ILLUMINATI ( PART III )

A harder trip."
"That's another meaning in Heracleitus. "The end is the beginning.'" Hagbard rose and shook himself
like a dog. "Wow," he said. "I better get to work with FUCKUP. You can stay here or go to your
own room, but I suggest that you don't rush off and talk about your experience to somebody else.
You can talk it to death that way."
George remained in Hagbard's room and reflected on what had happened. He had no urge to scribble
in his diary, the usual defense against silence and aloneness since his early teens. Instead, he savored
the stillness of the room and of his inner core. He remembered Saint Francis of Assisi called his body
"Brother Ass," and Timothy Leary used to say when exhausted, "The robot needs sleep." Those had
been their mantras, their defenses against the experience of the mountaintop and the terrible
arrogance it triggered. He remembered, too, the old classic underground press ad: "Keep me high and
I'll ball you forever." He felt sorry for the woman who had written that: pitiful modern version of the
maddened Saint Simon on his pillar in the desert. And Hagbard was right: any dog or cat could do it,
could make the jump to the mountaintop and wait without passion until the robot, Brother Ass,
survived the ordeal or perished in it. That was what primitive rites of initiation were all about—
driving the youth through sheer terror to the point of letting go, the mountaintop point, and then
bringing him back down again. George suddenly understood how his generation, in rediscovering the
sacred drugs, had failed to rediscover their proper use ... had failed, or had been prevented. The
Illuminati, it was clear, didn't want any competition in the godmanship business.
You could talk it to death in your own head as well as in conversation, he realized, but he went back
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over it again trying to dissect it without mutilating it. The homosexuality bit had been a false front
(with its own reality, of course, like all false fronts). Behind that was the conditioned terror against
the Robot: the fear, symbolized in Frankenstein and dozens of other archetypes, that if it were let
loose, unrestrained, the Robot would run amok, murder, rape, go mad . . . And then Hagbard had
waited until the Alamout Black brought him to freedom, showed him the peak, the place where the
cortex at last could idle, as a car motor or a dog or cat idles, the last refuge where the catatonic hides.
When George was safely in that harbor, Hagbard produced the gun— in a more primitive, or more
sophisticated, society, it would have been the emblem of a powerful demon— and George saw that
he could, indeed, idle there and not blindly follow the panic signals from the Robot's adrenalin
factory. And, because he was a human and not a dog, the experience had been ecstasy to him, and
temptation, so Hagbard, with a few words and a glance from those eyes, pushed him off the peak
into . . . what?
Reconciliation was the word. Reconciliation with the robot, with the Robot, with himself. The peak
was not a victory; it was the war, the eternal war against the Robot, carried to a higher and more
dangerous level. The end of the war was his surrender, the only possible end to that war, since the
Robot was three billion years old and couldn't be killed.
There were two great errors in the world, he perceived: the error of the submissive hordes, who
fought all their lives to control the Robot and please their masters (and who always sabotaged every
effort without knowing it, and were in turn sabotaged by the Robot's Revenge: neuroses, psychoses
and all the tiresome list of psychosomatic ailments); and the error of those who recaptured the animal
art of letting the Robot run itself, and who then tried to maintain this split from their own flesh
indefinitely, until they were lost forever in that eternally widening chasm. One sought to batter the
Robot to submission, the other to slowly starve it; both were wrong.
And yet, on another plane of his still-zonked mind, George knew that even this was a half truth; that
he was, indeed, just beginning his journey, not arriving at his destination. He rose and walked to the
bookshelves and, as he expected, found a stack of Hagbard's little pamphlets on the bottom: Never
Whistle While You're Pissing, by Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H. He wondered what the H.M. and S.H.
stood for, then flipped open to the first page, where he found only the large question:
WHO
IS THE ONE MORE TRUSTWORTHY
THAN
ALL THE BUDDHAS
AND SAGES
??
George laughed out loud. The Robot, of course. Me. George Dorn. All three billion years' worth of
evolution in every gene and chromosome of me. And that, of course, was what the Illuminati (and all
the petty would-be Illuminati who made up power structures everywhere) never wanted a man or
woman to realize.
George turned to the second page and began reading:
If you whistle while you're pissing, you have two minds where one is quite sufficient. If
you have two minds, you are at war with yourself. If you are at war with yourself, it is
easy for an external force to defeat you. This is why Mong-tse wrote, "A man must
destroy himself before others can destroy him."
That was all, except for an abstract drawing on page three that seemed to suggest an enemy figure
moving out toward the viewer. About to turn to page four, George got a shock: from another angle,
the drawing was two figures engaged in attacking each other. I and It. The Mind and the Robot. His
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memory leaped back twenty-two years and he saw his mother lean over the crib and remove his hand
from his penis. Christ, no wonder I grab it when I'm frightened: the Robot's Revenge, the Return of
the Repressed.
George started to turn the page again, and saw another trick in Hagbard's abstraction: from a third
angle, it might be a couple making love. In a flash, he saw his mother's face above his crib again, in
better focus, and recognized the concern in her eyes. The cruel hand of repression was moved by
love: she was trying to save him from Sin.
And Carlo, dead three years now, together with the rest of that Morituri group— what had inspired
Carlo when he and the four others (all of them less than eighteen, George remembered) blasted their
way into a God's Lightning rally and killed three cops and four Secret Service agents in their
attempts to gun down the Secretary of State? Love, nothing but mad love ...
The door opened and George tore his eyes from the text. Mavis, back again in her sweater and slacks
outfit, walked in. For a proclaimed right-wing anarchist, she sure dresses a lot like a New Leftist,
George thought; but then Hagbard wrote like a cross between Reichian Leftist and an egomaniacal
Zen Master— there was obviously more to the Discordian philosophy than he could grasp yet, even
though he was now convinced it was the system he himself had been groping toward for many years.
"Mmm," she said, "I like that smell. Alamout Black?"
"Yeah," George said, having trouble meeting her eyes. "Hagbard's been illuminating me."
"I can tell. Is that why you suddenly feel uncomfortable with me?"
George met her eyes, then looked away again; there was tenderness there but it was, as he had
expected, sisterly at best. He muttered, "It's just that I realize our sex" (why couldn't he say fucking
or, at least, balling?) "was less important to you than to me."
Mavis took Hagbard's chair and smiled at him affectionately. "You're lying, George. You mean it
was more important to me than to you." She began to refill the pipe; Christ God, George thought, did
Hagbard send her in to take me to the next stage, whatever it is?
"Well, I guess I mean both," he said cautiously. "You were more emotionally involved than I was
then, but now I'm more emotionally involved. And I know that what I want, I can't have. Ever."
"Ever is a long time. Let's just say you can't have it now."
" 'Humility is endless,' " George repeated.
"Don't start feeling sorry for yourself. You've discovered that love is more than a word in poetry, and
you want it right away. You just had two other things that used to be just words to you— sunyata
and satori. Isn't that enough for one day?"
"I'm not complaining. I know that 'humility is endless' also means surprise is endless. Hagbard
promised me a happy truth and that's it."
Mavis finally got the pipe lit and, after toking deeply, passed it over. "You can have Hagbard," she
said.
George, sipping very lightly since he was still fairly high, mumbled "Hm?"
"Hagbard will love you as well as ball you. Of course, it's not the same. He loves everybody. I'm not
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at that stage yet. I can only love my equals." She grinned wickedly. "Of course, I can still get horny
about you. But now that you know there's more than that, you want the whole package deal, right?
So try Hagbard."
George laughed, feeling suddenly lighthearted. "Okay! I will."
"Bullshit," Mavis said bluntly. "You're putting us both on. You've liberated some of the energies and
right away, like everybody else at this stage, you want to prove that there are no blocks anywhere
anymore. That laugh was not convincing, George. If you have a block, face it. Don't pretend it isn't
there."
Humility is endless, George thought. "You're right," he said, unabashed.
"That's better. At least you didn't fall into feeling guilty about the block. That's an infinite regress.
The next stage is to feel guilty about feeling guilty . . . and pretty soon you're back in the trap again,
trying to be the governor of the nation of Dorn."
"The Robot," George said.
Mavis toked and said, "Mm?"
"I call it the Robot."
"You picked that up from Leary back in the mid-'60s. I keep forgetting you were a child prodigy. I
can just see you, with your eyeglasses and your shoulders all hunched, poring over one of Tim's
books when you were eight or nine. You must have been quite a child. They've sure mauled you over
since then, haven't they?"
"It happens to most prodigies. And nonprodigies, too, for that matter."
"Yeah. Eight years' grade school, four high school, four college, then postgraduate studies. Nothing
left but the Robot at the end. The ever-rebellious nation of Me with poor old I sitting on the throne
trying to govern it."
"There's no governor anywhere," George quoted.
"You are coming along nicely."
"That's Chuang Chou, the Taoist philosopher. But I never understood him before."
"So that's where Hagbard stole it! He has little cards that say, 'There is no enemy anywhere.' And
ones that say, 'There is no friend anywhere.' He said once he could tell in two minutes which card
was right for a particular person. To jolt them awake."
"But words alone can't do it. I've known most of the words for years . . ."
"Words can help. In the right situation. If they're the wrong words. I mean, the right words. No, I do
mean the wrong words."
They laughed, and George said, "Are we just goofing, or are you taking up the liberation of the
nation of Dorn where Hagbard left off?"
"Just goofing. Hagbard did tell me that you had passed one of the gateless gates and that I might drop
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in, after you had a while alone."
"A gateless gate. That's another one I've known for years, without understanding it. The gateless gate
and the governorless nation. The chief cause of socialism is
capitalism. What the hell does that bloody apple have to do with all this?"
"The apple is the world. Who did Goddess say owns it?"
" 'The prettiest one.' "
"Who is the prettiest one?"
"You are."
"Don't make a pass right now. Think."
George giggled. "I've been through too much already. I think I'm getting sleepy. I have two answers,
one communist and one fascist. Both are wrong, of course. The correct answer has to fit in with your
anarcho-capitalism."
"Not necessarily. Anarcho-capitalism is just our trip. We don't mean to impose it on everybody. We
have an alliance with an anarcho-communist group called the JAMs. John Dillinger's their leader."
"Come off it. Dillinger died in 1935 or something."
"John Dillinger is alive and well today, in California, Fernando Poo and Texas," Mavis smiled. "As a
matter of fact, he shot John F. Kennedy."
"Give me another toke. If I have to listen to this, I might as well be in a state where I won't try to
understand it."
Mavis passed the pipe. "The prettiest one has quite a few levels to it, like all good jokes. I'll give you
the Freudian one, as beginners. You know the prettiest one, George. You gave it to the apple just
yesterday.
"Every man's penis is the prettiest thing in the world to him. From the day he's born until the day he
dies. It never loses its endless fascination. And, I kid you not, baby, the same is true of every woman
and her pussy. It's the closest thing to a real, blind, helpless love and religious adoration that most
people ever achieve. But they'd rather die than admit it. Homosexuality, the urge to kill, petty spites
and treacheries, fantasies of sadism, masochism, transvestism, any weird thing you can name, they'll
confess all that in a group therapy session. But that deep submerged constant narcissism, that
perpetual mental masturbation, is the earliest and most powerful block. They'll never admit it."
"From what I've read of psychiatric literature, I thought most people had rather squeamish and
negative feelings about their genitals."
"That, to quote Freud himself, is a reaction formation. The primordial emotional tone, from the day
the infant discovers the incredible pleasure centers there, is perpetual astonishment, awe and delight.
No matter how much society tries to crush it and repress it. For instance, everybody has some pet
name for their genitals. What's yours?"
"Polyphemus," he confessed.
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"What?"
"Because it has one eye, you know? Also, Polyphemus rhymes with penis, I guess. I mean, I can't
remember exactly what my mental process was when I invented that in my early teens."
"Polyphemus was a giant, too. Almost a god. You see what I mean about the primary emotional
tone? It's the origin of all religion. Adoration of your own genitals and of your lover's genitals.
There's Pan Pangeni-tor and the Great Mother."
"So," George said owlishly, still not sure whether this was profundity or nonsense, "the earth belongs
to our genitalia?"
"To their offspring, and their offspring's offspring, and so on, forever. The world is a verb, not a
noun."
"The prettiest one is three billion years old."
"You've got it, baby. We're all tenants here, including the ones who think they're owners. Property is
impossible."
"Okay, okay, I think I've got most of it. Property is theft because the Illuminati land titles are
arbitrary and unjust. And so are their banking charters and railroad franchises and all the other
monopoly games of capitalism—"
"Of state capitalism. Not of true laissez-faire."
"Wait. Property is impossible because the world is a verb, a burning house as Buddha said. All things
are fire. My old pal Heracleitus. So property is theft and property is impossible. How do we get to
property is liberty?"
"Without private property there can be no private decisions."
"So we're back where we started from?"
"No, we're one flight higher up on the spiral staircase. Look at it that way. Dialectically, as your
Marxist Mends say."
"But we care back at private property. After proving it's an impossible fiction."
"The Statist form of private property is an impossible fiction. Just like the Statist form of communal
property is an impossible fiction. Think outside the State framework, George. Think of property in
freedom."
George shook his head. "It beats the hell out of my ass. All I can see is people ripping each other off.
The war of all against all, as what's-his-name said."
"Hobbes."
"Hobbes, snobs, jobs. Whoever. Or whatever. Isn't he right?"
"Stop the motor on this submarine."
"What?"
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"Force me to love you."
"Wait, I don't . . ."
"Turn the sky green or red, instead of blue."
"I still don't get it."
Mavis took a pen off the desk and held it between two fingers. "What happens when I let go of this?"
"It falls."
"Where do you sit if there are no chairs?"
"On the floor?" If I wasn't so stoned, I would have had it by then. Sometimes drugs are more a
hindrance than a help. "On the ground?" I added.
"On your ass, that's for sure." Mavis said. "The point is, if the chairs all go away, you still sit. Or you
build new chairs." She was stoned, too; otherwise she'd be explaining it better, I realized. "But you
can't stop the motor without learning something about marine engineering first. You don't know what
switch to pull. Or switches. And you can't change the sky. And the pen will fall without a gravitygoverning
demon rushing into the room to make it fall."
"Shit and pink petunias," I said disgustedly. "Is this some form of Thomism? Are you trying to sell
me the Natural Law argument? I can't buy that at all."
"Okay, George. Here's the next jolt. Keep your asshole tight." She spoke to the wall, to a hidden
microphone, I guessed. "Send him in now."
The Robot is easily upset; my sphincter was already tightening as soon as she warned me there was a
jolt coming and she didn't really need to add that bit about my asshole. Carlo and his gun. Hagbard
and his gun. Drake's mansion. I took a deep breath and waited to see what the Robot would do.
A panel in the wall opened and Harry Coin was pushed into the room. I had time to think that I
should have guessed, in this game where both sides were playing with illusion constantly, Coin's
death could have been faked, artificial intestines dangling and all, and of course Mavis and her
raiders could have taken him out of Mad Dog jail even before they took me out of course, and I
remembered the pain when he slapped my face and when his cock entered me, and the Robot was
already moving, and I hardly had time to aim of course, and then his head was banging against the
wall, blood spurting from his nose, and I had time to clip him again on the jaw as he went down of
course, and then I came all the way back and stopped myself as I was about to kick him in the face as
he lay there unconscious. Zen in the art of face-punching. I had knocked a man out with two blows; I
who hated Hemingway and Machismo so much that I'd never taken a boxing lesson in my life. I was
breathing hard, but it was good and clean, the feeling of after-an-orgasm; the adrenalin was flowing,
but a fight reflex instead of a flight reflex had been triggered, and now it over, and I was calm. A
glint in the air: Hagbard's pistol was in Mavis's hand, then flying toward me. As I caught it, she said,
"Finish the bastard."
But the rage had ended when I held back the kick on seeing him already unconscious.
"No," I said. "It is finished."
"Not until you kill him. You're no good to us until you're ready to kill, George."
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I ignored her and rapped on the wall. "Haul the bastard out," I said clearly. The panel opened, and
two Slavic-looking seamen, grinning, grabbed Coin's arms and dragged him out. The panel closed
again, quietly.
"I don't kill on command," I said, turning back to Mavis. "I'm not a German shepherd or a draftee.
My case with him is settled, and if you want him dead, do the dirty work yourself."
But Mavis was smiling placidly. "Is that a Natural Law?" she asked.
And twenty-three hours later Tobias Knight listened to the voice in his earphones: "That's the
problem. I can't remember. But if you leave me alone for a while maybe it'll come back to me."
Smoothing his mustache nervously, Knight set the button for automatic record, removed the
earphones and buzzed Esperando Despond's office.
"Despond," the intercom said.
"The CIA has one. A man who was with the girl after Mocenigo. Send somebody down for the
tape— it's got a pretty good description of the girl."
"Wilco," Despond said tersely. "Anything else?"
"He thinks he might remember the name of her next customer. She mentioned it to him. We might
get that, too."
"Let's hope so," Despond said and clicked off. He sat back in his chair and addressed the three agents
in his office. "The guy we've got— what's his name? Naismith— is probably the next customer.
We'll check the two descriptions of the girl against each other and get a much more accurate picture
than the CIA has, since they're working from only one description."
But fifteen minutes later, he was staring in puzzlement at the chart which had been chalked on the
blackboard:
A tall, bearish agent named Roy Ubu said thoughtfully, "I've never seen two eyewitness descriptions
match exactly, but this . . ."
DESCRIPTIONS OF SUSPECT
First Witness Second Witness
Height 5'2" 5'5"
Weight 90-100 lbs 110-115 lbs
Hair Black Blond
Race Negro Caucasian
Name or alias Bonnie Sarah
Scars, etc. None Scar on throat
Age Late teens Mid-twenties
Sex Female Female
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A small, waspish agent named Buzz Vespa snapped, "One of them is lying for some reason. But
which one?"
"Neither of them has any reason to lie," Despond said. "Gentlemen, we've got to face the facts. Dr.
Mocenigo was unworthy of the trust that the U.S. government placed in him. He was a degenerate
sex maniac. He had two women last night, one of them a Nigra."
"What do you mean that little sawed-off bastard is gone?" Peter Kurten of the CIA was shouting at
that very moment. "The only way out of his room was right through that door, there, and we've all
had it under constant surveillance. The door was only opened once when DeSalvo took out the coffee
urn to have it refilled at the sandwich shop next door. Oh ... my ... God . . . the . . . coffee . . . urn . . ."
As he slumped back in his chair, mouth hanging open, an agent with a device that looked like a mine
sweeper stepped forward.
"Daily sweep for FBI bugs, sir," he said uncomfortably. "I'm afraid the machine is registering one
under your desk. If you'll let me just reach in and . . . uh . . .that gets it ..."
And Tobias Knight, listening, heard no more. It would be a few hours, at least, until their man in the
CIA was able to plant a new bug.
And Saul Goodman stepped hard on the brakes of his rented Ford Brontosaurus as a tiny and
determined figure, dashing out of the Papa Mescalito Sandwich Shop, ran right in front of the fender.
Saul heard a sickening thud and Barney Muldoon's voice beside him saying, "Oh Christ, no ..."
I was at the end of my ropes. The Syndicate I could see, but why the Feds? I was flabbygastered. I
said to that dumb cunt Bonnie Quint, "Are you a thousand percent sure?"
"Carmel," she says. "I know the Syndicate. They're not that smooth. These guys were just what they
claimed. Feds."
Oh, Christ Jesus. Christ Jesus with egg in his beard. I couldn't help myself, I just hauled off and
bopped her in the kisser, the dumb cunt. "What'd you tell them?" I screamed. "What'd you tell
them?"
She started to snivel. "I didn't tell them nothing," she says.
So I had to bop her again. Christ, I hate hitting women, they always blubber so much. "I'll use the
belt," I howled. "So help me, God, I'll use the belt Don't tell me you didn't tell them nothing.
Everybody tells them something. Even a clam would sing like Sinatra when they're finished with
him. So what'd you tell them?" I bopped her again, Christ, this was terrible.
"I just told them I wasn't with this Mocenigo. Which I wasn't."
"So who did you tell them you were with?"
"I made up a prescription. A midget. A guy I saw on the street. I wouldn't give the name of a real
John, I know that could come back against you. And me."
I didn't know what to do, so I bopped her again. "Go away," I says. "Be missing. Let me think."
She goes out, still blubbering, and I go over to the window and look at the desert to calm my head.
My rose fever was starting to act up; it was that time of year. Why did people have to bring roses to
the desert? I tried to contemplate hard on the problem and forget my health. There was only one
explanation: that damned Mocenigo figured out that Sherri was pumping him and told the Feds. The
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Syndicate wasn't in it yet They were all still running around the East like chickens with their legs cut
off, trying to figure who rubbed Maldonado, and why it happened at the house of a straight like this
banker Drake. So they hadn't got the time yet to find out that five million of Banana Nose's money
had disappeared into my own safe as soon as I heard he was dead. The Feds weren't in on that at all,
and the connection was circumsubstantial.
And then it hit me so hard that I almost fell over. Besides my own girls, who wouldn't talk, there
were a dozen or two cab drivers and bartenders and whatnots who knew that Sherri worked for me.
The Feds would get it out of somebody sooner or later, and probably sooner. It was like a light bulb
going on over my head in a comic strip: TREASON. AIDING AND ABEDDING THE ENEMY. I
remembered from when I was a kid those two Jewish scientists who the Feds got for that. The hot
squat. They fried them, Christ Jesus, I thought I'd vomit. Why does the fucking government have to
be that way about somebody just trying to make a buck? Even the Syndicate would only shoot you or
give you a lead enema, but the cocksucking government has to go and put you in an electrical chair.
Christ Jesus, I was hot as a chimney.
I took a candy out of my pocket and started chewing it, trying to think what to do. If I ran, the
Syndicate would guess I was the one who emptied the till when Maldonado was rubbed, and they'd
get me. If I didn't run, the Feds would be at the door with a high treason warrant. It was a double
whammy. I might try to highjack a plane to Panama, but I didn't know nearly enough about
Mocenigo's bugs to make a deal with the Commie government down there. They'd just send me right
back. It was hopeless, like trying to fill a three-card inside straight. The only thing to do was find a
hole and bury myself.
And then it was just like a light bulb in my head again, and I thought: Lehman Cave.
"What does the computer say now?" the President asked the Attorney General.
"What does the computer say now?" the Attorney General barked into the open phone before him.
"If the girl had two contacts before she died, at this moment the possible carriers number," the phone
paused, "428,000. If the girl had three contacts, 7,656,000."
"Get the Special Agent in Charge," the President snapped. He was the calmest man at the table—
ever since Fernando Poo, he had been supplementing his Librium, Tofranil and Elovil with Demerol,
the amazing little pills that had kept Hermann Goering so chipper and cheerful during the Nuremberg
Trials while all the other Nazis crumbled into catatonic, paranoid or other dysfunctional conditions.
"Despond," a second open phone said.
"This is your President," the President said. "Give it to us straight. Have you treed the coon?"
"Uh, sir, no, sir. We have to find the procurer, sir. The girl can't possibly be alive, but we haven't
found her. It is now mathematically certain that somebody hid her body. The obvious theory, sir, is
that her procurer, being in an illegal business, hid the body rather than report it. We have two
descriptions of the girl, sir, and, uh, although they don't tally completely they should lead us to her
procurer. Of course, he should die soon, sir, and then we'll find him. That's the Rubicon of the case,
sir. Meanwhile, I'm happy to report, sir, that we're lucking out amazingly. Only two definite cases off
the base so far and both of them injected with the antidote. It is possible, just possible, that the
procurer went into hiding after disposing of the body. In that case, he hasn't contacted another human
being and is not spreading it. Sir."
"Despond," the President said, "I want results. Keep us informed. Your country depends on you."
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"Yes, sir."
"Tree that coon, Despond."
"We will, sir."
Esperando Despond turned from the phone as an agent from the computer section entered the room.
"Got something?" he snapped nervously.
"The first girl, the Nigra, sir. She was one of the pros we questioned yesterday. Her name is Bonnie
Quint."
"You look worried. Is there a hitch?" Despond asked shrewdly.
"Just another of the puzzles. She didn't admit being with Mocenigo the night before, but that kind of
lying we expected. Here's what's weird: her description of the guy she says she was with." The
computer man shook his head dubiously. "It doesn't fit Naismith, the guy who said he was with her.
It fits the little mug, the dwarf, that the CIA grabbed. Only he said she was the second girl."
Despond mopped his brow. "What the heck has been going on in this town?" he asked the ceiling.
"Some kind of sex orgy?"
In fact, several kinds of sex orgies had been going on in Las Vegas ever since the Veterans of the
Sexual Revolution had arrived two days earlier. The Hugh M. Hefner Brigade had taken two stories
of the Sands, hired a herd of professional women, and hadn't yet come out to join the Alfred Kinsey
Brigade, the Norman Mailer Guerrillas and the others in marching up and down the Strip, squirting
young girls in the crotch with water pistols, passing bottles of hooch back and forth and generally
blocking traffic and annoying pedestrians. Dr. Naismith himself, after a few token appearances, had
avoided most of the merriment and retired to a private suite to work on his latest fund-raising letter
for the Colossus of Yorba Linda Foundation. Actually, the VSR, like White Heroes Opposing Red
Extremism, was one of Naismith's lesser projects and brought in only peanuts. Most of the real
veterans of the sexual revolution had succumbed to syphilis, marriage, children, alimony or some
such ailment, and few white heroes were prepared to oppose red extremism in the bizarre manner
suggested by Naismith's pamphlets; in both of those cases, he had recognized two nut markets that
nobody else was exploiting and had quickly moved in. Even the John Dillinger Died For You
Society, of which he was inordinately proud since it was probably the most implausible religion in
the long history of humanity's infatuation with metaphysics, didn't earn much less per annum than
these fancies. The real bread was in the Colossus of Yorba Linda Foundation, which had been
successfully raising money for several years to erect a heroic monument, in solid gold and ten feet
taller than the statue of Liberty, honoring the martyred former president Richard Milhous Nixon.
This monument, paid for entirely by the twenty million Americans who still loved and revered Nixon
despite the damnable lies of the Congress, the Justice Department, the press, the TV, the law courts,
et al., would stand outside Yorba Linda, Tricky Dicky's boyhood home, and scowl menacingly
toward Asia, warning those gooks not to try to get the jump on Uncle Sammie. Beside the gigantic
idol's right foot, Checkers looked adoringly upward; beneath the left foot was a crushed allegorical
figure representing Cesar Chavez. The Great Man held a bunch of lettuce in his right hand and a tape
recording in the left. It was all most tasteful, and so appealed to Fundamentalist Americans that
hundreds of thousands of dollars had already been collected by the Colossus fund, and Naismith
planned to hop to Nepal with the loot at the first sign that contributors or postal inspectors were
beginning to wonder when the statue would actually start rising on the plot he had purchased, amid
much publicity, after the first few thousand arrived.
Naismith was a small, slight man and, like many Texans, affected a cowboy hat (although he had
never herded cattle) and a bandito mustache (although his thefts were all based on fraud rather than
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force). He was also, for his nation at this time in history, an uncommonly honest man, and, unlike
most corporations of the epoch, none of his enterprises had poisoned or mutilated the customers
whose money he took. His one vice was cynicism based on lack of imagination: he reckoned most of
his countrymen as total mental basket cases and fondly believed that he was exploiting their folly
when he told them that a vast Illiminati conspiracy controlled the money supply and interest rates or
that a bandit of the 1930s was, in a sense, a redeemer of the atrophying human spirit. That there was
an element of truth in these bizarre notions never crossed his mind. In short, even though born in
Texas, Naismith was as alienated from the pulse, the poetry and the profundity of American emotion
as a New York intellectual.
But his cynicism served him well when, after reporting certain strange symptoms to the hotel doctor,
he found himself rushed to a supposed U.S. Public Health Service station which was manned by
individuals he quickly recognized as laws. This is an old Texas word, probably an abbreviation of
lawmen (Texans don't know much about abbreviating) and is as charged with suspicion and
wariness, although not quite so much rage, as the New Left's word pig. Bonnie Parker had used it,
eloquently, in her last ballad:
Someday they'll go down together
They'll bury them side by side
For some it means grief
For the laws a relief
But it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.
That about summed it up: the laws were not necessarily fascist Gestapo racist pigs (words largely
unknown in Texas), but they were people who would find it a relief if bothersome and rebellious
individualism disappeared, however bloody the disappearance might be. If you were ornery enough,
the laws would bushwhack you— shoot you dead from ambush, without a chance to surrender, as
they did to Miss Parker and Mr. Barrow—but even if you were merely a mildly larcenous hoaxter
like Dr. Naismith, they would be much cheered to put you someplace where you couldn't throw any
more entropy into the functioning of the Machine they served. And so, recognizing laws, Dr.
Naismith narrowed his eyes, thought deeply, and when they began their questioning, lied as only an
unregenerate old-school Texas confidence man can lie.
"You got it from somebody who had body contact with you. So either you were in a very crowded
elevator or you got it from a prostitute. Which was it?"
Naismith thought of the collision on the sidewalk with the Midget and the weasel-faced character
with the big suitcase, but he also thought that the questioner leaned heavily on the second possibility.
They were looking for a woman; and, if you tell the laws what they want to hear, they don't keep
coming back and asking more personal questions. "I was with a prostitute," he said, trying to sound
embarrassed.
"Can you describe her?"
He thought back over the pros he had seen with other VSR delegates, and one stood out Being a
kindly man, he didn't want to implicate an innocent whore in this messy business (whatever it was),
so he combined her with another woman, the first that he ever successfully penetrated in his long-ago
youth in the 1950s.
Unfortunately for Dr. Naismith's kindly intentions, the laws never expect an eyewitness description
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to match the person described in all respects, so when his information was coded into an IBM
machine, three cards came out. Each one had more similarities to his fiction than differences from it,
and they came from a card file of several hundred prostitutes whose descriptions had been gathered
and coded in the past twenty-four hours. Running the three cards through a different sorting in the
machine, limited to outstanding bodily characteristics most commonly remembered correctly, the
technicians emerged, after all, with Bonnie Quint. Forty-five minutes later she was in Esperando
Despond's office, nervously twirling her mink stole, picking at the hem of her mini-skirt, evading
questions nimbly and remembering intensely Camel's voice saying, "I'll use the belt. So help me,
God. I'll use the belt." She was also smarting from the injection.
"You don't work free-lance," Despond told her, nastily, for the fifth time. "In this town, the Maf
would put a knife up your ass and break off the handle if you tried that. You've got a pimp. Now, do
we throw the book at you or do we get his name?"
"Don't be too hard on her," Tobias Knight said. "She's only a poor, confused kid. Not twenty yet, are
you?" he asked her kindly. "Give her a chance to think. She'll do the right thing. Why should she
protect a lousy pimp who exploits her all the time?" He gave her a reassuring glance.
"Poor confused kid, my ass!" Despond exploded. "This is a matter of life and death and no Nigra
whore is going to sit here lying her head off and get away with it." He did a good imitation of a man
literally trembling with repressed fury. "I'd like to kick her head in," he screamed.
Knight, still playing the friendly cop, looked shocked. "That's not very professional," he said sadly.
"You're overtired, and you're frightening the child."
Three hours later— after Despond had nearly done a complete psycho schtick and virtually
threatened to behead poor Bonnie with his letter opener, and Knight had become so fatherly and
protective that both he and she were beginning to feel that she was actually his very own six-year-old
daughter being set upon by Goths and Vandals— a sobbing but accurate description of Carmel
emerged, including his address.
Twelve minutes later, Roy Ubu, calling via car radio, reported that Carmel was not in his house and
had been seen driving toward the Southwest in a jeep with a large suitcase beside him.
In the next eighteen hours, eleven men in jeeps were stopped on various roads southwest of Las
Vegas, but none of them was Carmel, although most of them were around the height and weight and
general physical description given by Bonnie Quint, and two of them even had large suitcases. In the
twenty-four hours after that, nearly a thousand men of all sizes and shapes were stopped on roads,
north, south, east and west, in cars not remotely like jeeps and some driving toward, not away from,
Las Vegas. None of them was Carmel either.
Among all the men wandering around the Desert Door base and the city of Las Vegas with
credentials from the U.S. Public Health Service, one who really was employed by USPHS, had a
long lean body, a mournful countenance, a general resemblance to the late great Boris Karloff, and
the name Fred Filiarisus. By special authority of the White House, Dr. Filiarisus was able to gain
access to everything known by the scientists at Desert Door, including the course of the disease in
those originally infected, among whom two had died before the antidote took effect and three had
shown a total lack of symptoms even though exposed along with the others. He also had access to
both FBI and CIA information as it came in, without having to bug either office. It was he, therefore,
who finally put together the correct picture, on April 30, and reported directly to the White House at
eleven that morning.
"Some people are naturally immune to Anthrax Leprosy Pi, Mr. President," Filiarisus said.
"Unfortunately, they serve as carriers. We found three like that at the base, and it is mathematically,
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scientifically certain that a fourth is still at large.
"Everybody was lying to the FBI and CIA, sir. They were all afraid of punishment for various
activities forbidden by our laws. No variation or permutation on their stories will hang together
reasonably. Each witness lied about something, and usually about several things. The truth is other
than it appeared. In short, the government, being an agency of punishment, acted as a distorting
factor from the beginning, and I had to use information-theory equations to determine the degree of
distortion present. I would say that what I finally discovered may have universal application: no
governing body can ever obtain an accurate account of reality from those over whom it holds power.
From the perspective of communication analysis, government is not an instrument of law and order,
but of law and disorder. I'm sorry to have to say this so bluntly, but it needs to be kept in mind when
similar situations arise in the future."
"He sounds like an effing anarchist," the Vice President muttered.
"The true picture, with a ninety-seven percent probability, is this," Filiarisus continued. "Dr.
Mocenigo had only one contact, and she died. The FBI hypothesis is correct: her body was then
hidden, probably in the desert, by an associate wishing to avoid involvement with law enforcement
agencies. If prostitution were legal, we might never have had this nightmare."
"I told you he was an effing anarchist," the Vice President growled. "And a sex maniac, too!"
"The associate who hid the body," Filiarisus went on, "is our fourth carrier, personally immune but
lethal to others. It was this person who infected Mr. Chaney and Dr. Naismith. This person was
probably not a prostitute. These men lied, among other reasons, because they knew what the
government agents wanted them to say. When power is wielded over people, they say as well as do
what they think is expected of them— another reason government always finds it difficult to learn
the truth about anything.
"The only hypothesis that mathematical logic will accept, when all the known data was fed into a
computer, is that the fourth carrier is the procurer who disappeared, Mr. Carmel. Experiencing no
symptoms himself, he is unaware that he carries the world's most dangerous disease. For reasons of
his own, which we cannot guess, he has been hiding since he disposed of the woman's body.
Probably, he feared that the corpse might be found and a case of manslaughter or homicide could be
made against him. Or he might have a motive completely unrelated to her death. Only twice has he
contacted other human beings. I would suggest that his contact with Miss Quint was typical of their
professional relationship; he either hit her or had sex relations with her. His contact with Dr.
Naismith and Mr. Chaney was some sort of accident— perhaps the crowded elevator that has been
suggested by Mr. Despond. Otherwise, he had been, as it were, underground.
"This is why we only found three cases instead of the thousands or millions we feared.
"However, the problem still remains. Carmel is immune, will never know he has the disease unless
he is told it, and will eventually surface somewhere. When he does, we will learn of it through the
outbreak of Anthrax Leprosy Pi cases in the vicinity. At that point, the whole nightmare begins
again, sir.
"Our best hope, and the computer backs me on this, is public disclosure. The panic we tried to avoid
will have to be faced. Every medium of communication in the nation must be given the full facts, and
Carmels description must be circulated everywhere. This is our last chance. The man is a walking
biological Doomsday Machine and he must be found.
"Psychologists and social psychologists have fed all the relevant facts about this case, and about
previous panics and plagues, into the computer also. The conclusion, with ninety-three percent
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certainty, is that the panic will be nationwide and martial law will have to be declared everywhere.
Liberals in Congress should be placed under house arrest as the first step, and the Supreme Court
must be stripped of its powers totally. The Army and the National Guard will have to be sent into
every city with authority to override any policies of local officials. Democracy, in short, must cease
until the emergency is ended."
"He's not an anarchist," the Secretary of the Interior said. "He's a goddam fascist."
"He's a realist," said the President, clear-minded, crisp, quick on the uptake and stoned clear round
the corner of schizophrenia by his usual three tranquilizers, a stronger dose of amphetamines than
usual, and loads of those happy little Demerol tablets. "We start implementing his suggestions right
now."
And so those few tattered remnants of the Bill of Rights which had survived into the fourth decade of
the Cold War were laid to rest —temporarily, it was thought by those present. Dr. Filiarisus, whose
name in the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria was Gracchus Gruad, had completed on the day
known as May Eve or Walpurgisnacht the project begun when the first dream of Anthrax Leprosy Pi
was planted in Dr. Mocenigo's mind on the day known as Candelmas. These dates were known by
much older names in the Illuminati, of course, and the burial of the Bill of Rights was expected, by
them, to be permanent.
(Two hours before Dr. Filiarisus spoke to the President, four of the world's five Illuminati Primi met
in an old graveyard in Ingolstadt; the fifth could not be present. They agreed that all was going as
scheduled, but one danger remained: nobody in the order, however developed his or her ESP, had
been able to trace Carmel. Leaning on a tombstone —where Adam Weishaupt had once performed
rites so unique that the psychic vibration had bounced off every sensitive mind in Europe, leading to
such decidedly peculiar literary productions as Lewis's The Monk, Maturin's Melmoth, Walpole's
Castle of Otranto, Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, and DeSade's One Hundred Twenty Days of
Sodom—the eldest of the four said, "It can still fail, if one of the mehums finds the pimp before he
infects a city or two." Mehums was an abbreviation for all descendants of those not part of the
original Unbroken Circle; it meant mere humans.
"Why can none of our ultra-sensitives find him?" a second asked. "Does he have no ego or soul at
all?"
"He has a vibration but it's not distinctly human. Whenever we seem to have a fix on it, we're usually
' picking up a bank vault or the safe of some paranoid millionaire," the eldest replied.
"We have that problem with an increasing number of Americans," the third commented morosely.
"In that nation, we have done our work too well. The conditioning to those pieces of paper is so
strong that no other psychic impulse remains to be read."
The fourth spoke. "Now is no time for trepidation, my brothers. The plan is virtually realized, and
this man's lack of ordinary mehum qualities will prove an advantage when we do fix on him. No ego,
no resistance. We will be able to move him at our whim. The stars are right, He Who Is Not To Be
Named is impatient, and now we must be intrepid!" She spoke with fervor.
The others nodded. "Heute die Welt, Morgens das Sonnensystem!" the eldest cried out fiercely.
"Heute die Welt" all repeated, "Morgens das Sonnensystem!")
But two days earlier, as the Leif Erikson left the Atlantic and entered the underground Ocean of
Valusia beneath Europe, George Dorn was listening to a different kind of chorus. It was, Mavis had
explained to him in advance, the weekly Agape Ludens, or Love Feast Game, of the Discordians, and
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the dining hall was newly bedecked with pornographic and psychedelic posters, Christian and
Buddhist and Amerindian mystic designs, balloons and lollypops dangling from the ceiling on Day-
Glo-dabbed strings, numinous paintings of Discordian saints (including Norton I, Sigismundo
Malatesta, Guillaume of Aquitaine, Chuang Chou, Judge Roy Bean, various historical figures even
more obscure, and numerous gorillas and dolphins), bouquets of roses and forsythia and gladiolas
and orchids, clusters of acorns and gourds, and the inevitable proliferation of golden apples,
pentagons and octopi.
The main course was the best Alaskan king crab Newburg that George had ever tasted, only lightly
dusted with a mild hint of Panamanian Red grass. Dozens of trays of dried fruits and cheeses were
passed back and forth among the tables, together with canapes of an exquisite caviar George had
never encountered before ("Only Hagbard knows where those sturgeon spawn," Mavis explained)
and the beverage was a blend of the Japanese seventeen-herb Mu tea with Menomenee Indian peyote
tea. While everyone gorged, laughed and got gently but definitely zonked, Hag-bard—who was
evidently satisfied that he and FUCKUP had located "the problem in Las Vegas"—merrily conducted
the religious portion of the Agape Ludens.
"Rub-a-dub-dub," he chanted, "O hail Eris!"
"Rub-a-dub-dub," the crew merrily chorused, "O Hail Eris!"
"Sya-dasti," Hagbard chanted. "All that I tell you is true."
"Sya-dasti," the crew repeated, "O hail Eris!" George looked around; there were three, or five, races
present (depending upon which school of physical anthropology you credited) and maybe half a
hundred nationalities, but the feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood transcended any sense of
contrast, creating instead a blend, as in musical progression.
"Sya-davak-tavya," Hagbard chanted now. "All that I tell you is false."
"Sya-davak-tavya," George joined in, "O hail Eris!"
"Sya-dasti-sya-nasti," Hagbard intoned. "All that I tell you is meaningless."
"Sya-dasti-sya-nasti," all agreed, some jeeringly, "O hail Eris!"
If they had services like this in the Baptist church back in Nutley, George thought, I never would
have told my mother religion is all a con and had that terrible quarrel when I was nine.
"Sya-dasti-sya-nasti-sya-davak-tav-yaska," Hagbard sang out. "All that I tell you is true and false
and meaningless."
"Sya-dasti-sya-nasti-sya-davak-tav-yaska," the massed voices replied, "O hail Eris!"
"Rub-a-dub-dub," Hagbard repeated quietly. "Does anyone have a new incantation?"
"All hail crab Newburg," a Russian-accented voice shouted.
That was an immediate hit. "All hail crab New -burg," everyone howled.
"All hail these bloody fucking beautiful roses," an Oxfordian voice contributed.
"All hail these bloody fucking beautiful roses," all agreed.
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Miss Mao arose. "The Pope is the chief cause of Protestantism," she recited softly.
That was another roaring success; everybody chorused, and one Harlem voice added, "Right on!"
"Capitalism is the chief cause of socialism," Miss Mao chanted, more confident. That went over well,
too, and she then tried, "The State is the chief cause of anarchism," which was another smashing
success.
"Prisons are built with the stones of law, brothels with the bricks of religion," Miss Mao went on.
"PRISONS ARE BUILT WITH THE STONES OF LAW, BROTHELS WITH THE BRICKS OF
RELIGION," the hall boomed.
"I stole that last one from William Blake," Miss Mao said quietly and sat down.
"Any others?" Hagbard asked. There was none, so he went on after a moment, "Very well, then, I
will preach my weekly sermon."
"Balls!" cried a Texas voice.
"Bullshit!" added a Brazilian female.
Hagbard frowned. "That wasn't much of a demonstration," he commented sadly. "Are the rest of you
so passive that you're just going to sit here on your dead asses and let me bore the piss out of you?"
The Texan, the Brazilian lady and a few others got up. "We are going to have an orgy," the Brazilian
said briefly, and they left.
"Well, sink me, I'm glad there's some life left on this old tub," Hagbard grinned. "As for the rest of
you— who can tell me, without uttering a word, the fallacy of the Illuminati?"
A young girl— she was no more than fifteen, George guessed, and the youngest member of the crew;
he had heard she was a runaway from a fabulously rich Italian family in Rome— slowly raised her
hand and clenched her fist.
Hagbard turned on her furiously. "How many times must I tell you people: no faking! You got that
out of some cheap book on Zen that neither the author nor you understood a damned word of. I hate
to be dictatorial, but phony mysticism is the one thing Discordianism can't survive. You're on
shitwork, in the kitchen, for a week, you wise-ass brat."
The girl remained immobile, in the same position, fist raised, and only slowly did George read the
slight smile that curled her mouth. Then he started to smile himself.
