The word was "skunk," but he
had short-circuited from there to "squid" and emerged with "squink." A new word: a new concept.
But what would a squink look like? Midway between a squid and a skunk, no doubt: it would have
eight arms and smell to hoch Himmel. A horrible thought: it reminded him, uncomfortably, of the
shoggoths in that damnable Necronomicon that Kolnier was always trying to get him to read when he
was stoned, saying that was the only way to understand it.
He lurched over to the Black Magic and Pornography section of his bookshelves— which he kept,
sardonically, next to his Bible commentaries— and took down the long-forbidden volume of the
visions of the mad poet Abdul Alhazred. He turned to the first drawing of a shoggoth. Strange, he
thought, how a creature so foul could also, from certain angles and especially when you were high,
look vaguely like a crazily grinning rabbit. "Du haxen Hase," he chortled to himself. . . .
Then his mind made the leap: five sides on the borders on the shoggoth sketches . . . five sides,
always, on all the shoggoth sketches . . . and "squid" and "skunk" both had five letters in them. . . .
He held up his hands, looked at the five fingers on each, and began to laugh. It was all clear
suddenly: the Sign of the Horns made by holding up the first two fingers in a V and folding the other
three down: the two, the three and their union in the five. Father, Son and Holy Devil . . . the Duality
of good and evil, the Trinity of the Godhead ... the bicycle and the tricycle. ... He laughed louder and
louder, looking— despite his long, thin face— like the Chinese statues of the Laughing Buddha.
While the gas chambers were operating, other features of life in the camps were also contributing to
the Final Solution. At Auschwitz, for instance, many perished from beatings and other forms of ill
treatment, but the general neglect of elementary sanitary and health precautions had the most
memorable results. First there was spotted fever, then paratyphoid fever and abdominal typhus
erysipelas. Tuberculosis, of course, was rampant, and— particularly amusing to certain of the
officers— incurable diarrhea brought death to many inmates, degrading as it killed. No attempt was
made, either, to prevent the ubiquitous camp rats from attacking those too ill to move or defend
themselves. Never before witnessed by twentieth-century doctors, noma also appeared and was
recognized only from the descriptions in old textbooks: it is the complication of malnutrition which
eats holes in the cheeks until you can see right through to the teeth. "Vernichtung," a survivor said
later, "is the most terrible word in any language."
Even so, the Aztecs grew more frantic toward the end, increasing the number of sacrifices, doubling
and tripling the days of the year that called for spilled blood. But nothing saved them: just as
Eisenhower's army advanced across Europe to end the ovens of Auschwitz, Cortez and his ships
moved toward the great pyramid, the statue of Tlaloc, the confrontation.
Seven hours after Simon spoke of George Dorn to Padre Pederastia, a private jet painted gold landed
at Kennedy International Airport. Four heavy crates were moved by crane from the belly of the plane
into a truck which bore on its side the sign "GOLD & APPEL TRANSFERS." A young man with
shoulder-length blond hair, wearing a fashionable cutaway and knee breeches of red velvet with
bottle-green silk stockings, stepped down from the plane and climbed into the cab of the truck.
Holding an alligator briefcase in his lap, he sat silently beside the driver.
Tobias Knight, the driver, kept his thoughts to himself and asked no questions.
George Dorn was frightened. It was a feeling he was getting used to, so accustomed in fact that it no
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longer seemed to stop him from doing insane things. Besides, Hagbard had given him a talisman
against harm, assuring him that it was 100 percent infallible. George slipped it out of his pocket and
glanced at it again, curiously and with a wan hope. It was gold-tinted card with the strange glyphs:
It was probably another of Hagbard's jokes, George decided. It might even be Etruscan for "Kick this
boob in the ass." Hagbard's refusal to translate it suggested some such Celinean irony, and yet he had
seemed very sober— almost religious— about the symbols.
One thing was sure: George was still frightened, but the fear was no longer paralyzing. If I was this
casual about fear a few years ago, he thought, there'd be one less cop in New York. And I wouldn't
be here either, probably. No, that's not right, either. I would have told Carlo to go fuck himself. I
wouldn't have let the fear of being called a copout stop me. George had been scared when he went to
Mad Dog, when Harry Coin tried to fuck him up the ass, when Harry Coin was killed, when he
escaped from the Mad Dog jail, when he saw his own death just as he was coming, and when the
Illuminati spider ships had attacked the Lief Erickson. Being scared was beginning to seem a normal
condition to him.
So now he was going to meet the men who ran organized crime in the U.S. He knew practically
nothing about the Syndicate and the Mafia, and what little he did know he tended to disbelieve on the
grounds that it was probably myth. Hagbard had sketched in a little additional information for him
while he was preparing for this flight. But the one thing that George was absolutely certain about was
that he was going unprotected among men who killed human beings as easily as a housewife kills
silverfish. And he was supposed to negotiate with them. The Syndicate had been working with the
Illuminati until now. Now they were supposed to switch over to the Discordians, on George's say-so.
With, of course, the help of four priceless statues. Except, what were Robert Putney Drake and
Federico Maldonado going to say when they heard these statues had been dredged up from the
bottom of the ocean floor out of the ruins of Atlantis? They would probably express their skepticism
with pistols and send George back to the place he claimed the statues came from.
"Why me?" George had asked Hagbard earlier that day.
"Why me?" Hagbard repeated with a smile. "The question asked by the soldier as the enemy bullets
whistle around him, by the harmless homeowner as the homicidal maniac steps through the kitchen
door hunting knife in hand, by the woman who has given birth to a dead baby, by the prophet who
has just had a revelation of the word of God, by the artist who knows his latest painting is a work of
genius. Why you? Because you're there, schmuck. Because something has to happen to you. OK?"
"But what if I fuck it up? I don't know anything about your organization or the Syndicate. If times are
as crucial as you say, it's silly to send somebody like me on this mission. I have no experience
meeting people like this."
Hagbard shook his head impatiently. "You underrate yourself. Just because you're young and afraid
you think you can't talk to people. That's stupid. And it's not typical of your generation, so you should
be all the more ashamed of yourself. Furthermore, you are experienced with even worse people than
Drake and Maldonado. You spent part of a night in a cell with the man who killed John F. Kennedy."
"What?" George felt the blood rush out of his face and he thought he might faint.
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"Oh, sure," said Hagbard casually. "Joe Malik was on the right track when he sent you to Mad Dog,
you know."
After all that, Hagbard told George he was perfectly free to turn down the mission if he didn't want
to go. And George said he would go for the same reason he had agreed to accompany Hagbard on
his golden submarine. Because he knew that he would have been a fool to pass up the experience.
A two-hour drive brought the truck to the outskirts of Blue Point, Long Island, to the gates of an
estate. Two heavy-set men in green coveralls searched George and the driver, pointed the bell-shaped
nozzle of an instrument at the truck and studied some dials, and then waved them through. They
drove up a winding, narrow asphalt road through woods just beginning to show the light green
budding of early spring. Shadowy figures prowled among the trees. Suddenly the road burst out of
the woods and into a meadow. From here there was a long gentle rising slope to the top of a hill that
was crowned by houses. From the edge of the woods George could see four large, comfortablelooking
cottages, each three stories high, a little smaller than Newport, a little larger than Atlantic
City. They were made of brick painted in seaside pastel colors and formed a semicircle on the crest
of the hill. The grass of the meadow was cut very short, and halfway up the hill it became a
beautifully manicured lawn The woods screened the houses from the road, the meadow made it
impossible for anyone emerging from woods to approach the houses without being seen, and the
houses themselves constituted the elements of a fortress.
The Gold & Appel truck followed the driveway, which led between two of the houses, rolling over
slots in the driveway where a section might be hydraulically raised to form a wall. The driver
stopped at a gesture from one of two men in khakis who approached. George could now see the
Syndicate fortress consisted of eight separate houses forming an octagon around a lawn. Each house
had its own fenced-in yard, and George noticed with surprise that there was play equipment for
children in front of several cottages. In the center of the compound was a tall white pole from which
Sew an American flag.
George and the driver stepped down from the cab of the truck. George identified himself and was
ushered to the far side of the compound. The hill was much steeper on this side, George saw. It
sloped down to a narrow boulder-strewn beach drenched by huge Atlantic waves. A nice view,
George thought. And eminently secure. The only way Drake's enemies could get at him would be to
shell his home from a destroyer.
A slender, blond man— at least sixty and maybe a well-preserved seventy— came down the steps of
the house George was approaching. He had a concave nose that ended in a sharp point, a strong, cleft
chin, ice-blue eyes. He shook hands vigorously.
"Hi. I'm Drake. The others are inside. Let's go. Oh— is it OK with you if we go ahead and unload
your truck?" He gave George a sharp, birdlike look. George realized with a sinking feeling that
Drake was saying that they would take the statues regardless of whether any deal went through.
Why, then, should they inconvenience themselves by changing sides in this underground war? But he
nodded in acquiescence.
"You're young, aren't you?" said Drake as they went into the house. "But that's the way it is
nowadays. Boys do men's work." The house was handsome inside, but not as one might expect,
incredible. The carpets were thick, the woodwork heavy, dark and polished, the furnishings probably
genuine antiques. George didn't see how Atlantean statues would fit into the decor. There was a
painting at the top of the stairs to the second floor of a woman who looked slightly like Queen
Elizabeth II. She wore a white gown with diamonds at her neck and wrists. Two small, fragilelooking
blond boys in navy blue suits with white satin ties stood with her, staring solemnly out of the
painting.
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"My wife and sons," said Drake with a smile.
They entered a large study full of mahogany, oak paneling, leather bound books and red and green
leather furniture. Theodore Roosevelt would have loved it, George thought. Over the desk hung a
painting of a bearded man in Elizabethan costume. He was holding a bowling ball in his hand and
looking superciliously at a messenger type who pointing out to sea. There were sailing ships in the
distant background.
"An ancestor," said Drake simply. He pressed a button in a panel on the desk. A door opened and
two men came in, the first a tall young Chinese with a bony face and unruly black hair, the second a
short, thin man who bore a faint resemblance to Pope Paul VI.
"Don Federico Maldonado, a man of the greatest respect," said Drake. "And Richard Jung, my chief
counselor." George shook hands with both of them. He couldn't understand why Maldonado was
known as "Banana-Nose"; his proboscis was on the large side, but bore little resemblance to a
banana. It was more like an eggplant. The name must be a sample of low Sicilian humor. The two
men took seats on a red leather couch. George and Drake sank into armchairs facing them.
"And how are my favorite musicians doing?" Jung said genially.
Was this some kind of password? George was sure of one thing: his survival depended on sticking
absolutely to truth and sincerity with these people, so he said, very sincerely, "I don't know. Who are
your favorite musicians?"
Jung smiled back, saying nothing, until George, his heart racing inside his chest like a hamster
determined to run clear off the treadmill, reached into his briefcase and took out a parchment scroll.
"This," he said, "is the fundamental agreement proposed by the people I represent." He handed it to
Drake. Maldonado, he noticed, was staring fixedly, expressionlessly, at him in the most unnerving
way. The man's eyes looked as if they were made of glass. His face was a waxen mask. He was,
George decided, a wax dummy of Pope Paul VI which had been stolen from Madame Tussaud's,
dressed in a business suit, and brought to life to serve as the head of the Mafia. George had always
thought there was something witchy about Sicilians.
"Do we sign this in blood?" said Drake, removing the cloth-of-gold ribbon from the parchment and
unrolling it.
George laughed nervously. "Pen and ink will do fine."
Saul's angry, triumphant eyes stare into mine, and I look away guiltily. Let me explain, I say
desperately. I really am trying to help you. Your mind is a bomb.
"What Weishaupt discovered that night of February second, seventeen seventy-six," Hagbard Celine
explained to Joe Malik in 1973, on a clear autumn day in Miami, about the same time that Captain
Tequilla y Mota was reading Luttwak on the coup d'etat and making his first moves toward
the officer's cabal that later seized Fernando Poo, "was basically a simple mathematical relationship.
It's so simple, in fact, that most administrators and bureaucrats never notice it. lust as the householder
doesn't notice the humble termite, until it's too late. . . . Here, take this paper and figure for yourself.
How many permutations are there in a system of four elements?"
Joe, recalling his high school math, wrote 4x3x2x1, and read aloud his answer "Twenty-four."
"And if you're one of-the elements, the number of coalitions— or to be sinister, conspiracies— that
you may have to confront would be twenty-three. Despite Simon Moon's obsessions, the twenty-
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three has no particularly mystic significance," Hagbard added quickly. "Just consider it
pragmatically— it's a number of possible relationships which the brain can remember and handle.
But now suppose the system has five elements . . . ?."
Joe wrote 5x4x3x2x1 and read aloud, "One hundred and twenty."
"You see? One always encounters jumps of that size when dealing with permutations and
combinations. But, as I say, administrators as a rule aren't aware of this. Korzybski pointed out, back
in the early thirties, that nobody should ever directly supervise more than four subordinates, because
the twenty-four possible coalitions ordinary office politics can create are enough to tax any brain.
When it jumps up to one hundred and twenty, the administrator is lost. That, in essence, is the
sociological aspect of the mysterious Law of Fives. The Illuminati always has five leaders in each
nation, and five international Illuminati Primi supervising all of them, but each runs his own show
more or less independent of the other four, united only by their common commitment to the Goal of
Gruad." Hagbard paused to relight his long, black Italian cigar.
"Now," he said, "put yourself in the position of the head of any counterespionage organization.
Imagine, for instance, that you're poor old McCone of the CIA at the time of the first of the New
Wave of Illuminati assassinations, ten years ago, in sixty-three. Oswald was, of course, a double
agent, as everybody always knew. The Russians wouldn't have let him out of Russia without getting
a commitment from him to do 'small jobs,' as they're called in the business, although he'd be a
'sleeper.' That is, he'd go about his ordinary business most of the time, and only be called on
occasionally when he was in the right place at the right time for a particular 'small job.' Now, of
course, Washington knows this; they know that no expatriate comes back from Moscow without
some such agreement And Moscow knows the other side: that the State Department wouldn't take
him back unless he accepted a similar status with the CIA. Then, November twenty-second, Dealy
Plaza—blam! the shit hits the fan. Moscow and Washington both want to know, the sooner the
quicker, who was he working for when he did it, or was it his own idea? Two more possibilities loom
at once: could a loner with confused politics like him have been recruited by the Cubans or the
Chinese? And, then, the kicker: could he be innocent? Could another group— to avoid the obvious,
let's call them Force X— have stage-managed the whole thing? So, you've got MVD and CIA and
FBI and who-all falling over each other sniffing around Dallas and New Orleans for clues. And
Force X gets to seem more and more implausible to all of them, because it is intrinsically incredible.
It is incredible because it has no skeleton, no shape, no flesh, nothing they can grab hold of. The
reason is, of course, that Force X is the Illuminati, working through five leaders with five times four
times three times two times one, or one hundred and twenty different basic vectors. A conspiracy
with one hundred and twenty vectors doesn't look like a conspiracy: it looks like chaos. The human
mind can't grasp it, and hence declares it nonexistent. You see, the Illuminati is always careful to
keep a random element in the one hundred and twenty vectors. They didn't really need to recruit both
the leaders of the ecology movement and the executives of the worst pollution-producing
corporations. They did it to create ambiguity. Anybody who tries to describe their operations sounds
like a paranoid. What clinched it," Hagbard concluded, "was a real stroke of luck for the Weishaupt
gang: there were two other elements involved, which nobody had planned or foreseen. One was the
Syndicate."
"It always starts with nonsense," Simon is telling Joe in another time-track, between Los Angeles and
San Francisco, in 1969. "Weishaupt discovered the Law of Fives while he was stoned and looking at
one of those shoggoth pictures you saw in Arkham. He imagined the shoggoth was a rabbit and said,
'du hexen Hase,' which has been preserved as an in-joke by Illuminati agents in Hollywood. It runs
through the Bugs Bunny cartoons: 'You wascal wabbit!' But out of that schizzy mixture of
hallucination and logomania, Weishaupt saw both the mystic meaning of the Five and its pragmatic
application as a principal of international espionage, using permutations and combinations that I'll
explain when we have a pencil and paper. That same mixture of revelation and put-on is always the
language of the supra-conscious, whenever you contact it, whether through magic, religion,
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psychedelics, yoga, or a spontaneous brain nova. Maybe the put-on or nonsense part comes by
contamination from the unconscious, I don't know. But it's always there. That's why serious people
never discover anything of real importance."
"You mean the Mafia?" Joe asks.
"What? I didn't say anything about the Mafia. Are you in another time-track again?"
"No, not the Mafia alone," Hagbard says. "The Syndicate is much bigger than the Maf." The room
returns to focus: it is a restaurant. A seafood restaurant. On Biscayne Avenue, facing the bay. In
Miami. In 1973. The walls are decorated with undersea motifs, including a huge octopus. Hagbard,
undoubtedly, had chosen this meeting place just because he liked the decor. Crazy bastard thinks he's
Captain Nemo. Still: we've got to deal with him. As John says, the JAMs can't do it alone. Hagbard,
grinning, seemed to be noting Joe's return to present time. "You're reaching the critical stage," he
said changing the subject. "You now only have two mental states: high on drugs and high without
drugs. That's very good. But as I was saying, the Syndicate is more than just the Maf. The only
Syndicate, up until October twenty-third, nineteen thirty-five, was nothing more than the Mafia, of
course. But then they killed the Dutchman, and a young psychology student, who also happened to
be a psychopath with a power drive like Genghis Khan, was assigned to do a paper on how the
Dutchman's last words illustrate the similarity between somatic damage and schizophrenia. The
Dutchman had a bullet in his gut while the police interviewed him, and they recorded everything he
said, but on the surface it was all gibberish. This psychology student wrote the paper that his
professor expected, and got an A for the course— but he also wrote another interpretation of the
Dutchman's words, for his own purposes. He put copies in several bank vaults— he came from one
of the oldest banking families in New England, and he was even then under family pressure to give
up psychology and go into banking. His name was (Robert Putney Drake visited Zurich in 1935. He
personally talked to Carl Jung about the archetypes of the collective unconscious, the I Ching, and
the principle of synchronicity. He talked to people who had known James Joyce before that drunken
Irish genius had moved to Paris, and learned much about Joyce's drunken claims to be a prophet. He
read the published portions of Finnegans Wake and went back for further conversations with Jung.
Then he met Hermann Hesse, Paul Klee and the other members of the Eastern Brotherhood and
joined them in a mescaline ritual. A letter from his father arrived about then, asking when he was
going to give up wasting his time and return to Harvard Business School. He wrote that he would
return for the fall semester, but not to study business administration. A great psychologist was almost
born then, and Harvard might have had its Timothy Leary scandal thirty years earlier. Except for
Drake's power drive.)
I. THE FAUST PARSON, SINGULAR. Napalm sundaes for How Chow Mein, misfortune's cookie.
Josephine Malik lies trembling on the bed, trying to be brave, trying to hide her fear. Where, now, is
the mask of masculinity?
This delusion that you are a man trapped in a woman's body can only be cured one way. I might be
kicked out of the American Psychoanalystical Association if they knew about my methods. In fact,
already had a spot of bother with them when one of my patients cured his Oedipus complex by
actually fucking his mother, convincing himself extensionally as the semanticists would say that she
really was an old lady and not the woman he remembered from infancy. Nevertheless, the whole
world is going bananas as you must have observed, my poor girl, and we have to use heroic measures
to save whatever sanity remains in any patient we encounter. (The psychiatrist is now naked. He
joins her on the bed.) Now, my little frightened dove, I will convince you that you really are a trueborn,
honest-to-God woman....
Josephine feels his finger in her cunt and screams. Not at the touch: at the reality of it. She hadn't
believed until then that the change was real.
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Weishaupt bridge is falling down Falling down Falling down
And modern novels are the same: in the YMCA on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, looking out the
window at the radio tower atop Brooklyn Technical High School, a man named Chancy (no relative
of the movie family) spreads his pornographic tarot cards across the bed. One of them, he notes, is
missing. Quickly, he arranges them in suits, and hunts for the lost card: it is the Five of Pentacles. He
curses softly: that was one of his favorite orgy tableux.
Rebecca. The Saint Bernard.
"It's probably all jumbled in your head," I went on, furious that our plan was falling apart, that I
needed his trust now but had no way to earn it. "We've been disintoxicating and dehypnotizing you,
but you almost certainly can't tell where the Illuminati left off and we rescued you and started
reversing the treatment. You're due to explode into psychosis within twenty-four hours and we're
using the only techniques that can defuse that process."
"Why am I hearing everything twice?" Saul asked, balancing between wary skepticism and a sense
that Malik was not playing games any more but urgently trying to help him.
"The stuff they gave you was an MDA derivative— very high on mescaline and methedrine both. It
has an echo effect for seventy-two hours minimum. You're hearing what I'm going to say before I
say it and then again when I do say it. That'll pass in a few minutes, but it'll be back, every half hour
or so, for the next day yet. The end of the chain is psychosis, unless we can stop it."
"Unless we can stop it."
"It's easing up now," Saul said carefully, "Less of an echo that time. I still don't know whether to
trust you. Why were you trying to turn me into Barney Muldoon?"
"Because the psychic explosion is on Saul Goodman's time-track, not on Barney Muldoon's."
Ten big rhinoceroses, eleven big rhinoceroses . . .
"You Wascal Wabbit," Simon whispers through the Judas Window. Immediately the door opens and
a grinning young man with the Frisco-style Jesus Christ hair-and-beard says, "Welcome to the
Joshua Norton Cabal." Joe sees to his relief that it was a normal but untypically clean hippie hangout,
and there are none of the sinister accoutrements of the Lake Shore Drive coven. At the same time, he
hears the strange man in the bed asking, "Why were you trying to turn me into Barney Muldoon?"
My God, now it's happening when I'm awake as well as when I'm asleep. Simu-multi-taneously, he
hears the alarm and cries, "The Illuminati must be attacking!"
"Attacking this building?" Saul asks confusedly.
"Building? You're on a submarine, man. The Lief Erickson, on its way to Atlantis!"
Twenty big rhinoceroses, twenty-one big rhinoceroses ...
"Number Seventeen," read Professor Curve, "Law and anarchists will give the American people a
speedy Cadillac."
All the Helen Hokinson types are out today. Another one just hit me for the Mothers
March Against Dandruff. I gave her a nickel.
1923 was a very interesting year for the occult, by the way. Not only did Hitler join the
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Illuminati and attempt the Munich putsch, but, glancing through the books of Charles
Fort, I found quite a few suggestive events. On March 17th— which not only fits our IT-
23 correlation but is also the anniversary of the defeat of the Kronstadt rebellion, the day
the Lord Nelson statue was bombed in Dublin in 1966 and, of course, good Saint
Patrick's holy day— a naked man was seen mysteriously running about the estate of
Lord Caernarvon in England. He appeared several times in the following days, but was
never caught. Meanwhile, Lord Caernarvon himself died in Egypt— some said he was a
victim of the curse of Tut-Ankh-Amen, whose tomb he had burglarized. (An
archaeologist is a ghoul with credentials.) Fort also records two cases that May of a
synchronistic phenomenon he has traced through the centuries: a volcanic eruption
coinciding with the discovery of a new star. In September, there was a Mumiai scare in
India—Mumiais are invisible demons that grab people in broad daylight. Throughout the
year, there were reports of exploding coal in England; some tried to explain this by
saying the embittered miners (it was a time of labor troubles) were putting dynamite in
the coal, but the police couldn't prove this. The coal went on exploding. In the summer,
French pilots began having strange mishaps, whenever they flew over Germany, and it
was suggested that the Germans were testing an invisible ray machine. Considering the
last three phenomena together— invisible demons in India, exploding coal in England,
invisible rays over Germany— I guess somebody was testing something. . . .
You can call me Doc Iggy. My full name, at present, is Dr. Ignotum P. Ignotius. The P. stands for
Per. If you're a Latinist, you'll realize that translates as "the unknown explained by the still more
unknown." I think it's a quite appropriate name for my function tonight, since Simon brought you
here to be illuminized. My slave name, before I was turned on myself, is totally immaterial. As far as
I'm concerned, your slave name is equally pointless, and I'll call you by the password of the Norton
Cabal, which Simon used at the door. Until tomorrow morning, when the drug starts wearing off, you
are U. Wascal Wabbit. That's U., the initial, not why-oh-you, by the way.
We accept Bugs Bunny as an exemplar of Mummu here, too, but otherwise we have little in common
with the SSS. That's the Satanist, Surrealists and Sadists— the crew who began your illuminization
in Chicago. All we share with them actually is use of the Tristero anarchist postal system, to evade
the government's postal inspectors, and a financial agreement whereby we accept their DMM
script—Divine Marquis Memorial script— and they accept our hempscript and the flaxscript of the
Legion of Dynamic Discord. Anything to avoid Federal Reserve notes, you know.
It'll be a while yet before the acid starts working, so I'll just chat like this, about things that are more
or less trivial— or quadrivial, or maybe pentivial—until I can see that you're ready for more serious
matters. Simon's in the chapel, with a woman named Stella who you'll really dig, getting things ready
for the ceremony.
You might wonder why we're called the Norton Cabal. The name was chosen by my predecessor,
Malaclypse the Younger, before he left us to join the more esoteric group known as ELF—the
Erisian Liberation Front. They're the Occidental branch of the Hung Mung Tong Cong and all their
efforts go into a long-range anti-Illuminati project known only as Operation Mindfuck. But that's
another, very complicated, story. One of Malaclypse's last writings, before he went into the Silence,
was a short paragraph saying, "Everybody understands Mickey Mouse. Few understand Hermann
Hesse. Hardly anyone understands Albert Einstein. And nobody understands Emperor Norton." I
guess Malaclypse was already into the Mindfuck mystique when he wrote that.
(Who was Emperor Norton? Joe asks, wondering if the drug is beginning to work already or Dr.
Ignotius just has a tendency to speak more slowly than most people.)
Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. San Francisco is proud of
him. He lived in the last century and got to be emperor by proclaiming himself as such. For some
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mysterious reason, the newspapers decided to humor him and printed his proclamations. When he
started issuing his own money, the local banks went along with the joke and accepted it on par with
U.S. currency. When the Vigilantes got into a lynching mood one night and decided to go down to
Chinatown and kill some Chinese, Emperor Norton stopped them just by standing in the street with
his eyes closed reciting the Lord's Prayer. Are you beginning to understand Emperor Norton a little,
Mr. Wabbit?
(A little, Joe said, a little. . .)
Well, chew on this for a while, friend: there were two very sane and rational anarchists who lived
about the same time as Emperor Norton across the country in Massachusetts: William Green and
Lysander Spooner. They also realized the value of having competing currencies instead of one
uniform State currency, and they tried logical arguments, empirical demonstrations and legal suits 'to
get this idea accepted. They accomplished nothing. The government broke its own laws to find ways
to suppress Green's Mutual Bank and Spooner's People's Bank. That's because they were obviously
sane, and their currency did pose a real threat to the monopoly of the Illuminati. But Emperor Norton
was so crazy that people humored him and his currency was allowed to circulate. Think about it. You
might begin to understand why Bugs Bunny is our symbol and why our currency has the ridiculous
name hempscript. Hagbard Celine and his Discordians, even more absurdly, call their money
flaxscript. That commemorates the Zen Master who was asked, "What is the Buddha?" and replied,
"Five pounds of flax." Do you begin to see the full dimensions of our struggle with the Illuminati?
At least, for now, you can probably grasp this much: their fundamental fallacy is the Aneristic
Delusion. They really believe in law n' order. As a matter of fact, since everybody in this crazy,
millennia-old battle has his own theory about what the Illuminati are really aiming at, I might as well
tell you mine. I think they're all scientists and they want to set up a scientific world government. The
Jacobins were probably following precise Illuminati instructions when they sacked the churches in
Paris and proclaimed the dawn of the Age of Reason. You know the story about the old man who
was in the crowd when Louis XVI went to the guillotine and who shouted as the king's head fell,
"Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged"? All the symbols that De Molay introduced into Masonry are
scientific implements— the T-square, the architect's triangle, even that pyramid that has caused so
much bizarre speculation. If you count the eye as part of the design, the pyramid has 73 divisions,
you know, not 72. What's 73 mean? Simple: multiply it by five, in accordance with Weishaupt's
funfwissenschaft, the science of fives, and you get 365, the days of the year. The damn thing is some
kind of astronomical computer, like Stonehenge. The Egyptian pyramids are facing to the East,
where the sun rises. The great pyramid of the Mayans has exactly 365 divisions, and is also facing to
the East. What they're doing is worshipping the "order" they have found in Nature, never realizing
that they projected the order there with their own instruments.
