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.

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

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 1:51 am

The Illuminatus! Trilogy
by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
© 1975 by Robert J. Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

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Table of Contents:

THE EYE IN THE PYRAMID
Book One: Verwirrung
• The First Trip, or Kether
• The Second Trip, or Chokmah
• The Third Trip, or Binah
Book Two: Zweitracht
• The Fourth Trip, or Chessed
• The Fifth Trip, or Geburah
THE GOLDEN APPLE
Book Three: Unordnung
• The Sixth Trip, or Tipareth
• The Seventh Trip, or Netzach
Book Four: Beamtenherrschaft
• The Eighth Trip, or Hod
LEVIATHAN
Book Four: Beamtenherrschaft Continued
• The Ninth Trip, or Yesod
Book Five: Grummet
• The Tenth Trip, or Malkuth
The Appendices
• Appendix Aleph: George Washington's Hemp Crop
• Appendix Beth: The Illuminati Cyphers, Codes and Calendars
• Appendix Gimmel: The Illumanati Theory of History
• Appendix Daleth: Hassan i Sabbah and Alamount Black
• Appendix Tzaddi: 23 Skidoo
• Appendix Vau: Flaxscript and Hempscript
• Appendix Zain: Property and Privilege
• Appendix Cheth: Hagbard's Abdication
• Appendix Lamed: The Tactics of Magick
Appendix Yod: Operation Mindfuck
• Appendix Kaph: The Rosy Double-Cross
• Appendix Teth: Hagbard's Booklet
• Appendix Mem: Certain Questions That May Still Trouble Some
• Appendix Nun: Additional Information About Some of the Characters
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 1:54 am

Part 1 of 2

The Eye In The Pyramid

BOOK ONE: VERWIRRUNG


The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies.
-Ishmael Reed, Mumbo-Jumbo


THE FIRST TRIP, OR KETHER

From Dealey Plaza To Watergate ...

The Purple Sage opened his mouth and moved his tongue and so spake to them and he said:

The Earth quakes and the Heavens rattle; the beasts of nature flock together and the nations of men flock apart; volcanoes usher up heat while elsewhere water becomes ice and melts; and then on other days it just rains. Indeed do many things come to pass.

-Lord Omar Khayaam Ravenhurst, K.S.C., "The Book of Predications." The Honest Book of Truth


It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton. On April 1, the world's great powers came closer to nuclear war than ever before, all because of an obscure island named Fernando Poo. By the time international affairs returned to their normal cold-war level, some wits were calling it the most tasteless April Fool's joke in history. I happen to know all the details about what happened, but I have no idea how to recount them in a manner that will make sense to most readers. For instance, I am not even sure who' I am, and my embarrassment on that matter makes me wonder if you will believe anything I reveal. Worse yet, I am at the moment very conscious of a squirrel-in Central Park, just off Sixty-eighth Street, in New York City-that is leaping from one tree to another, and I think that happens on the night of April 23 (or is it the morning of April 24?), but fitting the squirrel together with Fernando Poo is, for the present, beyond my powers. I beg your tolerance. There is nothing I can do to make things any easier for any of us, and you will have to accept being addressed by a disembodied voice just as I accept the compulsion to speak out even though I am painfully aware that I am talking to an invisible, perhaps nonexistent, audience. Wise men have regarded the earth as a tragedy, a farce, even an illusionist's trick; but all, if they are truly wise and not merely intellectual rapists, recognize that it is certainly some kind of stage in which we all play roles, most of us being very poorly coached and totally unrehearsed before the curtain rises. Is it too much if I ask, tentatively, that we agree to look upon it as a circus, a touring carnival wandering about the sun for a record season of four billion years and producing new monsters and miracles, hoaxes and bloody mishaps, wonders and blunders, but never quite entertaining the customers well enough to prevent them from leaving, one by one, and returning to their homes for a long and bored winter's sleep under the dust? Then, say, for a while at least, that I have found an identity as ringmaster; but that crown sits uneasily on my head (if I have a head) and I must warn you that the troupe is small for a universe this size and many of us have to double or triple our stints, so you can expect me back in many other guises. Indeed do many things come to pass.

For instance, right now, I am not at all whimsical or humorous. I am angry. I am in Nairobi, Kenya, and my name is, if you will pardon me, Nkrumah Fubar. My skin is black (does that disturb you? it doesn't me), and I am, like most of you, midway between tribalism and technology; to be more blunt, as a Kikuyu shaman moderately adjusted to city life, I still believe in witchcraft-I haven't, yet, the folly to deny the evidence of my own senses. It is April 3 and Fernando Poo has ruined my sleep for several nights running, so I hope you will forgive me when I admit that my business at the moment is far from edifying and is nothing less than constructing dolls of the rulers of America, Russia, and China. You guessed it: I am going to stick pins in their heads every day for a month; if they won't let me sleep, I won't let them sleep. That is Justice, in a sense.

