The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wilson

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 2:59 am

Part 4 of 4

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 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 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[/quote]

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.

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 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?"

"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.

"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.

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 O'Hare 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 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."
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 3:02 am

Part 1 of 4

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


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.

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! Tekeli-li!" 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 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 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 ivory-grained 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.

"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 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 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 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. 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."

"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 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 wealthiest-looking 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 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 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 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 space-time 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 double-bind tactic out of which the Dealy Lama later developed Operation Mindfuck.
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 3:03 am

Part 2 of 4

"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 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?"

"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."

"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 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.

"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.

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 ..."

"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 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."

"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!"

"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.

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?"

"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.

"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.

"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 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.
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 3:07 am

Part 3 of 4

"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 Ma-lik."

"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 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.)

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 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 high-ranking 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 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.

"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 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 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-orange-yellow-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 hollow-cheeked 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 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 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."
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 3:07 am

Part 4 of 4

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.

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 semi-visible 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.

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 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 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.

"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 well-organized 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 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.

("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 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 . . .
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 3:14 am

Part 1 of 4

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 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 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 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"

"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.

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


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 thirty-thousand-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."

"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 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 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 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 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 nuclear-submarine 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."

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 all-destroying 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 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.
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 3:14 am

Part 2 of 4

"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 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?"

"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 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 picked 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 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.


(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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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 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 top-quality 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 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 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 profan-

ation 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.

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 black-lung 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.")

"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 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?"

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.
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 3:17 am

Part 3 of 4

"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
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 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 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.

"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."

"Excuse me," said Mavis. "I want to talk with Hagbard." She disengaged her hand and walked away. Both Joe and George looked stricken. Malaclypse merely smiled.

Just then a tall, stern-looking black man came into the room. He too was wearing Bavarian peasant costume. He went up to Hagbard and shook hands.

"Hey, it's Otto Waterhouse, the infamous killer cop and cop killer!" roared Hagbard, swilling down beer from his huge stein. Waterhouse looked pained for a moment, then sat down and surveyed the room through narrowed eyes.

"Where's my Stella?" he demanded gruffly. George felt his hackles rise. He knew he had no right of possession where Stella was concerned. But then, neither did this guy. Exclusive possession seemed the one type of sexual relationship not practiced among the Discordians and their allies. There was a kind of tribal, general love among them which didn't prevent anybody from sleeping with anybody else. An unsympathetic observer might call it "promiscuity," but that word, as George understood it, meant using another's body for sex without feeling anything for the person you were physically involved with. The Discordians were all too close, too concerned about each other as people, for the word "promiscuity" to fit their sex lives. And George loved them all: Hagbard, Mavis, Stella, the other Discordians, Joe, even Harry Coin, maybe even Otto Waterhouse, who had just appeared.

Mavis said, "Stella's gone down to the submarine, Otto. She'll join us at the proper time."

Hagbard suddenly lurched to his feet. "Quiet!" he roared. A silence fell around the smoky room. People stared at Hagbard curiously.

"We're all here now," he said. "So, I got an announcement to make. I want you to all join me in drinking to an engagement announcement."

"Engagement?" somebody called incredulously.

"Shut the fuck up," Hagbard snarled. "I'm talking, and if anybody interrupts me again I'll throw them out. Yes, I'm talking about an engagement. To be married. Day after tomorrow, when the Eschaton has been immanentized and all of this is over— lift your steins— Mavis and I will be married aboard the Leif Erikson by Miss Portinari."

George sat there still for a moment, absorbing it, looking at Hagbard. He looked from Hagbard to Mavis, and tears started to well up in his eyes. He stood and lifted his stein.

"Here's to ya, Hagbard!" he said, and he drew his arm back in a sidearm motion so as not to spill any of the beer and then let the whole stein fly at Hagbard's head. Laughing, Hagbard swayed to one side, a movement so casual it didn't appear that he was ducking. The stein struck the painted head of Emperor Henry IV. The painting apparently had been done on a heavy board, because the stein smashed to bits without marking it. A waiter rushed forward to wipe the beer away, looking reproachfully at George.

"Sorry," said George. "Hate to damage a work of art. You should have kept your head in place, Hagbard. It would have been less of a loss." He took a deep breath and roared, "Sinners! Sinners in the hands of an angry God! You are all spiders in the hand of the Lord!" He held out his hand, palm upward. "And he holds you over a fiery pit!" George turned his palm over. He noticed suddenly that everyone in the room was silent and looking at him. Then he passed out, falling into the arms of Joe Malik.

"Beautiful," said Hagbard. "Exquisite."

"Is that what you meant by taking the woman away from him?" said Joe angrily as he eased George into a chair. "You're a sadistic prick."

"That's only the first step," said Hagbard. "And I said it was temporary. Did you see the way he threw that stein? His aim was perfect. He would have brained me if I hadn't known it was coming."

"He should have," said Joe. "You mean you were' lying about you and Mavis getting married? You were just saying that to bug George?"

"He certainly was not," said Mavis. "Hagbard and I have both had it with this catch-as-catch-can single life. And I'll never find another man who more perfectly fits my value system than Hagbard. I don't need anybody else." As if to prove that she meant what she said, she knelt abruptly and kissed Hagbard's hairy left instep.

"A new mysticism," Simon cried. "The Left-Foot Path."

Joe looked away, embarrassed by the gesture; then another thought crossed his mind, and he looked back. There was something about the scene that stirred a memory in him— but was it a memory of the past or of the future?

"What can I say?" Hagbard asked, grinning. "I love her."

More food arrived, and Harry Coin leaned over to ask, "Hagbard, are you dead sure that this goddess, Eris, is real and is going to be here tonight, just as solid as you and me?"

"You still have doubts?" Hagbard asked loftily. "If you have seen me, you have seen Our Lady." And he made a campy gesture.

The man really is going ape, Joe thought. "I can't eat any more," he said, motioning the waiter away and feeling dizzy.

Hagbard heard him and shouted, "Eat! Eat, drink, and be merry. You may never see me again, Joe. Somebody at this table is going to betray me, didn't you know that?"

Two thoughts collided in Joe's brain: He knows; he is a Magician and He thinks he's Jesus; he's nuts. But just then George Dorn woke up and said, "Oh, Jesus, Hagbard, I can't take acid."

Hagbard laughed. "The Morgenheutegesternwelt. You're ahead of the script, George. I hadn't started to hand the acid out yet." He took a bottle from his pocket and dumped a pile of caps on the table.

Just then, Joe distinctly heard a rooster crow.

Cars, except for official cars and the vehicles of the performers, their assistants, and the festival staff, were banned within ten miles of the festival stage. Hagbard, George, Harry Coin, Otto Waterhouse, and Joe pushed their way through shuffling crowds of young people. A VW camper carrying Clark Kent and His Supermen rolled past. Next a huge, black, 1930s-vintage Mercedes slowly made its way past cheering kids. It was surrounded by a square of motorcyclists in white overalls to keep eager fans away. Joe shook his head in admiration at the gleaming supercharger pipes, the glistening hand-rubbed black lacquer, and the wire-spoked wheels. The landau top of the car was up, but, by peering inside, Joe could see several crew-cut blond heads. A blond, girl suddenly put her face to the window and stared out expressionlessly.

"That's the American Medical Association in that Mercedes," George said.

"Hey," said Harry Coin, "we could pitch a bomb into their car and get all of them right now."

"You'd kill a lot of other people, too, and leave a lot of unfinished business hanging fire," said Hagbard, looking after the Mercedes, which slowly disappeared down the road ahead of them. "That's a nice machine. It belonged to Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, one of Hitler's ablest generals."

An elephantine black bus carrying the AMA's equipment followed close behind the Mercedes. Silently it trundled past.

WE'LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER

WE'LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER


The Closed Corporation was generally recognized to be the most esoteric and experimental of all rock groups; this was why their following, although fanatical, was relatively small. "It's heavy, all right," most of the youth culture said, "but is it really rock?" The same question, more politely worded, had often been asked by interviewers, and their leader, Peter "Pall" Mall, had a standard answer: "It's rock," he would say somberly, "and on this rock I will build a new church." Then he would giggle, because he was usually stoned during interviews. (Reporters made him nervous.) In fact, the religious tone was rather prominent when the Closed Corporation appeared in concert, and the chief complaint was that nobody could understand the chants that accompanied some of the more interplanetary chords they employed. These chants derived from the Enochian Keys which Dr. John Dee had deciphered from the acrostics in the Necronomicon, and in modern times had been most notably employed by the well-known poet Aleister Crowley and the Reverend Anton Lavey of the First Church of Satan in San Francisco. On the night of April 30 the Closed Corporation ritually sacrificed a rooster within a pentagram (it gave one last despairing crow before they slit its throat), called upon the Barbarous Names, dropped a tab of mescaline each, and departed for the concert grounds prepared to unleash vibes that would make even the American Medical Association turn pale with awe.

WE'LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER WHEN SHE COMES


"I just saw Hagbard Celine," said Winifred Saure.

"Naturally he'd be here with all his minions and catamites," said Wilhelm Saure. "We've got to expect to go right down to the wire on this."

"I wonder what he's planning," said Werner Saure.

"Nothing," said Wolfgang Saure. "In my opinion he's planning nothing at all. I know how his mind works— head full of Oriental mystical mush. He's going to rely on his intuition to tell him what to do. He hopes to make it more difficult for us to anticipate his actions, since he himself doesn't know what they will be. But he's wrong. His field of action is drastically limited, and there's nothing he can do to stop us."

First the towers appeared over the black-green tops of the pines. They looked like penitentiary guard towers, though in fact the men in them were unarmed and their primary purpose was to house spotlights and loudspeakers. Then the road turned and they were walking next to a twenty-foot-high wire fence. Running parallel to this was an inner fence thirty feet away and about the same height. Beyond that were bright green hillsides. The promoters of the fesival had chopped down and sold all the trees on the hills within the fenced-off area, bulldozed the stumps, and covered the raw earth with fresh sod. Already the green was partically covered by crowds of people. Tents had popped up like mushrooms, and banners waved in the air. Portable outhouses, painted Dayglo orange to make them easy to spot, were set at regular intervals. A vast hum of talking, shouting, singing, and music rose over the hills. Beyond the hills, beyond the central hill where the stage stood, the blue-black waters of Lake Totenkopf heaved and tossed. Even that side of the festival area had its fences and towers.

Joe said, "You'd think they were really worried about someone sneaking in for free."

"These people really know how to build this kind of place," said Otto Waterhouse.

Hagbard laughed. "Come on, Otto, are you a racist about Germans?"

"I was talking about whites. They've got good big ones in the U.S., too. I've seen a couple."

"I never saw one with a geodesic dome, though," said George. "Look at how big that thing is. Wonder what's in it."

"I read that the Kabouters were going to set up a dome," said Joe. "As a first-aid or bad-trip station, or something like that."

"Maybe it's a place where you can go hear the music," said Harry Coin. "Hell, size of this thing, you can barely see people on the stage, much less hear them."

"You haven't heard the loudspeakers they've got," said Hagbard. "When the music starts they'll be able to hear it all the way to Munich."

They came to a gate. Arching over it was a sign that declared, in red-painted Gothic letters: EWIGE BLUMENKRAFT

UNO EWIGE SCHLANGEKRAFT.

"See?" said Hagbard. "Right out in the open. For anyone who understands to read and know that the hour is at hand. They won't be hiding much longer."

"Well," said Joe, "at least it doesn't say 'Arbeit macht frei.'"

Hagbard handed in the orange week-long tickets for his group, and a black-uniformed usher punched them neatly and returned them. They were inside the Ingolstadt Festival. As the sun sank over the far side of Lake Totenkopf, Hagbard and his contingent mounted a hill. A huge sign over the stage announced that the Oklahoma Home Demonstration Club was playing, and the loudspeakers thundered out an old favorite of that group: "Custer Stomp."

Behind the stage the four members of the American Medical Association stood apart and gazed out at the sunset. They were wearing iridescent black tunics and trousers. Members of other bands stood together and talked, many of the groups happy to be meeting each other for the first time. They even fraternized with a few intrepid kids who managed to infiltrate past the guards and make it to the back side of the stage hill. But white-suited attendants kept the public and fellow performers away from the American Medical Association. This was generally accepted as the AMA's privilege. They were, after all, universally acclaimed as the greatest rock group in the world. Their records sold the most. Their tours drew audiences that dwarfed even those of the Beatles. Their sound was everywhere. As the Beatles had, for a time, expressed the new freedom of the '60s, so the AMA seemed to epitomize the repressive spirit of the '70s. The secret of their popularity was that they were so appalling. They reminded their fans of all the evils that were being daily visited upon them, and thus hearing and seeing them was like scratching a very bad itch. They suggested that perhaps youth had captured its oppressors or identified with them, and they momentarily turned the pain of the whole scene into pleasure. To learn how to enjoy suffering, since suffering was their lot, kids by the millions flocked to hear the AMA.

"Like a radiant heater," said Wolfgang. "We at the center. Our message projected into a bowl of vibrant young human consciousnesses. Massively reflected by them back across the lake— into the lake to the depth of a mile. There, reaching the sunken army. Raising them, in a sense, from the dead."

"We are so close to realizing the dream of thirty thousand years," said Winifred. "Will we be able to do it? Will we be the ones who complete the work begun by great Gruad? And, if not, what will become of us?"

"Doubtless we will scream in hell for all eternity," said Werner matter-of-factly. "What would you do to us if we failed?"

"We need fear eternity only if the Eater of Souls is on the scene," said Wilhelm. "And they've still got him imprisoned inside the Pentagon."

"Let no one speak of failure," said Wolfgang. "It is absolutely impossible for us to fail. The plan is foolproof."

Winifred shook her head. "Fools are precisely what it is not proof against. And you, Wolfgang, know that best of all."

It was dark now. The large tent made of cloth-of-gold was sheltered between the fence and a relatively secluded grassy knoll. There was greatest privacy here, because this corner of the festival area was farthest from the stage, and because the area was full of Discordians. Hagbard went into the tent and stayed there awhile. Joe and George stood outside, talking. George was thinking that Hagbard was probably in there with Mavis and he wished he could dash in there and kill the son of a bitch. Joe, agonizingly nervous, suspected that Hagbard was in the tent with a woman, probably Mavis, and he wondered it he should rush in and kill Hagbard while the Discordian leader was occupied. He kept his hand in his pocket, fingers curled around the small pistol.

I circle around, I circle around . . .

After about half an hour Hagbard emerged from the tent, smiling. "Go on in," he said to Joe. "You're needed in there."

George grabbed Hagbard's arm, trying to sink his fingers in. But the muscle felt like iron, and Hagbard didn't seem to notice. "Who's in there?" he demanded.

"Stella," said Hagbard, looking down at the stage, where the Plastic Canoe was playing.

"And you were fucking her?" Joe asked. 'To release the energies? And now I'm supposed to fuck her too? And George after me? And then everybody else? That's left-hand magic, and it's creepy."

"Just go in," Hagbard said. "You'll be surprised. I wasn't fucking Stella. Stella wasn't in there when I was."

"Who was?" George asked, thoroughly confused.

"My mother," said Hagbard happily.