Hagbard lowered his eyes for a second and gave a Sicilian shrug. "O oi che siete in picdoletta
barca," he said softly, and bowed. "I'm still in charge of nautical and technical matters," he
announced, "but Miss Portinari now succeeds me as episkopos of the Leif Erikson cabal. Anyone
with lingering spiritual or psychological problems, take them to her." He lunged across the room,
hugged the girl, laughed with her happily for a moment and placed his golden apple ring on her
finger. "Now I don't have to meditate every day," he shouted joyously, "and I'll have more time for
some thinking."
In the next two days, as the Leif Erikson slowly crossed the Sea of Valusia and approached the
Danube, George discovered that Hagbard had, indeed, put all his mystical trappings behind him. He
spoke only of technical matters concerning the submarine, or other mundane subjects, and was
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sublimely unconcerned with the role-playing, role-changing and other mind-blowing tactics that had
previously made up his persona. What emerged— the new Hagbard, or the old Hagbard of days
before his adoption of guru-hood— was a tough, pragmatic, middle-aged engineer, with wide
intelligence and interests, an overwhelming kindness and generosity, and many small symptoms of
nervousness, anxiety and overwork. But mostly he seemed happy, and George realized that the
euphoria derived from his having dropped an enormous burden.
Miss Portinari, meanwhile, had lost the self-effacing quality that made her so eminently forgettable
before, and, from the moment Hagbard passed her the ring, she was as remote and gnomic as an
Etruscan sybil. George, in fact, found that he was a little afraid of her— an annoying sensation, since
he thought he had transcended fear when he found that the Robot was, left to itself, neither cowardly
nor homicidal.
George tried to discuss his feelings with Hagbard once, when they happened to be seated together at
dinner on April 28. "I don't know where my head is at anymore," he said tentatively.
"Well, in the immortal words of Marx, putta your hat on your neck, then," Hagbard grinned.
"No, seriously," George murmured as Hagbard hacked at a steak. "I don't feel really awakened or
enlightened or whatever. I feel like K. in The Castle: I've seen it once, but I don't know how to get
back there."
"Why do you want to get back?" Hagbard asked. "I'm damned glad to be out of it all. It's harder work
than coal mining." He munched placidly, obviously bored by the direction of the conversation.
"That's not true," George protested. "Part of you is still there, and always will be. You've just given
up being a guide for others."
"I'm trying to give up," Hagbard said pointedly. "Some people seem to be trying to reenlist me.
Sorry. I'm not a German shepherd or a draftee. Non serviam, George."
George fiddled with his own steak for a minute, then tried another approach. "What was that Italian
phrase you used, just before you gave your ring to Miss Por-tinari?"
"I couldn't think of anything else to say," Hagbard explained, embarrassed. "So, as usual with me, I
got arty and pretentious. Dante addresses his readers, in the First Canto of the Paradiso, 'O voi che
siete in pic-cloletta barca'— roughly, Oh, you who are sailing in a very small boat astern of me. He
meant that the readers, not having had the Vision, couldn't really understand his words. I turned it
around, 'O oi che siete in piccioletta barca,' admitting I was behind her in understanding. I should
get the Ezra Pound Award for hiding emotion in tangled erudition. That's why I'm glad to give up the
guru gig. I never was much better than second-rate at it."
"Well, I'm still way astern of you . . ." George began.
"Look," Hagbard growled. "I'm a tired engineer at the end of a long day. Can't we talk about
something less taxing to my depleted brain? What do you think of the economic system I outline in
the second part of Never Whistle While You're Pissing? I've decided to start calling it technoanarchism;
do you think that's more clear at first sight than anarcho-capitalism?"
And George found himself, frustrated, engaged in a long discussion of non-interest-bearing
currencies, land stewardship replacing land ownership, the inability of monopoly capitalism to adjust
to abundance, and other, matters which would have interested him a week ago but now were very
unimportant compared to the question which Zen masters phrased as "getting the goose out of the
bottle without breaking the glass"— or specifically, getting George Dorn out of "George Dorn"
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without destroying GEORGE DORN.
That night, Mavis came again to his bed, and George said again, "No. Not until you love me the way
I love you."
"You're turning into a stiff-necked prig," Mavis said. "Don't try to walk before you can crawl."
"Listen," George cried. "Suppose our society crippled every infant's legs systematically, instead of
our minds? The ones who tried to get up and walk would be called neurotics, right? And the
awkwardness of their first efforts would be published in the all psychiatric journals as proof of the
regressive and schizzy nature of their unsocial and unnatural impulse toward walking, right? And
those of you who know the secret would be superior and aloof and tell us to wait, be patient, you'll
let us in on it in your own good time, right? Crap. I'm going to do it on my own."
"I'm not holding anything back," Mavis said gently.
"There's no field until both poles are charged."
"And I'm the dead pole? Go to hell and bake bagels."
After Mavis left, Stella arrived, wearing cute Chinese pajamas. "Horny?" she asked bluntly.
"Christ Almighty, yes!"
In ninety seconds they were naked and he was nibbling at her ear while his hand rubbed her pubic
mat; but a saboteur was at work at his brain. "I love you," he thought, and it was not untrue because
he loved all women now, knowing partially what sex was really all about, but he couldn't bring
himself to say it because it was not totally true, either, since he loved Mavis more, much more. "I'm
awfully fond of you," he almost said, but the absurdity of it stopped him. Her hand cupped his cock
and found it limp; her eyes opened and looked into his enquiringly. He kissed her lips quickly and
moved his hand lower, inserting a ringer until he found the clitoris. But even when her breathing got
deeper, he did not respond as usual, and her hand began massaging his cock more desperately. He
slid down, kissing nipples and bellybutton on the way, and began licking her clitoris. As soon as she
came, he cupped her buttocks, lifted her pelvis, got his tongue into her vagina and forced another
quick orgasm, immediately lowering her slightly again and beginning a very gentle and slow return
in spiral fashion back to the clitoris. But still he was flaccid.
"Stop," Stella breathed. "Let me do you, baby."
George moved upward on the bed and hugged her. "I love you," he said, and suddenly it did not
sound like a lie.
Stella giggled and kissed his mouth briefly. "It takes a lot to get those words out of you, doesn't it?"
she said bemusedly.
"Honesty is the worst policy," George said grimly. "I was a child prodigy, you know? A freak. It was
rugged. I had to have some defense, and somehow I picked honesty. I was always with older boys so
I never won a fight. The only way I could feel superior, or escape total inferiority, was to be the most
honest bastard on the planet earth."
"So you can't say 'I love you' unless you mean it?" Stella laughed. "You're probably the only man in
America with that problem. If you could only be a woman for a while, baby! You can't imagine what
liars most men are."
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"Oh, I've said it at times. When it was at least half true. But it always sounded like play-acting to me,
and I felt it sounded that way to the woman, too. This time it just came out, perfectly natural, no
effort."
"That is something," Stella grinned. "And I can't let it go unrewarded." Her black body slid
downward and he enjoyed the esthetic effect as his eyes followed her— black on white, like the yinyang
or the Sacred Chao—what was the psychoses of the white race that made this beauty seem ugly
to most of them? Then her lips closed over his penis and he found that the words had loosened the
knot: he was erect in a second. He closed his eyes to savor the sensation, then opened them to look
down at her Afro hairdo, her serious dark face, his cock slipping back and forth between her lips. "I
love you," he repeated, with even more conviction. "Oh, Christ, Oh, Eris, oh baby baby, I love you!"
He closed his eyes again, and let the Robot move his pelvis in response to her. "Oh, stop," he said,
"stop," drawing her upward and turning her over, "together," he said, mounting her, "together," as
her eyes closed when he entered her and then opened again for a moment meeting his in total
tenderness, "I love you, Stella, I love," and he knew it was so far along that the weight wouldn't
bother her, collapsing, using his arms to hug her, not supporting himself, belly to belly and breast to
breast, her arms hugging him also and her voice saying, "I love you, too, oh, I love you," and moving
with it, saying "angel" and "darling" and then saying nothing, the explosion and the light again
permeating his whole body not just the penis, a passing through the mandala to the other side and a
long sleep.
The next morning, he and Stella fucked some more, wildly and joyously; they said "I love you" so
many times that it became a new mantra to him, and they were still whispering at breakfast. The
problem of Mavis and the problem of reaching total enlightenment had both vanished from his mind.
Enjoying bacon and eggs that seemed tastier than he had ever eaten before, exchanging pointless and
very private jokes with Stella, George Dorn was at peace.
(But nine hours earlier, at that "same" time, the Kachinas gathered in the center of the oldest city in
North America, Orabi, and began a dance which an excited visiting anthropologist had never seen
before. As he questioned various old men' and old women among the People of Peace— which is
what ho-pi means— he found that the dance was dedicated to She-Woman-Forever-Not-Change. He
knew enough not to try to convert that title into his own grammar, since it represented an important
aspect of the Hopi philosophy of Time, which is much like the Simon Moon and Adam Weishaupt
philosophies of Time and nothing like what physics students learn, at least until they reach graduate
level studies. Only four times, he was told, had this dance ever been necessary: four times when the
many worlds were all in danger, and this was the time of the fifth and greatest danger. The
anthropologist, who happened to be a Hindu named Indole Ringh, quickly jotted in his notebook:
"Cf. four yogas in Upanishads, Wagadu legend in Sudan, and Marsh's queer notions about Atlantis.
This could be big." The dance went on, the drums pounded monotonously, and Carmel, far away,
broke into a sudden perspiration . . .)
And, in Los Angeles, John Dillinger calmly loaded his revolver, dropped it in his briefcase and set a
Panama hat on his neatly combed silver-gray hair. He was humming a song from his youth: "Those
wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine ..." I hope that pimp is where Hagbard says, he
thought; I've only got eighteen hours before they declare martial law. . . "Good-bye forever," he
hummed on, "old fellows and pals . . ."
I saw the fnords the same day I first heard about the plastic martini. Let me be very clear and precise
about this, since many of the people on this trip are deliberately and perversely obscure: I would not,
could not, have seen the fnords if Hagbard Celine hadn't hypnotized me the night before, on the
flying saucer.
I had been reading Pat Walsh's memos, at home, and listening to a new record from the Museum of
Natural History. I was adding a few new samples to my collection of Washington-Weishaupt
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pictures on the wall, when the saucer appeared hovering outside my window. Needless to say, it
didn't particularly surprise me; I had saved a little of the AUM, after Chicago, contrary to the
instructions from ELF, and had dosed myself. After meeting the Dealy Lama, not to mention
Malaclypse the Elder, and seeing that nut Celine actually talk to gorillas, I assumed my mind was a
point of receptivity where the AUM would trigger something truly original. The UFO, in fact, was a
bit of a letdown; so many people had seen them already, and I was ready for something nobody had
ever seen or imagined.
It was even more a disappointment when they psyched me, or slurped me aboard, and I found,
instead of Martians or Insect Trust delegates from the Crab Galaxy, just Hagbard, Stella Maris and a
few other people from the Leif Erikson.
"Hail Eris," said Hagbard.
"All hail Discordia," I replied, giving the three-after -two pattern, and completing the pentad. "Is this
something important, or did you just want to show me your latest invention?"
The inside of the saucer was, to be trite, eerie. Everything was non-Euclidean and semitransparent; I
kept feeling that I might fall through the floor and hurtle to the ground to smash myself on the
sidewalk. Then we started moving and it got worse.
"Don't let the architecture disturb you," Hagbard said. "My own adaptation of some of Bucky Fuller's
synergetic geometry. It's smaller, and more solid, than it looks. You won't fall out, believe me."
"Is this contraption behind all the flying saucer reports since 1947?" I asked curiously.
"Not quite," Hagbard laughed. "That's basically a hoax. The plan was created in the United States
government, one of the few ideas they've had without direct Illuminati inspiration since about the
middle of Roosevelt's first term. A reserve measure, in case something happens to Russia and
China."
"Hi, baby," I said softly to Stella, remembering San Francisco. "Would you tell me, minus the Celine
rhetoric and paradox, what the hell he's talking about?"
"The State is based on threat," Stella said simply. "If people aren't afraid of something, they'll realize
they don't need that big government hand picking their pockets all the time. So, in case Russia and
China collapse from internal dissension, or get into a private war and blow each other to hell, or
suffer some unexpected natural calamity like a series of earthquakes, the saucer myth has been
planted. If there are no earthly enemies to frighten the American people with, the saucer myth will
immediately change. There will be 'evidence' that they come from Mars and are planning to invade
and enslave us. Dig?"
"So," Hagbard added, "I built this little gizmo, and I can travel anywhere I want without interference.
Any sighting of this craft, whether by a radar operator with twenty years experience or a little old
lady in Perth Amboy, is regarded by the government as a case of autosuggestion— since they know
they didn't plant it themselves. I can hover over cities, like New York, or military installations that
are Top Secret, or any place I damned well please. Nice?"
"Very nice," I said. "But why did you bring me up here?"
"It's time for you to see the fnords," he replied. Then I woke up in bed and it was the next morning. I
made breakfast in a pretty nasty mood, wondering if I'd seen the fnords, whatever the hell they were,
in the hours he had blacked out, or if I would see them as soon as I went out in the street. I had some
pretty gruesome ideas about them, I must admit. Creatures with three eyes and tentacles, survivors
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from Atlantis, who walked among us, invisible due to some form of mind shield, and did hideous
work for the Illuminati. It was unnerving to contemplate, and I finally gave in to my fears and peeked
out the window, thinking it might be better to see them from a distance first.
Nothing. Just ordinary sleepy people, heading for their buses and subways.
That calmed me a little, so I set out the toast and coffee and fetched in the New York Times from the
hallway. I turned the radio to WBAI and caught some good Vivaldi, sat down, grabbed a piece of
toast and started skimming the first page.
Then I saw the fnords.
The feature story involved another of the endless squabbles between Russia and the U.S. in the UN
General Assembly, and after each direct quote from the Russian delegate I read a quite distinct
"Fnord!" The second lead was about a debate in Congress on getting the troops out of Costa Rica;
every argument presented by Senator Bacon was followed by another "Fnord!" At the bottom of the
page was a Times depth-type study of the growing pollution problem and the increasing use of gas
masks among New Yorkers; the most distressing chemical facts were interpolated with more
"Fnords."
Suddenly I saw Hagbard's eyes burning into me and heard his voice: "Your heart will remain calm.
Your adrenalin gland will remain calm. Calm, all-over calm. You will not panic. You will look at the
fnord and see it. You will not evade it or black it out. You will stay calm and face it." And further
back, way back: my first-grade teacher writing FNORD on the blackboard, while a wheel with a
spiral design turned and turned on his desk, turned and turned, and his voice droned on,
IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T
SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . .
I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords.
This was one step beyond Pavlov, I realized. The first conditioned reflex was to experience the panic
reaction (the activation syndrome, it's technically called) whenever encountering the word "fnord."
The second conditioned reflex was to black out what happened, including the word itself, and just to
feel a general low-grade emergency without knowing why. And the third step, of course, was to
attribute this anxiety to the news stories, which were bad enough in themselves anyway.
Of course, the essence of control is fear. The fnords produced a whole population walking around in
chronic low-grade emergency, tormented by ulcers, dizzy spells, nightmares, heart palpitations and
all the other symptoms of too much adrenalin. All my left-wing arrogance and contempt for my
countrymen melted, and I felt genuine pity. No wonder the poor bastards believe anything they're
told, walk through pollution and overcrowding without complaining, watch their sons hauled off to
endless wars and butchered, never protest, never fight back, never show much happiness or eroticism
or curiosity or normal human emotion, live with perpetual tunnel vision, walk past a slum without
seeing either the human misery it contains or the potential threat it poses to their security . . . Then I
got a hunch, and turned quickly to the advertisements. It was as I expected: no fnords. That was part
of the gimmick, too: only in consumption, endless consumption, could they escape the amorphous
threat of the invisible fnords.
I kept thinking about it on my way to the office. If I pointed out a fnord to somebody who hadn't
been de-conditioned, as Hagbard deconditioned me, what would he or she say? They'd probably read
the word before or after it. "No this word," I'd say. And they would again read an adjacent word. But
would their panic level rise as the threat came closer to consciousness? I preferred not to try the
experiment; it might have ended with a psychotic fugue in the subject. The conditioning, after all,
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went back to grade school. No wonder we all hate those teachers so much: we have a dim, masked
memory of what they've done to us in converting us into good and faithful servants for the Illuminati.
When I arrived at my desk, Peter Jackson handed me a press release. "What do you make of this?" he
asked with a puzzled frown, and I looked at the mimeographed first page. The old eye-and-pyramid
design leaped out at me. "DeMolay Freres invites you to the premiere debut of the world's first
plastic nude martini . . . ," the press release declared. On second glance the eye in the triangle turned
into the elliptical rim of a martini glass, while the pupil in the eye was actually the olive floating in
the cocktail.
"What the hell is a plastic nude martini?" said Peter Jackson. "And why would they invite us to a
press party for one?"
"You can bet that it's nonbiodegradable," said Joe.
"Which will make it very unfashionable with honky ecology freaks," said Peter sarcastically.
Joe squinted at the design again. It could be a coincidence. But coincidence was just another word
for synchronicity. "I think I'll go," he said. "And what's that?" he added as his eye fell upon a halfunfolded
poster on his desk.
"Oh, that came with the latest American Medical Association album," said Peter. "I don't want it, and
I thought you might. It's time you took those pictures of the Rolling Stones off your wall. This is the
age of constantly accelerating change, and a man who displays old pictures of the Stones is liable to
be labeled a reactionary."
Four owl-eyed faces stared at him. They were dressed in one-piece white suits, and three of them
were joining extended hands to form a triangle, while the fourth, Wolfgang Saure, generally
acknowledged to be the leader of the group, stood with his arms folded in the center. The picture was
taken from above so that the most prominent elements were the four heads, while the outstretched
arms clearly made the sides of the triangle, and the bodies seemed unimportant, dwindling away to
nothing. The background was jet black. The three young men and the woman, with their smoothshaven
bony faces, their blond crew-cuts and their icy blue eyes seemed extremely sinister to Joe. If
the Nazis had won the war and Heinrich Himmler had followed Hitler as ruler of the German
Empire, kids like this would be running the world. And they almost were, in a different sense,
because they had succeeded the Beatles and Stones as kings of music, which made them emperors
among youth. Although long hair remained the general fashion, the kids had accepted the American
Medical Association's antiseptic-clean appearance as a needed reaction against a style that had
become too commonplace.
As Wolfgang himself had said, "If you need an outward sign to know your own, you don't really
belong."
"They give me the creeps," said Joe.
"What did you think when the Beatles first came out?" said Peter.
Joe shrugged. "They gave me the creeps. They looked ugly and sexless and like teenage werewolves
with all that hair. And they seemed to be able to mesmerize twelve-year-old girls."
Peter nodded. "The bulk of the AMA's fans are even younger. So you might as well start
conditioning yourself to them now. They're going to be around for a long time."
"Peter, let's you and me have lunch," Joe said. "Then I'm going to get some work done, and then I'm
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going to leave here at four to go to this plastic martini party. First of all, though, hold the chair for
me while I take down the Stones and put up the American Medical Association."
The DeMolay Freres group wasn't kidding, he found. There were martinis, olives and all (or cocktail
onions for those who preferred them) in transparent plastic bags that were shaped like nude women.
Pretty terrible taste the manufacturer had, thought Joe. Briefly, Joe wondered if it would be a good
idea to infiltrate this company so as to get dosages of AUM in all the plastic nude martinis. But then
he remembered the emblem and thought maybe this company was already infiltrated. But by which
side?
There was a beautiful Oriental girl in the room. She had black hair that reached all the way down to
the small of her back, and when she raised her arms to adjust a head ornament, Joe was surprised to
see thick black hair in her armpits. Orientals did not normally have much body hair, he thought.
Could she be some relation to the hairy Ainu of northern Japan? It intrigued him, turned him on as
he'd never thought armpit hair would, and he went over to her to talk. The first thing he noticed was
that the headband she wore had a golden apple with the letter K printed on it right in the center of her
forehead. She is one of Us, he thought. His hunch about coming to this party was right.
"These martini bags sure have a silly shape," said Joe.
"Why? Don't you care for nude women?"
"Well, this has about as much to do with nude women as any other piece of plastic," said Joe. "No,
my point is that it's in such execrable taste. But, then, all of American industry is nothing but a giant
obscene circus to me. What's your name?"
The black eyes fixed his intently. "Mao Tsu-hsi."
"Any relation?"
"No. My name means 'cat' in Chinese. His doesn't. His name is Mao but mine is Mao." Joe was
enchanted by her enunciation of the two different tones.
"Well, Miss Cat, You are the most attractive woman I've met in ages."
She responded with a silent flirtation of her own and they were soon in a wonderfully interesting
conversation— which he could never remember afterwards. Nor did he notice the pinch of powder
she dropped into his drink. He began feeling strangely groggy. Tsu-hsi took his arm and led him to
the checkroom. They got their coats, left the building and hailed a cab. In the back seat they kissed
for a long time. She opened her coat and he pulled the zipper that went all the way down the front of
her dress. He felt her breasts and stroked her belly, then dropped his head into her bush. She was
wearing no underwear. She draped her legs over his, using her coat to screen what was going on
from the cab driver, and helped him expose his erect penis. With a few quick, agile movements she
had swept her skirt out of the way, raised her little seat into the air and slid her well-lubricated cunt
down over his cock and was fucking him sidesaddle. It could have been difficult and awkward, but
she was so light and well coordinated that she managed to bring herself to orgasm easily and
voluptuously. She drew in her breath sharply through her teeth and a shudder ran through her body.
She rested her head momentarily on his shoulder, then raised herself slightly and helped Joe to a
pleasant climax with a rotary motion of her ass.
The experience, Joe realized, would have been more exquisite a few months, or a few years, earlier.
Now, with his growing sensitivity, he was conscious of what had been missing: the actual energetic
contact. The effect of the JAMs and the Discordians on him, he reflected, had been paradoxical by
ordinary standards. He was no more puritanical than before they started tinkering with his nervous
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system (he was less), but at the same time casual sex was less appealing to him. He remembered
Atlanta Hope's diatribes against "sexism" in her book Telemachus Sneezed—the Bible of the God's
Lightning Movement—and he suddenly saw some weird kind of sense in her rantings. "The Sexual
Revolution in America was as much of a fraud as the Political Revolutions in China and Russia,"
Atlanta had written with her usual exuberant capitalization; she was, in a way, quite right. People
today were still wrapped in a cellophane of false ego, and even if they fucked and had orgasms
together the cellophane was still there and no real contact had been made.
And yet if Mao was what he suspected she would know this even better than he did. Was this quick,
cool spasm some kind of test or some lesson or demonstration? If so, how was he supposed to
respond?
And then he remembered that she had not given an address to the driver. The cab had been waiting
only for them to take them to a predetermined place, for reasons unknown.
I've seen the fnords, he thought; now I'm going to see more.
The cab stopped on a narrow, heavily shadowed street that seemed to be all empty stores, factory
buildings, loading docks and warehouses.
With Miss Mao leading, they entered an old dilapidated-looking loft building with the aid of a key
she had in her handbag, climbed some clanging cast-iron stairs, walked hand in hand down a long
dark corridor and came at last through a series of anterooms, each better appointed than the last, to a
splendid boardroom. Joe shook his head, amazed at what he saw, but there was something— he
suspected a drug— that was keeping him docile and passive.
Around a table sat men and women costumed from various eras of human history. Joe recognized
Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Mongol and Polynesian dress, also classical Greek and Roman, medieval
and Renaissance. There were other outfits more difficult to recognize at first glance. A flying Dutch
board meeting, Joe thought to himself. They were talking about the Illuminati, the Discordians, the
JAMs and the Erisians.
A man wearing a steel breastplate and helmet with gold inlay and a neatly trimmed mustache and
goatee said, "It is now possible to predict with ninety-eight percent probability of accuracy that the
Illuminati are setting up Fernando Poo for an international crisis. The question is, do we raid the
island and get the records now, making sure they're not endangered, or do we wait and take
advantage of the trouble as a cover for our raid?"
A man in a dragon-embroidered red silk robe said, "There will be no way to take advantage of the
trouble, in my opinion. It will seem like chaos on the surface, but underneath the Illuminati will have
everything very much under control. Now is the time to move."
A woman in a translucent silk blouse whose little vest did not hide her dark, rounded breasts, said,
"You realize this could be a lovely scoop for your magazine, Mr. Malik. You could send a reporter
there to look into conditions on Fernando Poo. Equatorial Guinea has all the usual problems of a
developing African nation. Will tribal rivalries flare up between the Bubi and the Fang, preventing
the further development of national cooperation? Will the poverty of the mainland province lead to
attempts to expropriate the wealth of Fernando Poo? And what of the army? What, for example, of a
certain Captain Jesus Tequila y Mota? An interview with the captain might prove to be a journalistic
coup three years from now."
"Yes," said a big woman in colorfully dyed furs who played incessantly with the carved leg bone of
some large animal. "We don't expect C. L. Sulzberger to grasp the importance of Fernando Poo until
the crisis is upon the world. So, if advance warning is desirable— as we think it is— why not
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through Confrontation?"
"Is that why you asked me here?" said Joe. "To tell me something is going to happen in Fernando
Poo? Where the hell is Fernando Poo, anyway?"
"Look it up in an atlas when you get back to work. It's one of several volcanic islands off the coast of
Africa," said a dark-skinned, slit-eyed man wearing a buffalo hide decorated with feathers. "Of
course, you understand that you could only hint at the real forces at work there," he added. "For
instance, we wouldn't want you to mention that Fernando Poo is one of the last outcroppings of the
continent of Atlantis, you know."
Mao Tsu-hsi was standing beside Joe with a glass containing a pinkish liquid. "Here, drink this," she
said. "It will sharpen your perceptions."
A man in gold-braid-encrusted field marshal's uniform said, "Mr. Malik is the next business in order
on our agenda. We are to educate him, to some extent Let's do it, to that extent."
The lights in the room went out. There was a rustling at one end, and suddenly Joe was looking at a
brightly lit movie screen.
WHEN ATLANTIS RULED THE EARTH
The title appears in letters that look like blocks of stone piled on top of one another to
form a kind of step pyramid. It is followed by shots of the earth as it looked thirty
thousand years ago, during the great ice ages, showing woolly mammoths, saber-toothed
tigers and Cro-Magnon hunters, while a narrator explains that at the same time the
greatest civilization ever known by man is flourishing on the continent of Atlantis. The
Atlanteans do not know anything about good or evil, the narrator explains. However,
they all live to be five hundred years old and have no fear of death. The bodies of all
Atlanteans are covered with fur, as with apes.
After seeing various domestic scenes in Zukong Gi-morlad-Siragosa, the largest and
most central city on the continent (but not the capital, because the Atlanteans do not
have a government), we move to a laboratory where the young (one hundred years old)
scientist GRUAD is displaying a biological experiment to an associate, GAO TWONE.
The experiment is a giant water-dwelling serpent-man. Gao Twone is impressed, but
Gruad declares that he is bored; he wishes to change himself in some unexpected way.
Gruad is already strange— unlike other Atlanteans, he is not covered with fur, but has
only short blond hair on top of his head and a close-cropped beard. In comparison to
other Atlanteans he seems hideously naked. He wears a high-collared pale green robe
and gauntlets. He tells Gao Twone that he is tired of accumulating knowledge for the
sake of knowledge. "It's just another guise for the pursuit of pleasure, to which too many
of our fellow Atlanteans devote their lives. Of course, there's nothing wrong with
pleasure— it moves the energies— but I feel that there is something higher and more
heroic. I have no name for it yet, but I know it exists."
Gao Twone is somewhat shocked. "You, as a scientist, can talk of knowing something
exists when you have no evidence?"
Gruad is dejected by this and admits, "My lens needs polishing." But after a moment he
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bounces back. "And yet, even though I have my moments of doubt, I think my lens
really is clear. Of course, I must find lie evidence. But even now, before I start, I feel
that I know what I will find. We could be greater and finer than we are. I look at what I
am and sometimes I despise myself. I'm just a clever animal. An ape who has learned to
play with tools. I want to be much more. I say we can be what the lloigor are, and even
more. We can conquer time and seize eternity, even as they have. I mean to achieve that
or destroy myself in the attempt."
The scene shifts to a banquet hall where INGEL RILD, a venerable Atlantean scientist,
has called together prominent Atlanteans to celebrate a space research achievement, the
production of a solar flare. Ingel Rild and his associates have developed a missile which,
when it strikes the sun, can cause an explosion. He tells the marijuana-smoking
gathering, "We can control to the second the timing of the flare and to the millimeter the
distance it will spring out from the sun. A flare of sufficient magnitude could burn our
planet to a crisp. A smaller flare could bombard the earth with radiations such that the
area closest to the sun would be destroyed, while the rest of our world would suffer
drastic changes. Most serious of all, perhaps, would be the biological changes these
excessive radiations would bring about. Life forms would be damaged and perhaps
become extinct. New life forms would arise. All of nature would undergo a tremendous
upheaval. This has happened naturally once or twice. It happened seventy million years
ago when the dinosaurs were suddenly wiped out and replaced by mammals. We still
have much to learn about the mechanism that produces spontaneous solar flares.
However, to be able to cause them artificially is a step toward predicting and possibly
controlling them. When that stage is reached, our planet and our race will be protected
from the kind of catastrophe that destroyed the dinosaurs."
After the applause, a woman named KAJECI asks whether it might not be disrespectful
to tamper with "our father, the sun." Ingel Rild replies that man is a part of nature and
what he does is natural and can't be construed as tampering. Now Gruad interrupts
angrily, pointing out that he, an unattractive mutation, is the product of tampering with
nature. He tells Ingel Rild that the Atlanteans do not truly understand nature and the
order that controls it. He declares that man is subject to laws. All things in nature are,
but man is different because he can disobey the natural laws that govern him. Gruad
goes on, "With humanity we can speak, as we speak of our own machines, in terms of
performance expected and performance delivered. If a machine does not do what it is
designed for, we try to correct it. We want it to do what it ought to do, what it should do.
I think we have the right and the duty to demand the same of people— that they perform
as they ought to and should perform." An aged and merry-eyed scientist named LHUV
KERAPHT interrupts, "But people are not machines, Gruad."
"Exactly," Gruad answers. "I have already considered that. Therefore, I have created
new words, words even stronger than should and ought. When a person performs as he
or she should and ought, I call that Good; and anything less than this I call Evil." This
outlandish notion is greeted with general laughter. Gruad tries to speak persuasively,
conscious of his lonely position as a pioneer, trying desperately to communicate with the
closed minds all around him. After further argument, though, he becomes threatening,
declaring, "The people of Atlantis do not live according to the law. In their pride, they
strike the sun itself, and boast of it, as you have, Ingel Rild, this day. I say that if
Atlanteans do not live according to the law, a disaster will befall them. A disaster that
will shake the entire earth. You have been warned! Heed my words!" Gruad strides
majestically out of the banquet hall, seizing his cloak at the door and sweeping it about
him as he leaves. Kajeci follows him and tells him that she thinks she partly understands
what he has been trying to say. The laws he speaks of are like the wishes of parents, and,
"The great bodies of the universe are our parents. Isn't that so?" Gruad's naked hand
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strokes Kajeci's furred cheek, and they go off into the darkness together.
Within six months Gruad has formed an organization called the Party of Science. Their
banner is an eye inside a triangle which in turn is surrounded by a serpent with its tail in
its mouth. The Party of Science demands that Atlantis publish the natural laws Gruad
has discovered and make them binding on all with systems of reward and punishment to
enforce them. The word "punishment" is another addition to the Atlantean vocabulary
coined by Gruad. One of Gruad's opponents explains to friends of his that it means
torture, and everyone's fur bristles. Ingel Rild announces to a gathering of his supporters
that Gruad has proven to his own satisfaction— and the demonstration runs to seventytwo
scrolls of logical symbols— that sex is part of what he calls Evil. Only sex for the
good of the community is to be permitted under Gruad's system, to keep the race alive.
A scientist called TON LIT exclaims, "You mean we must be thinking about conception
during the act? That's impossible. Men's penises would droop, and women's vaginas
wouldn't get moist. It's like— well, it's like making the shrill mouth-music while you are
urinating. It would take great training, if it can be done at all." Ingel Rild proposes the
formation of a Party of Freedom to oppose Gruad. Discussing Gruad's personality, Ingel
Rild says he checked the genealogical records and found that several of the most
agitated-energy people in all Atlantean history were among his ancestors. Gruad is a
mutation, and so are many of his followers. The energy of normal Atlanteans flows
slowly. Gruad's people are impatient and frustrated, and this is what makes them want to
inflict suffering on their fellow humans.
Joe sat up with a jolt. If he understood that part of the movie, Gruad— evidently the first
Illuminatus— was also the first homo neophilus. And the Party of Freedom, which seemed to be the
origin of the Discordian and JAM movements, was pure homo neophobus. How the hell could that be
squared with the generally reactionary attitude of current Illuminati policies, and the innovativeness
of the Discordians and JAMs? But the film was moving on—
In a disreputable-looking tavernlike place where men and women smoke dope in pipes
that they pass from one to another, while people grope in couples and groups in dark
corners, SYLVAN MARTISET proposes a Party of Nothingness that rejects the
positions of both the Party of Science and the Party of Freedom.
After this we see street fighting, atrocities, the infliction of punishment on harmless
people by men wearing Gruad's eye-and-triangle badge. The Party of Freedom proclaims
its own symbol, a golden apple. The fighting spreads, the numbers of the dead mount
and Ingel Rild weeps. He and his associates decide on a desperate expedient—
unleashing the lloigor Yog Sothoth. They will offer this unnatural soul-eating energy
being from another universe its freedom in return for its help in destroying Gruad's
movement. Yog Sothoth is imprisoned in the great Pentagon of Atlantis on a desolate
moor in the southern part of the continent. The Atlantean electric plane bearing Ingel
Rild, Ton Lit and another scientist drifts, trailing feathery sparks, to a landing in a flat
field overgrown with gray weeds. Within the Pentagon, an enormous black stone
structure, the ground is scorched and the air shimmers like a heat mirage. Flickers of
static electricity run through the shimmering from time to time, and an unpleasant noise,
like flies around a corpse, pervades the whole moor. The faces of the three Atlantean
sages register disgust, sickness and terror. They climb the nearest tower and talk to the
guard. Suddenly Yog Sothoth takes control of Ton Lit, speaking in an oily, rich, deep
and reverberating voice, and asks them what they seek of him. Ton Lit lets out a terrible
shriek and claps his hands over his ears. Froth slips from the side of his mouth, his fur
bristles and his penis stands erect. His eyes are delirious and suffering, like those of a
dying gorilla. The guard uses an electronic instrument that looks like a magician's wand
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topped with a five-pointed star to subdue Yog Sothoth. Ton Lit bays like a hound and
leaps for Ingel Rild's throat. The electronic ray drives him back and he stands panting,
tongue hanging loose, as the Pentagon first and then the ground begin to soften into
asymptotic curves. Yog Sothoth chants, "la-nggh-ha-nggh-ha-nggh-fthagn! la-nggh-hanggh-
ha-nggh-hgual! The blood is the life ... The blood is the life ..." All faces, bodies
and perspectives are skewed and there is a greenish tinge on everything. Suddenly the
guard strikes the nearest wall of the Pentagon directly with his electronic wand and Ton
Lit shrieks, human intelligence coming back into his eyes together with great shame and
revulsion. The three sages flee the Pentagon under a sky slowly turning back to its
normal shape and color. The laughter of Yog Sothoth follows them. They decide that
they cannot release the lloigor.
Meanwhile Gruad has called his closest followers, known as the Unbroken Circle of
Gruad, to announce that Kajeci has conceived. Then he shows them a group of manlike
creatures with green, scaly skin, wearing long black cloaks and black skullcaps with
scarlet plumes. These he calls his Ophidians. Since At-lanteans have a kind of
instinctive check on themselves that prevents them from killing except in blind fury,
Gruad has developed these synthetic humanoids from the serpent, which he has found to
be the most intelligent of all reptiles. They will have no hesitation about destroying men
and will act only on Gruad's command. Some of his followers protest, and Gruad
explains that this is not really killing. He says, "Atlanteans who will not accept the
teachings of the Party of Science are swinish beings. They are a sort of robot who has no
inner spiritual substance to control it. Our bodies, however, are deceived into feeling as
if they are our own kind, and we cannot raise our hands against them. Now, however,
the light of science has given us hands to raise." At this meeting Gruad also addresses
his men for the first time as the "illuminated ones."
At the next meeting of the Party of Freedom the Ophidians attack, using iron bars to
club people to death and slashing throats with their fangs. Then the Party of Freedom
holds a funeral for a dozen of its dead at which Ingel Rild gives an oration describing the
ways in which the struggle between Gruad's followers and the other Atlanteans is
changing the character of all human beings:
"Hitherto, Atlanteans have enjoyed knowledge but not worried over the fact that there is
much that we do not know. We are conservative and indifferent to new ideas, we have
no inner conflicts and we feel like doing the things that seem wise to us. We think that
the things we feel like doing will usually work out for the best. We consider pain and
pleasure a single phenomenon, which we call sensation, and we respond to unavoidable
pain by relaxing or becoming ecstatic. We do not fear death. We can read each other's
minds because we are in touch with all the energies of our bodies. The followers of
Gruad have lost that ability, and they are thankful that they have. The Scientists dote on
new things and new ideas. This love of the new thing is a matter of genetic
manipulation. Gruad is even encouraging people in their twenties to have children,
though it is our custom never to have children before we reach a hundred. The
generations of Gruad's followers come thick and fast, and they are not like us. They
agonize over their ignorance. They are full of uncertainty and inner conflict between
what they should do and what they feel like doing. The children, who are brought up on
Gruad's teachings, are even more disturbed and conflict-filled than their parents. One
doctor tells me that the attitudes and the way of life Gruad is encouraging in his people
is enough to shorten their life spans considerably. And they are afraid of pain. They are
afraid of death. And even as their lives grow shorter, they desperately seek for some
means of achieving immortality."
Gruad tells a meeting of his Unbroken Circle that the tune has come to intensify the
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struggle. If they can't rule the Atlanteans, they will destroy Atlantis. "Atlantis will be
destroyed by light," says Gruad. "By the light of the sun." Gruad introduces the worship
of the sun to his followers. He reveals the existence of gods and goddesses. "They are all
energy, conscious energy," says Gruad. "This conscious and powerfully directed and
focused pure energy I call spirit. All motion is spirit. All light is spirit. All spirit is light."
Under Gruad's direction, the Party of Science builds a great pyramid, thousands of feet
high. It is in two halves; the upper half, made of an indestructible ceramic substance and
inscribed with a terrible staring eye, floats five hundred feet above the base, held in
place by antigravity generators.
A band of men and women led by LILITH VELKOR, chief spokeswoman for the Party
of Nothingness, gathers at the base of the great pyramid and laughs at it. They carry
Nothingarian signs:
DON'T CLEAN OUR LENSES, GRUAD— GET THE CRACK OUT OF YOUR
OWN
EVERY TIME I HEAR THE WORD "PROGRESS" MY FUR BRISTLES
THE SUN SUCKS FREEDOM DEFINED IS FREEDOM DENIED
THE MESSAGE ON THIS SIGN IS A FLAT LIE
Lilith Velkor addresses the Nothingarians, satirizing all Gruad's beliefs, claiming that
the most powerful god is a crazy woman and she is the goddess of chaos. To the
accompaniment of laughter she declares, "Gruad says the sun is the eye of the sun god.
That's more of his notion that males are superior and reason and order are superior.
Actually, the sun is a giant golden apple which is the plaything of the goddess of chaos.
And it's the property of anyone she thinks is fair enough to deserve it." Suddenly a band
of Ophidians attacks followers of Lilith Velkor and kills several of them. Lilith Velkor
leads her people in an unprecedented attack on the Ophidians. They storm up the side of
the great pyramid and throw the Ophidians down to the street, killing them. Amazingly,
they succeed in wiping out all the Ophidians. Gruad declares that Lilith Velkor must die.
When the opportunity presents itself, his men seize her and take her to a dungeon. There
an enormous wheel has been constructed with four spokes in the shape:
Lilith Velkor is crucified with ropes, upside down, on this device. Several members of
the Party of Science lounge about, watching her die. Gruad enters, goes to the wheel and
looks at the dying woman, who says, "This is as good a day to die as any." Gruad
remonstrates with her, saying that death is a great evil and she should fear it. She laughs
and says, "All my life I have despised tradition and now I despise innovation also.
Surely, I must be a most wicked example for the world!" She dies laughing. Gruad's rage
is unbearable. He vows that he will wait no longer; Atlantis is too wicked to save and he
will destroy it.
On a windswept plain in the northern regions of Atlantis a huge teardrop-shaped rocket
with graceful fins is poised on the launching pad. Gruad is in the control room making
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last-minute adjustments while Kajeci and Wo Topod argue with him. Gruad says, "The
human race will survive. It will survive the better purged of these Atlanteans, who are
nothing but swine, nothing but robots, nothing but creatures who do not understand good
and evil. Let them perish." His finger strikes a red button and the rocket hurtles on its
way to the sun. It will take several days to reach there, and meanwhile Gruad has
gathered the Unbroken Circle on an airship which takes them away from Atlantis and
into the huge mountains to the east in a region that will one day be called Tibet. Gruad
calculates that by the time the missile strikes the sun, they will have been landed and
underground for two hours. The sun rides blinding yellow over the plains of Atlantis. It
is a beautiful day in Zukong Gimorlad-Siragosa, the sun shining down on its slender,
graceful towers with spider web bridges spiraling among them, its parks, its temples, its
museums, its fine public buildings and magnificent private palaces. Its handsome, richly
furred people gracefully stride amidst the beauties of the first and finest civilization man
has ever produced. Families, lovers, friends and enemies, all unsuspecting what is about
to happen, enjoy their private moments. A quintet plays the melodious zinthron, balatet,
mordan, swaz and fendrar. Over all, however, the great eye on the side of Gruad's
pyramid glares horrid and red.
Suddenly the sun's body rages. Coiled flames, balls of gas, roll out. The sun looks like a
giant fiery arachnid or octopus. One great flame comes rolling toward the earth, burning
red gas which turns yellow, then green, then blue, then white.
There is nothing left of Zukong Gimorlad-Siragosa, except the pyramid with its upper
segment now resting on the base, the antigravity generators having been destroyed. The
baleful eye looks out over an absolutely flat, burnt-black plain. The ground shakes, great
cracks open. The blackened area is a great circle, hundreds of miles in diameter, beyond
which is a dark brown and still desolate wasteland. Thousands of cracks appear in the
brittle surface of the continent, the strength of whose rocks has been destroyed by the
incredible heat of the solar flare. A tide of mud starts crawling over the empty plain. It
leaves only the top of the pyramid, with the great eye, showing. Water sweeps over the
mud, at first sinking in and standing in pools, then rising higher so that only the tip of
the pyramid sticks out of a great lake. Under the water enormous parallel fissures open
in the ground on either side of the blackened central circle. The midsection of the
continent, including the pyramid, begins to sink. The pyramid falls into the depths of the
ocean with cliffs rising on either side of it to the parts of Atlantis that still remain above
the ocean. They will remain for many thousands of years more, and they will be the
Atlantis remembered in the legends of men. But the true Atlantis— high Atlantis— is
gone.
Gruad stares into his crimson-glowing viewplate, watching the destruction of Atlantis.