In fact, the President of the United States had several severe migraines during the following weeks; but the atheistic rulers of Moscow and Peking were less susceptible to magic. They never reported a twinge. But, wait, here is another performer in our circus, and one of the most intelligent and decent in the lot-his name is unpronounceable, but you can call him Howard and he happens to have been born a dolphin. He's swimming through the ruins of Atlantis and it's April 10 already-time is moving; I'm not sure what Howard sees but it bothers him, and he decides to tell Hagbard Celine all about it. Not that I know, at this point, who Hagbard Celine is. Never mind; watch the waves roll and be glad there isn't much pollution out here yet. Look at the way the golden sun lights each wave with a glint that, curiously, sparkles into a silver sheen; and watch, watch the waves as they roll, so that it is easy to cross five hours of time in one second and find ourselves amid trees and earth, with even a few falling leaves for a touch of poetry before the horror. Where are we? Five hours away, I told you-five hours due west, to be precise, so at the same instant that Howard turns a somersault in Atlantis, Sasparilla Godzilla, a tourist from Simcoe, Ontario (she had the misfortune to be born a human being) turns a neat nosedive right here and lands unconscious on the ground. This is the outdoor extension of the Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec Park, Mexico, D.F., and the other tourists are rather upset about the poor lady's collapse. She later said it was the heat. Much less sophisticated in important matters than Nkrumah Fubar, she didn't care to tell anybody, or even to remind herself, what had really knocked her over. Back in Simcoe, the folks always said Harry Godzilla got a sensible woman when he married Sasparilla, and it is sensible in Canada (or the United States) to hide certain truths. No, at this point I had better not call them truths. Let it stand that she either saw, or imagined she saw, a certain sinister kind of tight grin, or grimace, cross the face of the gigantic statue of Tlaloc, the rain god. Nobody from Simcoe had ever seen anything like that before; indeed do many things come to pass.

And, if you think the poor lady was an unusual case, you should examine the records of psychiatrists, both institutional and private, for the rest of the month. Reports of unusual anxieties and religious manias among schizophrenics in mental hospitals skyrocketed; and ordinary men and women walked in off the street to complain about eyes watching them, hooded beings passing through locked rooms, crowned figures giving unintelligible commands, voices that claimed to be God or the Devil, a real witch's brew for sure. But the sane verdict was to attribute all this to the aftermath of the Fernando Poo tragedy.

The phone rang at 2:30 A.M. the morning of April 24. Numbly, dumbly, mopingly, gropingly, out of the dark, I find and identify a body, a self, a task. "Goodman," I say into the receiver, propped up on one arm, still coming a long way back.

"Bombing and homicide," he electrically eunuchoid voice in the transmitter tells me. I sleep naked (sorry about that), and I'm putting on my drawers and trousers as I copy the address. East Sixty-eighth Street, near the Council on Foreign Relations. "Moving," I say, hanging up.

"What? Is?" Rebecca mumbles from the bed. She's naked, too, and that recalls very pleasant memories of a few hours earlier. I suppose some of you will be shocked when I tell you I'm past sixty and she's only twenty-five. It doesn't make it any better that we're married, I know.

This isn't a bad body, for its age, and seeing Rebecca, most of the sheets thrown aside, reminds me just how good it is. In fact, at this point I don't even remember having been the ringmaster, or what echo I retain is confused with sleep and dream. I kiss her neck, unselfconsciously, for she is my wife and I am her husband, and even if I am an inspector on the Homicide Squad-Homicide North, to be exact-any notions about being a stranger in this body have vanished with my dreams into air. Into thin air.

"What?" Rebecca repeats, still more asleep than awake.

"Damned fool radicals again," I say, pulling on my shirt, knowing any answer is as good as another in her half-conscious state.

"Um," she says, satisfied, and turns over into deep sleep again.

I washed my face somewhat, tired old man watching me from the mirror, and ran a brush through my hair. Just time enough to think that retirement was only a few years away and to remember a certain hypodermic needle and a day in the Catskills with my first wife, Sandra, back when they at least had clean air up there . . . socks, shoes, tie, fedora . . . and you never stop mourning, as much as I loved Rebecca I never stopped mourning Sandra. Bombing and homicide. What a meshuganah world. Do you remember when you could at least drive in New York at three in the morning without traffic jams? Those days were gone; the trucks that were banned in the daytime were all making their deliveries now. Everybody was supposed to pretend the pollution went away before dawn. Papa used to say, "Saul, Saul, they did it to the Indians and now they're doing it to themselves. Goyische narrs." He left Russia to escape the pogrom of 1905, but I guess he saw a lot before he got out. He seemed like a cynical old man to me then, and I seem like a cynical old man to others now. Is there any pattern or sense in any of it?

The scene of the blast was one of those old office buildings with Gothic-and-gingerbread styling all over the lobby floor. In the dim light of the hour, it reminded me of the shadowy atmosphere of Charlie Chan in the Wax Museum. And a smell hit my nostrils as soon as I walked in.

A patrolman lounging inside the door snapped to attention when he recognized me. "Took out the seventeenth floor and part of the eighteenth," he said. "Also a pet shop here on the ground level. Some freak of dynamics. Nothing else is damaged down here, but every fish tank went. That's the smell."