Joe turned toward the tent. He would make one more effort to trust Celine, but then . . . Suddenly the hawk face leaned close to him and Hagbard whispered, "I know what you're planning for afterwards. Do it quickly."

SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS WHEN SHE COMES


On February 2 Robert Putney Drake received a book in the mail. The return address, he noted, was Gold & Appel Transfers on Canal Street, one of the corporations owned by that intriguing Celine fellow who had kept appearing at the best parties for the last year or so. It was titled Never Whistle While You're Pissing, and the flyleaf had a bold scrawl saying, "Best regards from the author,"'followed by a gigantic C like a crescent moon. The publisher was Green and Pleasant Publications, P.O. Box 359, Glencoe, Illinois 60022.

Drake opened it and read a few pages. To his astonishment, several Illuminati secrets were spelled out rather clearly, although in a hostile and sarcastic tone. He flipped the pages, looking for other interesting tidbits. Toward the middle of the book he found:

DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS

FREE MARKET: That condition of society in which all economic transactions result from voluntary choice without coercion.

THE STATE: That institution which interferes with the Free Market through the direct exercise of coercion or the granting of privileges (backed by coercion).

TAX: That form of coercion or interference with the Free Market in which the State collects tribute (the tax), allowing it to hire armed forces to practice coercion in defense of privilege, and also to engage in such wars, adventures, experiments, "reforms," etc., as it pleases, not at its own cost, but at the cost of "its" subjects.

PRIVILEGE: From the Latin privi, private, and lege, law. An advantage granted by the State and protected by its powers of coercion. A law for private benefit.

USURY: That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which one State-supported group monopolizes the coinage and thereby takes tribute (interest), direct or indirect, on all or most economic transactions.

LANDLORDISM: That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which one State-supported group "owns" the land and thereby takes tribute (rent) from those who live, work, or produce on the land.

TARIFF: That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which commodities produced outside the State are not allowed to compete equally with those produced inside the State.

CAPITALISM: That organization of society, incorporating elements of tax, usury, landlordism, and tariff, which thus denies the Free Market while pretending to exemplify it.

CONSERVATISM: That school of capitalist philosophy which claims allegiance to the Free Market while actually supporting usury, landlordism, tariff, and sometimes taxation.

LIBERALISM: That school of capitalist philosophy which attempts to correct the injustices of capitalism by adding new laws to the existing laws. Each time conservatives pass a law creating privilege, liberals pass another law modifying privilege, leading conservatives to pass a more subtle law recreating privilege, etc., until "everything not forbidden is compulsory" and "everything not compulsory is forbidden."

SOCIALISM: The attempted abolition of all privilege

by restoring power entirely to the coercive agent behind privilege, the State, thereby converting capitalist oligarchy into Statist monopoly. Whitewashing a wall by painting it black.

ANARCHISM: That organization of society in which the Free Market operates freely, without taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs, or other forms of coercion or privilege. RIGHT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate. LEFT ANARCHISTS predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete.


Drake, now totally absorbed, turned the page. What he found seemed to be an anthropological report on an obscure tribe he had never heard of; he quickly recognized it as a satire and a parable. Putting it aside for a moment, he buzzed his secretary and asked to be connected with Gold and Appel Transfers.

In a moment a voice said, "G and A T. Miss Maris."

"Mr. Drake calling Mr. Celine," Drake's secretary said.

"Mr. Celine is on an extended voyage," Miss Maris replied, "but he left a message in case Mr. Drake called."

"I'll take it," Drake said quickly. There was a click as his secretary went off the line.

"Mr. Celine will send an emissary to you at the appropriate time," Miss Maris said. "He says that you will recognize the emissary because he will bring with him certain artworks of the Gruad era. I'm afraid that is all, sir."

"Thank you," Drake said hollowly, hanging up. He knew the technique: he had used it himself in moving in on the Syndicate back in 1936.

"You were fucking Stella?"

"Who says I was fucking anybody?"

Joe went in. The tent was as richly hung as that of any Moorish chieftain. At one end was a diaphanous veil, behind it a figure on a pile of cushions. The figure was light-skinned, so Hagbard had been lying about being in here with Stella. Joe went over and pulled the veil aside.

It was Mavis, all right, just as Joe had guessed. She was wearing harem pajamas, red but translucent, through which he could see her dark nipples and the full bush of hair between her legs. At the expectation of making love to her, Joe could feel his cock begin to swell. But he was determined to impose his head trip on this scene.

"Why am I here?" he said, still holding the curtain back with one hand, trying to assume a casual pose. Mavis smiled faintly and motioned him to sit down on the cushions beside her. He did so, and found himself automatically sliding to a half-reclining position. There was a faint suggestion of perfume from Mavis, and he felt the tension in his loins build up a little more.

"I need all the energies we can set in motion to defeat the Illuminati," said Mavis. "Help me, Joe." She held out her arms.

"Were you fucking Hagbard? I never did like sloppy seconds."

Mavis gave a little snarl and threw herself on him. She slathered her drooling lips over his and plunged her tongue deep into his mouth, at the same time pressing her thigh between his legs. Joe fell back and gave up struggling against her. She was just too goddamned attractive. In a minute she had his pants open and his stiff hot prick throbbing in her hand. She lowered her head over it and began sucking it rhythmically.

"Wait," said Joe. "I'm going to go off in your mouth. It's been a week since I got laid, and I'm on a hair trigger."

She looked up at him with a smile. "Eat me, then. I hear you're good at that."

"Who'd you hear that from?" asked Joe.

"A gay priest friend of mine," she said with a laugh as she undid the drawstring of her red trousers.

Joe explored the lips of her vulva with his tongue, reveling in the acrid, musky odor of her bush. He began a businesslike up-and-down, up-and-down motion with his tongue over her clitoris. After a moment he felt her body tensing. It grew more and more rigid. Her pelvis began to buck, and he clamped both hands on her hips and lapped away inexorably. At last she gave a small shriek and tried to drive her whole mons veneris into his mouth.

"Now fuck me, quickly, quickly," she said, and Joe, his pants pulled down and his shirttail flapping, mounted her. He came in a series of exquisite spasms and dropped his head to the pillow, beside hers. She let him rest that way for a few minutes, then gently nudged him to pull out and rolled to her side to face him.

"Am I dismissed?" Joe said. "Have I done my job? Released the energies, or whatever?"

"You sound bitter," said Mavis, "and sad. I'd like you to stay with me a while longer. What's bothering you?"

"A lot of things. I feel like I did the wrong thing. George is obviously in love with you, and you and Hagbard treat it as a joke. And Hagbard treats me as a joke. And both of you are quite obviously using me. You're using me sexually, and I'm beginning to think Hagbard is using me in other ways. And I think you know about it."

"You didn't take the acid, did you?" she said, looking at him sadly.

"No. I knew what Hagbard was doing. This is too serious a moment to play games about the Passion of Christ."

Mavis smiled. She pressed her body closer to him and began playing with his limp penis, rubbing the head gently into her bush. "Joe, you were raised as a Catholic. Catholics have a finer appreciation of blasphemy than anybody. That's why Hagbard chose you. How's your passion, Joe? Is it mounting?" Pressing her naked body against his, she whispered, "How'd you like to fuck the Virgin Mary?"

Joe saw his mother's face, and he felt the blood throbbing in his penis. Now he thought perhaps he knew what Hagbard meant when he said his mother was in the tent.

A little later, when he was in her, she said, "I am a perpetual virgin, Joe. And every woman is, if only you have eyes to see. We wanted to give you eyes tonight. But you refused the Sacrament. You've chosen the hardest way of all, Joe. If you're going to make it through this night you're going to have to find a way to see for yourself. By other means than the one Hagbard provided. You'll have to find your own Sacrament."

And after she came, and he came, she whispered, "Was that the Sacrament?"

He pushed himself up and looked down at the triangular red tattoo between her breasts. "No. You're not the Virgin Mary. You're still Mavis."

"And you still have to make the decision," she said. "Good-bye, Joe. Send George to me."

As Joe was dressing, feeling the weight of the pistol in his trouser pocket, Mavis rolled over so that she was lying on her stomach, not looking at him. Her naked buttocks seemed utterly defenseless. He looked at the pillow on which her bottom had been resting during their lovemaking. It was a cloth-of-gold pillow, and embroidered on it in swirling letters was the word KALLISTI. Joe shook his head and left the tent.

As he emerged, Hagbard was saying in a low voice to Otto Waterhouse, ". . . would have been up your alley if we hadn't had other work for you. Anthrax Leprosy Pi can wipe out the whole population of the earth in a matter of days."

Suddenly, the white of Hagbard's shirt, the gold of the tent cloth, the blazing spotlights of the festival, all were coming in super-bright. That was adrenalin. My mouth was dry—dehydration. All the classic flight-fight symptoms. The activation syndrome, Skinner calls it. I was so keyed up that it was a trip.

"Hello, Joe," said Hagbard softly. Joe suddenly realized that his hand was clenched around the pistol. Hagbard smiled at him, and Joe felt like a little boy caught playing with himself, with his hand in his pocket. He took his hand out quickly.

"She wants George," Joe said weakly. He turned his back on Hagbard to look down at the stage, where the sign, glowing in the darkness, said LOAF AND THE FISHES. They were singing, "I circle around, I circle around, the borders of the earth. . ."

On a pile of cushions behind a diaphanous veil at one end of the tent lay Stella, wearing nothing but a red chiffon pajama top.

"Were you letting Joe fuck you?" George said. "Joe has never fucked me," Stella replied. "You'll be the first person to do that tonight. Look, George, we've got to get every bit of available energy flowing to combat the Illuminati. Come over here and get the energies going with me."

"This is Danny Pricefixer," Doris Horus said. "I met him on the plane coming over."

("Holy Jesus," said Maria Imbrium, vocalist with the Sicilian Dragon Defense, "there are angels coming out of the lake. Angels in golden robes. Look!")

("You're tripping on that Kabouter Kool-Aid, baby," a much-bandaged Hun told her. "There's nothing coming out of the lake.")

("Something is coming out of the lake," the drummer with the Sicilian Dragons said, "and you're so stoned you don't see it.")

("And what is it, if it isn't angels?" Maria demanded.)

("Christ, I don't know. But whoever they are, they're walking on the water.")

Wearing my long green feathers, as I fly,
I circle around, I circle around . . .

("Jesus. Walking on the water. You people are zonked out of your skulls.")

("It's just a bunch of surfers, wearing green capes for some crazy reason.")

("Surfers? My ass! That's some kind of gang of Bavarian demons. They all look like the Frankenstein monster wrapped up in seaweed.")

"Pricefixer?" said Kent. "Didn't 1 meet you five or six years ago in Arkham? Aren't you a cop?"

("It's a gigantic green egg . . . and it loves me . . .")

John Dillinger muttered to Hagbard, "That red-headed guy over there— the one with the black musician and the girl with the fantastic boobs. He's a cop on the New York Bomb Squad. Wanta bet he's here investigating the Confrontation bombing?"

"He must have been talking to Mama Sutra," Hagbard said thoughtfully.

SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS WHEN SHE COMES


When Otto Waterhouse entered the tent, it was Miss Mao who was waiting for him. "I never fucked a Chinese broad," said Otto, stripping off his clothing. "I don't think Stella is going to like this."

"It will be okay with Stella," said Miss Mao. "We need to get all the energies moving to combat the Illuminati. And we need your help." She held out her arms.

"You don't have to ask twice," said Otto, crouching over her.

At 5:45 in Washington, D.C., the switchboard at the Pentagon was warned that bombs planted somewhere in the building would go off in ten minutes. "You killed hundreds of us today in the streets of Washington," said the woman's voice. "But we are still giving you a chance to evacuate the building. You do not have time to find the bombs. Leave the Pentagon now, and let history be the judge of which side truly fought for life and against death."

The highest-ranking personnel in the Pentagon (and, with revolution breaking out in the nation's capital, everybody was there) were immediately moved to underground bombproof shelters. The Secretary of Defense, after consulting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that there was a 95 percent probability that the threat was a hoax, intended to disrupt the job of coordinating the suppression of revolution across the nation. A search would be instituted, but meanwhile work would go on as usual. "Besides," the Secretary of Defense joked to the Chief of Staff, Army, "one of those little radical bombs would do as much damage to this building as a firecracker would to an elephant."

Somehow the fact that the caller had said bombs (plural) had not gotten through. And the actual explosions were far more powerful than the caller had implied. Since a proper investigation was never subsequently undertaken, no one knows precisely what type of explosive was used, how many bombs there were, how they were introduced into the Pentagon, Where they were placed, and how they were set off. Nor was the most interesting question of all ever satisfactorily answered: Who done it? In any case, at 5:55 P.M., Washington time, a series of explosions destroyed one-third of the river side of the Pentagon, ripping through all four rings from the innermost courtyard to the outermost wall.

There was great loss of life. Hundreds of people who had been working on that side of the building were killed. Although the explosion had not visibly touched their bombproof shelter, the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and numerous other high-ranking military persons were found dead; it was assumed that the concussion had killed them, and in the ensuing chaos nobody bothered to examine the bodies carefully. After the explosions the Pentagon was belatedly evacuated, in the expectation that there might be more of the same. There was no more, but the U.S. military establishment was temporarily without a head.

Another casualty was Mr. H. C. Winifred of the U.S. Department of Justice. A civil servant with a long and honorable career behind him, Winifred, apparently deranged by the terrible events of that day of infamy, took the wheel of a Justice Department limousine and drove wildly, running twenty-three red lights, to the Pentagon. He raced to the scene of the explosion brandishing a large piece of chalk, and was trying to draw a chalk line from one side of the gap in the Pentagon wall to the other when he collapsed and died, apparently of a heart attack.

At 11:45 Ingolstadt time the loudspeakers and the sign over the stage announced the American Medical Association. After a ten-minute ovation, the four strange-eyed, ash-blond young people began to play their most popular song, "Age of Bavaria." (In Los Angeles the Mercalli scale on the UCLA seismograph jumped abruptly to grade 1. "Gonna be a little disturbance," Dr. Vulcan Troll said calmly, noting the rise. Grade 1 wasn't serious.) "What made you think we'd find him down here?" Saul asked.

"Common sense and psychology," Dillinger said. "I know pimps. He'd shit purple before he'd get the guts to try to cross a border. They're strictly mama's boys. The first place I looked was his own cellar, because he might have a hidden room there."

Barney laughed. "That's the first place Saul looked, too."

"We seem to think alike, Mr. Dillinger," Saul said drily.

"There isn't much difference between a cop and a crook, psychologically speaking," Dillinger mused.

"One of my own observations," Hagbard agreed. "What conclusion do you draw from it?"

"Well," Dillinger said. "Pricefixer didn't just pick up that girl because he wanted a lay. She has to fit somehow."

"The musician doesn't know that," Hagbard commented. "Watch his hands. He's repressing a fight impulse; in a few minutes he'll start a quarrel. He and the lady were lovers once— see the way her pelvis tilts when she talks to him?— and he wants Whitey to go away. But Whitey won't go away. He has her linked with the case he's working on."