The light changes color, from red to gray, and the face of Gruad turns gray. It is a
terrible face. It has aged a hundred years in the last few minutes. Gruad may claim to be
in the right, but deep down he knows that what he has done isn't nice. And yet deep
down there is satisfaction, too, for Gruad, long tortured by unreasonable guilt, now has
something he can really feel guilty about. He turns to the Unbroken Circle and proposes,
since it appears that the earth will survive the cataclysm (he was not really sure that it
would), that they plan for the future. Most of them, however, are still in shock. Wo
Topod, inconsolable, stabs himself to death, the first recorded time that a member of the
human race has deliberately killed himself. Gruad calls upon his followers to destroy all
remains of the Atlantean civilization and then, later, to build a perfect civilization when
even the ruins of Atlantis have been forgotten.
The great beasts that inhabited Europe, Asia and North America die off as a result of
mutations and diseases caused by the solar flare. All relics of the Atlan-tean civilization
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are destroyed. The people who were Gruad's erstwhile countrymen are either killed or
driven forth to wander the earth. Besides Gruad's Himalayan colony there is one other
remnant of the High Atlantean era: the Pyramid of the Eye, whose ceramic substance
resisted solar flare, earthquake, tidal wave and submersion in the depths of the ocean.
Gruad explains that it is right that the eye should remain. It is the eye of God, the One,
the scientific-technical eye of ordered knowledge that looks down on the universe and
by perceiving it causes it to be. If an event is not witnessed, it does not happen;
therefore, for the universe to happen there must be a Witness.
Among the primitive hunters and gatherers a mutation has appeared that seems to be
spreading rapidly. More and more people are being born without fur and with hair in the
same pattern as Gruad's. The Hour of God's Eye has caused mutations in every species.
From the Himalayas the rocket ships of the Unbroken Circle, painted red and white,
swoop out in squadrons. They sweep across Europe and land on the brown islands where
Atlantis used to be. There they land and raid a city of refugees from the Atlantean
disaster. They kill many of the leaders and intellectuals and herd the rest aboard the
ships, fly to the Americas and deposit the helpless people on a vast plain. Far below their
route of passage lies the Pyramid of the Eye at the bottom of the Atlantic. The base of
the pyramid is covered with silt and the break where the upper part of the pyramid had
floated on antigravity projectors is also covered. Still the pyramid itself towers over the
mud around it, taller by three times than the Great Pyramid of Egypt, the building of
which lies twenty-seven thousand years in the future. A vast shadow descends upon the
pyramid. There is a suggestion in the darkness of the ocean bottom of giant tentacles, of
sucker disks wide as the rims of volcanos, of an eye as big as the sun looking at the eye
on the pyramid. Something touches the pyramid, and enormous as it is, it moves slightly.
Then the presence is gone.
The pentagonal trap in which the people of Atlantis had heroically and brilliantly caught
the dread ancient being Yog Sothoth has been, amazingly, undamaged by the
catastrophe. Being on the southern plain, which was relatively uninhabited, the Pentagon
of Yog Sothoth becomes the center of a migration of people who survived the disaster.
Emergency cities are set up, those dying of radiation sickness are treated. A second
Atlantis begins to take root. And then, from the Himalayas, the ships of the Unbroken
Circle come swooping down on one of their raids. Lines of Atlantean men and women
are marched to the walls of the Pentagon and there mowed down by laser fire. Then
explosive charges are placed amid the heaps of bodies and the masked, uniformed men
of the Unbroken Circle withdraw. There is a series of explosions; horrid yellow smoke
goes coiling up. The gray stone walls crumble. There is a moment of stillness, balance,
tension. Then the piled-up boulders of one side of the wall fly apart as if thrust by the
hand of a giant. An enormous claw print appears in the soft soil around the ruins of the
Pentagon. The masked men of the Unbroken Circle race frantically for their ships and
take off. The ships dart into the sky, stop suddenly, waver and plummet like stones to
explosive crashes on the earth. The surviving refugees scream and scatter. Like a scythe
going through wheat, death sweeps among them in great arcs as they run in massed
mobs. Mouths open in soundless screams, they fall. Only a handful escapes. Over the
scene a colossal reddish figure of indeterminate shape and number of limbs stands
triumphant.
In the Himalayas, Gruad and the Unbroken Circle watch the destruction of the Pentagon
and the massacre of the Atlanteans. The Unbroken Circle cheers, but Gruad strangely
weeps. "You think I hate walls?" he says. "I love walls. I love any kind of wall.
Anything that separates. Walls protect good people. Walls lock away the evil. There
must always be walls and the love of walls, and in the destruction of the great Pentagon
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that held Yog Sothoth I read the destruction of all that I stand for. Therefore I am
stricken with regret."
At this the face of EVOE, a young priest, takes on a reddish glow and a demoniac look.
There is more than a hint of possession. "It is good to hear you say that," he says to
Gruad. "No man yet has befriended me, though many have tried to use me. I have
prepared a special place for your soul, oh first of the men of the future." Gruad attempts
to speak to Yog Sothoth, but the possession has apparently passed, and the other
members of the Unbroken Circle praise a new beverage that Evoe has prepared, made of
the fermented juice of grapes. At dinner, later that day, Gruad tries the new beverage and
praises it, saying, "This juice of grapes relaxes me and does not cause the disturbing
visions and sounds that makes the herb the Atlanteans used to smoke so unpleasant for a
man of conscience." Evoe gives him more to drink from a fresh jar, and Gruad takes it.
Before drinking he says, "Any culture that arises in the next twenty thousand years or so
is going to have the rot of Atlantis in it. Therefore I decree a noncultural time of eight
hundred generations. After that we may allow man free reign on his propensity for
building civilizations. The culture he builds will be under our guidance, with our ideas
implicit in its every aspect, with our control at every stage. Eight hundred generations
from now the new human culture will be planted. It will follow the natural law. It will
have the knowledge of good and evil, the light that comes from the sun, the sun that
blasphemers say is only an apple. It is no apple, I tell you, though it is a fruit, even as
this beverage of Evoe's that I now quaff is from a fruit. From the grape comes this drink
and from the sun comes the knowledge of good and evil, the separation of light and
darkness over the whole earth. Not an apple, but the fruit of knowledge!" Gruad drinks.
He puts down his glass, clutches his throat and staggers back. His other hand goes to his
heart. He topples over and lies on his back, his eyes staring upward.
Naturally, everyone accuses Evoe of poisoning Gruad. But Evoe calmly answers that it
was Lilith Velkor who did it. He was doing research on the energies of the dead and had
learned how to take them into him. But sometimes the energies of the dead could take
control of him, so that he would be just a medium through which they act. He cries,
"When you write this tragedy into the archives, you must say, not that Evoe the man did
it, but Evoe-Lilith, possessed by the evil spirit of a woman. The woman did tempt me, I
tell you! I was helpless." The Unbroken Circle is persuaded, and agree that since Lilith
Velkor and the crazy goddess she worshipped were responsible for Gruad's death,
henceforward women must be subordinate to men so such evils will not be repeated.
They decide to build a tomb for Gruad and to inscribe upon it, "The First Illuminated
One: Never Trust A Woman." They decide that since the lloigor is loose they will offer
sacrifices to it, and the sacrifices will be pure young women who have never lain with a
man. Evoe seems to be taking control of the group and Gao Twone protests this. To
prove his dedication to the true and the good, Evoe declares, he has had his penis
amputated as a sacrifice to the All-Seeing Eye. He pulls open his robe. All look at his
truncated crotch and immediately retch. Evoe goes on, "Furthermor.e, it is decreed by
the Eye and Natural Law that all male children who would be close to goodness and
truth must imitate my sacrifice, at least to the extent of losing the foreskin or being cut
enough to bleed." Kajeci comes in at this point, and they plan a great funeral, agreeing
that they will not burn Gruad as was the Atlantean custom, signifying that one is dead
forever, but will preserve his body, symbolizing the hope that he is not really dead but
will rise again.
There follow several thousand years of warfare between the remnants of the Atlanteans
and the inhabitants of Agharti, the stronghold of the Scientists, who now call themselves
variously the Knowledgeable or the Enlightened Ones. The last remnants of the
Atlantean culture are destroyed. Great cities were built, then destroyed by nuclear
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explosions. All the inhabitants of the city of Peos are killed in one night by the eater of
souls. Chunks of the continent break off and sink into the sea. There are earthquakes and
tidal waves. Finally, only outcroppings like the cone-shaped island of Fernando Poo rise
alone from the sea where Atlantis had been.
About 13,000 B.C. a new culture is planted on a hillside near the headwaters of the
Euphrates and it starts to spread. A tribe of Cro-Magnons, magnificently tall, strong,
large-headed people, is marched at gunpoint down from the snows of Europe to the
fertile lands of the Middle East. They are taken to the site chosen for the first
agricultural settlement and shown how to plant crops. For several years they do so while
the Unbroken Circle's men guard them with flame throwers. Their generations pass
rapidly, and once the new way of life has taken hold the Illuminated Ones leave them
alone. The tribe divides into kings, priests, scribes, warriors, and farmers. A city
surrounded by farms rises up. The kings and priests are soft, weak and fat. The peasants
are stunted and dulled by malnutrition. The warriors are big and strong, but brutal and
unintelligent. The scribes are intelligent, but thin and bloodless. Now the city makes war
on neighboring tribes of barbarians. Being well organized and technologically superior,
the people of the city win. They enslave the barbarians and plant other cities nearby.
Then a great tribe of barbarians comes down from the north and conquers the civilized
people and burns their city. This is not the end of the new civilization, though. It only
revitalizes it. Soon the conquerors have learned to play the roles of kings, priests and
warriors, and now there is a kind of nation consisting of several cities with a large body
of armed who must be kept occupied. Marching robotlike in great square formations,
they set out over the plain to find new peoples to conquer. The sun shines down on the
civilization created by the Illuminati. And below the sea the eye on the pyramid glares
balefully upward.
THE END
Lights flashed on suddenly. The screen rolled up into its receptacle with a snap. Blinded, Joe rubbed
his eyes. He had a ferocious headache. He also had a ferocious need to urinate at once, before his
bladder exploded. He'd had an awful lot of drinks at the plastic martini party, then made love to that
Chinese girl in the cab, then sat down to watch this movie without once taking time out to go to the
bathroom. The pain in his groin was excruciating. He imagined it felt something like what Evoe, that
fellow in the movie, had experienced after he castrated himself.
"Where the hell is the John?" said Joe loudly. There was no one in the room. While he was absorbed
in the movie, they, doubtless having seen it before, had crept away softly, leaving him alone to watch
the death of Atlantis.
"Christ's sake," he muttered. "Gotta take a leak. If I don't find the bathroom right away I'll pee in my
pants." Then he noticed a wastepaper can tinder the table. It was walnut with a metal lining. He bent
over and picked it up, sending new tremors of anguish through a body on the verge of bursting. He
decided to use it as a receptacle, set it down again, unzipped his fly, took out his dick and let go into
the can. What if they all came trooping back into the room now, he thought. Well, he would be
embarrassed, but what the hell. It was their fault for springing this movie on him without giving him
a chance to make himself comfortable. Joe looked somberly down into the foam.
"Piss on Atlantis," he muttered. Who the hell were those people he'd seen tonight? Simon and Padre
and Big John had never told him about a group like this. Nor had they ever said anything about
Atlantis. But there was the clear implication, if this movie was to be believed, that the Ancient
Illuminated Seers of Bavaria might better be called the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Atlantis. And
that the word "Ancient" meant a lot older than 1776.
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It was clearly time to leave this place. He could try searching the offices, but he doubted whether
he'd find anything, and, anyway, he was much too tired and hung over— not only from the alcohol
he'd drunk, but also from the strange drug the Oriental girl had given him before the movie. Still, it
had been a very nice drug. It had been Joe's habit since 1969, when he wasn't too busy and didn't
have to get up early in the morning, to get stoned and watch late movies on television. He found this
so enjoyable a pastime that he'd lost two girlfriends to it; they'd both wanted to go to bed when he
was just settling down in front of the tube, laughing himself silly at the incredibly clever witticisms,
marveling at the profundity of the philosophical aphorisms tossed off by the characters (such as
Johnny's line in Bitter Rice: "I work all week and then on Sundays I watch other people ride the
merry-go-round"—what a world of pathos had been expressed in that simple summation of a man's
life) or appreciating, as one wordsmith does another, the complex subtlety of the commercials and
the secret links between them and the movies into which they were inserted (like the slogan: "You
can take the Salem out of the country but you can't take the country out of Salem," in the middle of
The Wolf Man). All of this capacity for appreciating movies had been raised to a new high with the
drug Mao Tsu-hsi had given him, and added to this it was a full-color movie on a large screen
uninterrupted by commercials or, come to think of it, by fnords— and commercials no matter how
trickily interwoven with the plot of the movie did tend to seem like interruptions, even to one who
was stoned enough to know better. It had been a great movie. The best movie of his life. He would
never forget it. Joe tried the knob of the boardroom door and it opened at once. He stopped,
considering whether he should take out his pocket knife and carve "Malik was here" or some
obscenity into the beautiful wood of the table. That would, he felt in an obscure way, let them know
that he knew where they were at. But it would be a shame to spoil the wood, and besides, he was
dreadfully tired. He walked through darkened outer corridors, staggered down the stairs and let
himself out into the street. Looking toward the East River, he thought he could see light in the sky
over Queens. Was the sun coming up? Had he been there that long?
A cab cruised by with its light on. Joe hailed it. Sinking into the back seat as he gave the driver his
home address, he noticed that the man's name on his hack license was Albert Feather.
Well, here's that ladder now, Come on, let's climb. The first rung is yours, The rest are mine.
Funny, thought Lieutenant Otto Waterhouse of the State's Attorney's Police. Every time things get
hairy, that damn song starts going through my head. I must be an obsessive-compulsive neurotic.
He'd first heard the song, "To Be a Man" by Len Chandler, at the home of a chick he was balling
back in '65. It expressed pretty well for him his condition as a member of the tribe. The tribe, that
was how he thought of black people; he'd heard a Jew refer to the Jews that way, and he liked it
better than that soul brother shit. Deep down, he hated other blacks and he hated being black. You
had to climb, that was the thing. You had to climb, each man alone.
When Otto Waterhouse was eight years old, a gang of black kids on the South Side had beaten him,
knifed him and thrown him into Lake Michigan to drown. Otto didn't know how to swim, but
somehow he'd pulled himself along the concrete pilings, clinging to rusty steel where there was
nothing to cling to, his blood seeping out into the water, and he'd stayed there, hidden, till the gang
went away. Then he pulled himself along to a ladder, climbed up and dragged himself onto the
concrete pier. He lay there, almost dead, wondering if the gang would come back and finish him.
Someone did come along. A cop. The cop nudged Otto's body with his toe, rolled it over and looked
down. Otto looked up at the Irish face, round, pig-nosed and blue-eyed.
"Oh, shit," said the cop, and walked on.
Somehow Otto lived till morning, when a woman came along and found him and called an
ambulance. Years later, it seemed logical enough to him to join the police force. He knew the
members of the gang that nearly killed him. He didn't bother with them until after he got on the
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force. Then he found cause to kill each of the gang members— several of whom had by then become
respectable citizens— one by one. Most of them didn't know who he was or why he was killing
them. The number he killed made his reputation in the Chicago Police Department. He was a nigger
cop who could be trusted to deal with niggers.
Otto never did know who the cop was who'd left him to die— he remembered the face, more or less,
but they all looked alike to him.
He had another oddly vivid memory, of a fall day in 1970 when he'd been walking through Pioneer
Court and had hassled a dude who was giving out free samples of— of all things— tomato juice.
Otto took a ten from the dude and drank some tomato juice. The guy had a crew haircut and wore
horn-rimmed glasses. He didn't seem to mind having to pay a bribe, and he looked at Otto with an
odd gleam in his eye as the tomato juice went down. For a moment, Otto thought the tomato juice
might be poisoned. There were cop haters everywhere; many people seemed to have sworn to kill the
"pigs" as they called them. But dozens of people had already drunk the juice and gone away happy.
Otto shrugged and walked off.
Thinking back over the strange changes that had come over him, Otto always traced them back to
that moment. There had been something in the juice.
It wasn't till Stella Maris told him about AUM that he realized how he'd been had. And by then it was
too late. He was a three-way loser, working for the Syndicate, the Illuminati and Discordian
Movement. The only way out was down— down into the chaos with Stella pointing the way.
"Just tell me one thing, baby," he said to her one afternoon as they lay naked together in his
apartment in Hyde Park. "Why did they pick you to contact me?"
"Because you hate niggers," said Stella calmly, running her finger down his dick. "You hate niggers
worse than any white man does. That's why the way to freedom for you lies through me."
"And what about you?" he said angrily, pulling away from her and sitting up in bed. "I suppose you
can't tell the difference between black and white. Black meat and white meat, it's all the same to you,
ain't it, you goddamned whore!"
"You'd like to think so," said Stella. "You'd like to think only a nigger whore would lay you, a whore
who'd lay anybody regardless of race. But you know you are wrong. You know that Otto
Waterhouse, the black man who is better than all black men because he hates all black men, is a lie.
It's you who can't tell the difference between black and white and thinks the black man should be
where the white man is and hates the black man because he isn't white. No, I see color. But I see
everything else about a person, too, baby. And I know that nobody is where they should be and
everybody should be where they are."
"Oh, fuck your goddam philosophy," said Water-house. "Come here."
But he learned. He thought he'd learned everything Stella and Hagbard and the rest of them had to
teach him. And that was a lot, piled on top of all that Illuminati garbage. But now they'd thrown him
a total curve.
He was to kill.
The message came, as all the messages did, from Stella.
"Hagbard said to do this?"
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"Yes."
"And I suppose, if I go along with this, I''ll be told why later on, or I'll figure it out for myself?
Goddam, Stella, this is asking a lot, you know."
"I know. Hagbard told me you have to do this for two reasons. First, for the honor of the Discordians,
so that they will have respect."
"He sounds like a wop for once. But he's right. I understand that."
"Second. He said because Otto Waterhouse must kill a white man."
"What?" Otto started to tremble in the phone booth. He picked nervously, without reading it, at a
sticker that said, THIS PHONE BOOTH RESERVED FOR CLARK KENT.
"Otto Waterhouse must kill a white man. He said you'd know what that meant."
Otto's hand was still shaking when he hung up. "Oh, damn," he said. He was almost crying.
So now on April 28 he stood at a green metal door marked "1723." It was the service entrance to a
condominium apartment at 2323 Lake Shore Drive. Behind him stood a dozen State's Attorney's
police. All of them, like himself, were wearing body armor and baby-blue helmets with transparent
plastic visors. Two were carrying submachine guns.
"All right," said Waterhouse, glancing at his watch. It had amused Flanagan to set the time for the
raid at 5:23 A.M. It was 5:22:30. "Remember— shoot everything that moves." He kept his back to
the men so they would not see the damned tears that Insisted on welling up in his eyes.
"Right on, lieutenant," said Sergeant O'Banion satirically. Sergeant O'Banion hated blacks, but worse
than that he hated filthy, lice-ridden, long-haired, homosexual, Communist-inspired Morituri bomb
manufacturers. He believed that there was a whole disgusting nest of them, sleeping together, dirty
naked bodies entwined, like a can full of worms, just on the other side of that green metal door. He
could see them. He licked his lips. He was going to clean them out. He hefted the machine gun.
"Okay," said Waterhouse. It was 5:23. Shielding himself with one gloved hand, he pointed his .45 at
the lock on the door. The instructions given orally by Flanagan at the briefing were that they would
not show a warrant or even knock before entering. The apartment was said to be full of enough
dynamite to wipe out the entire block of luxury high-rise apartment houses. Presumably the kids, if
they knew they were caught, would set them off. That way they could take a bunch of pigs with
them, preserve their reputation for suicidal bravery, protect themselves from giving away any
information, use the explosives and avoid having to live with the shaming knowledge that they'd
been dumb enough to get caught.
O'Banion was imagining finding a white girl in the arms of a black boy and finishing them off with
one burst from his machine gun. His cock swelled in his pants.
Waterhouse fired.
In the next instant he threw his weight against the door and smashed it open. He was in a hallway
next to the kitchen. He walked into the apartment. His shoes rang on a bare tile floor. Tears ran down
his cheeks.
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he sobbed.
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"Who's that?" a voice called. Waterhouse, whose eyes had adjusted to the darkness, looked across the
empty living room into the foyer, where Milo A. Flanagan stood silhouetted in the light from the
exterior hall.
Waterhouse raised the heavy automatic in his hand to arm's length, sighted carefully, took a deep
breath and held it and squeezed the trigger. The pistol blasted and kicked his hand and the black
figure went toppling backwards into the startled arms of the men behind him.
A bat which had been sitting on a windowsill flew out the open window toward the lake. Only
Waterhouse saw it.
O'Banion came clumping into the room. He took a bent-kneed stance and fired a burst of six rounds
in the direction of the front door.
"Hold it!" Waterhouse snapped. "Hold your fire. Something's wrong." Something would really be
wrong if the guys at the front door came through again, shooting. "Turn on the lights, O'Banion,"
Waterhouse said.
"There's somebody in here shooting."
"We're standing here talking, O'Banion. No one is shooting at us. Find a light switch."
"They're gonna set off the bombs!" O'Banion's voice was shrill with fear.
"With the lights on, O'Banion, we'll see them doing it. Maybe we'll even be able to stop them."
O'Banion ran to the wall and began slapping it with the palm of one hand while he kept his machine
gun cradled in the free arm. One of the other men who had followed O'Banion through the service
entrance found the light switch.
The apartment was bare. There was no furniture. There were no rugs on the floor, no curtains on the
windows. Whoever had been living here had vanished.
The front door opened a crack. Before they could start shooting Waterhouse yelled, "It's all right. It's
Waterhouse in here. There's nobody here." He wasn't crying anymore. It was done. He had killed his
first white man.
The door swung all the way open. "Nobody there?" said the helmeted policeman. "Who the hell shot
Flanagan?"
"Flanagan?" said Waterhouse.
"Flanagan's dead. They got him."
"There isn't anybody here," said O'Banion, who had been looking through side rooms. "What the hell
went wrong? Flanagan set this up personally."
Now that the light was on, Waterhouse could see that someone had drawn a pentagram in chalk on
the floor. In the center of the pentagram was a gray envelope. Otto picked it up. There was a circular
green seal on the back with the word ERIS embossed on it Otto opened it and read:
Good going, Otto. Now proceed at once to Ingolstadt, Bavaria. The bastards are trying to
immanentize the Eschaton.
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S-M
Folding the note and shoving it into his pocket as he bolstered his pistol with his other hand, Otto
Waterhouse strode across the living room. He barely glanced down at the body of Milo A. Flanagan,
the bullet hole in the center of his forehead like a third eye. Hagbard had been right. Despite all the
advance terror and sorrow, once he'd done it, he didn't feel a thing. I have met the enemy and he is
mine, he thought.
Otto pushed past the men crowded around Flanagan's body. Everyone assumed he was going
somewhere to make some sort of report. No one had figured out who shot Flanagan.
By the time O'Banion had puzzled it out, Otto was already in his car. Six hours later, when they had
set up blockades at the airports and railway terminals, Otto was in Minneapolis International Airport
buying a ticket to Montreal. He had to fly back to Chicago, but he sat out the brief stopover at
International Airport aboard the plane, while his brother officers searched the terminals for him.
Twelve hours later, carrying a passport supplied by Montreal Discordians, Otto Waterhouse was on
his way to Ingolstadt.
"Ingolstadt," said FUCKUP. Hagbard had programmed the machine to converse in reasonably good
English this week. "The largest rock festival in the history of mankind, the largest temporary
gathering of human beings ever assembled, will take place near Ingolstadt on the shore of Lake
Totenkopf. Two million young people from all over the world are expected. The American Medical
Association will play."
"Did you know or suspect before this that the American Medical Association, Wolfgang, Werner,
Wilhehn and Winifred Saure, are four of the Dluminati Primi?" asked Hagbard.
"They were on a list, but fourteenth in order of probability," said FUCKUP. "Perhaps some of the
other groups I suspected are Illuminati Veri."
"Can you now state the nature of the crisis that we will face this week?"
There was a pause. "There were three crises for this month. Plus several subcrises designed to bring
the three major crises to a peak. The first was Fernando Poo. The world nearly went to war over the
Fernando Poo coup, but the Illuminati had a countercoup in reserve and that resolved the problem
satisfactorily. Heads of state are human and this feint has helped to make them jumpier and more
irrational. They are in no shape to react wisely to the next two jolts. Unless you wish me to continue
discussing the character structures of the present heads of state— which are important elements in
the crises through which the world is passing—I will proceed to the next crisis. This is Las Vegas. I
still do not know exactly what is going on there, but the sickness vibrations are still coming through
strongly. There is, I have deduced from recently acquired information, a bacteriological warfare
research center located in the desert somewhere near Las Vegas. One of my more mystical probes
came up with the sentence, "The ace in the hole is poisoned candy.' But that's one of those things that
we probably won't understand until we find out what's going on in Las Vegas by more conventional
means."
"I've already dispatched Muldoon and Goodman there," said Hagbard. "All right, FUCKUP,
obviously the third crisis is Ingolstadt. What's going to happen at that rock festival?"
"They intend to use the Illuminati science of strategic biomysticism. Lake Totenkopf is one of
Europe's famed 'bottomless lakes,' which means it has an outlet into the underground Sea of Valusia.
At the end of World War II Hitler had an entire S.S. division in reserve in Bavaria. He was planning
to withdraw to Obersalzburg and, with this fanatically loyal division, make a glorious last stand in
the Bavarian Alps. Instead the Illuminati convinced him that he still had a chance to win the war, if
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he followed their instructions. Hitler, Himmler and Bormann fed cyanide to all the troops, killing
several thousand of them. Then their bodies, dressed in full field equipment, were placed by divers
on a huge underground plateau near where the Sea of Valusia surfaces as Lake Totenkopf. Their
boots were weighted at the bottom so that they would stand at attention. The airplanes, tanks and
artillery assigned to the division were also weighted and sunk along with the troops. Many of them,
by the way, knew that there was cyanide in their last supper, but they ate it anyway. If the Fuehrer
thought it best to kill them, that was good enough for them."
"I can't imagine there would be much left of them after over thirty years," said Hagbard.
"You are wrong as usual, Hagbard," said FUCKUP. "The S.S. men were placed under a biomystical
protective field. The entire division is as good as it was the day it was placed there. Of course, the
Illuminati had tricked Hitler and Himmler. The real purpose of the mass sacrifice was to provide
enough explosively released consciousness energy to make it possible to translate Bormann to the
immortal energy plane. Bormann, one of the Illuminati Primi of his day, was to be rewarded for his
part in organizing World War II. The fifty million violent deaths of that war helped many Illuminati
to achieve transcendental illumination and were most pleasing to their elder brothers and allies, the
lloigor."
"And what will happen at Ingolstadt during the festival?"
"The American Medical Association's fifth number at Woodstock Europa will send out biomystical
waves that will activate the Nazi legions in the lake, and send them marching up the shore. They will
be, in their resurrection, endowed with supernormal strength and energy, making them almost
impossible to kill. And they will achieve even greater powers as a result of the burst of consciousness
energy that will be released when they massacre the millions of young people on the shore. Then, led
by the Saures, they will turn against Eastern Europe. The Russians, already made extremely nervous
by the Fernando Poo incident, will think an army is attacking them from the West. Their old fear that
Germany will once again, with the help of the capitalist powers, rise up and attack Russia and
slaughter Russians for the third time in this century will become a reality. They will find that
conventional weapons will not stop the resurrected Nazis. They will believe they are up against some
new kind of American super-weapon, that the Americans have decided to launch a sneak attack. The
Russians will then start bringing superweapons of their own into play. Then the Illuminati will play
their ace in the hole in Las Vegas, whatever that is." The voice of the computer, coming from
Hagbard's Polynesian teakwood desk, was suddenly silent.
"What happens after that?" said Hagbard, leaning forward tensely. George saw perspiration on his
forehead.
"It doesn't matter what happens after that," said FUCKUP. "If the situation develops as I project, the
Eschaton will have been immanentized. For the Illuminati, that will mean the fulfillment of the
project that has been their goal since the days of Gruad. A total victory. They will all simultaneously
achieve transcendental illumination. For the human race, on the other hand, that will be extinction.
The end."
BOOK FOUR: BEAMTENHERRSCHAFT
Well, Hoover performed. He would have fought. That was the point. He would have
defied a few people. He would have scared them to death. He has a file on everybody.
— Richard Milhous Nixon
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THE EIGHTH TRIP, OR HOD
(TELEMACHUS SNEEZED)
There came unto the High Chapperal one who had studied in the schools of the Purple
Sage and of the Hung Mung Tong and of the Illuminati and of the many other schools;
and this one had found no peace yet.
Yea: of the Discordians and the teachers of Mummu and of the Nazarene and of the
Buddha he had studied; and he had found no peace yet.
And he spake to the High Chapperal and said: Give me a sign, that I may believe.
And the High Chapperal said unto him: Leave my presence, and seek ye the horizon and
the sign shall come unto you, and ye shall seek no more.
And the man turned and sought of the horizon; but the High Chapperal crept up behind
him and raised his foot and did deliver a most puissant kick in the man's arse, which
smarted much and humiliated the seeker grievously.
He who has eyes, let him read and understand.
—"The Book of Grandmotherly Kindness," The Dishonest Book of Lies, by Mordecai
Malignatus, K.N.S.
The Starry Wisdom Church was not 00005's idea of a proper ecclesiastical shop by any means. The
architecture was a shade too Gothic, the designs on the stained-glass windows a bit unpleasantly
suggestive for a holy atmosphere ("My God, they must be bloody wogs," he thought), and when he
opened the door, the altar was lacking a proper crucifix. In fact, where the crucifix should have been
he found instead a design that was more than suggestive. It was, in his opinion, downright tasteless.
Not High Church at all, Chips decided.
He advanced cautiously, although the building appeared deserted. The pews seemed designed for
bloody reptiles, he observed- a church, of course, should be uncomfortable, that was good for the
soul, but this was, well, gross. They probably advertise in the kink newspapers, he reflected with
distaste. The first stained-glass window was worse from inside than outside; he didn't know who
Saint Toad was, but if that mosaic with his name on it gave any idea of Saint Toad's appearance and
predilections, then, by God, no self-respecting Christian congregation would ever think of
sanctifying him. The next feller, a shoggoth, was even less appetizing; at least they had the common
decency not to canonize him.
A rat scurried out from between two pews and ran across the center aisle, right before Chip's feet.
Fair got on one's nerves, this place did.
Chips approached the pulpit and glanced up at the Bible. That was, at least, one civilized touch.
Curious as to what text might have been preached last in this den of wogs, he scrambled up into the
pulpit and scanned the open pages. To his consternation, it wasn't the Bible at all. A lot of bragging
and bombast about some Yog Sothoth, probably a wog god, who was both the Gate and the Guardian
of the Gate. Absolute rubbish. Chips hefted the enormous volume and turned it so he could read the
spine. Necronomicon, eh? If his University Latin could be trusted, that was something like "the book
of the names of the dead." Morbid, like the whole building.
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He approached the altar, refusing to look at the abominable design above it. Rust— now what could
one say of brutes who let their altar get rusty? He scraped with his thumbnail. The altar was marble,
and marble doesn't rust. A decidedly unpleasant suspicion crossed his mind, and he tasted what his
nail had lifted. Blood. Fairly fresh blood.
Not High Church at all.
Chips approached the vestry, and walked into a web.
"Damn," he muttered, hacking at it with his flashlight— and something fell on his shoulder. He
brushed it off quickly and turned the light to the floor. It started to run up his trouser leg and he
brushed it off again, beginning to breathe heavily, and stepped on it hard. There was a satisfactory
snapping sound and he stomped again to be sure. When he removed his shoe and turned the light
down again, it was dead.
A damned huge ugly brute of a spider. Black gods, Saint Toads, rats, mysterious and heathenish
capitalized Gates, that nasty-looking shoggoth character, and now spiders. A buggering tarantula it
looked like, in fact. Next, Count Dracula, he thought grimly, testing the vestry door. It slid open
smoothly and he stepped back out of visible range, waiting a moment.
They were either not home or cool enough to allow him the next move.
He stepped through the door and flashed his light around.
"Oh, God, no," he said. "No. God, no."
"Good-bye, Mr. Chips," said Saint Toad.
Did you ever take the underground from Charing Cross to one of the suburbs? You know, that long
ride without stops when you're totally in the dark and everything seems to be rushing by outside in
the opposite direction? Relativity, the laboratory-smock people call it. In fact, it was even more like
going up a chimney than going forward in a tunnel, but it was like both at the same time, if you
follow me. Relativity. A bitter-looking old man went by, dressed in turn-of-the-century Yankee
clothing, muttering something about "Carcosa." An antique Pontiac car followed him, with four
Italians in it looking confused— it was slow enough for me to spot the year, definitely 1936, and
even to read the license plates, Rhode Island AW-1472. Then a black man, not a Negro or a wog, but
a really truly black man, without a face and I'd hate to tell you what he had where the face should
have been. All the while, there was this bleating or squealing that seemed to say "Tekeli-li! Tekelili!"
Another man, English-looking but in early 19th-century clothing; he looked my way, surprised,
and said, "I only walked around the horses!" I could sympathize: I only opened a bleeding door. A
giant beetle, who looked at me more intelligently than any bug I ever saw before— he seemed to be
going in a different direction, if there was direction in this place. A white-haired old man with
startling blue eyes, who shouted "Roderick Usher!" as he flew by. Then a whole parade of pentagons
and other mathematical shapes that seemed to be talking to each other hi some language of the past
or the future or wherever they called home. And by now it wasn't so much like a tunnel or even a
chimney but a kind of roller coaster with dips and loops but not the sort you find in a place like
Brighton— I think I saw this land of curve once, on a blackboard, when a class in non-Euclidean
geometry had used the room before my own class in Eng Lit Pope to Swinb. and Neo-Raph. Then I
passed a shoggoth or it passed me, and let me say that their pictures simply do not do them justice: I
am ready to go anywhere and confront any peril on H.M. Service but I pray to the Lord Harry I never
have to get that close to one of those chaps again. Next came a jerk, or cusp is probably the word: I
recognized something: Ingolstadt, the middle of the university. Then we were off again, but not for
long, another cusp: Stonehenge. A bunch of hooded people, right out of a Yank movie about the
KKK, were busy with some gruesome mummery right in the center of the stones, yelling ferociously
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about some ruddy goat with a thousand young, and the stars were all wrong overhead. Well, you pick
up your education where you can— now I know, even if I can't tell any bloody academic how I
know, that Stonehenge is much older than we think. Whizz, bang, we're off again, and now ships are
floating by— everything from old Yankee clippers to modern luxury liners, all of them signaling the
old S.O.S. semaphore desperately— and a bunch of airplanes following in their wake. I realized that
part must be the Bermuda Triangle, and about then it dawned that the turn-of-the-century Yank with
the bitter face might be Ambrose Bierce. I still hadn't the foggiest who all those other chaps were.
Then along came a girl, a dog, a lion, a tin man and a scarecrow. A real puzzler, that: was I visiting
real places or just places in people's minds? Or was there a difference? When the mock turtle, the
walrus, the carpenter and another little girl came along, my faith in the difference began to crumble.
Or did some of those writer blokes know how to tap into this alternate world or fifth dimension or
whatever it was? The shoggoth came by again (or was it his twin brother?) and shouted, or I should
say, gibbered, "Yog Sothoth Neblod Zin," and I could tell that was something perfectly filthy by the
tone of his voice. I mean, after all, I can take a queer proposition without butting the offender on the
nose— one must be cosmopolitan, you know— but I would vastly prefer to have such offers coming
out of human mouths, or at the very least out of mouths rather than orifices that shouldn't properly be
talking at all. But you would have to see a shoggoth yourself, God forbid, to appreciate what I mean.
The next stop was quite a refrigerator, miles and miles of it, and that's where the creature who kept
up that howling of "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" hung his hat. Or its hat. I shan't attempt to do him, or it,
justice. That Necronomicon said about Yog Sothoth that "Kadath in the cold waste hath known him,"
and now I realized that "known" was used there in the Biblical sense. I just hope he, or it, stays in the
cold waste. You wouldn't want to meet him, or it, on the Strand at midday, believe me. His habits
were even worse than his ancestry, and why he couldn't scrape off some of the seaweed and
barnacles is beyond me; he was rather like Saint Toad in his notions of sartorial splendor and table
etiquette, if you take my meaning. But I was off again, the curvature was getting sharper and the
cusps more frequent. There was no mistaking the Heads where I arrived next: Easter Island. I had a
moment to reflect on how those Heads resembled Tla-loc and the lloigor of Fernando Poo and then
this kink's version of a Cook's Tour moved on, and there I was at the last stop.
"Damn, blast and thunder!" I said, looking at Mano-lete turning his veronica and Concepcion lying
there with her poor throat cut. "Now that absolutely does tear it."
I decided not to toddle over to the Starry Wisdom Church this tune around. There is a limit, after all.
Instead, I went out into Tequila y Mota Street and approached the church but kept my distance,
trying to figure where BUGGER kept the Time Machine.
While I was reflecting on that, I heard the first pistol shot.
Then a volley.
The next thing I knew the whole population of Fernando Poo— Cubans descended from the
prisoners shipped there when it was a penal colony in the 19th century, Spaniards from colonial days,
blacks, wogs, and whatnot— were on Tequila y Mota street using up all the munitions they owned. It
was the countercoup, of course— the Captain Puta crowd who unseated Tequila y Mota and
prevented the nuclear war— but I didn't know that at the time, so I dashed into the nearest doorway
and tried to duck the flying bullets, which were coming, mind you, as thick as the darling buds in
May. It was hairy. And one Spanish bloke— gay as a tree full of parrots from his trot and his
carriage, goes by waving an old cutlass out of a book and shouting, "Better to die on our feet than to
live on our knees!"— headed straightway into a group of Regular Army who had finally turned out
to try to stop this business. He waded right into them, cutting heads like a pirate, until they shot him
as full of holes as Auntie's drawers. That's your Spaniards: even the queers have balls.
Well, this wasn't my show, so I backed up, opened the door and stepped into the building. I just had a
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moment to recognize which building I had picked, when Saint Toad gave me his bilious eye and said,
"You again!"
The trip was less interesting this time (I had seen it before, after all) and I had time to think a bit and
realize that old frog-face wasn't using a Time Machine or any mechanical device at all. Then I was in
front of a pyramid— they missed that stop last time— and I waited to arrive back in the Hotel
Durrutti. To my surprise, when there was a final jerk in the dimensions or whatever they were, I
found myself someplace else.
00005, in fact, was in an enormous marbled room deliberately designed to impress the bejesus out of
any and all visitors. Pillars reached up to cyclopean heights, supporting a ceiling too high and murky
to be visible, and every wall, of which there seemed to be five, was the same impenetrable ivorygrained
marble. The eyes instinctively sought the gigantic throne, in the shape of an apple with a seat
carved out of it, and made of a flawless gold which gleamed the more brightly in the dim lighting;
and the old man who sat on the throne, his white beard reaching almost to the lap of his much whiter
robe, commanded attention when he spoke: "If I may be trite," he said in a resonant voice, "you are
welcome, my son."
This still wasn't High Church, but it was a definite improvement over the digs where Saint Toad and
his loathsome objets d'art festered. Still, 00005's British common sense was disturbed. "I say," he
ventured, "you're not some sort of mystic, are you? I must tell you that I don't intend to convert to
anything heathen."
"Conversion, as you understand it," the aged figure told him placidly, "consists of pounding one's
own words into a man's ears until they start coming out of his mouth. Nothing is of less interest to
me. You need have no fear on that ground."
"I see." 00005 pondered. "This wouldn't be Shangri-La or some such place, would it?"
"This is Dallas, Texas, my son." The old man's eyes bore a slight twinkle although his demeanor
otherwise remained grave. "We are below the sewers of Dealy Plaza, and I am the Dealy Lama."
00005 shook his head. "I don't mind having my leg pulled," he began.
"I am the Dealy Lama," the old man repeated, "and this is the headquarters of the Erisian Liberation
Front."
"A joke's a joke," Chips said, "but how did you manage that frog-faced creature back in the Starry
Wisdom Church?"
"Tsathoggua? He is not managed by us. We saved you from him, in fact Twice."
"Tsathoggua?" Chips repeated. "I thought the swine's name was Saint Toad."
"To be sure, that is one of his names. When he first appeared, in Hyperborea, he was known as
Tsathoggua, and that is how he is recorded in the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Necronomicon and other
classics. The Atlantean high priests, Klarkash Ton and Lhuv Kerapht, wrote the best descriptions of
him, but their works have not survived, except in our own archives."
"You do put on a good front," 00005 said sincerely. "I suppose, fairly soon, you'll get around to
telling me that I have been brought here due to some karma or other?" He was actually wishing there
were some place to sit down. No doubt, it added to the Lama's dignity to sit while Chips had to stand,
but it had been a hard night already and his feet hurt.
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"Yes, I have many revelations for you," the old man said.
"I was afraid of that. Isn't there some place where I can bring my arse to anchor, as my uncle Sid
would say, before I listen to your wisdom? I'm sure it's going to be a long time in the telling."
The old man ignored this. "This is the turning point in history," he said. "All the forces of Evil,
dispersed and often in conflict before, have been brought together under one sign, the eye in the
pyramid. All the forces of Good have been gathered, also, under the sign of the apple."
"I see," 00005 nodded. "And you want to enlist me on the side of Good?"
"Not at all," the old man cried, bouncing up and down in his seat with laughter. "I want to invite you
to stay here with us while the damned fools fight it out aboveground."
00005 frowned. "That isn't a sporting attitude," he said disapprovingly; but then he grinned. "Oh, I
almost fell for it, didn't I? You are pulling my leg!"
"I am telling you the truth," the old man said vehemently. "How do you suppose I have lived to this
advanced age? By running off to join in every idiotic barroom brawl, world war, or Armageddon that
comes along? Let me remind you of the street where we picked you up; it is entirely typical of the
proceedings during the Kali Yuga. Those imbeciles are using live ammunition, son. Do you want me
to tell you the secret of longevity, lad— my secret? I have lived so outrageously long because," he
spoke with deliberate emphasis, "I don't give a fuck for Good and Evil."
"I should be ashamed to say so, if I were you," Chips replied coolly. "If the whole world felt like
you, we'd all be a sorry kettle of fish."
"Very well," the old man started to raise an arm. "I'll send you back to Saint Toad."
"Wait!" Chips stirred uneasily. "Couldn't you send me to confront Evil in one of its, ah, more human
forms?"
"Aha," the old man sneered. "You want the lesser Evil, is it? Those false choices are passing away,
even as we speak. If you want to confront Evil, you will have to confront it on its own terms, not in
the form that suits your own mediocre concepts of a Last Judgment. Stay here with me, lad. Evil is
much more nasty than you imagine."
"Never," Chips said firmly. " 'Ours not to reason why, Ours but to do or die!' Any Englishman would
tell you the same."
"No doubt," the old man snickered. "Your countrymen are as fat-headed as these Texans above us.
Glorifying that idiotic Light Brigade the way these bumpkins brag about their defeat at the Alamo!
As if stepping in front of a steamroller were the most admirable thing a man could do with his time.
Let me tell you a story, son."
"You may if you wish," 00005 said stiffly. "But no cynical parable will change my sense of Right
and Duty."
"Actually, you're glad of the interlude; you're not all that eager to face the powers of Tsathoggua
again. Let that pass." The old man shifted to a more comfortable position and, still oblivious of
Chips' tired shifting from leg to leg, began:
This is the story of Our Lady of Discord, Eris, daughter of Chaos, mother of Fortuna. You have read
some of it in Bullfinch, no doubt, but his is the exoteric version. I am about to give you the Inside
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Story.