Barney Muldoon, an old friend with the look and mannerisms of a Hollywood cop, appeared out of the shadows. A tough man, and nowhere as dumb as he liked to pretend, which was why he was head of the Bomb Squad.

"Your baby, Barney?" I asked casually.

"Looks that way. Nobody killed. The call went out to you because a clothier's dummy was burned on the eighteenth floor and the first car here thought it was a human body."

(Wait: George Dorn is screaming....)

Saul's face showed no reaction to the answer-but poker players at the Fraternal Order of Police had long ago given up trying to read that inscrutable Talmudic countenance. As Barney Muldoon, I knew how I would feel if I had the chance to drop this case on another department and hurry home to a beautiful bride like Rebecca Goodman. I smiled down at Saul-his height would keep him from appointment to the Force now, but the rules were different when he was young-and I added quietly, "There might be something in it for you, though."

The fedora ducked as Saul took out his pipe and started to fill it. All he said was, "Oh?"

"Right now," I went on, "we're just notifying Missing Persons, but if what I'm afraid of is right, it'll end up on your desk after all."

He struck a match and started puffing. "Somebody missing at this hour . . . might be found among the living ... in the morning," he said between drags. The match went out, and shadows moved where nobody stirred.

"And he might not, in this case," Muldoon said. "He's been gone three days now."

"An Irishman your size can't be any more subtle than an elephant," Saul said wearily. "Stop tantalizing me. What have you got?"

"The office that was hit," Muldoon explained, obviously happy to share the misery, "was a magazine called Confrontation. It's kind of left-of-center, so this was probably a right-wing job and not a left-wing one. But the interesting thing is that we couldn't reach the editor, Joseph Malik, at his home, and when we called one of the associate editors, what do you think he told us? Malik disappeared three days ago. His landlord confirms it. He's been trying to get hold of Malik himself because there's a no-pets rule there and the other tenants are complaining about his dogs. So, if a man drops out of sight and then his office gets bombed, I kind of think the matter might come to the attention of the Homicide Department eventually, don't you?"

Saul grunted. "Might and might not," he said. "I'm going home. I'll check with Missing Persons in the morning, to see what they've got."

The patrolman spoke up. "You know what bothers me most about this? The Egyptian mouth-breeders."

"The what?" Saul asked.

"That pet shop," the patrolman explained, pointing to the other end of the lobby. "I looked over the damage, and they had one of the best collections of rare tropical fish in New York City. Even Egyptian mouth-breeders." He noticed the expressions on the faces of the two detectives and added lamely, "If you don't collect fish, you wouldn't understand. But, believe me, an Egyptian mouth-breeder is pretty hard to get these days, and they're all dead in there."

"Mouth-breeder?" Muldoon asked incredulously.

"Yes, you see they keep their young in their mouths for a couple days after birth and they never, never swallow them. That's one of the great things about collecting fish: you get to appreciate the wonders of nature."

Muldoon and Saul looked at each other. "It's inspiring," Muldoon said finally, "to have so many college graduates on the Force these days."

The elevator door opened, and Dan Pricefixer, a redheaded young detective on Muldoon's staff, emerged, carrying a metal box.

"I think this is important, Barney," he began immediately, with just a nod to Saul. "Damned important. I found it in the rubble, and it had been blown partly open, so I looked inside."

"And?" Muldoon prompted.

"It's the freakiest bunch of interoffice memos I ever set eyes on. Weird as tits on a bishop."

This is going to be a long night, Saul thought suddenly, with a sinking feeling. A long night, and a heavy case.

"Want to peek?" Muldoon asked him maliciously.

"You better find a place to sit down," Pricefixer volunteered. "It'll take you awhile to go through them."

"Let's use the cafeteria," Saul suggested.

"You just have no idea," the patrolman repeated. "The value of an Egyptian mouth-breeder."

"It's rough for all nationalities, man or fish," Muldoon said in one of his rare attempts to emulate Saul's mode of speech. He and Saul turned to the cafeteria, leaving the patrolman looking vaguely distressed.

His name is James Patrick Hennessy and he's been on the Force three years. He doesn't come back into this story at all. He had a five-year-old retarded son whom he loved helplessly; you see a thousand faces like his on the street every day and never guess how well they are carrying their tragedies . . . and George Dorn, who once wanted to shoot him, is still screaming. . . . But Barney and Saul are in the cafeteria. Look around. The transition from the Gothic lobby to this room of laminated functional and glittering plastic colors is, one might say, trippy. Never mind the smell; we're closer to the pet shop here.

Saul removed his hat and ran a hand through his gray hair pensively, as Muldoon read the first two memos in one quick scan. When they were passed over, he put on his glasses and read more slowly, in his own methodical and thoughtful way. Hold onto your hats. This is what they said:

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #1

7/23

J.M.:

The first reference I've found is in Violence by Jacques Ellul (Seabury Press, New York, 1969). He says (pages 18-19) that the Illuminated Ones were founded by Joachim of Floris in the llth century and originally taught a primitive Christian doctrine of poverty and equality, but later under the leadership of Fra Dolcino in the 15th century they became violent, plundered the rich and announced the imminent reign of the Spirit. "In 1507," he concludes, "they were vanquished by the 'forces of order'-that is, an army commanded by the Bishop of Vercueil." He makes no mention of any Illuminati movement in earlier centuries or in more recent times. I'll have more later today.