"I used to be a cop," Danny said with an engaging imitation of frankness. "But that was years ago, and the work really didn't appeal to me. I'm a salesman for Britannica now. Better hours, and people only slam doors in my face — they don't shoot at me through them."

"Listen," Doris said excitedly. "The AMA is playing 'Age of Bavaria.' " It was the song that, more than any other, both expressed and mocked the aspirations of youth around the world, and the accuracy with which it expressed their yearnings and the savagery with which it denied them had won them over.

It started almost the instant the music began. A mile below the surface of the lake, near the opposite shore, an army began to rise from the dead. The black-uniformed corpses broke loose from their moorings, rose to the surface, and began to drift toward shore. As more and more of the semblance of life returned, the drifting became swimming motions, then wading. They fell into ranks on the shore. Under the steel helmets their complexions were greenish, their eyes heavily lidded, their black lips drawn back in wide grimaces. The mouths of the officers and non-coms moved, forming words of command, though no sound came forth. No sound was needed, it seemed, for the orders were instantly obeyed. Once again the power that had been granted to Adolf Hitler by the Illuminated Lodge in 1923 ("Because you are so preposterous," they told him at the time)— the power that had manifested itself in steel-helmed armies that had won Hitler an empire stretching from Stalingrad to the Atlantic, from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert—once again that power was visible on the earth.

"They are coming. I can feel it," Werner whispered to his twin, Wilhelm, as Wolfgang thundered on the drums and Winifred belted out:

This is the dawning of the Age of Bavaria— Age of Bavaria— Bavaria—Bavaria!


The tanks and artillery were rolling into position. The caterpillar treads of the troop carriers were churning. Motorcycle couriers sped up and down the beach. A squadron of partially dismantled Stukas was lined up in the road. After the festivalgoers had been massacred and Ingolstadt had been overrun, the planes would be trucked to the nearby Ingolstadt Aerodrome, where they would be assembled and ready to fly by morning.
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 3:20 am

Part 4 of 4

The dead men removed black rubber sheaths from rolled up red-white-and-black banners and unfurled them. Many of them were the familiar swastika flags and banners of the Third Reich, with one addition: a red eye-and-pyramid device superimposed on the center of each swastika. Other banners carried Gothic-lettered mottos such as DRANG NACH OESTEN and HEUTE DIE WELT, MORGENS DAS SONNENSYSTEM.

At last all was in readiness. The blue-black lips of General-of-the-SS Rudolf Hanfgeist, thirty years dead, shaped the command to march, which was relayed in similar fashion from the higher-ranking officers to the lower-ranking officers to the men. The lights and music on the opposite shore beckoned across the dark, bottomless waters. Moonlight glinting on the death's heads on their caps and runic SS insignia on their collars, the soldiers moved out, company by company. The only sound was the growl of the diesel engines of troop carriers and the clank of weapons.

"They're coming," said the woman under Hagbard, who was neither Mavis nor Stella nor Mao, but a woman with straight black hair, olive skin, fierce black eyebrows, and a bony face.

"Coming, Mother," said Hagbard, giving himself up to the irresistible onward sweep of sensation to the brink of orgasm and over.

"I'm not your mother," said the woman. "Your mother was a blond, blue-eyed Norweigian. And I look Greek now, I think."

"You're the mother of all of us," said Hagbard, kissing her sweat-damp neck.

"Ah," said the woman. "Is that who I am? Then we're getting somewhere."

Then I started to flip, Malik eclipsed by Malaclypse and Celine hardly serene, Mary Lou I Worship You, the Red Eye is my own Mooning, what is the meaning of moaning? and suchlike seminal semantic antics (my head is a Quick-tran quicksand where The Territorial Imperative always triggers Stay Off My Turf, the Latin and the Saxon at' war in poor Simon's synapses, dead men fighting for use of my tongue, turning Population Explosion into We're Fucking Overcrowded and backward also, so it might emerge Copulation Explosion, and besides Hag barred straights from this Black-and-White Mass, the acid was in me, I was tripping, flipping, skipping, ripping, on my Way with Maotsey Taot-sey for the number of Our Lady is an hundred and fifty and six— there is Wiccadom!), but I never expected it this way.

"What do you see?" I asked Mary Lou.

"Some people who were swimming, coming out of the lake. What do you see?"

"Not what I'm supposed to see."

For the front line, clear as claritas, was Mescalito from my peyote visions and Osiris with enormous female breasts and Spider Man and the Tarot Magus and Good Old Charlie Brown and Bugs Bunny with a Tommy gun and Jughead and Archie and Captain America and Hermes Thrice-Blessed and Zeus and Athene and Zagreus with his lynxes and panthers and Micky Mouse and Superman and Santa Claus and Laughing Buddha Jesus and a million million birds, canaries and budgies and, gaunt herons and holy crows and crowly hose and eagles and hawks and mourning doves (for mourning never ends), and they'd all been stoned since the late Devonian period, when they first started eating hemp seeds, no wonder Huxley found birds "the most emotional class of life," singing all the time, stoned out of their bird-brained skulls, all singing "I circle around, I circle around," except the mynah Birds squawking "Here, kitty-kitty-kitty!" and I remembered again that existence isn't sensible any more than it's hot or red or high or sour, only parts of existence have those qualities, and then there was the Zig-Zag man and my God my god my father leading them in singing

SOLIDARITY FOREVER
SOLIDARITY FOREVERRRR
THE UNION MAKES US STRONG


"I say," said an Englishman, "I thought he was a monster, and he's only Toad of Toad Hall . . . with Rat . . . and Tinker Bell . . . and Wendy . . . and Bottom . . ."

"That's who you are," said Hagbard, "if you can call that any kind of a fucking identity."

"I think it's time you went up on stage and made our little announcement," said the woman. "I think everyone is ready for that."

"I'll send Dillinger in to you."

"Goody!"

"It's not true, you know. That was the other guy, Sullivan."

"I wasn't thinking about that. I don't care if it's no bigger than my little finger. It's just the idea of fucking with John Dillinger. If that doesn't put me over, nothing will."

Hagbard stood up and laughed. "You're starting to look and sound like Mavis again. I think you're slipping, Super-bitch."

The American Medical Association had left the stage, and Clark Kent and His Supermen were playing as Hag-bard, accompanied by George, Harry, Otto, and Malaclypse, made his way down their own hill and up to the crest of the hill where the stage was erected. The journey took a half-hour as they picked their way through groups of people engaged in Mongolian clusterfuck, sitting Za-Zen, or just listening to the music. At the stage Hagbard took out a gold card, which he showed to a group of marshals guarding the area from intrusion. "I have an announcement to make," he said firmly. The marshals allowed him to climb on stage, and told him to wait till the Supermen had finished their set.

As soon as Pearson saw Hagbard he motioned his men to stop playing. A murmur arose from the audience. "Well, all right, Hagbard," said Robert Pearson, "I was wondering if you were ever going to show up." He walked over to the side of the stage where Hagbard and his group were standing.

"Good evening, Waterhouse," said Pearson. "How's my gal, Stella?"

"Where the fuck do you get off calling her your girl?" said Waterhouse, his tone containing nothing but menace.

"The acid only opens your eyes, George. It doesn't work miracles."

And it shall come to pass, that whosoever call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

"Wonder what the hell is in that suitcase," Dillinger murmured.

"I'll open it," Saul said. "We'll all have to take the antidote anyway, after this. I have a supply out in the car." And he leaned forward, parted Carmel's stiff blue hands, and tugged the suitcase free. Barney, Dillinger, and Markoff Chancy crowded close to look as he snapped the lock and lifted the top.

"I'll be damned and double damned," Barney Muldoon said in a small, hollow voice.

"Hagbard has been putting us on all along," Simon says dreamily. (It doesn't matter in the First Bardo.) "Those Nazis have been dead for thirty years, period. He just brought us here to put us on a Trip. Nothing is coming out of the lake. I'm hallucinating everything."

"Something is happening," Mary Lou insisted vehemently. "It's got nothing to do with the lake— that's a red herring to distract us from the real battle between your Hagbard and those crazy musicians up there. If I wasn't tripping my head would work better, damn it. It's got something to do with sound waves. The sound waves are turning solid in the air. Whatever it is, the rest of us aren't supposed to understand it. This lake thing is just to give us something we can understand, or almost understand." Her black face was intense with intelligence battling against the ocean of undigestible information pouring in through all of her senses.

"Dad!" Simon cried, weeping happily. "Tell me the Word. You must know now. What is the Word?"

"Kether," said Tim Moon blissfully.

"Kether? That's all? Just Cabalism?" Simon shook his head. "It can't be that simple."

"Kether," Tim Moon repeats firmly. "Right here in the middle of Malkuth. As above, so below."

I see the throne of the world. One single chair twenty-three feet off the ground, studded with seventeen rubies, and brooding over it the serpent swallowing its tail, the Rosy Cross, and the Eye.

"Who was that nice man?" Mary Lou asked.

"My father," Simon said, really weeping now. "And I may never see him again. Mourning never ends."

And then I understood why Hagbard had given us the acid— why the Weather Underground and Morituri used it constantly— because I started to die, I literally felt myself dwindling to a point and approaching absolute zero. I was so shit-scared I grabbed Simon's hand and said "help" in a weak voice, and if he had said "Admit you're a cop first, then I'll help," I sure as hell would have told him everything, blurted it all out, but he just smiled, squeezed my hand gently, and murmured, "Its alive!"— and it was, the point was giving off light and energy, my light and my energy but God's also, and it wasn't frightening because it was alive and growing. The word "omnidirectional halo" came to me from somewhere (was it Hagbard talking to Dillinger?), and I looked, holy Key-rizt, Dillinger split in two as I watched. That was the answer to one question: There were two Dillingers, twins, in addition to the fake Dillinger who got shot at the Biograph, 0 = 2, I thought, feeling some abstract eternal answer there, along with the answer to some of the questions that had bugged so many writers about Dillinger's criminal career (like why some witnesses claimed he was in Miami on that day in 1934 when other witnesses claimed he was robbing a bank and killing a bank guard in East Chicago, and why Hagbard had said something about him being in Las Vegas when I could see him right here in Ingolstadt), but it was all moving, moving, a single point, but everything coming out of it was moving, a star with swords and wands projecting outward as rays, a crown that was also a cup and a whirling disc, a pure white brilliance that said "I am Ptah, come to take you from Memphis to heaven," but I only remembered the cops who beat Daddy up in Memphis and made him swear when he got back that he'd never go south again (and how did that tie in with why I became a cop?), and Ptah became Zeus, lacchus, Wotan, and it didn't matter, all were distant and indifferent and cold, not gods of humanity but gods above humanity, gods of the void, brilliant as the diamond but cold as the diamond, the three whirling in the point until they became a turning swastika, then the face of the doctor who gave me the abortion that time I got knocked up by Hassan i Sabbah X, saying, "You have killed the Son of God in your womb, black woman," and I started to weep again, Simon holding my hand and repeating, "Its alive," but I felt that it was dying and I had somehow killed it. I was Otto Waterhouse in reverse: I wanted to castrate Simon, to castrate all white men, but I wouldn't; I would go on castrating black men— the Nightmare Life-in-Death am I.

"It's alive, baby," Simon repeated, "it's alive. And I love you, baby, even if you are a cop."

("The whole lake is alive," the vibe man with the Fillet of Soul was trying to explain to the rest of that group, "one big spiral rising and turning, like the DNA molecule, but with a hawk's head at the top . . .")

"Good evening, Waterhouse," said Pearson. "How's my gal, Stella?"

"Where the fuck do you get off calling her your girl?" said Waterhouse, his tone containing nothing but menace.

"Cool it brother," said Pearson reasonably.

"Don't hand me that brother shit. I asked you a question."

"You and your question come out of a weak, limp bag," said Pearson.

Hagbard said, "Robert only fucks white women, Otto. I'm sure he's never laid Stella Maris."

"Don't be too sure," said Pearson.

"Don't play with Otto, Robert," said Hagbard. "He specializes in killing black men. In fact, he's only just killed his first white man, and he's not at all sure he enjoyed it."

"I never knew what killing was before," said Waterhouse. "I was crazy all those years, and I enjoyed what I did because I didn't know what I was doing. After I killed Flanagan I understood what I'd been doing all along, and it was like I killed all the others all over again." His cheeks were wet, and he turned away.

Pearson stood looking at him for a moment, then said softly, "Wow. Come on, Hagbard. Let's get you on stage." They walked out to the microphone together. A few people in the audience had begun clapping rhythmically for more music. Most, though, had been waiting silently, happily, for whatever might happen next.

What happened was that Robert Pearson said to them, "Brothers and sisters, this is Freeman Hagbard Celine, my ace, and the heaviest dude on the planet Earth. Listen while he runs it down to you what's happening."

He stepped aside and deferentially ushered Hagbard to the microphone.

Into the silence Hagbard said, "My name, as Clark Kent just told you, is Hagbard Celine . . ."

(In Mad Dog, Texas, John Dillinger and Jim Cartwright looked up from the chess board as the radio music stopped and an announcer's voice said, "We interrupt this show to bring you a special message from Washington." John moved a knight and said softly, "Checkmate. That'll be the President, I bet. I hope to hell my brother finds that missing pimp before things get much worse." Cartwright surveyed the board dismally. "Checkmate," he agreed finally. "I hope your other brother, and Hagbard, are handling things right in Ingolstadt," he added, as they both turned, with a reflex acquired from TV watching, and looked at the radio . . .)

Being a woman is bad enough, but being a black woman is even worse. I always feel split in two, a divided lion (I'm thinking like Simon) with a hole in the middle (and that's all men are interested in, the hole in the middle), but the acid was making the split into a conscious agony and then was healing it, I was a whole Lion, ready to devour my enemies: I understood my father and why he felt he finally had to stand up to the whites even if it killed him. A knight moved across a wasteland, the desert around Las Vegas, but it was laid out in squares like a chess board; he raised a fiery wand, crying "Black Power," and it was Hassan i Sabbah, my lover, my enemy, a Black Christ and yet also a baboon with a crazy grin, all blue pearl gray like semen, inside every woman there's an angry man trying to get out, a man-woman with the eyes of an owl, and the joy came over me as my clit got hot and grew into a penis; I was my father; I was afraid of nothing; I could destroy the world without caring, with one angry flash of my eye, like Shiva. MY PENIS IS THE INVISIBLE STAR RUBY AND MEN CONSPIRE TO MAKE ME HIDE IT; THAT'S WHY I MUST TAKE THEIRS. I am two-faced, always deceiving, like all women; deception is our only defense, I understand it more clearly as the wisdom of my insanity increases, and the musky smell of hashish coming from the Plastic Canoe trailer is like me, a female plant with male strength, they are nailing me to the cross (literally) but the cross is inside a spinning wheel of flame, oh Holy Moses, I'm finding Buddha not Eris in my pineal gland, the third eye is opening, I am the earth beneath your feet, I am Billie Freshette, I am legion, there are millions of me, a plague of locusts to devour your White Male Technology, "My name is Hagbard Celine" he is saying, they sold heroin in my grammar school (that's the way a Chicago black gets educated), Simon is still trying to bring me through it saying now "Death shall have no dominion," and I try to believe Love shall have the dominion but first I must spend my hate to the last penny, they made me kill my baby, I really am going to go crazy because I have the hots again and want Simon's lance in my cup but I also know the real God is beyond God and the real Illuminati is beyond the Illuminati, there's a secret society behind the secret society: The Illuminati we're fighting are puppets of another Illuminati and so are we.