That's why they hate ordinary mankind— because we're so disorderly. They've been trying for six or
seven thousand years to reestablish Atlantis-style high civilization— law 'n' order— the Body
Politic, as they like to call it. A giant robot is what their Body Politic really amounts to, you know. A
place for everything and everything in its place. A place for everybody and everybody in his place.
Look at the Pentagon— look at the whole army, for Goddess's sake! That's what they want the planet
to be like Efficient, mechanical, orderly— very orderly— and inhuman. That's the essence of the
Aneristic Delusion: to imagine you have found Order and then to start manipulating the quirky,
eccentric chaotic things that really exist into some kind of platoons or phalanxes that correspond to
your concept of the Order they're supposed to manifest. Of course, the quirkiest, most chaotic things
that exist are other people— and that's why they're so obsessed with trying to control us.
Why are you staring like that? Am I changing colors or growing bigger or something? Good: the acid
is starting to work. Now we can really get to the nitty-gritty. First of all, most of what I've been
telling you is bullshit. The IIluminati have no millennia-old history; neither do the JAMs. They
invented their great heritage and tradition— Jacques De Molay and Charlemagne and all of it— out
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of whole cloth in 1776, picking up all sorts of out-of-context history to make it seem plausible.
We've done the same. You might wonder why we copy them, and even deceive our own recruits
about this. Well, part of illumination— and we've got to be illuminized ourselves to fight them— is
in learning to doubt everything. That's why Hagbard has that painting in his stateroom saying "Think
for yourself, schmuck," and why Hassan i Sabbah said "Nothing is true." You've got to learn to doubt
us, too, and everything we tell you. There are no honest men on this voyage. In fact, maybe this part
is the only lie I've told you all evening, and the Illuminati history before 1776 really is true and not
an invention. Or maybe we're just a front for the Illuminati... to recruit you indirectly. . . .
Feeling paranoid? Good: illumination is on the other side of absolute terror. And the only terror that
is truly absolute is the horror of realizing that you can't believe anything you've ever been told. You
have to realize fully that you are "a stranger and afraid in a world you never made," like Houseman
says.
Twenty-two big rhinoceroses, twenty-three big. rhinoceroses .. .
The Illuminati basically were structure-freaks. Hence, their hangup on symbols of geometric law and
architectural permanence, especially the pyramid and the pentagon. (God's Lightning, like all
authoritarian Judeo-Christian heresies, had its own share of this typically Occidental straight-line
mystique, which was why even the Jews among them, like Zev Hirsch, accepted the symbol first
suggested by Atlanta Hope: that most Euclidean of all religious emblems: the Cross.) The
Discordians made their own sardonic commentary on the legal and scientific basis of law V order by
using a 17-step pyramid—17 being a number with virtually no interesting geometric, arithmetic or
mystic properties, outside of Java, where it was the basis of a particularly weird musical scale— and
topping it with the Apple of Discord, symbol of the un-rational, un-geometrical, and thoroughly
disorderly spontaneity of the vegetable world of creative evolution. The Erisian Liberation Front
(ELF) had no symbol, and when asked for one by new recruits, replied loftily that their symbol could
not be pictured, since it was a circle whose circumference was everywhere and its center nowhere.
They were the most far-out group of all, and only the most advanced Discordians could begin to
understand their gibberish.
The JAMs, however, had a symbol that anyone could understand, and, just as Harry Pierpont showed
it to John Dillinger midway through a nutmeg high in Michigan City prison, Dr. Ignotius showed it
to Joe midway through his first acid trip.
"This," he said dramatically, "is the Sacred Chao."
"That's a symbol of technocracy," Joe said, giggling.
"Well," Dr. Ignotius smiled, "at least you're original. Nine out of ten new members mistake it for the
Chinese yin-yang or the astrological symbol of Cancer. It's similar to both of them— and also to the
symbols of the Northern Pacific Railroad and the Sex Information and Education Council of the
United States, all of which is eventually going to lead to some interesting documents being produced
at John Birch headquarters, I'm sure, proving that sex educators run the railroads or that astrologers
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control the sex educators or something of that sort. No, this is different. It is the Sacred Chao, symbol
of Mummu, God of Chaos.
"On the right, O nobly born, you will see the image of your 'female' and intuitive nature, called yin
by the Chinese. The yin contains an apple which is the golden apple of Eris, the forbidden apple of
Eve, and the apple which used to disappear from the stage of the Flatbush Burlesque House in
Brooklyn when Linda Larue did the split on top of it at the climax of her striptease. It represents the
erotic, libidinal, anarchistic, and subjective values worshiped by Hagbard Celine and our friends in
the Legion of Dynamic Discord.
"Now, O nobly born, as you prepare for Total Awakening, turn your eyes to the left, yang side of the
Sacred Chao. This is the image of your 'male,' rationalistic ego. It contains the pentagon of the
Illuminati, the Satanists, and the U.S. Army. It represents the anal, authoritarian, structural, law 'n'
order values which the Illuminati have imposed, through their puppet governments, on most of the
peoples of the world.
"This is what you must understand, O newborn Buddha: neither side is complete, or true, or real.
Each is an abstraction, a fallacy. Nature is a seamless web in which both sides are in perpetual war
(which is another name for perpetual peace). The equation always balances. Increase one side, and
the other side increases by itself. Every homosexual is a latent heterosexual, every authoritarian cop
is the shell over an anarchistic libido. There is no Vernichtung, no Final Solution, no pot of gold at
the end of the rainbow, and you are not Saul Goodman, when you're lost out here."
Listen: the chaos you experience under LSD is not an illusion. The orderly world you imagine you
experience, under the artificial and poisonous diet which the Illuminati have forced on all civilized
nations, is the real illusion. I am not saying what you are hearing. The only good fnord is a dead
fnord. Never whistle while you're pissing. An obscure but highly significant contribution to
sociology and epistemology occurs in Malignowski's study "Retroactive Reality," printed in Wieczny
Kwiat Wtadza, the journal of the Polish Orthopsychiatric Psociety, for Autumn 1959.
"All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and
false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and
true and false and meaningless in some sense. Do you follow me?"
(In some sense, Joe mutters. . . .)
The author, Dr. Malignowski, was assisted by three graduate students named Korzybski-1,
Korzybski-2, and Korzybski-3 (Siamese triplets born to a mathematician and, hence, indexed rather
than named). Malignowski and his students interviewed 1,700 married couples, questioning husband
and wife separately in each case, and asked 100 key questions about their first meeting, first sexual
experience, marriage ceremony, honeymoon, economic standing during the first year of marriage,
and similar subjects which should have left permanent impressions on the memory. Not one couple
in the 1,700 gave exactly the same answers to 100 questions, and the highest single score was made
by a couple who gave the same answers to 43 of the questions.
"This study demonstrated graphically what many psychologists have long suspected: the life-history
which most of us carry around in our skulls is more our own creation (at least seven percent more)
than it is an accurate recording of realities. As Malignowski concludes, 'Reality is retroactive,
retrospective and illusory.'
"Under these circumstances, things not personally experienced but recounted by others are even
more likely to be distorted, and after a tale passes through five tellers it is virtually one hundred
percent pure myth: another example of the Law of Fives.
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"Only Marxists," Dr. Iggy concluded, opening the door to usher Joe into the chapel room, "still
believe in an objective history. Marxists and a few disciples of Ayn Rand."
Jung took the parchment from Drake and stared at it "It's not to be signed in blood? And what the
hell is this yin-yang symbol with the pentagon and the apple? You're a fucking fake." His lips curled
tightly in against his teeth.
"What do you mean?" said George through a throat that was rapidly closing up.
"I mean you're not from the goddam Illuminati," said Jung. "Who the hell are you?"
"Didn't you know that before I came here— that I'm not from the Illuminati?" said George. "I'm not
trying to fake anybody out. Honest, really, I thought you knew the people who sent me. I never said I
was from the Illuminati."
Maldonado nodded, a slight smile bringing his face to life. "I know who he is. The people of the Old
Strega. The Sybil of Sybils. All hail Discordia, kid. Right?"
"Hail Eris," said George with a slight feeling of relief.
Drake frowned. "Well, we seem to be at cross purposes. We were contacted by mail, then by
telephone, then by messenger, by parties who made it quite clear that they knew all about our
business with the Illuminati. Now, to the best of my knowledge— perhaps Don Federico knows
better— there is only one organization in the world that knows anything about the AISB, and that is
the AISB itself." George could tell he was lying.
Maldonado raised a warning hand. "Wait. Up, everybody. To the bathroom."
Drake sighed. "Oh, Don Federico! You and your tired notions of security. If my house isn't safe,
we're all dead men as of this moment. And if the AISB is as good as it's said to be, an old trick like
running water will be no obstacle to them. Let's conduct this discussion like civilized men, for God's
sake, and not huddled around my shower stall."
"There are times when dignity is suicide," said Maldonado. He shrugged. "But, I yield. I'll settle the
question with you in hell if you're wrong."
"I'm still in the dark," said Richard Jung. "I don't know who this guy is or where he's from."
"Look, Chinaman," said Maldonado. "You know who the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria are,
right? Well, every organization has opposition, right? So do the Illuminati. Opposition that's like
them, religious, magical, spooky stuff. Not simply interested in becoming rich, as is our gentlemanly
aim in life. Playing supernatural games. Capeesh?"
Jung looked skeptical. "You could be describing the Communist party, the CIA, or the Vatican."
"Superficial," said Maldonado scornfully. "And upstarts, compared with the AISB. Because the
Bavarian Illuminati aren't Bavarians, you understand. That's just a recent name and manifestation for
their order. Both the Illuminati and their opposition, which this guy represents, go back a long ways
before Moscow, Washington or Rome. A little imagination is called for to understand this,
Chinaman."
"If the Illuminati are yang," George said helpfully, "we're yin. The only solution is a Yin Revolution.
Dig?"
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"I am a graduate of Harvard Law School," said Jung loftily, "and I do not dig it. What are you, a
bunch of hippies?"
"We never made a deal with your bunch before," said Maldonado. "They never had enough to offer
us."
Robert Putney Drake said, "Yes, but wouldn't you like to, though, Don Federico? Haven't you had a
bellyfull of the others? I know I have. I know where you're from now, George. And you people have
been making giant strides in recent decades. I'm not surprised that you're able to tempt us. It's worth
our lives— and we are supposedly the most secure men in the United States— to betray the
Illuminati. But I understand you offer us statues from Atlantis. By now they should be uncrated. And
that there are more where these came from? Is that right, George?"
Hagbard had said nothing about that, but George was too worried about his own survival to quibble.
"Yes," he said. "There are more."
Drake said, "Whether we want to risk our lives by working with your people will depend on what we
find when we examine the objets d'art you are offering. Don Federico, being a highly qualified
expert in antiquities, particularly in those antiquities which have been carefully kept outside of the
ken of conventional archaeological knowledge, will pronounce on the value of what you've brought.
As a Sicilian thoroughly versed in his heritage, Don Federico is familiar with things Atlantean. The
Sicilians are about the only extant people who do know about Atlantis. It is not generally realized
that the Sicilians have the oldest continuous civilization on the face of the planet. With all due
respects to the Chinese." Drake nodded formally to Jung.
"I consider myself an American," said Jung. "Though my family knows a thing or two about Tibet
that might surprise you."
"I'm sure," said Drake. "Well, you shall advise, as you are able. But the Sicilian heritage goes back
thousands of years before Rome, as does their knowledge of Atlantis. There were a few things
washed up on the shores of North Africa, a few things found by divers. It was enough to establish a
tradition. If there were a museum of Atlantean arts, Don Federico is one of the few people in the
world qualified to be a curator."
"In other words," said Maldonado with a ghastly smile, "those statues better be authentic, kid.
Because I will know if they are not."
"They are," said George. "I saw them picked up off the ocean bottom myself."
"That's impossible," said Jung.
"Let's look," said Drake.
He stood up and placed the palm of his hand flat against an oak panel which immediately slid to one
side, revealing a winding metal staircase. Drake leading the way, the four of them descended what
seemed to George five stories to a door with a combination lock. Drake opened the door and they
passed through a series of other chambers, ending up in a large underground garage. The Gold &
Appel truck was there and beside it the four statues, freed of their crates. There was no one in the
room.
"Where did everybody go?" said Jung.
"They're Sicilians," said Drake. "They saw these and were afraid. They did the job of uncrating them
and left." His face and Maldonado's wore a look of awe. Jung's craggy features bore an irritated,
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puzzled frown.
"I'm beginning to feel that I've been left out of a lot," he said.
"Later," said Maldonado. He took a small jeweler's glass out of his pocket and approached the
nearest statue. "This is where they got the idea for the great god Pan," he said. "But you can see the
idea was more complicated twenty thousand years ago than two thousand." Fixing the jeweler's glass
in his eye, he began a careful inspection of a glittering hoof.
At the end of an hour, Maldonado, with the help of a ladder, had gone over each of the four statues
from bottom to top with fanatical care and had questioned George about the manner of their seizure
as well as what little he knew of their history. He put his jeweler's glass away, turned to Drake and
nodded.
"You got the four most valuable pieces of art in the world."
Drake nodded. "I surmised as much. Worth more than all the gold in all the Spanish treasure ships
there ever were."
"If I have not been dosed with a hallucinogenic drug," said Richard Jung, "I gather you are all saying
these statues come from Atlantis. I'll take your word for it that they're solid gold, and that means
there's a lot of gold there."
"The value of the matter is not worth one one ten-thousandth the value of the form," said Drake.
"That I don't see," said Jung. "What is the value of Atlantean art if no reputable authority anywhere
in the world believes in Atlantis?"
Maldonado smiled. "There are a few people in the world who know that Atlantis existed, and who
know there is such a thing as Atlantean art. And believe me, Richard, those few got enough money to
make it worth anyone's while who has a piece from the bottom of the sea. Any one of these statues
could buy a middle-sized country."
Drake clapped his hands with an air of authority. "I'm satisfied if Don Federico is satisfied. For these
and for four more like them— or the equivalent if four such statues simply don't exist— my hand is
joined with the hand of the Discordian movement. Let us go back upstairs and sign the papers— in
pen and ink. And then, George, we would like you to be our guest at dinner."
George didn't know if he had the authority to promise four more statues, and he was certain that total
openness was the only safe approach with these men. As they were climbing the stairs, he said to
Drake, who was above him, "I wasn't authorized by the man who sent me to promise anything more.
And I don't believe he has any more at the moment, unless he has a collection of his own. I know
these four statues are the only ones he captured on this trip."
Drake let out a small fart, an incredible thing, it seemed to George, for the leader of all organized
crime in the United States to do. "Excuse me," he said. "The exertion of these stairs is too much for
me. Would love to put in an elevator, but that wouldn't be as secure. One of these days my heart will
give out, going up and down those stairs." The fart smelled moderately bad, and George was glad
when he had climbed out of its neighborhood. He was surprised that a man of Drake's importance
would acknowledge that he farted. Perhaps that kind of straightforwardness was a factor in Drake's
success. George doubted that Maldonado would admit to a fart. The Don was too devious. He was
not your earthy sort of Latin— he was paper-thin and paper-pale, like a Tuscan aristocrat of
attenuated bloodline.
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They reentered Drake's office, and Drake and Maldonado each signed the parchment scroll. After the
phrase, "for valuable considerations received," Drake inserted the words, "and considerations of
equal value yet to come."
He smiled at George. "Since you can't guarantee the additional objects, I'll expect to hear from your
boss within twenty-four hours after you leave here. This whole deal is contingent upon the additional
payment from you."
ORGASM. HER BUBBIES FRITCHID BY THE GYNING DEEP SEADOODLER.
All in a lewdercrass chaste for a moulteeng fawkin. In fact, hearing Drake say that he was to be
leaving the Syndicate fortress made George feel a bit better. He signed in behalf of the Discordians
and Jung signed as a witness.
Drake said, "You understand, there is no way the organizations which Don Federico and I represent
can be bound by anything we sign. What we agree to here is to use our influence with our many
esteemed colleagues and to hope that they will grant us the favor of cooperation in the mutual
enterprise."
Maldonado said, "I couldn't have said it better myself. We, of course, personally pledge our lives and
our honor to further your purposes."
Robert Putney Drake took a cigar out of a silver humidor. Slapping George on the back, he shoved
the cigar into his mouth. "You know, you're the first hippie I've ever done business with. I suppose
you'd like to have some marijuana. I don't keep any around the house, and as you probably know we
don't deal much in the stuff. Too bulky to transport, considering the amount you can make on it.
Aside from that, I think you'll like the food and drink here. We'll have a big dinner and some
entertainment."
The dinner was steak Diane, and it was served to the four men at a long table in a dining room hung
with large, old paintings. They were waited on by a series of beautiful young women, and George
wondered where the gang leaders kept their wives and mistresses. In some sort of pur-dah, perhaps.
There was something Arabic about this whole setup.
During the main course a blonde in a long white gown which left one breast bare played the harp in a
corner of the room and sang. There was conversation with the coffee; four young women sat down
briefly with the men and regaled them with witticisms and funny stories.
With the brandy came Tarantella Serpentine. She was an amazingly tall woman, at least six feet two,
with long blond hair that was piled high on her head and fell below her shoulders. She was wearing
tinkling gold bracelets around her wrists and ankles, and there were diaphonous veils wrapped
around her slender body, and nothing else. George could see pink nipples and dark crotch hair. When
she strode through the door Banana-Nose Maldonado wiped his mouth with his napkin and began
applauding gleefully. Robert Putney Drake smiled proudly and Richard Jung swallowed hard.
George just stared. "The star of our little rural retreat," said Drake by way of introduction. "May I
present— Miss Tarantella Serpentine." Maldonado's applause continued, and George wondered if he
should join in. Music, Oriental but with a touch of rock, flooded the room. The sound reproduction
equipment was excellent, nigh perfect. Tarantella Serpentine began to dance. It was a strange, hybrid
sort of dance, a synthesis of belly-dancing, go-go, and modern ballet. George licked his lips and he
felt his face get warm and his penis begin to throb and swell as he watched. Tarantella Serpentine's
dance was even more sensuous than the dance Stella Maris had done when he was being initiated
into the Discordian movement.
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After she had done three dances, Tarantella bowed and left. "You must be tired, George," said Drake,
resting his hand on George's shoulder.
Suddenly, George realized he had been going on almost no sleep except for the times he'd dozed off
in the car on the way from Mad Dog to the Gulf. He had been under incredible physical, and even
more important, emotional pressure.
He agreed that he was tired, and, praying that he would not be murdered in his sleep, he let Drake
lead him to a bedroom.
The bed was an enormous four poster with a cloth-of-gold canopy. Naked, George slid between cool,
crisp sheets, and clutching the top sheet around his neck, lay flat on his back, shut his eyes tight and
sighed. That morning he had been on a beach in the Gulf of Mexico watching naked Mavis
masturbate. He had fucked an apple. He had been to Atlantis. And now he was lying on a downy-soft
mattress in the home of the chief of all organized crime in America. If he closed his eyes he might
find himself back in the Mad Dog jail. He shook his head. There was nothing to fear.
He heard the bedroom door open. There was nothing to fear. To prove it, he kept his eyes closed. He
heard a board squeak. Squeaky boards in this place? Sure— to warn the sleeper that there was
someone sneaking up on him. He opened his eyes.
Tarantella Serpentine was standing over the bed. "Bobby-baby sent me," she said.
George closed his eyes again. "Sweetheart," he said, "you are beautiful. You really are. You're
beautiful. Make yourself comfortable."
She reached down and turned on a bedside lamp. She was wearing a gold metallic bikini top with a
short matching skirt. Her breasts were delightfully small, George thought. Although, on a five-foottwo
girl they'd be ample. But Tarentella was built like a Vogue model. George liked her looks. He
had always been partial to tall, slender boyish women.
"I'm not intruding on you, am I?" she asked. "You sure you wouldn't rather sleep?"
"Well it's not so much what Td rather do," said George. "I doubt that I can do anything other than
sleep. I have had a very trying day." Masturbated once, he thought, had one blow job, and fucked one
apple. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Plus been scared out of my wits 90 percent of
the time.
Tarantella said, "My name is known in ratified circles for what I can achieve with men whose days
are all trying. Presidents, kings, Syndicate heads— naturally— rock stars, oil billionaires, people like
that. My thing is, I can make men come. Over and over and over and over again. Ten times,
sometimes even twenty times, no matter how old or how tired. I get paid a lot. Tonight, Bobby-baby
is paying for my services, and I'm to service you. Which I like very much, because most of my
clientele is on the middle-aged side, and you're nice and young and have a firm body." She gently
pulled the sheet loose from George's grip— he had forgotten he was still holding it up around his
neck— and caressed his bare shoulder.
"How old are you, George— twenty-two?"
"Twenty-three," said George. "But I don't want to disappoint you. I'm willing and I'm interested. In
fact, I'm curious about what you do. But I'm pretty tired."
"Honey, you can't disappoint me. The more limp you are, the more I like it. The more of a challenge
you are to me. Let me show you my specialty."
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Tarantella doffed her bra, skirt, and panties quickly but deliberately enough to let George enjoy
watching her. Smiling at him, she stood before him, her legs spread wide apart. Her fingernails
tickled her nipples, and George watched them swell up. Then, her left hand playing with her left
breast, her right hand snaked down to her groin and began massaging the golden-brown hairs of her
mons. Her middle finger disappeared between her legs. After a few moments a scarlet flush spread
over her face, neck, and chest, her body arched backward, and she gave a single, agonized cry. Her
skin, from head to toe, was glowing with a fine coating of sweat.
After a momentary pause she smiled and looked at him. Her right hand caressed his cheek and he felt
the wetness on his face and smelled the Lobster Newburg aroma of a young cunt. Her fingers drifted
to the sheets, and with a sudden movement she stripped them away from George's body. She grinned
down at his stiff cock and in a moment was on top of him, holding his prick, inserting it into herself.
Two minutes of smooth pistonlike movements on her part brought him to an unexpectedly pleasant
orgasm.
"Baby," he said. "You could wake the dead."
He enjoyed his second orgasm about a half hour later, and his third a half hour after that. The second
time Tarantella lay on her back and George lay on top of her, and the third time she was on her
stomach and he was straddling her from the rear. There was something about the mood Tarantella
created that was crucial to what she called her "specialty." Though she had boasted about her ability
to make a man come repeatedly, when it came right down to doing things she made him feel that it
didn't really matter what happened with him. She was fun-loving, playful, carefree. He did not feel
obligated in any sense to stiffen, to come. Tarantella might view men as a challenge, but she made it
clear that George was not to see her as a challenge.
After a short nap, he woke to find her sucking his rapidly hardening penis. It took much longer this
time for him to come, but he enjoyed every second of mounting pleasure. After that they lay side by
side and talked for a while. Then Tarantella went to the bedside table and took a tube of petroleum
jelly out of a drawer. She began applying it to his penis, which grew erect during the process. Then
she rolled over and presented him with her rosy asshole. It was the first time George had had a
woman that way, and he came rather quickly after insertion from the novelty and excitement of it all.
They slept for a while and he awoke to find her masturbating him. Her fingers were very clever and
seemed quickly to find their way to all the most sensitive parts of his penis— with special attention
to that area just behind the crown of the head. He opened his eyes wide when he came and saw, after
a few seconds, a small, pale, pearl-like drop of semen appear on the end of his dick. A wonder there
was any at all.
It was getting to be a trip. His ego went away somewhere, and he was all body, letting it all happen.
It was fucking Tarantella, and it was coming— and, judging by the sounds she was making and the
wetness in which his penis was sloshing, she was coming, too.
There followed two more blow jobs. Then Tarantella pulled something that looked like an electric
razor out of the bed-table drawer. She plugged it into the wall and began to stroke his penis with its
vibrating head, pausing every so often to lick and lubricate the areas she was working on.
George closed his eyes and rolled his hips from side to side as he felt yet another orgasm coming on.
From a great distance he heard Tarantella Serpentine say, "My greatness lies in the life I can generate
in limp pricks."
George's pelvis began to pump up and down. It was really going to be that superorgasm Hemingway
described. It began to happen. It was pure electricity. No juice— all energy pouring out like lightning
through the magic wand at the center of his being. He wouldn't be surprised to discover that his balls
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and cock were disintegrating into whirling electrons. He screamed, and behind his tight-clenched
eyes, he saw, very clearly, the smiling, face of Mavis.
He awoke in the dark, and his instinctive groping motion told him that Tarantella was gone.
Instead, Mavis, in a white doctor's smock, stood at the foot of the bed, watching him with large
bright eyes. The darkened Drake bedroom had turned into a hospital ward, and was suddenly brightly
lit.
"How did you get here?" he blurted. "I mean— how did I get here?"
"Saul," she said kindly, "it's almost all over. You've come through it."
And suddenly he realized that he felt, not twenty-three, but sixty-three years old.
"You've won," he admitted, "I'm no longer sure who I am."
"You've won," Mavis contradicted. "You've gone through ego loss and now you're beginning to
discover who you really are, poor old Saul."
He examined his hands: old man's. Wrinkled. Goodman's hands.
"There are two forms of ego loss," Mavis went on, "and the Illuminati are masters of both. One is
schizophrenia, the other is illumination. They set you on the first track, and we switched you to the
other. You had a time bomb in your head, but we defused it."
Malik's apartment. The Playboy Club. The submarine. And all the other past lives and lost years. "By
God," Saul Goodman cried, "I've got it. I am Saul Goodman, but I am all the other people, too."
"And all time is this time," Mavis added softly.
Saul sat upright, tears gleaming in his eyes. "I've killed men. I've sent them to the electric chair.
Seventeen times. Seventeen suicides. The savages who cut off fingers or toes or ears for their gods
are more sensible. We cut off whole egos, thinking they are not ourselves but separate. God God
God," and he burst in sobs.
Mavis rushed forward and held him, cradling his head to her breast. "Let it out," she said. "Let it all
out. It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand until it makes you weep."
QUEENS. Psychoanalysts in living cells, moving in military ordure, and a shitty outlook on life and
sex, dancing coins in harry's krishna. It all coheres, even if you approach it bass ackwards. It coheres.
"Gruad the grayface!" Saul screamed, weeping, beating his fist against the pillow as Mavis held his
head, stroked his hair. "Gruad the damned! And I have been his servant, his puppet, sacrificing
myselves on his electric altars as burnt offerings."
"Yes, yes," Mavis cooed in his ear. "We must learn to give up our sacrifices, not our joys. They have
taught us to give up everything except our sacrifices, and those are what we must give up. We must
sacrifice our sacrifices."
"The Grayface, the life-hater!" Saul shrieked. "The bastard motherfucker! Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, I
know him under all his aliases. Grayface, Grayface, Grayface! I know his wars and his prisons, the
young boys he shafts up the ass, the George Dorns he tries to turn into killers like himself. And I
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have served him all my life. I have sacrificed men on his bloody pyramid!"
"Let it out," Mavis repeated, holding the old man's trembling body "Let it all out, baby. . . ."
NOTHUNG. Woden you gnaw it, when you herd those flying sheeps with Wagner's loopy howls?
Hassan walked this loony valley, he had to wake up by himself. August 23, 1966: before he ever
heard of the SSS, the Discordians, the JAMs or the Illuminati: stoned and beatific, Simon Moon is
browsing in a Consumer Discount store on North Clark street, digging the colors, not really
intending to buy anything. He stops in a frieze, mesmerized by a sign above the timeclock:
NO EMPLOYEE MAY, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, PUNCH
THE TIME CARD FOR ANY OTHER EMPLOYEE.
ANY DEVIATION WILL RESULT IN TERMINATION.
THE MGT.
"God's pajamas," Simon mutters, incredulous.
"Pajamas? Aisle seven," a clerk says helpfully.