Pat

P.S. I found a little more about Joachim of Floris in the back files of the National Review, William Buckley and his cronies think Joachim is responsible for modern liberalism, socialism and communism; they've condemned him in fine theological language. He committed the heresy, they say, of "immanentizing the Christian Eschaton." Do you want me to look that up in a technical treatise on Thomism? I think it means bringing the end of the world closer, sort of.

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #2

7/23

J.M.:

My second source was more helpful: Akron Daraul, A History of Secret Societies (Citadel Press, New York, 1961).

Daraul traces the Illuminati back to the 11th century also, but not to Joachim of Floris. He sees the origin in the Ishmaelian sect of Islam, also known as the Order of Assassins. They were vanquished in the 13th century, but later made a comeback with a new, less-violent philosophy

and eventually became the Ishmaelian sect of today, led by the Aga Khan. However, in the 16th century, in Afghanistan, the Illuminated Ones (Roshinaya) picked up the original tactics of the Order of Assassins. They were wiped out by an alliance of the Moguls and Persians (pages 220-223). But, "The beginning of the seventeenth century saw the foundation of the Illuminated Ones of Spain-the Allumbrados, condemned by an edict of the Grand Inquisition in 1623. In 1654, the 'illuminated' Guerinets came into public notice in France." And, finally-the part you're most interested in- the Bavarian II-luminati was founded on May Day, 1776, in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, by Adam Weishaupt, a former Jesuit. "Documents still extant show several points of resemblance between the German and Central Asian Illuminists: points that are hard to account for on grounds of pure coincidence" (page 255). Weishaupt's Illuminati were suppressed by the Bavarian government in 1785; Daraul also mentions the Illuminati of Paris in the 1880s, but suggests it was simply a passing fad. He does not accept the notion that the Illuminati still exist today.

This is beginning to look big. Why are we keeping the details from George?

Pat


Saul and Muldoon exchanged glances. "Let's see the next one," Saul said. He and Muldoon read together:

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #3

7/24

J.M.:

The Encyclopedia Britannica has little to say on the subject (1966 edition, Volume 11, "Halicar to Impala," page 1094):

Illuminati, a short-lived movement of republican free thought founded on May Day 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, professor of canon law at Ingolstadt and a former Jesuit. . . . From 1778 onward they began to make contact with various Masonic lodges where, under the impulse of A. Knigge (q.v.) one of their chief converts, they often managed to gain a commanding position. . . .

The scheme itself had its attractions for literary men like Goethe and Herder, and even for the reigning dukes of Gotha and Weimar....

The movement suffered from internal dissention and was ultimately banned by an edict of the Bavarian government in 1785.

Pat


Saul paused. "I'll make you a bet, Barney," he said quietly. "The Joseph Malik who vanished is the J.M. these memos were written for."

"Sure," Muldoon replied scornfully. "These Illuminati characters are still around, and they got him. Honest to God, Saul," he added, "I appreciate the way your mind usually pole-vaults ahead of the facts. But you can ride a hunch just so far when you're starting from nothing."

"We're not starting from nothing," Saul said softly. "Here's what we've got to start with. One"-he-held up a finger-"a building is bombed. Two"-another finger- "an important executive disappeared three days before the bombing. Already, there's an inference, or two inferences: something got him, or else he knew something was coming for him and he ducked out. Now, look at the memos. Point three"-he held up another finger-"a standard reference work, the Encyclopedia Britannica, seems to be wrong about when the Illuminati came into existence. They say eighteenth-century Germany, but the other memos trace it back to-let's see-Spain in the seventeenth century, France in the seventeenth century, then in the eleventh century back to Italy and halfway across the world to Afghanistan. So we've got a second inference: if the Britannica is wrong about when the thing started, they may be wrong about when it ended. Now, put these three points and two inferences together-"

"And the Illuminati got the editor and blew up his office. Nutz. I still say you're going too fast."

"Maybe I'm not going fast enough," Saul said. "An organization that has existed for a couple of centuries minimum and kept its secrets pretty well hidden most of that time might be pretty strong by now." He trailed off into silence, and closed his eyes to concentrate. After a moment, he looked at the younger man with a searching glance.

Muldoon had been thinking too. "I've seen men land on the moon," he said. "I've seen students break into administration offices and shit in the dean's waste basket. I've even seen nuns in mini-skirts. But this international conspiracy existing in secret for eight hundred years, it's like opening a door in your own house and finding James Bond and the President of the United States personally shooting it out with Fu Manchu and the five original Marx Brothers."

"You're trying to convince yourself, not me. Barney, it sticks out so far that you could break it into three pieces and each one would be long enough to goose somebody up in the Bronx. There is a secret society that keeps screwing up international politics. Every intelligent person has suspected that at one time or another. Nobody wants war any more, but wars keep happening-why? Face it, Barney-this is the heavy case we've always had nightmares about. It's cast iron. If it were a corpse, all six pallbearers would get double hernias at the funeral. Well?" Saul prompted.