MY NAME IS HAGBARD CELINE, AND THE CARNIVAL IS OVER. REMOVE YOUR MASKS ALL PLAYERS.

"That's a funny thing for Toad of Toad Hall to say," muttered Fission Chips to nobody in particular. But the voice came booming back MY NAME IS HAGBARD CELINE. PLEASE DON'T PANIC WHEN YOU HEAR WHAT I'VE GOT TO SAY TO YOU and Chips saw that it wasn't Toad of Toad Hall or even the sinister Saint Toad but just a well-dressed wop with two faces, one smiling and one frowning in wrath. "You know," 00005 said aloud, "I do believe there was a fucking drug in that water."

MY NAME IS HAGBARD CELINE. PLEASE DON'T PANIC WHEN YOU HEAR WHAT I HAVE TO SAY TO YOU. PAY CLOSE ATTENTION. I HAVE COME TO TELL YOU THAT YOUR LIVES ARE IN GRAVE DANGER. AT THIS MOMENT AN ARMY IS MARCHING AROUND THE SHORE OF LAKE TOTENKOPF FOR THE PURPOSE OF MASSACRING ALL THE PEOPLE ATTENDING THIS FESTIVAL.

"Jesus," said George, "this is never going to work. He's putting it so badly. They'll never believe him. They'll laugh at him. Three-quarters of them don't even understand English."

"Is that how it sounds to you?" said Malaclypse. "As if he's speaking in English? It also sounds to me as if he's saying everything in a flat, direct way. But I hear him speaking in the Greek dialect of Athens in the fifth century B.C.E."

"What do you mean?"

"He's actually talking in Norwegian or Italian, whichever language he knows best. He's using what I call the Pentecost Gimmick. It's described in the Acts of the Apostles as the gift of tongues. After the death of Jesus the Apostles were sitting together on the feast of Pentecost, when tongues of fire appeared over their heads. Then they went out and preached to a crowd of people from many different countries, and each person heard the sermons in his own language and in the form most likely to persuade him. They made tens of thousands of converts to Christianity that way. I was the one who laid the trick on them, though they never knew that."

"Speaking in tongues!" said George in wonderment "They used to preach about it in Bible class: 'And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.' "

("Don't play games with yourself, George. You know perfectly well that a moment ago I was Mavis.")

"It's a giant black woman . . . it's Goethe's Mother Night," somebody was saying, but I was thinking of 69ing with Simon oh the tricks that cat knows to please a woman to make you feel like a queen on a throne and I don't care if he knows I'm a cop there's always a sorrow after a joy on this plane yes I will always be split in two the void will always be there at the center God yes the mask of night is on my face like I read in Shakespeare in school I am the river yellow with sewage and cocksucker is a dirty word but what else is the sign of cancer or that yin-yang all about Christ I loved doing it women who claim they don't are just liars I hate him and I love him the ambiguity is always there that detective who wanted to praise me that time said "You've got balls for a woman" but how would it sound if I said to him "You've got tits for a man" throne after throne cast down into the void and yet I have the power all they're worshipping in their trinities and pyramids are symbols of the cunt and it's hot again but I just want him to hold me I can't ball now I can't speak I see my father's face but it's silver instead of tlack and all of a sudden I knew Joe Malik had a gun and even that he had a silver bullet in it Mother of God does he think Hagbard is something inhuman and I smelled opium mixed with the hash those are heavy cats in the Plastic Canoe I could feel the energy surging through me I'm in the tent and I'm being fucked by all the men I'm Mavis and Stella and I'm the mother of all of them I am Demeter and Frigga and Cybelle as well as Eris and I am Napthys the Black Sister of Isis of whom none dare, speak and I can even see why Joe Malik blew up his own office it was a trap and Hagbard fell into it Joe knows his secret now.

"They used to preach about it in Bible class: 'And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.' And 'All flesh will see it in one instant.'"

Malaclypse smiled. " 'To conceive of pentecostal training it is necessary to die. These are the words of the first, last, and between, Kallisti.' You must have won the prize for memorizing verse in that Bible class, George."

"I would have, only the teacher didn't like my attitude."

"Good," said Malaclypse. "I also taught the Pentecost Gimmick to Hagbard. What he's saying sounds flat to you, because you don't need to be persuaded. Everybody else is hearing as much emotion and rhetoric as is needed to motivate them. It's a good gimmick, the Pentecost Gimmick." It all came in solid and three-dimensional and I felt mercy flowing from me like some psychological monthly with water instead of blood I even forgave the American Medical Association all four of them separately and distinctly I was Isis all purple and blue and veiled and even if Poseidon was rising in that lake I could forgive him too He was covered with olives and shamrocks a green water god glistening like amethyst with one huge unicorn horn and then he was Indra the rainmaker whose voice of thunder was only a disguised blessing I obeyed him and put the doll in the tetrahedron there was nothing to fear for all that would happen were blessings and good things .as the Brilliant Ones descended bringing their white fire to the red earth the work would be perfected in pleasure not pain for I even knew that Joe found out Pat Walsh's memos were misleading because Hagbard wanted him to find out and wanted him to plant the bomb and even wanted him to come here tonight with the gun so it all makes sense if you had a model of the globe with a black light flashing for every death and a white light for everytime somebody comes it would seem to be glowing all the time that's what's so good about being a woman I can come and come and come oh God as many times as I want and men even Simon hardly ever come more than once in a night that mean Miss Forbes in first grade she needed a good lay but I can even forgive her.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

"Everyone must leave the festival area," Hagbard was saying. "The resurrected Nazis intend to slaughter all of you. Fortunately, we have had time to build you a pathway to safety. Behold!" He stretched out his arm and the spotlight moved beyond him to the lake, illuminating a great pontoon bridge stretching from the festival area on the eastern shore diagonally to the lake's northwest corner. It had been silently erected by Hagbard's crew, with the indispensable help of Howard and the dolphins, during the last hour.

"Wow," George said to Malaclypse. "I suppose you'd call that the Red Sea Gimmick."

Hagbard lifted his hands. "I name that the Adam Weishaupt Bridge. Everyone will now rise and proceed in an orderly fashion to walk across the lake."

MY FELLOW AMERICANS, IT IS WITH A HEAVY HEART THAT I COME BEFORE YOU FOR THE SECOND TIME TODAY. MANY IRRESPONSIBLE ELEMENTS HAVE REACTED TO THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY WITH MAD, ANIMAL PANIC, AND THEY ARE ENDANGERING ALL THE REST OF US. I ASSURE YOU AGAIN, IN THE WORDS OF A GREAT FORMER LEADER, THAT WE HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR BUT FEAR ITSELF.

The face on the TV screen expressed absolute confidence, and many citizens felt a slight upsurge in hope; actually, he was totally around the bend on Demerol, and when the White House had burned earlier in the day his most constructive suggestion had been "Let's toast some marshmallows before we leave."

EVEN AS I SPEAK TO YOU THE DIRECTOR OF THE FBI HAS ASSURED ME THAT HIS MEN ARE CLOSING IN ON THE ONE SINGLE PLAGUE-CARRIER WHO HAS CAUSED ALL THIS HYSTERIA. IF YOU STAY IN YOUR HOMES, YOU WILL BE SAFE, AND THE EMERGENCY WILL SOON BE OVER.

"We can send the army to the west side of the lake to intercept them," said Wilhelm.

("Rosebuds," cried John Dillinger. "Why the hell would he bring a suitcase full of rosebuds down here?")

Suddenly everybody was aroused and moving Simon was leading me gently along I was back in Time again there was a real fight going on between Hagbard and the American Medical Association and a fight means that somebody is going to lose the Gates of Hell were opening and I could hardly move my feet Daddy's head on the floor of that Memphis police station and those cops stomping him and stomping him why didn't they put a spear through his side while they were at it and how can I really forgive that's just the drug and underneath I'll always hate white men even Simon if this is the Last Judgment I know what Christ will do with every blue-eyed bastard among them they own all the power and make all the wars they've fucked the planet their only god is Death they destroy everything living a giant blond god Thor swinging his hammer and smashing

all the colored races red scarlet red blood on that hammer black blood especially but Hagbard is Horus this is the way it will always be fighting and killing to the end of time and women and children the chief victims only the flesh is holy and men are killers of the flesh cannibals.

"How many do you think there are?" the leader of the Closed Corporation asked dreamily.

"Six hundred and sixty-six," one of his group answered. "When you sacrifice a rooster in a pentagram on Walpurgis Night, you always get six sixty-six."

"And they're coming right toward us," the leader went on in his dreamy voice. "To bow down and serve us."

The Closed Corporation sat perfectly still, in silent ecstasy, awaiting the arrival of the 666 horned-and-tailed demons they saw approaching them . . . Outside Lehman Cave, Saul loads the antidote needle. "I'll go first," says John Herbert Dillinger, rolling up his sleeve ... AT THIS HOUR WHEN YOUR GOVERNMENT NEEDS YOUR FAITH . . .

In a fusilade of bullets, the President sank beneath the podium, leaving only the Seal of the Chief Executive on the TV screens. The viewers saw the same confident expression on his face as he floated in Demerol tranquility toward death. "Oh my God!" said an announcer's voice off screen ... In Mad Dog, John Hoover Dillinger looks at Jim Cartwright quizzically. "Whose conspiracy was behind that?" he asks as the announcer gibbers hysterically. "There seem to have been five people shooting from five different parts of the press corps, but the President may not be dead—" "They blew his fucking head to pulp," another voice near the microphone said, distinctly and hopelessly ... In New York, August Personage, one of the few people neither rioting nor listening to TV, reads Atlas Shrugged with total absorption, getting Religion ...

"Are you a turtle?" Lady Velkor asks.

"Huh?" Danny Pricefixer responds.

"Never mind," she says hurriedly. He hears her asking the next man on the right, "Are you a turtle?"

"We can send the army to the west side of the lake to intercept them," said Wilhelm.

"Nein," said Wolfgang, who was standing in the rear of the slowly moving command car, studying the situation through field glasses. "That verdammte bridge goes toward the northern shore of the lake. They can go straight, while our men go around. They'd all be across before we could reach them."

"We could shell the bridge from here," said Werner.

"We daren't use the artillery," said Wolfgang. "We'd have the whole West German army blundering down here, getting in the way of our drive to the east. If the West Germans start fighting us, the East Germans will not make the mistake we want them to make. They won't think we are an invading West German army. The Russians, in turn, will have plenty of warning. The whole plan will fall through."

"Let's skip this phase, then," said Winifred. "It's too much of a hassle. Let's head immediately eastward, and the hell with these kids."

"Nein again, dear sister, my love," said Wolfgang. "We have twenty-three candidates for transcendental illumination, including Hitler himself, waiting up there in the old Fuehrer Suite of the Donau Hotel. The speedy mass termination of all those lives is to translate them to eternal life on the energy plane. And I will not let that Scheisskopi Hagbard Celine thwart us at this juncture. I mean to show him once and for all which of us is master. And all the rest of those SchweinenDillinger, the Dealy Lama, Malaclypse, the old Lady herself, if she's here. If all of them are here, it's our chance to make a clean sweep and annihilate the opposition once and for all, at the beginning of the immanentizing of the Eschaton, rather than in the final stage."

"But we can't catch the kids," said Wilhelm.

"We can. We shall. It will take a long, long time to move them all across that pontoon bridge, and they are all on foot. We have vehicles and can catch up with them before half of them are even on the bridge. They'll all be bunched together, and those on the bridge will be a perfect target for machine guns. We shall simply sweep in on them, harvesting their lives as we go. We spent years building up our identity as the American Medical Association just so we could organize the Ingolstadt festival and trap masses of human beings on the shore of Lake Totenkopf, that our sacred lake might run red with their blood. Would you throw all that away?"

"I agree. A brilliant analysis," said Wilhelm.

"We must move on at full speed, then," said Wolfgang. He turned to the car behind him and shouted. "Vorwarts at maximum speed!" General-of-the-SS Hanfgeist stood up, turned toward his subordinates, and moved his blackened lips to form the same words. Immediately the tanks, halftracks, motorcycles, and armored cars began to rev up their engines and the troops started to trot down the road on the double.

A lookout in one of the festival light-and-sound towers spotted them and relayed a warning to the stage, where Robert Pearson spoke into a microphone. "It is my sad duty to inform you that the pigs are intensifying their approach. Now, don't run. But do quicken your pace with all deliberate speed."

Hagbard called in through the doorway of the gold tent, "John, you've had enough, for Discordia's sake. Come on out and let Malaclypse go in."

"I thought you were noncorporeal," said George.

"If you'd known me any length of time you would have noticed that I frequently pick my nose," said the Sartrelike apparition.

"Whew," said John-John Dillinger, emerging from the tent, "who would have thought the old man'd have so much come in him? She says she wants George in there after Mal."

The woman behind the veil was glowing. There was no light in the tent, save for the deep golden radiance that came from her body.

"Come closer, George," she said. "I don't want you to make love to me now— I only want you to learn the truth. Stand here before me."

The woman behind the veil was Mavis. "Mavis, I love you," said George. "I've loved you ever since you took me out of that jail in Mad Dog."

"Look again, George," said Stella.

"Stella! What happened to Mavis?"

I circle around, I circle around . . .

"Don't play games with yourself, George. You know perfectly well that a moment ago I was Mavis."

"It's the acid," said George.

"The acid only opens your eyes, George. It doesn't work miracles," said Miss Mao.

I circle around, I circle around . . .

"Oh, my God!" said George. And he thought: And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Mavis was there again. "Do you understand, George? Do you understand why you never saw all of us together at once? Do you understand why, all the time you wanted to fuck me, that when you were fucking Stella you were fucking me? And do you understand that I am not one woman or three women but an infinite number of women?" Before his eyes she turned red, yellow, black, brown, young, middle-aged, a child, an old woman, a Norwegian blonde, a Sicilian brunette, a wild-eyed Greek woman, a tall Ashanti, a slant-eyed Masai, a Japanese, a Chinese, a Vietnamese, and on and on and on.

The paleface kept turning colors, the way people do when you're on peyote. Now he looked almost like an Indian. That made it easier to talk to him. Why shouldn't people turn colors? All the trouble in the world came from the fact that they usually stayed the same color. James nodded profoundly. As usual, peyote had brought him a big Truth. If whites and blacks and Indians were turning colors all the time, there wouldn't be any hate in the world, because nobody would know which people to hate.

Who the hell's mind was that? George wondered. The tent was dark. He looked around for the woman. He rushed out of the tent. No one was looking at him. They were all, Hagbard and the rest of them, staring in awe at a colossal figure that grew ever taller as it strode away from them. It was a golden woman in golden robes with wild gold, red, black hair flowing free. She stepped over the fence that guarded the festival grounds as casually as if it were the threshold of a door. She towered over the Bavarian pines. In her left hand she carried an enormous golden orb. .

Hagbard put his hand on George's shoulder. "It is possible," he said, "to achieve transcendental illumination though a multiplicity of orgasms as well as through a multiplicity of deaths."