Is the thought of a unicorn a real thought? In a sense, that is the basic question of philosophy—
I thought you were going to tell me a story, not launch into some dreary German metaphysics. I had
enough of that at the University.
Quite so. The thought of a unicorn is a real thought, then, to be brief. So is the thought of the
Redeemer on the Cross, the Cow who Jumped Over the Moon, the lost continent of Mu, the Gross
National Product, the Square Root of Minus One, and anything else capable of mobilizing emotional
energy. And so, in a sense, Eris and the other Olympians were, and are, real. At the same time, in
another sense, there is only one True God and your redeemer in His only begotten son; and the
lloigor, like Tsathoggua, are real enough to reach out and draw you into their world, which is on the
other side of Nightmare. But I promised to keep the philosophy to a minimum.
You recall the story of the Golden Apple, in the exoteric and expurgated version at least? The true
version is the same, up to a point. Zeus, a terrible old bore by the way, did throw a bash on Olympus,
and he did slight Our Lady by not inviting Her. She did make an apple, but it was Acapulco Gold,
not metallic gold. She wrote Kallisti, on it, to the prettiest one, and rolled it into the banquet hall.
Everybody— not just the goddesses; that's a male chauvinist myth— started fighting over who had
the right to smoke it. Paris was never called in to pass judgment; that's all some poet's fancy. The
Trojan War was just another imperialistic rumble and had no connection with these events at all.
What really happened was that everybody was squabbling over the apple and working up a sweat and
pushing one another around and pretty soon their vibrations— Gods have very high vibration,
exactly at the speed of light, in fact— heated up the apple enough to unleash some heavy fumes. In a
word, the Olympians all got stoned.
And they saw a Vision, or a series of Visions.
In the first Vision, they saw Yahweh, a neighboring god with a world of his own which overlapped
theirs in some places. He was clearing the set to change its valence and start a new show. His method
struck them as rather barbarous. He was, in fact, drowning everybody— except one family that he
allowed to escape in an Ark.
"This is Chaos," said Hermes. "That Yahweh is a mean mother', even for a god."
And they looked at the Vision more closely, and because they could see into the future and were all
(like every intelligent entity) rabid Laurel and Hardy fans and because they were zonked on the
weed, they saw that Yahweh bore the face of Oliver Hardy. All around him, below the mountain on
which he lived (his world was fiat), the waters rose and rose. They saw drowning men, drowning
women, innocent babes sinking beneath the waves. They were ready to vomit. And then Another
came and stood beside Yahweh, looking at the panorama of horrors below, and he was Yahweh's
Adversary, and, stoned as they were, he looked like Stanley Laurel to them. And then Yahweh
spoke, in the eternal words of Oliver Hardy: "Now look what you made me do," he said.
And that was the first Vision.
They looked again, and they saw Lee Harvey Oswald perched in the window of the Texas School
Book Depository; and he, again, wore the face of Stanley Laurel. And, because this world had been
created by a great god named Earl Warren, Oswald fired the only shots that day, and John Fitzgerald
Kennedy was, as the Salvation Army charmingly expresses it, "promoted to glory."
"This is Confusion," said Athena with her owl-eyes flashing, for she was more familiar with the
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world created by the god Mark Lane.
Then they saw a hallway, and Oswald-Laurel was led out between two policemen. Suddenly Jack
Ruby, with the face of Oliver Hardy, stepped forward and fired a pistol right into that frail little
body. And then Ruby spoke the eternal words, to the corpse at his feet: "Now look what you made
me do," he said.
And that was the second Vision.
Next, they saw a city of 550,000 men, women and children, and in an instant the city vanished;
shadows remained where the men were gone, a firestorm raged, burning pimps and infants and an
old statue of a happy Buddha and mice and dogs and old men and lovers; and a mushroom cloud
arose above it all. This was in a world created by the crudest of all gods, Realpolitik.
"This is Discord," said Apollo, disturbed, laying down his lute.
Harry Truman, a servant of Realpolitik, wearing the face of Oliver Hardy, looked upon his work and
saw that it was good. But beside him, Albert Einstein, a servant of that most elusive and gnomic of
gods, Truth, burst into tears, the familiar tears of Stanley Laurel facing the consequences of his own
karma. For a brief instant, Truman was troubled, but then he remembered the eternal words: "Now
look what you made me do," he said.
And that was the third Vision.
Now they saw trains, many trains, all of them running on time, and the trains criss-crossed Europe
and ran 24 hours a day, and they all came to a few destinations that were alike. There, the human
cargo was stamped, catalogued, processed, executed with gas, tabulated, recorded, stamped again,
cremated and disposed.
"This is Bureaucracy," said Dionysus, and he smashed his wine jug in anger; beside him, his lynx
glared balefully.
And then they saw the man who had ordered this, Adolf Hitler, wearing still the mask of Oliver
Hardy, and he turned to a certain rich man, Baron Rothschild, wearing the mask of Stanley Laurel,
and they knew this was the world created by the god Hegel and the angel Thesis was meeting the
demon Antithesis. Then Hitler spoke the eternal words: "Now look what you made me do," he said.
And that was the fourth Vision.
They did then look further and, lo, high as they were they saw the founding of a great republic and
proclamations hailing new gods named Due Process and Equal Rights for All. And they saw many in
high places in the republic form a separate cult and worship Mammon and Power. And the Republic
became an Empire, and soon Due Process and Equal Rights for All were not worshipped, and even
Mammon and Power were given only lip-service, for the true god of all was now the impotent What
Can I Do and his dull brother What We Did Yesterday and his ugly and vicious sister Get Them
Before They Get Us.
"This is Aftermath," said Hera, and her bosom shook with tears for the fate of the children of that
nation.
And they saw many bombings, many riots, many rooftop snipers, many Molotov cocktails. And they
saw the capital city in ruins, and the leader, wearing the face of Stanley Laurel, taken prisoner amid
the rubble of his palace. And they saw the chief of the revolutionaries look about at the rubble and
the streets full of corpses, and they heard him sigh, and then he addressed the leader, and he spoke
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the eternal words: "Now look what you made me do," he said.
And that was the fifth Vision.
And now the Olympians were coming down and they looked at each other in uncertainty and dismay.
Zeus himself spoke first.
"Man," he said, "that was Heavy Grass."
"Far fuckin out," Hermes agreed solemnly.
"Tree fuckin mendous," added Dionysus, petting his lynx.
"We were really fuckin into it," Hera summed up, for all.
And they turned their eyes again on the Golden Apple and read the word Our Lady Eris had written
upon it, that most multiordinal of all words, Kallisti. And they knew that each god and goddess, and
each man and woman, was in the privacy of the heart, the prettiest one, the fairest; the most innocent,
the Best. And they repented themselves of not having invited Our Lady Eris to their party, and they
summoned her forth and asked her, "Why did you never tell us before that all categories are false and
all Good and Evil a delusion of limited perspective?"
And Eris said, "As men and women are actors on a stage of our devising, so are we actors on the
stage devised by the Five Fates. You had to believe in Good and Evil and pass judgments on your
creatures, the men and women below. It was a curse the Fates put upon you! But now you have come
to the Great Doubt and you are free."
The Olympians thereupon lost interest in the god-game and soon were forgotten by humanity. For
She had shown them a great Light, and a great Light destroys shadows; and we are all, gods and
mortals, nothing else but gliding shadows. Do you believe that?
"No," said Fission Chips.
"Very well," the Dealy Lama said somberly. "Begone, back to the world of maya!"
And Fission Chips whirled head over heels into a vortex of bleatings and squealings, as tune and
space were given another sharp tug and, nearly a month later, head over heels, the Midget is up and
tottering across Route 91 as the rented Ford Brontosaurus shrieks to a stop and Saul and Barney are
out the doors (every cop instinct telling them that a man who runs from an accident is hiding
something) but John Dillinger, driving toward Vegas from the north, continues to hum "Good-bye
forever, old sweethearts and gals, God . . . bless . . . you . . " and the same tug in space-time grips
Adam Weishaupt two centuries earlier, causing him to abandon his planned soft sell and blurt out to
an astonished Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Spielen Sie Strip Schnipp-Schnapp?" and Chips,
hearing Weishaupt's words, is back in the graveyard at Ingolstadt as four dark figures move away in
dusk.
"Strip Schnipp-Schnapp?" Goethe asks, putting hand on chin in a pose that was later to become
famous, "Das ist dein hoch Zauberwerk?"
"Ja, ja," Weishaupt says nervously, "Der Zweck heiligte die Mittel."
Ingolstadt always reminds me of the set of a bleeding Frankenstein movie, and, after Saint Toad and
that shoggoth chap and the old Lama with his wog metaphysics, it was no help at all to have an
invisible voice ask me to join him in a bawdy card game. I've faced some weird scenes in H.M.
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Service but this Fernando Poo caper was turning out to be outright unwholesome, in fact unheimlich
as these krauts would say. And, hi the distance, I began to hear wog music, but with a Yank beat to
it, and suddenly I knew the worst: that blasted Lama or Saint Toad or somebody, had lifted nearly a
month out of my life. I had walked into Saint Toad's after midnight on March 31 (call it April 1,
then) and this would be April 30 or May 1. Walpur-gisnacht. When all the kraut ghosts are out. And
I was probably considered dead back in London. And if I called in and tried to explain what had
happened, old W. would be downright psychiatric about the matter, oh, he'd be sure I was well
around the bend. It was a rum go either way.
Then I remembered that the old Lama in Dallas had said he was sending me to the final battle
between Good and Evil. This was probably it, right here, right now, this night in Ingolstadt. A bit
breathtaking to think of that. I wondered when the Angels of the Lord would appear: bloody soon, I
hoped. It would be nice to have them around when Old Nick unleashed the shoggoth and Saint Toad
and that lot.
So I toddled out into the streets of Ingolstadt and started sniffing around for the old sulphur and
brimstone.
And half a mile below and twelve hours earlier, George Dorn and Stella Maris were smoking some
Alamout Black hash with Harry Coin.
"You haven't got a bad punch for an intellectual," Coin said with warm regard.
"You're pretty good at rape yourself," George replied, "for the world's most incompetent assassin."
Coin started to draw back his lips in an angry snarl, but the hash was too strong. "Hagbard told you,
Ace?" he asked bashfully.
"He told me most of it," George said. "I know that everybody on this ship once worked for the
Illuminati directly or for one of their governments. I know that Hagbard has been an outlaw for more
than two decades—"
"Twenty-three years exactly," Stella said archly.
"That figures," George nodded. "Twenty-three years, then, and never killed anybody until that
incident with the spider ships four days ago."
"Oh, he killed us," Harry said dreamily, drawing on the pipe. "What he does is worse than capital
punishment, while it's going on. I can't say I'm the same man I was before. But it's pretty bad until
you come through."
"I know," George grinned. "I've had a few samples myself."
"Hagbard's system," Stella said, "Is very simple. He just gives you a good look at your own face in a
mirror. He lets you see the puppet strings. It's still up to you to break them. He's never forced anyone
to do anything that goes against their heart. Of course," she frowned in concentration, "he does sort
of maneuver you into places where you have to find out in a hurry just what your heart is saying to
you. Did he ever tell you about the Indians?"
"The Shoshone?" George asked. "The cesspool gag?"
"Let's play a game," Coin interrupted, sinking lower in his chair as the hash hit him harder. "One of
us in this room is a Martian, and we've got to guess from the conversation which one it is."
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"Okay," Stella said easily. "Not the Shoshone," she told George, "the Mohawk."
"You're not the Martian," Coin giggled. "You stick to the subject, and that's a human trait."
George, trying to decide if the octopus on the wall was somehow connected with the Martian riddle,
said, "I want to hear about Hagbard and the Mohawk. Maybe that will help us identify the Martian.
You think up good games," he added kindly, "for a guy who was sent on seven assassination
missions and fucked up every one of them."
"I'm dumb but I'm lucky," Coin said. "There was always somebody else there blasting away at the
same time. Politicians are awfully unpopular these days, Ace."
This was a myth, Hagbard had confided to George. Until Harry Coin had completed his course in the
Celine System, it was better if he believed himself the world's most unsuccessful assassin rather than
face the truth: that he had goofed only on his first job (Dallas, November 22, 1963) and really had
killed five men since then. Of course, even if Hagbard wasn't a holy man any longer, he was still
tricky: maybe Harry had, indeed, missed every time. Perhaps Hagbard was keeping the image of
Harry as mass murderer in George's mind to see if George could relate to the man's present instead of
being hung up on his "past."
At least I've learned this much, George thought. The word "past" is always in quotes for me, now.
"The Mohawk," Stella said, leaning back lazily (George's male organ or penis or dick or whatever
the hell is the natural word, if there is a natural word, well, my cock, then, my delicious ever-hungry
cock rose a centimeter as her blouse tightened on her breasts, Lord God, we'd been humping like
wart hogs in rutting season for hours and hours and hours and I was still horny and still in love with
her and I probably always would be, but then again maybe I'm the Martian). Well, in fact, the old
pussy hunter didn't rise more than a millimeter, not a centimeter, and he was as slow, as an old man
getting out of bed in January. I had just about fucked until my brains came out my ears, even before
Harry brought in the hash and wanted to talk. Looking for the Martian. Looking for the governor of
Dorn. Looking for the Illuminati. Krishna chasing his tail around the curved space of the Einsteinian
universe until he disappears up his own ass, leaving behind a behind: the back of the void: the Dorn
theory of circutheosodomognosis. "Owned some land," she continued. That beautiful black face, like
ebon melody: yes, no painter could show but Bach could hint the delight of those purple-tinted lips in
that black face, saying, "And the government wanted to steal the land. To build a dam." The inside of
her cunt had that purple hue to it, also, and there was a tawny beige in her palm, like a Caucasian's
skin, there were so many delights in her body, and in mine, too, treasures that couldn't be spent in a
million years of the most tender and violent fucking. "Hagbard was the engineer hired to build the
dam, but when he found out that the Indians would be dispossessed and relocated on less fertile
ground, he refused the job." Eris, Eros spelled sideways. "He broke his contract, so the government
sued him," she said. "That's how he got to be a close friend with the Mohawk."
Which was all pure crapperoo. Obviously, Hagbard had gone to court as a lawyer for the Indians, but
that one touch of shame in him had kept him from admitting to Stella that he had once been a lawyer,
so he made up that bit about being the engineer on the dam to explain how he got involved in the
case.
"He helped them move when they were dispossessed." I could see bronze men and women moving in
twilight, a hill in the background. "This was a long time ago, back in the '50s, I think. (Hagbard was
a hell of a lot older than he looked.) One Indian was carrying a raccoon he said was his grandfather.
He was a very old man himself. He said Grandfather could remember General Washington and how
he changed after he became President. (He would be there tonight, that being who had once been
George Washington and Adam Weishaupt: he of whom Hitler had said, "He is already among us. He
is intrepid and terrible. I am afraid of him.") Hagbard says he kept thinking of Patrick Henry, the one
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man who saw what had happened at the Constitutional Convention. It was Henry who had looked at
the Constitution and said right away, 'I smell a rat. It squints toward monarchy.' The Old Indian,
whose name was Uncle John Feather, said that Grandfather, when he was a man, could speak to all
animals. He said the Mohawk Nation was more than the living, it was the soul and the soil joined
together. When the land was taken, some of the soul died. He said that was why he couldn't speak to
all animals but only to those who had once been part of his family." The soul is in the blood, moving
the blood. It is in the night especially. Nutley is a typical Catholic-dominated New Jersey town, and
the Dorns are Baptists, so I was hemmed in two ways, but even as a boy I used to walk along the
Passaic looking for Indian arrowheads, and the soul would move when I found one. Who was the
anthropologist who thought the Ojibway believed all rocks were alive? A chief had straightened him
out: "Open your eyes," he said, "and you'll see which rocks are alive." We haven't had our Frobenius
yet, American anthropology is like virgins writing about sex.
"I know who the Martian is," Coin crooned in a singsong. "But I'm not telling. Not yet." That man
who was either the most successful or the most unsuccessful assassin of the 20th century and who
had raped me (which was supposed to destroy my manhood forever according to some idiots) was
smashed out of his skull and he looked so happy that I was happy for him.
"Hagbard," Stella went on, "stood there like a tree. He was paralyzed. Finally, old Uncle John
Feather asked what was the matter."
Stella leaned forward, her face more richly black against the golden octopus on the wall. "Hagbard
had foreseen the ecological catastrophe. He had seen the rise of the Welfare State, Warrior
Liberalism (as he calls it) and the spread of Marxism out of Russia across the world. He saw why it
all had to happen, with or without the Illuminati helping it along. He understood the Snafu
Principle."
He had worked all that night, after explaining to Uncle John Feather that he was troubled in his heart
at the tragedy of the Mohawk (not mentioning the more enormous tragedy coming at the planet, the
tragedy which the old man understood already in his own terms); hard work, carrying pitiful cheap
furniture from cabins onto trucks, tying whole households' possessions with tough ropes; he was
sweating and winded when they finished shortly before dawn. The next day, he had burned his
naturalization papers and put the ashes in an envelope addressed to the President of the United
States, with a brief note: "Everything relevant is ruled irrelevant. Everything material is ruled
immaterial. An ex-citizen." The ashes of his Army Reserve discharge went to the Secretary of
Defense with a briefer note: "Non serviam. An ex-slave." That year's income tax form went to the
Secretary of the Treasury, after he wiped his ass on it; the note said: "Try robbing a poor box. Der
Einziege." His fury still mounting, he grabbed his copy of Das Kapital off the bookshelf, smiling
bitterly at the memory of his sarcastic marginal notes, scrawled "Without private property there is no
private life" on the flyleaf, and mailed it to Josef Stalin in the Kremlin. Then he buzzed his secretary,
gave her three months pay in lieu of notice of dismissal and walked out of his law office forever. He
had declared war on all governments of the world.
His afternoon was spent giving away his savings, which at that time amounted to seventy thousand
dollars. Some he gave to drunks on the street, some to little boys or little girls in parks; when the
Stock Exchange closed, he was on Wall Street, handing out fat bundles of bills to the wealthiestlooking
men he could spot, telling them, "Enjoy it. Before you die, it won't be worth shit." That night
he slept on a bench hi Grand Central Terminal; in the morning, flat broke, he signed on as A.B.S.
aboard a merchant ship to Norway.
That summer he tramped across Europe working as tourist guide, cook, tutor, any odd job that fell
his way, but mostly talking and listening. About politics. He heard that the Marshall Plan was a
sneaky way of robbing Europe under the pretense of helping it; that Stalin would have more trouble
with Tito than he had had with Trotsky; that the Viet Minh would surrender soon and the French
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would retake Indo-China; that nobody in Germany was a Nazi anymore; that everybody in Germany
was still a Nazi; that Dewey would unseat Truman easily.
During his last walking tour of Europe, in the 1930s, he had heard that Hitler only wanted
Czechoslovakia and would do anything to avoid war with England; that Stalin's troubles with
Trotsky would never end; that all Europe would go socialist after the next war; that America would
certainly enter the war when it came; that America would certainly stay out of the war when it came.
One idea had remained fairly constant, however, and he heard it everywhere. That idea was that
more government, tougher government, more honest government was the answer to all human
problems.
Hagbard began making notes for the treatise that later became Never Whistle While You're Pissing.
He began with a section that he later moved to the middle of the book:
It is now theoretically possible to link the human nervous system into a radio network so
that, micro-miniaturized receivers being implanted in people's brains, the messages
coming out of these radios would be indistinguishable to the subjects from the voice of
their own thoughts. One central transmitter, located in the nation's capital, could
broadcast all day long what the authorities wanted the people to believe. The average
man on the receiving end of these broadcasts would not even know he was a robot; he
would think it was his own voice he was listening to. The average woman could be
treated similarly.
It is ironic that people will find such a concept both shocking and frightening. Like
Orwell's 1984, this is not a fantasy of the future but a parable of the present. Every
citizen in every authoritarian society already has such a "radio" built into his or her
brain. This radio is the little voice that asks, each time a desire is formed, "Is it safe?
Will my wife (my husband/my boss/my church/my community) approve? Will people
ridicule and mock me? Will the police come and arrest me?" This little voice the
Freudians call "The Superego," with Freud himself vividly characterized as "the ego's
harsh master." With a more functional approach, Peris, Hefferline and Goodman, in
Gestalt Therapy, describe this process as "a set of conditioned verbal habits."
This set, which is fairly uniform throughout any authoritarian society, determines the
actions which will, and will not, occur there. Let us consider humanity a biogram {the
basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram
(this set of "conditioned verbal habits"). The biogram has not changed in several
hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. When the logogram
reinforces the biogram, we have a libertarian society, such as still can be found among
some American Indian tribes. Like Confucianism before it became authoritarian and
rigidified, American Indian ethics is based on speaking from the heart and acting from
the heart—'that is, from the biogram.
No authoritarian society can tolerate this. All authority is based on conditioning men and
women to act from the logogram, since the logogram is a set created by those in
authority.
Every authoritarian logogram divides society, as it divides the individual, into alienated
halves. Those at the bottom suffer what I shall call the burden of nescience. The natural
sensory activity of the biogram— what the person sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels, and,
above all, what the organism as a whole, or as a potential whole, wants —is always
irrelevant and immaterial. The authoritarian logogram, not the field of sensed
experience, determines what is relevant and material. This is as true of a highly paid
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advertising copywriter as it is of an engine lathe operator. The person acts, not on
personal experience and the evaluations of the nervous system, but on the orders from
above. Thus, personal experience and personal judgment being nonoperational, these
functions become also less "real." They exist, if at all, only in that fantasy land which
Freud called the Unconscious. Since nobody has found a way to prove that the Freudian
Unconscious really exists, it can be doubted that personal experience and personal
judgment exist; it is an act of faith to assume they do. The organism has become, as
Marx said, "a tool, a machine, a robot."
Those at the top of the authoritarian pyramid, however, suffer an equal and opposite
burden of omniscience. All that is forbidden to the servile class— the web of perception,
evaluation and participation in the sensed universe— is demanded of the members of the
master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and
decision-making for the whole society.
But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull
the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with
its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely
as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The
master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is
actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs.
Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time
passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be
progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.
The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole
society.
I call this the Snafu Principle.
That autumn, Hagbard settled in Rome. He worked as a tourist guide, amusing himself by combining
authentic Roman history with Cecil B. DeMille (none of the tourists ever caught him out); he also
spent long hours scrutinizing the published reports of Interpol. His Wanderjahr was ending; he was
preparing for action. Never subject to guilt or masochism, he had one reason only for his dispersal of
his savings: to prove to himself that what he intended could be done starting from zero. When winter
arrived, his studies were complete: Interpol's crime statistics had very kindly provided him with a list
of those commodities which, either because of tariffs intended to stifle competition or because of
"morals" laws, could become the foundation of a successful career in smuggling.
One year later, in the Hotel Claridge on Forty-fourth Street in New York, Hagbard was placed under
arrest by two U.S. narcotics agents named Galley and Eichmann. "Don't take it too hard," Galley
said. "We're only following orders."
"It's okay," Hagbard said, "don't feel guilty. But what are you going to do with my cats?"
Galley knelt on the floor and examined the kittens thoughtfully, scratching one under the chin,
rubbing the ear of the other. "What's their names?" he asked.
"The male is called Vagina," Hagbard said. "The female I call Penis."
"The male is called what?" Eichmann asked, blinking.
"The male is Vagina, and the female is Penis," Hagbard said innocently, "but there's a metaphysic
behind it. First, you have to ask yourself, which appeared earlier on this planet, life or death? Have
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you ever thought about that?"
'This guy is nuts," Galley told Eichmann.
"You've got to realize," Hagbard went on, "that life is a coming apart and death is a coming together.
Does that help?"
("I never know whether Hagbard is talking profundity or asininity," George said dreamily, toking
away.)
"Reincarnation works backward in time," Hagbard went on, as the narcs opened drawers and peered
under chairs. "You always get reborn into an earlier historical period. Mussolini is a witch in the 14th
century now, and catching hell from the Inquisitors for his bum karma in this age. People who
'remember' the past are all deluded. The only ones who really remember past incarnations remember
the future, and they become science-fiction writers."
(A little old lady from Chicago walked into George's room with a collection can marked Mothers
March Against Phimosis. He gave her a dime and she thanked him and left. After the door closed,
George wondered if she had been a hallucination or just a woman who had fallen through a spacetime
warp and landed on the Leif Erikson.)
"What the hell are these?" Eichmann asked. He had been searching Hagbard's closet and found some
red, white and blue bumper stickers. The top half of each letter was blue with white stars, and the
bottom half was red-and-white stripes; they looked patriotic as all get-out. The slogan formed this
way was
LEGALIZE ABORTION PREGNANCY IS A JEWISH PLOT!
Hagbard had been circulating these in neighborhoods like the Yorkville section of Manhattan, the
western suburbs of Chicago, and other places where old-fashioned Father Coughlin-Joe McCarthy
style Irish Catholic fascism was still strong. This was a trial run on the logogram-biogram doublebind
tactic out of which the Dealy Lama later developed Operation Mindfuck.
"Patriotic stickers," Hagbard explained.
"Well, they look patriotic . . ." Eichmann conceded dubiously.
("Did a little woman from Chicago just walk through this room?" George asked.
"No," Harry Coin said, toking again. "I didn't see any woman from Chicago. But I know who the
Martian is.")
"What the hell are these?" Galley asked. He had found some business-size cards saying RED in
green letters and GREEN in red letters.
("When you're out of it all the way, on the mountain," George asked, "that's neither the biogram nor
the logogram, right? What the hell is it, then?")
"An antigram," Hagbard explained, still helpful.
"The cards are an antigram?" Eichmann repeated, bewildered.
"I may have to place you under arrest and take you downtown," Hagbard warned. "You've both been
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very naughty boys. Breaking and entering. Pointing a gun at me— that's technically assault with a
deadly weapon. Seizing my narcotics— that's theft. All sorts of invasion of privacy. Very, very
naughty."
"You can't arrest us," Eichmann whined. "We're supposed to arrest you."
"Which is red and which is green?" Hagbard asked.
"Look again," They looked and RED was now really red and GREEN was really green. (Actually,
the tints changed according to the angle at which Hagbard held the card, but he wasn't giving away
his secrets to them.) "I can also change up and down," he added. "Worse yet, I clog zippers. Neither
one of you can open your fly right now, for instance. My real gimmick, though, is reversing
revolvers. Try to shoot me and the bullets will come out the back and you'll never use your good
right hand again. Try it and see if I'm bluffing."
"Can't you go a little easy on us, officer?" Eichmann took out his wallet. "A cop's salary ain't the
greatest in the world, eh?" He nudged Hagbard insinuatingly.
"Are you trying to bribe me?" Hagbard asked sternly.
"Why not?" Harry Coin whined. "You got nothing to gain by killing me. Take the money and put me
off the sub at the first island you pass."
"Well," Hagbard said thoughtfully, counting the money.
"I can get more," Harry added. "I can send it to you."
"I'm sure." Hagbard put the money in his clam-shell ashtray and struck a match. There was a brief,
merry blaze, and Hagbard asked calmly, "Do you have any other inducements to offer?"
"I'll tell you anything you want to know about the Illuminati!" Harry shrieked, really frightened now,
realizing that he was in the hands of a madman to whom money meant nothing.
"I know more about the Illuminati than you do," Hagbard replied, looking bored. "Give me a
philosophic reason, Harry. Is there any purpose in allowing a specimen like you to go on preying on
the weak and innocent?"
"Honest, I'll go straight. I'll join your side. I'll work for you, kill anybody you want."
"That's a possibility," Hagbard conceded. "It's a slim one, though. The world is full of killers and
potential killers. Thanks to the Illuminati and their governments, there's hardly an adult male alive
who hasn't had some military training. What makes you think I couldn't go out on the streets of any
large city and find ten better-qualified killers than you inside an afternoon?"
"Okay, okay," Harry said, breathing hard. "I don't have no college education, but I'm not a fool
either. Your men dragged me from Mad Dog Jail to this submarine. You want something, Ace.
Otherwise, I'd be dead already."
"Yes, I want something." Hagbard leaned back in his chair. "Now you're getting warm, Harry. I want
something but I won't tell you what it is. You've got to produce it and show it to me without any
clues or hints. And if you can't do that, I really will have you killed. I shit you not, fellow. This is my
version of a trial for your past crimes. I'm the judge and the jury and you've got to win an acquittal
without knowing the rules. How do you like that game?"
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"It ain't fair."
"It's more of a chance than you gave any of the men you shot, isn't it?"
Harry Coin licked his lips. "I think you're bluffing," he ventured finally. "You're some chicken-shit
liberal who doesn't believe in capital punishment. You're looking for an excuse to not kill me."
"Look into my eyes, Harry. Do you see any mercy in them?"
Coin began to perspire and finally looked down into his lap. "Okay," he said hollowly. "How much
time do I have?"
Hagbard opened his drawer and took out his revolver. He cracked it open, showing the bullets, and
quickly snapped it closed again. He slipped the safety catch— a procedure he later found
unnecessary with George Dorn, who knew nothing about guns— and aimed at Harry's belly. "Three
days and three minutes are both too long," he said casually. "If you're ever going to get it, you're
going to get it now."
"Mama," Coin heard himself exclaim.
"You're going to shit your pants in a moment," Hagbard said coldly. "Better not. I find bad smells
offensive, and I might shoot you just for that. And mama isn't here, so don't call her again."
Coin saw himself lunging across the room, the gun roaring in mid-leap, but at least trying to get his
hands on this bastard's throat before dying.
"Pointless," Hagbard grinned icily. "You'd never get out of the chair." His finger tightened slightly,
and Coin's gut churned; he knew enough about guns to know how easy it was to have an accident,
and he thought of the gun going off even before the bastard Celine intended it to, maybe even as he
was on the edge of guessing the goddam riddle, the pointlessness of it was the final horror, and he
looked again into those eyes without guilt or pity or any weakness he could exploit; then, for the first
time in his life, Harry Coin knew peace, as he relaxed into death.
"Good enough," Hagbard said from far away, snapping the safety back in place. "You've got more on
the ball than either of us realized."
Harry slowly came back and looked at that face and those eyes. "God," he said.
"I'm going to give you the gun in a minute," Hagbard went on. "Then it's my turn to sweat. Of course,
if you kill me you'll never get off this sub alive, but maybe you'll think that's worthwhile, just for
revenge. On the other hand, maybe you'll be curious about that instant of peace— and you'll wonder
if there's an easier way to get back there and if I can teach it to you. Maybe. One more thing, before I
toss you the gun. Everybody who joins me does it by free choice. When you said you'd come over to
my side just because you were afraid of dying, you had no value to me at all. Here's the gun, Harry.
Now, I want you to check it. There are no gimmicks, no missing firing pin or anything like that. No
other tricks, either— nobody watching you through a peephole and ready to gun you down the
minute you aim at me, or anything like that. I'm totally at your mercy. What are you going to do?"
Harry examined the gun carefully, and looked back at Hagbard. He had never studied kinetics and
orgonomy as Hagbard had, but he could read enough of the human face and body to know what was
going on in the other man. Hagbard had that same peace he himself had experienced for a moment.
"You win, you bastard," Harry said, tossing the gun back. "I want to know how you do it."
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"Part of you already knows," Hagbard smiled gently, putting the gun back in the drawer. "You just
did it, didn't you?"
"What would he have done if I did block?" Harry asked Stella in present time.
"Something. I don't know. A sudden act of some sort that scared you more than the gun. He plays it
by ear. The Celine System is never twice the same."
"Then I was right, he wouldn't have killed me. It was all bluff."
"Yes and no." Stella looked past Harry and George, into the distance. "He wasn't acting with you, he
was manifesting. The mercilessness was quite real. There was no sentimentality involved in saving
you. He did it because it's part of his Demonstration."
"His Demonstration?" George asked, thinking of geometry problems and the neat Q.E.D. at the
bottom, back in Nutley years and years ago.
"I've known Hagbard longer than she has," Eichmann said. "In fact, Galley and I were among the
first people he enlisted. I've watched him over the years, and I still don't understand him. But I
understand the Demonstration."
"You know," George said absently, "when you two first came in, I thought you were a
hallucination."
"You never saw us at dinner, because we work in the kitchen," Galley explained. "We eat after
everybody else."
"Only a small part of the crew are former criminals," Stella told George, who was looking confused.
"Rehabilitating a Harry Coin— pardon me, Harry— doesn't really excite Hagbard much.
Rehabilitating policemen and politicians, and teaching them useful trades, is work that really turns
Hagbard on."
"But not for sentimental reasons," Eichmann emphasized. "It's part of his Demonstration."
"It's his Memorial to the Mohawk Nation, too," Stella said. "That trial set him off. He tried a direct
frontal assault that time, attempting to cut through the logogram with a scalpel. It didn't work, of
course; it never does. Then he decided: 'Very well, I'll put them where words can't help, and see what
they do then.' That's his Demonstration."
Hagbard, actually— well, not actually; this is just what he told me— had started with two handicaps,
intending to prove that they weren't handicaps. The first was that he would have a bank balance of
exactly $00.00 at the beginning, and the second was that he would never kill another human being
throughout the Demonstration. That which was to be proved (namely, that government is a
hallucination, or a self-fulfilling prophecy) could be shown only if all his equipment, including
money and people, came to him through honest trade or voluntary association. Under these rules, he
could not shoot even in self-defense, for the biogram of government servants was to be preserved,
and only their logograms could be disconnected, deactivated and defused. The Celine System was a
consistent, although flexible, assault on the specific conditioned reflex— that which compelled
people to look outside themselves, to a god or a government, for direction or strength. The servants
of government all carried weapons; Hagbard's insane scheme depended on rendering the weapons
harmless. He called this the Tar-Baby Principle ("You Are Attached To What You Attack").
Being a man of certain morbid self-insight, he realized that he himself exemplified the Tar-Baby
Principle and that his attacks on government kept him perpetually attached to it. It was his malign
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and insidious notion that government was even more attached to him; that his existence qua anarchist
qua smuggler qua outlaw aroused greater energetic streaming in government people than their
existence aroused in him: that, in short, he was the Tar Baby on which they could not resist hurling
themselves in anger and fear: an electrochemical reaction in which he could bond them to himself
just as the Tar Baby captured anyone who swung a fist at it.
More (there was always more, with Hagbard), he had been impressed, on reading Weishaupt's Uber
Strip Schnipp-Schnapp, Weltspielen and Funfwissenschaft, by the passage on the Order of Assassins,
which read:
Surrounded by Moslem maniacs on one side and Christian maniacs on the other, the
wise Lord Hassan preserved his people and his cult by bringing the art of assassination
to esthetic perfection. With just a few daggers strategically placed in exactly the right
throats, he found Wisdom's alternative to war, and preserved the peoples by killing their
leaders. Truly, his was a most exemplary life of grandmotherly kindness.
"Grossmutterlich Gefalligkeit," muttered Hagbard, who had been reading this in the original
German, "now where have I heard that before?"
In a second, he remembered: the Mu-Mon-Kan or "Gateless Gate" of Rinzai Zen contained a story
about a monk who kept asking a Zen Master, "What is the Buddha?" Each time he asked, he got hit
upside the head with the Master's staff. Finally discouraged, he left and sought enlightenment with
another Master, who asked him why he had left the previous teacher. When the poor gawk explained,
the second Master gave him the ontological hotfoot: "Go back to your previous Master at once," he
cried, "and apologize for not showing enough appreciation of his grandmotherly kindness!"
Hagbard was not surprised that Weishaupt evidently knew, in 1776 when Uber Strip Schnipp-
Schnapp was written, about a book which hadn't yet been translated into any European tongue; he
was astonished, however, that even the evil Ingolstadt Zauberer had understood the rudiments of the
Tar-Baby Principle. It never pays to underestimate the Illuminati, he thought then— for the first
time. He was to think it many times in the next two and a half decades.
On April 24, when he told Stella to deliver some Kallisti Gold to George's stateroom, Hagbard had
already asked FUCKUP the odds that Illuminati ships would arrive in Peos within the time he
intended to be there. The answer was better than 100-to-l. He thought about what that meant, then
buzzed to have Harry Coin sent in.
Harry swaggered to a chair, trying to look insolent, and said, "So you're the leader of the
Discordians, eh?"
"Yes," Hagbard said evenly, "and on this ship, my word is law. Wipe that silly grin off your face and
sit up straight." He observed the involuntary stiffening of Harry's body before the man caught
himself and remembered to maintain his slouch. Typical: Coin could resist the key conditioning
phrases, but only with effort. "Listen," he said softly "/ will tell you only one more time"—another
Bavarian Fire Drill, that—"This is my ship. You will address me as Captain Celine. You will come
to attention when I talk to you. Otherwise . . ." he let the phrase trail off.
Slowly, Coin shifted to a more respectful kinesic posture— immediately modifying it by grinning
more insolently. Well, that was good; the streak of rebellion ran deep. The breathing was not bad for
a professional criminal: the only block seemed to be at the bottom of the exhalation. The grin was a
defense against tears, of course, as with most chronic American smilers. Hagbard attempted a probe:
Harry's father was the kind who pretended to consider the case and to toy with forgiveness before he
would administer the thrashing.
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"Is that better?" Harry asked, accentuating his respectful posture and grinning more sarcastically.
"A little," Hagbard said, sounding mollified. "But I don't know what I'm going to do with you, Harry.
That's a bad bunch you've been mixed up with, very un-American." He paused to get a reaction to the
word; it came at once.
"Their money is as good as anyone's," Harry said defiantly. His shoes crept backwards, as he spoke,
and his neck decreased an inch— the turtle reflex, Hagbard called it; and it was a sure sign of the
repressed guilt denied by the man's voice.
"You were born pretty poor, weren't you?" Hagbard asked, in a neutral tone.
"Poor? We was white niggers."
"Well, I guess there's some excuse for you . . ." Hagbard watched: the grin grew wider, the body
imperceptibly moved back toward slouching. "But, to turn on your own country, Harry. That's bad.
That's the lowest thing a human being can do. It's like turning against your own mother." The toes
curled inward again, tentatively. What did Harry's father say before wielding the belt? Hagbard
caught it: "Harry," he repeated it gravely, "you haven't been acting like a proper white man. You've
been acting like you got nigger blood."
The grin stretched to the breaking point and became a grimace, the body stiffened to the most
respectful possible posture. "Now, look here, sir," Harry began, "you got no call to talk to me that
way—"
"And you're not even ashamed," Hagbard ran over him. "You don't show any remorse." He shook his
head with profound discouragement. "I can't let you wander around loose, committing more crimes
and treasons. I'm going to have to feed you to the sharks."
"Listen, Captain Celine, sir, I've got a money belt under this shirt and it's full of more hundred-dollar
bills than you ever saw at one time . . ."
"Are you trying to bribe me?" Hagbard asked sternly; the rest of the scene would be easy, he
reflected. Part of his mind drifted to the Illuminati ships he would meet at Peos. There was no way to
use the Celine System without communicating, and he knew the crew would be "protected" against
him by some Illuminati variation on the ear wax of Ulysses' men passing the Sirens. The money
would go in the giant clam-shell ashtray, a real shocker for a man like Coin, but what would he do
about the Illuminati ships?
When the time came to produce the gun, he slipped the safety off viciously. If I'm going to join the
ancient brotherhood of killers, he thought morosely, maybe I should have the stomach to start with a
visible target. "Three days and three minutes are both too long," he said, trying to sound casual, "if
you're ever going to get it, you're going to get it now." They would be at Peos in less than an hour, he
thought, as Coin involuntarily cried "Mama." Like Dutch Schultz, Hagbard reflected; like how many
others? It would be interesting to interview doctors and nurses and find out how many people passed
out with that primordial cry for the All-Protector on their lips . . . but Harry finally surrendered,
abdicated, left the robot running itself according to the biogram. He was no longer sitting in an
insolent slouch, a respectful attention, a guilty cramp ... He was simply sitting. He was ready for
death.
"Good enough," Hagbard said. "You've got more on the ball than either of us realized." The man
would now transfer his submissive reflexes to Hagbard; and the next stage would be longer and
harder, before he learned to stop playing roles entirely and just manifest as he had in the face of
extinction.
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The gun gambit was variation #2 of the third basic tactic in the Celine System; it had five usual
sequels. Hagbard picked the most dangerous one— he usually did, since he didn't much like the gun
gambit at all, and could only stomach it if he gave most of the subjects a chance at the other role.
This time, however, he knew he had another motive: somewhere, deep inside, a coward in him hoped
Harry Coin was crazier than he had estimated and would, in fact, shoot; that way Hagbard could
avoid the decision awaiting him in Peos.
"You win, you bastard," Coin's voice said; Hagbard came back and quickly rushed through a small
verbal game involving Hell images picked up from Harry's childhood. When he had Coin sent back
to his room, under light security, he slouched in his chair and rubbed his eyes tiredly. He probed for
Dorn and found the Dealy Lama was on that channel, broadcasting.
— Leave the kid alone, he beamed. It's my turn now. Go contemplate your navel, you old fraud.
A shower of rose petals was the nonverbal answer. The Lama faded out. George went on rapping to
himself on the themes planted by the ELF leader: Odd, the big red one. Eye think it was his I. The
eye of Apollo. His luminous I.
— Aye, trust me not, Hagbard beamed. Trust not a man who's rich in flax— his morals may be sadly
lax. (Some of my own doubts getting in here, he thought.) Her name is Stella Maris. Black star of the
seas. (I won't tell him who she and Mavis really are.) George, I want you in the captain's control
room.
George should start with variation #1, the Liebestod or orgasm -death trip, Hagbard decided. Make
him aware of the extent to which he treats women as objects— and, of course, give him some
mystical hogwash later to gloss it over temporarily, so the doubt will be pushed into the unconscious
for a while. Yes: George was already on a pornography trip, very similar to Atlanta Hope and
Smiling Jim Treponema, except that in his case it was egodystonic.
"That was a good trick," George said a few moment's later in the captain's control room, "how you
got me up on the bridge with that telepathy thing."
Hagbard, still thinking about the decision in Peos, tried to look innocent when he replied, "I called
you on the intercom." He realized that he was whistling and pissing at once, worrying about Peos as
well as about George, and brought himself back sharply. "Absurd" was the word in George's mind—
absurd innocence. Well, Hagbard thought, I fucked that one up.
"You think I can't tell a voice in my head from a voice in my ears?" George demanded. Hagbard
roared with laughter, totally in the present again; but after George had been sent to the chapel for his
initiation, the problem returned. Either the Demonstration failed, or the Demonstration failed. Double
bind. Damned both ways. It was infuriating, but all the books had warned him long ago: "As ye give,
so shall ye get." He had used the Celine System on quite a few people over nearly three decades, and
now he was in the middle of a classic Celine Trap himself. There was no correct answer, except to
give up trying.
When the moment came, though, he found that part of him had not given up trying. "Ready for
destruction of enemy ships," said Howard.
Hagbard shook his head. George was remembering some crazy incident in which he had tried to
commit suicide while standing by the Passaic River, and Hagbard kept picking up parts of that bum
trip while trying to clear his own head. "I wish we could communicate with them," he said aloud,
realizing that he was possibly blowing the guru game by revealing his inner doubts to George. "I
wish I could give them a chance to surrender ..."
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"You don't want them too close when they go," said Howard.
"Are your people out of the way?" Hagbard asked in agony.
"Of course," the dolphin replied irritably. "Quit this hesitating. This is no time to be a humanitarian."
"The sea is crueler than the land," Hagbard protested, but then he added "sometimes."
"The sea is cleaner than the land," Howard replied. Hagbard tried to focus— the dolphin was
obviously aware of his distress, and soon George would be (no: a quick probe showed George had
retreated from the scene into the past and was shouting, "You silly sons of bitches," at somebody
named Carlo). "These people have been your enemies for thirty thousand years."