"Well, we're either going to have to do something or get off the pot, as my sainted mother used to say."

It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton. On April 1 the world's great powers came closer to nuclear war than ever before, all because of an obscure island named Fernando Poo. But, while all other eyes turned to the UN building in apprehension and desperate hope, there lived in Las Vegas a unique person known as Carmel. His house was on Date Street and had a magnificent view of the desert, which he appreciated. He liked to spend long hours looking at the wild cactus wasteland although he did not know why. If you told him that he was symbolically turning his back upon mankind, he would not have understood you, nor would he have been insulted; the remark would be merely irrelevant to him. If you added that he himself was a desert creature, like the gila monster and the rattlesnake, he would have grown bored and classified you as a fool. To Carmel, most of the world were fools who asked meaningless questions and worried about pointless issues; only a few, like himself, had discovered what was really important-money- and pursued it without distractions, scruples, or irrelevancies. His favorite moments were those, like this night of April 1, when he sat and tallied his take for the month and looked out his picture window occasionally at the flat sandy landscape, dimly lit by the lights of the city behind him. In this physical and emotional desert he experienced happiness, or something as close to happiness as he could ever find. His girls had earned $46,000 during March, of which he took $23,000; after paying 10 percent to the Brotherhood for permission to operate without molestation by Banana-Nose Maldonado's soldiers, this left a tidy profit of $20,700, all of it tax free. Little Carmel, who stood five feet two and had the face of a mournful weasel, beamed as he completed his calculations; his emotion was as inexpressible, in normal terms, as that of a necrophile who had just broken into the town morgue. He had tried every possible sexual combination with his girls; none gave him the frisson of looking at a figure like that at the end of a month.

He did not know that he would have another $5 million, and incidentally become the most important human being on earth, before May 1. If you tried to explain it to him, he would have brushed everything else aside and asked merely, "The five million-how many throats do I hafta cut to get my hands in it?"

But wait: Get out the Atlas and look up Africa. Run your eyes down the map of the western coast of that continent until you come to Equatorial Guinea. Stop at the bend where part of the Atlantic Ocean curves inward and becomes the Bight of Biafra. You will note a chain of small islands; you will further observe that one of these is Fernando Poo. There, in the capital city of Santa Isobel, during the early 1970s, Captain Ernesto Tequilla y Mota carefully read and reread Edward Luttwak's Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook, and placidly went about following Luttwak's formula for a perfect coup d'etat in Santa Isobel. He set up a timetable, made his first converts among other officers, formed a clique, and began the slow process of arranging things so that officers likely to be loyal to Equatorial Guinea would be on assignment at least forty-eight hours away from the capital city when the coup occurred. He drafted the first proclamation to be issued by his new government; it took the best slogans of the most powerful left-wing and right-wing groups on the island and embedded them firmly in a tapioca-like context of bland liberal-conservatism. It fit Luttwak's prescription excellently, giving everybody on the island some small hope that his own interests and beliefs would be advanced by the new regime. And, after three years of planning, he struck: the key officials of the old regime were quickly, bloodlessly, placed under house arrest; troops under the command of officers in the cabal occupied the power stations and newspaper offices; the inoffensively fascist-conservative-liberal-communist proclamation of the new People's Republic of Fernando Poo went forth to the world over the radio station in Santa Isobel. Ernesto Tequilla y Mota had achieved his ambition-promotion from captain to generalissimo in one step. Now, at last, he began wondering about how one went about governing a country. He would probably have to read a new book, and he hoped there was one as good as Luttwak's treatise on seizing a country. That was on March 14.

On March 15, the very name of Fernando Poo was unknown to every member of the House of Representatives, every senator, every officer of the Cabinet, and all but one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In fact, the President's first reaction, when the CIA report landed on his desk that afternoon, was to ask his secretary, "Where the hell is Fernando Poo?"

Saul took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief, conscious of his age and suddenly more tired than ever. "I outrank you, Barney," he began.

Muldoon grinned. "I know what's coming."

Methodically, Saul went on, "Who, on your staff, do you think is a double agent for the CIA?

"Robinson I'm sure of, and Lehrman I suspect."

"Both of them go. We take no chances."

"I'll have them transferred to the Vice Squad in the morning. How about your own staff?"

"Three of them, I think, and they go, too."

"Vice Squad'll love the increase in manpower."

Saul relit his pipe. "One more thing. We might be hearing from the FBI."

"We might indeed."

'They get nothing."

"You're really taking me way out on this one, Saul."

"Sometimes you have to follow your hunches. This is going to be a heavy case, agreed?"

"A heavy case," Muldoon nodded.

"Then we do it my way."