There were lights advancing down the road. The woman, now ninety-three feet tall, strode toward those lights. She laughed, and the laughter echoed across Lake Totenkopf.

"Great Gruad! What's that?" cried Werner.

"It's the Old Woman!" shouted Wolfgang, his lips falling away from his teeth in a snarl.

The sudden cry "Kallisti!" reverberated through the Bavarian hills louder than the music of the Ingolstadt festival had been. Trailing a cometlike cloud of sparks, the golden apple fell into the center of the advancing army.

The Supernazis might have been the living dead, but they were still human. What each man saw in the apple was his heart's desire. Private Heinrich Krause saw the family he had left behind thirty years ago— not knowing that his living grandchildren were at this moment on the pontoon bridge across Lake Totenkopf, fleeing his advance. Corporal Gottfried Kuntz saw his mistress (who in reality had been raped and then disemboweled by Russian soldiers when Berlin fell in 1945). Oberlieutenant Sigmund Voegel saw a ticket to the Wagner festival at Bayreuth. Colonel-SS Konrad Schein saw a hundred Jews lined up before a machine gun that awaited his hand on the trigger. Obergruppenfuehrer Ernst Bickler saw a blue china soup tureen standing in an empty fireplace at his grandmother's house in Kassel. It was brimful of steaming brown dogshit into which was plunged a silver spoon. General Hanfgeist saw Adolf Hitler, his face blackened, his eyes and tongue bulging out, his neck broken, spinning at the end of a hangman's rope.

All of the men who saw the apple, in whatever form, began to fight and kill one another for possession. Tanks smashed into one another head-on. Artillerymen lowered the barrels of their guns and fired point-blank into the center of the melee.

"What is it, Wolfgang?" said Winifred imploringly, her arms thrown in panic around his waist.

"Look into the center of the battle," said Wolfgang grimly. "What do you see?"

"I see the throne of the world. One single chair twenty-three feet off the ground, studded with seventeen rubies, and brooding over it the serpent swallowing its tail, the Rosy Cross, and the Eye. I see that throne and know that I alone am to ascend it and occupy it forever. What do you see?"

"I see Hagbard Celine's teufelschelss head on a silver platter," Wolfgang snarled, thrusting her from him with trembling hands. "Eris has thrown the Apple of Discord, and our Supernazis will fight and kill each other until we destroy it."

"Where did she go?" asked Werner.

"She's lurking about somewhere in some other form, no doubt," said Wolfgang. "As a toadstool or an owl or some such thing, cackling over the chaos she's caused."

Suddenly Wilhelm stood up, his fingers clawing at empty air. In a frightfully clumsy fashion, as if he were deaf, dumb, and blind, he clawed and clamored his way over the side of the Mercedes that had belonged to von Rundstedt. Once out of the car, he took a position about ten feet away from his brothers and sister, turned, and faced them. His eyes stared— every muscle in his body was rigid— the crotch of his trousers bulged.

The voice that came out of his mouth was deep, rich, oleaginous, and horrid: "There are long accounts to settle, children of Gruad."

Wolfgang forgot the sounds of battle that raged around him. "You! Here! How did you escape?"

The voice was like crude petroleum seeping through gravel, and, like petroleum, it was a fossil thing, the voice of a creature that had arisen on the planet when the South Pole was in the Sahara and the great cephalopods were the highest form of life.

"I took no notice. The geometries ceased to bind me. I came forth. I ate souls. Fresh souls, not the miserable plasma you have fed me all these years."

"Great Gruad! Is that your gratitude?" Wolfgang stormed. In a lower voice he said to Werner, "Find the talisman. I think it's in the black case sealed with the Seal of Solomon and the Eye of Newt." To the being that occupied Wilhelm's body he said, "You come at an opportune time. There will be much killing here, and many souls to eat."

"These around us have no souls. They have only pseudo-life. It sickens me to sense them."

Wolfgang laughed. "Even the lloigor can feel disgust, then."

"I have been sick for many hundreds of years, while you kept me sealed in one pentagon after another, feeding me not fresh souls but those wretched stored essences."

"We gave you much!" cried Werner. "Every year, just for you, thirty thousand— forty thousand— fifty thousand deaths in traffic accidents alone."

"But not fresh: Not fresh! Perhaps, though, you can settle your debt to me tonight. I sense many lives nearby— Lives you have somehow lured here. They can be mine."

Werner handed Wolfgang a stick with a silver pentagon at the tip. Wolfgang pointed it at the possessed Wilhelm, who shrieked and fell to his knees. For a moment there was silence, broken only by the sound of Winifred's terrified sobbing and the crack of rifles and the chatter of machine guns in the background.

"You shall not have those lives, Yog Sorhoth. They are for the transcendental illumination of our servants. Wait, though, and there shall be lives in plenty for all of us."

Werner said, "While we parley our army is destroying itself, and there will be no lives for anyone."

"Really?" said the thick voice. "How has your plan gone astray? Let me read you and learn." Wolfgang felt goose pimples break out all over his body. He shuddered as coarse, boneless fingers dripping with slime turned the pages of his mind.

"Mmm— I see. She is here, then. My ancient enemy. It would be good to meet her in battle once again."

"Are your powers equal to hers?" said Wolfgang eagerly.

"I yield to none," came the proud reply.

"Ask him why he's always getting trapped in pentagons, then," said Werner in a low voice.

"Shut up!" Wolfgang whispered savagely. To the lloigor he said, "Destroy her golden apple and release my army to move ahead, and I will withhold the power of this pentagon and give you all the lives you seek."

"Done!" said the voice. Wilhelm suddenly threw his head back, mouth wide open. A choking sound came from his throat. He collapsed on his back, spread-eagled. A strange, greenish, glowing gas rose from his throat.

Werner jumped from the car and rushed over to Wilhelm. "He's alive."

"Of course he's alive," said Wolfgang. "The Eater of Souls simply took possession of his body to communicate with us."

Winifred screamed, "Look!"

The same phosphorescent gas, a huge cloud of it, now obscured the heart of the battle. It seemed to take a shape like a spider with an uncountable number of legs, arms, antennae, and tentacles. Gradually the shape changed, glowing brighter and brighter. A nearby tower on the festival grounds was as visible in the reflected light as if it were day. Then the glow faded, and the tower was silhouetted in moonlight. A great silence fell over the hills around Lake Totenkopf, broken only by the glad cries of the last contingent of festivalgoers as they made it safely to the opposite shore.

"There's no time to lose," Wolfgang said to Werner and Wilhelm. "Round up some officers. See if you can find Hanfgeist."

Hanfgeist had disappeared. The highest-ranking officer surviving was Obergruppenfuehrer Bickler, visions of dog turds sadly fading in a mind that possessed only a horrid semblance of life. A quick survey showed the four Illuminati Prirni that the Apple of Discord had cost them half their army.

"Onward!" roared Wolfgang, and, tanks in the van, they smashed through the festival fence, raced over the hills, troops trotting double-time, and unhesitatingly charged out onto the bridge. Wolfgang stood in the back seat of the von Rundstedt Mercedes, his black-gloved hands gripping the back of the front seat, the wind blowing through his crew cut like a field of wheat. Suddenly, beside him, Wilhelm screamed.

"What is it now?" yelled Wolfgang over the roar of his advancing army.

"The lives we are about to take," the voice of the lloigor grated. "They are mine, yes? All mine?"

"Listen to me, you energy vampire. We have other debts to discharge, and other projects to complete. There are twenty-three of our faithful servants waiting in the Donau Hotel to be transcendentally illuminated. They come first. You'll get yours. Wait your turn."

"Farewell," said the lloigor. "I shall see you at the hour of your death."

"I will never die!"

"Fool!" the voice shrieked with Wilhelm's mouth. Suddenly Wilhelm stood up, threw open the door of the car, and hurled himself out into the lake. He struck with a huge splash, then sank like a stone. A greenish glow spread in the black water where he had gone down. And then there were four.

Hagbard stood atop a hill, watching the tanks roll across the bridge, followed by the black Mercedes, followed by troop carriers and artillery, followed by trotting foot soldiers. He knelt beside a detonator and shoved down the handle.

From end to end the bridge and those upon it disappeared in geysers of white water. The thunder of the explosions— demolition charges placed by the porpoise horde under the direction of Howard— echoed through the hills around the lake.

The tanks went under first. As the front end of the command car sank under water, Werner Saure screamed, "My foot's caught!" He went down with the car, while Wolfgang and Winifred, their tears mingling with the water of Lake Totenkopf, splashed about in the water with the few remaining Supernazis.

And then there were three.

Hagbard shouted, "I sank it! I sank the George Washington Bridge!"

"Is anything changed?" said George. "Of course," said Hagbard. "We've got them on the run. We'll be able to finish them off in a few more minutes. Then there'll be no more evil in the world. Everything will be ginger-peachy." His tone seemed sarcastic rather than victorious, George noted apprehensively.

"Now I'll admit," Fission Chips said reasonably, "that I'm under the influence of some bloody drug from the Kool-Aid. But this simply cannot all be hallucination. Very definitely, thirteen people took their clothes off and started dancing. I quite certainly heard them singing 'Blessed be, blessed be,' over and over. Then a simply gigantic woman rose up from somewhere and all the sirens and undines and mermaids went back into the water. If this was Armageddon, it was not precisely the way the Bible described it Is that a fair summary of the situation?" The tree he was talking to didn't answer. "Blessed be, blessed be," Lady Velkor sang on, as she and her hastily assembled coven danced widdershins in their circle. The spell had worked: With her own eyes she had seen the Great Mother, Isis, rise up and smite the evil spirits of the dead Catholic Inquisitors whom the Illuminati had tried to revive. She knew Hagbard Celine would later be boasting in all the most chic occult circles that he had performed the miracle, and giving the credit to that destructive bitch Eris— but that didn't matter. She with her own eyes had seen Isis, and that was enough.

"Now I ask you," Fission Chips went on, addressing another tree, who seemed more communicative, "what the sulphurous hell did you see happening here tonight?"

"I saw a master Magician," said the tree, "or a master con man— the two are the same— plant a few suggestions and get a bunch of acidheads running away from their own shadows." The tree, who was actually Joe Malik and only looked like a tree to poor befuddled 00005, added, "Or I saw the final battle between Good and Evil, with Horus on both sides."

"You must be drugged too," Chips said pettishly.

"You bet your sweet ass I am," said the tree, walking away.

. . . I don't know how the courts will ever untangle this. With five of them shooting at once, and the Secret Service shooting back right away, the best crime lab in the world will never get the trajectories of all the bullets right. Who, among the survivors, will be tried for murder and who for attempted murder? Thafs the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question and . . . what? . . . oh . . .And now, ladies and gentlemen, on this sad occasion . . . uh ... in this tragic hour of our country's history, let us all pay especially close attention to the new President, who will now address us.

Who's that jig standing over there? the new Chief Exec was asking somebody off camera when he appeared on the TV screens.

The Chevrolet Stegosaurus drove into the empty concert grounds and came to a slow halt. The guitarist stuck his head out the window and yelled to Lady Velkor, "What the hell happened here?"

"There was some bad acid in me Kool-Aid," she told him gravely. "Everybody freaked out and ran off toward town."

"Hell," he said, "and this was going to be our first big audience. We're a new group, just formed. What lousy luck."

He turned and drove off, and she read the sign on the back of the car: THE FERNANDO POO INCIDENT.

"How are you now, baby?" Simon asked.

"I know who I am," Mary Lou said slowly, "and you might not like the results of that any more than the Chicago police force will." Her eyes were distant and pensive.

Wolfgang and Winifred were very near shore when the dark, humped shapes rose out of the water around them. Winifred shrieked, "Wolfgang! For the love of Gruad, Wolfgang! They're pulling me down!" Her long blond hair floated for a moment after her head went under; then that too disappeared.

And then there were two.

The porpoises have her, Wolfgang thought to himself. He continued to swim madly toward shore. Something caught his trouser leg, but he kicked free. Then he was in the shallows, too close in for the sea beasts to follow. He stood up and waded ashore. And came face to face with John Dillinger.

"Sorry, pal," said John, and squeezed the trigger of his Thompson submachine gun. Thirty silver bullets struck Wolfgang with the impact of clubs and threw him back into the water. All feeling was gone from his body, and he felt the foul tentacles closing around his mind and the murmuring, horrible laughter grew to a soundless roar, and the syrupy voice spoke to his mind: Welcome to the place prepared for you from everlasting to everlasting. Now truly you will never die. And the mind of Wolfgang Saure, imprisoned like a living fly in amber, knowing that it must remain so for billions upon billions of years, screamed and screamed and screamed.

And then there was one.

And Joe Malik, feeling as if he were sitting in an audience watching himself perform, walked over to that One and held out his hand. "Congratulations," he said icily. "You really did it."

Hagbard looked at the hand and said, "You were more intimate the last time around."

"Very well," said Joe. "My Lord, my enemy." He leaned forward and kissed Hagbard full on the mouth. Then he took the gun out of his pocket and carefully fired directly into Hagbard's brain. And then there were none.

It was quite real; Joe shook himself, stood up, and grinned. Walking over to Hagbard, he took out the gun and handed it to him.

"Surprise ending," he said. "I read all the clues, just like you wanted me to. I know you're the fifth Illuminatus Primus, and I know your motive for wiping out the other four is nothing like you've led us to believe. But I can't play my role. I still trust you. You must have a good reason."

Hagbard's mouth fell open in completely genuine surprise. "Well, sink me!" he said, beginning to laugh.

Dawn was breaking; the Nine Unknown Men, most mysterious of all rock groups, ceremonially donned their football helmets and faced the East to chant:

There is only ONE God: He is the SUN God: Ra! Ra! Ra!
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 3:21 am

Part 1 of 4

BOOK FIVE: GRUMMET

The bursts to the moon and to the planets are also not historic events. They are the major evolutionary breakthroughs . . . Today when we speak of immortality and of going to another world we no longer mean these in a theological or metaphysical sense. People are now striving for physical immortality. People are now traveling to other worlds. Transcendence is no longer a metaphysical concept. It has become reality.

—F. M. ESFANDIARY, Upwingers


THE TENTH TRIP, OR MALKUTH

FAREWELL TO PLANET EARTH

Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear; and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack freedom.

—LORD OMAR KHAYYAM RAVENHURST, K.S.C., "Epistle to the Paranoids," The Honest Book of Truth


As the earth turned on its axis and dawn reached city after city, hamlet after hamlet, farm after farm, mountain and valley after mountain and valley, it became obvious that May 1 would be bright and sunny almost everywhere. In Athens a classical scholar waking in the small cell where certain Platonic opinions had landed him felt a burst of unexpected hope and greeted Helios with rolling syllables from Sappho, crying through the bars, "Brodadaktylos Eos!" Birds, startled by the shout, took off from the jailyard below, filling the air with the flapping of their wings; the guards came and told him to shut up. He answered them gaily with "Polyphloisbois thalassas! You've taken everything else away from me, but you can't take old Homer away!"