"I'm not that old," Hagbard said wearily. The Demonstration had failed. He was committed, and
others with him were now committed. Hagbard reached out a brown finger, let it rest on a white
button on the railing in front of him, then pressed it decisively. "That's all there is to it," he said
quietly.
("Be a wise-ass then! When you start flunking half your subjects, perhaps you'll come back to
reality." A voice long, long ago ... at Harvard . . . And once, in the South, he had been moved by a
very simple, a ridiculously simple, Fundamentalist hymn:
Jesus walked this lonesome valley. He had to walk it all alone. Nobody else could walk
there for Him. He had to walk it by Himself.
I will walk this lonesome valley, Hagbard thought bitterly, all by myself, all the way to Ingolstadt
and the final confrontation. But it's meaningless now, the Demonstration has failed; all I can do is
pick up the pieces and salvage what I can. Starting with Dorn right here and right now.)
Hate, like molten lead, drips from the wounded sky . . . they call it air pollution . . . August
Personage dials slowly, with the cunt-starved eyes of a medieval saint. . . "God lies!" Weishaupt
cried in the middle of his first trip, "God is Hate!" . . . Harry Coin is crumpled in his chair . . .
George's head hangs at an angle, like a doll with a broken spring . . . Stella doesn't move. . . They are
not dead but stoned . . .
Abe Reles blew the whistle on the entire Murder Inc. organization in 1940 . . . He named Charley
Workman as the chief gun in the Dutch Schultz massacre ... He gave the details proving the roles of
Lepke (who was executed) and Luciano (who was imprisoned and, later, exiled) ... He kept his
mouth shut about certain other things, however . . . But Drake was worried. He gave orders to
Maldonado, who conveyed them to a capo, who passed them on to some soldiers . . . Reles was
guarded by five policemen but nonetheless he went out his hotel window and spread like jam on the
ground below . . . There were mutterings in the press . . . The coroner's jury couldn't believe that five
cops were on the take from the Syndicate . . . Reles's. death was declared to be suicide . . . But in
1943, as the Final Solution moved into high gear, Lepke announced he wanted to talk before his
execution . . . Tom Dewey, alive by grace of the Dutchman's death, was governor, and he granted a
stay of execution . . . Lepke spent twenty-four hours with Justice Department officials and it was
announced later that he refused to reveal anything of significance . . . One of the officials had been
brought back from State to work with Justice because of his background on Schultz and the Big Six
Syndicate ... He said little, but Lepke read a lot in his eyes . . . His name, of course, was Winifred . . .
Lepke understood: as Bela Lugosi once said, there are worse things than dying . . .
In 1932 the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped . . . Already at that time, a
heist of that dimension could not be permitted in the Northeast without the consent of a full-fledged
don of the Mafia . . . Even a capo could not authorize it alone . . . The aviator's father, Congressman
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Charles Lindbergh Sr., had been an outspoken critic of the Federal Reserve monopoly . . . Among
other things, he had charged on the floor of Congress, "Under the Federal Reserve Act panics are
scientifically created; the present one is the first scientifically created one worked out as we figure a
mathematical problem ..." The go-between in delivering the ransom money was Jafsie Condon,
Dutch Schultz's old high school principal . . . "It's got to be one of them coincidences," as Marty
Krompier said later....
John Dillinger arrived in Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963, and rented an Avis at the
airport. He drove out to Dealy Plaza and scouted the terrain. The Triple Underpass where Harry Coin
was supposed to stand when doing the job was under observation from a railroadman's shack, he
noted; it occurred to him that the man in that shack would not have a long life expectancy. There
would be a lot of other eyewitnesses, he realized, and the JAMs couldn't protect them all, not even
with the help of the LDD. It was going to be bad all around ... In fact, the man in the railroad shack,
S. M. Holland, told a story that didn't jibe with the Earl Warren version, and later died when his car
went off the road under circumstances that aroused speculation among those given to speculating; the
coroner's jury called it an accident. . . Dil-linger found his spot in the thickly wooded part of the
Grassy Knoll and waited until Harry Coin appeared on the Underpass. He made himself relax and
looked around to be sure that he was invisible from everywhere but a helicopter (there were no
helicopters: the Illuminati's top double agent within the Secret Service had seen to that). A movement
in the School Book Depository caught Ms eye. Something not kosher up there. He swung his
binoculars . . . and caught another head, ducking quickly, atop the Dal-Tex building. An Italian, very
young . . . That was bad. If one of Maldonado's soldiers was here, either the Illuminati were aware
they had a double agent in their midst and had hired two assassins, or else the Syndicate was acting
on its own. John panned back to the School Book Depository: whoever that clown was, he had a
rifle, too, and he was being cagey: definitely not Secret Service.
This was a piss-cutter.
John's original plan was to plug Harry Coin before Coin could get a bead on the young Hegelian
from Boston. Now, he had three men to knock out at once. It couldn't be done. There was no human
way of hitting more than two of those targets— all three of them in different areas and at different
elevations— before the fuzz were swarming all over him. The third would have time to do the job
while that was happening. It was what Hagbard called an existential koan.
"Shit, piss and industrial waste," John muttered, quoting another Celinism.
Well, save what you can, as Harry Pierpont always said when a bank job went sour in the middle.
Save what you can and haul ass out of that place.
If Kennedy had to die, and obviously it was in the cards or in the I Ching at least (which probably
explained why Hagbard, after consulting that computer of his, refused to get involved in this caper),
then "save what you can" could only be applied, in this case, to mean: screw the Illuminati. He would
give them a mystery they would never solve.
The motorcade was already in front of the School Book Depository, and the gazebo up there might
start blasting at any minute, if Harry Coin or the Mafiosos weren't quicker. Dillinger hoisted his rifle,
quickly sighted on John F. Kennedy's skull, and thought briefly, Even if it falls through and doesn't
remain an enigma to bug the Illuminati, think of those wild headlines when I'm caught: PRESIDENT
SHOT BY JOHN DILLINGER, people will think Orson Welles is publishing the papers now, and then
he tightened his finger.
("Murder?" George asked. "It's hard not to think of Good and Evil when a man's games get that
hairy."
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"During the Kali Yuga," Stella replied, "almost all our games are played with live ammunition.
Haven't you noticed?")
The three shots blew brains into Jackie Kennedy's lap and Dillinger, whirling in amazement, saw the
man start to run out of the Grassy Knoll down into the street. John set off in pursuit and caught a
glimpse of the face as the killer mingled in the crowd below.
"Christ!" John said. "Him?"
Stella toked again— she never seemed to think she I was sufficiently stoned. "Wait," she said.
"There's a I passage in Never Whistle While You're Pissing that goes into this a bit." She got up,
walking quite slowly like all potheads, and rummaged among the books on the wall shelf. "You
know the old saying, 'different strokes for different folks'?" she asked over her shoulder. "Hagbard
and FUCKUP have classified sixty-four thousand personality types, depending on which strokes, or
gambits, they use most often in relating to others." She found the book and carefully walked back to
her chair. "For instance," she said slowly. "Right now, you can intersect my life line in a number of
ways, from kissing my hand to slitting my throat. Between those extremes, you can, let's say, carry
on an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation underneath it, or an intellectual conversation
with sexual flirtation and also with kinesic signals indicating that the flirtation is only a game and
you don't really want me to respond, and on an even deeper level you can be sending other signals
indicating that actually you do want me to respond after all but you're not ready to admit that to
yourself. In authoritarian society, as we know it, people are usually sending either very simple
dominance signals— 'I'm going to master you, and you better accept it before I get really nasty'— or
submissive signals— 'You're going to master me, and I'm reconciled to it.'"
"Lord in Heaven," Harry Coin said softly. "That was what my first session with him was all about. I
tried dominance signals to bluff him, and it didn't work. So I tried submissive signals, which is the
only other gimmick I ever knew, and that didn't work either. So I just gave up."
"Your brain gave up," Stella corrected. "The strategy center, for dealing with human relations in
authoritarian society, was exhausted. It had nothing left to try. Then the Robot took over. The
biogram. You acted from the heart."
"But what has redundance got to do with this?" George asked.
"Here's the passage," Stella said. She began to read aloud:
People exist on a spectrum from the most redundant to the most flexible. The latter,
unless they are thoroughly trained in psychodynamics, are always at a disadvantage to
the former in social interactions. The redundant do not change their script; the flexible
continually keep changing, trying to find a way of relating constructively. Eventually,
the flexible ones find the "proper" gambit, and communication, of a sort, is possible.
They are now on the set created by the redundant person, and they act out his or her
script.
The steady exponential growth of bureaucracy is not due to Parkinson's Law alone. The
State, by making itself ever more redundant, incorporates more people into its set and
forces them to follow its script.
"That's heavy," George said, "but I'll be damned if I can see how it applies to Jesus or Emperor
Norton."
"Exactly!" Harry Coin chortled. "And that ends the game. You've just proven what I suspected all
along. You're the Martian!"
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"Don't raise your voices," Galley said drowsily from the floor. "I can see hundreds of blissful
Buddhas floating through the air ..."
A single blissful Buddha, meanwhile— together with an inverted Satanic cross, a peace symbol, a
pentagon and the Eye in the Triangle— were taking up Danny Pricefixer's attention, back in New
York. He had finally decided to play his hunch about the Confrontation bombing and the five
associated disappearances. The decision came after he and the acting head of Homicide received a
thorough ass-chewing from the Police Commissioner himself. "Malik is gone. The Walsh woman is
gone. This Dora kid was taken right out of a jail in Texas. Two of my best men, Goodman and
Muldoon, are gone. The Feds are nasty and I can tell they know something that makes this case even
more important than five possible murders alone would account for. I want you to report some kind
of progress before the day is over, or I'll replace you with Post-Toasties Junior G-Men."
When they escaped into the hall, Pricefixer asked the man from Homicide, Van Meter, "What are
you going to do?"
"Go back and give my men the same ass-chewing. They'll produce." Van Meter didn't really sound
convinced. "What are you going to do?" he added lamely.
"I'm going to play a hunch," Danny said, and he walked down to Bunco-Fraud, where he exchanged
some words with a detective named Sergeant Joe Friday who always insisted on trying to act like his
namesake in the famous television series.
"I want a mystic," Danny said.
"Palmist, crystal-gazer, witch, astrologer . . . any preference?" Friday asked.
"The technique doesn't matter. I want one you've never been able to pin anything on. One you
investigated and found a little scary ... as if she or he really did have something on the ball."
"I know the one you want," Friday said emphatically, hitting the intercom button on his phone. "R &
I," he said and waited. "Carella? Send up the package on Mama Sutra."
The package, when it shot out of the interoffice tube, proved to be all that Danny had hoped for.
Mama Sutra had no arrests. She had been investigated several times— usually at the demand of rich
husbands who thought she had too much influence over their wives, and once at the demand of the
board of directors of a public utility who thought the president of the firm consulted too often with
her— but none of her activities involved any claims that could be construed to be in violation of the
fraud laws. Furthermore, she had dealt with the extremely wealthy for many years and had never
played any games remotely like an okanna borra or Gypsy Switch on any of them. Her business
card, included in the package, modestly offered only "spiritual insight," but she evidently delivered it
in horse doctor's doses: one detective, after interviewing her, quit the force and entered a Trappist
monastery in Kentucky, a second became questionable and finally useless in the eyes of his superiors
because of an incessant series of memos he wrote urging that New York be the first American city to
experiment with the English system of unarmed policemen, and a third announced that he had been a
closet queen for two decades and began sporting a Gay Liberation button, necessitating his
immediate transfer to the Vice Squad.
"This is my woman," Pricefixer said; and an hour later, he sat in her waiting room studying the
blissful Buddha and other occult accessories, feeling like a horse's ass. This was really going way out
on a limb, he knew, and his only excuse was that Saul Goodman frequently cracked hopeless cases
by making equally bizarre jumps. Danny was ready to jump: the disappearance of Professor Marsh,
in Arkham, was connected with the Confrontation mystery, and both were connected with Fernando
Poo and the gods of Atlantis.
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The receptionist, an attractive young Chinese woman named Mao something-or-other, put down her
phone and said, "You can go right in."
Danny opened the door and walked into a completely austere room, white as the North Pole. The
white walls had no paintings, the white rug was solid white without any design in it, and Mama
Sutra's desk and the Danish chair facing it were also white. He realized that the total lack of occult
paraphernalia, together with the lack of color, was certainly more impressive than heavy curtains,
shadows, smoldering candles and a crystal ball.
Mama Sutra looked like Maria Ouspenskaya, the old actress who was always popping up on the late
late show to tell Lon Chaney Jr. that he would always walk the "thorny path" of lycanthropy until
"all tears empty into the sea."
"What can I do for you?" she asked in a brisk, businesslike manner.
"I'm a detective on the New York Police," Danny said, showing her his badge. "I'm not here to hassle
you or give you any trouble. I need knowledge and advice, and I'll pay for it out of my own pocket."
She smiled gently. "The other officers, who investigated me for fraud in the past, must have created
quite a legend at police headquarters. I promise no miracles, and my knowledge is limited. Perhaps I
can help you; perhaps not There will be no fee, in either case. Being in a sensitive profession, I
would like to keep on friendly terms with the police."
Danny nodded. "Thanks," he said. "Here's the story . . ."
"Wait." Mama Sutra frowned. "I think I am picking up something already. Yes. District Attorney
Wade. Clark. The ship is sinking. 2422. If I can't live as please, let me die when I choose. Does any
of that mean anything to you?"
"Only the first part," Danny said, perplexed. "I suspect that the matter I'm investigating goes back at
least as far as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The man who handled the original investigation
of that killing, in Dallas, was District Attorney Henry Wade. The rest of it doesn't help at all, though.
Where did you get it from?"
"There are ... vibrations . . . and I register them." Mama Sutra smiled again. "That's the best
explanation I can offer. It just happens, and I've learned how to use it. Somewhat. I hope someday
before I die a psychologist will go far enough out in his investigations to find something that will
explain to me what I do. The sinking ship is meaningless? How about the date, June 15, 1904? That
seems to be on the same wave."
Pricefixer shook his head. "No help, as they say in poker."
"Wait," Mama Sutra said. "It means something to me. There was an Irish writer, James Joyce, who
studied the theosophy of Blavatski and the mysticism of the Golden Dawn Society. He wrote a novel
in which all the action takes place on June 16, 1904. The novel is called Ulysses, and is impregnated
on every page with coded mystical revelations. And, yes, now I remember, there is a shipwreck
mentioned in it. Joyce made all the background details historically accurate, so he included what was
actually in the Dublin papers that day— the book takes place in Dublin, you see— and one of the
stories concerned the sinking of the ship, General Slocum, in New York Harbor the day before, June
15."
"Did you say Golden Dawn?" Pricefixer demanded excitedly.
"Yes. Does that help?"
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"It just adds to the confusion, but at least it shows you're on the right track. The case I'm working on
seems to be connected with the disappearance of a professor from a university in Massachusetts
several years ago, and he left behind some notes that mentioned the Golden Dawn Society and . . .
let's see ... some of its members. Aleister Crowley is one name I remember."
"To Mega Theiron," Mama Sutra said slowly, beginning to pale slightly. "Young man, what you are
involved in is very serious. Much more than an ordinary police officer could understand. But you are
not an ordinary police officer or you wouldn't have come to me in the first place. Let me tell you
flatly, then, that what you have stumbled upon is something that could very easily involve both
James Joyce's mysticism and the assassination of President John Kennedy. But to understand it you
will have to stretch your mind to the breaking point. Let me suggest that you wait while I have my
receptionist make you a rather stiff drink."
"Can't drink on duty, ma'am," Danny said sadly. Mama Sutra took a deep breath. "Very well. You'll
have to take it cold and struggle with it as best you can."
"Does it involve the lloigor?" Danny asked hesitantly.
"Yes. You already have a large part of the puzzle if you know that much."
"Ma'am," Danny said, "I think I'll have that drink. Bourbon, if you have it."
2422, he thought while Mama Sutra spoke to the receptionist, that's even crazier than the rest of this.
2 plus 4 plus 2 plus 2. Adds up to 10. The base of the decimal system. What the hell does that mean?
Or 24 plus 22 adds up to 46. That's two times 23, the number missing in between 24 and 22. Another
enigma. And 2 times 4 times 2 times 2 is, let's see, 32. Law of falling bodies. High school physics
class. 32 feet per second per second. And 32 is 23 backwards. Nuts.
Miss Mao entered with a tray. "Your drink, sir," she said softly. Danny took the glass and watched
her gracefully walk back toward the door. Mao is Chinese for cat, he remembered from his years in
Army Intelligence, and she certainly moved like a cat. Mao: onomatopoeia they call that. Like kids
calling a dog "woof-woof." Come to think of it, that's how we got the word "wolf." Funny, I never
thought of that before. Oh, the pentagram outside, and the pentagram in those old Lon Chaney Wolf
Man movies. Malik's mystery mutts. Enough of that.
He took a stiff wallop of the bourbon and said, "Go ahead. Start. I'll take some more of the medicine
when my mind starts crumbling."
"I'll give it to you raw," Mama Sutra said quietly. "The earth has already been invaded from outer
space. It is not some threat in the future, for writers to play with. It happened, a long time ago. Fifty
million years ago, to be exact."
Danny took another belt of his drink. "The lloigor," he said.
"That was their generic name for themselves. There were several races of them. Shoggoths and
Tcho-Tchos and Dholes and Tikis and Wendigos, for instance. They were not entirely composed of
matter as we understand it, and they do not occupy space and time in the concrete way that furniture
does. They are not sound waves or radio waves or anything like that either, but think of them that
way for a while. It's better than not having any mental picture of them at all. Did you take any
physics in high school?"
"Nothing like relativity," Danny said, realizing that he was believing all this.
"Sound and light?" she asked.
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"A little."
"Then you probably know two elementary experiments. Project a white light through a prism and a
spectrum appears on the screen behind the prism. You've seen that?"
"Yes."
"And the experiment with a glass tube that has a thin layer of colored powder on the bottom, when
you send a sound wave through it?"
"Yeah. And the wave leaves little marks at each of its valleys and you can see them in the powder."
The track of the invisible wave in a visible medium.
"Very well. Now you can picture, perhaps, how the lloigor, although not made of matter as we
understand it, can manifest themselves in matter, leaving traces that show, let us say, a cross section
of what they really are."
Danny nodded, totally absorbed.
"From our point of view," Mama Sutra went on, "they are intolerably hideous in these
manifestations. There is a reason for that. They were the source of the worst terrors experienced by
the first humans. Our DNA code still carries an aversion and terror toward them, and this activates a
part of our minds which the psychologist Jung called the Collective Unconscious. That is where all
myth and art come from. Everything frightening, loathsome and terrible—in the folklore, in the
paintings and statues, in the legends and epics of every people on earth—contains a partial image of
a manifestation of the lloigor. 'As a foulness shall ye know Them,' a great Arab poet wrote."
"And they've been at war with us through all history?" Danny asked unhappily.
"Not at all. Are the stockyards at war with the cattle? It's nothing like war at all," Mama Sutra said
sinply. "It's just that they own us."
"I see," Danny said. "Yes, of course. I see." He looked into his empty glass dismally. "Could I have
another?" he murmured.
After Miss Mao had brought him another bourbon, he took a huge swallow and slouched forward in
his chair. "There's nothing we can do about it?" he asked.
"There is one group that has been trying to liberate humanity," Mama Sutra said. "But lloigor have
great powers to warp and distort minds. This group is the most maligned, slandered and hated people
on earth. All the evil they seek to prevent has been attributed to them. They operate in secret because
otherwise they would be destroyed. Even now, the John Birch Society and various other fanatics—
including an evil genius named Hagbard Celine— struggle ceaselessly to combat the group of whom
I speak. They have many names, the Great White Brotherhood, the Brethren of the Rosy Cross, the
Golden Dawn . . . usually, though they are known as the Illuminati."
"Yes!" Danny cried excitedly. "There was a whole bunch of memos about them at the scene of the
crime that started this case."
"And the memos, I would wager, portrayed them in an unfavorable light?"
"Sure did," Danny agreed. "Made them seem the worst bastards in history. Pardon me, ma'am." I'm
getting drunk, he thought.
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"That is how they are usually portrayed," Mama Sutra said sadly. "Their enemies are many, and they
are few . . ."
"Who are their enemies?" Danny leaned forward eagerly.
"The Cult of the Yellow Sign," Mama Sutra replied. "This is a group serving one particular lloigor
called Hastur. They live in such terror of this being that they usually call him He Who Is Not To Be
Named. Hastur resides in a mysterious place called Hali, which was formerly a lake but is now just
desert. Hali was by a great city in the lost civilization of Carcosa. You look as if those names mean
something to you?"
"Yes. They were in the notes of the professor who disappeared. The other case that I was convinced
was connected with this one."
"They have been mentioned— unwisely, I think— by certain writers, such as Bierce and Chambers
and Lovecraft and Bloch and Derleth. Carcosa was located where the Gobi Desert is at present. The
major cities were Hali, Mnar and Sarnath. The Cult of the Yellow Sign has managed to conceal all
this rather thoroughly, although a few archeologists have published some interesting speculations
about the Gobi area. Most of the evidence of a great civilization before Sumer and Egypt has been
either hidden or doctored so that it seems to point to Atlantis. Actually, Atlantis never existed, but
the Cult of the Yellow Sign carefully keeps the myth alive so nobody will discover what went on,
and still goes on, in the Gobian wastelands. You see, the Cult of the Yellow Sign still goes there, on
certain occasions, to worship and make certain transactions with Hastur, and with Shub Niggurath, a
lloigor who is known in mystical literature as the Black Goat with a Thousand Young, and with
Nyarlathotep, who appears either as a solid black man, not a Negro but black as an abyss, or else as a
gigantic faceless flute player. But I repeat: you cannot understand the lloigor by these manifestations
or cross sections into our space-time continuum. Do you believe in God?"
"Yes," Danny answered, startled by the sudden personal question.
"Take a little more of your drink. I must tell you now that your God is another manifestation of some
lloigor. That is how religion began, and how the lloigor and their servants in the Cult of the Yellow
Sign continue it. Have you ever had what is called a religious or mystical experience?"
"No," Danny said, embarrassed.
"Good. Then your religion is just a matter of believing what you have been told and not of a personal
emotional experience. All such experiences come from the lloigor, to enslave us. Revelations,
visions, trances, miracles, all of it is a trap. Ordinary, normal people instinctively avoid such
aberrations. Unfortunately, due to their gullibility and a concerted effort to brainwash them, they are
willing to follow the witches and wizards and shamans who traffic in these matters. You see, and I
urge you to take another drink right now, every religious leader in human history has been a member
of the Cult of the Yellow Sign and all their efforts are devoted to hoaxing, deluding and enslaving the
rest of us."
Danny finished his glass and asked meekly, "May I have more?"
Mama Sutra buzzed for Miss Mao and said, "You're taking this part very well. People who have had
religious visions take it very poorly; they don't want to know what foul source those experiences
actually came from. The lloigor, of course, can be considered gods— or demons— but it is more
profitable, at this point in history, to just consider them another life form cast up by the universe,
unfortunately superior to us and even more unfortunately inimical to us. You see, religion is always a
matter of sacrifice, and whenever there is a sacrifice there is a victim— and also a person or entity
profiting from the sacrifice. There is no religion in the world— not one— that is not a front for the
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Cult of the Yellow Sign. The Cult itself, like the lloigor, is of prehuman origin. It began among the
snake people of Valusia, the peninsula that is now Europe, and then spread eastward to be adopted
by the first humans in Carcosa. Always the purpose of the Cult has been to serve the lloigor, at the
expense of other human beings. Since the rise of the Illuminati, the Cult has also acted to combat
their work and discredit them."
Danny was glad that Miss Mao arrived then with his third stiff bourbon. "And who are the Illuminati
and what is their goal?" he asked, belting away a strong swallow.
"Their founder," Mama Sutra said, "was the first man to think rationally about the lloigor. He
realized that they were not supernatural, but just another aspect of nature; not all-powerful, but just
more powerful than us; and that when they came 'out of the heavens' they came from other worlds
like this one. His name has come down to us in certain secret teachings and documents. It was Malik."
"Jesus," Danny said, "that's the name of the guy whose disappearance started all this."
"The name meant 'one who knows' in the Carcosan tongue. Among the Persians and some Arabs
today it still exists but means 'one who leads.' His followers, the Illuminati, are those who have seen
the light of reason— which is quite distinct from the stupefying and mind- destroying light in which
the lloigor sometimes appear to overwhelm and mystify their servants in the Cult of the Yellow Sign.
What Ma-lik sought, what the Illuminati still seek, is scientific knowledge that will surpass the
powers of the lloigor, end mankind's enslavement and allow us to become self-owners instead of
property."
"How large is the Illuminati?"
"Very small. I don't know the exact number." Mama Sutra sighed. "I have never been accepted for
membership. Their standards are quite high. One must virtually be a walking encyclopedia to qualify
for an initial interview. You must remember that this is the most dedicated, most persecuted, most
secret group in the world. Everything they do, if not wiped off the records by the Cult of the Yellow
Sign, is always misrepresented and pictured as malign, devious and totally evil. Indeed, any effort to
be rational, to think scientifically, to discover or publish a new truth, even by those outside the
Illuminati, is always pictured in those colors by the Cult and all the religions which serve as its
fronts. All churches, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist or whatever, have
always opposed and persecuted science. The Cult of the Yellow Sign even fills the mass media with
this propaganda. Their favorite stories are the one about the scientist who isn't fully human until he
has a religious insight and recognizes 'the higher powers'— the lloigor, that is— and the other one
about the scientist who seeks truth without fear and causes a disaster. 'He meddled with things man
should leave alone' is always the punch line on that one. The same hatred of knowledge and
glorification of superstition and ignorance permeates all human societies. How much more of this
can you stand?" Mama Sutra asked abruptly.
"I don't honestly know," Danny said wearily. "It seems if I do get to the bottom of this business, it'll
bring every power in this country down on my head. The least that'll happen is that I'll get kicked out
of my job. More likely, I'll disappear like the man I'm looking for and the first two detectives on this
case. But for my own satisfaction, I'd like to know the rest of the truth, before I bid you good day and
look for a hole to hide in. You might also tell me how you can survive, knowing as much as you do."
"I have studied much. I have a Shield. I cannot explain the Shield anymore than I can explain my
ESP. I only know that it works. As to answering your other questions, first tell me about your
investigation. Then I will be able to relate it to the Illuminati and the Cult of the Yellow Sign."
Danny took another drink, closed his eyes for a minute and launched into his story. He began with
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the Marsh disappearance in Arkham four years earlier, his perusal of the missing professor's notes,
his reading in the books mentioned in those notes and his conclusion that a drug cult was involved.
Then he told of the Confrontation bombing, his skimming of the Illuminati memos, the
disappearance of Ma-lik, Miss Walsh, Goodman and Muldoon, and the frantic curiosity of the FBI.
"That's it," he concluded. "That's about all I know."
Mama Sutra nodded thoughtfully, "It is as I feared," she said finally. "I think I can shed light on the
matter, but you will be well advised to leave the police force and seek the protection of the Illuminati
after you have heard. You are already, at this very moment, in great peril." She lapsed into silence
again, and then said, "You will not see the picture of what is happening now, until I give you more of
the background."
For the next hour, Danny Pricefixer sat transfixed as Mama Sutra told him of the longest war in
history, the battle for the freedom of the human mind waged by the Illuminati against the forces of
slavery, superstition and sorcery.
It began, she repeated, in ancient Carcosa when the first humans were contacted by the serpent
people of Valusia. The latter brought with them certain fruits with strange powers. These fruits
would be called hallucinogens or psychedelics today, Mama Sutra said, but what they did to the brain
of the eater was not in any sense a hallucination. It opened him to invasion by the lloigor. The chief
fruit used in these rites was a botanical cousin of the modern apple, yellowish or golden in color, and
the snake people promised, "Eat of this and you shall become all-powerful." In fact, the eaters
became enslaved by the lloigor, and especially by Hastur, who took up residence in the Lake of Hali;
distorted versions of what happened have come down to us in various African legends about people
who had commerce with snakes and lost their souls, in the Homeric tale of the lotus eaters, in
Genesis, and in the Arabic lore utilized in the fiction of Robert W. Chambers, Ambrose Bierce and
others. Soon, the Cult of the Yellow Sign was formed among the eaters of the golden apples, and its
first high priest, Gruad, bargained with Hastur for certain powers in return for .which the lloigor
were fed on human sacrifices. The people were told that the sacrifices were good for the crops—and
this, in fact, was partially true, for the lloigor ate only the energy of the victim, and the body, buried
in the fields, gave back its nitrogen to the soil. This was the beginning of religion—and of
government. Gruad controlled the Temple, and the Temple soon controlled Hali, and, then, all of
Carcosa.
So things went for many thousands of years, until the priests were rich, fat and decadent, while the
citizens lived in terror and slavery. The number of sacrifices increased ever, for Hastur grew with
each victim whose energy he absorbed and his appetite grew with him. Finally, among the people,
there arose one who had been refused admission to the priesthood, Ma-lik, and he taught that
humanity could become all-powerful, not through eating the golden apples and sacrificing to the
lloigor, but through a process he called rational thought. He was, of course, fed to Hastur as soon as
the priests heard of this teaching, but he had followers, and they quickly learned to keep their
thoughts private and plan their activities in secret. This was the age of midnight arrests, purge trials
and accelerating sacrifices in Carcosa, Mama Sutra said, and eventually the followers of Ma-lik—the
few who had escaped extermination—fled to the Thuranian subcontinent, which is now Europe.
There they met little people who had come down from the north after the snake folk had
exterminated each other in some form of slow, insidious and stealthy civil war. (Apparently, the
snakes never met in a single battle during all this time: the poison in the wine cup, the knife in the
back and similar subtle activities had slowly escalated to the deadly level of actual warfare. The
serpent people had an aversion to facing an enemy as they killed him.) The little people had had their
own experiences with the lloigor, long ago, but all they remembered were confused legends about
Ores (whom Mama Sutra identified with the Tcho-Tchos) and a great hero named Phroto who battled
a monster called Zaurn (evidently a shoggoth, Mama Sutra said.)
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Many millenniums passed, and the little people and the followers of Ma-lik intermarried, producing
basically the human race of today. A great law-giver named Kull tried to establish a rational society
on Ma-lik's principles, and fought a battle with some of the serpent people who had surprisingly
survived in hidden places; most of this got lost in exaggeration and legend. After more thousands of
years, a barbarian named Konan or Conan arose, somehow, to the throne of Aquilonia, mightiest
kingdom on the Thuranian subcontinent; Konan brooded much about the continuing horrors in
Carcosa, which he sensed as a threat to the rest of the world. Finally, he disappeared, abdicating in
favor of his son, Conn, and reputedly sailing to the west.
Konan, Mama Sutra said, was the same person who appeared in the Yucatan peninsula at that time
and became known as Kukulan. He was evidently seeking, among the Mayan scientists, some
knowledge or technology to use against the lloigor. Whatever happened, he left them, and only the
legend of Kukulan, "the feathered serpent," remained. When the Aztecs came down from the north,
Kukulan became Quetzalcoatl, and human sacrifice was instituted in his name. The lloigor, in some
fashion, had turned the work of Konan around and made it serve their own ends.
Carcosa meanwhile perished. What happened is unknown, but some students of ancient lore suspect
that Konan actually circumnavigated the globe, collecting knowledge as he went, and descended
upon Carcosa with weapons that destroyed both the Cult of the Yellow Sign and all traces of the
civilization that served it.
Throughout the rest of history, Mama Sutra went on, the Cult of the Yellow Sign never regained its
former powers, but it has come very close in certain times and certain places. The lloigor continued
to exist, of course, but could no longer manifest in our kind of space-time continuum unless the Cult
performed very complicated technical operations, which were sometimes disguised as religious
rituals and sometimes as wars, famines or other calamities.
Over the intervening ages, the Cult waged steady warfare against the one power that threatened
them: rationality. When they couldn't manifest a lloigor to blast a mind, they learned to fake it; if real
magic wasn't available, stage magic served in its place. "By 'real magic,' of course," Mama Sutra
explained, "I mean the technology of the lloigor. As science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has
commented, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The lloigor have
that kind of technology. That's how they got to earth from their star."
"You mean their planet, don't you?" Danny asked.
"No, they lived originally on a star. I told you they were not made of matter as we understand it.
Incidentally, their origin on a star explains why the pentagram or star shape always attracts their
attention and is one of the best ways of summoning them. They invented that design. A star doesn't
look five-pointed to a human being, but that's what it looks like to them."
Finally, in the 18th century, the Age of Reason appeared to be at hand. Tentatively, as an experiment,
one branch of the Illuminati surfaced in Bavaria. They were led by an ex-Jesuit named Adam
Weishaupt who had inside knowledge of how the Cult of the Yellow Sign operated and performed its
hoaxes and "miracles." The real brain behind this movement, however, was Weishaupt's wife, Eve;
but they knew that, even in the Age of Reason, humanity was not ready yet for a liberation
movement led by a woman, so Adam fronted for her.
The experiment was unsuccessful. The Cult of the Yellow Sign planted fake documents in the home
of an Illuminatus named Zwack, whispered some hints to Bavarian government and then watched
with glee as the movement was disbanded and hounded out of Germany.
A simultaneous experiment began in America, started by two Illuminati named Jefferson and
Franklin. Both preached reason, like Weishaupt, but carefully did not make his mistake of stating
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explicitly how this contradicted religion and superstition. (This latter matter they discussed only in
their private letters.) Since Jefferson and Franklin were national heroes, and since the rationalistic
government they helped to create seemed well established, the Cult of the Yellow Sign dared not
denounce them openly. One trial balloon was attempted: the Reverend Jebediah Morse, a high
Yellow Sign adept, openly accused Jefferson of being an Illuminatus and charged him and his party
with most of the crimes that had discredited Weishaupt in Bavaria. The American public was not
deceived— but all subsequent Yellow Sign propaganda in America has rested on the original anti-
Illuminati claims of Reverend Morse.
Due to Jefferson, one Illuminati symbol was adopted by the new government: the Eye on the
Pyramid, representing knowledge of geometry and, hence, of the order of nature. This was to be used
in later generations, if necessary, to indicate the truth about the founding of the U.S. government,
since it was well understood that the Cult of the Yellow Sign would try to distort the facts as soon as
possible. Another Illuminati work, of more immediate importance, was the Bill of Rights (the part of
the Constitution still under most vigorous attack by the Yellow Sign fanatics) and certain key
expressions in early documents, such as the reference to "Nature and Nature's God" in the
Declaration of Independence— as far as Jefferson dared to go in leavening traditional superstition
with a natural-science admixture. And, of course, the first half-dozen Presidents were all highranking
Masons and Rosicrucians who understood at least the fundamentals of Illuminati philosophy.
Mama Sutra sighed briefly, and went on. All this, she said, is only the tip of the iceberg. Government
actually plays a minor role in controlling people; far more important are the words and images that
make up the semantic environment. The Cult of the Yellow Sign not only suppresses words and
images that threaten their power, but infiltrates every branch of communications with their own
ideology. Science and reason are forever mocked or portrayed as menacing. Wishful thinking,
fantasy, religion, mysticism, occultism and magic are forever preached as the real solutions to all
problems. Best-selling books teach people to pray, not work, for success. Movies win awards by
showing a child's ignorant faith justified over the skepticism of adults. There is an astrology column
in virtually every newspaper. More and more, the ideology of the Cult of the Yellow Sign is set forth
openly, as the ideas of the Illuminati and the Founding Fathers are forgotten or distorted. One only
has to think of any antidemocratic, antirational or antihumane idea out of the Dark Ages,' Mama
Sutra said, and one can immediately think of some popular religious columnist or some movie star
who is blatantly expounding it and calling it "Americanism."
The Cult of the Yellow Sign, the old woman continued, is determined to destroy the United States,
because it came closer than any other nation to the Illuminati ideals of free minds and free people
and because it still retains a few tattered relics of Illuminism in its laws and customs.
This is where Mr. Hagbard Celine enters the picture, Mama Sutra said grimly.
Celine, she went on, was a brilliant but twisted personality, the son of an Italian pimp and a
Norwegian prostitute. Raised in the underworld, he early developed a contempt and hatred for
ordinary, decent society. The Mafia, recognizing his talents and predilections, took him in and
financed his way through Harvard Law School. After graduation, he became an important
mouthpiece for Syndicate hoodlums in trouble with the law. On the side, however, he also took some
cases for American Indians, since this was a way of frustrating the government. In one particularly
bitter battle, he attempted to stop the construction of a much-needed dam in upstate New York; his
unbalanced behavior in the courtroom (which helped lose the case) indicated his deep attraction for
the occult, since he had obviously been taken in by the superstitions of the Indians he served. Mafia
dons conferred with leaders of the Cult of the Yellow Sign, and soon, Hagbard, who had been
wandering around Europe aimlessly, was recruited to start a new front for the Cult, to fight the
United States both politically and religiously. This front, Mama Sutra said, was called the Legion of
Dynamic Discord, and, while it pretended to be against all governments, it was actually devoted only
to harming the U.S. He was given a submarine (which he later claimed to have designed himself) and
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became an important cog in the Mafia heroin-smuggling business. More important, his crew—
renegades and misfits from all nations—were indoctrinated in a deliberately nonsensical variety of
mysticism.
An important center of Celine's heroin network, Mama Sutra added, was a fake church in Santa
Isobel on the island of Fernando Poo.
Obviously, Mama Sutra concluded, Joseph Malik, the editor of Confrontation, was investigating the
IIluminati, deceived by the lies spread against them by Celine and the Yellow Sign adepts. As for
Professor Marsh, his explorations in Fernando Poo may have revealed something about Celine's
heroin ring.
"Then you think they're both dead," Danny said somberly. "And, probably, Goodman and Muldoon
and Pat Walsh, the researcher, also."
"Not necessarily. Celine, as I have told you, is both brilliant and quite insane. He has perfected his
own form of brainwashing and it amuses him to recruit rather than destroy any possible opponent. It
is quite possible that all of these people are working for him right now, against the Illuminati and the
United States, which they will believe to be the major enemies of humanity." Mama Sutra paused
thoughtfully. "However, that is far from sure. Events in the last few days have changed Celine for the
worse. He is more insane, and more dangerous, than ever. The assassinations of April 25 all across
the nation appear to be his work, engineered through the Mafia. He is striking out blindly against
anyone he imagines may be an Illuminatus. Needless to say, most of the victims were not actually in
the Illuminati, which is, as I have mentioned, a very small organization. Since he is in this violent
and paranoid frame of mind, I fear for the lives of anyone associated with him."
Danny was slumped forward in his chair, drunk, dejected and depressed. "Now that I know," he
asked rhetorically, "what can I do about it? My God, what can I do about it?"
I finally got around to reading Telemachus Sneezed on the flight to Munich, a touch of appropriate
synchronicity, since Atlanta Hope (like the Illuminati's pet paperhanger) had an umbilical connection
backward toward Clark Kent's old enemy Lothar and his festive burgher's unsure God. In fact,
Atlanta wrote as if she had her own Diet of Worms for breakfast every morning. What made it even
more fan-fuckin'-tastic was that she was on the same flight with me, sitting, in fact, a few seats ahead
of me and to port, or starboard, or whatever is the correct word for right when you're in the air.
Mary Lou was with me; she was a hard woman to get out of your system once you'd made it with
her. John had advanced me only enough money for my own passage, so I'd hustled some Alamout
Black on Wells Street to raise the extra fare for her, and then I had to explain that it wasn't just a
pleasure trip.
"What's all the mystery?" she had asked, "Are you CIA or a Commie or something for Christ's
sake?"
"If I told you," I said, "you wouldn't believe it. Just enjoy the music and the acid and whatever else is
coming down, and when it happens you'll see it. You'd never believe it before you see it."
"Simon Motherfucking Moon," she told me gravely, "after the yoga and sex you've taught me these
last three days, I'm ready to believe anything."
"Ghosts? The grand zombi?"
"Oh, there you go again, putting me on," she protested.
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"See?"
So it was more or less left at that and we smoked two joints and hopped a cab out to O'Hare, passing
all the signs where they were tearing down lower-middle-class neighborhoods to turn them into
upper-middle-class high-rise neighborhoods and each sign said,
THIS IS ANOTHER IMPROVEMENT FOR CHICAGO—RICHARD J. DALEY, MAYOR.
Of course, in the lower-class neighborhoods, they weren't tearing anything down, just waiting for the
people to go on another rampage and burn it down. The signs there were all done with spray cans and
had more variety: OFF THE PIG, BLACK P. STONE RUNS IT, POWER TO THE PEOPLE, FRED
LIVES, ALMIGHTY LATIN KINGS RUN IT, and one that would have pleased Hagbard, OFF THE
LANDLORDS. Then we got into the traffic on the Eisenhower Expressway (Miss Doris Day
standing before Ike's picture in my old schoolroom flashed through memory like the ghost of an old
hard-on, the flesh of her mammary) and we put on our gas masks and sat while the cab crawled along
fast enough to possibly catch a senile snail with arthritis.
Mary Lou bought Edison Yerby's seventieth or eightieth novel in the airport, which suited me fine
since I like to read on airplanes myself. Looking around, I spotted Telemachus Sneezed and decided,
what the hell, let's see how the other half thinks. So there we were at fifty thousand feet a few yards
from the author herself and I was plunged deeply into the donner-und-blitzen metaphysics of God's
Lightning. Unlike the lamentable Austrian monorchoid, Atlanta wrote like she had balls, and she
expressed her philosophy in a frame of fiction rather than autobiography. Pretty soon, I was in her
prose up to my ass and sinking rapidly. Fiction always does that to me: I buy it completely and my
critical faculties come into action only after I'm finished.
Briefly, then, Telemachus Sneezed deals with a time in the near future when we dirty, filthy, freaky,
lazy, dope-smoking, frantic-fucking anarchists have brought Law and Order to a nervous collapse in
America'. The heroine, Taffy Rhinestone, is, like Atlanta was once herself, a member of Women's
Liberation and a believer in socialism, anarchism, free abortions and the charisma of Che. Then
comes the rude awakening: food riots, industrial stagnation, a reign of lawless looting and plunder,
everything George Wallace ever warned us against— but the Supreme Court, who are all anarchists
with names ending in -stein or -farb or -berger (there is no overt anti-Semitism in the book), keeps
repealing laws and taking away the rights of policemen. Finally, in the fifth chapter— the climax of
Book One— the heroine, poor toughy Taffy, gets raped fifteen times by an oversexed black brute
right out of The Birth of a Nation, while a group of cops stand by cursing, wringing their hands and
frothing at the mouth because the Supreme Court rulings won't allow them to take any action.
In Book Two, which takes place a few years later, things have degenerated even further and factory
pollution has been replaced by a thick layer of marijuana smoke hanging over the country. The
Supreme Court is gone, butchered by LSD crazed Mau-Maus who mistook them for a meeting of the
Washington chapter of the Policemen's Benevolent Association. The President and a shadowy
government-in-exile are skulking about Montreal, living a gloomy emigre existence; the Blind
Tigers, a rather thinly disguised caricature of the Black Panthers, are terrorizing white women
everywhere from Bangor to Walla Walla; the crazy anarchists are forcing abortions on women
whether they want them or not; and television shows nothing but Maoist propaganda and Danish stag
films. Women, of course, are the worst sufferers in this blightmare, and, despite all her karate
lessons, Taffy has been raped so many times, not only by standard vage-pen but orally and anally as
well, that she's practically a walking sperm bank. Then comes the big surprise, the monstro-rape to
end all rapes, committed by a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never
changes expression. "Everything is fire," he tells her, as he pulls his prick out afterwards, "and don't
you ever forget it." Then he disappears.