"Let's look at the fourth memo," Muldoon said tonelessly. They read:

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #4

7/24

J.M.:

Here's a letter that appeared in Playboy a few years ago ('The Playboy Advisor," Playboy, April, 1969, pages 62-64):

I recently heard an old man of right-wing views-a friend of my grandparents-assert that the current wave of assassinations in America is the work of a secret society called the Illuminati. He said that the Illuminati have existed throughout history, own the international banking cartels, have all been 32nd-degree Masons and were known to lan Fleming, who portrayed them as Spectre in his James Bond books-for which the Illuminati did away with Mr. Fleming. At first all this seemed like a paranoid delusion to me. Then I read in The New Yorker that Allan Chapman, one of Jim Garrison's investigators in the New Orleans probe of the John Kennedy assassination, believes that the Illuminati really exist....

Playboy, of course, puts down the whole idea as ridiculous and gives the standard Encyclopedia Britannica story that the Illuminati went out of business in 1785.

Pat


Pricefixer stuck his head in the cafeteria door. "Minute?" he asked.

"What is it?" Muldoon replied.

"Peter Jackson is out here. He's the associate editor I spoke to on the phone. He just told me something about his last meeting with Joseph Malik, the editor, before Malik disappeared."

"Bring him in," Muldoon said.

Peter Jackson was a black man-truly black, not brown or tan. He was wearing a vest in spite of the spring weather. He was also very obviously wary of policemen. Saul noted this at once, and began thinking about how to overcome it-and at the same time he observed an increased blandness in Muldoon's features, indicating that he, too, had noted it and was prepared to take umbrage.

"Have a seat," Saul said cordially, "and tell us what you just told the other officer." With the nervous ones it

was sound policy to drop the policeman role at first, and try to sound like somebody else-somebody who, quite naturally, asks a lot of questions. Saul began slipping into the personality of his own family physician, which he usually used at such times. He made himself feel a stethoscope hanging about his neck.

"Well," Jackson began in a Harvard accent, "this is probably not important. It may be just a coincidence."

"Most of what we hear is just unimportant coincidence," Saul said gently. "But it's our job to listen."

"Everybody but the lunatic fringe has given up on this by now," Jackson said. "It really surprised me when Joe told me what he was getting the magazine into." He paused and studied the two impassive faces of the detectives; finding little there, he went on reluctantly. "It was last Friday. Joe told me he had a lead that interested him, and he was putting a staff writer on it. He wanted to reopen the investigation of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers."

Saul carefully didn't look at Muldoon, and just as carefully moved his hat to cover the memos on the table. "Excuse me a moment," he said politely and left the cafeteria.

He found a phone booth in the lobby and dialed his home. Rebecca answered after the third ring; she obviously had not gotten back to sleep after he left. "Saul?" she asked, guessing who would be calling at this hour. "It's going to be a long night," Saul said. "Oh, hell."

"I know, baby. But this case is a son-of-a-bitch!" Rebecca sighed. "I'm glad we had a little ball earlier this evening. Otherwise, I'd be furious."

Saul thought, suddenly, of how this conversation would sound to an outsider. A sixty-year-old man and a twenty-five-year-old wife. And if they knew she was a whore and a heroin addict when I first met her . ..

"Do you know what I'm going to do?" Rebecca lowered her voice. "I'm going to take off my nightgown, and throw the covers to the foot of the bed, and lie here naked, thinking about you and waiting."

Saul grinned. "A man my age shouldn't be able to respond to that, after doing what I did earlier."

"But you did respond, didn't you?" Her voice was confident and sensual.

"I sure did. I won't be able to leave the phone booth for a couple of minutes."

She chuckled softly and said, "I'll be waiting. . . ."

"I love you," he said, surprised (as always) at the simple truth of it in a man his age. I won't be able to leave the phone booth at all if this keeps up, he thought. "Listen," he added hurriedly, "let's change the subject before I start resorting to the vices of a high school boy. What do you know about the Illuminati?" Rebecca had been an anthropology major, with a minor in psychology, before the drug scene had captured her and she fell into the abyss from which he had rescued her; her erudition often astonished him.

"It's a hoax," she said.

"A what?"

"A hoax. A bunch of students at Berkeley started it back around sixty-six or sixty-seven."

"No, that's not what I'm asking. The original Illuminati in Italy and Spain and Germany in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries? You know?"

"Oh, that's the basis of the hoax. Some right-wing historians think the Illuminati still exist, you see, so these students opened an Illuminati chapter on the campus at Berkeley and started sending out press releases on all sorts of weird subjects, so people who want to believe in conspiracies would have some evidence to point to. That's all there is to it. Sophomore humor."

I hope so, Saul thought. "How about the Ishmaelian sect of Islam?"

"It has twenty-three divisions, but the Aga Khan is the leader of all of them. It was founded around-oh-1090 A.D., I think, and was originally persecuted, but now it's part of the orthodox Moslem religion. It has some pretty weird doctrines. The founder, Hassan i Sabbah, taught that nothing is true and everything is permissible. He lived up to that idea-the word 'assassin' is a corruption of his name."

"Anything else?"

"Yes, now that I think of it. Sabbah introduced marijuana to the Western world, from India. The word 'hashish' also comes from his name."