In Paris the Communists under the Red banner and the anarchists under the Black were preparing for the annual International Labor Solidarity Day, at which the usual factionalism and sectarianism would once again demonstrate the absolute lack of international labor solidarity. And in London, Berlin, a thousand cities, the Red and the Black would wave and the tongues of their partisans would wag, and the age-old longing for a classless society would once again manifest itself; while, in the same cities, an older name and an older purpose for that day would be commemorated in convent after convent and school after school where verses (far older than the name of Christianity) were sung to the Mother of God:

Queen of the Angels Queen of the May


In the United States, alas, the usual celebrations of National Law Day had to be cancelled, since the rioting was not quite ended yet.

But everywhere, in Asia and Africa as in Europe and the Americas, the members of the Oldest Religion were returning from their festivals, murmuring "Blessed be" as they parted, secure in their knowledge that the Mother of God was indeed still alive and had visited them at midnight, whether they knew her as Dian, Dan, Tan, Tana, Shakti, or even Erzulie.

Queen of the Angels Queen of the May


In Nairobi, Nkrumah Fubar picked up his mail from a friend employed at the post office. To his delight, American Express had relented and corrected their error, crediting him with his February 2 payment at last. This was, to his thinking, big magic, since the notification had been mailed from New York even before he began his geodesic spiels against the President of American Express on April 25. Obviously, such retroactive witchcraft was worthy of further investigation, and the key was the synergetic geometry of the Fuller tetrahedron in which he had kept his manikin during the spell-casting. Over breakfast, before leaving for the university, he opened Fuller's No More Second-Hand God and again grappled with the arcane mathematics and metaphysics of omnidirectional halo. Finishing breakfast, he closed the book, shut his eyes, and tried to visualize the Fuller universe. The image formed, and, to his amazement and amusement, it was identical with certain symbols an old Kikuyu witch doctor had once drawn when explaining the doctrine of "fan-shaped destiny" to him.

As the book closed in Kenya, the drums of Orabi stopped abruptly. It was one in the morning there, and the visiting anthropologist, Indole Ringh, immediately asked how the dancers knew the ceremony was finished. "The danger is past," an old Hopi told him patiently, "can't you feel the difference in the air?" (Saul, Barney, and Markoff Chaney were racing toward Las Vegas in the rented Brontosaurus, while Dillinger was leisurely driving back toward Los Angeles.) In Honolulu, as the clocks struck nine the previous evening, Buckminster Fuller, trotting between airplanes, suddenly caught a glimpse of a new geodesic structure fully incorporating omnidirectional halo . . . And, after a four-hour flight eastward, landing in Tokyo at the "same time" he left Honolulu, he had a detailed sketch finished (it looked somewhat fan-shaped) as the NO SMOKING FASTEN SEAT BELT sign flashed. (It was four A.M. in Los Angeles, and Dillinger, safely home— he thought— heard the gunfire dying out in the distance. The President must already be withdrawing the National Guard, at least in part, he thought.) The phone by Rebecca's bed rang just then, eight o'clock New York time, and she answered it to hear Molly Muldoon shout excitedly, "Saul and Barney are on TV. Turn it on— they've saved the country!"

In Las Vegas, Barney blinked under the TV lights and stared woodenly into the camera, while Saul kept his eyes on the interviewer and spoke in his kindly-family-doctor persona.

"Would you tell our viewers, Inspector Goodman, how you happened to be looking in Lehman Caves for the missing man?" The interviewer had the professional tone of all TV newscasters; his intonation wouldn't have changed if he'd been asking "And why did you find our sponsor's product more satisfactory?" or "How did you feel when you learned you had brain cancer?"

"Psychology," Saul pronounced gravely. "The suspect was a procurer. That's a definite psychological type, just as a safecracker, a bank robber, a child molester, and a policeman are definite types. I tried to think and feel like a procurer. What would such a man do with the whole government looking for him? Attempt an escape to Mexico or somewhere else? Never—that's a bank-robber reaction. Procurers are not people who take risks or make bold moves against the odds. What would a procurer do? He would look for a hole to hide in."

"The FBI crime lab definitely confirms that the man Inspector Goodman found is the missing plague-carrier, Carmel," the interviewer threw in. (He had orders to repeat this every two minutes.) "Tell me, Inspector, why wouldn't such a man hide in, say, an empty house, or a secluded cabin in the mountains?"

"He wouldn't travel far," Saul explained. "He'd be too paranoid— seeing police officers everywhere he went. And his imagination would vastly exaggerate the actual power of the government. There is only one law enforcement agent to each four hundred citizens in this country, but he would imagine the proportion reversed. The most secluded cabin would be too nerve-wracking for him. He'd imagine hordes of National Guardsmen and law officers of all sorts searching every square foot of woods in America. He really would. Procurers are very ordinary men, compared to hardened criminals. They think like ordinary people in most ways. The ordinary man and woman never commits a crime because they have the same exaggerated idea of our omnipotence." Saul's tone was neutral, descriptive, but in New York Rebecca's heart skipped a beat: This was the new Saul talking, the one who was no longer on the side of law and order.

"So you just asked yourself, where's a good-sized hole near Las Vegas?"

"That was all there was to it, yes."

"The American people will certainly be grateful to you. And how did it happen that you got involved in this case? You're with the New York Police Department, aren't you?"

How will he answer that one? Rebecca wondered; just then the phone rang.

Turning down the TV sound, she lifted the phone and said, "Yes?"

"I can tell by your voice you're the kind of woman who fully meets the criteria of my value system," said August Personage. "I want to lick your ass and your pussy and have you piss on me and—"

"Well, that's a most amazing story, Inspector Goodman," the interviewer was saying. Oh, hell, Rebecca thought. Saul's expression was so sincere that she knew he had just told one of the most outrageous lies of his life.

The phone rang again. With a pounce Rebecca grabbed it and snouted, "Listen, you creep, if you keep calling me-"

"That's no way to talk to a man who just saved the world," Saul's voice said mildly.

"Saul! But you're on television—"

"They videotaped that a half-hour ago. I'm at the Las Vegas Airport, about to take a jet to Washington. I'm having a conference with the President"

"My God. What are you going to tell him?"

"As much," Saul pronounced, "as an asshole like him can understand."

(In Los Angeles, Dr. Vulcan Troll watched the seismograph move upward to Grade 2. That still wasn't serious, but he scratched a note to the graduate student who would soon be replacing him. "If this jumps to 3, call me at my house." Then he drove home, passing Dillinger's bungalow, humming happily, thankful that the rioting was ending and the Guard being withdrawn. At the lab the graduate student, reading a paperback titled Carnal Orgy, didn't notice when the graph jumped past 3 and hit 4.)

Danny Pricefixer, waking in Ingolstadt, glanced at his wristwatch. Noon. My God, he thought; sleeping so late was a major sin in his system of morality. Then he remembered a little of last night, and smiled contentedly, turning in the bed to kiss Lady Velkor's neck. A huge black arm hung over the other shoulder, and a black hand, limp in sleep, held her breast. "My God!" Danny said out loud, remembering more, as Clark Kent sat up groggily and stared at him.

("Smiling Jim" Treponema, at that moment, was navigating a very dangerous pass in the mountains of Northern California. Strapped to his back was a 6mm Remington Model 700 Bolt Action rifle with 6-power Bushnell telescope; a canteen of whiskey was hooked to one side of his belt, and a canteen of water to the other. He was perspiring from labor, in spite of the altitude, but he was one of the few happy people in the country, since he had been nowhere near a radio for three days and had missed the whole terror connected with Anthrax Leprosy Pi plague, the declaration of martial law, and the rioting and bombings. He was on his yearly vacation, free from the sewer of smut in which he was submerged forty-nine weeks of the year— the foulness and filth in which he heroically struggled daily, risking his soul for the good of his fellow citizens— and he was breathing clean air and thinking clean thoughts. Specifically, as an avid hunter, he had read that only one American eagle still survived, and he was determined to be immortalized in hunting literature as the man who killed it. He knew well, of course, how ecologists and conservation-ists would regard that achievement, but their opinions didn't bother him. A bunch of fags, commies, and smut-nuts: That was his estimate of those bleeding-heart types. Probably smoked dope, too. Not a man's man among them. He shifted his rifle, which was pressing his sweat-soaked shirt uncomfortably, and climbed onward and upward.)

Mama Sutra stared at the central Tarot card in the Tree of Life: It was The Fool.

"Pardon me," the little Italian tree said.

"This is getting ridiculous," Fission Chips muttered. "I don't intend to spend the rest of my life in conversation with trees."

"I'm a tree worth talking to," the dark-skinned tree with her hair in a bun persisted.

He squinted. "I know what you are," he said finally, "half tree and half woman. Ergo, a dryad. Benefit of classical education."

"Very good," said the dryad. "But when you stop tripping, you're going to crash. You'll remember London and your job, and you'll wonder how you're going to explain the last month to them."

"Somebody stole a month from me," Chips agreed pleasantly. "A cynical old swine named the Dealy Lama. Or another feller named Toad. Bad lot. Shouldn't go around stealing months."

The tree handed him an envelope. "Try not to lose that," she said. "It'll make everybody in your office so happy that they'll accept any story you make up to explain how it took you a month to get it."

"What is it?"

"The name of every BUGGER agent in the British government. Together with the false names they use for the bank accounts where they keep all the money they can't account for. And the account numbers and the names of the banks, too. In one nice package. All it needs is a red ribbon."

"I think my leg is being pulled again," said Chips. But he was coming down, and he opened the envelope and peered at the contents. "This is real?" he asked.

"They won't be able to account for the money," the tree assured him. "Some very interesting confessions will be obtained."

"Who the devil are you?" Chips asked, seeing a teen-age Italian girl and not a tree.

"I'm your holy guardian angel," she said.

"You look like an angel," Chips admitted grudgingly, "but I don't believe any of this. Time travel, talking trees, giant toads, none of it. Somebody slipped me a drug."

"Yes, somebody slipped you a drug. But I'm your holy guardian angel, and I'm slipping you this envelope, and it'll make everything all right back in London. All you have to do is make up a halfway reasonable lie . . ."

"I was held prisoner in a BUGGER dungeon with a beautiful Eurasian love-slave," Chips began improvising.

"Very good," she said. "They won't believe it, but they'll think you believe it. That's good enough."

"Who are you really?"

But the tree only repeated, "Don't lose that envelope," and walked away, turning into an Italian teenager again, and then into a gigantic woman carrying a golden apple. Hauptmann, chief of field operations for the Federal Republic of Germany's police, looked around the Fuehrer Suite in disgust. He had arrived from Bonn and headed straight for the Donau Hotel, determined to make some sense of the scandals, tragedies, and mysteries of the previous night. The first suspect he grilled was Freiherr Hagbard Celine, sinister jet-set millionaire, who had come to the rock festival with a large entourage. Celine and Hauptmann talked quietly in one corner of the suite of the Donau Hotel, while the cameras of police photographers clicked away behind them.

Hauptmann was tall and thin, with close-cropped silver-gray hair, long, vulpine features, and piercing eyes. "Dreadful tragedy, the death of your President last night," he said. "My condolences. Also for the unhappy state of affairs in your country." Actually, Hauptmann was delighted to see the United States of America falling into chaos. He had been fifteen at the end of World War II, had been called to the colors as the Allies advanced on German soil, and had seen his country overrun by American troops. All of this made a deeper and more lasting impression on him than the U.S. - West German cooperation that developed later.

"Not my president, not my country," said Hagbard quickly. "I was born in Norway. I lived in the U.S. for quite some time, and did become a citizen for a while, when I was much younger than I am now. But I renounced my American citizenship years ago."

"I see," said Hauptmann, trying unsuccessfully to conceal his distaste for Hagbard's indistinct sense of national identity. "And what country today has the honor of claiming you as a citizen?"

Smiling, Hagbard reached for the inside pocket of the brass-buttoned navy-blue yachtsman's blazer he had worn for the occasion. He handed his passport to Hauptmann, who took it and grunted with surprise.

"Equatorial Guinea." He looked up, frowning. "Fernando Poo!"

"Quite so," said Hagbard, a white-toothed grin breaking through his dark features. "I will accept your expression of sympathy for the sad state of affairs in that country."

Hauptmann's dislike of this Latin plutocrat grew deeper. The man was undoubtedly one of those unprincipled international adventurers who carried citizenship the way many freighters carried Panamanian registry. Celine's wealth was probably equal to or greater than the total wealth of Equatorial Guinea. Yet it was likely that he had done nothing for his adopted country other than bribe a few officials to obtain the citizenship. Equatorial Guinea had split asunder, nearly plunging the world into a third and final war, and yet here was this parasitical Mediterranean fop, driving to a rock festival in a Bugatti Royale with a host of drones, yes-men, flunkies, minions, whores, dope fiends, and all-round social liabilities. Disgusting!

Hagbard looked around. "This room is a pretty foul place to have a conversation. How can you stand that smell? It's nauseating me."

Pleased to be causing some discomfort to this man, whom he disliked more and more as he got to know him, Hauptmann settled back in the red armchair, his teeth bared in a smile. "You will forgive me, Freiherr Celine, I find it necessary to be here at this time and also necessary to talk to you. However, I would have thought this peculiar odor of fish would not be unpleasant to you. Perhaps your nautical dress has led me astray."

Hagbard shrugged. "I am a seaman of sorts. But just because a man likes the sea doesn't mean he wants to sit next to a ton of dead mackerel. What do you think it is, anyway?"

"I have no idea. I was hoping you could identify it for me."

"Just dead fish, that's all it smells like to me. I'm afraid you may be expecting more from me all around than I can possibly provide. I suppose you think I can tell you a lot about last night. Just what are you trying to find out?"

"First of all, I want to find out what actually happened. What we have, I think, is a case of drug abuse on a colossal scale. And we— the Western world in general— have had too many of those in recent years. Apparently there is not a single person who was present at this festival who did not partake of some of this soft drink dosed with LSD."

"Treat every man to his dessert and none should 'scape tripping," said Hagbard.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I was parodying Shakespeare," said Hagbard. "But it's not very relevant. Please go on."

"Well, so far no one has been able to give me a coherent or plausible account of the evening's events," said Hauptmann. "There have been at least twenty-seven deaths that I'm fairly sure of. There has been massive abuse of LSD. There are numerous accounts of pistol, rifle, and machine-gun fire somewhere on the shore of the lake. A number of witnesses say they saw many men in Nazi uniforms running around in the woods. If that wasn't a hallucination, dressing as a Nazi is a serious crime in the Federal Republic of Germany. So far we have managed to keep much of this out of the papers by holding the press people who came here incommunicado, but we will have to determine precisely what crimes were committed and who committed them, and we must prosecute them vigorously. Otherwise, we will appear to the whole world as a nation incapable of dealing with the wholesale corruption of youth within our borders."

"All nations are wholesale corruptors of youth," said Hagbard. "I wouldn't worry about it."

Hauptmann grunted, seeing in his mind's eye a vision of drug-crazed masqueraders in Nazi uniforms and himself in a German army uniform over thirty years ago at the age of fifteen and understanding very well what Hagbard meant "I have my job to do," he said sullenly.

See how much more pleasant the world is now that the Saures are gone, the Dealy Lama flashed into his brain. Hagbard kept a poker face.