Well, it turns out that Taffy has gone all icky-sticky-gooey over this character, and she determines to
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find him again and make an honest man of him. Meanwhile, however, a subplot is brewing,
involving Taffy's evil brother, Diamond Jim Rhinestone, an unscrupulous dope pusher who is mixing
heroin in his grass to make everybody an addict and enslave them to him. Diamond Jim is allied with
the sinister Blind Tigers and a secret society, the Enlightened Ones, who cannot achieve world
government as long as a patriotic and paranoid streak of nationalism remains in America.
But the forces of evil are being stymied. A secret underground group has been formed, using the
cross as their symbol, and their slogan is appearing scrawled on walls everywhere:
SAVE YOUR FEDERAL RESERVE NOTES, BOYS, THE STATE WILL RISE AGAIN!
Unless this group is found and destroyed, Diamond Jim will not be able to addict everyone to horse,
the Blind Tigers won't be able to rape the few remaining white women they haven't gotten to yet, and
the Enlightened Ones will not succeed in creating one world government and one monotonous
soybean diet for the whole planet. But a clue is discovered: the leader of the Underground is a pure
Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression. Furthermore,
he is in the habit of discussing Heracleitus for like seven hours on end (this is a neat trick, because
only about a hundred sentences of the Dark Philosopher survive— but our hero, it turns out, gives
lengthy comments on them).
At this point there is a major digression, while a herd of minor characters get on a Braniff jet for
Ingolstadt. It soon develops that the pilot is tripping on acid, the copilot is bombed on Tangier hash
and the stewardesses are all speed freaks and dykes, only interested in balling each other. Atlanta
then takes you through the lives of each of the passengers and shows that the catastrophe that is
about to befall them is richly deserved: all, in one way or another, had helped, to create the Dope
Grope or Fucks Fix culture by denying the "self-evident truth" of some hermetic saying by
Heracleitus. When the plane does a Steve Brodie into the North Atlantic, everybody on board,
including the acid-tripping Captain Clark, are getting just what they merit for having denied that
reality is really fire.
Meanwhile, Taffy has hired a private detective named Mickey "Cocktails" Molotov to search for her
lost Aryan rapist with hollow cheeks. Before I could get into that, however, I was wondering about
the synchronistic implications of the previous section, and called over one of the stewardesses.
"Could you tell me the pilot's name?" I asked.
"Namen?" she replied. "Ja, Gretchen."
"No, not your name," I said, "the pilot's name. Namen wiser, um, Winginmacher?"
"Winginmacher?" she repeated, dubiously, "Bin Augenblick." She went away, while I looked up
Augenblick in a pocket German-English dictionary, and another stewardess, with the identical
uniform, the identical smile and the identical blue eyes, came over, asking, "Was wollen sie haben?"
I gave up on Winginmacher, obviously a bad guess. "Gibt mir, bitte," I said, "die Namen unser
Fliegen-macher." I spread my arms, imitating the plane. "Luft Fliegenmacher," I repeated, adding
helpfully, "How about Luft Piloten?"
"It's Pilot, not Piloten," she said wit h lots of teeth. "His name is Captain Clark. Heathcliffe Clark."
"Danke— Thanks," I said glumly, and returned to Telemachus Sneezed, imagining friend Heathcliffe
up front there weathering heights of MISSPELLED - soaring and plunging into the ocean because, as
Mallory said, it's there. An Englishman piloting a kraut airline, no less, just to remind me that I'm
surrounded by the paradoxical paranoidal paranormal parameters of synchronicity. Their wandering
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ministerial Eye. Lord, I buried myself again in Atlanta Hope's egregious epic.
Cocktails Molotov, the private dick, starts looking for the Great American Rapist, with only one
clue: an architectural blueprint that fell out of his pocket while he was tupping Taffy. Cocktails's
method of investigation is classically simple: he beats up everybody he meets until they confess or
reveal something that gives him a lead. Along the way he meets an effete snob type who makes a
kind of William O. Douglas speech putting down all this brutality. Molotov explains, for seventeen
pages, one of the longest monologues I ever read in a novel, that life is a battle between Good and
Evil and the whole modern world is corrupt because people see things in shades of red-orangeyellow-
green-blue-indigo-violet instead of in clear black and white.
Meanwhile, of course, everybody is still mostly involved in fucking, smoking grass and neglecting to
invest their capital in growth industries, so America is slipping backward toward what Atlanta calls
"crapulous precapitalist chaos."
At this point, another character enters the book, Howard Cork, a one-legged madman who
commands a submarine called the Life Eternal and is battling everybody— the anarchists, the
Communists, the Diamond Jim Rhinestone heroin cabal, the Blind Tigers, the Enlightened Ones, the
U.S. government-in-exile, the still-nameless patriotic Underground and the Chicago Cubs—since he
is convinced they are all fronting for a white whale of superhuman intelligence who is trying to take
over the world on behalf of the cetaceans. ("No normal whale could do this," he says after every TV
newscast reveals further decay and chaos in America, "but a whale of superhuman intelligence . .
. !") This megalomaniac tub of blubber— the whale, not Howard Cork— is responsible for the
release of the famous late-1960s record Songs of the Blue Whales, which has hypnotic powers to lead
people into wild frenzies, dope-taking, rape and loss of faith in Christianity. In fact, the whale is
behind most of the cultural developments of recent decades, influencing minds through hypnotic
telepathy. "First, he introduced W. C. Fields," Howard Cork rages to the dubious first mate, "Buck"
Star, "then, when America's moral fiber was sufficiently weakened, Liz and Dick and Andy
Warhol and rock music. Now, the Songs of the Blue Whales!" Star becomes convinced that Captain
Cork went uncorked and wigged when he lost his leg during a simple ingrown toenail operation
bungled by a hip young chiropodist stoned on mescaline. This suspicion is increased by the moody
mariner's insistence on wearing an old cork leg instead of a modern prosthetic model, proclaiming, "I
was born all Cork and I'm not going to die only three-fourths Cork!"
Then comes a turnabout scene, and it is revealed that Cork is actually not bananas at all but really a
smooth apple. In a meeting with a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that
never changes expression, it develops that the Captain is an agent of the Underground which is called
God's Lightning because of Heracleitus's idea that God first manifested himself as a lightning bolt
which created the world. Instead of hunting the big white whale, as the crew thinks, the Life Eternal
is actually running munitions for the government-in-exile and God's Lightning. When the hollowcheeked
leader leaves, he says to Cork, "Remember: the way up is the way down."
Meanwhile, the Gateless Gate swung creakingly open and I started picking up some of the "real"
world. That is, I began to recognize myself, again, as the ringmaster. All of this information gets fed
into me, entropy and negentropy all synergized up in a wodge of wonderland, and I compute it as
well as my memory banks give it unto me to understand these doings.
But, as Harry Coin, I enter Miss Portinari's suite somewhat diffidently. I am conscious of the ghosts
of dead pirates, only partly induced by this room's surrealist variety of Hagbard's nautical taste in
murals. In fact, Harry, in his own language, had an asshole tight enough to shit bricks. It was easy,
now, to accept that long-haired hippie, George, and even his black girlfriend as equals, but it just
didn't seem right to be asked to accept a teenage girl as a superior. A couple days ago I would have
been thinking how to get into her panties. Now I was thinking how to get her into my head. That
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Hagbard and his dope sure have screwed up my sense of values worse than anything since I left
Biloxi.
And, for some reason, I could hear the Reverend Hill pounding the Bible and hollering up a storm
back there in Biloxi, long ago, "No remission without blood! No remission without blood, brothers
and sisters! Saint Paul says it and don't you forget it! No remission without the blood of our Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ! Amen."
And Hagbard reads FUCKUP'S final analysis of the strategy and tactics in the Battle of Atlantis. All
the evidence is consistent with Assumption A, and inconsistent with Assumption B, the
mathematical part of FUCKUP has decided. Hagbard grinds his teeth in a savage grimace:
Assumption A is that the Illuminati spider ships were under remote control, and Assumption B is that
there were human beings aboard them.
—Trust not a man who's rich in flax—his morals may be sadly lax.
"Ready for destruction of enemy ships," Howard's voice came back to him.
"Are your people out of the way?"
"Of course. Quit this hesitating. This is no time to be a humanitarian."
(Assumption A is that the Illuminati spider ships were under remote control.)
The sea is cruder than the land. Sometimes.
(None of the evidence is consistent with Assumption B.)
Hagbard reached out a brown finger, let it rest on a white button on the railing in front of him, then
pressed it decisively. That's all there is to it, he said.
But that wasn't all there was to it. He had decided, coolly and in his wrong mind, that if he was a
murderer already the final gambit might as well be one that would salvage part of the Demonstration.
He had sent: George to Drake (Bob, you're dead now, but did you ever understand, even for a
moment, what I tried to tell you? What Jung tried to tell you even earlier?) and then twenty-four real
men and women were dead, and now the bloodshed was escalating, and he wasn't sure that any part
of the Demonstration could be saved.
"No remission - without blood! No remission without blood, brothers and sisters . . . No remission
without the blood of our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ!"
I got into the Illuminati in 1951, when Joe McCarthy was riding high and everybody was looking for
conspiracies everywhere. In my own naive way (I was a sophomore at New York University at the
time) I was seeking to find myself, and I answered one of those Rosicrucian ads in the back of a
girlie magazine. Of course, the Rosicrucians aren't a front in the simple way that the Birchers and
other paranoids think; only a couple of plants at AMORC headquarters are Illuminati agents. But
they select possible candidates at random, and we get slightly different mailings than those sent to
the average new member. If we show the proper spirit, our mailings get more interesting and a
personal contact is made. Well, pretty soon I swore the whole oath, including that silly part about
never visiting Naples, which is just an expression of an old grudge of Weishaupt's, and I was
admitted as Illuminatus Minerval with the name Ringo Erigena. Since I was majoring in law, I was
instructed to seek a career in the FBI.
I met Eisenhower only once, at a very large and sumptuous ball. He called another agent and myself
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aside. "Keep your eye on Mamie," he said. "If she has five martinis, or starts quoting John Wayne,
get her upstairs quick."
Kennedy I never even talked to, but Winifred (whose name in the order is Scotus Pythagoras) used to
bitch about him a lot. "This New Frontier stuff is dangerous," Winfred would say testily. "The man
thinks he's living in a western movie. One big showdown, and the bad guys bite the dust. We'd best
not let him last too long."
You can imagine how upset I was when the Dallas caper began to throw light on the whole overall
pattern. Of course, I didn't know what to do: Winifred was my only superior in the government who
was also a superior in the Illuminati, but I had a lot of hunches and guesses about some others, and I
wouldn't want to bet that John Edgar wasn't one of them, for instance. When the feeler came from the
CIA I went on what these kids today call a paranoid trip. It could have been coincidence or
synchronicity, but it could have been the Order, scanning me, and ensuring that my involvement
would get deeper.
("Most people in espionage don't know who they're working for," Winifred told me once, in that
voice of silk and satin and stilettos, "especially the ones who only do 'small jobs.' Suppose we find a
French Canadian separatist in Montreal who's in a position to provide certain information at certain
times. We certainly don't ask him to work for American Intelligence. That's no concern of his, and
even inimical to his real interests. So he's approached by another very convincing French Canadian
who has 'evidence' to prove he's an agent of the most secret of all Quebec Libre underground
movements. Or, if the Russians find a woman in Nairobi who has access to certain offices and
happens to be anti-Communist and pro-English: no sense in trying to recruit her for the MVD, right?
The contact she meets has a full set of credentials and just the right Oxford tone to convince her he's
with M.5 in London. And so it goes," he ended dreamily, "so it goes . . .")
My CIA contact really was CIA; I'm almost absolutely willing to give odds around 60-40 on that. At
least, he knew the proper passwords to show that he was acting under presidential orders, whatever
that proves.
It was Hoover himself who ordered me to infiltrate God's Lightning. Well, he didn't pick me alone; I
was part of a group, and a rousing pep talk he gave us. I can still remember him saying, "Don't let
their American flags fool you. Look at those lightning bolts, right out of Nazi Germany, and,
remember, the next thing to a godless Commie is a godless Nazi. They're both against Free
Enterprise." Of course, as soon as I was admitted to the Arlington chapter of God's Lightning, I
found out that Free Enterprise stood second only to Heracleitus in their pantheon. J. Edgar did get
some queer hornets in his headgear at times—like his fear that John Dillinger was really still alive
some place, laughing at him. That was the dread that turned him against Melvin Purvis, the agent
who gunned Dillinger down in Chicago, and he rode Purvis right out of the Bureau. Those of you
with long memories will recall that poor Purvis ended up working for a breakfast cereal company,
acting as titular head of the Post-Toasties Junior G-Men.
It was in God's Lightning that I read Telemachus Sneezed, which I still think is a rip-roaring good
yarn. That scene where Taffy Rhinestone sees the new King on television and it's her old rapist
friend with the gaunt cheeks and he says, "My name is John Guilt"— man, that's writing. His
hundred-and-three-page-long speech afterwards, explaining the importance of guilt and showing why
all the anti-Heracleiteans and Freudians and relativists are destroying civilization by destroying guilt,
certainly is persuasive—especially to somebody like me with three-going-on-four personalities each
of which was betraying the others. I still quote his last line, "Without guilt there can be no
civilization." Her nonfiction book, Militarism: The Unknown Ideal for the New Heracleitean is, I
think, a distinct letdown, but the God's Lightning bumper stickers asking "What Is John Guilt?" sure
give people the creeps until they learn the answer.
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I met Atlanta Hope herself at the time of the New York Draft Riots. That was, you will remember,
when God's Lightning, disgusted with reports that the FBI was swamped in two years' backlog in
draft resistance and draft evasion cases, decided to organize vigilante groups to hunt down the
hippie-yippie-commie-pacifist scum themselves. As soon as they entered the East Village— which
harbored, as they suspected, hundreds of thousands of bearded, long-haired and otherwise semivisible
fugitives from the Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Chile and Tierra
del Fuego conflicts—they began to encounter both suspects and resistance. After the third hour, the
Mayor ordered the police to cordon the area. The police, of course, were on the side of God's
Lightning and did all they could to aid their mayhem against the Great Unwashed while preventing
reciprocal mayhem. After the third day, the Governor called out the National Guard. The Guard, who
were mostly draft-dodgers at heart themselves, tried to even the score, and even help the Dregs and
Drugs a bit. After the third week, the President declared that part of Manhattan a disaster area and
sent in the Red Cross to help the survivors.
I was in the thick and din of it (you have no idea how bizarre civil war gets when one side uses trash
cans as a large part of their arsenal) and even met Joe Malik, prematurely, under a Silver Wraith
Rolls Royce where he had crawled to take notes near the front line and I had crept to nurse wounds
received while being pushed through the window of the Peace Eye Bookstore— I have scars I could
show you still— and a voice over my shoulder says that I should put in the fact that August
Personage was trapped in a phone booth only a few feet away, suffering hideous paranoid delusions
that in spite of all this chaos the police would trace his last obscene call and find him still in
the .booth afraid to come out and face the trash can covers and bullets and other miscellaneous
metals in the air— and I even remember that the Rolls had license plate RPD-1, which suggests that
a certain person of importance was also in that odd vicinity on some doubtless even odder errand. I
met Atlanta herself a day later and a block north, on the scene where Taylor Mead was making his
famous Last Stand. Atlanta grabbed my right arm (the wounded one: it made me wince) and howled
something like, "Welcome, brother in the True Faith! War is the Health of the State! Conflict is the
creator of all things!" Seeing she was on a heavy Heracleitus wavelength, I quoted, with great
passion, "Men should fight for the Laws as they would for the walls of the city!" That won her and I
was Atlanta's Personal Lieutenant for the rest of the battle.
Atlanta remembered me from the Riots and I was summoned to organize the first tactical strikes
against Nader's Raiders. If I do say so myself, I did a commendable job; it earned me a raise from the
Bureau, a tight but genuinely pleased smile from my CIA drop, a promotion to Illuminatus Prelator
from Winifred— and another audience with Atlanta Hope which led to my initiation into the A:.A:.,
the supersecret conspiracy for which she was really working. (The A:.A:. is so arcane that even now
I can't reveal the full name hinted in those initials.) My secret name was Prince of Wands E; I got the
Prince of Wands by picking a Tarot card at random, and she gave me the E herself— from which I
deduced that there were four other Princes of Wands, together with five Kings of Swords, and so
forth, meaning that the A:.A:. was something special in even esoteric realms, since it was a
worldwide conspiracy with no more than three hundred ninety members (five tunes the number of
cards in the Tarot deck). The name fairly suited me— I wouldn't want to be Hanged Man D or Fool
A— and I was happy that the Prince is known for his multiple personalities.
If I had been three and a half agents before (my role in God's Lightning a fairly straightforward one,
at least from GL's point of view, since I was only asked to smash, not to spy) there was no doubt that
I was four agents now, belonging to the FBI, the CIA, the Illuminati and the A:.A:.and betraying
each of them to at least one and sometimes two or three of the others. (Yes, I had been converted to
the A:.A:. during their initiation; if I could describe that most amazing ritual you would not wonder
why.) Then came the Vice President's brainstorm about economizing on agents, and I began to get
transferred on loan to the CIA frequently, whereupon the Bureau discreetly asked me to report
anything interesting that I observed. This, however, I perceive as a further complexification of my
four-way psychic stretch and not as the inevitable, irrefragable and synergetic fifth step.
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And I was right. For it was only in the last year that I entered the terminal stage, or Grumment as the
Order calls it, due to those curious events which led me from Robert Putney Drake to Hagbard
Celine.
I was sent to the Council on Foreign Relations banquet carrying the credentials of a Pinkerton
detective; my supposed role as private dick was to keep an eye on the jewels of the ladies and other
valuables. My real job was to place a small bug on the table where Robert Putney Drake would be
sitting; I was on loan to IRS that week, and they didn't know that Justice had standing orders never to
prosecute him for anything, so they were trying to prove he had concealed income. Naturally, I also
had an ear peeled for anything that might be of import for the Illuminati, the A:.A:. and the CIA, if
my Lincoln Memorial contact really was CIA and not Military or Naval Intelligence or somebody
else entirely. (You can be sure I often meditated on the possibility that he might be Moscow, Peking
or Havana, and Winifred told me once that the Illuminati had reason to believe him part of an
advance-guard fifth column sent by invaders from Alpha Centauri— but Grand Masters of the
Illuminati are notorious put-on artists, and I didn't buy that yarn any more than I bought the tale that
had originally brought me into the Illuminati, the one about them being a conspiracy to establish a
world government run by British Israelites.) Conspiracy was its own reward to me, now; I didn't care
what I was conspiring for. Art for art's sake. Not whether you betray or preserve but how you play
the game. I sometimes even identified it with the A:.A:. notion of the Great Work, for in the twisting
labyrinths of my selves I was beginning to find the rough sketch for a soul.
There was a hawk -faced wop at Drake's table, very elegant in a spanking new tuxedo, but the cop in
me made him as illegit. Sometimes you can make a subject precisely, as bunco-con, safe-blower,
armed robber or whatnot, but I could only place him vaguely somewhere on that side of the game; in
fact, I associated him with images of piracy on the high seas or the kind of gambits the Borgias
played. Somehow the conversation got around to a new book by somebody named Mortimer Adler
who had already written a hundred or so great books if I understood the drift. One banker type at the
table was terribly keen on this Adler and especially on his latest great book. "He says that we and the
Communists share the same Great Tradition" (I could hear the caps by the way he pronounced the
term) "and we must join together against the one force that really does threaten civilization—
anarchism!"
There were several objections, in which Drake didn't take part (he just sat back, puffing his cigar and
looking agreeable to everyone, but I could see boredom under the surface) and the banker tried to
explain the Great Tradition, which was a bit over my head, and, judging by the expressions around
the table, a bit over everybody else's head, too, when the hawk-faced dago spoke up suddenly.
"I can put the Great Tradition in one word," he said calmly. "Privilege."
Old Drake suddenly stopped looking agreeable-but-bored— he seemed both interested and amused.
"One seldom encounters such a refreshing freedom from euphemism," he said, leaning forward. "But
perhaps I am reading too much into your remark, sir?"
Hawk-face sipped at his champagne and patted his mouth with a napkin before answering. "I think
not," he said at last. "Privilege is defined in most dictionaries as a right or immunity giving special
favors or benefits to those who hold it. Another meaning in Webster is 'not subject to the usual rules
or penalties.' The invaluable thesaurus gives such synonyms as power, authority, birthright,
franchise, patent, grant, favor and, I'm sad to say, pretension. Surely, we all know what privilege is in
this club, don't we, gentlemen? Do I have to remind you of the Latin roots, privi, private, and lege,
law, and point out in detail how we have created our Private Law over here, just as the Politburo
have created their own private law in their own sphere of influence?"
"But that's not the Great Tradition," the banker type said (later, I learned that he was actually a
college professor; Drake was the only banker at that table). "What Mr. Adler means by the Great
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Tradition—"
"What Mortimer means by the Great Tradition," hawk-face interrupted rudely, "is a set of myths and
fables invented to legitimize or sugar-coat the institution of privilege. Correct me if I'm wrong," he
added more politely but with a sardonic grin.
"He means," the true believer said, "the undeniable axioms, the time-tested truths, the shared wisdom
of the ages, the . . ."
"The myths and fables," hawk-face contributed gently.
"The sacred, time-tested wisdom of the ages," the other went on, becoming redundant. "The basic
bedrock of civil society, of civilization. And we do share that with the Communists. And it is just
that common humanistic tradition that the young anarchists, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, are
blaspheming, denying and trying to destroy. It has nothing to do with privilege at all."
"Pardon me," the dark man said. "Are you a college professor?"
"Certainly. I'm head of the Political Science Department at Harvard!"
"Oh," the dark man shrugged. "I'm sorry for talking so bluntly before you. I thought I was entirely
surrounded by men of business and finance."
The professor was just starting to look as if he spotted the implied insult in that formal apology when
Drake interrupted.
"Quite so. No need to shock our paid idealists and turn them into vulgar realists overnight. At the
same time, is it absolutely necessary to state what we all know in such a manner as to imply a rather
hostile and outside viewpoint? Who are you and what is your trade, sir?"
"Hagbard Celine. Import-export. Gold and Appel Transfers here in New York. A few other small
establishments in other ports." As he spoke my image of piracy and Borgia stealth came back
strongly. "And we're not children here," he added, "so why should we avoid frank language?"
The professor, taken aback a foot or so by this turn in the conversation, sat perplexed as Drake
replied:
"So. Civilization is privilege— or Private Law, as you say so literally. And we all know where
Private Law comes from, except the poor professor here— out of the barrel of a gun,' in the words of
a gentleman whose bluntness you would appreciate. Is it your conclusion, then, that Adler is, for all
his naivete, correct, and we have more in common with the Communist rulers than we have setting
us at odds?"
"Let me illuminate you further," Celine said— and the way he pronounced the verb made me jump.
Drake's blue eyes flashed a bit, too, but that didn't surprise me: anybody as rich as IRS thought he
was, would have to be On the Inside.
"Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage," Celine went on.
"In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods,
that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of
us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal
exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total
freedom— in anarchy— such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of
unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor— raise your
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nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is— and you will not observe such
unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit
accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor?
Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then,
where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it
yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the
marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always
profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the
Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws— the rules of the game, as promulgated by the
Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government
and the Federal Reserve Board on this side— are slightly different; that's all. And it is this that is
threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us," he concluded, strongly
emphasizing the last clause, staring at Drake, not at the professor.
The professor had a lot more to say in a hurry then, about the laws of society being the laws of nature
and the laws of nature being the laws of God, but I decided it was time to circulate a bit more so I
didn't hear the rest of the conversation. The IRS has a complete tape of it, I'm sure, since I had placed
the bug long before the meal.
The next time I saw Robert Putney Drake was a turning point. I was being sent to New York again,
on a mission for Naval Intelligence this time, and Winifred gave me a message that had to be
delivered to Drake personally; the Order wouldn't trust any mechanical communication device.
Strangely, my CIA drop also gave me a message for Drake, and it was the same message. That didn't
jar me any, since it merely confirmed some of what I had begun to suspect by then.
I went to this office on Wall Street, near the corner of Broad (just about where I'd be toiling at
Corporate Law, if my family had had its way) and I told his secretary, "Knigge of Pyramid
Productions to see Mr. Drake." That was the password that week; Knigge had been a Bavarian baron
and second-in-command to Weishaupt in the original AISB. I sat and cooled my heels awhile,
studying the decor, which was heavily Elizabethan and made me wonder if Drake had some private
notion about being a reincarnation of his famous ancestor.
Finally, Drake's door opened and who stood there but Atlanta Hope, looking kind of wild-eyed and
distraught. Drake had his arm on her shoulder and he said piously, "May your work hasten the day
when America returns to purity." She stumbled past me in a kind of daze and I was ushered into his
office. He motioned me to an overstuffed chair and stared at my face until something clicked.
"Another Knigge in the woodpile," he laughed suddenly. "The last time I saw you, you were a
Pinkerton detective." You had to admire a memory like that; it had been a year since the CFR
banquet and I hadn't done anything to attract his attention that night.
"I'm FBI as well as being in the Order," I said, leaving out a few things.
"You're more than that," he said flatly, sitting behind a desk as big as some kids' playgrounds. "But I
have enough on my mind this week without prying into how many sides you're playing. What' s the
message?"
"It comes from the Order and the CIA both," I said, to be clear and relatively above-board. "This it
is: The Taiwan heroin shipments will not arrive on time. The Laotian opium fields are temporarily in
the hands of the Pathet Lao. Don't believe the Pentagon releases about our troops having the
Laotian situation under control. No answer required." I started to rise.
"Wait, damn it," Drake said, frowning. "This is more important than you realize." His face went
blank and I could tell his mind was racing like an engine with governor off; it was impressive.
"What's your rank in the Order?" he asked finally.
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"Illuminatus Prelator," I confessed, humbly.
"Not nearly high enough. But you have more practical espionage experience than a great many
higher members. You'll have to do." The old barracuda relaxed, having come to a decision. "How
much do you know about the Cult of the Black Mother?" he asked.
"The most militant and most secret Black Power group in the country," I said carefully. "They avoid
publicity instead of seeking it, because their strategy is based on an eventual coup d'etat, not on
revolution. Until a minute ago, I thought no white man in the country even knew of their existence,
except those of us in the FBI. The Bureau has never reported on them to other government agencies,
because we're ashamed to admit we've never been able to keep an informer inside for long. They all
die of natural causes, that's what bugs us."
"Nobody in the Order has ever told you the truth?" Drake demanded.
"No," I said, curious. "I thought what I just told you was the truth."
"Winifred is more closed-mouth than he needs to be," Drake said. "The Cult of the Black Mother is
entirely controlled by the Order. They monitor ghetto affairs for us. Right now, they predict a revival
of 1960s-style uprisings for late summer in Harlem, on the West Side of Chicago, and in Detroit.
They need to up the addiction rate at least eighteen percent, hopefully twenty or twenty-five percent,
in all those areas, or the property damage will be even more enormous than we are prepared to
absorb.
"They can't do it, if they have to cut their present stock even more than it's already cut. There just has
to be more junk in the ghettoes or all hell will break loose by August."
I began to realize that he had used the word "monitor" in its strict cybernetic meaning.
"There's only one alternative," Drake went on. "The black market. There's a very cunning and wellorganized
group that's been trying to crack the CIA-Syndicate heroin monopoly for quite a while
now. The Cult, of the Black Mother will have to deal with them directly. I don't want the Order
involved at all— that would make it messy, and besides we'll have to crush this group later, when
we're able to pierce their cover."
The upshot of it was that I found myself on One Hundred Tenth Street in Harlem, feeling very white
and un-bulletproof, entering a restaurant called The Signifying Monkey. Walking through a lot of
hostile stares, I went direct to the coffee-colored woman at the cash register and said, "I've got a
tombstone disposition."
She gave me a piercing look and muttered, "Upstairs, after the men's room, the door marked Private.
Knock five times." She grinned maliciously, "And if you're not kosher, kiss your white ass good-bye,
brother."
I went up the stairs, found the door, knocked five times, and one eye in an ebony face looked out at
me stonily. "White," he said.
"Man," I replied.
"Native," he came back.
"Born," I finished. A bolt slipped on a chain and the door opened the rest of the way. I never did find
out whose idea of a joke that password was— they had lifted it from the Ku Klux Klan, of course.
The room I was in was heavy with marijuana smoke, but I could see that it was decently furnished
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and dominated by an enormous statue of Kali, the Black Mother; I had visions of weird Gunga Din
rites and shouts of "Kill for the love of Kali!" There were four other men in the room, hi addition to
the one who let me in, and two reefers were circulating, one deosil and one widder-shins.
"Who you from?" a voice asked in the murk.
"AISB," I answered carefully, "And I'm to speak to Hassan i Sabbah X."
"You're speaking to him," said the tallest and blackest character in the bunch, passing me a reefer. I
took a quick, deep draw and, Christ, it was good. I'd been half addicted ever since the March on the
Pentagon in 1967, where I walked right behind Norman Mailer part of the way, and later fell in with
some hippies who were sitting on the steps smoking it. I say I was half addicted since then, because
two of me believe, as a loyal government employee, that the old government publications claiming
marijuana is addicting must be true or the government wouldn't have printed them. Fortunately, the
other two of me know that it isn't addicting, so I don't go through very bad withdrawal when it's
scarce.
I started to outline the situation to Hassan i Sabbah X but the other joint came around, widdershins,
and I took a drag on that. "A man could get stoned doing this," I said facetiously.
"Yeah," a satisfied black voice agreed in the gloom.
Well, by the time I explained the problem to Hassan, I was so bombed that I immediately let him
recruit me for the next step, on his rationalization that a white man could handle it easier than a black
man. Actually, I was curious to contact this group of heroin pirates.
Hassan wrote the address carefully. "Now, here's the passwords," he said. "You say, 'Do what thou
wilt shall be the whole of the Law.' Don't say 'Do what you will'— they can't stand anybody fucking
around with the words, it has something to do with magic. She replies, 'Love is the law, love under
will.' Then you finish it with 'Every man and every woman is a star.' Got it?"
You can bet your ass I got it. I was almost goggleeyed. It was the passwords of the A:.A:.
"One more thing," Hassan added, "be sure to ask for Miss Mao, not Mama Sutra. Mama isn't cleared
for this."
(As the Braniff jet took off from Kennedy International, Simon was already deep into Telemachus
Sneezed again. He didn't notice the preoccupied-looking red-headed young man who took the seat
across the aisle; if he had, he would have immediately made the identification, cop. He was reading,
"Factory smog is a symbol of progress, of the divine fire of industry, of the flaming deity of
Heracleitus.")
HARRY KRISHNA HARRY KRISHNA HARRY HARRY
Harry Coin didn't know what the drug was; Miss Portinari had merely said, "It takes you further than
pot," and handed him the tablet. It might be that LSD the hippies use, he reflected, or it might be
something else entirely that Hagbard and FUCKUP had concocted in the ship's laboratory. Miss
Portinari went on chanting:
HARRY RAMA HARRY RAMA HARRY HARRY
Obediently, he continued to stare into the aquamarine pool between them; she wore a yellow robe
and sat placidly in the lotus position.
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("I've gotta know," he had told her. "I can't go around with two sets of memories and never be sure
which are real and which Hagbard just put in my head like a man puts a baby into a woman. Did I
kill all those people or didn't I?"
"You must be in the proper frame of mind before you can accept the answer," she had replied
remotely.)
HARRY COINSHA HARRY COINSHA HARRY HARRY
Was she changing the chant or was it the drug? He tried to keep calm and continue staring into the
pool, as she had ordered, but the porcelain design around it was changing. Instead of two dolphins
chasing each other's tails like the astrological sign of Pisces (the age that was ending, according to
Hagbard), it was now one long serpentlike creature trying to swallow its own tail.
That's me, he thought. A lot of people have told me I'm as thin and long as a snake.
And it's everybody else, too (he realized suddenly). I'm seeing what George told me: the Self
pursuing the Self and trying to govern it, the Self trying to swallow the Self.
But as he stared, fascinated, the pool turned red, blood red, the color of guilt, and he felt it reach out
and try to pull him down into it, into red oblivion, a void made flush.
"It's alive," he screamed. "Jesus Motherfucking Christ!"
Miss Portinari casually stirred the pool, remote and calm, and its spiral inward slowly turned back to
aquamarine. Harry felt himself blushing, it was only a hallucination, and muttered, "Pardon my
language, ma'am."
"Don't apologize," she said sharply. "The most important truths always appear first as blasphemies or
obscenities. That's why every great innovator is persecuted. And the sacraments look obscene, too, to
an outsider. The eucharist is just sublimated cannibalism, to the unawakened. When the Pope kisses
the feet of the laity, he looks like an old toe-queen to some people. The rites of Pan look like a
suburban orgy. Think about what you said. Since it has five words and fits the Law of Fives, it is
especially significant."
This is a weird bunch, but they know important things, Harry reminded himself. He looked deep into
the blue spiral and silently repeated to himself, "It's alive, Jesus Motherfucking Christ, it's alive . . ."
Jesus, looking strangely hawk-faced and Hagbardian, rose from the pool. "This is my bodhi," he said,
pointing. Harry looked and saw Buddha sitting beneath the bodhi-tree. "Tat TVam Asi," he said, and
the falling leaves of the tree turned into millions of TV sets all broadcasting the same Laurel and
Hardy movie. "Now look what you made me do," Hardy was saying ... In a previous incarnation,
Harry saw himself as a centurion, Semper Cuni Linctus, driving the nails into the cross. "Look," he
said to Jesus, "nothing personal. I'm only following orders." "So am I," Jesus said, "My Father's
orders. Aren't we all?"
"Look into the pool," Miss Portinari repeated. "Just look into the pool."
It was like each Chinese box had another Chinese box inside it; but the best of all belonged to Miss
Mao Tsu-hsi. We were reclining in her trim but elegant pad on West Eighty-seventh Street, passing a
joint back and forth and comparing multiple identities. We were naked on a bearskin rug, a dream
come true, for she was my ideal woman. "I got into the A:.A:. first, Tobias," she was saying. "They
recruited me at a Ba'Hai meeting— they have cruisers out, looking for likely prospects, in every
mystical group from Subud to Scientology, you know. Then Naval Intelligence contacted me and I
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reported to them on what the A:.A:. was up to. I'm not flexible as you, though, and my loyalties tend
to stay fairly constant— chiefly I was reporting to A:.A:. what I gleaned from Naval Intelligence. I
did believe in the A:.A:. basically. Until I met Him"
"That reminds me," I said, jealous of the worshipful way she said Him as if talking about a god. "If
he's coming soon, shouldn't we get up and put some clothes on?"
"If you want to be bourgeois," she said.
While we were dressing, I remembered something. "By the way," I asked casually, "who are you
spying on Mama Sutra for— the A:.A:. Naval Intelligence, or Him?"
"All three of them." She was starting to pull her panties on, and I said suddenly, "Wait." I knelt and
kissed her pussy one last time, "For the nicest Chinese box I've opened in this whole case," I said
gallantly. That was my Illuminati training; as an FBI man, I was ashamed of such a perverted act.
We finished dressing and she was pouring some wine (a light German vintage from, of all places,
Bavaria) when the knock came.
Miss Mao sidled over to the door in her slinky Chinese dress and said softly, "Hail Eris."
"All hail Discordia," came a voice from outside. She slipped the lock and a little fat man walked in.
My first reaction was astonishment; he didn't look anything like the superintellectual superhero she
had described.
"Hagbard couldn't come," he said briefly. "I'll handle the sale, and initiate you" with a glance at me,
"into the Legion of Dynamic Discord, if you're really ready, as Miss Mao says, to battle every
government on earth and the Illuminati to boot."
"I'm ready," I said passionately. "I'm tired being a puppet on four sets of strings." (Actually, I know I
just wanted a fifth set.)
"Good," he said. "Put her there," and he held out his hand. As we shook, he said, "Episkopos Jim
Cartwright of the Mad Dog Cabal."
"Tobias Knight," I said, "of the FBI, the CIA, the A:.A:. and the Illuminati."
He blinked briefly. "I've met double agents and triple agents, but you're the first quadruple agent in
my experience. I guess this was inevitable, by the Law of Fives. Welcome to the fifth ring of the
world's oldest continuous Five Ring Circus. Prepare for Death and Rebirth."
JESUS MOTHERFUCKING CHRIST IT'S ALIVE . . .
LEVIATHAN
The mutation from terrestrial to interstellar life must be made, because the womb planet
itself is going to blow up within a few billion years . . . Planet Earth is a stepping stone
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on our time-trip through the galaxy. Life has to get its seed-self off the planet to
survive . . .
There are also some among us who are bored with the amniotic level of mentation on
this planet and look up in hopes of finding someone entertaining to talk to. —
TIMOTHY LEARY, Ph.D., and L. WAYNE BRENNER, Terra II
THE NINTH TRIP, OR YESOD
(WALPURGISNACHT ROCK)
SINK is played by Discordians and people of much ilk. PURPOSE: To sink object or an
object or a thing ... in water or mud or anything you can sink something in. RULES:
Sinking is allowed in any manner. To date, ten-pound chunks of mud have been used to
sink a tobacco can. It is preferable to have a pit of water or a hole to drop things into.
But rivers— bays— gulfs— I dare say even oceans— can be used.
TURNS are taken thusly: whosoever gets the junk up and in the air first.
DUTY: It shall be the duty of all persons playing SINK to help find more objects to
sink, once one object is sunk. UPON SINKING: The sinker shall yell, "I sank it!" or
something equally as thoughtful.
NAMING OF OBJECTS is sometimes desirable. The object is named by the finder of
such object, and whoever sinks it can say (for instance), "I sank Columbus, Ohio."
—ALA HERA, E.L., N.S., Rayville Apple Panthers,
quoted in Principia Discordia, by Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C.
For over a week the musicians had been boarding planes and heading for Ingolstadt. As early as
April 23, while Simon and Mary Lou listened to Clark Kent and His Supermen and George Dorn
wrote about the sound of one eye opening, the Fillet of Soul, finding bookings sparse in London,
drove into Ingolstadt in a Volvo painted seventeen Day-Glo colors and flaunting Ken Kesey's old
slogan, "Furthur!" On April 24 a real trickle began, and while Harry Coin looked into Hagbard
Celine's eyes and saw no mercy there (Buckminster Fuller, just then, was explaining
"omnidirectional halo" to his seatmate on a TWA Whisperjet in m-H-Pacific), the Wrathful Visions,
the Cockroaches, and the Senate and the People of Rome all drove down Ra-thausplatz in bizarre
vehicles, while the Ultra-Violet Hippopotamus and the Thing on the Doorstep both navigated
Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse in even more amazing buses. On April 25, while Carmel looted Maldonado's
safe and George Dorn repeated "I Am the Robot," the trickle turned to a stream and in came Science
and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the Glue Sniffers, King Kong and His Skull Island Dinosaurs,
the Howard Johnson Hamburger, the Riot in Cell Block Ten, the House of Frankenstein, the
Signifying Monkey, the Damned Thing, the Orange Moose, the Indigo Banana, and the Pink
Elephant. On April 26 the stream became a flood, and while Saul and Barney Mul-doon tried to
reason with Markoff Chaney and he struggled in their grip, Ingolstadters found themselves inundated
by Frodo Baggins and His Ring, the Mouse That Roars, the Crew of the Flying Saucer, the
Magnificent Ambersons, the House I Live In, the Sound of One Hand, the Territorial Imperative, the
Druids of Stonehenge, the Heads of Easter Island, the Lost Continent of Mu, Bugs Bunny and His
Fourteen Carrots, the Gospel According to Marx, the Card-Carrying Members, the Sands of Mars,
the Erection, the Association, the Amalgamation, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the Climax, the
Broad Jumpers, the Pubic Heirs, the Freeks, and the Windows. Mick Jagger and his new group, the
Trashers, arrived on April 27, while the FBI was interviewing every whore in Las Vegas, and there
quickly followed the Roofs, Moses and Monotheism, Steppenwolf, Civilization and Its Discontents,
Poor Richard and His Rosicrucian Secrets, the Wrist Watch, the Nova Express, the Father of Waters,
the Human Beings, the Washington Monument, the Thalidomide Babies, the Strangers in a Strange
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Land, Dr. John the Night Tripper, Joan Baez, the Dead Man's Hand, Joker and the One-Eyed Jacks,
Peyote Woman, the Heavenly Blues, the Golems, the Supreme Awakening, the Seven Types of
Ambiguity, the Cold War, the Street Fighters, the Bank Burners, the Slaves of Satan, the Domino
Theory, and Maxwell and His Demons. On April 28, while Dillinger loaded his gun and the kachinas
of Orabi began the drum-beating, the Acapulco Gold-Diggers arrived, followed by the Epic of
Gilgamesh, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Dracula and His Brides, the Iron Curtain, the
Noisy Minority, the International Debt, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, the Cloud of
Unknowing, the Birth of a Nation, the Zombies, Attila and His Huns, Nihilism, the Catatonics. the
Thorndale Jag Offs, the Haymarket Bomb, the Head of a Dead Cat, the Shadow Out of Time, the
Sirens of Titan, the Player Piano, the Streets of Laredo, the Space Odyssey, the Blue Moonies, the
Crabs, the Dose, the Grassy Knoll, the Latent Image, the Wheel of Karma, the Communion of Saints,
the City of God, General Indefinite Wobble, the Left-Handed Monkey Wrench, the Thorn in the
Flesh, the Rising Podge, SHA-ZAM, the Miniature Sled, the 23rd Appendix, the Other Cheek, the
Occidental Ox, Ms. and the Chairperson, Cohen Cohen Cohen and Kahn, and the Joint Phenomenon.
On April 29, while Danny Pricefixer listened raptly to Mama Sutra, the deluge descended upon
Igolstadt: Buses, trucks, station wagons, special trains, and every manner of transport except dog
sleds, brought in the Wonders of the Invisible World, Maule's Curse, the Jesus Head Trip, Ahab and
His Amputation, the Horseless Headsmen, the Leaves of Grass, the Gettysburg Address, the Rosy-
Fingered Dawn, the Wine-Dark Sea, Nirvana, the Net of Jewels, Here Comes Everybody, the Pisan
Cantos, the Snows of Yesteryear, the Pink Dimension, the Goose in the Bottle, the Incredible Hulk,
the Third Bardo, Aversion Therapy, the Irresistible Force, MC Squared, the Enclosure Acts,
Perpetual Emotion, the 99-Year Lease, the Immovable Object, Spaceship Earth, the Radiocarbon
Method, the Rebel Yell, the Clenched Fist, the Doomsday Machine, the Rand Scenario, the United
States Commitment, the Entwives, the. Players of Null-A, the Prelude to Space, Thunder and Roses,
Armageddon, the Time Machine, the Mason' Word, the Monkey Business, the Works, the Eight of
Swords, Gorilla Warfare, the Box Lunch, the Primate Kingdom, the New Aeon, the Enola Gay, the
Octet Truss, the Stochastic Process, the Fluxions, the Burning House, the Phantom Captain, the
Decline of the West, the Duelists, the Call of the Wild, Consciousness III, the Reorganized Church of
the Latter-Day Saints, Standard Oil of Ohio, the Zig-Zag Men, the Rubble Risers, the Children of Ra,
TNT, Acceptable Radiation, the Pollution Level, the Great Beast, the Whores of Babylon, the Waste
Land, the Ugly Truth, the Final Diagnosis, Solution Unsatisfactory, the Heat Death of the Universe,
Mere Noise, I Opening, the Nine Unknown Men, the Horse of Another Color, the Falling Rock
Zone, the Ascent of the Serpent, Reddy Willing and Unable, the Civic Monster, Hercules and the
Tortoise, the Middle Pillar, the Deleted Expletive, Deep Quote, LuCiFeR, the Dog Star, Nuthin'
Sirius, and Preparation H.