"This is a heavy case," Saul said, "and now that I can walk out of the phone booth without shocking the patrol-

man in the hall, I'll get back to work on it. Don't say anything that'll get me aroused again. Please."

"I won't. I'll just lie here naked and . . ."

"Good-bye."

"Good-bye," she said, laughing.

Saul hung up frowning. Goodman's intuition, the other detectives call it. It's not intuition; it's a way of thinking beyond and between the facts, a way of sensing wholes, of seeing that there must be a relationship between fact number one and fact number two even if no such relationship is visible yet. And I know. There is an Illuminati, whether or not those kids at Berkeley are kidding.

He came out of his concentration and realized where he was. For the first time, he noticed a sticker on the door:

THIS PHONE BOOTH RESERVED FOR CLARK KENT


He grinned: an intellectual's kind of joke. Probably somebody on the magazine.

He walked back to the cafeteria, reflecting. "Nothing is true. Everything is permissible." With a doctrine like that, people were capable of ... He shuddered. Images of Buchenwald and Belsen, of Jews who might have been him. . . .

Peter Jackson looked up as he reentered the cafeteria. An intelligent, curious black face. Muldoon was as impassive as the faces on Mount Rushmore. "Mad Dog, Texas, was the town where Malik thought these . . . assassins . . . had their headquarters," Muldoon said. "That's where the staff writer was sent"

"What was the staff writer's name?" Saul asked.

"George Dorn," Muldoon said. "He's a young kid who used to be in SDS. And he was once rather close to the Weatherman faction."

Hagbard Celine's gigantic computer, FUCKUP-First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic-Ultramicro-Programmer- was basically a rather sophisticated form of the standard self-programming algorithmic logic machine of the time; the name was one of his whimsies. FUCKUP's real claim to uniqueness was a programmed stochastic process whereby it could "throw" an I Ching hexagram, reading' a random open circuit as a broken (yin) line and a random closed circuit as a full (yang) line until six such "lines" were round. Consulting its memory banks, where the whole tradition of 1 Ching interpretation was stored, and then cross-checking its current scannings of that day's political, economic, meteorological, astrological, astronomical, and technological eccentricities, it would provide a reading of the hexagram which, to Hagbard's mind, combined the best of the scientific and occult methods for spotting oncoming trends. On March 13, the stochastic pattern spontaneously generated Hexagram 23, "Breaking Apart." FUCKUP then interpreted:

This traditionally unlucky sign was cast by Atlantean scientist-priests shortly before the destruction of their continent and is generally connected with death by water. Other vibrations link it to earthquakes, tornadoes and similar disasters, and to sickness, decay, and morbidity as well.

The first correlation is with the unbalance between technological acceleration and political retrogression, which has proceeded earth-wide at ever widening danger levels since 1914 and especially since 1964. The breaking apart is fundamentally the schizoid and schismatic mental fugue of lawyer-politicians attempting to administrate a worldwide technology whose mechanisms they lack the education to comprehend and whose gestalt trend they frustrate by breaking apart into obsolete Renaissance nation-states.

World War III is probably imminent and, considering the advances in chemical biological warfare in conjunction with the sickness vibrations of Hexagram 23, the unleashing of plague or nerve gas or both is as probable as thermonuclear overkill.

General prognosis: many megadeaths.

There is some hope for avoidance of the emerging pattern with prompt action of correct nature. Probability of such avoidance is 0.17 ± 0.05.

No blame.


"My ass, no blame," Hagbard raged; and rapidly reprogrammed FUCKUP to read off to him its condensed psychobiographies of the key figures in world politics and the key scientists in chemobiological warfare.

The first dream came to Dr. Charles Oceangoing on February 2-more than a month before FUCKUP picked up the vibrations. He was, as usual with him, aware that he was dreaming, and the vision of a gigantic pyramid which seemed to walk or lumber' about meant nothing and quickly vanished. Now he seemed to be looking at an enlargement of the DNA double helix; it was so detailed that he began searching it for the bonding irregularities at every 23rd Angstrom. To his surprise, they were missing; instead, there were other irregularities at each 17th Angstrom. "What the devil . . . ?" he asked-and the pyramid returned seeming to speak and saying, "Yes, the devil." He jolted awake, with a new concept, Anthrax-Leprosy-Mu, coming into consciousness, and began jotting in his bedside pad.

"What the hell is this Desert Door project?" the President had asked once, scrutinizing the budget. "Germ warfare," an aide explained helpfully. "They started with something called Anthrax Delta and now they've worked their way up to something called Anthrax Mu and . . . " His voice was drowned out by the rumble of paper shredders in the next room. The President recognized the characteristic sound of the "cesspool cleaners" hard at work. "Never mind," he said. "Those things make me nervous." He scribbled a quick "OK" next to the item and went on to "Deprived Children," which made him feel better. "Here," he said, "this is something we can cut"

He forgot everything about Desert Door, until the Fernando Poo crises. "Suppose, just suppose," he asked the Joint Chiefs on March 29, I go on the tube and threaten all-out thermonuclear heck, and the other side doesn't blink. Have we got something that'll scare them even more?"