Hauptmann went on, "Your own role in the incident seems to have been a constructive one, Freiherr Celine. You are described as going to the stage when the hysteria and the hallucinating had reached some sort of a climax and making a speech which greatly calmed the audience."

Hagbard laughed. "I have no idea at all what I said. You know what I thought? I thought I was Moses and they were the Israelites and I was leading them across the Red Sea while the Pharaoh's army, intent on slaughtering them, pursued."

"The only Israelites present last night seemed to have fared rather badly. You're not Jewish yourself, are you, Freiherr Celine?"

"I'm not religious at all. Why do you ask?"

"I thought that then, perhaps, you could shed some light on the scene we find here in these rooms. Well, no matter for the moment. It is interesting that you thought you led them across the lake. In fact, this morning, when the police reserves entered the area, they found most of the young people wandering around on the shore of the lake opposite the festival"

"Well, perhaps we all marched around it while we thought we were going across it," said Hagbard. "By the way, didn't you have any men at the festival at all? If you did, they should be able to tell you something."

"We had a few plainclothes agents there, and they could tell me nothing. All but one had unknowingly taken the LSD, and the one who didn't must have been hallucinating too, from some kind of psychological contagion. He saw the Nazis, a glowing woman a hundred feet tall, a bridge across the lake. Sheer garbage. As you doubtless noticed, there were no uniformed police there. Arrangements were made— and sanctioned at the highest level of government— to leave policing at the festival to its management. It was felt that, given the attitudes of youth today, official police would not be effective in handling the huge crowd. I might say, in my own opinion, I consider that a cowardly decision. But I'm not a politician, thank God. As a result of that decision, order-keeping at the festival was ultimately in the hands of people like yourself who happened to be inspired to do something about the situation. And were themselves hampered, as involuntary victims of LSD."

"Well," said Hagbard, "in order to fully understand what happened, you have to realize that many people there probably welcomed an acid trip. Many must have brought their own acid and taken it. I, personally, have had a great deal of experience with LSD. A man of my wide-ranging interests, you understand, feels obligated to try everything once. I was taking acid back when it was still legal everywhere in the world."

"Of course," said Hauptmann sourly.

Hagbard looked around the room and said, "Have you considered the possibility that these men, old as they are, might have unknowingly imbibed LSD and suffered heart failure or some such thing?"

There were twenty-three dead men in the suite. Thirteen were in the large parlor where Hagbard and Hauptman were sitting. The dead men, too, were seated, in various attitudes of total collapse, some with their heads lolling back, others bent forward at the waist, heads hanging between their knees, knuckles resting on the floor. There were nine more old men in the bedroom, and one in the bathroom. Most of them were white-haired; several were completely bald. Not one could have been under eighty years of age, and several appeared to be over ninety. The man in the bathroom had been caught by death in the embarrassing position of sitting on the toilet with his pants down. This was the old gentleman with the white mustache and the unruly forelock who had spoken harshly to George in the lobby the night before last.

Hauptmann shook his head. "I'm afraid it will be no easy task to find out what happened to these men. They all seem to have died at about the same moment. There are no observable traces of poison, no signs of struggle or pain, except for the expression around the eyes. All of their eyes are open, and they appear to be looking at some unguessable horror."

"Do you have any idea who they are? Why did you say I might have been able to help if I were Jewish?"

"We have found their passports. They are all Israeli citizens. That in itself is quite odd. Generally, Jews that old do not care to come to this country, for obvious reasons. However, there was an organization connected with the Zionist movement founded here in Ingolstadt on May 1, 1776. These elders of Zion might have assembled here to celebrate the anniversary."

"Oh, yes," said Hagbard. "The Illuminati of Bavaria, wasn't it? I remember hearing about them When we first arrived here."

"The organization was founded by an unfrocked Jesuit, and its membership consisted of freemasons, freethinkers, and Jews. There were also some famous names in politics and the arts: King Leopold, Goethe, Beethoven."

"And this organization was behind the Zionist movement, you say?"

Hauptmann brushed away the suggestion with long, slender fingers. "I did not say they were behind anything. There are always those who think that every political or criminal phenomenon must have something behind it. There is always a conspiracy that explains everything. That is unscientific. If you wish to understand events, you must analyze the masses of the people and the economic, cultural, and social conditions in which they live. Zionism was a logical development out of the situation of the Jews during the last hundred years. One need not imagine some group of illuminated ones thinking it up and promulgating the movement for devious reasons of their own. The Jews were in a wretched condition in many places— they needed somewhere to go— a child could have seen that Palestine was an attractive possibility."

"Well," said Hagbard, "if the Illuminati are of no importance in the history of Israel, what are these twenty-three old Israelis doing here on the day of the organization's founding?"

"Perhaps they thought the Illuminati were important Perhaps they themselves were members. I shall make inquiries to Israel about their identities. Relatives will probably claim the bodies. Otherwise, the German government will see that they are buried in Ingolstadt Jewish cemetery with proper rabbinical ceremonies. The government is very solicitous of Jewish persons. Nowadays."

"Maybe they were freethinkers," said Hagbard. "Maybe they wouldn't like being buried with religious ceremonies."

"The question is wearisome and unimportant," said Hauptmann. "We shall consult the Israeli government and do as it suggests." An elderly waiter knocked and was admitted by one of Hauptmann's men. He pushed a serving cart bearing a magnificent silver coffee urn, cups, and a tray full of pastries. Before serving anyone else, he rolled the cart across the thick carpet to Hauptmann and Hagbard. His rheumy eyes studiously avoided the bodies scattered around the suite. He poured out coffee for both men.

"Lots of cream and sugar," said Hagbard.

"Black for me," said Hauptmann, picking up a pastry with cherry filling and biting into it with relish.

"How do you know somebody hasn't dosed the coffee or the pastry with LSD?" said Hagbard, smiling mischievously.

Hauptmann brushed his hand over his hair and smiled back. "Because I would put this hotel out of business if I were served food tainted in any way, and they know it. They will take the utmost precautions."

"Now that we're being a little more sociable and drinking coffee together," said Hagbard, "let me ask you a favor. Turn me loose today. I have interests to look after in the U.S., and I'd like to be leaving."

"You were originally planning to stay for the entire week. Now, suddenly, you have to leave at once. I don't understand."

"I was planning to stay, but that was before most of the U.S. government got wiped out. Also, since the remainder of the festival is being called off, there's no reason to stay. I'm still not clear on that, however. Why is the festival being called off? Whose idea is it, and what are the reasons?"

Hauptmann stared down his long nose at Hagbard and took another bite of the pastry, while Hagbard wondered how the man could eat in the midst of this awful smell. He could understand how a detective would not be bothered by the presence of the dead, but the fishy smell was something else again.

"To begin with, Freiherr Celine, there is the disappearance and possible death by drowning of the four members of the Saure family, known as the American Medical Association. Accounts of what happened to them are garbled, fantastic, and contradictory, as are those of every other incident that occurred last night. As I reconstruct it, they drove their car straight into the lake."

"From which side?"

Hauptmann shrugged. "It hardly matters. The lake is virtually bottomless. If they're in there, I doubt that we will ever find them. They must have been under the influence of LSD, and they certainly weren't used to it." He looked accusingly at Hagbard. "They were so clean-cut. Absolutely the hope of the future. And the car was a national relic. A great loss."

"Were they the only well-known casulaties?"

"Who can say? We have no accurate record of who was attending the festival. No list was kept of those who bought tickets, as should have been done. A thousand young men and women could have drowned themselves in that lake and we wouldn't know about it. In any case, the Saures, as you may not know, were the moving spirits behind the Ingolstadt festival. Very patriotic. They wished to do something to promote tourism to Germany, particularly of Bavaria, since they were native Bavarians."

"Yes," said Hagbard, "I read that Ingolstadt was their home town."

Hauptmann shook his head. "Their press agent gave that out when the festival was conceived. Actually, they were born in northern Bavaria, in Wolframs-Eschenbach. It is the birthplace of another famous German musician, the Minnesinger Wolfram von Eschenbach, who wrote Parzival. Well, now they are gone, barring a miracle, and no one else seems to be in charge. Without them the festival is simply collapsing, like a headless body. Furthermore, the government wants the festival shut down because we don't want a repetition of last night. LSD is still illegal in West Germany, unlike the U.S."

"There are parts of the U.S. where it's still illegal," said Hagbard. "It's not illegal in Equatorial Guinea, because we've just never had a drug problem there."

"Since you are an ethusiastic citizen of Equatorial Guinea, I am sure that delights you," said Hauptmann. "Well, Freiherr Celine, I would like to release you immediately, but when I've pieced together more of last night's events I shall have more questions for you. I must ask you to stay in the Ingolstadt area."

Hagbard stood up. "If you'll agree not to have me tailed or guarded, I'll give you my word that I'll stick around."

Hauptmann smiled thinly. "Your word won't be necessary. Every road is blocked; no planes are permitted to take off or land at Ingolstadt Aerodrome. You can have the run of the town, the lake, and the festival area, and you will not be disturbed."

Hagbard left at the same time the old waiter did. The waiter bowed Hagbard out the door and when it closed behind him said, "A great shame."

"Well," said Hagbard, "they were all in their eighties. That's a good age to die."

The waiter laughed. "I am seventy-five, and I do not think any age is a good age to die. But that is not what I was referring to. Perhaps mein herr did not notice the fish-tank in the room. It was broken, and the fish were spilled all the floor. I have taken care of that tank for over twenty years. It was a fine collection of rare tropical fish. Even Egyptian mouth-breeders. Now they are all dead. So it goes."

Hagbard wanted to ask the waiter what an Egyptian mouth-breeder was, but the old man suddenly nodded, pushed open a doorway to a service room, and disappeared.

Danny Pricefixer was wandering around in the dark with Lady Velkor and Clark Kent, feeling absolutely wonderful, when Miss Portinari intercepted him. "This will interest you," she said, handing him an envelope similar to the one she had handed Fission Chips.

"What is it?" he asked, seeing her as a Greek woman in classic robes holding a golden apple.

'Take a look."

He opened the envelope and found a picture of Tobias Knight and Zev Hirsch, in the middle of the Confrontation office, setting the timer on the bomb.

"This man," she said, pointing to Knight, "is willing to turn State's evidence. Against both Hirsch and Atlanta Hope. You've wanted to nab them for a long time, haven't you?"

"Who are you?" Danny asked, staring.

"I am the one Mama Sutra told you of, the one appointed to contact you here in Ingolstadt. I am of the Illuminated."

("What are those two talking about?" Clark Kent asked Lady Velkor. "Who knows?" she shrugged. "They're both tripping.")

"God's Lightning is the most active front in America today for the Cult of the Yellow Sign," Miss Portinari went on, Telling the Mark the Tale ... A few feet away, Joe Malik said to Hagbard, "I don't like frame-ups. Even for people like Hirsch and Hope."

"You suspect us of unethical behavior?" Hagbard asked innocently.

(Pat Walsh is dialing a phone.)

"I don't believe in jails," Joe said bluntly. "I don't think Atlanta and Zev will be any better when they get out. They'll be worse."

"You can be sure the Illuminati will protect you," Miss Portinari concluded gravely. Danny Pricefixer continued staring at her.

The phone is ringing far away, dragging me back to a body, a self, a purpose, shattering my memories of being the Ringmaster. I sit up and lift the receiver. "Hirsch," I say.

"My name is Pat Walsh," a woman's voice says. "I speak for Atlanta herself. The pass word is Theleme."

"Go ahead," I say hoarsely, wondering if it's about that peacenik professor we killed at UN plaza on April 1.

"You're being framed for a bombing," she said. "You have to go into hiding."

Hagbard laughed. "Atlanta isn't returning to the States. She's been a double agent for over two years. Working for me." (I found the warehouse door the Walsh woman described. It was open, as she had promised, and I wondered about the name on it, Gold & Appel Transfers . . .) "So is Tobias Knight, and he'll cop a plea. It's all been carefully planned, Joe. You only thought bombing your own office was your idea."

"How about Zev Hirsch?" Joe asked.

"He's having some very educational experiences about this time in New York City," Hagbard replied. "I don't believe in jails, either."

And I am trapped, the three of them surround me, and Jubela demands, 'Tell us the Word," Jubelo repeats, "Tell us the Word," and Jubelum unsheathes the sword, 'Tell us the Word, Zev Hirsch . . ."

"A bombing in New York?" the President asked shrewdly, trying to look as tough as his predecessor.

"Yes," Saul went on. "As soon as the link with God's Lightning was clear to us, Barney and I took off for Las Vegas. You can understand why."

The President didn't understand any of this, but wasn't about to admit that. "You headed for Las Vegas?" he asked shrewdly, trying to look as tough as his predecessor.

"Yes," Saul said sincerely. "As soon as we found out about Anthrax Leprosy Pi and Dr. Mocenigo's death, we realized the same organization must be implicated. God's Lightning—"

"God's Lightning?" the President asked shrewdly, remembering earlier years when he had been a guest speaker at their rallies.

"And the secret group that has infiltrated them and taken them over, the Cult of the Yellow Sign. We have reason to believe that an English intelligence agent named Chips will be arriving in London in a few hours with evidence against most of the Yellow Sign operatives within their government. You see, sir, this is an international conspiracy."

"An international conspiracy?" the President asked shrewdly.

And in Central Park our old friend Perri hops from tree to ground, snatches a nut thrown by August Personage, and quickly runs around the tree three times in case this friend-possibly-enemy produces a gun and starts blasting . . .

While far above the highest mountains in California another aspect of my consciousness soars like winged poetry: and knows, somehow, more about what is coming than Dr. Troll's seismograph: for I am the last, truly the last. The ecologists are right: mine is not merely an endangered but nearly an extinct species, and my senses have been sharpened beyond instinct by these last years. I circle around, I circle around, I soar: I bank: I float. I am, rare moment for me! not thinking about fish, for my belly is full at present I circle around, circle around, thinking only about the soaring, the freedom, and, more vaguely, about the bad vibes coming up from below. Must you have a name? Call me Hah' One, then: haliaeetus leucocephalus the last: symbol once of imperial Rome and now of imperial America: of which I neither know nor care, for all I know is the freedom of my estate and about that the Romans and the Americans have never had aught but the most confused and distorted ideas. Wearing my long green feathers I circle around. I am Hali One and I scream, not with rage or with fear or with anger; I scream with ecstasy, the terrible joy of my very existence, and the scream echoes from mountain to mountain to another mountain, resonating onward and onward, a sound that only another of my species could understand, and none are left to hear it. But still I scream: the shriek of Shiva the Destroyer, true face of Vishnu the Preserver and Brahma the Creator: for my scream is not of life or death but of life-in-death, and I am equally contemptuous of Perri and of August Personage, of squirrels and of men, and of all lesser birds who cannot ascend to my height and know the agony and supremacy of my freedom.