"Yes. Thanks," Simon speaks very distinctly, edging away, hiding his high. God's pajamas and
spats, he thinks in a half-illuminated trance, either I'm more stoned than I think or that sign is
absolutely the whole clue to how the show runs.
RAGS. Hail Ghoulumbia, her monadmen are fled and all she's left now is a bloody period. "The
funny part," Saul said, smiling while a few tears still flowed, "is that I'm not ashamed of this. Two
days ago I would have rather died than be seen weeping— especially by a woman."
"Yes," Mavis said, "especially by a woman."
"That's it— isn't it?" Saul gasped. 'That's their whole gimmick. I couldn't see you without seeing a
woman. I couldn't see that editor, Jackson, without seeing a Negro. I couldn't see anybody without
seeing the attached label and classification."
"That's how they keep us apart," Mavis said gently. "And that's how they train us to keep our masks
on. Love was the hardest bond for them to smash, so they had to create patriarchy, male supremacy,
and all that crap— and the 'masculine protest' and 'penis envy" in women came in as a result— so
even lovers couldn't look at one another without seeing a separate category."
"O my God, my God," Saul moaned, beginning to weep heavily again. " 'A rag, a bone, a hank of
hair.' O my God. And you were with them!" he cried suddenly, raising his head. "You're a former
Illuminatus— that's why you're so important to Hagbard's plan. And that's why you have that tattoo!"
"I was one of the Five who run the U.S.," Mavis nodded. "One of the Insiders, as Robert Welch calls
them. I've been replaced now by Atlanta Hope, the leader of God's Lightning."
"I've got it, I've got it!" Saul said, laughing, "I looked every way but the right way before. He's inside
the Pentagon. That's why they build it in that shape, so he couldn't escape. The Aztecs, the Nazis . . .
and now us ..."
"Yes," Mavis said grimly. "That's why thirty thousand Americans disappear every year, without
trace, and their cases end up in the unsolved files. He has to be fed."
" 'A man, though naked, may be in rags." Saul quoted. "Ambrose Bierce knew about it."
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"And Arthur Machen," Mavis added. "And Lovecraft. But they had to write in code. Even so,
Lovecraft went too far, mentioning the Necronomicon by name. That's why he died so suddenly
when he was only forty-seven. And his literary executor, August Derleth, was persuaded to insert a
note in every edition of Lovecraft's works, claiming that the Necronomicon doesn't exist and was just
part of Lovecraft's fantasy."
"And the Lloigor?" Saul asked. "And the dols?"
"Real," Mavis said. "All real. That's what causes bad acid trips and schizophrenia. Psychic contact
with them when the ego wall breaks. That's where the Illuminati were sending you when we raided
their fake Playboy Club and short-circuited the process."
"Du hexen Hase," Saul quoted. And he began to tremble.
UNHEIMLICH. Urvater whose art's uneven, horrid be thine aim. Harpoons in him, corpus whalem:
take ye and hate.
Fernando Poo was given prominent attention in the world press only once before the notorious
Fernando Poo Incident. It occurred in the early 1970s (while Captain Tequilla y Mota was first
studying the art of the Coup d'Etat and laying his first plans,) and was occasioned by the outrageous
claims of the anthropologist J. N. Marsh, of Miskatonic University, that artifacts he had found on
Fernando Poo proved the existence of the lost continent of Atlantis. Although Professor Marsh had
an impeccable reputation for scholarly caution and scientific rigor before this, his last published
book, Atlantis and Its Gods, was greeted with mockery and derision by his professional colleagues,
especially after his theories were picked up and sensationalized by the press. Many of the old man's
friends, in fact, blame this campaign of ridicule for his disappearance a few months later, which they
suspect was the suicide of a broken-hearted and sincere searcher after truth.
Not only were Marsh's theories now beyond all scientific credibility, but his methods— such as
quoting Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross or Graves' The White Goddess as if they were
as reputable as Boas, Mead, or Frazer— seemed to indicate senility. This impression was increased
by the eccentric dedication "To Ezra Pound, Jacques De Molay and Emperor Norton I." The real
scientific scandal was not the theory of Atlantis (that was a bee that had haunted many a scholarly
bonnet) but Marsh's claim that the gods of Atlantis actually existed; not as supernatural beings, of
course, but as a superior class of life, now extinct, which had preexisted mankind and duped the
earliest civilization into worshiping them as divine and offering terrible sacrifices at their altars. That
there was absolutely no archaeological or paleontological evidence that such beings ever existed, was
the mildest of the scholarly criticisms aimed at this hypothesis.
Professor Marsh's rapid decline, in the few months between the book's unanimous rejection by the
learned world and his sudden disappearance, caused great pain to colleagues at Miskatonic. Many
recognized that he had acquired some of his notions from Dr. Henry Armitage, generally regarded as
having gone somewhat bananas after too many years devoted to puzzling out the obscene
metaphysics of the Necronomicon. When the librarian Miss Horus mentioned at a faculty tea shortly
after the disappearance that Marsh had spent much of the past month with that volume, one Catholic
professor urged, only half-jokingly, that Miskatonic should rid itself of scandals once and for all by
presenting "that damned book" (he emphasized the word very deliberately) to Harvard.
Missing Persons Department of the Arkham police assigned the Marsh case to a young detective who
had previously distinguished himself by tracing several missing infants to one of the particularly vile
Satanist cults that have festered in that town since the witch-hunting days of 1692. His first act was
to examine the manuscript on which the old man had been working since the completion of "Atlantis
and Its Gods." It seemed to be a shortish essay, intended for an anthropological magazine, and was
quite conservative in tone and concept, as if the professor regretted the boldness of his previous
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speculations. Only one footnote, expressing guarded and qualified endorsement of Urqhuart's theory
about Wales being settled by survivors from Mu, showed the bizarre preoccupations of the Atlantis
book. However, the final sheet was not related to this article at all and seemed to be notes for a piece
which the Professor evidently intended to submit, brazenly and in total contempt of academic
opinion, to a pulp publication devoted to flying saucers and occultism. The detective puzzled over
these notes for a long time:
The usual hoax: fiction presented as fact. This hoax described here opposite to this: fact
presented as fiction.
Huysmans' La-Bas started it, turns the Satanist into hero.
Machen in Paris 1880s, met with Huysman's circle.
"Dols" and "Aklo letters" in Machen's subsequent "fiction."
Same years: Bierce and Chambers both mention Lake of Hali and Carcosa. Allegedly,
coincidence.
Crowley recruiting his occult circle after 1900.
Bierce disappears in 1913.
Lovecraft introduces Halt, dols, Aklo, Cthulhu after 1923.
Lovecraft dies unexpectedly, 1937.
Seabrook discusses Crowley, Machen, etc. in his "Witchcraft," 1940.
Seabrook's "suicide," 1942.
Emphasize: Bierce describes Oedipus Complex in "Death of Halpin Frazer," BEFORE
Freud, and relativity in "Inhabitant of Carcosa," BEFORE Einstein. Lovecraft's
ambiguous descriptions of Azathoth as "blind idiot-god," "Demon-Sultan" and "nuclear
chaos" circa 1930: fifteen years before Hiroshima.
Direct drug references in Chambers' "King in Yellow," Machen's 'White Powder,"
Lovecraffs "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" and "Mountains of Madness."
The appetites of the Lloigor or Old Ones in Bierce's "Damned Thing." Machen's "Black
Stone," Love-craft (constantly.)
Atlantis known as Thule both in German and Panama Indian lore, and of course,
"coincidence" again the accepted explanation. Opening sentence for article: "The more
frequently one uses the word 'coincidence' to explain bizarre happenings, the more
obvious it becomes that one is not seeking, but evading, the real explanation." Or,
shorter: "The belief in coincidence is the prevalent superstition of the Age of Science."
The detective then spent an afternoon at Miskatonic library, browsing through the writings of
Ambrose Bierce, J-K Huysmans, Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, and H. P. Lovecraft. He
found that all repeated certain key words; dealt with lost continents or lost cities; described
superhuman beings trying to misuse or victimize mankind in some unspecified manner; suggested
that there was a cult, or group of cults, among mankind who served these beings; and described
certain books (usually not giving their titles: Lovecraft was an exception) that reveal the secrets of
these beings. With a little further research, he found that the occult and Satanist circles in Paris in the
1880s had influenced the fiction of both Huysmans and Machen, as well as the career of the
egregious Aleistair Crowley, and that Seabrook (who knew Crowley) hinted at more than he stated
outright in his book on Witchcraft, published two years before his suicide. He then wrote a little
table:
Huysmans—hysteria, complaints about occult attacks, final seclusion in a monastery.
Chambers—abandons such subjects, turns to light romantic fiction.
Bierce—disappears mysteriously. Lovecraft—dead at an early age. Crowley—hounded
into silence and obscurity. Machen—becomes a devout Catholic. (Huysmans' escape?)
Seabrook—alleged suicide.
The detective then went back and reread, not skimming this time, the stories by these writers in
which drugs were specifically mentioned, according to Marsh's notes. He now had a hypothesis: the
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old man had been lured into a drug cult, as had these writers, and had been terrified by his own
hallucinations, finally ending his own life to escape the phantoms his own narcotic-fogged brain had
created. It was a good enough theory to start with, and the detective conscientiously set about
interviewing every friend on campus of old Marsh, leading into the subject of grass and LSD very
slowly and indirectly. He made no headway and was beginning to lose his conviction when good
fortune struck, in the form of a remark by another anthropology professor about Marsh's
preoccupation in recent years with amanita muscaria, the hallucinogenic mushroom used in ancient
Near Eastern religions.
"A very interesting fungus, amanita," this professor told the detective. "Some sensationalists without
scholarly caution have claimed it was every magic potion in ancient lore: the soma of the Hindus, the
sacrament used in the Dionysian and Eleusinian mysteries in Greece, even the Holy Communion of
the earliest Christians and Gnostics. One chap in England even claims amanita, and not hashish, was
the drug used by the Assassins in the Middle Ages, and there's a psychiatrist in New York, Puharich,
who claims it actually does induce telepathy. Most of that is rubbish, of course, but amanita certainly
is the strongest mind-altering drug in the world. If the kids ever latch onto it, LSD will seem like a
tempest in a teapot by comparison."
The detective now concentrated on finding somebody— anybody— who had actually seen old
Marsh when he was stoned out of his gourd. The testimony finally came from a young black student
named Pearson, who was majoring in anthropology and minoring in music. "Excited and euphoric?
Yeah," he said thoughtfully. "I saw old Joshua that way once. It was in the library of all places—
that's where my girl works— and the old man jumped up from a table grinning about a yard wide and
said out loud, but talking to himself, you know, 'I saw them— I saw the fnords!' Then he ran out like
Jesse Owens going to get his ashes hauled. I was curious and went over to peek at what he'd been
reading. It was the New York Times editorial page, and not a picture on it, so he certainly didn't see
the fnords, whatever the hell they are, there. You think he was maybe bombed a little?"
"Maybe, maybe not," the detective said noncommittally, obeying the police rule of never accusing
anyone of anything in hearing of a witness unless ready to make an arrest. But he was already quite
sure that Professor Marsh would never reappear to be subject to arrest or any other harassment by
those who had not entered his special world of lost civilizations, vanished cities, lloigors, dols, and
fnords. To this day, the file on the Joshua N. Marsh case in the Arkham police department bears the
closing line: "Probable cause of death: suicide during drug psychosis." Nobody ever traced the
change in Professor Marsh back to a KCUF meeting in Chicago and a strangely spiked punch; but
the young detective, Daniel Pricefixer, always retained a nagging doubt and a shapeless disquiet
about this particular investigation, and even after he moved to New York and went to work for
Barney Muldoon, he was still addicted to reading books on pre-history and thinking strange thoughts.
SIMON MAGUS. You will come to know gods.
After the disappearance of Saul Goodman and Barney Muldoon, the FBI went over the Malik
apartment with a fine-tooth comb. Everything was photographed, fingerprinted, analyzed,
catalogued, and where possible shipped back to the crime laboratory in Washington. Among the
items was a short note on the back of a Playboy Club lunch receipt, not in Malik's handwriting,
which meant nothing to anybody and was included only for the sake of the completeness so loved by
the Bureau.
The note said:
"Machen's dols = Lovecraft's dholes?"
VECTORS. You will come to no gods.
On April 25, most of New York was talking about the incredible event that had occurred shortly
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before dawn at the Long Island mansion of the nation's best-known philanthropist, Robert Putney
Drake. Danny Pricefixer of the Bomb Squad, however, was almost oblivious of this bizarre
occurrence, as he drove through heavy traffic from one part of Manhattan to another interviewing
every witness who might have spoken to Joseph Malik in the week before the Confrontation
explosion. The results were uniformly disappointing: aside from the fact that Malik had grown
increasingly secretive in recent years, none of the interviews seemed to provide any useful
information. A killer smog had again settled on the city, for the seventh straight day, and Danny, a
nonsmoker, was very aware of the wheeze in his chest, which did nothing to improve his mood.
Finally, at three in the afternoon, he left the office of ORGASM at 110 West Fortieth Street (an
associate editor there was an old friend of Malik's and frequently lunched with him, but had nothing
substantial to offer in leads) and remembered that the main branch of the New York Public Library
was only half a block away. The hunch had been in the back of his mind, he realized, ever since he
glanced at Malik's weird Illuminati memos. What the hell, he thought, it'll only be a few more wasted
minutes in a wasted day.
For once, the congestion at the window in the main reference room was not quite as bad as a Canal
Street traffic jam. Atlantis and Its Gods by Professor J. N. Marsh was delivered to him in seventeen
minutes, and he began leafing through it looking for the passage he vaguely remembered. At last, on
page 123, he found it:
Hans Stefan Santesson points out the basic similarity of Mayan and Egyptian investiture
rituals, as previously indicated in Colonel Churchward's insightful but wrongheaded
books on the lost continent of Mu. As we have demonstrated, Churchward's obsession
with the Pacific, based on his having received his first clues about our lost ancestors in
an Asiatic temple, led him to attribute to the fictitious Mu much of the real history of the
actual Atlantis. But this passage from Santesson's Understanding Mu (Paperback
Library, New York, 1970, page 117) needs little correction:
Next he was taken to the Throne of Regeneration of the Soul, and the
Ceremony of Investiture or Illumination took place. Then he experienced
further ordeals before attaining to the Chamber of the Orient, to the Throne
of Ra, to become truly a Master. He could see for himself in the distance the
uncreated light from which was pointed out the whole happiness of the
future ... In other words, as Churchward puts it, both in Egypt and in Maya
the initiate had to "sustain" (i.e., survive) "the fiery ordeal" to be approved
as an adept. The adept had to become justified. The justified must then
become illuminate. . . . The destruction of Mu was commemorated by the
possibly symbolic House of Fire of the Quiche Mayas and by the relatively
later Chamber of Central Fire of the Mysteries which we are told were
celebrated in the Great Pyramid.
Substituting Atlantis for Mu, Churchward and Santesson are basically correct. The god,
of course, could choose the shape in which He would appear in the final ordeal, and,
since these gods, or lloigor in the Atlantean language, possessed telepathy, they would
read the initiate's mind and manifest in the form most terrifying to the specific
individual, although the shoggoth form and the classic Angry Giant form such as
appears in Aztec statues of Tlaloc were most common. To employ an amusing conceit, if
these beings had survived to our time, as some occultists claim, they would appear to the
average American as, say, King Kong or, perhaps, Dracula or the Wolf-Man.
The sacrifices demanded by these creatures evidently contributed significantly to the fall
of Atlantis, and we can conjecture that the mass burnings practiced by the Celts at
Beltain and even the Aztec religion, which turned their altars into abattoirs, were minor
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in comparison, being merely the result of persistent tradition after the real menace of the
lloigor had vanished. We, of course, cannot fully understand the purpose of these bloody
rituals, since we cannot fathom the nature, or even the sort of matter or energy, that
comprised the lloigor. That the chief of these beings, is known in the Pnakotic
Manuscripts and the Eltdown Shards as lok-Sotot, "Eater of Souls," suggests that it was
some energy or psychic vibration of the dying victim that the lloigor needed; the
physical body was, as in the case of the corpse-eating cult of Leng, consumed by the
priests themselves, or merely thrown away, as among the Thuggee of India.
Thoughtfully and quietly, Danny Pricefixer returned the book to the clerk at the checkout window.
Thoughtfully and quietly, he walked out on Fifth Avenue and stood between the two guardian lions.
Who was it, he wondered, who had asked, "Since nobody wants war, why do wars keep happening?"
He looked at the killer smog around him and asked himself another riddle, "Since nobody wants air
pollution, why does air pollution keep increasing?"
Professor Marsh's words came back to him: "if these beings had survived to our time, as some
occultists claim...."
Walking toward his car, he passed a newsstand and saw that the disaster at the Drake Mansion was
still the biggest headline even in the afternoon editions. It was irrelevant to his problem, however, so
he ignored it.
Sherri Brandi continued the chant in her mind, maintaining the rhythm of her mouth movements . . .
fifty-three-big rhinoceroses, fifty-four big rhinoceroses, fifty-five—Camel's nails dug into her
shoulders suddenly and the salty gush splashed hot on her tongue. Thank the Lord, she thought, the
bastard finally made it. Her jaw was tired and she had a crick in her neck and her knees hurt, but at
least the son-of-a-bitch would be in a good mood now and wouldn't beat her up for having so little to
report about Charley and his bugs.
She stood up, stretching her leg and neck muscles to remove the cramps, and looked down to see if
any of Car-mel's come had dribbled on her dress. Most men wanted her naked during a blow job, but
not creepy Carmel; he insisted she wear her best gown, always. He liked soiling her, she realized;
but, hell, he wasn't as bad as some pimps and we've all got to get our kicks some way.
Carmel sprawled back in the easy chair, his eyes still closed. Sherri fetched the towel she had been
warming over the radiator and completed the transaction, drying him and gently kissing his ugly
wand before tucking it back inside his fly and zippering him up. He does look like a gaddam frog,
she thought bitterly, or a nasty-tempered chipmunk.
"Terrif," he said finally. The johns really get their money's worth from you, kid. Now tell me about
Charley and his bugs."
Sherri, still feeling cramped, pulled over a footstool and perched on its edge. "Well," she said, "you
know I gotta be careful. If he knows I'm pumping him, he might drop me and take up with some
other girl..."
"So you were too damn cautious and you didn't get anything out of him?" Carmel interrupted
accusingly.
"Oh, he's over the loop," she answered, still vague. "I mean, really crazy now. That must be... uh,
important... if you have to deal with him..." She came back into focus. "How I know is, he thinks he's
going to other planets in his dreams. Some planet called Atlantis. Do you know which one that is?"
Carmel frowned. This was getting stickier: first, find a commie: then, find out how to get the info out
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 185 von 470
of Charley despite the FBI and CIA and all the other government people; and now, how to deal with
a maniac... He looked up and saw that she was out of focus again, staring into space. Dopey broad,
he thought, and then watched as she slid slowly off the stool onto a neat sleeping position on the
floor.
"What the hell?" he said out loud.
When he knelt next to her and listened for her heart, his own face paled. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, he
thought standing up, now I got to get rid of a fucking corpus delectus. The damned bitch went and
died.
"I can see the fnords!" Barney Muldoon cried, looking up from the Miami Herald with a happy grin.
Joe Malik smiled contentedly. It had been a hectic day- especially since Hagbard had been tied up
with the battle of Atlantis and the initiation of George Dorn- but now, at last, he had the feeling their
side was winning. Two minds set on a death trip by the Illuminati had been successfully saved. Now
if everything worked out right between George and Robert Putney Drake...
The intercom buzzed and Joe answered, calling across the room without rising, "Malik."
"How's Muldoon?" Hagbard's voice asked.
"Coming all the way. He sees the fnords in a Miami paper."
"Excellent," Hagbard said dustractedly. "Mavis reports that Saul is all the way through, too, and just
saw the fnords in the New York Times. Bring Muldoon up to my room. We've located that other
problem- the sickness vibrations that FUCKUP has been scanning since March. It's somewhere
around Las Vegas and it's at a critical stage. We think there's been one death already."
"But we've got to get to Ingolstadt before Walpurgia night..." Joe said thoughtfully.
"Revise and rewrite," Hagbard said. "Some of us will go to Ingolstadt. Some of us will have to go to
Las Vegas. It's the old Illuminati one-two punch- two attacks from different directions. Get your
asses in gear, boys. They're immanentizing the Eschaton."
WEISHAUPT. Fnords? Prffft!
Another interruption. This time it was the Mothers March Against Muzak. Since that
seems to be the most worthwhile cause I've been approached for all day, I gave the lady
$1. I think that if Muzak can be stamped out, alot of our other ailments will disappear
too, since they're probably stress symptoms, caused by noise pollution.
Anyway, it's getting late and I might as well conclude this. One month before our KCUF
experiment- that is, on September 23, 1970- Timothy Leary passed five federal agents at
O'Hare Airport here in Chicago. He had vowed to shoot rather than go back to jail, and
there was a gun in his pocket. None of them recognized him... And, oh, yes, there was a
policeman named Timothy O'Leary in the hospital room where Dutch Schultz dies on
October 23, 1935.
I've been saving the best for last. Aldous Huxley, the first major literary figure
illuminated by Leary, died the same day as John F. Kennedy. The last essay he wrote
revolved around Shakespeare's phrase, "Time must have a stop"- which he had
previously used for the title of a novel about life after death. "Life is an illusion," he
wrote, "but an illusion which we must take seriously." Two years later, Laura, Huxley's
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widow, met the medium, Keith Milton Rhinehart. As she tells the story in her book, This
Timeless Moment, when she asked if Rinehart could contact Aldous, he replied that
Aldous wanted to transmit "classical evidence of survival," a message, that is, which
could not be explained "merely" as telepathy, as something Rinehart picked out of her
mind. It had to be something that could only come from Aldous's mind.
Later that evening, Rinehart produced it: instructions to go to a room in her house, a
room he hadn't seen and find a particular book, which neither he nor she was familiar
with. She was to look on a certain page and a certain line. The book was one Aldous had
read but she had never even glanced at; it was an anthology of literary criticism. The line
indicated—I have memorized it— was: "Aldous Huxley does not surprise us in this
admirable communication in which paradox and erudition in the poetic sense and the
sense of humor are interlaced in such an efficacious form." Need I add that the page was
17 and the line was, of course, line 23?
(I suppose you've read Seutonius and know that the late J. Caesar was rendered exactly
23 stab wounds by Brutus and Co.)
Brace yourself, Joe. Worse attacks on your Reason are coming along. Soon, you'll see
the fnords.
Hail Eris,
p.s. Your question about the vibes and telepathy is easily answered. The energy is
always moving in us, through us, and out of us. That's why the vibes have to be right
before you can read someone without static. Every emotion is a motion.
The Golden Apple
There is no god but man.
Man has the right to live by his own law— to live in the way that he wills to do; to work
as he will; to play as he will; to rest as he will; to die when and how he will.
Man has the right to eat what he will; to drink what he will; to dwell where he will; to
move as he will on the face of the earth.
Man has the right to think what he will; to speak what he will; to write what he will; to
draw, paint, carve, etch, mold, build as he will; to dress as he will.
Man has the right to love as he will.
Man has the right to kill those who thwart these rights.
—The Equinox: A Journal of Scientific Illuminism, 1922 (edited by Aleister Crowley)
BOOK THREE: UNORDNUNG
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Believe not one word that is written in The Honest Book of Truth by Lord Omar nor any
that be in Principia Discordia by Malaclypse the Younger; for all that is there contained
are the most pernicious and deceptive truths.
—"Epistle to the Episkopi," The Dishonest Book of Lies, by Mordecai Malignatus,
K.N.S.
THE SIXTH TRIP, OR TIPARETH
(THE MAN WHO MURDERED GOD)
To choose order over disorder, or disorder over order, is to accept a trip composed of
both the creative and the destructive. But to choose the creative over the destructive is an
all-creative trip composed of both order and disorder. —"The Curse of Grayface and the
Introduction of Negativism," Principia Discordia, by Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C.
April 25 began, for John Dillinger, with a quick skimming of the New York Times; he noticed more
fnords than usual. "The fit's about to hit the shan," he thought grimly, turning on the eight o'clock
news— only to catch the story about the Drake Mansion, another bad sign. In Las Vegas, in rooms
where the light never changed, none of the gamblers noticed that it was now morning; but Carmel,
returning from the desert, where he had buried Sherri Brandi, drove out of his way to look over Dr.
Charles Mocenigo's home, hoping to see or hear something helpful; he heard only a revolver shot,
and quickly sped away. Looking back, he saw flames leaping toward the sky. And, over the mid-
Atlantic, R. Buckminster Fuller glanced at his three watches, noting that it was two in the morning
on the plane, midnight at his destination (Nairobi) and 6 A.M. back home in Carbondale, Illinois. (In
Nairobi itself, Nkrumah Fubar, maker of voodoo dolls that caused headaches to the President of the
United States, prepared for bed, looking forward to Mr. Fuller's lecture at the university next
morning. Mr. Fubar, in his sophisticated-primitive way, like Simon Moon in his primitivesophisticated
way, saw no conflict between magic and mathematics.)
In Washington, D.C., the clocks were striking five when Ben Volpe's stolen Volkswagen pulled up in
front of the home of Senator Edward Coke Bacon, the nation's most distinguished liberal and leading
hope of all those young people who hadn't yet joined Morituri groups. "In quick and out quick," Ben
Volpe said tersely to his companions, "a cowboy." Senator Bacon turned in his bed (Albert "the
Teacher" Stern fires directly at the Dutchman) and mumbled, "Newark." Beside him, his wife half
woke and heard a noise in the garden (Mama mama mama, the Dutchman mumbles): "Mama," she
hears her son's voice saying, as she sinks back toward a dream. The rain of bullets jolts her awake
into a sea of blood and in one flash she sees her husband dying beside her, her son twenty years ago
weeping for a dead turtle, the face of Mendy Weiss, and Ben Volpe and two others backing out of
the room.
But, in 1936, when Robert Putney Drake returned from Europe to accept a vice presidency in his
father's bank in Boston, the police already knew that Albert the Teacher really hadn't shot the
Dutchman. There were even a few, such as Elliot Ness, who knew the orders had come from Mr.
Lucky Luciano and Mr. Alphonse "Scarface" Capone (residing in Atlanta Penitentiary) and had been
transmitted through Federico Maldonado. Nobody, outside the Syndicate itself, however, could name
Jimmy the Shrew, Charley the Bug and Mendy Weiss as the actual killers— nobody except Robert
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Putney Drake.
On April 1, 1936, Federico Maldonado's phone rang and, when he answered it, a cultivated Boston
voice said conversationally, "Mother is the best bet. Don't let Satan draw you too fast." This was
followed by an immediate click as the caller hung up.
Maldonado thought about it all day and finally mentioned it to a very close friend that evening.
"Some nut calls me up today and gives me part of what the Dutchman told the cops before he died.
Funny thing about it— he gives one of the parts that would really sink us all, if anybody in the police
or the Feds could understand it."
"That's the way some nuts are," pronounced the other Mafioso don, an elegant elderly gentleman
resembling one of Frederick II's falcons. "They're tuned in like gypsies. Telepathy, you know? But
they get it all scrambled because they're nuts."
"Yeah, I guess that's it," Maldonado agreed. He had a crazy uncle who would sometimes blurt out a
Brotherhood secret that he couldn't possibly know, in the middle of ramblings about priests making it
with altar boys and Mussolini hiding on the fire escape and nonsense like that. "They tune in— like
the Eye, eh?" And he laughed.
But the next morning, the phone rang again, and the same voice said with elaborate New England
intonation, "Those dirty rats have tuned in. French Canadian bean soup." Maldonado broke into a
cold sweat; it was that moment, in fact, when he decided his son, the priest, would say a mass for the
Dutchman every Sunday.
He thought about it all day. Boston— the accent was Boston. They had witches up there once.
French Canadian bean soup. Christ, Harvard is just outside Boston and Hoover is recruiting Feds
from the Harvard Law School. Were there lawyers who were witches, too? Cowboy the son of a
bitch, I told them, and they found him in the men's crapper. That damned Dutchman. A bullet in his
gut and he lives long enough to blab everything about the Segreto. The goddam tedeschi . . .