(But, on April 23, while Joe Malik and Tobias Knight were setting the bomb in Confrontation's
office, the Dealy Lama broadcast a telepathic message to Hagbard Celine saying It's not too late to
turn back and Joe hesitated a moment, blurting finally, "Can we be sure? Can we be really sure?"
Tobias Knight raised weary eyes. "We can't be sure of anything," he said simply. "Celine has popped
up at banquets and other social occasions where Drake was present five times now, and each
conversation eventually got around to the puppet metaphor and Celine's favorite bit about the
unconscious saboteur in everybody. What else can we assume?" He set the timer for 2:30 A.M. and
then met Joe's eyes again. "I wish I could have given George a few more hints," Joe said lamely.
"You gave him too damned many hints as it is," Knight replied, closing the bomb casing.)
On April 1, while God's lightning paraded about UN Plaza and Captain Tequila y Mota was led
before a firing squad, John Dillinger arose from his cramped lotus position and stopped broadcasting
the mathematics of magic. He stretched, shook all over like a dog, and proceeded down the tunnel
under the UN building to Alligator Control. OTO yoga was always a strain, and he was glad to
abandon it and return to more mundane matters.
A guard stopped him at the AC door, and John handed over his plastic eye-and-pyramid card. The
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guard, a surly-looking woman whose picture John had seen in the newspapers as a leader of the
Radical Lesbians, fed the card into a wall slot; it came out again almost at once, and a green light
flashed.
"Pass," she said. "Heute die Welt."
"Morgens das Sonnensystem," John replied. He entered the beige plastic underworld of Alligator
Control, and walked through geodesic corridors until he came to the door marked MONOTONY
MONITOR. After he inserted his card in the appropriate slot, another green light blinked and the
door opened.
Taffy Rheingold, wearing a mini-skirt and still pert and attractive despite her years and gray hair,
looked up from her typing. She sat behind a beige plastic desk that matched the beige plastic of the
entire Alligator Control headquarters. A broad smile spread across her face when she recognized
him.
"John," she said happily. "What brings you here?"
"Gotta see your boss," he answered, "but before you buzz him, do you know you're in another
book?"
"The new Edison Yerby novel?" She shrugged philosophically. "Not quite as bad as what Atlanta
Hope did to me in Telemachus Sneezed."
"Yeah, I suppose, but how did this guy find out so much? Some of those scenes are absolutely true.
Is he in the Order?" John demanded.
"A mind leak," Taffy said. "You know how it is with writers. One of the Illuminati Magi scanned
Yerby and he thought he had invented all of it. Not a clue. The same kind of leak we had when
Condon wrote The Manchurian Candidate." She shrugged. "It just happens sometimes."
"I suppose," John said absently. "Well, tell your boss I'm here."
In a minute he was in the inner office, being effusively greeted by the old man in the wheelchair.
"John, John, it's so good to see you again," said the crooning voice that had hypnotized millions;
otherwise, it was hard, in this aged figure, to recognize the once handsome and dynamic Franklin
Delano Roosevelt.
"How did you get stuck with a job like this?" Dillinger asked finally, after the amenities had been
exchanged.
"You know how it is with the new gang in Agharti," Roosevelt murmured. " 'New blood, new
blood'— that's their battle cry. All of us old and faithful servants are being pushed into minor
bureaucratic positions."
"I remember your funeral," John said wistfully. "I was envious, thinking of you going to Agharti and
working directly with the Five. And now it's come to this . . . Monotony Monitor in Alligator
Control. Sometimes I get pissed with the Order."
"Careful," Roosevelt said. "They might be scanning. And a double agent, such as you are, John, is
always under special surveillance. Besides, this isn't really so bad, considering how they reacted in
Agharti when the Pearl Harbor revelations started coming out in the late forties. I did not handle that
matter too elegantly, you know, and they had a right to demote me. And Alligator Control is
interesting." "Maybe," John said dubiously. "I never have understood this project"
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"It's very significant work," Roosevelt said seriously. "New York and Chicago are our major
experiments in testing the mehum tolerance level. In Chicago we concentrate on mere ugliness and
brutality, but in New York we're simultaneously carrying on a long-range boredom study. That's
where Alligator Control comes in. We've got to keep the alligators in the sewers down to a minimum
so the Bureau of Sanitation doesn't reactivate their own Alligator Control Project, which would be an
opportunity for adventure and a certain natural mehum hunting-band mystique among some of the
young males. It's the same reason we took out the trolley cars: Riding them was more fun than buses.
Believe me, Monotony Monitoring is a very important part of the New York project"
"I've seen the mental-health figures," John said, nodding. "About seventy percent of the people in the
most congested part of Manhattan are already prepsychotic."
"We'll have it up to eighty percent by 1980!" Roosevelt cried, with some of his old steely-eyed
determination. But then he fixed a joint in his ivory holder and, clenching it at his famous jaunty
angle, added, "And we're immune, thanks to Sabbah's Elixir." He quoted cheerfully: " 'Grass does
more than Miltpwn can/ To justify God's ways to man.' But what does bring you here, John?"
"A 'small job,' " Dillinger said. "There's a man in my organization named Malik who is getting a little
too close to the secret of the whole game. I need some help here in New York to set him off on a
snark hunt until after May first I'd like to know who you've got on your staff closest to him."
"Malik," Roosevelt said thoughtfully. "That would be the Malik of Confrontation magazine?" John
nodded, and Roosevelt sat back in his wheelchair, smiling. "This is a lead-pipe cinch. We've got an
agent in his office."
(But neither of them realized that ten days later a dolphin swimming through the rums of Atlantis
would discover that no Dragon Star had ever fallen. Nor could they have guessed how Hagbard
Celine would reevaluate Illuminati history when that revelation was reported to him, and they had no
clue of the decision he would then make, which would change everybody's conspiracies shockingly
and unexpectedly.)
"Here are the five alternate histories," Gruad said, his wise old eyes crinkling humorously. "Each of
you will be responsible for planting the evidence to make one ot these histories seem fairly credible.
Wo Topod, you get the Carcosa story. Evoe, you get the lost continent of Mu." He handed out two
bulky envelopes. "Gao Twone, you get this charming snake story—I want variations of it scattered
throughout Africa and the Near East." He handed out another envelope. "Unica, you get the Urantia
story, but that one isn't to be released until fairly late in the Game." He picked up the fifth envelope
and smiled again. "Kajeci, my love, you get the Atlantis story, with certain changes that make us out
to be the most double-dyed bastards in all history. Let me explain the purpose behind that ..."
And in 1974 the four members of the American Medical Association gazed somberly down at Joe
Malik from his office wall. It looked to be a long day, and there was nothing to anticipate as exciting
as last night had been. There was a thick manuscript in a manila envelope in the IN box; he noticed
that the stamps had been removed. That was doubtless Pat Walsh's work; her kid brother was a stamp
collector. Joe smiled, remembering the diary he'd kept when he was a teen-ager. In case his parents
found it, he always referred to masturbation as stamp collecting. "Collected five stamps today— a
new record." "After five days of no stamps, collected a beauty in several colors. Enormous, but the
negotiations were tiring." Doubtless today's kids, if they kept diaries (they probably used casette tape
recorders), either talked openly about it or considered it too incidental to mention. Joe shook his
head. The Catholic teen-ager he had been in 1946 was no more remote than the crumbling liberal
he'd been in 1968. And yet, in spite of all he'd been through, much of the time he felt that all of the
knowledge didn't make a difference. People like Pat and Peter still treated him as if he were the same
man, and he still did the same job in the same way.
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He took the heavy manuscript out and shook the envelope. Damn it, there was no return envelope.
Well, working at a magazine like Confrontation, whose contributors were mostly radicals and the
kind of kooks who were willing to write for no bread, you didn't really expect them to enclose
stamped self-addressed envelopes. There was a covering letter. Joe sucked in his breath when he saw
the golden apple embossed in the upper left-hand corner.
Hail Eris and Hi, Joe,
Here is a brilliant, original interpretation of international finance called "Vampirism, the
Heliocentric Theory and the Gold Standard." It's by Jorge Lobengula, a really far-out
young Discordian thinker. JAMs don't go in much for writing, but Discordians,
fortunately, do. If you find it worth printing, you may have it at your usual rates. Make
the check payable to the Fernando Poo Secessionist Movement and sent it to Jorge at 15
Rue Hassan, Algiers 8.
Incidentally, Jorge will not be involved in the Fernando Poo coup. He is turning toward
a synergistic economics, which will gradually lead him to see the folly of Fernando Poo
going it alone. And the coup itself, of course, will not be any of our doing. But Jorge
will be a key figure in Equatorial Guinea's subsequent economic recovery—assuming
the world pulls through that particular mess. If you can't use this paper, burn it Jorge has
plenty of copies.
Five tons of flax,
Mal
P.S. The Fernando Poo rebellion may still be one or two years in the future, so don't
jump to the conclusion that the pot is coming to a boil already. Remember what I told
you about the goose in the bottle.
M.
(Down the hall in the lady's room, bolting the door for privacy, Pat Walsh takes her transistorized
transmitter from her pantyhose and broadcasts to the receiver at the Council on Foreign Relations
headquarters half a block east "I'm still writing lots of Illuminati research papers, and they'll give him
plenty of false leads. The big news today is an article on Erisian economics by a Fernando Poo
national. It came with a covering letter signed 'Mal,' and from the context, I feel fairly certain it's the
original— Malaclypse the Elder himself. If not, at last we've got a lead on that damned elusive
Malaclypse the Younger. The envelope was postmarked Mad Dog, Texas . . .")
Joe put down Mal's letter, trying to remember the obscure references to Fernando Poo before the
movie last night. Someone had said something was going to happen there. Maybe he should get a
stringer on the island, or even send somebody over. A malicious grin crossed his face: It might be
interesting to send Peter. First some AUM, then a trip to Fernando Poo. That might fix Peter up.
Joe flipped through the Loberigula manuscript quickly, scanning. There were no fnords. That was a
relief. He had become painfully conscious of them since Hagbard had removed the aversion reflex,
and each fnord had sent a pang through him that was a ghost of the low-grade emergency in which
he had previously lived. He turned back to the first page and began to read in earnest:
VAMPIRISM, THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY AND THE GOLD STANDARD
by Jorge Lobengula Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law
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Joe stopped. That sentence had been used in the Black Mass in Chicago and further back, he knew, it
was the code of the Abbey of Theleme in Rabelais; but there was something else about it that chewed
at his consciousness, something that suggested a hidden meaning. This was not just a first axiom of
anarchism—there was something else there, something more hermetic. He looked back at Mal's
letter: "Remember what I told you about the goose in the bottle."
That was a simple riddle used by Zen Masters in the training of monks, Joe remembered. You take a
newborn gosling and slip it through the neck of a bottle. Month after month you keep it in there and
feed it, until it is a full-grown goose and can no longer be passed through the bottle's neck. The
question is: Without breaking the bottle, how do you get the goose out?
Neither riddle seemed to shed much light on the other.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
How do you get the goose out of the bottle?
"Holy God." Joe laughed. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
The goose gets out of the bottle the same way John Dillinger got out of the "escape-proof" Crown
Point jail.
"Jesus motherfucking Christ," Joe gasped. "It's alive!"
JUST LIKE A TREE THAT'S STANDING BY THE WAAATER WE SHALL NOT WE
SHALL NOT BE MOVED
The only place where all five Illuminati Primi met was the Great Hall of Gruad in Agharti, the thirtythousand-
year-old Illuminati center on the peaks of the Tibetan Himalayas, with a lower-level water
front harbor on the vast underground Sea of Valusia.
"We will report in the usual order," said Brother Gracchus Gruad, pressing a button in the table
before him so his words would automatically be recorded on impervium wire for the Illuminati
archives. "First of all, Fernando Poo. Jorge Lobengula, having decided that the combined resources
of Fernando Poo and Rio Muni can be reallocated so as to increase the per-capita wealth of citizens
of both provinces, has accordingly broken with the Fernando Poo separatists and returned to Rio
Muni, where he hopes to persuade Fang leaders to go along with his schemes for economic
redevelopment. Our plans now center on a Captain Ernesto Tequila y Mota, one of the few
Caucasians left on Fernando Poo. He has good contacts among the wealthier Bubi, the ones who
favor separatism, and he is inordinately ambitious. I don't think we need contemplate a change in
timetable."
"I should hope not," said Brother Marcus Marconi. "It would be such a shame not to immanentize the
Eschaton on May first"
"Well, we can't count on May first," said Brother Gracchus Gruad. "But with three distinct plans
pointing in that direction, one of them is bound to hit. Let's hear from you, Brother Marcus."
"Charles Mocenigo has now reached Anthrax Leprosy Mu. A few more nightmares at the right
moment and he'll be home."
Sister Theda Theodora spoke next. "Atlanta Hope and God's Lighting are becoming more powerful
all the time. The President will be scared shitless of her when the time comes, and he'll be ready to be
even more totalitarian than her, just to keep her from taking over."
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"I don't trust Drake," said Brother Marcus Marconi.
"Of course," said Brother Gracchus Gruad. "But he has builded his house by the sea."
"And he who builds by the sea builds on sand," said Brother Otto Ogatai. "My turn. Our record,
Give, Sympathize, Control, is an international hit. Our next tour of Europe should be an extraordinary
success. Then we can begin, very slowly and tentatively, negotiations for the Wal-purgisnacht
festival. Anyone who tries to develop the idea prematurely, of course, will have to be deflected."
"Or liquidated," said Brother Gracchus Gruad. He looked down the long table at the man who sat by
himself at the far end. "Now you. You've been silent all this time. What do you have to say?"
The man laughed. "A few words from the skeleton at the feast, eh?" This was the fifth and most
formidable Illuminatus Primus, Brother Henry Hastur, the only one who would have the gall to name
himself after a lloigor.
"It is written," he said, "that the universe is a practical joke by the general at the expense of the
particular. Do not be too quick to laugh or weep, if you believe this saying. All I can say is, there is a
serious threat in being to all your plans. I warn you. You have been warned. You may all die. Are
you afraid of death? You need not answer— I see that you are. That in itself may be a mistake. I
have tried to explain to you about not fearing death, but you will not listen. All your other problems
follow from that."
The other four Illuminati Primi listened in cold, disdainful silence and did not reply.
"If all are One," the fifth Illuminatus added significantly, "all violence is masochism."
"If all are One," Brother Otto replied nastily,'"all sex-is masturbation. Let's have no more mehum
metaphysics here."
HARE KRISHNA HARE HARE
"George!"
Then George was here, with Celine, in Ingolstadt. This was going to be tricky. George's head was
bent over an earthenware stein, doubtless full of the local brew.
"George!" Joe called again. George looked up, and Joe was astonished. He had never seen George
like this before. George shook his shoulder-length blond hair to clear it away from his face, and Joe
looked deep into his eyes.
They were strange eyes, eves without fear or pity or guilt, eyes that acknowledged that the natural
state of man was one of perpetual surprise, and therefore could not be greatly surprised by any one
thing, even the unexpected appearance of Joe Malik. What has Celine done to him in the past seven
days? Joe wondered. Has he destroyed his mind or has he—illuminated him?
Actually, it was George's tenth stein of beer that day, and he was very, very drunk.
HARRY ROBOT HARRY HARRY
(Civil liberties were suspended and a state of national emergency declared during a special
presidential broadcast on all channels between noon and 12:30 on April 30. Fifteen minutes later the
first rioting started in New York, at the Port Authority on Forty-first Street, where a mob attempted
to overrun the police and steal buses in which to escape to Canada. It was 6:45 P.M. just then in
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Ingolstadt, and Count Dracula and His Brides were giving forth a raga-rock version of an old Walt
Disney cartoon song . . . And in Los Angeles, where it was 9:45 A.M., a five-person Morituri group,
hurriedly convened, decided to use up all its bombs against police stations immediately. "Cripple the
motherfucker before it's heavy," said their leader, a sixteen-year-old girl with braces on her teeth . . .
Her idiom, in standard English, meant: "Paralyze the fascist state before it's entrenched" . . . and
Saul, trusting the pole-vaulter in the unconscious, was leading Barney and Markoff Chaney into the
mouth of Lehman Cavern . . . Carmel, nearly a kilometer south of them, and several hundred feet
closer to the center of the earth, still clutched his briefcase and its five million green gods, but he did
not move . . . Near him were the bones of a dozen bats he had eaten . . .)
TO BE A BAT'S A BUM THING
A SILLY AND A DUMB THING
BUT AT LEAST A BAT IS SOMETHING
AND YOU'RE NOT A THING AT ALL
Joe Malik, hit by the raga rock as if by an avalanche of separate notes which were each boulders, felt
his body dissolve. Count Dracula wailed it again (YOU'RE NOT A THING AT ALL), and Joe felt
mind crumble along with body and could find no center, no still point in the waves of sound and
energy; the fucking acid was Hagbard's ally and had turned against him, he was dying; even the
words "Hey that cat's on a bummer" came from far away, and his effort to determine if they really
meant him collapsed into an effort to remember what the words were, which imploded into an
uncertainty about what effort he was trying to make, mental or physical, and why. "Because," he
cried out, "because, because—" . . . but "because" meant nothing.
YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A NOTHING NOTHING BUT A NOTHING
"But I can't take acid now," George had protested. "I'm so damned drunk on this Bavarian beer, it's
sure to be a down trip."
"Everybody takes acid," Hagbard said coldly. "Those are Miss Portinari's orders, and she's right. We
can only face this thing if our minds are completely open to the Outside."
"Hey, dig," Clark Kent said. "That French cat eating the popsicle."
"Yeah?" said one of the Supermen.
"It's Jean-Paul Sartre. Who'd ever expect to see him here?" Kent shook his head. "Hope to hell he
stays long enough to hear our gig. Sheee-it, the influence that man has had on me! He should hear it
come back at him in music."
"That's your trip, baby," a second Superman said. "I don't give a fuck what any motherfuckin' honky
thinks about our music."
YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A NOTHING
"Mick Jagger hasn't even played 'Sympathy for the Devil' yet and already the trouble has started," an
English voice drawled . . . Attila and His Huns were trying to do acute bodily damage to the Senate
and the People of Rome . . . Both groups were speeding, and they had gotten into a very intellectual
discussion of the meaning of one of Dylan's lyrics ... A Hun bopped a Roman with a beer stein as
another voice mumbled something about Tyl Eulenspiegel's merry pranks.
YOU'RE NOT A THING AT ALL
Joe had always had the policy at Confrontation that real screwballs should be sent to him for
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interviewing, but the little fat man who came in didn't seem particularly crazy. He just had the bland,
regular, somewhat smallish features of a typical WASP.
"The name is James Cash Cartwright," the fat man said, holding out his hand, "and the subject is
consciousness energy."
"The subject of what?"
"Oh— this here article I have written for you." Cartwright reached into his alligator briefcase and
pulled out a thick sheaf of typewritten paper. It was an odd size, possibly eight by ten. He handed the
manuscript to Joe. "What kind of paper is this?" said Joe. "It's the standard size in England," said
Cartwright. "When I was over there in 1963 visiting the tombs of my ancestors, I bought ten reams
of it. I took the plane from Dallas on November 22, the day Kennedy was shot. Synchronicity. Also,
I sneezed the moment the gunman squeezed. More synchronicity. But about this paper, I've never
used anything else for my writing since then. Kind of gives a man a nice feeling to know that all the
trees that went into my paper were chopped down over ten years ago, and no trees have died since
then to support the proliferation of Jim Cartwright's philosophical foliage."
"That certainly is a wonderful thing," said Joe, thinking how much he loathed ecological moralists.
During the height of the ecology fad, back in 1970 and '71, several people actually had had the nerve
to write Joe saying that ecologically responsible journals like Confrontation had a duty to cease
publication in order to save trees. "Just what fruit have your philosophical researches borne, Mr.
Cartwright?" he asked.
"Golden apples of the sun, silver apples of the moon," said Cartwright with a smile. Joe saw Lilith
Velkor defying Gruad atop the Pyramid of the Eye.
"Well, sir," said Cartwright, "my basic finding is that life energy pervades the entire universe, just as
light and gravity do. Therefore, all life is one, just as all light is one. All energies, you see, are
broadcast from a central source, yet to be found. If four amino acids—adenine, cytosine, guanine,
and thymine—suddenly become life when you throw them together, then all chemicals are
potentially alive. You and me and the fish and bugs are that kind of life made from adenine, cytosine,
guanine, and thymine: DNA life. What we call dead matter is another kind of life: non-DNA-life.
Okay so far? If awareness is life and if life is one, then the awareness of the individual is just one of
the universe's sensory organs. The universe produces beings like us in order to perceive itself. You
might think of it as a giant, self-contained eye."
Joe remained impassive.
Cartwright went on. "Consciousness is therefore also manifested as telepathy, clairvoyance, and
telekinesis. Those phenomena are simply non-localized versions of consciousness. I'm very
interested in telepathy, and I've had a lot of success with telepathic research. These cases of
communication are just further evidence that consciousness is a seamless web throughout the
universe."
"Now wait a minute," said Joe. "Automobiles run on mechanical energy, heat energy, and electrical
energy, but that doesn't mean that all the automobiles in the world are in contact with each other."
"What burns?" said Cartwright, smiling.
"You mean in a car? Well, the gas ignites explosively in the cylinder—"
"Only organic matter burns," said Cartwright smugly. "And all organic matter is descended from a
single cell. All fire is one. And all automobiles do communicate with each other. You can't tell me
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anything about gas or oil. Or cars. I'm a Texan. Did I tell you that?"
Joe shook his head. "Just what part of Texas are you from?"
"Little place called Mad Dog."
"Had a notion you might be. Tell me, Mr. Cartwright, do you know anything about a conspiratorial
organization called the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria?"
"Well, I know three organizations that have similar names: the Ancient Bavarian Conspiracy, the
New Bavarian Conspiracy, and the Conservative Bavarian Seers."
Joe nodded. Cartwright didn't seem to have the facts straight— as Joe knew them. Perhaps the fat
man had other pieces of the puzzle, perhaps fewer pieces than Joe had. Still, if they were different,
they might be useful.
"Each of these organizations controls one of the major TV networks in the U.S.," said Cartwright.
"The initials of each network have been intentionally chosen to refer back to the name of the group
that runs it. They also control all the big magazines and newspapers. That's why I came to you.
Judging by the stuff you've been getting away with printing lately, not only do the Illuminati not
control your magazine, but you seem to have the benefit of some pretty powerful protection."
"So, there are three separate Illuminati groups, and among them they dominate all the
communications media— is that correct?" said Joe.
"That's right," said Cartwright, his face as cheerful as if he were explaining how his wife made ice
cream with a hand freezer. "They dominate the motion-picture industry too. They took a hand in the
making of hundreds of movies, the best known of which are Gunga Din and Citizen Kane. Those two
movies are especially full of Illuminati references, symbols, code messages, and subliminal
propaganda. 'Rosebud,' for instance, is their code name for the oldest Illuminati symbol, the so-called
Rosy Cross. You know what that means." He snickered lewdly.
Joe nodded. "So— you know about 'flowery combat.'"
Cartwright shrugged. "Who doesn't? Dr. Horace Naismith, a learned friend of mine, and head of the
John Dillinger Died for You Society, has written an analysis of Gunga Din, pointing out the real
meaning of the thuggee, the evil goddess Kali, the pit full of serpents, the elephant medicine, the
blowing of the bugle from the top of the temple, and so forth. Gunga Din celebrates the imposition of
law and order in an area terrorized by the criminal followers of a goddess who breeds evil and chaos.
The thuggee are a caricature of the Discordians, and the English represent the Illuminati's view of
themselves. The Illuminati love that movie."
"Sometimes I wonder if we're not all working for them, one way or another," said Joe, trying
deliberately to be ambivalent to see which way Cartwright would move.
"Well, sure we are," said Cartwright. "Everything we do that contributes to a lack of harmony in the
human race helps them. They are forever shaking up society with experiments involving suffering
and death for large numbers of people. For instance, consider the General Slocum disaster on June
15, 1904. Note that 19 plus 04 equals 23, by the way."
Him too? Joe groaned mentally. He's got to be either one of us or one of them, and if he's one of
them, why is he telling me so much?
"You tell me," Cartwright said, "if all consciousness is not one, just how did Joyce happen to pick
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 329 von 470
the very next day for Ulysses, so the General Slocum disaster would be in the newspaper his
characters read? You see, Joyce knew he was a genius, but he never did understand the nature of
genius, which is to be in better touch with the universal consciousness than the average man is.
Anyway, the Illuminati were trying, with the General Slocum disaster, a new, more economical
technique for achieving transcendental illumination—one that would require only a few hundred
sudden deaths instead of thousands. Not that they care about saving lives, you understand, though the
desire might result from the return of the repressed original purpose of the Illuminati, which was
benign."
"Really?" said Joe. "What was the benign purpose?"
"The preservation of human knowledge after the natural catastrophe that destroyed the continent of
Atlantis and the first human civilization, thirty thousand years ago," said Cartwright.
"Natural catastrophe?"
"Yes. A solar flare that erupted just when Atlantis was turned toward the sun. The original Illuminati
were scientists who predicted the solar flare but were scoffed at by their fellows, so they fled by
themselves. The benevolence of those early Illuminati was replaced by elitist attitudes id their
successors, but the benign purpose keeps coming back in the form of factions which arise among the
Illuminati and split off. The factions preserve traditional Illuminati secrecy, but they aim to thwart
the destructiveness of the parent body. The Justified Ancients of Mummu were expelled from the
Illuminati back in 1888. But the oldest anti-Illuminati conspiracy is the Erisian Liberation Front,
which splintered off before the beginnings of the current civilization. Then there's the Discordian
Movement— another splinter faction, but they're almost as bad as the Illuminati. They're sort of like
a cross between followers of Ayn Rand and Scientologists. They've got this guy named Hagbard
Celine, their head honcho. You didn't read about it because the governments of the world were too
scared shitless to do anything about it, but five years ago this Celine character infiltrated the nuclearsubmarine
service of the U.S. Navy for the Illuminati—and stole a sub. He's a supersalesman, Celine
is— he could talk old H. L. Hunt right out of half his oil wells. He was a Chief Petty Officer. First he
converted about half the crew with the most incredible line of bullshit you've heard since Tim Leary
was in his prime. Then he put some kind of drug in the ship's air supply, and while they were under
the influence he converted most of the others. The ones that were stubborn he just blew out through
the torpedo tubes. Nice guy. Now, mind you, this sub was armed with Polaris missiles. So the next
thing Ce-line does is get himself off to someplace in the ocean where they can't find him and
blackmail the fucking governments of the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and Red China to each give him ten
million dollars in gold, and after he gets the thirty million he will scuttle his missiles. Otherwise he
will dump 'em on a city of one of those three countries."
"Was Celine still working for the Illuminati at that point?"
"Hell, no!" Cartwright snorted. "That's not how they play the game. They like to operate stealthily,
behind the throne-room curtains. They work with poison and daggers and things, not H-bombs. No,
Celine told the Illuminati to go fuck themselves, and there was nothing they could do but grind their
teeth. He's been operating like a pirate ever since. And I'll tell you something else. There's more than
one world leader, including the Illuminati leaders, that hasn't been able to sleep at night because of
what else Hagbard Celine has on that submarine."
"What's that, Mr. Cartwright?"
"Well, see, the U.S. Government did a very dumb thing. They weren't satisfied to have just nuclear
weapons aboard their Polaris submarines for a while. They also thought the subs should be armed
with the other kind of weapon— bugs."
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Joe felt himself go cold, and the back of his neck prickled. Let others worry about the nuclear
devastation all they want. Disease— the extinction of the human race through the spread of some
manmade plague for which man would have no remedy— was his particular nightmare. Maybe
because at the age of seven he'd very nearly died of polio; though he'd been healthy ever since, the
fear of fatal illness had been impossible to shake.
"This Hagbard Celine— these Discordians— have a bacteriological weapon aboard the submarine?"
"Yeah. Something called Anthrax Tau. All Celine has to do is release it in the water and within a
week the whole human race would be dead. It spreads faster'n a two-dollar whore on Saturday night.
Any living thing can carry it. But one nice thing about it— it's fatal only to man. If Celine ever gets
crazy enough to use it— and he's pretty crazy these days, and getting worse all the time— it'll give
the planet a fresh start, so to speak. Some other life form could evolve into sentience. Now, if we
have a nuclear war, or if we pollute the planet to death, there won't be any life left worth talking
about. Might be the best thing that ever happened if Hagbard Celine shot that Anthrax Tau down the
tube. It would sure prevent worse things from happening."
"If there were no one left alive," said Joe, "from whose point of view would it be the best thing that
ever happened?"
"Life's," said Cartwright. "I told you, all life is one. Which gets me back to my manuscript. I'll just
leave it with you. I realize it's much longer than what you usually publish, so feel free to excerpt
from it as you please, and to pay me at your usual rates for whatever you publish."
That evening Joe stayed till nine at his office. He was, as usual, a day late getting copy to the
typesetter on his editorial column and the letters column. These were two parts of the magazine that
he felt only he could do right, and he refused to delegate either job to Peter or anyone else on the
staff. First he ran the letters through his typewriter, shortening and pointing them up, then adding
brief editorial answers where called for. After that he put aside his notes and research for the editorial
he'd planned for this August issue, and instead he wrote an impassioned plea that each reader make
himself personally responsible for doing something about the menace of bacteriological warfare.
Even if what Cartwright had told him was a crock, it reminded him of his long-held conviction that
germ warfare was far more likely to put the quietus to the human race than nuclear weapons. It was
just too easy to unleash. He envisioned Hagbard in his submarine spewing the microbes of alldestroying
plague out into the seas, and he shuddered.
His briefcase weighed down by Cartwright's manuscript, which he'd decided to take home with him,
he stood in the lobby of his office building, gazing gloomily at the tanks full of tropical fish in the
window of the pet store. One tank had, as an ornament, a china model of a sunken pirate ship. It
made Joe think again of Hagbard Celine. Did he trust Hagbard or didn't he? Was it possible to really
believe in a Hagbard with the Captain Nemo psychosis, brooding over tubes and jars full of bacteria
cultures, one hairy finger hovering tentatively over a button that would send a torpedo full of
Anthrax Tau germs out into the inky waters of the Atlantic? Within a week all humans would die,
Cartright had said. And it was hard to think that Cartwright was lying, since he knew so much about
so many other things.
When Joe got home he put on his favorite Museum of National History record, The Language and
Music of the Wolves, and lit up a joint He liked listening to the wolves when he was high, and trying
to understand their language. Then he took Cartwright's manuscript out of his briefcase and looked at
the title page. It didn't say a word about consciousness energy, indeed, it referred to a subject Joe
found much more interesting:
HOW THE ANCIENT BAVARIAN CONSPIRACY PLOTTED AND CARRIED OUT
THE ASSASSINATIONS OF MALCOLM X, JOHN F. KENNEDY, MARTIN
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LUTHER KINO, JR., GEORGE LINCOLN ROCKWELL, ROBERT KENNEDY,
RICHARD M. NECON, GEORGE WALLACE, JANE FONDA, GABRIEL CONRAD,
AND HANK BRUMMER
"Well," said Joe, "I'll be fucked."
"It was quite a trip," said Hagbard Celine.
"You're quite a tripper," Miss Portinari replied. "You really did Harry Coin very well. Probably just
the way he'll do it, when he gets up the nerve to come see me."
"It was simpler than doing my own trip," Hagbard said wearily. "My guilt is much deeper, because I
know more. It was easier to take his guilt trip than to take my own."
"And it's over? Your fur no longer bristles?"
"I know who I am and why I'm here. Adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine."
"How did you ever forget?"
Hagbard grinned. "It's easy to forget. You know that"
She smiled back. "Blessed be, Captain."
"Blessed be," he said.
Returning to his stateroom, he was still subdued. The vision of the self-begotten and the serpent
eating its own tail had broken the lines of word, image, and emotional energy that were steering him
toward the Dark Night of the Soul again— but resolving his personal problem did not rescue the
Demonstration or help him cope with the oncoming disaster. It merely freed him to begin anew. It
merely reminded him that the end is the beginning and humility is endless.
It merely, merrily, turned the Wheel another Tarot-towery connection ...
He realized he was still tripping a little. That was readily fixed: Harry Coin was tripping, and he
wasn't Harry Coin right now.
Hagbard, remembering again who he was and why he was there, opened his stateroom door. Joe
Malik sat in a chair, under an octopus mural, and regarded him with a level glance.
"Who killed John Kennedy?" Joe asked calmly. "I want a straight answer this time, H.C."
Hagbard relaxed into another chair, smiling gently. "That one finally registered, eh? I told John, all
those years ago, to emphasize that you should never trust anyone with the initials H.C., and yet
you've gone on trusting me and never noticing."
"I noticed. But it seemed too wild to take seriously."
"John Kennedy was killed by a man named Harold Canvera who lived on Fullerton Avenue in
Chicago, near the Seminary Restaurant, where you and Simon first discussed his theories of
numerology. Dillinger had moved back to that neighborhood for a while in the late fifties, because he
liked to go to the Biograph Theatre for old times' sake, and Canvera was his landlord. A very sane,
ordinary, rather, dull individual. Then, in Dallas in 1963, John saw him blow the President's head off
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before Oswald or Harry Coin or the Mafia gun could fire." Hagbard paused to light a cigar. "We
investigated Canvera afterward, like scientists investigating the first extraterrestrial life form. You
can imagine how thorough we were. He had no politics at all at the time, which puzzled the hell out
of us. It turned out that Canvera had put a lot of money into Blue Sky; Inc., a firm that made devices
for landing on low-gravity planets. That was back in the very early fifties. Finally, Elsenhower's
hostility to the space program drove Blue Sky to the bottom off the board, and Canvera sold out at a
terrible loss. Then Kennedy came in and announced that the U.S. was going toi put a man on the
moon. The stocks he'd sold were suddenly worth millions. Canvera's brain snapped— that was all.
Killing Kennedy and getting away with it turned him schizzy; finally. He went for spiritualism for a
while, and then later joined White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism, one the really paranoid anti-
Illuminati groups, and ran a telephone message service giving WHORE propaganda."
"And nobody else ever suspected?" Joe asked. "Canvera is still there in Chicago, going about his
business, just another face on the street?"
"Not quite. He was shot a few years ago. Due to you."
"Due to me?"
"Yes. He was one of the subjects in the first AUM test. He subsequently made the mistake of
knocking up the daughter of a local politician. It appears that the AUM made him susceptible to
libertine ideas."
WE'RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT
"You sound very convincing, and I almost believe you," Joe said slowly. "Why, all of a sudden?
Why no more put-ons and runarounds?"
"We're getting to the chimes at midnight," Hagbard replied simply, with a Latin shrug. "The spell is
ending. Soon the coach turns back to a pumpkin, Cinderella goes back to the kitchen, everybody
takes their masks off, and the carnival is over. I mean it," he added, his face full of sincerity. "Ask
me anything and you get the truth."
"Why are you keeping George and me apart? Why do I have to skulk around the sub like a wanted
fugitive and eat with Calley and Eichmann? Why don't you want George and me to compare notes?"
Hagbard sighed. "The real explanation for that would take a day. You'd have to understand the whole
Celine System first. In the baby talk of conventional psychology, I'm taking away George's father
figures. You're one: his first and only boss, an older man he trusts and respects. I became another
very quickly, and that's one of the thousand and one reasons I turned the guru-hood over to Miss
Portinari. He had to confront Drake, the bad father, and lose you and me, the good fathers, before he
could really learn to ball a woman. The next step, if you're curious, is to take the woman away from
him. Temporarily," Hagbard added quickly. "Don't be so jumpy. You've been through a large part of
the Celine System, and it hasn't killed you. You're stronger because of it, aren't you?"
Joe nodded, accepting this, but shot the next question immediately. "Do you know who bombed
Confrontation?"
"Yes, Joe. And I know why you did it"
YOU'RE NOT A THING AT ALL
"Okay, then, here's the payoff, and your answer better be good. Why are you helping the Illuminati to
immanentize the Eschaton, Hagbard?"
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"It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time, as a very wise man once said."
"Jesus," Joe said wearily. "I thought I had crossed that pom asinorum. When I figured out how you
get the goose out of the bottle in the Zen riddle— you do nothing and wait for the goose to peck its
way out, just like a chick pecks its way out of an egg— I realized 'Do what thou wilt' becomes 'the
whole of the law' by a mathematical process. The equation balances when you realize who the 'thou'
is, as distinguished from the ordinary 'you.' The whole fucking works, the universe—all of it alive in
the same way we're alive, and mechanical in the same way we're mechanical. The Robot. The one
more trustworthy than all the Buddhas and sages. Oh, Christ, yes, I thought I understood it all. But
this, this . . . this stone fatalism— what the hell are we going to Ingolstadt for, if we can't do
anything?"
"The coin has two sides. It's the only coin that comes up at this time, but it still has two sides."
Hagbard leaned forward intensely. "It's mechanical and alive. Let me give you a sexual metaphor,
since you usually hang out with New York intellectuals. You look at a woman across a room and you
know you're going to bed with her before the night is over. That's mechanical: Something has
happened when your eyes met But the orgasm is organic; what it will be like, neither of you can
predict. And I know, just as the Illuminati know, that immanentization is going to happen on May
first because of a mechanical process Adam Weishaupt started on another May first two centuries
ago, and because of other processes other people started before then and since then. But neither I nor
the Illuminati know what form immanentization will take. It doesn't have to be hell on earth. It can
be heaven on earth. And that's why we're going to Ingolstadt."
THREE O'CLOCK TWO O'CLOCK ONE O'CLOCK ROCK
I became a cop because of Billie Freshette. Well, I don't want to jive you— that wasn't the whole
reason. But she sure as hell was one bodacious big part of the reason, and that's the curious thing
about what finally happened, and how Milo Flanagan assigned me to infiltrate the Lincoln Park
anarchist group, getting me in right up to my black ass in all that international intrigue and yoga-style
balling with Simon Moon. But maybe I should start over from the beginning again, from Billie
Freshette. I was a little kid and she was an old woman— it was in the early 1950s, you see (Hassan i
Sabbah X was operating in the open then, going around the South Side preaching that the greatest of
the White Magicians had just died recently in England and now the age of the Black Magicians was
beginning; everybody thought he was one stone-crazy stud), and my father was a cook in a restaurant
on Halsted. He pointed her out to me on the street once (it must have been just a while before she
went back to the reservation in Wisconsin to die). "See that old woman, child? She was John
Dillinger's girl friend."
Well, I looked, and I saw she was really heavy and together and that whatever the law had done to
her never broke her, but I also saw that sorrow hung around her like a dark halo. Daddy went on and
told me a lot more about her, and about Dillinger, but it was the sorrow that got printed all over every
cell in my little baby brain. It took years for me to figure it out, but what it really meant, as an omen
or conjure, was that she was basically just like the women of the black gang leaders on the South
Side, even if she was an Indian. There's just one way for a black in Chicago, and that's to join a
gang— Solidarity Forever, as Simon would say— but I dug that there was only one gang that was
really safe, the biggest gang of all, Mister Charlie's boys, the motherfucking establishment
I guess every black cop has that in the back of his head, before he finds out that we never really can
join mat gang, not as full members anyway. I found out quicker, being not just black but female. So I
was in the gang, the baddest and heaviest gang, but I was always looking for something better, the
impossible, the boss gimmick that would get me off the Man's black-and-white chessboard entirely
into some place where I was myself and not just a pawn being moved around at Charlie's whim.
Otto Waterhouse never had that feeling, at least not until near the end of the game. I never did get
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inside his head enough to know what was going on there (he was a real cop and got into my head
almost as soon as we met, and I could always feel him watching me, waiting for the time when I
would round on Charlie and go over to the other side), so the best I can do in making him is to say
that he was no Tom in the ordinary sense: He didn't screw blacks for the Man, he screwed blacks for
himself; it was strictly his own trip.
Otto was my drop after I got assigned to underground work. We met in a place that I could always
have an excuse to visit, a rundown law firm called Washington, Weishaupt, Budweiser and Kief, on
23 North Clark. Later, for some reason I was never told, they changed the name to Ruly, Kempt,
Sheveled and Couth, and then to Weery, Stale, Flatt and Profitable, and to keep up the front they
actually did hire a couple of lawyers and did some real law work for a corporation called Blue Sky,
Inc.
On April 29, still harboring a cargo of doubt about Hag-bard, Joe Malik decided to try the simplest
method of Tar-ot divination. Concentrating all his energy on the question,' he cut the deck and
out one card that would reveal Hagbard Celine's true nature, if the divination worked. With a sinking
heart, he saw that he had come up with the Hierophant Running the mnemonics Simon had taught
him, Joe quickly identified this figure with the number five, the Hebrew letter Vau (meaning "nail"),
and the traditional interpretation of a false show: a hypocrisy or a trick. Five was the number of
Grummet, the destructive and chaotic end of a cycle. Vau was the letter associated with quarrels, and
the meaning "nail" was often related to the implement of Christ's death. The card was telling him that
Hag-bard was a hypocritical trickster aiming at destruction, a murderer of the Dreamer-Redeemer
aspect of humanity. Or, taking a more mystical reading, as was usually advisable with the Tarot,
Hagbard only seemed to be these things, and was actually an agent of Resurrection and Rebirth—as
Christ had to die before he could become the Father, as (in Vedanta) the false "self must be
obliterated to join the great Self. Joe swore. The card was only reflecting his own uncertainty. He
rummaged in the bookshelf Hagbard had provided for his stateroom and found three books on the
Tarot. The first, a popular manual, was absolutely useless: It identified the Hierophant with the letter
of religion in contrast to the spirit, with conformity, and with all the plastic middle-class values
Hagbard conspicuously lacked. The second (by a true adept of the Tarot) just led him back to his
own confused reading of the card, remarking that the Hierophant is "mysterious, even sinister. He
seems to be enjoying a very secret joke at somebody's expense." The third work raised more doubts:
It was Liber 555, by somebody named Mordecai Malignatus, which vaguely reminded Joe that the
old East Village Other chart of the Illuminati conspiracy showed a "Mordecai the Foul" in charge of
the Sphere of Chaos— and "Mordecai Malignatus" was a fair Latinization of "Mordecai the Foul."
Mordecai, Joe remembered, was, according to that half-accurate and half -deceptive chart, in dual
control (along with Richard Nixon, then living) of the Elders of Zion, the House of Rothschild, the
Politburo, the Federal Reserve System, the U.S. Communist Party, and Students for a Democratic
Society. Joe flipped the pages to see what the semimythical Mord had to say about the Hierophant.
The chapter was brief; it was in "The Book of Republicans and Sinners," and said:
5 Vau
(nail) THE HIEROPHANT
They nailed Love
to a Cross
Symbolic of their
Might
But Love was
undefeated
It simply didn't
fight.
Five stoned men were in a courtyard when an elephant entered.
The first man was stoned on sleep, and he saw not the elephant but dreamed instead
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(At eight o'clock in Ingolstadt an unscheduled group called the Cargo Cult managed to get the mike
and began blasting out their own outer-space arrangement of an old children's song:
SHE'LL BE COMING 'ROUND THE MOUNTAIN WHEN SHE COMES
SHE'LL BE COMING 'ROUND THE MOUNTAIN WHEN SHE COMES
And, in Washington, where it was still only two in the afternoon, the White House was in flames,
while the National Guard machine-gunned an armed mob crossing the Mall in front of the
Washington Monument, a single finger pointing upward in an eloquent and vulgar gesture which
only the Illuminati knew meant "Fuck you!" ... In Los Angeles, where it was eleven in the morning,
the bombs started to go off in police stations . . . And in Lehman Cavern, Markoff Chaney
disgustedly pointed out a graffito to Saul and Barney: HELP STAMP OUT SIZEISM: TAKE A
MIDGET TO LUNCH.