No— because they broke Billie Freshette slow and ugly and they broke Marilyn Monroe fast and bright like lightning They broke Daddy and they broke Mama but shit like I mean it this time they ain't going to break me No even if it's greater with Simon than with any other man even if he knows more than any other man I've had No it can't be him and it can't even be Hagbard who seems to be the king of the circus the very Ringmaster and keeper of the final secret No it can't be any man and it most certainly by Jesus and by Christ it can't be going back to Mister Charlie's police force No it's dark like my own skin and dark like the destiny they've inflicted on me because of my skin but whatever it is I can only find it alone God the time that rat bit me while I was sleeping Daddy screaming until he. was almost crying "I'll kill the fucking landlord I'll kill the motherfucker I'll cut his white heart out" until Mama finally calmed him No he died a little then No it would have been better if he had killed the landlord No even if they caught him and they would have caught him No even if he died in the goddam electric chair and we went on welfare No a man shouldn't let that happen to his children he shouldn't be realistic and practical No no matter how good it is no matter how wonderful the come it will always be there in the back of my head that Simon is white No white radical white revolutionary white lover it doesn't matter it still comes up white and it's not acid and it's not a mood I mean shit you have to decide sooner or later Are you on somebody else's trip or are you on your own No and I 'can't join God's Lightning or even what's left of the old Women's Lib I mean shit that poetry Simon quoted is all wrong No it's not true that no man is an island No the truth is every man is an island and especially every woman is an island and even more every black woman is an island

On August 23, 1928, Rancid, the butler in the Drake Mansion on old Beacon Hill, reported a rather distressing fact to his employer. "Good Lord Harry," old Drake cried at first, "is he turning Papist now?" His second question was less rhetorical: "You're absolutely sure?"

"There is no doubt," Rancid replied. "The maids showed me the socks, sir. And the shoes."

That night there was a rattier strangulated attempt at conversation in the mansion's old library. "Are you going back to Harvard?" "Not yet."

"Are you at least going to try another damned alienist?" "They call themselves psychiatrists these days, Father. I don't think so."

"Dammit, Robert, what did happen in the war?" "Many things. They all made profits for our bank, though, so don't worry about them." "Are you turning Red?"

"I see no profit there. The State of Massachusetts killed two innocent men today for holding opinions of that sort." "Innocent my Aunt Fanny. Robert, I know the judge personally—"

"And he believes what the friend of a banker should believe."

There was a long pause, and old Drake crushed out a cigar he had hardly started. "Robert, you know you're sick." "Yes."

"What is this latest thing— glass and nails in your shoes? Your mother would die if she knew."

There was another silence. Robert Putney Drake finally answered, lanquidly, "It was an experiment. A phase. The Sioux Indians do much worse to themselves in the Sun Dance. So do lots of chaps in Spanish monasteries, and in India, among other places. It's not the answer." "It's really finished?"

"Oh, yes. Quite. I'm trying something else." "Something to hurt yourself again?" "No, nothing to hurt myself."

"Well, then, I'm glad to hear that. But I do wish you would go to another alienist, or psychiatrist, or whatever they call themselves." Another pause. "You can pull yourself together, you know. Play the man, Robert. Play the man."

Old Drake was satisfied. He had talked turkey to the boy; he had performed his fatherly duty. Besides, the private detectives assured him that the Red Business really was trivial: The lad had been to several anarchist and Communist meetings, but his comments had been uniformly aloof and cynical.

It was nearly a year later when the really bad news from the private investigators arrived.

"How much will the girl take to keep her mouth shut?" old Drake asked immediately.

"After we pay hospital expenses, maybe a thousand more," the man from Pinkerton's said.

"Offer her five hundred," the old man replied. "Go up to a thousand only if you have to."

"I said maybe a thousand," the detective said bluntly. "He used a special kind of whip, one with twisted nails in the ends. She might want two or three thou."

"She's only a common whore. They're used to this sort of thing."

"Not to this extent." The detective was losing his deferential tone. "The photos of her back, and her buttocks especially, didn't bother me much. But that's because I'm in this business and I've seen a lot. An average jury would vomit, Mr. Drake. In court—"

"In court," old Drake pronounced, "she would come before a judge who belongs to several of my clubs and has investments in my bank. Offer five hundred."

Two months thereafter, the stock market crashed and New York millionaires began leaping from high windows onto hard streets. Old Drake, the next day, ran into his son begging on the street near the Old Granary cemetery. The boy was wearing old clothes from a secondhand store.

"It's not that bad, son. We'll pull through."

"Oh, I know that. You'll come out ahead, in fact, if I'm any judge of character."

"Then what the hell is this disgraceful damned foolishness?"

"Experience. I'm breaking out of a trap."

The old man fumed all the way back to the bank. That evening he decided it was time for another open and honest discussion; when he went to Robert's room, however, he found the boy thoroughly trussed up in chains and quite purple in the face.

"God! Damn! Son! What is this?"

The boy— who was twenty-seven and, in some respects, more sophisticated than his father— grinned and relaxed.

The purple faded from his face. "One of Houdini's escapes," he explained simply.

"You intend to become a stage magician? My God!"

"Not at all. I'm breaking out of another trap— the one that says nobody but Houdini can do these things."

Old Drake, to do him justice, hadn't acquired his wealth without some shrewdness concerning human peculiarities. "I begin to see," he said heavily. "Pain is a trap. That was why you put the broken glass in your shoes that time. Fear of poverty is a trap. That's why you tried begging on the streets. You're trying to become a Superman, like those crazy boys in Chicago, the 'thrill killers.' What you did to that whore last year was part of all this. What else have you done?"

"A lot." Robert shrugged. "Enough to be canonized as a saint, or to be burnt as a diabolist. None of it seems to add up, though. I still haven't found the way." He suddenly made a new effort, and the chains slipped to the floor. "Simple yoga and muscle control," he said without pride. "The chains in the mind are much harder. I wish there were a chemical, a key to the nervous system . . ."

"Robert," said old Drake, "you are going back to an alienist. I'll have you committed if you won't go voluntarily."

And so Dr. Faustus Unbewusst acquired a new patient, at a time when many of his most profitable cases were discontinuing therapy because of the monetary depression. He made very few notes on Robert, but these were subsequently found by an Illuminati operative, photostated, and placed in the archives at Agharti, where Hagbard Celine read them in 1965. They were undated, and scrawled in a hurried hand— Dr. Unbewusst, in reaction-formation against his own anal component, was a conspicuously untidy and careless person— but they told a fairly straightforward story:

RPD, age 27, latent homo. Father rich as Croesus. Five sessions per week @ $50 each, $250. Keep him in therapy 5 yrs that's a clear $65,000. Be ambitious, aim for ten years. $130,000. Beautiful.

RPD not latent homo at all. Advanced psychopath. Moral imbecile. Actually enjoys the money I'm soaking his father. Hopeless case. All drives egosyntonic. Bastard doesn't give a fuck. Maybe as long as 12 yrs.?-$156,000. Hot shit!

RPD back on sadism again. Thinks that's the key. Must use great care. If he gets caught at something serious, jail or a sanitorium; and can kiss that $156,000 good-bye. Maybe use drugs to calm him?

RPD in another schizo mood today. Full of some crap a gypsy fortune-teller told him. Extreme care needed: If the occultists get him, that's 13 grand peryear out the window.

Clue to RPD: All goes back to the war. Can't stand the thought that all must die. Metaphysical hangup. Nothing I can do. If only there were an immortality pill. Risk of losing him to the occultists or even a church worse than I feared. I can feel the 13 grand slipping away.

RPD wants to go to Europe. Wants meeting, maybe therapy, with that sheissdreck dummkopf Carl Jung. Must warn parents too sick to travel.

RPD gone after only 10 months. A lousy 11-grand case. Too angry to see patients today. Spent morning drafting letter to Globe on why fortune-tellers should be forbidden by law. If I could get my hands on that woman, on her fat throat, the bitch, the fat stinking ignorant bitch. $156,000. Down the drain. Because he needs immortality and doesn't know how to get it.


(In Ingolstadt, Danny Pricefixer and Clark Kent are still staring at each other over Lady Velkor's sleeping body when Atlanta Hope bursts into the room, fresh from a shower, and throws herself on the bed, hugging and kissing everybody. "It was the first time," she cries. "The first time I ever really made it! It took all three of you." On the other side of Kent, Lady Velkor opens an eye and says, "Don't I get any credit? It takes Five that way, remember?")

Mama Sutra was only thirty then, but she streaked her hair with gray to fit the image of the Wise Woman. She recognized Drake as soon as he wandered into the tea parlor: old Drake's son, the crazy one, loaded.

He motioned to her before the waitress could take his order. Mama Sutra, quick to pick up clues, could tell from his suit's wrinkles that he had been lying down; Boston Common is a long walk from Beacon Hill; there were shrinks in the neighborhood; ergo, he hadn't come from home but from a therapy session.

"Tea leaves or cards?" she asked courteously, sitting across from him at the table.

"Cards," he said absently, looking down from the window to the Common. "Coffee," he added to the waitress. "Black as sin."

"Were you listening to the preachers down there?" Mama Sutra asked shrewdly.

"Yes." He grinned, engagingly. " 'He that believeth shall never taste death.' They're in rare form today."

"Shuffle," she said, handing the cards over. "But they awakened some spiritual need in you, my son. That's why you came up here."

He met her eye cynically. "I'm willing to try any kind of witchcraft once. I just came from a practitioner of the latest variety, just off the boat from Vienna a few years."

Bull's-eye, she thought.

"Neither his science nor their unenlightened faith can help you," Mama said somberly, ignoring his cynicism. "Let us hope that the cards will show the way." She dealt a traditional Tree of Life.

At the crown was Death upside-down, and below it were the King of Swords in Chokmah and the Knight of Wands in Binah. "He that believeth shall never taste death," he had quoted cynically.

"I see a battlefield," she began; it was common Boston gossip that Drake first started acting odd after the war. "I see Death come very close to you and then miss you." She pointed to the reverse Death card with a dramatic finger. "But many died, many that you cared for deeply."

"I liked a few of them," he said grudgingly. "Mostly I was worried about my own a—my own hide. But go ahead."

She looked at the Knight of Wands in the Binah position. Should she mention the bisexuality implied? He was going to a shrink, and might be able to take it. Mama tried to hold the Knight of Wands and King of Swords together in her focus, and the way became clear. "There are two men in you. One loves other men, perhaps too much. The other is desperately trying to free himself from all of humanity, even from the world. You're a Leo," she added suddenly, taking a leap.

"Yes," he said, unimpressed. "August 6." He was thinking that she had probably looked up the birthdates of all the richer individuals in town in case they ever wandered in.

"It's very hard for Leos to accept death," she said sadly. "You are like Buddha after he saw the corpse on the road. No matter what you have or own, no matter what you achieve, it will never be enough, for you saw too many corpses in the war. Ah, my son, would that I could help you! But I only read cards; I am no alchemist who sells the Elixir of Eternal Life." While he was digesting that one— a sure hit, she felt— Mama rushed on to examine the Five of Wands reversed in Chesed and the Magus upright in Ge-burah. "So many wands," she said. "So many fire signs. A true Leo, but so much of it turned inward. See how the energetic Knight of Wands descends to the Five upside-down: All your energies, and Leos are very powerful, are turned against yourself. You are a burning man, trying to consume yourself and be reborn. And the Magus, who shows the way, is below the King of Swords and dominated by him: Your reason won't allow you to accept the necessity of the fire. You are still rebelling against Death." The Fool was in Tipareth and, surprisingly, upright. "But you are very close to taking the final step. You are ready to let the fire consume even your intellect and die to this world." This was going swimmingly, she thought— and then she saw the Devil in Netzach and the Nine of Swords reversed in Yod. The rest of the Tree was even worse: the Tower in Yesod and the Lovers reversed (of course!) in Malkuth. Not a cup or a pentacle anywhere.

"You're going to emerge as a much stronger man," she said weakly.

"That isn't what you see," Drake said. "And it isn't what I see. The Devil and the Tower together are a pretty destructive pair, aren't they?"

"I suppose you know what the Lovers reversed means, too?" she asked.

" 'The Answer of the Oracle Is Always Death,' " he quoted.

"But you won't accept it."

"The only way to conquer Death— until science produces an immortality pill— is to make him your servant, your company cop," Drake said calmly. "That's the key I've been looking for. The bartender never becomes an alcoholic, and the high priest laughs at the gods. Besides, the Tower is rotten to the core and deserves to be destroyed." He pointed abruptly to the Fool. "You have some real talents obviously— even if you do cheat like everybody in this racket—and you must know there are two choices after crossing the Abyss. The right-hand path and the left-hand path. I seem to be headed for the left-hand path. I can see that much, and it confirms what I already suspect. Go ahead and tell me the rest of what you see; I'm not afraid to hear it."

"Very well." Mama wondered if he was one of the few, the very few, who would eventually come to the attention of the Shining Ones. "You will make Death your servant, as a tactic to master him. Yours is, indeed, the left-hand path. You will cause immense suffering— especially to yourself at first. But after a while you won't notice that; after a while you won't even notice the horrors that you inflict on others. Men will say that you are a materialist, a worshipper of money. What do you hate most?" she asked abruptly.

"Sentimental slop and lies. All the Christian lies in Sunday school, all the democratic lies in the newspapers, all the socialist lies our so-called intellectuals are spouting these days. Every rotten, crooked, sneaking, hypocritical deception people use to hide from themselves that we're all still hunting animals in a jungle."

"You admire Neitzsche?"

"He was crazy. Let's just say I have less contempt for him, and for DeSade, than I have for most intellectuals."

"Yes. So we know what the Tower is that you will destroy. Everything in America that smacks of democracy or Christianity or socialism. The whole facade of humanitarianism from the Constitution onward to the present. You will turn your fire loose and burn all that up with your Leonine energies. You will force your view of America into total reality, and make every citizen afraid of the jungle and of the death that lurks in the jungle. Crime and commerce are moving closer together, due to Prohibition; you will complete their marriage. All, all this, just to make Death your servant instead of your master. The money and power are just incidental to that."

NO— because even if you think you have it beat even if you think you can work out a reconciliation a separate peace I mean shit the war still goes on No you're only kidding yourself Even say I love Simon and that's all Holly-

wood bullshit you can't really tell in only one week no matter how good it is but even if I love Simon the war goes on as long as we're going around in separate skins White Man Black Man Bronze Man White Woman Black Woman Bronze Woman even if Hagbard claims to have gotten past all that on his submarine it's only because they're under the water and away from the world Out here the bastards are using live ammunition like it says in the old joke Maybe that's the only truth in the world Not the Bibles or poetry or philosophy but just the old jokes Especially the bad jokes and the sad jokes No they're using live ammunition I mean shit they never see me all of them White Man Black Man Bronze Man White Woman Black Woman Bronze Woman they look at me and I'm in their game I have my role I am Black Woman I am never just me No it goes on and on every step upward is a step into more hypocrisy until the game is stopped completely and nobody has found out how to do that No the more Simon says that he does see me the more he's lying to himself No he never makes it with White Woman because she's too much like his mother or some damned Freudian reason like that I mean shit No I can't go on in their game I am going to scream with rage I am going to scream like an eagle I am going to scream in the ears of the whole world until somebody does see me until I am not Black Woman and not Black and not Woman and nothing No nothing justme No they'll say I'm giving up love and sanity Well fuck them fuck them all No I won't turn back the acid has changed everything No at the end of it when I really am me maybe then I can find a better love and a better sanity No but first I have to find me.
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