Robert Putney Drake dined on lobster Newburg that evening with a young lady from one of the
lesser-known branches of the House of Morgan. Afterward, he took her to see Tobacco Road and, in
the cab back to his hotel, they talked seriously about the sufferings of the poor and the power of
Henry Hull's performance as Jeeter. Then he took her up to his room and fucked her from hell to
breakfast. At ten in the morning, after she had left, he came out of the shower, stark naked, thirtythree
years old, rich, handsome, feeling like a healthy and happy predatory mammal. He looked
down at his penis, thought of snakes in mescaline visions back in Zurich and donned a bathrobe
which cost enough to feed one of the starving families in the nearby slums for about six months. He
lit a fat Cuban cigar and sat down by the phone, a male mammal, predatory, happy. He began to dial,
listening to the clicks, the dot and the dot and the dot-dot, remembering the perfume his mother had
worn leaning over his crib one night thirty-two years ago, the smell of her breasts, and the time he
experimentally tried homosexuality in Boston Common with the pale faggot kneeling before him in
the toilet stall and the smell of urine and Lysol disinfectant, the scrawl on the door saying
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT SUCKS and his instant fantasy that it wasn't a faggot genuflecting in
church before his hot hard prick but the President's wife . . . "Yes?" said the taut, angry voice of
Banana Nose Maldonado.
"When I reached the can, the boy came at me," Drake drawled, his mild erection becoming warm and
rubbery. "What happened to the other sixteen?" He hung up quickly. ("The analysis is brilliant,"
Professor Tochus at Harvard had said of his paper on the last words of Dutch Schultz. "I particularly
like the way you've combined both Freud and Adler in finding sexuality and power drives expressed
in the same image at certain places. That is quite original." Drake laughed and said: "The Marquis de
Sade anticipated me by a century and a half, I fear. Power— and possession— are sexual, to some
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males.")
Drake's brilliance had also been noted by Jung's circle in Zurich. Once— when Drake was off taking
mescaline with Paul Klee and friends on what they called their Journey to the East— Drake had
been a topic of long and puzzled conversation in lung's study. "We haven't seen his like since Joyce
was here," one woman psychiatrist commented. "He is brilliant, yes," Jung said sadly, "but evil. So
evil that I despair of comprehending him. I even wonder what old Freud would think. This man
doesn't want to murder his father and possess his mother; he wants to murder God and possess the
cosmos."
Maldonado got two phone calls the third morning. The first was from Louis Lepke, and was crudely
vehement: "What's up, Banana Nose?" The insult of using the forbidden nickname in personal
conversation was deliberate and almost unforgivable, but Maldonado forgave it.
"You spotted my boys following you, eh?" he asked genially.
"I spotted your soldiers," Lepke emphasized the word, "and that means you wanted me to spot them.
What's up? You know if I get hit, you get hit."
"You won't get hit, caromio," Don Federico replied, still cordial. "I had a crazy idea about something
I thought might be coming from inside and you're the only one who would know enough to do it, I
thought. I was wrong. I can tell by your voice. And if I was right, you wouldn't have called me. A
million apologies. Nobody will be following you anymore. Except maybe Tom Dewey's
investigators, eh?" he laughed.
"Okay," Lepke said slowly, "Call them off, and I'll forget it. But don't try to scare me again. I do
crazy things when I'm scared."
"Never again," Maldonado promised.
He sat frowning at the phone, after Lepke hung up. Now I owe him, he thought. I'll have to arrange
to bump off somebody who's annoying him, to show the proper and most courteous apology.
But, Virgin Mother, if it isn't the Butcher, who is it? A real witch?
The phone rang again. Crossing himself and calling on the Virgin silently, Maldonado lifted the
receiver.
"Let him harness himself to you and then bother you," Robert Putney Drake quoted pleasantly, "fun
is fun." He did not hang up.
"Listen," Don Federico said, "who is this?"
"Dutch died three times," Drake said in a sepulchral tone. "When Mendy Weiss shot him, when
Vince Coil's ghost shot him and when that dumb junkie, the Teacher, shot him. But Dillinger never
even died once."
"Mister, you got a deal," Maldonado said. "I'm sold. I'll meet you anywhere. In broad daylight. In
Central Park. Any place you'll feel safe."
"No, you will not meet me just now," Drake said coolly. "You are going to discuss this with Mr.
Lepke and Mr. Capone, first. You will also discuss it with—" he read, off a card in his hand, fifteen
names. "Then, after you have all had time to consider it, you will be hearing from me." Drake farted,
as he always did in the nervous moments when an important deal was being arranged, and hung up
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quickly.
Now, he said to himself, insurance.
A photostat of his second analysis of the last words of Dutch Schultz— the private one, not the
public version which he had turned in to the Department of Psychology at Harvard— was on the
hotel desk before him. He folded it smartly and pinned on top of it a note saying, "There are five
copies in the vaults of five different banks." He then inserted it in an envelope, addressed it to
Luciano and strolled out to drop it down the hotel mail chute.
Returning to his room he dialed Louis Lepke, born Louis Buchalter, of the organization later to be
named Murder Inc. by the sensational press. When Lepke answered, Drake recited solemnly, still
quoting the Dutchman, "I get a month. They did it. Come on, Illuminati."
"Who the hell is this?" Lepke's voice cried as Drake gently cradled the phone. A few moments later,
he completed checking out of the hotel and flew home on the noon flight, to spend five grueling
twenty-hour days reorganizing and streamlining his father's bank. On the fifth night he relaxed and
took a young lady of the Lodge family to dance to Ted Weems's orchestra and listen to their new
young vocalist, Perry Como. Afterwards, he fucked her thirteen to the dozen and seven ways to a
Sunday. The next morning, he took out a small book, in which he had systematically listed all the
richest families in America, and placed her first name and a check after Lodge, as he had done with
Morgan the week before. A Rockefeller would be next.
He was on the noon flight to New York and spent the day negotiating with Morgan Trust officials.
That night he saw a breadline on Fortieth Street and became profoundly agitated. Back in his hotel,
he made one of his rare, almost furtive diary entries:
Revolution could occur at any time.
If Huey Long hadn't been shot last year, we might have it already. If Capone had let the
Dutchman hit Dewey, the Justice Department would be strong enough now, due to the
reaction, to ensure that the State would be secure. If Roosevelt can't maneuver us into
the war when it starts, all will be lost. And the war may be three or four years away yet.
If we could bring Dillinger back, the reaction might strengthen Hoover and Justice, but
John seems to be with the other side. My plan may be the last chance, and the Illuminati
haven't contacted me yet, although they must have tuned in. Oh, Weishaupt, what a
spawn of muddleheads are trying to carry on your work.
He tore the page out nervously, farted and crumbled it in the ashtray, where he burned it slowly.
Then, still agitated, he dialed Mr. Charles Luciano on the phone and said softly, "I am a pretty good
pretzler, Winifred. Department of Justice. I even got it from the department."
"Don't hang up," Luciano said softly. "We've been waiting to hear from you. Are you still there?"
"Yes," Drake said carefully, with tight lips and a tighter sphincter.
"Okay," Mr. Lucky said. "You know about the Illuminati. You know what the Dutchman was trying
to say to the police. You even seem to know about the Liberteri and Johnnie Dillinger. How much do
you want?"
"Everything," Drake replied. "And you are all going to offer it to me. But not yet. Not tonight." And
he hung up.
(The wheel of tune, as the Mayans knew, spins three ways; and just as the earth revolves on its own
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axis, simultaneously orbits about the sun and at the "same" time trails after the sun as that star
traverses the galaxy's edge, the wheel of time, which is a wheel of ifs, is come round again, as
Drake's phone clicks off, to Gruad the Grayface calculating the path of a comet and telling his
followers: "See? Even the heavenly bodies are subject to law, and even the lloigor, so must not men
and women also be subject to law?" And in a smaller cycle, Semper Cuni Linctus, centurion
stationed in a godforsaken outpost of the Empire, listens in boredom as a subaltern tells him
excitedly: "That guy we crucified last Friday—people all over town are swearing they've seen him
walking around. One guy even claims to have put a hand through his side!" Semper Cuni Linctus
smiles cynically. "Tell that to the gladiators," he says. And Albert Stern turns on the gas, takes one
last fix, and full of morphine and euphoria, dies slowly, confident that he will always be remembered
as the man who shot Dutch Schultz, not knowing that Abe Reles will reveal the truth five years
later.)
Camp-town racetrack five miles long... During Joe's second trip on the Leif Erikson, they went all the
way to Africa, and Hagbard had an important conference with five gorillas. At least, he said
afterwards that it was important; Joe couldn't judge, since the conversation was in Swahili. "They
speak some English," Hagbard explained back on the sub, "but I prefer Swahili, since they're more
eloquent in it and can express more nuances."
"Are you the first man to teach an ape to speak," Joe asked, "in addition to your other
accomplishments?"
"Oh, not at all," Hagbard said modestly. "It's an old Discordian secret. The first person to
communicate with a gorilla was an Erisian missionary named Malaclypse the Elder, who was born in
Athens and got exiled for opposing the imposition of male supremacy when the Athenians created
patriarchy and locked up their women. He then wandered all over the ancient world, learning all sorts
of secrets and leaving behind a priceless collection of mind-blowing legends— he's the Phoenix
Madman mentioned in the Confucian scriptures, and he passed himself off as Krishna to recite that
gorgeous Bible of revolutionary ethics, the Bhaga-vad Gita, to Arjuna in India, among other feats. I
believe you met him in Chicago while he was pretending to be the Christian Devil."
"But how have you Discordians concealed the fact that gorillas talk?"
"We're rather close-mouthed, you might say, and when we do speak it's usually to put somebody on
or blow their minds—"
"I've noticed that," Joe said.
"And the gorillas themselves are too shrewd to talk to anybody but another anarchist. They're all
anarchists themselves, you know, and they have a very healthy wariness about people in general and
government people in particular. As one of them told me once, 'If it got out that we can talk, the
conservatives would exterminate most of us and make the rest pay rent to live on our own land; and
the liberals would try to train us to be engine-lathe operators. Who the fuck wants to operate an
engine lathe?' They prefer their own pastoral and Eristic ways, and I, for one, would never interfere
with them. We do communicate, though, just as we communicate with the dolphins. Both species are
intelligent enough to realize that it's in their interest, as part of earth's biosphere, to help the handful
of human anarchists to try to stop, or at least slow down, the bloodletting and slaughter of our Aneristic
rulers and Aneristic mobs."
"Sometimes I still get confused about your theological terms— or are they psychological? The
Aneristic forces, especially the Illuminati, are structure freaks: they want to impose their concept of
order on everybody else. But I still get confused about the differences between the Erisian, the Eristic
and the Discordian. Not to mention the JAMs."
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"The Eristic is the opposite of the Aneristic," Hagbard explained patiently, "and, therefore, identical
with it. Remember the Hodge-Podge. Writers like De Sade, Max Stirner and Nietzsche are Eristic; so
are the gorillas. They represent total supremacy of the individual, total negation of the group. It isn't
necessarily the war-of-all-against-all, as Aneristic philosophers imagine, but it can, under stress,
degenerate into that. More often, it's quite pacifistic, like our hairy friends in the trees back there.
The Erisian position is modified; it recognizes that Aneristic forces are part of the world drama, too,
and can never be totally abolished. We merely stress the Eristic as a balance, because human society
has been tilted grotesquely toward the Aneristic side all through the Piscean age. We Discordians are
the activists in the Erisian movement; we do things. The pure Erisians work in more mysterious
ways, in accordance with the Taoist principle of wu-wei- doing nothing effectively. The JAMs are
left-wingers, who might have become Aneristic except for special circumstances that led them in a
libertarian direction. But they've fucked it all up with typical left-wing hatred trips. They haven't
mastered the Gita: the art of fighting with a loving heart."
"Strange," Joe said. "Dr. Iggy, in the San Francisco JAM cabal, explained it to me differently."
"What would you expect?" Hagbard replied. "No two who know, know the same in their knowing.
By the way, why haven't you told me that you're sure those gorillas back there were just men I
dressed up in gorilla suits?"
"I'm becoming more gullible," Joe said.
"Too bad," Hagbard told him sadly. "They really were men in gorilla suits. I was testing how easily
you could be bamboozled, and you flunked."
"Now, wait a minute. They smelled like gorillas. That was no fake. You're putting me on now."
"That's right," Hagbard agreed. "I wanted to see if you'd trust your own senses or the word of a
Natural-Born Leader and Guru like me. You trusted your own senses, and you pass. My put -ons are
not just jokes, friend. The hardest thing for a man with dominance genes and piratical heredity like
me is to avoid becoming a goddam authority figure. I need all the feedback and information I can
get— from men, women, children, gorillas, dolphins, computers, any conscious entity— but nobody
contradicts an Authority, you know. Communication is possible only between equals: that's the first
theorem of social cybernetics— and the whole basis of anarchism— and I have to keep knocking
down people's dependence on me or I'll become a fucking Big Daddy and won't get accurate
communication anymore. If the pig-headed Illuminati and their Aneristic imitators in all the
governments, corporations, universities and armies of the world understood that simple principle,
they'd occasionally find out what's actually going on and stop screwing up every project they start. I
am Freeman Hagbard Celine and I am not anybody's bloody leader. As soon as you fully understand
that I'm your equal, and that my shit stinks just like yours, and that I need a lay every few .days or I
get grouchy and make dumb decisions, and that there is One more trustworthy than all the Buddhas
and sages but you have to find him for yourself, then you'll begin to understand what the Legion of
Dynamic Discord is all about."
"One more trustworthy than all the Buddhas and sages . . . ?" Joe repeated, finding himself most
confused when he had been closest to total comprehension a second earlier.
"To receive light you must be receptive," Hagbard said curtly. "Work that one out for yourself.
Meanwhile, take this back to New York and chew on it a bit." And he presented Joe with a book
entitled Never Whistle While You're Pissing: A Guide to Self-Liberation, by Hagbard Celine, H.M.,
S.H.
Joe read the book carefully in the following weeks— while Pat Walsh, in Confrontation's research
department, checked out every assertion about the Illuminati that Joe had picked up from Hagbard,
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Simon, Dillinger and Dr. Ignotius—but, although some of the book was brilliant, much was obscure,
and he found no clue to the One more trustworthy than all Buddhas. Then, one night high on
Alamout Black hashish, he started working on it with expanded and intensified consciousness.
Malaclypse the Elder? No, he was wise, and somewhat benevolent in a fey sort of style, but certainly
not trustworthy. Simon? For all his youth and nuttiness, he had moments of incredible perception,
but he was almost certainly less enlightened than Hagbard. Dillinger? Dr. Ignotius? The mysterious
Malaclypse the Younger, who had disappeared, leaving behind only the inscrutable Principia
Discordia?
Christ, Joe thought, what a male chauvinist I am! Why didn't I think of Stella? The old joke came
back to him . . . "Did you see God?" "Yes, and she's black." Of course. Hadn't Stella presided over
his initiation, in Dr. Iggy's chapel? Hadn't Hagbard said she would preside over George Dorn's
initiation, when George was ready? Of course.
Joe always remembered that moment of ecstasy and certainty: it taught him a lot about the use and
misuse of drugs and why the Illuminati went wrong. For the unconscious, which always tries to turn
every good lay into a mother figure, had contaminated the insight which his supraconscious had
almost given him. It was many months later, just before the Fernando Poo crisis, that he finally
discovered beyond all doubt the One who was more trustworthy than all Buddhas and all sages.
Do-da, do-da, do-da-do-da-DAY...
(And Semper Cuni Linctus, the very night that he reamed his subaltern for taking native superstitions
seriously, passed an olive garden and saw the Seventeen . . . and with them was the Eighteenth, the
one they had crucified the Friday before. Magna Mater, he swore, creeping closer, am I losing my
mind? The Eighteenth, whatshisname, the preacher, had set up a wheel and was distributing cards to
them. Now, he turned the wheel and called out the number at which it stopped. The centurion
watched, in growing amazement, as the process was repeated several times, and the cards were
marked each time the wheel stopped. Finally, the big one, Simon, shouted "Bingo!" The scion of the
noble Linctus family turned and fled . . . Behind him, the luminous figure said, "Do this in
commemoration of me."
"I thought we were supposed to do the bread and wine bit in commemoration of you?" Simon
objected.
"Do both," the ghostly one said. "The bread and wine is too symbolic and arcane for some folks. This
one is what will bring in the mob. You see, fellows, if you want to bring the Movement to the people,
you have to start from where the people are at. You, Luke, don't write that down. This is part of the
secret teachings.")
Slurp, slurp... Camp-town ladies sing this song....
(But how do you account for a man like Drake? one of Carl Jung's guests asked at the Sunday
afternoon Kaffeeklatsch where the strange young American had inspired so much speculation. Jung
sucked on 'his pipe thoughtfully— wondering, actually, how he could ever cure his associates of
treating him like a guru— and answered finally, "A fine mind strikes on an idea like the arrow hitting
bull's-eye. The Americans have not yet produced such a mind, because they are too assertive, too
outgoing. They land on an idea, even an important idea, like one of their fullbacks making a tackle.
Hence, they always crumple or cripple it. Drake has such a mind. He has learned everything about
power— more than Adler knows, for all his obsession on the subject— but he has not learned the
important thing. That is, of course, how to avoid power. What he needs, and will probably never
achieve, is religious humility. Impossible in his country, where even the introverts are extroverted
most of the time.")
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It was a famous novelist, who was later to win the Nobel Prize, who actually gave Drake his first
lead on what the Mafia always called il Segreto. They had been talking about Joyce and his
unfortunate daughter, and the novelist mentioned Joyce's attempts to convince himself that she
wasn't really schizophrenic. "He told Jung, 'After all, I do the same sorts of things with language
myself.' Do you know what Jung, that old Chinese sage disguised as a psychiatrist, answered? 'You
are diving, but she is sinking.' Incisive, of course; and yet, all of us who write anything that goes
below the surface of naturalism can understand Joyce's skepticism. We never know for sure whether
we're diving or just sinking."
That reminded Drake of his thesis, and he went and got the last words of Mr. Arthur Flegenheimer,
a.k.a. Dutch Schultz, from his bureau. He handed the sheets to the novelist and asked, "Would you
say the author of this was diving or sinking?"
The novelist read slowly, with increasing absorption, and finally looked up to regard Drake with
extremely curious eyes. "Is it a translation from the French?" he asked.
"No," Drake said. "The author was an American."
"So it's not poor Artaud. I thought it might be. He's been around the bend, as the English say, since
he went to Mexico. I understand he's currently working on some quite remarkable astrological charts
involving Chancellor Hitler." The novelist lapsed into silence, and then asked, "What do you regard
as the most interesting line in this?"
" 'A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim,' " Drake quoted, since that was the line that
bothered him most.
"Oh, that boy imagery is all personal, just repressed< homosexuality, quite ordinary," the novelist
said impatiently. " 'I was in the can and the boy came at me.' I think the author hurt the boy in some
way. All the references are tinged with more than normal homosexual guilt."
My God, Drake thought, Vince Coll. He was young enough to seem like a boy to Schultz. The
Dutchman thought Coil's ghost was shooting at him in that John in Newark.
"I would imagine the author killed himself, or is in a mental hospital by now," the novelist went on
thoughtfully.
"He's dead," Drake said grudgingly. "But I won't give you any more clues. It's fascinating to see how
well you're doing on your own."
"This is the interesting line," the novelist said. "Or three lines rather. 'I would hear it, the Circuit
Court would hear it, and the Supreme Court might hear it. If that ain't the payoff. Please crack down
on the Chinaman's friends and Hitler's commander.' You swear this author was American?"
"Well, he came of German ancestry," Drake said, thinking of Jung's theory of genetic memory. "But
Chancellor Hitler would hate to admit it. His people were not Aryan."
"He was Jewish?" the novelist exclaimed.
"What's so surprising about that?"
"Only that scarcely two or three people in the whole world, outside the inner circle of the Nazi Party,
would understand what was meant by the Chinaman and Hitler's commander. This author must have
delved very deeply into occult literature— things like Eliphas Levi, or Ludvig Prinn, or some of the
most closely guarded Rosicrucian secrets, and then made a perfectly amazing guess in the right
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direction."
"What in the world are you talking about?"
The novelist looked at Drake for a long time, then said, "I hate to even discuss it. Some things are too
vile. Some books, as your Mr. Poe said, should not allow themselves to be read. Even I have coded
things in my most famous work, which is admired for all the wrong reasons. In my search for the
mystical, I have learned things I would rather forget, and the real goal of Herr Hitler is one of those
things. But you must tell me: who was this remarkable author?"
("He just called me," Luciano told Maldonado, "and I got this much at least: he's not a shakedown
artist. He's aiming big, and he's big already himself. I'm getting my lawyer out of bed, to run down
all the best Boston families, and find one with a son who shows signs of having the old larceny in his
heart. I bet it's a banking family. I can hear money in a voice, and he has it.")
Drake was persistent, and finally the novelist said, "As you know, I refuse to live in Germany
because of what is happening there. Nevertheless, it is my home, and I do hear things. If I try to
explain, you must get your mind out of the arena of ordinary politics. When I say Hitler does have a
Master, that doesn't mean he is a front man in the pedestrian political sense." The novelist paused.
"How can I present the picture so you will understand it? You are not German . . . How can you
understand a people of whom it has been said, truthfully, that they have one foot in their own land
and one foot in Thule? Have you even heard of Thule? That's the German name for the fabulous
kingdom the Greeks called Atlantis. Whether this kingdom ever existed is immaterial; the belief in it
has existed since the dawn of history and beliefs motivate actions. In fact, you cannot understand a
man's actions unless you understand his beliefs."
The novelist paused again, and then began talking about the Golden Dawn Society in England in the
1890s. "Strange things were written by the members. Algernon Blackwood, for instance, wrote of
intelligent beings who preexisted mankind on earth. Can you take such a concept seriously? Can you
think about Black-wood's warnings, of his guarded phrases, such as, 'Of such great powers or beings
there may conceivably be a survival, of which poetry and legend alone caught a flying memory and
called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds'? Or, Arthur Machen, who wrote
of the 'miracles of Mons' during the Great War, describing the angels, as they were called, and
published this two days before the soldiers at the scene sent back reports of the incident. Machen was
in the Golden Dawn, and he left it to rejoin the Catholic Church, warning, 'There are sacraments of
Evil as well as of Good.' William Butler Yeats was a member, too, and you must certainly know his
remarkable lines, 'What rough beast/ Its hour come round at last/ Slouches toward Bethlehem to be
born?' And the Golden Dawn was just the outer portal of the Mysteries. The things that Crowley
learned after leaving the Golden Dawn and joining the Ordo Templi Orientis . . . Hitler suppressed
both the Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis, you know. He belonged to the Vril Society himself,
where the really extraterrestrial secrets are kept . . ."
"You seem to be having a hard time getting to the point," Drake said.
"Some things need to be approached in hints, even in allegories. You have taken mescaline with Klee
and his friends, and spent the night seeing the Great Visions. Do I need to remind you that reality is
not a one-level affair?"
"Very well," Drake said. "Behind the Golden Dawn and the OTO and the Vril Society is a hidden
group of real Initiates. There was a German branch of the Golden Dawn, and Hitler was a member.
You want me to understand that to treat these sacraments of Evil and these beings from Atlantis as
no more than fictions would be to oversimplify; is that right?"
"The Golden Dawn was founded by a German woman, carrying on a tradition that was already a
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hundred years old in Bavaria. As for these powers or beings from Thule, they do not exist in the
sense that bricks and beefsteak exist, either. The physicist, by manipulating these fantastic
electrons— which, I remind you, have to be imagined as moving from one place to another without
passing through any intervening space like a fairy or a ghost— produces real phenomena, visible to
the senses. Say, then, that by manipulating these beings or powers from Thule, certain men are able
to produce effects that can also be seen and experienced."
"What was the Golden Dawn?" Drake asked, absorbed. "How did it begin?"
"It's very old, more than medieval. The modern organization began in 1776, with a man who quit the
Jesuits because he thought he was an atheist, until his researches into Eastern history had surprising
results ..."
(It's him! Hitler screamed, He has come for me! And then, as Herman Rauschning recorded, "he
lapsed into gibberish." The boss himself, Dutch Schultz moaned, Oh, mama, I can't go through with
it. Please. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Take to the sword. Shut up. You got
a big mouth.)
We've got two real possibilities, Lepke's lawyer reported. But one of them is Boston Irish and what
you described was the old original Boston accent. The second one is probably your man, then. His
name is Robert Putney Drake.
Standing before the house on Benefit Street, Drake could see, across the town, the peak of Sentinel
Hill and the old deserted church that had harbored the Starry Wisdom Sect in the 1870s. He turned
back to the door and raised the old Georgian knocker (remembering: Lillibridge the reporter and
Blake the painter had both died investigating that sect), then rapped smartly three times.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, pale, gaunt, cadaverous, opened the door. "Mr. Drake?" he asked
genially.
"It was good of you to see me," Drake said.
"Nonsense," Lovecraft replied, ushering him into the Colonial hallway. "Any admirer of my poor
tales is always welcome here. They are so few that I could have them all here on a single day without
straining my aunt's dinner budget."
He may be one of the most important men alive, Drake thought, and he doesn't really suspect.
("He left Boston by train this morning," the soldier reported to Maldonado and Lepke. "He was going
to Providence, Rhode Island.")
"Of course, I have no hesitation in discussing it," Lovecraft said after he and Drake were settled in
the old book-lined study and Mrs. Gamhill had served them tea. "Whatever your friend in Zurich
may feel, I am and always have been a strict materialist."
"But you have been in touch with these people?"
"Oh, certainly, and an absurd lot they are, all of them. It began after I published a story called
'Dagon' in, let me see, 1919. I had been reading the Bible and the description of the Philistine sea
god, Dagon, reminded me of sea serpent legends and of the reconstructions of dinosaurs by
paleontologists. And the notion came to me: suppose Dagon were real, not a god, but simply a longlived
being vaguely related to the great saurians. Simply a story, to entertain those who enjoy the
weird and Gothic in literature. You can't imagine my astonishment when various occult groups began
contacting me, asking which group I belonged to and which side I was on. They were all terribly put
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out when I made perfectly clear that I didn't believe any such rubbish."
"But," Drake asked perplexed, "why did you pick up more and more of these hidden occult teachings
and incorporate them in your later stories?"
"I am an artist," Lovecraft said, "a mediocre artist, I fear— and don't contradict me. I value honesty
above all the other virtues. I would like to believe in the supernatural, in a world of social justice and
in my own possession of genius. But reason commands that I accept the facts: the world is made of
blind matter, the wicked and brutal always have and always will trample on the weak and innocent,
and I have a very microscopic capacity to create a small range of esthetic effects, all macabre and
limited in their appeal to a very special audience. Nevertheless, I would that things were otherwise.
Hence, although a conservative, I support certain social legislation that might improve the conditions
of the poor, and, although a poor writer, I try to elevate the status of my own wretched prose.
Vampires and ghosts and werewolves are worn out; they provoke chuckles rather than terror. Thus,
when I began to learn of the old lore, after 'Dagon' was published, I began to use it in my stories.
You can't imagine the hours I have spent with those old volumes at Miskatonic, wading through tons
of trash— Alhazred and Levi and Von Juntzt were all mental cases, you know— to sift out the
notions that were unfamiliar enough to cause a genuine shock, and a real shudder, in my readers."
"And you've never received threats from any of these occult groups for mentioning lok Sotot or
Cthulhu outright in your stories?"
"Only when I mentioned Kali," Lovecraft said with a wry smile. "Some thoughtful soul reminded me
of what happened to Bierce after he wrote a bit frankly on that subject. But that was a friendly
warning, not a threat. Mr. Drake, you are a banker and a businessman. Certainly, you don't take any
of this seriously?"
"Let me reply with a question of my own," Drake said carefully. "Why, in all the esoteric lore which
you have chosen to make exoteric through your stories, have you never mentioned the Law of
Fives?"
"In fact," Lovecraft said, "I did hint at it, rather broadly, in 'At the Mountains of Madness.' Have you
not read that? It's my longest, and, I think, my best effort to date." But he seemed abruptly paler.