"You see?" he demanded. "That's supposed to be funny. It's not funny at all. Not one damned bit")
SHE'LL BE DRIVING SIX WHITE HORSES
SHE'LL BE DRIVING SIX WHITE HORSES
SHE'LL BE DRIVING SIX WHITE HORSES WHEN SHE COMES
On April 29 Hagbard invited George to join him on the bridge of the Leif Erikson. They had been
sailing through a smooth-walled tubular passage that was completely filled with water and was both
underground and below sea level It had been built by the Atlanteans and not only had survived the
catastrophe but had been maintained in good condition for the next thirty thousand years by the
Illuminati. There was even a salt lock, located, roughly, under Lyon, France, which served to keep
the salt water of the Atlantic out of the further reaches of the passage and the underground freshwater
Sea of Valusia. The underground waterways were connected with many lakes in Switzerland,
Bavaria, and eastern Europe, Hagbard explained, and if salt water were found in all of those lakes the
existence of the weird subsurface world of the Illuminati would be suspected. As the submarine
approached a huge circular hatchway barring the passage, Hagbard turned off the devices that
rendered the craft indetectable. Immediately the enormous round metal door swung toward them.
"Won't the Illuminati know we've activated this machinery?" said George.
"No. This works automatically," said Hagbard. "It's never occurred to them that anyone else might
use this passageway."
of things unreal to those awake.
The second man was stoned on nicotine, caffeine, DDT, carbohydrate excess,
protein deficiency, and the other chemicals in the diet which the Illuminati have
enforced upon the half-awake to keep them from fully waking. "Hey," he said,
"there's a big, smelly beast in our courtyard."
The third stoned man was on grass, and he said, "No, dads, that's the Ghostly Old
Party in its true nature, the Dark Nix on the Soul," and he giggled in a silly way.
The fourth stoned man was tripping on peyote, and he said, "You see not the
mystery, for the elephant is a poem written in tons instead of words," and his eyes
danced.
The fifth stoned man was on acid, and he said nothing, merely worshipping the
elephant in silence as the Father of Buddha.
And then the Hierophant entered and drove a nafl of mystery into all their hearts,
saying, "You are all elephants!"
Nobody understood him.
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"But they know you could. And you guessed wrong about their spider-ships being able to detect
you."
Hagbard whirled on George, a hairy arm lifted to punch him in the chest. "Shut up about the fucking
spider-ships! I don't want to hear any more about the spider -ships! Portinari's running the show now.
And she says it's safe. Okay?"
"Commander, you're out of your fucking mind," George said firmly.
Hagbard laughed, his shoulders slumping slightly in relaxation. "All right. You can get off the sub
any time you want to. Well just open the hatch and let you swim out."
"You're out of your fucking mind, but I'm stuck with you," said George, clapping Hagbard on the
shoulder.
"You're either on the sub or off the sub," said Hagbard. "Watch this."
The Leif Erikson had sailed through the round metal gateway, which closed behind it Here the
ceiling of the underwater passage was about fifty feet higher than it had been in the section they just
left, and the tunnel was only partially filling with water. The air seemed to be coming from vents in
the ceiling. There was another metal hatchway in the distance down the tunnel.
"This lock is pretty big," George said. "The Illuminati must have sailed some enormous submarines
through here."
"And animals," said Hagbard.
The hatchway ahead of them opened, and fresh water came pouring in. The water level in the lock
rose until it I reached the ceiling, and the Leif Erikson's engines turned over and began to propel it
forward once more. Now George is writing in his diary again:
April 29
And what the hell does it mean to say that life shouldn't change too rapidly? How fast is
evolution? Do you measure it in terms of lifetime? A year is more than a lifetime to
many kinds of animals, while seventy years is an hour in the lifetime of a sequoia. And
the universe is only ten billion years old. How fast do ten billion years go? To a god they
might go very fast indeed. They might all happen at once. Suppose the lifetime of your
typical basic god was a hundred quintillion years. The whole lifetime of this universe
would be to him no more than the amount of time it takes us to watch a movie.
So, from the point of view of a god or of the universe, things evolve very quickly. It's
like one of those Walt Disney films where you watch a plant growing before your eyes
and the whole cycle from bud to fruit takes about two minutes. To a god, life is a single
organism proliferating in all directions all over the earth, and now on the moon and
Mars, and the whole process from the first of the protobionts to George Dorn and fellow
humans takes no longer than...
Hagbard's voice over the intercom jolted him out of his reverie. "Come on back up, George. There's
more to see."
This time Mavis was on the bridge with Hagbard. As George entered, Hagbard withdrew his hand
from her left breast in an unhurried movement. George wanted to kill Hagbard, but he was thankful
that he hadn't seen Mavis touching Hagbard in any sexual way. That would have been past bearing.
He might have tested his new-found courage by taking a poke at Hagbard, and Goddess only knows
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what karate or yoga or magic would be the response. Besides, Mavis and Hagbard must be balling all
the time. Who else but Hagbard would a woman like Mavis take for her regular lover? Who else but
Hagbard could satisfy her?
Mavis greeted George with a comradely hug that made the entire front of his body ache. Hagbard
pointed to an inscription carved into the wall of the cave. There was a row of symbols that George
didn't recognize, but above them was something quite familiar: a circle with a downward-pointing
trident carved inside it.
"The peace symbol," said George. "I didn't know it was that old."
"In the days when it was put up there," said Hagbard, "it was called the Cross of Lilith Velkor, and
its meaning is simply that anyone who attempts to thwart the Illuminati will suffer from the most
horrible torture the Illuminati can devise. Lilith Velkor was one of the first of their victims. They
crucified her on a revolving cross that looked very much like that"
"You told me it wasn't really a peace symbol," said George, looking wistfully back at the carving,
"but I didn't know what you meant."
"There was a Dirigens-grade Illuminatus in Bertrand Russell's circle who put it in somebody's mind
that the circle and trident would be a good symbol for the Aldermaston marchers to carry. It was very
cleverly and subtly done. If the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament had thought about it, what did
they need any kind of a symbol for? But Russell and his people fell for it What they didn't know was
that the circle-and-trident had been a traditional symbol of evil among left-hand-path Satanists for
thousands of years. So many right-wingers are secret left-hand-path magicians and Satanists that of
course they spotted the symbol for what it was right away. That made them think the Illuminati were
behind the peace movement, which threw them off the track, and they accused the peaceniks of using
a Satanist symbol, which to a small extent discredited the peace movement. A cute gambit."
"Why is it there on the wall?" said George.
"The inscription warns the passerby to purify his heart because he is about to enter the Sea of
Valusia, which belongs exclusively to the Illuminati. Traveling across the Sea of Valusia, you come
eventually to the underground port of Agharti, which was the first Illuminati refuge after the
Atlantean catastrophe. We are emerging into the Sea of Valusia right now. Watch."
Hagbard gestured, and George watched, open-mouthed, as the walls of the cave that closed around
them fell away. They were sailing out of the tunnel, but what they seemed to be entering was an
infinite fog. The television cameras and their laser wave-guides penetrated just as far into this
lightless ocean that they were about to navigate as they had into the Atlantic, but this ocean was
neither blue nor green, but gray. It was a gray that seemed to extend infinitely in all directions, like
an overcast sky. It was impossible to gauge distance. The farthest depth of the gray around them
might be hundreds of miles away, or it might be right outside the submarine.
"Where's the bottom?" he asked.
"Too far below us to see," said Mavis. "The top of this ocean is just a little above the level of the
bottom of the Atlantic."
"You're so smart," said Hagbard, pinching her buttock and causing George to flinch.
"Don't pay any attention to him, George," said Mavis. "He's a little bit nervous, and it's making him
silly."
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"Shut the fuck up," said Hagbard.
Beginning to feel anxious himself, wondering if the noble mind of Hagbard Celine was being
overthrown by the weight of responsibility, George turned to look out at the empty ocean. Now he
saw that it wasn't quite empty. Fish swam by, some large, some small, many of them grotesque. All
were totally eyeless. An octopoidal monster with extremely long, slender tentacles drifted past the
submarine, feeling for its prey. There was a covering of fine hairs on the tips of the tentacles. A small
fish, also blind, swam close enough to one tentacle to set up a current that disturbed the hairs.
Instantly the octopus's whole body moved in that direction, the disturbed tentacle wrapped itself
around the hapless fish, and several others joined in to help scoop it up. The octopus devoured the
fish in three bites. George was glad to see that at least the blood of these creatures was red.
The door behind them opened, and Harry Coin stepped out onto the bridge. "Morning, everybody. I
was just wondering if I might find Miss Mao up here."
"She's doing her stint in Navigation right now," said Hagbard. "But stay here and have a look at the
Sea of Valusia, Harry."
Harry looked all around, slowly and thoughtfully, then shook his head. "You know, there's times
when I start to think you're doing this."
"What do you mean, Harry?" asked Mavis.
"You know," Harry waved a long, snakelike hand, "doing this, like a science-fiction movie. You've
just got us in an abandoned hotel somewheres, and you've got a big engine in the basement that
shakes the whole place, and here you've got some movie cameras, only they point at the screen
instead of away from you, if you know what I mean."
"Rear projection," said Hagbard. "Tell me, Harry, what difference would it make if it wasn't real?"
Harry thought a moment, his chinless face sour. "We wouldn't have to do what we think we have to
do. But even if we don't have to do what we think we have to do, it won't make any difference if we
do it Which means we should just go ahead."
Mavis sighed. "Just go ahead."
"Just go ahead," said Hagbard. "A powerful mantra."
"And if we don't go ahead," said George, "it doesn't matter either. Which means that we just do go
ahead."
"Another powerful mantra," said Hagbard. "Just do go ahead."
George noticed a small speck in the distance. As it got closer, he reccognized it He shook his head.
Was there no end to the surrealism he'd been subjected to in the last six days? A dolphin wearing
scuba gear!
"Hi, man-friends," said Howard's voice over the loudspeaker on the bridge. George cast a glance at
Harry Coin. The former assassin was standing open-mouthed and limp with astonishment
"Greetings, Howard," said Hagbard. "How goes it with the Nazis?"
"Dead, sleeping, whatever it is they are. I have a whole porpoise horde— most of the Atlantean
Adepts— watching them."
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"And ready to perform other tasks as needed, I hope," said Hagbard.
"Ready indeed," said Howard. He turned a somersault.
"All right," said Harry Coin softly. "All right," he said more firmly. "It's a talking fish. But why the
hell is it wearing an oxygen tank and breathing through a fucking mask?"
"I see we have a new friend on the bridge," said Howard. "I got the mask from Hagbard's on-shore
representative at Fernando Poo. After all, a porpoise has to breathe air. And there is no surface in
most of this underground ocean. It's water all the way to the top of the cavernous chambers that
contain it. The only place I can get air near here is by swimming up to the top of Lake Totenkopf."
"The Lake Totenkopf monster," said George with a laugh.
"We'll moor the submarine in Lake Totenkopf later today," said Hagbard. "Howard, I'd like you and
your people to stand by tonight and tomorrow night. Tomorrow night be ready to do a lot of hard
physical work. Meanwhile, stay out of the way of the Nazis— the protection they're under is
particularly aimed at sea animals, since that was the presumed greatest danger to them. We'll have
oxygen equipment as needed for any of your people who want it. Tell them to try to avoid surfacing
on the lake unless absolutely necessary. We don't want to attract more attention than we have to."
"I salute you in the name of the porpoise horde," said Howard. "Hail and farewell." He swam away.
A little later, sailing on, they saw in the distance an enormous reptile with four paddles for
swimming and a neck twice the length of its body. It was in hot pursuit of a school of blind fish.
"The Loch Ness monster," said Hagbard, and George remembered his little joke about Howard's
surfacing in Lake Totenkopf. "One of Gruad's genetic experiments with reptiles," Hagbard went on.
"He was really queer for reptiles. He filled the Sea of Valusia with these plesiosaurlike things. Blind,
of course, so they could navigate in darkness. Think about that— eyes are a liability under certain
conditions. Graud figured monsters like that would be another protection against anybody finding
Agharti. But the Leif Erikson is too big for Nessie to tangle with, and she knows it."
At last there was a column of yellow light ahead. This was the light let into the Sea of Valusia by
Lake Totenkopf. Hagbard explained that the lake was simply a place where the ceiling of rock over
the Sea of Valusia had been soft and unstable enough to collapse. The resulting hole, being at sea
level, filled with water. Debris falling down through the bottom of the lake had formed a mountain
below the place where the roof of the Sea of Valusia was punctured.
"The Jesuits, of course, always knew that Lake Totenkopf connected with the Sea of Valusia and
thus made possible easy contact with Agharti," Hagbard said. "That's why, when they gave
Weishaupt the assignment of founding an overt branch of the Illuminati, they sent him to Ingolstadt,
which is right by Lake Totenkopf. And there's the mountain under the lake."
It loomed ahead of them, dark and forbidding. As the submarine sailed over it, George saw a cloud
of dolphins circling in the distance. The mountain top had been sheared off in a fashion that seemed
too precise to be natural; it formed a plateau about two miles long and one mile wide. There were
what appeared to be dark squares on this gray plateau. The submarine swooped down, and George
saw that the squares were huge formations of men. In a moment they were hovering over the army,
like a helicopter observing troops on parade. George could clearly see the black uniforms, the green
tanks with black-and-white crosses painted on them, the long, dark, upjutting snouts of big guns.
They stood there silent and immobile, thousands of feet below the surface of the lake.
"That's the weapon the Illuminati plan to use to immanentize the Eschaton?" asked George. "Why
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don't we destroy them now?"
"Because they're under a protective biomystic field," said Hagbard, "and we can't. I did want you to
see them, though. When the electrical, Astral, and orgonomic vibrations of the American Medical
Association, amplified by the synergetic clusters of sound, image, and emotional energy of all these
young people responding to the beat, bring that Nazi legion back to life, it will call for nothing less
than the appearance on the field of battle of the goddess Eris Herself to save the day."
"Hagbard," George protested disgustedly. "Are you telling me Eris is real? Really real and not just an
allegory or symbol? I can't buy that any more than I can believe Jehovah or Osiris is really real."
But Hagbard answered very solemnly, "When you're dealing with these forces or powers in a
philosophic and scientific way, contemplating them from an armchair, that rationalistic approach is
useful. It is quite profitable then to regard the gods and goddesses and demons as projections of the
human mind or as unconscious aspects of ourselves. But every truth is a truth only for one place and
one time, and that's a truth, as I said, for the armchair. When you're actually dealing with these
figures, the only safe, pragmatic and operational approach is to treat them as having a being, a will,
and a purpose entirely apart from the humans who evoke them. If the Sorcerer's Apprentice had
understood that, he wouldn't have gotten into so much trouble."
SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS
SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS
SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS WHEN SHE COMES
Approaching the outskirts of the crowd, Fission Chips saw a group of musicians who were obviously
English from their dress and hair style. Their name, he saw on the biggest drum, was Calculated
Tedium, and the guitar play had a canteen strapped to his hip. It reminded 00005 of how thirsty he
was, and he asked, "Pardon me, do you know where I could get some water or a soft drink?"
"Take a snort from my canteen," the guitarist said affably, passing it over. He pointed to the west.
"See that geodesic plywood dome there? It's a bleeding giant Kool Aid station set up by the
Kabouters and guaranteed to hold out even if the crowd doubles in size before this is over. I just
filled the canteen from there, so it's fresh. You can get more over there any time you need it."
"Thanks," 00005 said warmly, taking a long, cold, delightful swallow.
He had a very low threshhold for LSD. The world began to seem brighter, stranger, and more
colorful within only a few minutes.
(The joker was actually Rhoda Chief, the vocalist who sang with the Heads of Easter Island, and who
had inspired much admiration in the younger generation—and much horror in the older— when she
named her out-of-wedlock baby Jesus Jehovah Lucifer Satan Chief. A former Processene and
Scientologist, currently going the Wicca route, the buxom Rhoda was renowned through show biz
for "giving head like no chick alive," a reputation which often provoked certain Satanists on the
Linda Lovelace for President Committee to send very deadly vibes in her direction, all of which
bounced off due to her Wicca shield. She was also possibly the greatest singer of her generation, and
firmly believed that most human problems would be solved if the whole world could be turned on to
acid. She had been preparing for the Ingolstadt festival for several months, buying only the topquality
tabs from the most reliable dealers, and she had crept into the geodesic Kool-Aid station only
a few moments earlier, dumping enough pure lysergic acid diethylamicte to blow the minds of the
population of a small country. Actually, the idea had been subtly planted in her consciousness by the
leader of her Wiccan, an astonishingly beautiful woman with flaming red hair and smoldering green
eyes who had once played a starring role in a Black Mass celebrated by Padre Pederastia at 2323
Lake Shore Drive. This woman called herself Lady Velkor, and often made jokes about her
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memories of 18th-century Bavaria, which Rhoda assumed were references to reincarnation.) On
April 10, while Howard made his discovery in the ruins of Atlantis and Tlaloc grinned in Mexico
D.F., Tobias Knight, in his room at the Hotel Pan Kreston in Santa Isobel, concluded a broadcast to
the American submarine in the Bight of Biafra. "The Russkies and Chinks have completed their
withdrawal, and Generalissimo Puta is definitely friendly to our side, besides being popular with
both the Bubi and the Fang. My work is definitely finished, and I'll await orders to return to
Washington." "Roger. Over and out."
(Frank Sullivan, capitalizing on his only real asset, was operating in Havana as a Cuban Superman,
using the name Papa Piaba, when the Brotherhood spotted his resemblance to John Dillinger.
"Gosh," he said when they made the offer, "five thousand dollars just to take two ladies to a movie
one night? And it's only a practical joke, you say?" "It'll be a very funny joke," Jaicapo Mocenigo
promised him. And the Smithsonian acquired Mr. Sullivan's asset as one of their most interesting
relics.)
WE'LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER
(Hagbard was accompanied by Joe Malik when he returned to the stateroom. "You go to the beer hall
in Munich," he was saying, "and steal any item, anything at all, as long as it's obviously old enough
to have been there the night he tried the Putsch. Then you rejoin the rest of us in Ingolstadt.
Understood?")
WE'LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER
Lady Velkor, wearing a green peasant blouse and green hotpants, looked around the geodesic Kool-
Aid dome. A man in a green turtleneck sweater and green slacks caught her eye, and she walked over
to him, asking, "Are you a turtle?"
"You bet your sweet ass I am," he answered eagerly and so she had failed to make contact— and
owed this oaf a free drink also. But she smiled pleasantly and concealed her annoyance.
WE'LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER WHEN SHE COMES
Robinson and Lehrman of the Homicide Department actually started the last phase of the operation. I
was in New York to see Hassan i Sabbah X about a new phase of Laotian opium operation (I had just
come from Chicago, after staging that conversation with Waterhouse for Miss Servix's benefit), and I
decided to check with them for those little nuances that can't go into an official report We met in
Washington Square and found a bench far enough from the chess nuts to give us some privacy.
"Muldoon is on to us," Robinson told me right off. He was wearing a beard; I figured that meant he
was currently in a Weather Underground group, since he was too old to pass for under twenty-one
and get into Morituri.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
He made the usual reply: "Who's ever sure of anything in this business? But Barney is pure cop
through and through," he added, "and his instincts are like dowsing rods. Everybody on the force
knows we've infiltrated them by now, anyway. They even make jokes about it 'Who's the CIA man in
your department?'— that kind of thing."
"Muldoon is on to us, all right," Lehrman agreed. "But he's not the one I worry about."
"Who is?" I brushed my walrus mustache nervously; being the first pentuple agent in the history of
espionage was starting to grind me down. I really wasn't sure which of my bosses should hear about
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this, although the CIA certainly had to be told, since for all I know Robinson and Lehnnan might be
reporting to them twice, having another contact as a fail-safe check on my own integrity.
"The head of Homicide North," Lehnnan said. "An old geezer named Goodman. He's so damned
smart, I sometimes wonder if he's a double agent for the Eye themselves. His mind jumps ahead of
facts just like an Adeptus Exemptus in the Order."
I looked up at the statue of Garibaldi, remembering the old NYU myth that he would pull his sword
the rest of the way out of the scabbard if a virgin ever walked through Washington Park. "Tell me
more about this Goodman," I said.
("Check out the pair on that chick," a Superman said enthusiastically.
("Watermelons," a second Superman agreed enthusiastically. "And you know how us cullud folk dig
watermelons," he added, licking his lips.)
("Skin!" the first cried.)
("Skin!" the second agreed.)
(They slapped palms, and Clark Kent came out of his reverie. Having sampled the Kool-Aid a while
earlier, he was beginning to float a little, although not yet aware of what was happening—he just felt
a rather unusual tug of memory from his days as an anthropologist, and was deeply concerned with a
new insight about the relationship between the black Virgin of Guadalupe, the Greek goddess
Persephone, and his own sexual proclivities—and he came out of it with a start, looking at the
woman whose breasts had inspired such reverence.)
("Son of a bitch," he said piously, his mouth spreading in a grin.)
Rebecca Goodman left the house at 3 P.M., hauling a shopping cart and walking past the garage. The
nearest supermarket was a good ten minutes on foot, and big enough to keep her busy for a half-hour
finding what she wanted and getting through one of those checkout lines. I slipped out of the car and
walked right to the back of the house, perfectly secure from neighboring eyes in my Bell Telephone
overalls.
The kitchen door had an easy slip-lock, and I didn't even need my keys. A playing card did the job,
and I was in.
My first thought was to head for the bedroom— the old man from Vienna was right, and that's where
you'll find the real clues to a man's character— but one chair in the kitchen stopped me. The vibes
were so strong that I closed my eyes and psychometered it according to the difficult Third Alko of
the A:.A:>. It was Rebecca herself: She had sat there and thought about shooting heroin. It faded
fast, before I could read what had stopped her.
The bedroom almost knocked me over when I found it "Who would have thought the old man had so
much hot blood in him?" I paraphrased, backing out It was a profanation
to read too much in there, and what I did scan was enough. As Miss Mao would say, this man
was Tao-Yin (Beta prime in the terminology of the I). No wonder Rob inson kept talking about his
"intuition." '
The living room had a statue of the Mermaid of Copenhagen that stopped me. I read it and chuckled;
Lord, the hangups we all have.
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One wall was a built-in bookcase, but Rebecca seemed to be the reader in the family. I started
scanning experimentally and found Saul's vibes on a shelf of detective stories and a Scientific
American anthology of mathematical and logical puzzles. The man had no concept of his own latent
powers, and thought only in terms of solving riddles. Sherlock Holmes, without even the violin and
the dope for relief from all that cortical activity. Everything else went into his marriage, that
hothouse bedroom upstairs.
No; there was a sketchpad on the coffee table. His, according to the aura.
I flipped pages rapidly: all detailed, precise, perfectly naturalistic. Mostly faces: criminals he had
dealt with professionally, all touched with a perception and compassion that he kept out of his work
hours. Trees in Central Park; Nudes of Rebecca, adoration in every line of the pencil. A surprising
face of a black kid, with some Harem slum building in the background—another touch of unexpected
compassion. Then a switch—the first abstract. It was a Star of David, basically, but he had started
adding energetic waves coming out of it, and the descending triangle was shaded—somewhere, in
the back of his head, he had been working out the symbolism, and coming amazingly close to the
truth. More faces of obvious criminal types. A scene in the Catskills, with Rebecca reading a book
under a tree— something wrong, gloom and fear in the shading. I closed my eyes and concentrated:
The picture came in with a second woman ... I opened my eyes, sweating. It was his first wife, and
she had died of cancer. He was afraid of losing Rebecca too, but she was young and healthy. Another
man. He thought she might leave him for a younger man. Well, that was the key, then. I flipped a
few more pages and saw a unicorn—some more of the unconscious work that went into that erotic
Star of David.
A quick scan of Rebecca's books then. Mostly anthropology, mostly African. I took one off the shelf
and held it
Eros again, thinly sublimated. The other part of the key. As Hassan i Sabbah X once remarked to me,
"Breathes there a white woman with soul so dead, she never yearned for a black in her bed?"
I returned everything to its place carefully and headed for the back door. I stopped in the kitchen to
read the chair again, since relapse is as much a part of the syndrome in heroin addiction as in blacklung
disease. This time I found what stopped her. If I say love, I'll sound sentimental, and if I say
sex, I'll sound cynical. I'll call it pair bonding and sound scientific.
Slipping back into my car, I checked the time elapsed: seventeen minutes. It would have taken
several hours to unearth as many facts by ordinary detection methods, and they would have been
different, less significant, facts. A:.A:. training has certainly made all my other jobs easier.
There was only one remaining problem: I didn't want to kill anybody at this point, and a bombing
would only get Muldoon in. Even having Malik disappear might only bring in Missing Persons.
Then I remembered the dummies used by the clothier on the eighteenth floor, right above the
Confrontation office. Burn the dummy just right before setting the bomb and it might work ... I drove
back toward Manhattan whistling "Ho -Ho-Ho, Who's Got the Last Laugh Now?"
(The bomb went off at 2:30 A.M. one week later. Simon, leaving O'Hare Airport, where it was 1:30
A.M., decided he still had time to get to the Friendly Stranger and meet that cute lady cop who had
so cleverly infiltrated the Nameless Anarchist Horde. He could get her into bed easily enough, since
female spies always expect men to reveal secrets when they're in the dreamy afterglow with their
guard down; he would teach her some sexual yoga, he decided, and see what secrets she might slip.
But he remembered the midnight conference at the UN building after the bomb was set, and Malik's
grim words: "If we're right about this, we might all be dead before Woodstock Europa opens next
week.")
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"Are you a turtle?" Lady Velkor asks again, approaching another man in green. "No," he says, "I
have no armor." She smiles as she murmurs, "Blessed be," and he replies, "Blessed be" ... Doris
Horus heard the voice behind her say "And how's the Miskatonic Messalina?" and her heart leaped,
not believing it, but when she turned it was him, Stack . . . "Jesus," one Superman said to another,
"does he personally know all the good-looking white chicks in the world?" . . . The Senate and the
People of Rome were still tussling with Attila and His Huns, but Hermie "Speed King" Trismegistos,
drummer with the Credibility Gap, watched placidly from only a few feet away, seeing them as a
very complicated, almost mathematical ballet; he was concerned only with determining whether they
illustrated the eternal warfare of Set and Osiris or the joining of atoms to make molecules. He knew
he was on acid, but, what the hell, that must have been the Kool-Aid, another of Tyl Eulenspiegel's
merry pranks . . .
The submarine rose above the plateau, lifting into the waters of Lake Totenkopf. Mooring it well
below the surface on the shore opposite Ingolstadt, Hagbard and about thirty of his crew entered
scuba launches and buzzed to the surface. Parked on a road beside the lake was a line of cars, led by
a magnificent Bugatti Royale. Hagbard grandly ushered George, Stella, and Harry Coin into the
enormous car. George was shocked to see that the chauffeur was a man whose face was covered with
gray fur.
It was a long drive around the lake to the town of Ingolstadt. It was very much as George had
imagined it, all turrets and spires and Gothic towers mixed with modern-Martian edifices straight
from Mad Avenue, but most of the buildings looking like they had been put up in the days of Prince
Henry the Fowler.
"This place is full of beautiful buildings," said Hagbard. "The big Gothic cathedral in the center of
town is called the Liebfrauenminister. There's another rococo church called the Maria Victoria—I've
always wanted to get 'stoned on acid and go look at the carvings, they're so intricate."
"Have you been here before, Hagbard?" Harry asked.
"On scouting missions. I know where all the good places are. Tonight you're all going to be my
guests at the Schlosskeller in Ingolstadt Castle."
"We have to be your guests," said George. "None of us have any money."
"If you have flax," said Hagbard, "you can pay in flax at the Schlosskeller."
They went first to the Donau Hotel, which Hagbard said was the most modern and comfortable in
Ingolstadt, where Hagbard had reserved almost all the rooms for his people. With every hotel in
Ingolstadt bursting at the seams, it had taken a huge advance payment to bring this off. The hotel's
staff jumped to attention when they saw the line of cars with Hagbard's splendid Bugatti in the
vanguard. Even in a town crowded with celebrities, overrun with wealthy rock musicians and
affluent rock fans from all over the world, a machine like Hagbard's commanded respect.
George, following Hagbard into the lobby, suddenly found himself face to face with two ancient,
bent German men. One, with a long white mustache and a lock of white hair that fell over his
forehead, said, in heavily accented English, "Get out of my way, degenerate Jewish Communist
homosexual." The other old man winced and said something placating to his colleague in a soft
voice. The first man waved his hand in dismissal, and they tottered toward the elevators together.
Several more old men joined them as George watched, too surprised to be angry. Here, though, in the
fatherland of that kind of mentality, the old man's hatred seemed historical curiosity to him more
than anything else. Doubtless such men as that had actually seen Hitler in the flesh.
Hagbard grandly took a handful of room keys from the desk clerk. "For simplicity's sake, I've
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assigned a man and a woman to each room," he said as he passed them out. "Choose your roommates
and switch around as you like. When you get up to your rooms you'll find suitable Bavarian peasant
costumes laid out on the bed. Please put them on."
Stella and George went upstairs together. George unlocked the door and surveyed the large room
with its two double beds. On top of one lay a man's outfit of lederhosen with silk shirt and knee
socks, while on the other bed was a woman's peasant skirt, blouse, and vest.
"Costumes," Stella said. "Hagbard's really crazy." She shut the door and tugged at the zipper of her
one-piece gold knit pantsuit She had nothing on underneath. She smiled as George regarded her with
admiration.
When the group was assembled in the lobby, only Stella looked good in costume. Of the men,
Hagbard looked most natural and happy in lederhosen—which was, perhaps, why he'd had the notion
of dressing that way. Long, skinny Harry looked ridiculous and uncomfortable, but his buck-toothed
grin showed he was trying to be a good sport.
George looked around. "Where's Mavis?" he asked Hagbard.
"She didn't come with us. She's back minding the store." Hagbard raised his arm imperiously. "On to
the Schlosskeller."
The Ingolstadt Castle, a battlemented medieval building built on a hill, had a magnificent restaurant
in what had formerly been either a dungeon or a wine cellar or both. Hagbard had reserved the entire
cellar for the evening.
"Here," he said, "we'll rally our forces around us, have some fun, and prepare for the morrow." He
seemed in an agitated, almost giddy mood. He took his place at the center of a big table in a
blackened carved chair that looked like a bishop's throne. On the wall behind him was a famous
painting. It depicted the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV barefoot in the snow at Canossa, but with
one foot on the neck of Pope Gregory the Great, who lay prone, his tiara knocked off, his face
ignominiously buried in a snowdrift.
"The story goes that this was commissioned by the notorious Bavarian jester Tyl Eulenspiegel when
he was at the height of his fortunes," Hagbard said. "Later, when he was old and penniless, he was
hanged for his anarchistic attitudes and his low Bavarian sense of humor. So it goes."
SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS
("There he is!" Markoff Chancy whispers tensely. Saul and Barney lean forward, peering at the
figure ahead of them. About five-seven, Saul estimates, and Carmel was five-two, according to the
R&I packet they had lifted from Las Vegas police headquarters . . . But who else would be down
here, so far from the route of the guided tours? . . . Saul's hand moves toward his gun, but the other
figure whirls on them, flashing a pistol, and shouts, "Hold it right there, all of you!")
SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS
"Oh Christ," Saul says disgustedly. "Hail Eris, friend— we're on the same side." He holds up his
hands, empty. "I'm Saul Goodman and this is Barney Muldoon, both formerly of the New York
Police Force. This is our friend Markoff Chancy, a man of great imagination and a true servant of
Goddess. All hail Discordia, Twenty-three Skidoo, Kallisti, and do you need any more passwords,
Mr. Sullivan?"
"Gosh," Markoff Chaney says. "You mean that's really John Dillinger?"
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 346 von 470
SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS WHEN SHE COMES
(Rhoda Chief, vocalist and apprentice witch, sampled some of her own Kool-Aid early in the
evening. She swore until the day she died that what happened in Ingolstadt that Walpurgisnacht was
nothing less than the appearance of a giant sea serpent in Lake Totenkopf. The beast, she insisted,
turned, took its own tail in its mouth, and gradually dwindled to a dot, giving off good vibes and
flashes of Astral Light as it diminished.)
There were many empty places at the big table when the Discordians sat down. Hagbard seemed in
no hurry to order dinner. Instead he called for round after round of the local beer, of which enormous
stocks had been laid in to prepare for the great rock festival. George, Stella, and Harry Coin sat
together near Hagbard, and George and Harry discussed sodomy objectively, between long,
thoughtful pauses and deep drinking. Hagbard sent the beer around so fast that George frequently
had to swill down a whole stein in a minute or two, just to keep up. Various people came in and sat
down at empty places at the table. George shook hands with a man around thirty who introduced
himself as Simon Moon. He had a lovely black woman with him named Mary Lou Servix. Simon
immediately began telling everybody about a fantastic novel he had been reading on the plane
coming over. George was interested until he found out that the book was Telemachus Sneezed, by
Atlanta Hope. He didn't see how anyone could take trash like that seriously.
Just around the time George was finishing his tenth stein of Ingolstadt's fabled beer and feeling quite
woozy, a man who looked very familiar floated into his line of vision. The man wore a brown suit
and horn-rimmed glasses, and his gray hair was crew-cut.
"George!" the man shouted.
"Yes, it's me, Joe," said George. "Of course it's me. That's you, Joe, isn't it?" He turned to Harry
Coin. "That's the guy who sent me down to Mad Dog to investigate." Harry laughed.
"My God," said Joe. "What's happened to you, George?" He looked vaguely frightened.
"A lot of things," said George. "How many years has it been since I've seen you, Joe?"
"Years? It's been seven days, George. I saw you just before you caught the plane to Texas. What
have you been doing?"
George shook his finger. "You were holding out on me, Joe. You wouldn't be here now if you didn't
know a lot more than you claimed to when you sent me to Mad Dog. Maybe good old Hagbard can
tell you what I've been doing. There's good old Hagbard looking over at us from his end of the table
right now. What do you say, Hagbard? Do you know good old Joe Malik?"
Hagbard lifted a huge, ornamented stein of beer, which the management of the Schlosskeller had
provided him as an honored guest. It was adorned with elaborate bas-reliefs of pagan woodland
scenes, including tumescent satyrs pursuing chubby nymphs.
"How you doing, Malik?" called Hagbard.
"Great, Hagbard, just great," said Joe.
"We're gonna save the earth, aren't we, Joe?" Hagbard yelled. "Gonna save the earth, that right?"
"Jesus saves," said George. He began to sing:
I've got the peace that passeth understanding
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 347 von 470
Down in my heart,
Down in my heart,
Down in my heart.
I've got the peace that passeth understanding
Down in my heart—
Down in my heart—to—stay!
Hagbard and Stella laughed and applauded. Harry Coin shook his head and muttered, "Takes me
back. Sure does take me back."
Joe took a few steps away from George, moving so he could face Hagbard across the table. "What do
you mean, save the earth?"
Hagbard looked at him stupidly, his mouth hanging open. "If you don't know that, why are you
here?"
"I just want to know— we're going to save the earth, but are we going to save the people?"
"What people?"
"The people that live on the earth."
"Oh— those people," said Hagbard. "Sure, sure, we're gonna save everybody."
Stella frowned. "This is the silliest conversation I've ever heard."
Hagbard shrugged. "Stella, honey, why don't you go on back to the Leif Erikson?"
"Well, fuck you, Charley." Stella stood up and flounced off, her peasant skirt swinging.
At that moment a little wall-eyed man tapped Joe on the shoulder. "Sit down, Joe. Have a drink. Sit
down with George and me."
"I've seen you before," said Joe.
"Perhaps. Come, sit down. Let's have some of this good Bavarian beer. It has great integrity. Have
you ever tried it? Waitress!" The newcomer snapped his fingers impatiently, all the while staring
owlishly at Joe through lenses as thick as the bottoms of beer glasses. Joe let himself be led to a
chair.
"You look exactly like Jean-Paul Sartre," said Joe as he sat down. "I've always wanted to meet Jean-
Paul Sartre."
"Sorry to disappoint you, then, Joe," said the man. "Put your hand into my side."
"Mal, baby!" Joe cried, attempting to embrace the apparition and ending up hugging himself while
George, bleary-eyed, stared and shook his head. "Am I glad to see you here," Joe went on. "But how
come you're doing Jean-Paul Sartre instead of your hairy taxi driver?"
"This is a good cover," said Malaclypse. "People would expect Jean-Paul Sartre to be here, covering
the world's biggest rock festival from an existentialist point of view. On the other hand, this is Lon
Chaney, Jr., country, and if I started showing up as Sylvan Martiset, with a face covered with fur, I'd
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 348 von 470
have a mob of peasants carrying torches looking for me all over town."
"I saw a hairy chauffeur today," said George. "Do you suppose it was Lon Chancy, Jr.?"
"Don't worry, George," said Malaclypse with a smile. "The hairy people are on our side."
"Really?" said Joe. He looked around. Hagbard Celine was the hairiest person at the table. His
fingers, hands, and bare forearms were black with hair. The stubble of his beard came high up on his
cheekbones, just below his eyes. On the back of his neck the hair didn't stop growing, but continued
down into his collar. Stripped, Joe thought, the man must look like a bear rug. Many of the other
people at the table had long hair or Afro haircuts, and the men had beards and mustaches. Joe
remembered Miss Mao's hairy armpits. The peasant blouses on the women in this room hid their
armpits from examination. George, of course, had that shoulder-length blond hair that made him look
like a Giotto angel. But, Joe thought, what about me? I'm not hairy at all. I keep my hair in a crew cut
because I prefer it that way. Where does that leave me?
"What difference does hair make?" he asked Malaclypse.
"Hair is the most important thing in this society," said George. "I've tried repeatedly to explain that to
you, Joe, and you've always never listened. Hair is the whole thing."
"Hair in this society at this moment is a symbol," said Malaclypse. "However, there is a real aspect to
hair which enables me, for instance, to look around this room and surmise that many of these people
are enemies of the Illuminati. You see, all humans were once fur-bearing."
Joe nodded. "I saw that in the movie."
"Oh, yes, you saw When Atlantis Ruled the Earth, didn't you?" said Malaclypse. "Well, hairlessness,
you'll recall, was Gruad's peculiarity. Most of the people whom the Illuminati permitted to live— and
to eventually become recivilized, Illuminati-style— were mated with or raped by descendants of
Gruad. But the fur-bearing gene, found in all humans before the catastrophe, has not disappeared. It
is quite common in enemies of the Illuminati. My suspicion is that if we knew the histories of ELF
and the Discordians and the JAMs, we'd find that they go back to Atlantean origins and preserve to
some extent the genes of Gruad's foes. I'm inclined to believe that hairy people, in whom the genes
of Atlanteans other than Gruad predominate, are inherently predisposed to anti-Illuminati activities.
Conversely, people who work against the Illuminati are also likely to favor lots of hair. These factors
have given rise to legends about werewolves, vampires, beast-men of all kinds, abominable
snowmen, and furry demons. Note the general success of the Illuminati propaganda campaign to
portray all such hirsute beings as fearsome and evil. The propensity for hairiness among anti-
Illuminati types also explains why lots of
hair is a common characteristic of Bohemians, beatniks, leftists generally, scientists, artists, and
hippies. All such people tend to make good recruits for the anti-Illuminati organizations."
"Sometimes we make it sound as if the Illuminati were the only menace on earth," said Joe. "Isn't it
equally possible that people who are opposed to the Illuminati may be dangerous?"
"Oh, yes indeed," said Malaclypse, "Good and evil are two ends of the same street. But the street was
built by the Illuminati. They had excellent reasons, from their viewpoint, to preach the Christian
ethic to the masses, you know. What is John Guilt?"
Joe remembered what he'd said to Jim Cartwright several years ago: Sometimes I wonder if we're not
all working for them, one way or another. He hadn't meant it at the time, but now he realized it was
probably true. He might be doing the Illuminati's work right now, when he thought he was saving the
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 349 von 470
human race. Just as Celine might be doing the will of the Illuminati while thinking that he was
preserving the earth.
George, bleary-eyed and smiling, said, "Where'd you meet Sheriff Jim, Joe?"
Joe stared at him. "What?"
"Hairlessness is the reason why Gruad and his successors were partial to reptiles," said Malaclypse,
adjusting his thick glasses. "They had a real feeling of kinship. One of their symbols was a serpent
with its tail in its mouth, which was intended to refer both to Gruad's Ophidian assassins and to his
other experiments with reptilian lifeforms."
Joe, still shaken by George's question, yet not wanting to probe further in that direction, said, "All
kinds of myths involving serpents crop up in all parts of the world."
"All of them go back to Gruad," said Malaclypse. "The serpent symbol and the Atlantean catastrophe
gave rise to the myth that Adam and Eve, tempted by the serpent, fell into misery when they acquired
the knowledge of good and evil. Just as Atlantis fell through the moralistic ideology of Gruad the
serpent-scientist. Then there's the old Norse myth of the World Serpent with its tail in its mouth that
holds the universe together. The Illuminati serpent symbol was also the origin of the brazen serpent
of Moses, the plumed serpent of the Aztecs, and their legend of the eagle devouring the snake, the
caduceus of Mercury, St. Patrick casting the snakes out of Ireland, various Baltic tales of the serpent
king, legends of dragons, the monster guarding the fabulous treasure at the bottom of the Rhine, the
Loch Ness monster, and a whole raft of other stories connecting serpents with the supernatural. In
fact, the name 'Gruad' comes from an Atlantean word that translates variously as 'worm,' 'serpent,' or.
'dragon,' depending on context."
"I'd say he was all three," said Joe. "From what I know."
George said, "I saw the Loch Ness monster today. Hagbard called it a she, which surprised me. But
this is the first I've heard about this serpent business. I thought the Illuminati symbol was an eye in a
pyramid."
"The Big Eye is their most important symbol," said Malaclypse, "but it isn't the only one. The Rosy
Cross is another. But most widely copied is the serpent symbol. The eye in the pyramid and the
serpent are often seen in combination. Together they represent the sea monster Leviathan, whose
tentacles are depicted as serpents and whose central body is shown as an eye in a pyramid. Since
each of Leviathan's tentacles is said to have an independent brain, that's not half bad. The swastika,
which was a pretty important symbol around these parts some decades ago, was originally a stylized
drawing of Leviathan and his many tentacles. Early versions of it have more than four hooks, and
they often include a triangle, sometimes even an eye-and-triangle, in the center. A common
transitional form is a triangle with the sides extended and then hooked to form tentacle shapes. There
are two tentacles for each of the three angles, which yields a twenty-three. Polish archeologists found
a swastika painted in a cave. The drawing dated back to Cro-Magnon times, not long after the fall of
Atlantis, and there were twenty-three swirling tentacles around a beautifully executed pyramid with
an ocher eye in its center."
George held his breath. Mavis had come into the room. Instead of the peasant-skirt outfit Hagbard
had decreed, she was wearing what might have been called hot lederhosen, a very short, very tight
pair of leather breeches that made her legs look fantastically long and underlined the round curves of
her ass.
"Wow— that's some attractive woman," said Joe.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 350 von 470
"Don't you know her?" asked George. "Well, that puts me one up on you. You're going to meet her."
Mavis came over, and George said, "Mavis, this is Joe Malik, the guy who put me in the cell you got
me out of."
"That's a little unfair," Joe said, taking Mavis's hands with a smile, "but I did send him down to Mad
Dog."