"In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,'" Drake pursued, "you quote a formula from Eliphas Levi's
History of Magic. But you don't quote it in full. Why was that?"
Lovecraft sipped his tea, obviously framing his answer carefully. Finally he said, "One doesn't have
to believe in Santa Claus to recognize that people will exchange presents at Christmas time. One
doesn't have to believe in Yog Sothoth, the Eater of Souls, to realize how people will act who do
hold that belief. It is not my intent, in any of my writings, to provide information that will lead even
one unbalanced reader to try experiments that will result in the loss of human life."
Drake arose. "I came here to learn," he said, "but it appears that my only possible function is to
teach. Let me remind you of the words of Lao-tse: Those who speak do not know; those who know
do not speak.' Most occult groups are in the first class, and their speculations are as absurd as you
think. But those in the second class are not to be so lightly dismissed. They have left you alone
because your stories appear only in magazines that appeal to a small minority. These magazines,
however, have lately been printing stories about rockets and nuclear chain reactions and other
matters that are on the edge of technological achievement. When these fantasies start coming true,
which will probably occur within a decade, there will be much wider interest in such magazines, and
your stories will be included in that renaissance. Then you will receive some very unwelcome
attention."
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Lovecraft remained seated. "I think I know of whom you are speaking; I can also read newspapers
and make deductions. Even if they are mad enough to attempt it, they do not have the means. They
would have to take over not one government but many. That project would keep them busy enough, I
should think, to distract them from worrying about a few lines here and there in stories that are
published as fiction. I can conceive of the next war leading to breakthroughs in rocketry and nuclear
energy, but I doubt that even that will lead many people to take my stories seriously, or to see the
connections between certain rituals, which I have never described explicitly, and acts which will be
construed as the normal excesses of despotism."
"Good day, sir," Drake said formally. "I must be off to New York, and your welfare is really not a
major concern in my life."
"Good day," Lovecraft said, rising with Colonial courtesy. "Since you have been so good as to give
me a warning, I will return the favor. I do not think your interest in these people is based on a wish to
oppose them, but to serve them. I beg you to remember their attitude toward servants."
Back out on the street, Drake experienced a momentary dejection. For nearly twenty years he's been
writing about them and they haven't contacted him. I've been rocking the boat on two continents, and
they haven't contacted me. What does it take to make them show their hand? And if I don't have an
understanding with them, anything I work out with Maldonado and Capone is written on the wind. I
just can't afford to deal with the Mafia before I deal with them. What should I do— put an ad in the
New York Times: "Will the All-Seeing Eye please look in my direction? R. P. Drake, Boston"?
And a Pontiac (stolen an hour before in Kingsport) pulled away from the curb, several houses back,
and started following Drake as he left Benefit Street and walked back toward the downtown area. He
wasn't looking back, so he didn't see what happened to it, but he noticed an old man coming toward
him stop in his tracks and turn white.
"Jesus on a pogo stick," the old man said weakly.
Drake looked over his shoulder and saw nothing but an empty street. "What is it?" he asked.
"Never mind," the old man replied. "You'd never believe me, mister." And he cut across the sidewalk
toward a saloon.
("What do you mean, you lost four soldiers?" Maldonado screamed into the phone.
"Just what I'm saying," Eddie Vitelli, of the Providence gambling, heroin and prostitution Vitellis,
said. "We found your Drake at a hotel. Four of the best soldiers we've got followed him. They called
in once to say he was at a house on Benefit Street. I told them to pick him up as soon as he comes
out. And that's it, period, it's all she wrote. They're all gone, like something picked them off the face
of the earth. I've got everybody looking for the car they were in, and that's gone, too.")
Drake canceled his trip to New York and went back to Boston, plunging into bank business and
mulling over his next move. Two days later, the janitor came to his desk, hat in hand, and asked,
"Could I speak to you, Mr. Drake?"
"Yes, Getty, what is it?" Drake replied testily. His tone was deliberate; the man was probably about
to ask for a raise, and it was best to put him on the defensive immediately.
"It's this, sir," the janitor said, laying a card on Drake's desk. Drake looked down impatiently and saw
a rainbow of colors— the card was printed on some unknown plastic and created a prismatic effect
recalling his mescaline trips in Zurich. Through the rainbow, shimmering and radiant, he saw the
outlines of a thirteen-step pyramid, with a red eye at the top. He stared up at the janitor and saw a
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face without subservience or uncertainty.
"The Grand Master of the Eastern United States is ready to talk to you," the janitor said softly.
"Holy Cleopatra!" Drake cried, and tellers turned to stare at him.
"Kleopatra?" Simon Moon asked, twenty-three years later. "Tell him about Kleopatra."
It was a sunny afternoon in October and the drapes in the living room of the apartment on the
seventeenth floor of 2323 Lake Shore Drive were pulled back to reveal a corner window view of
Chicago's Loop skyscrapers and the whitecap-dotted blue surface of Lake Michigan. Joe sprawled in
a chair facing the lake. Simon and Padre Pederastia were on a couch under an enormous painting
titled "Kleopatra." She looked a good deal like Stella Maris and was holding an asp to her bosom.
The eye-and-pyramid symbol appeared several times in the hieroglyphs on the tomb wall behind her.
Sitting in an armchair opposite the painting was a slender man with sharp, dark features, shoulderlength
chestnut hair, a forked brown beard and green eyes.
"Kleopatra," said the man, "was an instant study. Would have made her Polymother of the great
globe itself, if she'd lived. She damned near brought down the Roman Empire, and she did shorten its
life by centuries. She forced Octavius to bring so much Aneristic power to bear that the Empire went
prematurely into the state of bureaucracy."
"What do I call you?" said Joe. "Lucifer? Satan?"
"Call me Malaclypse the Elder," said the fork-bearded man with a smile that seemed to beam through
endless shifting veils of warm self-regard.
"I don't get it," said Joe. "The first tune I saw you, we were all terrified out of our minds. Though
when you finally showed up looking like Billy Graham, I didn't know whether to laugh or go catto.
But I know I was scared."
Padre Pederastia laughed. "You were so terrified, my son, that you were trying to climb right inside
our little redhead's big red bird's nest. You were so frightened that that hefty cock of yours"— he
licked his lips— "was squirting juice all over the carpet. Oh, you were terrified, all right. Oh, my,
yes."
"Well, I wasn't so scared just at that moment you mention," said Joe with a smile. "But a little later,
when our friend here was about to appear. You were terrified yourself, Padre Pederastia. You kept
hollering, 'Come not in that form! Come not in that form!' Now we're all sitting around the living
room behaving like old chums— and this— this being here is reminiscing about the good old days
with Kleopatra."
"They were terrible days," said Malaclypse. "Very cruel days, very sad days. Constant wars, tortures,
mass murders, crucifixions. Bad times."
"I believe you. And what's worse, I can understand what it means if I believe you, and I can live
knowing that you exist. And even sit down in this living room and smoke a cigarette with you."
Two lit cigarettes appeared between Malaclypse's fingers. He passed one to Joe. Joe drew on it; it
tasted sweet, with just a hint of marijuana.
"That's a corny trick," said Joe.
"Just so you don't lose your old associations to me too quickly," said Malaclypse. "Too quick to
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understand, too soon to misunderstand."
Padre Pederastia said, "The night of that Black Mass, I simply had worked myself up to the point
where I totally believed. That's what magic is, after all. The people who were here that night relate to
left-hand magic, to the Satan myth, to the Faust legend. It's a quick way to get them involved. It
worked with you at the time, but we've brought you along fast, because we want more help from you.
So now you don't need the trappings."
"You don't have to be a Satanist to love Malaclypse," said Malaclypse.
"In fact, its better if you're not," said Simon. "Satanists are creeps. They skin dogs alive and shit like
that."
"Because most Satanists are Christians," said Joe. "Which is a very masochistic religion."
"Now, just a minute—" said Padre Pederastia with some asperity.
"He's right, Pederastia," said Malaclypse. "Nobody knows that better than you— or me, for that
matter."
"Did you ever meet Jesus?" Joe asked, awed in spite of his skepticism.
Malaclypse smiled. "I was Jesus."
Padre Pederastia flapped his hands and bounced up and down in his chair. "You're telling too much!"
"For me, trust is total or nonexistent," said Malaclypse. "I perceive that I can trust Joe. I wasn't the
original Jesus, Joe, the one they crucified. But— this happened a few centuries after I experienced
transcendental illumination at Melos— I was passing through Judea in the persona of a Greek
merchant when they crucified Jesus. I met some of his followers the day he died, and I talked with
them. If you think Christianity is a bloody religion as it is, this is nothing to what it would have been
if Jesus hadn't seemed to come back. If the seventeen original apostles— five of them have been
purged from the records— had been left on their own, they would have passed from horror and terror
at Jesus's death to vindictive fury. It would have been as if Islam had come seven centuries earlier.
Instead of slowly taking over the Roman Empire and preserving much of the Greco-Roman world
intact, it would have swept and mobilized the East, destroyed most of Western civilization and
replaced it with a theocracy more oppressive than Pharaonic Egypt. I stopped that with a few magic
tricks. Appearing in the persona of the resurrected Jesus, I taught there was no need for hatred and
vengeance after my death. I even tried to get them to realize that life is a game by teaching them
Bingo. To this day, nobody understands and critics call it part of the commercialism of the Church.
The sacred Tarot wheel, the moving Mandala! So despite my influence, Christianity focused
obsessively on the crucifixion of Jesus— which is really irrelevant to what he taught while he was
alive— and remained a kind of death worship. When Paul went to Athens and made the link-up with
the Illuminati, who were using Plato's Academy as a front, the ideology of Plato combined with the
mythology of Christ to deliver the knockout blow to pagan humanism and lay the foundations for the
modern world of superstates. After that, I changed my appearance again and took the name of Simon
Magus and had some success spreading ideas contradictory to Christianity."
"You can change your appearance at will, then," said Joe.
"Oh, sure thing. I'm just as quick with a thought projection as anybody." He pushed his pinkie
thoughtfully into his left nostril and worked it around. Joe stiffened; he didn't care to watch people
picking their noses in public. He looked resolutely over Malaclypse's left shoulder. "Now that you
know as much as you do about us, Joe, it's time you started working with us. Chicago, as you know,
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is the Illuminati nerve center in this hemisphere, so we'll use this town to test AUM, a new drug with
astonishing properties, if ELF's technicians are correct. It's supposed to turn neophobes into
neophiles."
Simon slapped his forehead and shouted "Wow, man!" and started laughing. Pederastia gasped and
whistled.
"You look blank, Joe," said Malaclypse. "Has no one explained to you that the human race is divided
into two distinct genotypes— neophobes, who reject new ideas and accept only what they have
known all their lives, and neophiles, who love new things, change, invention, innovation? For the
first four million years of man's history, all humans were neophobes, which is why civilization did
not develop. Animals are all neophobes. Only mutation can change them. Instinct is simply the
natural behavior of a neophobe. The neophile mutation appeared about a hundred thousand years
ago, and speeded up thirty thousand years ago. However, there has never been more than a handful
of neophiles anywhere on the planet. The Illuminati themselves sprang from one of the oldest
neophile-neophobe conflicts on record."
"I take it the Illuminati were trying to hold back progress," said Joe. "Is that their general aim?"
"You're still thinking like a liberal," said Simon. "Nobody gives a fuck for progress."
"Right," said Malaclypse. "They were the innovators in that instance. All the Illuminati were and are
neophiles. Even today, they see their work as directed toward progress. They want to become like
gods. It's possible for humans, given the right methods, to translate themselves into sentient
latticework of pure energy that will be more or less permanent. The process is called transcendental
illumination, to distinguish it from the acquisition of insight into the true nature of man and the
universe, which is ordinary illumination. I've gone through transcendental illumination and am a
being composed altogether of energy, as you may have guessed. However, prior to becoming energy
fields men often fall victim to hubris. Their actions cause pain to others and make them insensitive,
uncreative and irrational. Mass human sacrifice is the most reliable method of achieving
transcendental illumination. Human sacrifice can, of course, be masked as other things, such as war,
famine and plague. The vision of the Four Horsemen vouchsafed to Saint John is actually a vision of
mass transcendental illumination."
"How did you achieve it?" Joe asked.
"I was present at the massacre of the male inhabitants of the city of Melos by the Athenians in 416
B.C. Have you read Thucydides?"
"A long time ago,"
"Well, Thucydides had it wrong. He presented it as an out-and-out atrocity, but there were
extenuating circumstances. The Melians had been stabbing Athenian soldiers in the back, poisoning
them, filling them full of arrows from ambush. Some of them were working for the Spartans and
some were on the side of Athens, but the Athenians didn't know which ones they could trust. They
didn't want to do any unnecessary killing, but they did want to get back to Athens alive. So they
rounded up all the Melian men one day and hacked them to pieces in the town square. The women
and children were sold into slavery."
"What did you do?" said Joe. "Were you there with the Athenians?"
"Yes, but I didn't do any killing. I was a chaplain. Of the Erisian denomination, of course. But I was
prepared to perform services to Hermes, Dionysus, Heracles, Aphrodite, Athena, Hera and some of
the other Olympians. I almost went mad with horror— I didn't understand that Pangenitor is
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Panphage. I was praying to Eris to deliver me or deliver the Melians or do something, and she
answered me."
"Hail, she what done it all," said Simon.
"I almost believe you," said Joe. "But every once in a while the suspicion creeps in that you're simply
doing a two -thousand-year-old man routine and the butt of the joke is me."
Malaclypse stood up with a little smile. "Come here, Joe."
"What for?"
"Just come here." Malaclypse held his hands away from his sides, palms turned toward Joe
appealingly. Joe walked over and stood before him.
"Put your hand into my side," said Malaclypse.
"Oh, come on," said Joe. Pederastia snickered. Malaclypse just looked at him with a gentle,
encouraging smile, so he reached out to touch Malaclypse's shirt. His hands still felt nothing. He
closed his eyes to verify that. There was no sensation whatever. Thin air. Eyes still shut, he moved
his hand forward. He opened his eyes, and when he saw his arm sunk into Malaclypse's body up to
the elbow, he almost barfed his cookies.
He drew back. "It can't be a movie. I'd be almost willing to say a moving holograph, but the illusion
is too perfect. You're looking right at me. To my eyes you are unquestionably there."
"Try a few karate chops," said Malaclypse. Joe obliged, swinging his hand like a scythe through
Malaclypse's waist, chest and head. For a finale, Joe brought his hand straight down through the top
of the being's head.
"I suspend judgment," said Joe. "Maybe you are what you say you are. But it's pretty hard to take.
Can you feel anything?"
"I can create temporary sensory organs for myself whenever I want to. I can enjoy just about
anything a human enjoys or experiences. But my primary mode of perception is a very advanced
form of what you would call intuition. Intuition is a kind of sensitivity in the mind to events and
processes; what I have is a highly developed intuitional receptor which is completely controllable."
Joe went back and sat down, shaking his head. "You certainly are in an enviable position."
"Like I said, it's the real reason for human sacrifice," said Malaclypse. He, too, sat down, and Joe
now noticed that the soft upholstery of his chair didn't sink beneath his weight. He seemed to rest on
the surface of the cushions. "Any sudden or violent death releases a burst of consciousness energy,
which can be controlled and channeled as any explosive energy can be. The Illuminati would all like
to become as gods. That has been their ambition for longer than I care to say."
"Which means they have to perpetrate mass murder," said Joe, thinking of nuclear weapons, gas
chambers, chemical-biological warfare.
Malaclypse nodded. "Now, I don't disapprove of that on moral grounds, since morals are purely
illusory. I do have a personal distaste for that sort of thing. Although, when you've lived as long as I
have, you have lost so many friends and lovers that it is impossible not to take the deaths of humans
as a matter of course. So it goes. And, since I achieved my own immortality and nonmateriality as
the result of a mass murder, it would be hypocritical of me to condemn the Illuminati. For that
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matter, I don't condemn hypocrisy, though it is also personally distasteful to me. But I do say that the
method of the Illuminati is stupid and wasteful, since everybody is already everything. So, why fuck
around with things? It is absurd to try to be something else when there is nothing else."
"That kind of statement is simply beyond my comprehension," said Joe. "I don't know, maybe it's my
engineering training. But even after my own partial illumination in San Francisco with Dr. Iggy, this
kind of talk doesn't make any more sense than Christian Science to me."
"Soon you'll understand more," said Malaclypse. "About the history of man, about some of the
esoteric knowledge that has been lying around for tens of thousands of years. Eventually you'll know
all that's worth knowing about absolutely everything."
(Tobias Knight, the FBI agent monitoring the bugging equipment in Dr. Mocenigo's home, heard the
pistol shot the same time Carmel did. "What the hell?" he said out loud, sitting up straight. He had
heard the door open and footsteps walking about and had been waiting for a conversation . . . and
then, without warning, he had heard the shot. Now a voice spoke, "Sorry, Dr. Mocenigo. You were a
great patriot, and this is a dog's death. But I will share it with you." Then there were more footsteps
and something else . . . Knight recognized the sound: it was liquid being poured. The steps and the
pouring liquid continued, and Knight abruptly tore himself out of his state of shock and pressed the
intercom. "Knight?" asked a voice which he recognized as Esperando Despond, the Special Agent in
Charge for Las Vegas. "Mocenigo's house," Knight said crisply. "Get a whole crew out there doublequick.
Something is happening, one killing at least." He released the intercom and listened,
paralyzed, to the footsteps and the liquid sounds, which were now mixed with subdued humming. A
man doing an unpleasant job, but trying to keep his cool. Knight recognized the tune, finally: "Camptown
Races." The humming and walking and slurping continued. "Do-da-Do-da . . ." Then the voice
spoke again: "This is General Lawrence Stewart Talbot, speaking to the CIA, the FBI and whoever
else has this house bugged. I discovered at two this morning that several people in our Anthrax
Leprosy Pi project have accidentally been subjected to live cultures. All of them are living at the
installation, and can easily be isolated while the antidote works. I have already given orders to that
effect. Dr. Mocenigo himself unknowingly received the worst dose, and was in advanced morbidity,
a few minutes from death, when I arrived. His whole house, obviously, will have to be burned down,
and I am also, due to my proximity while examining him, too far gone to be saved. I will therefore
shoot myself after setting fire to the house. There is one remaining problem. I found evidence that a
woman had been in Dr. Mocenigo's bed earlier— that's what comes of allowing important people to
live off base— and she must be found and given the antidote and each of her contacts must be traced.
Needless to say, this must be done quietly, or there will be a nationwide panic. Tell the President to
see that my wife gets the medal for this. Tell my wife that with my last breath I still insist she was
wrong about that girl in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. In closing, I firmly believe that this is the greatest
country in the history of the world, and can still be saved if Congress will lock up those damned
college kids for once and for all. God bless America!" There was a scratching sound— my God!
Knight thought, the match— and the sound of flames, in the midst of which General Talbot tried to
add a postscript but couldn't get the words out because he was screaming. Finally, the second shot
came, and the screaming stopped. Knight raised his head, jaw clenched, repressed tears in his steely
eyes. "That was a great American," he said aloud.)
Over cigars and brandy, after George had been sent off to bed to be distracted by Tarantella, Richard
Jung asked pointedly, "Just how sure are you that this Discordian bunch is a match for the
Illuminati? It's kind of late in the game to change sides."
Drake started to speak, then turned to Maldonado. "Tell him about Italy in the 19th century," he said.
"The Illuminati are just men and women," Maldonado replied obligingly. "More women than men, in
fact. It was Eve Weishaupt who started the whole show; Adam just acted as her front because people
are used to taking orders from men. This Atlantis stuff is mostly bullshit. Everybody who knows
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about Atlantis at all traces his family, or his clan, or his club, back there. Some of the old dons in the
Maf even try to trace la Cosa Nostra back there. All bullshit. Just like all the WASPs tracing
themselves back to the Mayflower. For everyone who can prove it, like Mr. Drake, there's a hundred
who are just bluffing.
"You see," Maldonado went on more intensely, chewing his cigar ferociously, "originally the
Illuminati was just a— how do you call it— a kind of 18th-century women's liberation front. Behind
Adam Weishaupt was Eve; behind Godwin, who started all this socialism and anarchism with his
Political Justice book, was his mistress Mary Wollstonecraft, who started the woman revolution with
a book called, uh . . ."
"Vindication of the Rights of Women," Drake contributed.
"And they got Tom Paine to write on women's lib, too, and to defend their French Revolution and try
to import it here. But that all fell through and they didn't get a real controlling interest in the U.S.
until they hoodwinked Woody Wilson into creating the Federal Reserve in 1914. And that's the way
it usually goes. In Italy they had a front called the Haute Vente, that was so damn secret Mazzini was
a member all his life and never knew the control came from Bavaria. My grandpa told me all about
those days. We had a three-way dogfight. The Monarchists on one side, the Haute Vente and the
Liberteri, the anarchists, on the other, and the Maf in the middle trying to roll with the punches and
figure out which way the bread was buttered, you know? Then the Liberteri got wise to the Haute
Vente and split from it, and it was a four-way fight. You look it up in the history books, they tell it
like it was except they don't mention who ran the Haute Vente. And then the good old Law of Fives
came into it, and we had the Fascisti and it was a five-way dogfight. Who won? Not the Illuminati. It
wasn't until 1937, manipulating the English government to discourage Mussolini's peace plans and
using Hitler to get Benito into the Berlin-Tokyo axis, that the Illuminati had some kind of control in
Italy. And even then it was indirect. When we made our deal with the CIA— it was called the OSS
back in those days— Luciano got out of the joint and we turned over Italy and delivered Mussolini
dead."
"And the point of all this?" Jung asked coldly.
"The point is," Maldonado said, "the Maf has been against the Illuminati more of the time than we've
been with them, and we're still doing business and we're stronger than ever. Believe me, their bark is
much worse than their bite. Because they know some magic, they scare everybody. We've had
magicians and belladonnas— witches, to you— in Sicily since before Paris got hot pants for Helen,
and believe me a bullet kills them as dead as it kills anybody else."
"The Illuminati do have a bite," Drake interjected, "but it is my judgment that they are going out with
the Age of Pisces. The Discordians, I think, represent an Aquarian swing."
"Oh, I don't go for that mystic stuff," Jung said. "Next thing you'll be quoting I Ching at me, like my
old man."
"You're an anal type, like most accountants," Drake replied coolly. "And a Capricorn as well. Down -
to-earth and conservative. I won't attempt to persuade you about this aspect of the matter. Just take
my word, I didn't get where I am by ignoring significant facts just because they won't fit on a profitand-
loss statement. On the profit-and-loss level, however, I have had reasons to believe that the
Discordians can currently outbid the Illuminati. These reasons date back many months before the
appearance of those marvelous statues today."
Later, in bed, Drake turned the matter around in his head and looked at it from several sides.
Lovecraft's words came back to him: "I beg you to remember their attitude toward their servants."
That was it, basically. He was an old man, and he was tired of being their servant, or satrap, or
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satellite. When he was thirty-three, he was ready to take them over, as Cecil Rhodes had once done.
Somehow, he had been maneuvered into taking over just one section of their empire. If he could
think, truthfully, that he owned the United States more thoroughly than any President in four
decades, the fact remained that he did not own himself. Not until he signed his Declaration of
Independence tonight by joining the Discordians. The other Jung, the alter Zauber in Zurich, had
tried to tell him something about power once, but he had dismissed it as sentimental slop. Now he
tried to remember it ... and, suddenly, all the old days came back, Klee and his numinous paintings,
the Journey to the East, old Crowley saying, "Of course, mixing the left-hand and right-hand paths is
dangerous. If you fear such risks, go back to Hesse and Jung and those old ladies. Their way is safe
and mine isn't. All that can be said for me is that I have real power and they have dreams." But the
Illuminati had crushed Crowley, just as they smashed Willie Seabrook, when those men revealed too
much. "I beg you to remember their attitude toward their servants." Damn it, what was it Jung had
said about power?
And he turned the card over, and on the back was an address on Beacon Hill with the words "8:30
tonight." He looked up at the janitor, who backed away deferentially, saying, "Thank you, Mr.
Drake, sir," without a touch of irony in his face or voice. And it hadn't surprised him at all that, for
deliberate contrast, the Grand Master he met that night, one of the five Illuminati Primi for the U.S.,
was an official of the Justice Department. (And what had Jung said about power?) "A few of them
will have to fall. Lepke, I would recommend. Perhaps Luciano also." No mystical trappings: just a
businesslike meeting. "Our interest is the same as yours: increasing the power of the Justice
Department. An equal increment in the power of the other branches of government will proceed
nicely when we get the war into gear." Drake remembered his excitement: it was all as he had
foreseen. The end of the Republic, the dawn of the Empire.
"After Germany, Russia?" Drake asked once.
"Very good; you are indeed farseeing," the Grand Master replied. "Mr. Hitler, of course, is only a
medium. Virtually no ego at all, on his own. You have no idea how dull and prosaic such types are,
except when under proper Inspiration. Naturally, his supplied ego will collapse, he will become
psychotic, and we will have no control over him at all, then. We are prepared to help him fall. Our
real interest now is here. Let me show you something. We do not work in general outlines; our plans
are always specific, to the last detail." He handed Drake a sheaf of papers. "The war will probably
end in '44 or '45. We will have Russia built up as the next threat within two years. Read this
carefully."
Drake read what was to become the National Security Act of 1947. "This abolishes the Constitution,"
he said almost in ecstasy.
"Quite. And believe me, Mr. Drake, by '46 or '47, we will have Congress and the public ready to
accept it. The American Empire is closer than you imagine."
"But the isolationists and pacifists—Senator Taft and that crowd—"
"They will wither away. When communism replaces fascism as the number one enemy, your smalltown
conservative will be ready for global adventures on a scale that would make the heads of poor
Mr. Roosevelt's liberals spin. Trust me. We have every detail pinpointed. Let me show you where the
new government will be located."
Drake stared at the plan and shook his head. "Some people will recognize what a pentagon means,"
he said dubiously.
"They will be dismissed as superstitious cranks. Believe me, this building will be constructed within
a few years. It will become the policeman of the world. Nobody will dare question its actions or
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judgments without being denounced as a traitor. Within thirty years, Mr. Drake, within thirty years,
anyone who attempts to restore power to the Congress will be cursed and vilified, not by liberals but
by conservatives."
"Holy God," Drake said.
The Grand Master rose and walked to an old-fashioned globe nearly as large as King Kong's head.
"Pick a spot, Mr. Drake. Any spot. I guarantee you we will have American troops there within thirty
years. The Empire that you dreamed of while reading Tacitus."
Robert Putney Drake felt humbled for an instant, even though he recognized the gimmick: using one
single example of telepathy, plucking Tacitus out of his head, to climax the presentation of the
incredible dream. At last he understood firsthand the awe that the Illuminati created in both its
servitors and its enemies.
"There will be opposition," the Grand Master went on. "In the 1960s and early 1970s especially.
That's where your notion for a unified crime syndicate fits into our plan. To crush the opposition, we
will need a Justice Department equivalent in many ways to Hitler's Gestapo. If your scheme works—
if the Mafia can be drawn into a syndicate that is not entirely under Sicilian control, and the various
other groups can be brought under the same umbrella— we will have a nationwide outlaw cartel. The
public itself will then call for the kind of Justice Department that we need. By the mid-1960s,
wiretapping of all sorts must be so common that the concept of privacy will be archaic." And, tossing
sleeplessly, Drake thought how smoothly it had all worked out; why then was he rebelling against it?
Why did it give him no pleasure? And what was it Jung had said about power?
Richard Jung, wearing Carl Jung's old sweater and smoking his pipe, said, "And next the solar
system." The room was crowded with white rabbits, Playboy bunnies, Bugs Bunny, the Wolf Man,
Ku Kluxers, Ma-fiosos, Lepke with accusing eyes, a dormouse, a mad hatter, the King of Hearts, the
Prince of Wands, and Jung was shouting over the din. "Billions to reach the moon. Trillions to get to
Mars. All pouring into our corporations. Better than the gladiatorial games." Linda Lovelace
elbowed him aside. "Call me Ishmaelian," she said suggestively; but Jung handed Drake the skeleton
of a Biafran baby. "For Petruchio's feast," he explained, producing a piece of ticker tape. "We now
own," he began to read, "seventy-two percent of earth's resources, and fifty-one percent of all the
armed troops in the world are under our direction. Here," he said, passing the body of an infant that
had died in Appalachia, "see that this one gets an apple in its mouth."
A bunny passed Drake a 1923 Thompson machine gun, the model that had been called an automatic
rifle because the Army had no funds to buy submachine guns that year. "What's this for?" Drake
asked, confused. "We have to defend ourselves," the bunny said. "The mob is at the gates. The
hungry mob. An astronaut named Spartacus is leading them." Drake handed the gun to Maldonado
and crept upstairs to his private heliport. He passed through the lavatory to the laboratory (where Dr.
Frankenstein was attaching electrodes to Linda Lovelace's jaws) and entered the golf course again,
where the door opened to the airplane cabin.
He was escaping in his 747 jet, and below he could see Black Panthers, college kids, starving coal
miners, Indians, Viet Cong, Brazilians, an enormous army pillaging his estate. "They must have seen
the fnords," he said to the pilot. But the pilot was his mother and the sight of her threw him into a
rage. "Leaving me alone!" he screamed. "Always leaving me alone to go to your damned parties with
father. I never had a mother, just one nigger maid after another acting as mothers. Were the parties
that fucking important?"
"Oh," she said reddening, "how can you use that word in front of your own mother?"
"To hell with that. All I remember is your perfume hanging in the air, and some strange black face
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coming when I called for you."
"You're such a baby," she said sadly. "All your life, you've always been a big baby." It was true: he
was wearing diapers. A vice president of Morgan Guarantee Trust stared at him incredulously. "I
Drake, do you really think that is appropriate garb for an important business meeting?" Beside him
Linda Lovelace bent in ecstasy to kiss the secret ardor of Ishmael. "A whale of a good time," the vice
president said, suddenly giggling inanely.
"Oh, fuck you all," Drake screamed. "I've got more money than any of you."
"The money is gone," Carl Jung said, wearing Freud's beard. "What totem will you use now to ward
off insecurity and the things that go bump in the night?" He sneered. "What childish codes!
M.A.F.I.A.—Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela. French Canadian bean so up— the Five Consecrated
Bavarian Seers. Annuit Coeptis Novus Or do Seclorum—Anti-Christ Now Our Savior. A boy has
never wept nor dashed a thousand kim—Asmodeus Belial Hastur Nyarlathotep Wotan Niggurath
Dholes Azathoth Tind-alos Kadith. Child's play! Glasspielen!"
"Well, if you're so damned smart, who are the inner Five right now?" Drake asked testily.
"Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and Gummo," Jung said, riding off on a tricycle. "The Illuminati is
your mother's breast, sucker," added Albert Hoffman, peddling after Jung on a bicycle.
Drake awoke as the Eye closed. It was all clear in an instant, without the labor he had spent working
over the Dutchman's words. Maldonado stood by the bedside, his face Karloff's, and said, "We
deserve to be dead." Yes: that was what it was like when you discovered you were a robot, not a
man, like Karloff in the last scene of Bride of Frankenstein.
Drake awoke again and this time he was really awake. It was clear, crystal clear, and he had no
regrets. Far away over Long Island Sound came the first distant rumble of thunder, and he knew this
was no storm that any scientist less heretical than Jung or Wil-helm Reich would ever understand.
"Our job," Huxley wrote before death, "is waking up."
Drake put on his robe quickly and stepped out into the dark Elizabethan hallway. Five hundred
thousand dollars this house and grounds had cost, including the cottages, and it was only one of his
eight estates. Money. What did it mean when Nyarlathotep appeared and "the wild beasts followed
him and licked his hands" as that damned stupid-smart Lovecraft wrote? What did it matter when
"the blind idiot God Chaos blew earth's dust away"?
Drake pushed open the dark paneled doorway of George's room. Good: Tarantella was gone. The
thunder rumbled again, and Drake's own shadow looming over the bed reminded him once more of a
Karloff movie.
He bent over the bed and shook George's shoulder gently. "Mavis," the boy said. Drake wondered
who the hell Mavis was; somebody terrific, obviously, if George could be dreaming about her after a
session with the Illuminati-trained Tarantella. Or was Mavis another ex-Illuminatus? There were a
lot of them with the Discordians lately, Drake had surmised. He shook George's shoulder again,
vigorously.
"Oh, no, I can't come again," George said. Drake gave another shake, and two weary and frightened
eyes opened to look at him.
"What?"
"Up," Drake grunted, grabbing George under the arms and pulling him to a sitting position. "Out of
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bed," he added, panting, rolling the boy to the edge.
Drake was looking through waves upward at George. Damn it, the thing has already found my mind.
"You've got to get out," he repeated. "You're in danger here."
October 23, 1935: Charley Workman, Mendy Weiss and Jimmy the Shrew charge through the door
of the Palace Chop House and, according to orders, cowboy the joint . . Lead pellets like rain; and
rain like lead pellets hitting George's window, "Christ, what is it?" he asked. Drake stood him up
stark naked and handed him his drawers, repeating "Hurry!" Charley the Bug looked over the three
bodies: Abadaba Berman, Lulu Rosenkrantz and somebody he didn't recognize. None of them was
the Dutchman. "My God, we fucked up," he said, "Dutch ain't here." But a commotion has started in
the alleys of the dream: Albert Stern, taking his last fix of the night, suddenly recalls his fantasy of
killing somebody as important as John Dillinger. "The can," Mendy Weiss says excitedly; he had a
hard-on, like he always did on this kind of job. "Man is a giant," Drake says, "forced to live in a
pigmy's hut." "What does that mean?" George asks. "It means we're all fools," Drake says excitedly,
smelling the old whore Death, "especially those of us who try to act like giants by bullying the others
in the hut instead of knocking the goddam walls down. Carl Jung told me that, only in more elegant
language." George's dangling penis kept catching his eye: homosexuality (an occasional thing with
Drake), heterosexuality (his normal state) and the new lust for the old whore Death were all tugging
at him. The Dutchman dropped his penis, urine squirting his shoes, and went for his gun as he heard
the shots in the barroom. He turned quickly, unable to stop pissing, and Albert Stern came through
the door, shooting before Dutch could take aim. Falling forward, he saw that it was really Vince
Coll, a ghost. "Oh, mama mama mama," he said, lying in his urine.
"Which way do we go?" George asked, buttoning his shirt.
"You go," Drake said. "Down the stairs and out the back, to the garage. Here's the key to my Silver
Wraith Rolls Royce. It won't be any use to me anymore."
"Why aren't you coming?" George protested.
"We deserve to be dead," Drake said, "all of us in this house."
"Hey, that's crazy. I don't care what you've done, a guilt trip is always crazy."
"I've been on a crazier trip, as you'd call it, all my life," Drake said calmly. "The power trip. Now,
move!"
"George, don't make no bull moves," the Dutchman said. "He's talking," Sergeant Luke Conlon
whispered at the foot of the hospital bed; the police stenographer, F. J. Long, began taking notes.
"What have you done with him?" the Dutchman went on. "Oh, mama, mama, mama. Oh, stop it. Oh,
oh, oh, sure. Sure, mama." Drake sat down in the window seat and, too nervous for a cigar, lit one of
his infrequent cigarettes. One hundred and fifty-seven, he thought, remembering the last entry in his
little notebook. One hundred and fifty-seven rich women, one wife, and seventeen boys.
And never once did I really make contact, never once did I smash the walls . . . The wind and the rain
were now deafening outside . . . Fourteen billion dollars, thirteen billion illegal and tax-free; more
than Getty or Hunt, even if I could never publicize the fact. And that Arab boy in Tangier who
picked my pocket after he blew me, my mother's perfume, hours and hours in Zurich puzzling over
the Dutchman's words.
Outside Flegenheimer's livery stable in the Bronx, Phil Silverberg is teasing young Arthur
Flegenheimer in 1913, holding the burglar's tools out of reach, asking mockingly, "Do you really
think you're big enough to knock over a house on your own?" In the Newark hospital, the Dutchman
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cries angrily, "Now listen, Phil, fun is fun." The seventeen Illuminati representatives vanished in the
dark; the one with the goat's head suddenly returned. "What happened to the other sixteen?" Dutch
asked the hospital walls. The blood from his arm signed the parchment. "Oh, he done it. Please," he
asked vaguely. Sergeant Conlon looks bemusedly at the stenographer, Lang. The lightning seemed
dark, and the darkness seemed light. It's taking hold of my mind completely, Drake thought, sitting
by the window.
I will hold onto my sanity, Drake swore silently. What was that rock song about Jesus I was
remembering?
"Only five inches between me and happiness," was it? No, that's from Deep Throat. The whiteness of
the whale.
The waves covered his vision again: wrong song, obviously. I have to reach him, to unify the forces.
No, dammit, that's not my thought. That's his thought. He's coming up, up out of the waves. I must
rise. I must rise. To unify the forces.
Dillinger said, "You're right, Dutch. Fuck the Illuminati. Fuck the Maf. The Justified Ancients of
Mummu would be glad to have you." The Dutchman looked right into Sergeant Conlon's eyes and
asked, "John, please, oh, did you buy the whole tale? You promised a million, sure. Get out, I wished
I knew.
Please make it quick. Fast and furious. Please. Fast and furious. Please help me get out."
I should have gotten out in '42, when I first learned about the camps, Drake thought. I never realized
until then that they really meant to do it. And next Hiroshima. Why did I stay after Hiroshima? It was
so obvious, it was just the way Lovecraft wrote, the idiot God Chaos blew earth's dust away, and
back in '35 I knew the secret: if a cheap hoodlum like Dutch Schultz had a great poet buried in him,
what might be released if any man looked the old whore Death in the eye? Say that I betrayed my
country and my planet, but worse, add that I betrayed Robert Putney Drake, the giant of psychology I
murdered when I used the secret for power and not for healing.
I see the plumbers, the cesspool cleaners, the colorless all-color of atheism. I am the Fate's
lieutenant: I act under ardors. White, White void. Ahab's eye. Five inches from happiness, the Law of
Fives, always. Ahab schlurped down, down.
"This Bavarian stuff is all bullshit," Dillinger said. "They're mostly Englishmen, since Rhodes took
command in 1888. And they've already infiltrated Justice, State and Labor, as well as the Treasury.
That's who you're playing ball with. And let me tell you what they plan to do with your people, the
Jews, in this war they're cooking up."
"Listen," the Dutchman interrupted. "Capone would have a bullet in me if he knew I was even
talking to you, John."
"Are you afraid of Capone? He arranged to have the Feds put a bullet in me at the Biograph and I'm
still sassy and lively as ever."
"I'm not afraid of Capone or Lepke or Maldonado or . . ." The Dutchman's eyes brought back the
hospital room. "I'm a pretty good pretzeler," he told Sergeant Conlon anxiously. "Winifred,
Department of Justice. I even got it from the department." The pain shot through him, sharp as
ecstasy. "Sir, please stop it!" He had to explain about DeMolay and Weishaupt. "Listen," he urged,
"the last Knight. I don't want to holler." It was so hard, with the pulsings of the pain. "I don't know,
sir. Honestly, I don't. I went to the toilet. I was in the can and the boy came at me. If we wanted to
break the Ring. No, please. I get a month. Come on, Illuminati, cut me off." It was so hard to explain.
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"I had nothing with him and he was a cowboy in one of the seven days. Ewige! Fight... No business,
no hangouts, no friends. Nothing. Just what you pick up and what you need." The pain wasn't just the
bullet; they were working on his mind, trying to stop him from saying too much. He saw the goat
head. "Let him harness himself to you and then bother you," he cried. "They are Englishmen and
they are a type and I don't know who is best, they or us." So much to say, and so little time. He
thought of Francie, his wife. "Oh, sir, get the doll a rofting." The Illuminati formula to summon the
lloigor: he could at least reveal that. "A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim. Did you hear
me?" They had to understand how high it went, all over the world. "I would hear it, the Circuit Court
would hear it, and the Supreme Court would hear it. If that ain't the payoff. Please crack down on the
Chinaman's friends and Hitler's Commander." Eris, the Great Mother, was the only alternative to the
Illuminati's power; he had to tell them that much. "Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw
you too fast."
"He's blabbing too much," the one who wore the goat head, Winifred, from Washington, said.
"Increase the pain."
"The dirty rats have tuned in," Dutch shouted.
"Control yourself," Sergeant Conlon said soothingly.
"But I am dying," Dutch, explained. Couldn't they understand anything?
Drake met Winifred at a cocktail party in Washington, in '47, just after the National Security Act was
passed by the Senate. "Well?" Winifred asked, "do you have any further doubts?"
"None at all," Drake said. "All my open money is now invested in defense industries."
"Keep it there," Winifred smiled, "and you'll get richer than you ever dreamed. Our present
projection is that we can get Congress to approve one trillion dollars in war preparations before
1967."
Drake thought fast and asked softly, "You're going to add another villain beside Russia?"
"Watch China," Winifred said calmly.
For once, curiosity surpassed cupidity in Drake; he asked, "Are you really keeping him in the
Pentagon?"
"Would you like to meet him, face to face?" Winifred asked with a faint hint of a sneer in his voice.
"No thank you," Drake said coolly. "I've been reading Herman Rauschning. I remember Hitler's
words about the Superman: 'He is alive, among us. I have met him. He is intrepid and terrible. I was
afraid of him.' That's enough for my curiosity."
"Hitler," Winifred replied, not hiding the sneer now. "Saw him in his more human form. He's . . .
progressed ... since then."
Tonight, Drake thought, as the thunder rose to a maddening crescendo, I will see him, or one of
them. Surely, I could have picked a more agreeable form of suicide? The question was pointless;
Jung had been right all along, with his Law of Opposites. Even Freud knew it: every sadist becomes
a masochist at last.
On an impulse, Drake arose and fetched a pad and pen from the bedside Tudor table. He began to
scribble by the light of the increasing electrical storm outside:
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What am I afraid of? Haven't I been building up to this rendezvous ever since I threw the
bottle at mother when I was 1 1/2 years old?
And it is kin to me. We both live on blood, do we not, even if I have prettied it over by
taking the blood money instead of the blood itself?
Dimensions keep shifting, whenever it gets a fix on me. Prinn was right in his De Vermis
Mysteriis, they don't really participate in the same space-time as us. That's what
Alhazred meant when he wrote, "Their hand is at your throat but you see them not. They
walk serene and unsuspected, not in the spaces we know, but between them."
"Pull me out," the Dutchman moaned. "I am half crazy. They won't let me get up. They dyed my
shoes. Give me something. I am so sick."
I can see Kadath and the two magnetic poles. I must unify the forces by eating the entity.
Which me is the real me? Is it so easy to flow into my soul because there is so little soul
left? Is that what Jung was trying to tell me about power?
I see Newark Hospital and the Dutchman. I see the white light and then the black that
does not pulsate or move. I see George trying to drive the Rolls in this damnable rain. I
see the whiteness of whiteness is black.
"Anybody," the Dutchman pleaded, "kindly take my shoes off. No, there's a handcuff on them. The
Baron says these things."
I see Weishaupt and the Iron Boot. No wonder only five ever withstand the ordeal to
become the top of the pyramid. Baron Rothschild won't let Rhodes get away with that.
What is time or space, anyway? What is soul, that we claim to judge it? Which is real—
the boy Arthur Flegenheimer, seeking for his mother, the gangster Dutch Schultz,
dealing in murder and corruption with the cool of a Medici or a Morgan, or the mad poet
being born in the Newark hospital bed as the others die?
And Elizabeth was a bitch. They sang "The Golden Vanity" about Raleigh, but none
could speak a word against me. Yet he received the preference. The Globe Theatre, new
drama by Will Shakespeare, down the street they torture Sackerson the bear for sport.
Christ, they opened the San Andreas Fault to hide the most important records about
Norton. Sidewalks opening like mouths, John Barrymore falling out of bed, Will
Shakespeare in his mind, my mind, Sir Francis's mind. Roderick Usher. Starry Wisdom,
they called it.
"The sidewalk was in trouble," the Dutchman tried to explain, "and the bears were in trouble and I
broke it up. Please put me in that room. Please keep him in control."
I can hear it! The very sounds recorded by Poe and Lovecraft: Tekeli-li, tekeli-li! It must
be close.
I didn't mean to throw the bottle, mother. I just wanted your attention. I just wanted
attention.
"Okay,' the Dutchman sighed. "Okay, I am all through. Can't do another thing. Look out, mama, look
out for her. You can't beat Him. Police. Mama. Helen. Mother. Please take me out."
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I can see it and it can see me. In the dark. There are things worse than death, vivisections
of the spirit. I should run. Why do I sit here? The bicycle and the tricycle. 23 skiddoo.
Inside the pentagon, the cold of interstellar space. They came from the stars and brought
their images with them. Mother. I'm sorry.
"Come on, open the soap duckets," the Dutchman said hopelessly. "The chimney sweeps. Take to the
sword."
It is like a chimney without end. Up and up forever, in deeper and deeper darkness. And
the red all-seeing eye.
"Please help me up. French Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone."
I want to join it. I want to become it. I have no more will of my own. I take thee, old
whore Death, as my lawful wedded wife. I am mad. I am half mad. Mother. The bottle.
Linda, schlurped, sucked down.
Unity.
A nine-year-old girl named Patty Cohen lived three miles down the coast from the Drake estate, and
she went mad in those early morning hours of April 25. At first, her parents thought she had gotten
hold of some of the LSD which was known to be infiltrating the local grammar school and, being
fairly hip, they fed her niacin and horse doctor's doses of vitamin C as she ran about the house
alternately laughing and making faces at them, howling about "he's laying in his own piss" and "he's
still alive inside it" and "Roderick Usher." By morning they knew it was more than acid, and months
of sadness began as they took her to clinics and private psychiatrists and more clinics and more
private psychiatrists. Finally, just before Chanukah in December, they took her to an elegant shrink
on Park Avenue, and she had a virtual epileptic fit in the waiting room, staring at a statue on the end
table and screaming, "Don't let him eat me! Don't let him eat me!" Her recovery began from that day,
and the sight of that miniature representation of the giant Tlaloc in Mexico City.
But three hours after Drake's death, George Dorn lay on his bed in the Hotel Tudor, holding a phone
to his ear, listening to it ring. A young woman's voice on the other end suddenly said hello.
"I'd like to speak to Inspector Goodman," said George.
There was a momentary pause, then the voice said, "Who's calling, please?"
"My name is George Dorn, but it probably wouldn't mean anything to the Inspector. But would you
ask him to come to the phone please and tell him I have a message for him about the case of Joseph
Malik."
There was a constricted silence, as if the woman on the other end of the phone wanted to scream and
had stopped breathing. Finally she said, "My husband is working just now, but I'll be glad to give
him any message you have."
"That's funny," said George. "I've been told Inspector Goodman's duty hours are noon to 9 P.M."
"I don't think it's any of your business where he is," the woman suddenly blurted. George felt a little
shock. Rebecca Goodman was frightened and she didn't know where her husband was: something in
the tone of her last three words revealed her mental state to George. I must be getting more sensitive
to people, he thought.
"Do you ever hear from him?" he said gently. He was feeling sorry for Mrs. Inspector Saul
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Goodman, who was, come to think of it, the wife of a pig. If, just a few years ago, George had read
in the paper that this woman's husband had been shot down at random by some unknown
revolutionary-type assailants, he would probably have whispered, "Right on." One of George's own
friends of that period might have killed Inspector Goodman. There was even a moment when George
himself might have done it. Once, one of the kids in George's group had called up the young widow
of a policeman killed one December by young blacks and called her a bitch and the wife of a pig and
told her that her husband was guilty of crimes against the people and that those who had shot him
would go down in history as heroes. George had approved of this verbal action as a means of
hardening oneself against bourgeois sentimentality. The papers had been full of stories about how
this policeman's three little kids would have no Christmas this year; such tripe made George urgently
want to throw up.
But now this woman's anguish was coursing through the wire and he was feeling it, just because her
husband was not known to be dead, just missing. And probably not dead at all; otherwise why would
Hagbard have said that George should get in touch with him?
"I—I don't know what you mean," she said. She was starting to break, George thought. In another
minute she'd be blurting out all her fears to him. Well, for Christ's sake, he didn't know where
Goodman was.
"Look," he said sharply, pushing back against the flow of emotion coming through to him, "if you
hear from Inspector Goodman, tell him if he wants to know more about the Bavarian Illuminati he
should call George Dorn at the Hotel Tudor. That's D-O-R-N, Hotel Tudor. Have you got that?"
"The Illuminati! Look, uh, Mr. Dorn, whatever you want to tell, you can tell me. I'll pass it on to
him."
"I can't do that, Mrs. Goodman. Thank you, now. Good-bye."
"Wait! Don't hang up."
"I can't help you, Mrs. Goodman. I don't know where he is, either." George dropped the phone into
its cradle with a sigh. His hands were cold and moist. Well, he'd have to tell Hagbard he couldn't
reach Inspector Goodman. But he had learned something— that Saul Goodman, who was supposed
to be investigating Joe Malik's disappearance, had himself disappeared, and the words "Bavarian
Illuminati" meant something to his wife. George crossed the small room and turned on the TV. The
noon news would be on. He went back to his bed, lay down and lit a cigarette. He was still
exhausted, from his sexual bout of the night before with Tarantella Serpentine.
The announcer said, "The Attorney General has announced that he will speak at six this evening on
the early morning epidemic of gangland-style assassinations at widely separated locations all over
the country. The death toll from killings of this type has reached twenty-seven, though, local officials
refuse to say whether all— or any— of these deaths are connected. Among those shot are Senator
Edward Coke Bacon; two high-ranking Los Angeles police officers; the mayor of a town called Mad
Dog, Texas; a New York fight promoter; a Boston pharmacist; a Detroit ceramicist; a Chicago
Communist; three New Mexico hippie leaders; a New Orleans restaurateur; a barber in Yorba Linda,
California; and a sausage manufacturer in She-boygan, Wisconsin. There were bomb explosions at
fifteen locations, killing thirteen more people. Six persons around the country have disappeared, and
four of these were seen being forced into cars at different times last night and this morning. The
Attorney General today called this 'a reign of terror perpetrated by organized crime,' pointing out that
though the motives for the widely scattered slayings is obscure they bear the earmarks of gangster
killings. However, new FBI director 3eorge Wallace, who has ordered FBI agents around the country
into action, issued a written statement declaring— quote—'Once again the Attorney General has
treed the wrong coon, proving that law enforcement should be left to the experienced professionals.
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We have reason to think that these murders are the work of Negro Communists directed from
Peking.'—end of quote. Meanwhile, the office of the Vice President has issued an apology to the
Italian-American Anti-Defamation League for his reference to 'Mafioso rubouts' and the League has
withdrawn its picket line from the White House. Remember, the Attorney General will address the
nation at 6 P.M. tonight." The announcer suddenly changed his facial expression from neutral
newscaster to pugnacious patriot. "Certain dissident elements keep complaining that people don't get
a chance to participate in decisions made by their government. Yet, at a time like this, when the
whole nation has an opportunity to hear the Attorney General, the ratings are not always as good as
they should be. So let's do everything we can to build up those ratings tonight, and let the whole
world know that this is still a democracy."
"Fuck!" George shouted at the screen. He didn't recall TV newscasters being that obnoxious. Must be
a fairly recent development, something that had happened after he left for Mad Dog—maybe a late
outgrowth of the Fernando Poo crisis. It was in this very hotel, George remembered, just after the
bloody Fernando Poo demonstrations at the UN that Joe Malik had first broached the subject of Mad
Dog. Now Joe had disappeared, not unlike those people who, as George knew, the Syndicate had
snuffed in earnest of their good intentions, having accepted Hagbard's gift of objets d'art. Not unlike
Inspector Saul Goodman who perhaps had gone down the same rabbit hole as Joe.
There was a knock at the door. George went to it, turning off the TV set in passing. It was Stella
Maris.
"Well, glad to see you, baby. Strip off that dress and come over to the bed, so we can reaffirm my
initiation rites."
Stella put her hands on his shoulders. "Never mind that now, George. We've got things to worry
about Robert Putney Drake and Banana Nose Maldonado are dead. Come on. We've got to get back
to Hagbard right away."
Traveling first by helicopter, then by executive jet and finally by motorboat to Hagbard's Chesapeake
Bay submarine base, George was exhausted and dazed in terror's aftermath. He rallied when he saw
Hagbard again.
"You motherfucker! You sent me to get goddam killed!"
"And that has given you the courage to tell me off," said Hagbard with an indulgent smile. "Fear is a
funny thing, isn't it, George? If we weren't afraid of dying of diseases, we'd never develop the
science of microbiology. That science in turn creates the possibility of germ warfare. And each
superpower is so afraid that the others may wage germ warfare against it, each develops its own
plagues to wipe out the human race."
"Your mind is wandering, you stupid old fart," said Stella. "George isn't kidding about nearly being
killed."
"The fear of death is the beginning of slavery," Hagbard said simply.
Even though it was early, George found himself on the verge of collapse, ready to sleep for twentyfour
hours or more. The submarine's engines vibrated under his feet as he trudged to his cabin, but he
wasn't even curious about where they were going. He lay down on his bed, and picked a book off the
headpost bookshelf, part of his getting-ready-for-sleep ritual. Sexuality, Magic and Perversion said
the binder. Well, that sounded juicy and promising. Author named Francis King, whoever that is.
Citadel Press, 1972. Only a few years ago. Well, then. George opened at random:
Within a few years Prater Paragranus had become Chief of the Swiss section of the
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OTO, had entered into friendly relationships with the disciples of Aleister Crowley—
notably Karl Germer — and had established a magazine. Subsequently Prater
Paragranus inherited the chieftainship of Krumm- Heller's Ancient Rosicrucian
Fraternity and the Patriarchate of the Gnostic Catholic Church—this latter dignity he
derived from Chevillon, murdered by the Gestapo in 1944, who was himself the
successor of Johnny Bricaud. Prater Paragranus is also the head of one of the several
groups who claim to be the true heirs and successors of the Illuminati of Weishaupt as
revived (circa 1895) by Leopold Engd.
George blinked. Several Illuminati? He had to ask Hagbard about this. But he was already beginning
to visualize into hypnogogic revery and sleep was coming.
In less than a half-hour, Joe had distributed ninety-two paper cups of tomato juice containing AUM,
the drug that promised to turn neophobes into neophiles. He stood in Pioneer Court, just north of the
Michigan Avenue Bridge, at a table from which hung a poster reading FREE TOMATO JUICE.
Each person who took a cupful was invited to fill out a short questionnaire and leave it in a box on
Joe's table. However, Joe explained, the questionnaire was optional, and anyone who wanted to drink
the tomato juice and run was welcome to do so.
AUM would work just as well either way, but the questionnaire would give ELF an opportunity to
trace its effect on some of the subjects.
A tall black policeman was suddenly standing in front of the table. "You got a permit for this?"
"You bet," said Joe with a quick smile. "I'm with the General Services Corporation, and we're
running a test on a new brand of tomato juice. Care to try some, officer?"
"No thanks," said the cop unsmilingly. "We had a bunch of yippies threatening to put LSD in the
city's water supply two years ago. Let's just see your credentials." There was something cold, hard
and homicidal in this cop's eyes, Joe thought. Something beyond the ordinary. This would be a
unique guy, and the stuff would affect him uniquely. Joe looked down at the nameplate on the
policeman's jacket, which read WATERHOUSE. The line behind Patrolman Waterhouse was getting
longer.
Joe found the paper Malaclypse had given him. He handed it to Waterhouse, who glanced at it and
said, "This isn't enough. You apparently didn't tell them you were going to set up your stand in
Pioneer Court You're blocking pedestrian traffic here. This is a busy area. You'll have to move."
Joe looked out at the street where crowds walked back and forth, at the bridge across the green,
greasy Chicago river and at the buildings surrounding Pioneer Court. The brick-paved area was an
ample public square, and there was clearly room for everyone. Joe smiled at Waterhouse. He was in
Chicago and knew what to do. He took a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket, folded it twice lengthwise
and wrapped it around a cup of the tomato juice, which he deftly filled from the plastic jug on his
table. Waterhouse drained the tomato juice without comment, and when he tossed the cup into the
wastebasket the ten-dollar bill was gone.
A bunch of baldheaded, cackling small-town businessman types was lined up in front of the table.
Each one wore an acetate-covered badge bearing a red Crusaders' cross, the letters KCUF and the
words, "Dominus Vobiscum! My name is ———— ." Joe smilingly handed them cups of tomato
juice, noting that the lapels of several bore an additional decoration, a square white plastic cross with
the letters CL printed across it. Any of these men, Joe knew, would love to put him in jail for the rest
of his life because he was the publisher of a radical magazine that occasionally got very explicit
about sex and several times had published what Joe considered very beautiful erotica. The Knights of
Christianity United for the Faith were rumored to be behind the firebombing of two theaters in the
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Midwest and the lynching of a news dealer in Alabama. And, of course, they had close ties with
Atlanta Hope's God's Lightning Party.
AUM would be strong medicine for this bunch, Joe thought. He wondered if it would get them off
their censorship kick or just make them more formidable. In either case, they would be bound to bust
loose from II-uminati control for a time. If only there were a way he and Simon could get into their
convention and administer AUM to more of them . . .
Behind the KCUF contingent there was a small man who looked like a rooster with a gray comb.
When Joe read the questionnaire later, he found out that he had administered AUM to Judge Caligula
Bushman a shining ornament of the Chicago judiciary.
There followed a succession of faces Joe did not find memorable. They all had that complex, stupid,
shrewd, angry, defeated, cynical, gullible look characteristic of Chicago, New York and other big
cities. Then he found himself confronting a tall redhead whose features seemed to combine the best
of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. "Any vodka in that?" she asked him.
"No, ma'am, just straight tomato juice," said Joe.
"Too bad," she said as she tossed it down. "I could use one."
Caligula Bushman, known as the toughest judge on the Chicago bench, was trying six people who
were charged with attacking a draft board, destroying all its furniture, ruining its files and dumping a
wheelbarrow full of cow manure on the floor. Suddenly Bushman interrupted the trial about halfway
through the prosecution's presentation of its case with the announcement that he was going to hold a
sanity hearing. To the bewilderment of all, he then asked State's Attorney Milo A. Flanagan a series
of rather odd questions:
"What would you think of a man who not only kept an arsenal in his home, but was collecting at
enormous financial sacrifice a second arsenal to protect the first one? What would you say if this
man so frightened his neighbors that they in turn were collecting weapons to protect themselves from
him? What if this man spent ten times as much money on his expensive weapons as he did on the
education of his children? What if one of his children criticized his hobby and he called that child a
traitor and a bum and disowned it? And he took another child who had obeyed him faithfully and
armed that child and sent it out into the world to attack neighbors? What would you say about a man
who introduces poisons into the water he drinks and the air he breathes? What if this man not only is
feuding with the people on his block but involves himself in the quarrels of others in distant parts of
the city and even in the suburbs? Such a man would clearly be a paranoid schizophrenic, Mr.
Flanagan, with homicidal tendencies. This is the man who should be on trial, though under our
modern, enlightened system of jurisprudence we would attempt to cure and rehabilitate him rather
than merely punish.
"Speaking as a judge," he continued, "I dismiss this case on several grounds. The State is clinically
insane as a corporate entity and is absolutely unfit to arrest, try and incarcerate those who disagree
with its policies. But I doubt that this judgment, though obvious to any man of common sense, quite
fits into the rules of our American jurisprudential game. I also rule, therefore, that the right to destroy
government property is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and therefore the
crime with which these people are charged is not a crime under the Constitution. Government
property belongs to all of the people, and the right of any of the people to express displeasure with
their government by destroying government property is precious and shall not be infringed." This
doctrine had come to Judge Bushman suddenly while he was speaking without his robe. It startled
him, but he had noticed that his mind was working better and faster this afternoon.
He went on, "The State does not exist as a person or thing exists, but is a legal fiction. A fiction is a
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form of communication. Anything said to be owned by a form of communication must also thereby
be itself a form of communication. Government is a map and government paper is a map of the map.
The medium, in this case, is definitely the message, as any semanticist would agree. Furthermore,
any physical act directed against a communication is itself a communication, a map of the map of the
map. Thus, destruction of government property is protected by the First Amendment. I will issue a
more ample written opinion on this point, but I feel now that the defendants need suffer in durance
no longer. Case dismissed."
Many spectators trooped out of the courtroom sullenly, while those who loved the defendants
surrounded them with tears, laughter and hugs. Judge Bushman, who stepped down from the bench
but remained in the courtroom, was the benign center of a cluster of reporters. (He was thinking that
his opinion would be a map of the map of the map of the map, or a fourth-order map. How many
potential further orders of symbolism were there? He barely heard the praises showered on him. Of
course, he knew his decision would be overturned; but the judge business already bored him. It
would be interesting to get into mathematics, really deep.)
Harold Canvera had not bothered to fill out a questionnaire and therefore was not under observation
and was not protected. He returned to his home, and his job as an accountant, and his avocation,
which was recording telephone spiels against the Illuminati, the Communists, the Socialists, the
Liberals, the Middle-of-the-Roaders and all insufficiently conservative Republicans. (Mr. Canvera
also mailed out similar pamphlets whenever anybody was intrigued enough by his phone messages to
send him twenty-five cents for additional information. He performed these worthy educational
services for a group calling itself White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism, which was a splinter off
Taxpayers Warring Against Tyranny, which was a splinter off God's Lightning.) In the following
weeks, however, strange new ideas began to appear in Canvera's taped phone messages.
"Lower taxes aren't enough," he said, for instance. "When you hear some so-called conservative
Bircher or some follower of William Buckley Jr. call for lower taxes, beware. There's a man who's
squishy soft on IIluminism. All taxes are robbery. Instead of attacking Joan Baez, a real American
should support her for refusing to pay any more money into the Illuminati treasury in Washington."
The next week was even more interesting: "White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism has often told
you that there's no real difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Both are pawns of the
Illuminati scheme to destroy private property and make everybody a slave of the State, so the
International Bankers of a certain minority group can run everything. Now it's time for all thinking
patriots to take an even more skeptical look than ever before at the so-called anti-Il-luminati John
Birch Society. Why are they always putting up those stickers saying, 'Support Your Local Police'?
Ever wonder about that? What's the most important thing to a police state? Isn't it police? And if we
got rid of the police, how could we ever have a police state? Think about it, fellow Americans, and
Remember the Alamo!"
A few of these new strange ideas had come from various right-wing anarchist periodicals (all
secretly subsidized by Hagbard Celine) that Canvera had mysteriously received three months earlier
and hadn't glanced at until swallowing the AUM. The periodicals had been mailed by Simon Moon,
as a joke, in an envelope with the return address Illuminati International, 34 East 68th Street, New
York City— the headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations, long regarded by the Birchers as
an Illuminati hotbed. "Remember the Alamo," Canvera had picked up from Bowie Knife, a
publication of the Davy Crockett Society, a paramilitary right-wing fascist group which had
splintered off God's Lightning when their leader, a Texas oil millionaire of gigantic paranoias,
became convinced that many apparent Mexicans were actually Red Chinese agents in slight disguise.
Later, the dogma became retroactive and he claimed that the Chinese had always been Communists,
all Mexicans had always been Chinese, and the attack on the Alamo was the first Communist assault
against American capitalism.
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The third week was quite remarkable. Evidently, AUM, like LSD, changed some personality traits
but left others fairly intact; in any event, in Canvera's irregular evolution from right-wing
authoritarianism to right-wing libertarianism, he had somehow managed to arrive at a thesis never
before enunciated except by Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade. What this rare man did was to
give a three-minute spiel in favor of the right of any person, of either sex, to use any other person, of
either sex, with or without their consent, for sexual gratification of any sort needed or at least
desired. The only option he granted the recipients of these intimate invasions was the reciprocal right
to use the initiator for their own needs or desires. Now, most of the people who regularly called
Canvera's phone service were not offended by any of this; they were Lincoln Avenue hippies and
dialed him only when stoned, for what they called "a really weird and far-out head trip," and they
were bored that he was no longer as funky as in his old Negro-baiting, Jew -hating and Illuminaticastigating
days. However, there were a few members of White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism
who called occasionally to check that their contributions were still financing the dissemination of
true Americanism, and these people were severely puzzled and finally disturbed. Some of them even
wrote to WHORE headquarters in Mad Dog, Texas, to complain that there was something a little bit
peculiar in the Americanism lately. However, the president of WHORE, Dr. Horace Naismith, who
also ran the John Dillinger Died for You Society, Veterans of the Sexual Revolution, and the
Colossus of Yorba Linda Foundation, was in it only for the money, sad to say, and had no time for
such petty complaints. He was too busy implementing his newest fund-raising scheme, the Male
Chauvinist Organization (MACHO), which he hoped would milk mucho denaros from Russ Meyers,
illegal abortionists, pimps, industrialists who regularly paid female workers thirty percent of the
salaries of men doing the same jobs, and all others threatened by the Women's Liberation Movement.
The fourth week was, to be frank about it, definitely bizarre. Canvera discoursed at length on the lost
civilization that once existed in the Gobi Desert and denounced those, such as Brion Gysin, who
believed it had destroyed itself in atomic war. Rather, he asserted, it had been obliterated when the
Illuminati arrived from the planet Vulcan in flying saucers. "Remember the Alamo" was now
replaced by "Remember Carcosa," Canvera having discerned that both Ambrose Bierce and H. P.
Lovecraft were describing this tragic Gobian society in their fiction. The hippies were again
delighted— this was the funky kind of trip that had originally made Canvera a mock folk hero
among them— and they especially appreciated his call for the U.S. to abandon the next moon shot
and launch a punitive expedition to Vulcan both to wipe out Illuminism at its source and to avenge
poor Carcosa. The WHORE regulars, however, were again upset; all that concern with Carcosa
struck them as creeping one-worldism.
The fifth week, Canvera took a new turn, denouncing the masses for their stupidity and proclaiming
that the boobs probably deserved being governed by the Illuminati since most of them were too
dumb to find their own behinds in a dark room even using both hands. He had been browsing
through a volume of H. L. Mencken (sent to him over a year earlier by El Haj Stackerlee
Mohammed, ne Pearson, after one of his put-prayers-back-in-the-public-schools tirades); but he had
also been pondering an invitation to join the Illuminati. This document, which came in an envelope
with no return address, informed him that he was too smart to stay with the losers all his life and
ought to climb on the winning side before it was too late. It added that membership dues were $3125,
which should be put in a cigar box and buried in his back yard, after which it promised "one of our
underground agents will contact you." At first, Canvera had considered this a hoax— he received
many put-ons in the mail, together with pornography, Rosicrucian pamphlets, illustrated with the
eye-and-pyramid design, and pretended fan letters signed by such names as Eldridge Cleaver, Fidel
Castro, Anton Szandor Levay or Judge Crater, all of course cooked up by his Lincoln Avenue
audience. Later, however, it struck him that 3125 was five to the fifth power and that convinced him a
True Illuminatus was indeed communicating with him. He took the $3125 out of his savings account,
buried it as instructed, made a pro-Illuminati recording as a gesture of good faith and waited. The
next day he was shot, several times, in the head and shoulders, dying of natural causes as a result.
(In present time again, Rebecca Goodman enters the Hotel Tudor lobby in answer to the second
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 219 von 470
mysterious phone call of the day, while Hagbard decides George Dorn needs to be illuminized
further before Ingolstadt, and Esperando Despond clears his throat and says, "I want to explain the
mathematics of plague to you men . . .")
Actually, poor old Canvera's death had nothing to do with the Illuminati or with his former
compatriots in WHORE. The man had been practicing the libertine philosophy of his post-AUM
phone editorials and had tampered with Cassandra Acconci, the beloved daughter of Ronald
Acconci, Chicago Regional Commander of God's Lightning and a long-time contributor to KCUF.
Acconci arranged, via State's Attorney Milo A. Flanagan, for the local Maf to do a hit on Canvera.
But there are no endings, any more than there are any beginnings; it next developed that Canvera's
seed lived on in wedlock with Cassandra's ovum and was in danger of becoming a human being
within her previously trim abdomen.
Saul Goodman had no idea that the room he was in had last been rented to George Dorn; he was
conscious only of his impatience, not knowing that Rebecca was at that moment on an elevator
approaching his floor . . . And a mile north, Peter Jackson, still trying to put together the July issue
of Confrontation virtually singlehanded, dives into the slush pile (which is the magazine industry's
elegant name for unsolicited manuscripts) and comes up with more fallout from the Moon-Malik
AUM project of 1970. "Orthodox Science: The New Religion," he reads. Well, lets sample it, what
the hell. Opening at random he finds:
Einstein's concept of spherical space, furthermore, suffers from the same defect as the
concept of a smoothly or perfectly spherical earth: it rests upon the use of the irrational
number, p. This number has no operational definition; there is no place on any
engineer's scale to which one can point and say "This is exactly p," although these scales
are misleadingly marked with such a spot. p, in fact, can never be found in the real
world, and there are historical and archeological reasons to believe it was created by a
Greek mathematician under the influence of the mind-warping hallucinogenic
mushroom Amanita muscaria. It is pure surrealism. You cannot write p as a real
number; you can only approximate it, as 3.1417 . . . etc. Chemistry knows no such units:
three atoms of an element may combine with four atoms of another element, but you
will never find p atoms combining with anything. Quantum physics reveals that an
electron may jump three units or four units, but it will not jump p units. Nor is p
necessary to geometry, as is sometimes claimed; R. Buckminster Fuller has created an
entire geometric system, at least as reliable as that of the ancient Greek dope fiends, in
which p does not appear at all. Space, then, may be slanted or kiltered in various ways,
but it cannot be smoothly spherical...
"What the ring-tailed rambling hell?" Peter Jackson said aloud. He flipped to the end:
In conclusion, I want to thank a strange and uncommon man, James Mallison, who
provided the spark which set me thinking about these matters. In fact, it was due to my
meeting with Mr. Mallison that I sold my hardware business, returned to college and
majored in cartography and topology. Although he was a religious fanatic (as I was at
the time of our meeting) and would, therefore, not appreciate many of my discoveries, it
is due to this man's perverse, peculiar and yet brilliant prodding that I embarked on the
search which has lead to this new theory of a Penta-hedroidal Universe.
W. Clement Cotex, Ph.D
"Far fucking out," Peter muttered. James Mallison was a pen name Joe Malik sometimes used, and
here was another James Mallison inspiring this guy to become a Ph.D. and invent a new
cosmological theory. What was the word Joe used for such coincidences? Synch-something . . .
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("1472," Esperando Despond concludes his gloomy mathematical calculations. "That's the number of
plague cases we might have right now, at noon, if the girl had only two contacts after leaving Dr.
Mocenigo. Now, if she had three contacts . . ." The assembled FBI agents are gradually turning a
pale greenish color from the neck up. Cannel, the only actual contact, is busy two blocks away
stuffing money into a briefcase.)
"That's him!" Mrs. Edward Coke Bacon cried excitedly, addressing Basil Banghart, another FBI
agent, in an office in Washington. She is pointing at a photo of Albert "the Teacher" Stern. "Ma'am,"
Banghart says kindly, "that can't be him. 1 don't even know why his picture's still in the file. That's a
no-account junkie who once got on our most-wanted list because he confessed to a murder he didn't
even commit." In Cincinnati, an FBI artist is completing a portrait under the direction of the widow
of a slain TV repairman: the face of the killer, gradually emerging, combines various features of
Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, George Dorn and the lead vocalist of the American Medical Association,
which group was at that moment boarding a plane at Kennedy International Airport for the Ingolstadt
gig. Rebecca Goodman, rising in the Hotel Tudor elevator, has a flash memory of a nightmare of the
night before: Saul being shot by the same vocalist, dressed as a monk, in red-and-white robes, while
a Playboy bunny danced in front of some kind of giant pyramid. In Princeton, New Jersey, a nuclear
physicist named Nils Nosferatu—one of the few survivors of the early morning shootings— babbles
to the detective and police stenographer at his bedside, "Tlaloc sucks. You can't trust them. The
midget is the one to watch. We'll be moved, all right, when the tear gas hits. Fun is fun. Omega.
George's brother met the dolphins first, and that was the psychic hook that brought George in. She's
at the door. She's buried in the desert. Any deviation will result in termination. Unify the forces. You
hold the hose. I'll get Mark."
"I've got to start telling you the truth, George," Hagbard began hesitantly, as the Midget, Carmel and
Dr. Horace Naismith collided in front of the door of the Sands Hotel ("Watch the fuck where you're
going," Carmel growled), and she was at the door, her heart was pounding, an intuition was forming
in her mind, and she knocked (and Peter Jackson began dialing Epicene Wildeblood), and she was
sure of it, and she was afraid of being sure because she might be wrong, and the Midget said to Dr.
Naismith "Rude bastard, wasn't he?" and the door opened, and the door of Milo O. Flanagan's office
opened to admit Cassandra Acconci, and her heart stopped, and Dr. Nosferatu screamed, "The door.
She's in the door. The door in the desert. He eats Carmels," and it was him and she was in his arms
and she was weeping and laughing and asking, "Where have you been, baby?" And Saul closed the
door behind her and drew her further into the room. "I'm not a cop anymore," he said, "I'm on the
other side."
"What?" Rebecca noticed there was a new thing in his eyes, a thing for which she had no word.
"You can stop worrying that you'll get back on horse," he went on gaily. "And if you've ever been
afraid of your sexual fantasies, don't be. We've all got them. Saint Bernards!"
But even that wasn't as weird as the new thing in his eyes.
"Baby," she said, "baby.What the hell is this?"
"I wanted sex with my father, when I was two years old. When did you have that thing about the
Saint Bernard?"
"When I was eleven or twelve, I think. Just before my first period. My God, you must have been a lot
further away than I ever imagined." She was beginning to recognize the new thing. It wasn't
intelligence; he had always had that. With awe, she realized it was what the ancients called wisdom.
"I've always had a thing about black women, just like your thing about black men," he went on. "I
think everybody in this country has a touch of it. The blacks have it about us, too. I was in one head,
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 221 von 470
a brilliant black guy, musician, scientist, poet, a million talents, and white women were like the Holy
Grail to him. And your fantasy about Spiro Agnew—I had one just like that about Ilse Koch, a Nazi
bitch from before your time. It was the same thing in both cases, revenge. Not real sex, hate-sex. Oh,
we're all so crazy-in-the-head."
Rebecca backed up and sat down on the bed. "It's too much, too fast, I'm scared. I can see you don't
have any contempt for me, but, Lord, can I live knowing that somebody else knows every single
repressed desire I have?"
"Yes," Saul said calmly. "And you're mistaken about Time. I can't know every secret, darling. I've
only had a smattering of them. A handful. There are a dozen people right now who've been through
my head the same way, and I can look any one of them in the eye. The things I know about them!"
He laughed.
"It's still too fast," Rebecca said. "You disappear, and then you come back knowing thongs about me
that I only half know myself, and you're not a cop anymore . . . What do you mean, you've joined 'the
other side'? The Mafia? The Morituri groups?"
"No," Saul answered happily. "Much further out than that. Darling, I've been driven mad by the
world's best brainwashers and put back together again by a computer that does psychotherapy,
predicts the future and steers a submarine all at once. On the way, I learned things about humanity
and the universe that it would take a year to tell you. And I don't have much time right now, because
I've got to fly to Las Vegas. In two or three days, if everything works out, I'll be able to show you,
not just tell you—"
"Are you reading my mind right now?" Rebecca asked, still awed and nervous.
Saul laughed again. "It isn't that simple. It takes years of training, and even then it's like an old radio
would you like to hear a scientific lecture while you're being laid? That's a perversion we've never
tried before." His hand moved down from her cheek to her neck and then began unbuttoning her
blouse.
("There's a Morituri bomb factory in your building," Cassandra Acconci said flatly. "On the
seventeenth floor. The name on the buzzer is the same as yours."
"My brother!" Milo O. Flanagan bellowed. "Right under my nose! That freaking faggot!")
"Oh, Saul. Oh, Saul, Saul," Rebecca closed her eyes as the mouth tightened on her nipple . . . and Dr.
Horace Naismith crossed the lobby of the Sands, affixing the VSR badge to his lap'el, and passed the
Midget again . . . "Well," the Attorney General told the President, "one solution, of course, is to nuke
Las Vegas. But that wouldn't solve the problem of the possible carriers who could have hopped a
plane already and might be anywhere in the country now, or anywhere in the world." While the
President washes down three Librium, a Tofranil and an Elavil, the Vice President asks thoughtfully,
"Suppose we just distribute the antidote to party workers and ride this thing out?" He is feeling more
than usually misanthropic, having had an appalling evening in New York due to his impulsiveness in
answering a personal ad which had touched his heart ...
("Thank you Cassandra," Milo A. Flanagan said fervently. "I'm eternally grateful to you."
"One helping hand deserves another," Cassandra replied; she remembered how Milo and Smiling Jim
Tre-pomena had helped her get the abortion the time she was knocked up by that Canvera character.
Her father had wanted to send her to New York for a legal D & C, but Milo had pointed out that it
would look kind of funny to some people for the daughter of a high KCUF spokesman to have an
official abortion. "Besides," Smiling Jim had added, "you don't want to fool around with them New
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York Jew doctors. They might do dirty things to you. Just trust me, child; we've got the country's
best-qualified criminal abortionists in Cincinnati." Actually, though, the real reason Cassandra was
blowing the whistle on Padre Pederastia's bomb emporium was to annoy Simon Moon, whom she
had been trying to get into her bed ever since she met him at the Friendly Stranger Coffee House six
months before. Simon hadn't been interested, due to his obsession with black women, who
represented the Holy Grail to him.)
"Wildeblood here," the cultured drawl came over the wire.
"Have you finished your review yet?" Peter Jackson asked, crushing another cigarette butt in his
ashtray and worrying about lung cancer.
"Yes, and you'll love it. I really tear these two smart-asses apart." Wildeblood was enthusiastic.
"Listen to this: 'a pair of nursery Nietzsches dreaming of a psychedelic Superman.' And this: 'a plot
that is only a put-on, characters who are cardboard, and a pretense of scholarship that amounts to
sheer bluff.' But this is the crusher; listen: 'a constant use of obscene language for shock effect until
the reader begins to feel as depressed as an unwilling spectator at a quarrel between a fishwife and a
lobster-pot pirate.' Don't you think that will get quoted at all the best cocktail parties this season?"
"I suppose so. The book's a real stinker, eh?"
"Heavens, I wouldn't know for sure. I told you yesterday, it's absurdly long. Three volumes, in fact.
Boring as hell. I only had time to skim it. But listen to this, dear boy: 'If The Lord of the Rings is a
fairy tale for adults, sophisticated readers will quickly recognize this monumental miscarriage as a
fairy tale for paranoids.' That refers to the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the plot, if there is one,
seems to revolve around. Nicely worded, wouldn't you say?"
"Yeah, sure," Peter said, crossing off book review on his pad. "Send it over. I'll pay the messenger."
Epicene Wildeblood, hanging up, crossed off Confrontation on his own pad, found Time next on the
list, and picked up another book to be immortalized by his devastating witticisms. He was feeling
more than usually misanthropic, having had a disastrous evening the night before. Somebody had
answered his personal ad about his "interest in Greek Culture" and he had thrilled at the thought of a
new asshole to conquer; the asshole, unfortunately, had turned out to be the Vice President of the
United States, who was interested only in declaiming about the glorious achievements of the military
junta that had ruled in Athens. When Eppy, despairing of sex, had tried to steer the conversation to
Plato at least, the VP asked, "Are you sure he was a Greek? That sounds like a wop name to me."
(Tobias Knight and two other FBI agents elbow past the Midget searching for whores who might
have been with Dr. Mocenigo the night before, while outside the VSR's first contingent, the Hugh M.
Hefner Brigade, led by Dr. Horace Naismith himself, marches by singing: "We're Vetrans of the
Sexule Revolution/ Our rifles were issued, we had our own guns/ One was for fighting, the other for
fun/ We rose up in arms and none failed to come/ We're Vets of the Sex Revo-loooooooooootion!")
You see, darling, it all revolves around sex, but not in the sense that Freud thought. Freud never
understood sex. Hardly anybody understands sex, in fact, except a few poets here and there. Any
scientist who starts to get an inkling keeps his mouth shut because he knows he'd be drummed out of
the profession if he said what he knew. Here, I'll help you unhook that. What we're feeling now is
supposed to be tension, and what we'll feel after orgasm is supposed to be relaxation. Oh, they're so
pretty. Yes, I know I always say that. But they are pretty. Pretty, pretty, pretty. Mmmm. Mmmm. Oh,
yes, yes. Just hold it like that a moment. Yes. Tension? Lord, yes that's what I mean. How can this be
tension? What's it got in common with worry or anxiety or anything else that we call tension? It's a
strain, but not a tension. It's a drive to break out, and a tension is a drive to hold in. Those are the two
polarities. Oh, stop for a minute. Let me do this. You like that?
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Oh, darling, yes, darling, I like it, too. It makes me happy to make you happy. You see, we're trying
to break through our skins into each other. We're trying to break the walls, walls, walls. Yes, Yes.
Break the walls. Tension is trying to hold up the walls, to keep the outside from getting in. It's the
opposite. Oh, Rebecca. Let me kiss them again. They're so pretty. Pretty pretty titties. Mmm. Mmm.
Pretty. And so big and round. Oh, you've got two hard-ons and I've only got one. And this, this, ah,
you like it, don't you, that's three hard-ons. You want me to take my finger away and kiss it? Oh,
darling, pretty belly, pretty. Mmm. Mmm. Darling, Mmm. MMMMM. Mmm. Lord, Lord. You never
came so fast before, oh, I love you. Are you happy? I'm so happy. That's right, just for a minute. Oh,
God, I love watching you do that. I love to see it go into your mouth. Lord, God, Rebecca, I love it.
Yes, now I'll put him in. Little Saul, there, coming up inside you, there. Does little Rebecca like him?
I know, I know. They love each other, don't they? The way we love each other. She's so warm, she
welcomes him so nicely. You're inside me, too. That's what I'm trying to say. My field. You're inside
my field, just like I'm inside yours. It's the fields, not the physical act. That's what people are afraid
of. That's why they're tense during sex. They're afraid of letting the fields merge. It's a unifying of
the forces. God, I can't keep talking. Well, if we slow way down, yes, this is nicer, isn't it? That's
why it's so fast for most people. They rush, complete the physical act, before the fields are charged.
They never experience the fields. They think it's poetry, fiction, when somebody who's had it
describes it. One scientist knew. He died in prison. I'll tell you about him later. It's the big taboo, the
one all the others grow out of. It isn't sex itself they're trying to stop. That's too strong, they can't stop
it. It's this. Darling, yes. This. The unifying. It happens at death, but they try to steal it even then.
They've taken it out of sex. That's why the fantasies. And the promiscuity. The search. Blacks,
homosexuality, our parents, people we know we hate, Saint Bernards. Everything. It's not neuroses
or perversion. It's a search. A desperate search. Everybody wants sex with an enemy. Hate mobilizes
the field, too, you see. And hate. Is safer. Safer than love. Love too dangerous. Lord, Lord, I love
you. I love you. Let me more. Get the weight on my elbows, hold your ass with my hands. Yes.
Poetry isn't poetry. I mean it doesn't lie. It's true when I say I worship you. Can't say it outside bed.
Can only say love then, usually. Worship too scary. Some people can't even say love in bed.
Searching, partner to partner. Never able to say love. Never able to feel it. Under control. They can't
let us learn, or the game is up. Their name? They got a million names. Monopolize it. Keep it to
themselves. They had to stamp it out in the rest of us, to control. To control us. Drove it
underground, into background noise. Mustn't break through. That's how. How it happened. Darling.
First they repressed telepathy, then sex. That's why schizos. Darling. Why schizos break into crazy
sex things first. Why homosexuals dig the occult. Break one taboo, come close to the next. Finally
break the wall entirely. Get through. Like we get through, together. They can't have that. Got to keep
us apart. Schisms. Always splitting and schisms. White against black, men against women, all the
way down the line. Keep us apart. Don't let us merge. Make sex a dirty joke. A few more minutes. A
few more. My tongue in your ear. Oh, God. Soon. So fast. A miracle. Whole society set up to prevent
this. To destroy love. Oh, I do love you. Worship you. Adore you. Rebecca. Beautiful, beautiful.
Rebecca. They don't want us to. Unify. The. Forces. Rebecca. Rebecca. Rebecca.
THE SEVENTH TRIP, OR NETZACH
(THE SNAFU PRINCIPLE)
The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned,
forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of
all Damned Things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians,
psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of
industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing
this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the
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Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned to it. The theologians call it a sinner and
try to reform it The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it The psychotherapist
calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots.
—Never Whistle While You're Pissing, by Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H.
The Midget, whose name was Markoff Chaney, was no relative of the famous Chaneys of
Hollywood, but people did keep making jokes about that. It was bad enough to be, by the standards
of the gigantic and stupid majority, a freak; how much worse to be so named as to remind these big
oversized clods of the cinema's two most famous portrayers of monstro-freaks; by the time the
Midget was fifteen, he had built up a detestation for ordinary mankind that dwarfed (he hated that
word) the relative misanthropies of Paul of Tarsus, Clement of Alexandria, Swift of Dublin and even
Robert Putney Drake. Revenge, for sure, he would have. He would have revenge.
It was in college (Antioch, Yellow Springs, 1962) that Markoff Chaney discovered another hidden
joke in his name, and the circumstances were— considering that he was to become the worst
headache the Illuminati ever encountered— appropriately synchronistic. It was in a math class, and,
since this was Antioch, the two students directly behind the Midget were ignoring the professor and
discussing their own intellectual interests; since this was Antioch, they were a good six years ahead
of intellectual fads elsewhere. They were discussing ethology.
"So we keep the same instincts as our primate ancestors," one student (he was from Chicago, his
name was Moon, and he was crazy even for Antioch) was saying. "But we superimpose culture and
law on top of this. So we get split in two, dig? You might say," Moon's voice betrayed pride in the
aphorism he was about to unleash, "mankind is a statutory ape."
". . . and," the professor, old Fred "Fidgets" Digits, said at just that moment, "when such a related
series appears in a random process, we have what is known as a Markoff Chain. I hope Mr. Chaney
won't be tormented by jokes about this for the rest of the term, even if the related series of his
appearances in class do seem part of a notably random process." The class roared; another ton of bile
was entered in the Midget's shit ledger, the list of people who were going to eat turd before he died.
In fact, his cuts were numerous, both in math and in other classes. There were tunes when he could
not bear to be with the giants, but hid in his room, Playboy gatefold open, masturbating and
dreaming of millions and millions of nubile young women built like Playmates. Today, however,
Playboy would avail him not; he needed something raunchier. Ignoring his next class, Physical
Anthropology (always good for a few humiliating moments), he hurried across David Street, passed
by Atlanta Hope without noticing her, and slammed into his room, chain-bolting the door behind
him.
Damn old Fidgets Digits, and damn the science of mathematics itself, the line, the square, the
average, the whole measurable world that pronounced him a bizarre random factor. Once and for all,
beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul he declared war on the statutory ape, on law and order, on
predictability, on negative entropy. He would be a random factor in every equation; from this day
forward, unto death, it would be civil war: the Midget versus the Digits.
He took out the pornographic Tarot deck, which he used when he wanted a really far-out fantasy for
his orgasm, and shuffled it thoroughly. Let's have a Mark-off Chain masturbation to start with, he
thought with an evil grin.
And, thus, without ever contacting the Legion of Dynamic Discord, the Erisian Liberation Front or
even the Justified Ancients of Mummu, Markoff Chaney began his own crusade against the
Illuminati, not even knowing that they existed.
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His first overt act— his Fort Sumter, as it were— began in Dayton the following Saturday. He was in
Norton's Emporium, a glorified 5 & 100 store, when he saw the sign:
NO SALESPERSON MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR WITHOUT
THE AUTHORIZATION OF A SUPERIOR.
THE MGT
What!, he thought, are the poor girls supposed to pee in their panties if they can't find a superior?
Years of school came back to him ("Please, may I leave the room, sir?") and rituals which had
appeared nonsensical suddenly made sense in a sinister way. Mathematics, of course. They were
trying to reduce us all to predictable units, robots. Hah! not for nothing had he spent a semester in
Professor "Sheets" Kelly's intensive course on textual analysis of modern poetry. The following
Wednesday, the Midget was back at Norton's and hiding in a coffee urn when the staff left and
locked up. A few moments later, the sign was down and a subtly different one was in its place:
NO SALESPERSON MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR OR GO TO THE
DOOR WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION OF A SUPERIOR.
THE MGT.
He came back several times in the next few weeks, and the sign remained. It was as he suspected: in
a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top
are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below. It was the
chains of communication, not the means of production, that determined a social process; Marx had
been wrong, lacking cybernetics to enlighten him. Marx was like the engineers of his time, who
thought of electricity in terms of work done, before Marconi thought of it in terms of information
transmitted. Nothing signed "THE MGT." would ever be challenged; the Midget could always pass
himself off as the Management.
At the same tune, he noticed that the workers were more irritable; the shoppers picked this up and
became grouchier themselves; sales, he guessed correctly, were falling off. Poetry was the answer:
poetry in reverse. His interpolated phrase, with its awkward internal rhyme and its pointlessness,
bothered everybody, but in a subliminal, preconscious fashion. Let the market researchers and
statisticians try to figure this one out with their computers and averages.
His father had been a stockholder in Blue Sky Inc., generally regarded as the worst turkey on the Big
Board (it produced devices to be used in making landings on low-gravity planets); profits had soared
when John Fitzgerald Kennedy had announced that the U.S. would put a man on the moon before
1970; the Midget now had a guaranteed annuity amounting to thirty-six hundred dollars per year,
three hundred dollars per month. It was enough for his purposes. Revenge, in good measure, he
would have. He would have revenge.
Living in Spartan fashion, dining often on a tin of sardines and a pint of milk from a machine,
traveling always by Greyhound bus, the Midget crisscrossed the country constantly, placing his
improved surrealist signs whenever the opportunity presented itself. A slowly mounting wave of
anarchy followed in his wake. The Illuminati never got a fix on him: he had little ego to discover,
burning all his energies into Drive, like a dictator or a great painter— but, unlike a dictator or a great
painter, he had no desire for recognition. For years, the Illuminati attributed his efforts to the
Discordians, the JAMs or the esoteric ELF. Watts went up, and Detroit; Birmingham, Buffalo,
Newark, a flaming picnic blanket spread across urban America as the Midget's signs burned in the
stores that had flaunted them; one hundred thousand marched to the Pentagon and some of them tried
to expel the Demon (the Illuminati foiled that at the last minute, forbidding them to form a circle); a
Democratic convention was held behind barbed wire; in 1970 a Senate committee announced that
there had been three thousand bombings in the year, or an average of ten per day; by 1973 Morituri
groups were forming in every college, every suburb; the SLA came and came back again; Atlanta
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Hope was soon unable to control God's Lightning, which was going in for its own variety of
terrorism years before Illuminati planning had intended.
"There's a random factor somewhere," technicians said at Illuminati International; "There's a random
factor somewhere," Hagbard Celine said, reading the data that came out of FUCKUP; "There's a
random factor somewhere," the Dealy Lama, leader of ELF, said dreamily in his underground
hideout beneath Dealy Plaza.
Drivers on treacherous mountain roads swore in confusion at signs that said:
SLIPPERY WHEN WET
MAINTAIN 50 M.P.H.
FALLING ROCK ZONE
DO NOT LITTER
Men paid high initiation fees to revel in the elegance of all-WASP clubs whose waiters were
carefully trained to be almost as snobbish as the members, then felt vaguely let down by signs
warning them:
WATCH YOUR HAT AND COAT
NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR LOST PROPERTY.
THE MGT.
The Midget became an electronic wizard in his spare tune. All over the country, pedestrians stood
undecided on curbs as electric signs said WALK while the light was red and then switched to DON'T
WALK when the light Went green. He branched out and expanded his activities; office workers
received memos early in the morning (after he had spent a night with a Xerox machine) and puzzled
over:
1. All vacation requests must be submitted in triplicate to the Personnel Department at
least three weeks before the planned vacation dates.
2. All employees who change their vacation plans must notify Personnel Department by
completing Form 1472, Vacation Plan Change, and submitting it three weeks before the
change in plans.
3. All vacation plans must be approved by the Department Supervisor and may be
changed if they conflict with the vacation plans of employees of higher rank and/or
longer tenure.
4. Department Supervisors may announce such cancellations at any time, provided the
employee is given 48 hours notice, or two working days, whichever is longer, as the case
may be. (Employees crossing the International Date Line, see Form 2317.)
5. Employees may not discuss vacation plans with other employees or trade preferred
dates.
6. These few simple rules should prevent a great deal of needless friction and frustration
if all
employees cooperate, and we will all have a happy summer.
- THE MGT.
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On April 26 of the year when the Illuminati tried to immanentize the Eschaton, the Midget
experienced aches, pains, nausea, spots before his eyes, numbness in his legs and dizziness. He went
to the hotel doctor, and a short while after describing his symptoms he was rushed in a closed car to a
building that had a Hopi Indian Kachina Doll Shop in front and the Las Vegas CIA office in the
back. He was fairly delirious by then, but he heard somebody say, "Ha, we're ahead of the FBI and
the Cesspool Cleaners on this one." Then he got an injection and began to feel better, until a friendly
silver-haired man sat down by his cot and asked who "the girl" was.
"What girl?" the Midget asked irritably.
"Look, son, we know you've been with a girl. She gave you this."
"Was it the clap?" the Midget asked, dumbfounded. Except for his pornographic Tarot cards, he was
still a virgin (the giant women were all so damned patronizing, but his own female equivalents bored
him; the giantesses were the Holy Grail to him, but he had never had the courage to approach one). "I
never knew the clap could be this bad," he added, blushing. His greatest fear was that somebody
would discover his virginity.
"No, it wasn't the clap," said the kindly man (who didn't deceive the Midget one bit; if this guy
couldn't pump him, he knew, they would send in the mean, tough one; the nice cop and the nasty
cop; oldest con in the business). "This girl had a certain, uh, rare disease, and we're with the U.S.
Public Health Service." The gentle man produced forged credentials to "prove" this last allegation.
Horseshit, the Midget thought. "Now," the sweet old codger went on, "we've got to track her down,
and see that she gets the antidote, or a lot of people will get this disease. You understand?"
The Midget understood. This guy was Army Intelligence or CIA and they wanted to crack this before
the FBI and get the credit. The disease was started by the government, obviously. Some fuckup in
one of their biological war laboratories, and they had to cover it up before the whole country got
wise. He hesitated; none of his projects had ever been consciously intended to lead to death, just to
make things a little unpredictable and spooky for the giants.
"The U.S. Public Health Service will be eternally grateful to you." the grandfatherly man said, eyes
crinkling with sly affection. "It isn't often that a little man gets a chance to do such a big job for his
country." That did it.
"Well," the Midget said, "she was blonde, in her mid-twenties I guess, and she told me her name was
Sarah. She had a scar on her neck— I suppose somebody tried to cut her throat once. She was, let's
see, about five-five and maybe 110-115 pounds. And she was superb at giving head," he concluded,
thinking that was a very plausible Las Vegas whore he had just created. His mind was racing rapidly;
they wouldn't want people running around loose knowing about this. The antidote had been to keep
him alive while they pumped him. He needed insurance. "Oh, and here's a real lead for you," he said
"I just remembered. First, I want to explain something about, uh, people who are below average in
stature. We're very sexy. You see, our sex gland or whatever it's called works extra, because our
growth gland doesn't work. So we never get enough." He was making this up off the top of his head
and enjoying it. He hoped it would spread; he had a beautiful vision of bored rich women seeking
midgets as they now seek blacks. "So you see," he went on, "I kept her a long time, having encores
and encores and encores. Finally, she told me she'd have to raise her price, because she had another
customer waiting. I couldn't afford it so I let her go." Now the clincher. "But she mentioned his
name. She said, 'Joe Blotz will be pissed if I disappoint him,' only the name wasn't Joe Blotz."
"Well, what was it?"
"That's the problem," the Midget said sadly. "I can't remember. But if you leave me alone awhile," he
added brightly, "maybe it'll come back to me." He was already planning his escape.
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And, twenty-five hours earlier, George Dorn, quoting Pilate, asked, "What is Truth?" (Barney
Muldoon just then, was lounging in the lobby of the Hotel Tudor, waiting for Saul to finish what he
had called "a very important, very private conversation" with Rebecca; Nkrumah Fubar was
experimentally placing a voodoo doll of the president of American Express inside a tetrahedron—
their computer was still annoying him about a bill he'd paid over two months ago, on the very
daynight that Soapy Mocenigo dreamed of Anthrax Leprosy Pi; R. Buckminster Fuller, unaware of
this new development in his geodesic revolution, was lecturing the Royal Institute of Architects in
London and explaining why there were no nouns in the real world; August Personage was breathing
into a telephone in New York; Pearson Mohammed Kent was exuberantly balling a female who was
not only white but from Texas; the Midget himself was saying "Rude bastard, isn't he?" to Dr.
Naismith; and our other characters were variously pursuing their own hobbies, predilections,
obsessions and holy missions). But Hagbard, with uncharacteristic gravity, said, "Truth is the
opposite of lies. The opposite of most of what you've heard all your life. The opposite of most of
what you've heard from me."
They were in Hagbard's funky stateroom and George, after his experience at the demolished Drake
mansion, found the octopi and other sea monsters on the wall murals distinctly unappetizing.
Hagbard, as usual, was wearing a turtleneck and casual slacks; this time the turtleneck was
lavender— an odd, faggoty item for him. George remembered, suddenly, that Hagbard had once told
him, about homosexuality, "I've tried it, of course," but added something about liking women better.
(Goodness, was that only two mornings ago?) George wondered what it would be like to "try it" and
if he would ever have the nerve. "What particular lies," he asked cautiously, "are you about to
confess?"
Hagbard lit a pipe and passed it over. "Alamout Black hash," he said croakingly, holding the smoke
down. "Hassan i Sabbah's own private formula. Does wonders when heavy metaphysics is coming at
you."
George inhaled and felt an immediate hit like cocaine or some other forebrain stimulant. "Christ,
what's this shit cut with?" he gasped, as somebody somewhere seemed to turn colored lights on in the
gold-and-nautical-green room and on that outasight lavender sweater.
"Oh," Hagbard said casually, "a hint of belladonna and stramonium. That was old Hassan's secret,
you know. All that crap in most books about how he had turned his followers on with hash, and
they'd never i had it before so they thought it was magic, is unhistorical. Hashish was known in the
Mideast since the neolithic age; archeologists have dug it up in tombs. Seems our ancestors buried
their priests with a load of hash to help them negotiate with their gods when they got to Big Rock
Candy Mountain or wherever they thought they were going. Hassan's originality was blending
hashish with just the right chemical cousins to produce a new synergetic effect."
"What's synergetic?" George asked slowly, feeling seasick for the first time aboard the Leif Erikson.
"Nonadditive. When you put two and two together and get five instead of four. Buckminster Fuller
uses synergetic gimmicks all the time in his geodesic domes. That's why they're stronger than they
look." Hagbard took another toke and passed the pipe again.
What the hell? George thought. Sometimes increasing the dose got you past the nausea. He toked,
deeply. Hadn't they started out to discuss Truth, though?
George giggled. "Just as I suspected. Instead of using your goddam prajna or whatever it is to spy on
the Illuminati, you're just another dirty old man. You use it to play Peeping Tom in other people's
heads."
"Heads?" Hagbard protested, laughing. "I never scan the heads. Who the hell wants to watch people
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 229 von 470
eliminating their wastes?"
"I thought you were going to be Socrates," George howled between lunatic peals of tin giggles, "and
I was prepared to be Plato, or at least Glaucon or one of the minor characters. But you're as stoned as
I am. You can't tell me anything important. All you can do is make bad puns."
"The pun," Hagbard replied with dignity (ruined somewhat by an unexpected chortle), "is mightier
than the sword. As James Joyce once said."
"Don't get pedantic."
"Can I get semantic?"
"Yes. You can get semantic. Or antic. But not pedantic."
"Where were we?"
"Truth."
"Yes. Well, Truth is like marijuana, my boy. A drug on the market."
"I'm getting a hard-on."
"You too? That's the way the balling bounces. At least, with Alamout Black. Nausea, then
microamnesia, then the laughing jag, then sex. Be patient. The clear light comes next. Then we can
discuss Truth. As if we haven't been discussing it all along."
"You're a hell of a guru, Hagbard. Sometimes you sound even dumber than me."
"If the Elder Malaclypse were here, he'd tell you a few about some other gurus. And geniuses. Do
you think Jesus never whacked off? Shakespeare never got on a crying jag at the Mermaid Tavern?
Buddha never picked his nose? Gandhi never had the crabs?"
"I've still got a hard-on. Can't we postpone the philosophy while I go look for Stella— I mean,
Mavis?"
"That's Truth."
"What is Truth?"
"Up in the cortex it makes a difference to you whether it's Stella or Mavis. Down in the glands, no
difference. My grandmother would do as well."
"That's not Truth. That's just cheap half-assed Freudian cynicism."
"Oh, yes. You saw the mandala with Mavis."
"And you were inside my head somehow. Dirty voyeur."
"Know thyself."
"This will never take its place beside the Platonic Dialogues, not in a million years. We're both
stoned out of our gourds."
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"I love you, George."
"I guess I love you, too. You're so damned overwhelming. Everybody loves you. Are we gonna
fuck?"
(Mavis had said, "Wipe the come off your trousers." Fantasizing Sophia Loren while he masturbated.
Or fantasizing that he masturbated while actually...)
"No. You don't need it. You're starting to remember what really happened in Mad Dog jail."
"Oh, no." Coin's enormous, snaky cock . . . the pain. . . the pleasure . . .
"I'm afraid so."
"Damn it, now I'll never know. Did you put that in my head, or did it really happen? Did I fantasize
the interruption then or did I fantasize the rape just now?"
"Know thyself."
"Did you say that twice or did I just hear it twice?"
"What do you think?"
"I don't know. I don't know, right now. I just don't know. Is this some devious homosexual
seduction?"
"Maybe. Maybe it's a murder plot. Maybe I'm leading up to cutting your throat."
"I wouldn't mind. I've always had a big self-destructive urge. Like all cowards. Cowardice is a
defense against suicide."
Hagbard laughed. "I never knew a young man who had so much pussy and risked death so often.
And there you sit, still worrying about being whatever it was they called you when you first started
letting your hair grow long in your early teens."
"Sissy. That was the word in good old Nutley, New Jersey. It meant both faggot and coward. So I've
never cut my hair since then, to prove they couldn't intimidate me."
"Yeah. I'm tracking a black guy now, a musician, who's balling a white lady, a fair flower from
Texas. Partly, because she really turns him on. But partly because she could have a brother who
might come after him with a gun. He's proving they can't intimidate him."
"That's the Truth? We spend all our time proving we can't be intimidated? But all the time we are
intimidated on another level?" The colors were coming back strong again; it was that kind of trip.
Every time you thought you were the pilot, it would go off in an unexpected direction to remind you
that you were just a passenger.
"That's part of the Truth, George. Another part is that every time you think you're intimidated you're
really rebelling on another level. Oh, what idiots the IIluminati really are, George. I once collected
statistics on industrial accidents in a sample city— Birmingham, England, actually. Fed all the
relevant facts into FUCKUP and got just what I expected. Sabotage. Unconscious sabotage. Every
case was a blind insurrection. Every man and woman is in rebellion, but only a few have the guts to
admit it. The others jam the system by accident, har har har, or by stupidity, har har har again. Let
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me tell you about the Indians, George."
"What Indians?"
"Did you ever wonder why nothing works right? Why the whole world seems completely fucked up
all the time?"
"Yeah. Doesn't everybody?"
"I suppose so. Pardon me, I've got to get more stoned. In a little while, I go into FUCKUP and we put
our heads together— literally, I attach electrodes to my temples— and I'll try to track down the
problem in Las Vegas. I don't spend all my time on random voyeurism," Hagbard pronounced with
dignity. He refilled the pipe, asking pettishly, "Where was I?"
"The Indians in Birmingham. How did they get there?"
"There weren't any fucking Indians in Birmingham. You're getting me confused." Hagbard toked
deeply.
"You're getting yourself confused. You're bombed out of your skull."
"Look who's talking."
Hagbard toked again. "The Indians. The Indians weren't in Birmingham. Birmingham was where I
did the study that convinced me most industrial accidents are unconscious sabotage. So are most
misfiled documents among white-collar workers, I'd wager. The Indians are another story. I was a
lawyer once, when I first came to your country and before I went in for piracy. I usually don't admit
that, George. I usually tell people I played the piano in a whorehouse or something else not quite so
disreputable as the truth. If you want to know why nothing makes sense in government forms,
remember there are two hundred thousand lawyers working for the bureaucracy these days.
"The Indians were a band of Shoshones. I was defending them against the Great Land Thief, or as it
pretentiously titles itself, the Government, in Washington. We were having a conference. You know
what an Indian conference is like? Nobody talks for hours sometimes. A good yoga. When
somebody does finally speak, you can be sure it comes from the heart. That old movie stereotype,
'White man speak with forked tongue,' has a lot of truth in it. The more you talk, the more your
imagination colors things. I'm one of the most long-winded people alive and one of the worst liars."
Hagbard toked again and finally held the pipe out inquiringly; George shook his head. "But the story
I wanted to tell was about an archeologist. He was hunting for relics of the Devonian culture, the
Indians who lived in North America just before the ecological catastrophe of 10,000 B.C. He found
what he thought was a burial mound and asked to dig into it. Grok this, George. The Indians looked
at him. They looked at me. They looked at each other. Then the oldest man spoke and, very gravely,
gave permission. The archeologist hefted his pick and shovel and went at it like John Henry trying to
beat that steam drill. In two minutes he disappeared. Right into a cesspool. Then the Indians laughed.
"Grok, George. I knew them as well as any white man ever knows Indians. They had learned to trust
me, and I, them. And yet I sat there, while they played their little joke, and I didn't get a hint of what
was about to happen. Even though I had begun to discover my telepathic talents and even focus them
a little. Think about it, George. Think about all the pokerfaced blacks you've seen. Think about every
time a black has done something so fantastically, outrageously stupid that you had a flash of
racism— which, being a radical, you were ashamed of, right?—and wondered if maybe they are
inferior. And think of ninety-nine percent of the women in the Caucasian world, outside Norway,
who do the Dumb Dora or Marilyn Monroe act all the time. Think a minute, George. Think."
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There was a silence that seemed to stretch into some long hall of near-Buddhist emptiness—George
recognized a glimpse, at last!, into the Void all his acidhead friends had tried to describe— and then
he remembered this was not the trip Hagbard was pushing him toward. But the silence lingered as a
quietness of spirit, a calm in the tornado of those last few days, and George found himself ruminating
with total dispassion, without hope or dread or smugness or guilt; if not totally without ego, or in full
darshana, at least without the inflamed and voracious ego that usually either leaped forward or
shrunk back from naked fact. He contemplated his memories and was unmoved, objective, at peace.
He thought of blacks and women and of their subtle revenges against their Masters, acts of sabotage
that could not be recognized clearly as such because they took the form of acts of obedience; he
thought of the Shoshone Indians and their crude joke, so similar to the jokes of oppressed peoples
everywhere; he saw, suddenly, the meaning of Mardi Gras and the Feast of Fools and the Saturnalia
and the Christmas Office Party and all the other limited, permissible, structured occasions on which
Freud's Return of the Repressed was allowed; he remembered all the times he had gotten his own
back against a professor, a high school principal, a bureaucrat, or, further back, his own parents, by
waiting for the occasion when, by doing exactly what he was told, he could produce some form of
minor catastrophe. He saw a world of robots, marching rigidly in the paths laid down for them from
above, and each robot partly alive, partly human, waiting its chance to drop its own monkey wrench
into the machinery. He saw, finally! why everything in the world seemed to work wrong and the
Situation Normal was All Fucked Up. "Hagbard," he said slowly. "I think I get it. Genesis is exactly
backwards. Our troubles started from obedience, not disobedience. And humanity is not yet created."
Hagbard, more hawk -faced than ever, said carefully, "You are approaching Truth. Walk cautiously
now, George. Truth is not, as Shakespeare would have it, a dog that can be whipped out to kennel.
Truth is a tiger. Walk cautiously, George." He turned in his chair, slid open a drawer in his Danish
Modern quasi-Martian desk and took out a revolver. George watched, as cool and alone as a man
atop Everest, as Hagbard opened the chamber and showed six bullets inside. Then, with a snap, the
gun was closed and placed on the desk blotter. Hagbard did not glance at it again. He watched
George; George watched the pistol. It was the scene with Carlo all over again, but Hagbard's
challenge was unspoken, gnomic; his level glance did not even admit that a contest had begun. The
gun glittered maliciously; it whispered of all the violence and stealth in the world, treacheries
undreamed of by Medici or Machiavelli, traps set for victims who were innocent and blameless; it
seemed to fill the room with an aura of its presence, and yes, it even had the more subtle menace of a
knife, weapon of the sneak, or of a whip in the hands of a man whose smile is too sensual, too
intimate, too knowing; into the middle of George's tranquility it had come, inescapable and
unexpected as a rattlesnake hi the path on the afternoon of the sweetest spring day in the world's
most manicured and artificial garden. George heard the adrenalin begin to course into his
bloodstream; saw the "activation syndrome" moisten his palms, accelerate his heart, loosen his
sphincter a micrometer; and still, high and cool on his mountain, felt nothing.
"The robot," he said, glancing finally at Hagbard, "is easily upset"
"Don't put your hand in that fire," Hagbard warned, unimpressed. "You'll get burned." He watched;
he waited; George could not tear his glance from those eyes and in them, then, he saw the merriment
of Howard, the dolphin, the contempt of his grade school principal ("A high IQ, Dorn, does not
justify arrogance and insubordination"), the despairing love of his mother, who could never
understand him, the emptiness of Nemo, his tomcat of childhood days, the threat of Billy Holtz, the
school bully, and the total otherness of an insect or a serpent. More: he saw the child Hagbard, proud
like himself of intellectual superiority and frightened like himself of the malice of stupider but
brawnier boys, and the very old Hagbard, years hence, wrinkled as a reptile but still showing an
endless searching intelligence. The ice melted; the mountain, with a roar of protest and defiance,
crumbled; and George was borne down, down in the river racing toward the rapids where the gorilla
howled and the mouse trotted quickly, where the saurian head raised above the Triassic foliage,
where the sea slept and the spirals of DNA curled backward toward the flash that was this radiance
now, this raging eternally against the quite impossible dying of the light, this storm and this
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centering.
"Hagbard . . ." he said at last.
"I know. I can see it. Just don't fall back into that other thing. It's the Error of the Illuminati."
George smiled weakly, still not quite back into the world of words. " 'Eat and ye shall be as gods'?"
he said.
"I call it the no-ego ego trip. It's the biggest ego trip of all, of course. Anybody can learn it. A child
of two months, a dog, a cat. But when an adult rediscovers it, after the habit of obedience and
submission has crushed it out of him for years or decades, what happens can be a total disaster.
That's why the Zen Roshis say, 'One who achieves supreme illumination is like an arrow flying
straight to hell.' Keep in mind what I said about caution, George. You can release at any moment. It's
great up there, and you need a mantra to keep you away from it until you learn how to use it. Here's
your mantra, and if you knew the peril you are in you'd brutally burn it into your backside with a
branding iron to make sure you'd never forget it: I Am The Robot. Repeat it."
"I Am The Robot."
Hagbard made a face like a baboon and George laughed again, at last. "When you get tune," Hagbard
said, "look into my little book, Never Whistle While You're Pissing—there are copies all over the
ship. That's my ego tip. And keep it in mind: you are the robot and you'll never be anything else. Of
course, you're also the programmer, and even the meta-programmer; but that's another lesson, for
another day. For now, just remember the mammal, the robot."
"I know," George said. "I've read T. S. Eliot, and now I understand him. 'Humility is endless.'"
"And humanity is created. The . . . other ... is not human."
George said then, "So I've arrived. And it's just another starting place. The beginning of another trip.