The J.C.'s exchanged glances. One of them spoke tentatively. "Out near Las Vegas," he said, "we have this Desert Door project that seems to be way ahead of the Comrades in b-b and b-c-"

"That's biological-bacteriological and biological-chemical," the President explained to the Vice-President, who was frowning. "It has nothing to do with B-B guns." Turning his attention back to the military men, he asked, "What have we got specifically that will curdle Ivan's blood?"

"Well, there's Anthrax-Leprosy-Mu. . . . It's worse than any form of anthrax. More deadly than bubonic and anthrax and leprosy all in one lump. As a matter of fact," the General who was speaking smiled grimly at the thought, "our evaluation suggests that "with death being so quick, the psychological demoralization of the survivors-if there are any survivors-will be even worse than in thermonuclear exchange with maximum 'dirty' fallout."

"By golly," the President said. "By golly. We won't use that out in the open. My speech'll just talk Bomb, but we'll leak it to the boys in the Kremlin that we've got this anthrax gimmick in cold storage, too. By gosh, you just wait and see them back down." He stood up, decisive, firm, the image he always projected on television. "I'm going to see my speech writers right now. Meanwhile, arrange that the brain responsible for this Anthrax-Pi gets a raise. What's his name?" he asked over his shoulder going out the door.

"Mocenigo. Dr. Charles Mocenigo."

"A raise for Dr. Charles Mocenigo," the President called from the hallway.

"Mocenigo?" the Vice-President asked thoughtfully. "Is he a wop?"

"Don't say wop," the President shouted back. "How many times do I have to tell you? Don't say wop or kike or any of those words anymore." He spoke with some asperity, since he lived daily with the dread that someday the secret tapes he kept of all" Oval Room transactions would be released to the public. He had long ago vowed that if that day ever came, the tapes would not be full of "(expletive deleted)" or "(characterization deleted)." He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of Russia and China.

In Central Park, the squirrel woke again as a car honked loudly in passing. Muttering angrily, he leaped to another tree and immediately went back to sleep. At the all-night Bickford's restaurant on Seventy-second Street, a young man named August Personage left a phone booth after making an obscene call to a woman in Brooklyn; he left behind one of his THIS PHONE BOOTH RESERVED FOR CLARK KENT stickers. In Chicago, one hour earlier on the clock but the same instant, the phone booth closed, a rock group called Clark Kent and His Supermen began a revival of "Rock Around the Clock": their leader, a tall black man with a master's degree in anthropology, had been known as El Hajj Starkerlee Mohammed during a militant phase a few years earlier, and his birth certificate said Robert Pearson on it. He was observing his audience and noted that bearded young white cat, Simon, was with a black woman as usual-a fetish Pearson-Mohammed-Kent could understand by reverse psychology, since he preferred white chicks himself. Simon, for once, was not entranced by the music; instead, he was deep in conversation with the girl and drawing a diagram of a pyramid on the table to explain what he meant. "Crown Point," Pearson heard him say over the music. And listening to "Rock Around the Clock" ten years earlier, George Dorn had decided to let his hair grow long, smoke dope and become a musician. He had succeeded in two of those ambitions. The statue of Tlaloc in the Museum of Anthropology, Mexico, D.F., stared inscrutably upward, toward the stars . . . and the same stars glittered above the 'Carribean where the porpoise named Howard sported in the waves.

The motorcade passes the Texas School Book Depository and moves slowly toward the Triple Underpass. At the sixth-floor window, Lee Harvey Oswald sights carefully through the Carcano-Mannlicher: his mouth is dry, desert dry. But his heartbeat is normal; and no sweat stands out on his forehead. This is the moment, he is thinking, the one moment transcending time and hazard, heredity and environment, the final test and proof of free will and of my right to call myself a man. In this moment, now, as I tighten the trigger, the Tyrant dies, and with him all the lies of a cruel, mendacious epoch. It is a supreme exaltation, this moment and this knowledge: and yet his mouth is dry, dust-dry, dry as death, as if his salivary glands alone rebelled against the murder which his intellect pronounced necessary and just. Now: He recalls the military formula BASS: Breathe, Aim, Slack, Squeeze. He breathes, he aims, he slacks, he starts to squeeze, as a dog barks suddenly-

And his mouth falls open in astonishment as three shots ring out, obviously from the direction of the Grassy Knoll and Triple Underpass.

"Son-of-a-bitch," he said, softly as a prayer. And he began to grin, a rictus not of omnipotence such as he had expected but of something different and unexpected and therefore better-omniscience. That smirk appeared in all the photos during the next day and a half, before his own death, a sneering smile that said so clearly that none dared to read it: I know something you don't know. That grimace only faded Sunday morning when Jack Ruby pumped two bullets into Lee's frail fanatic body, and its secret went with him to the grave. But another part of the secret had already left Dallas on Friday afternoon's TWA Whisperjet to Los Angeles, traveling behind the business suit, gray hair, and only moderately sardonic eyes of a little old man who was listed on the flight manifest as "Frank Sullivan."

This is serious, Peter Jackson was thinking; Joe Malik wasn't on a paranoid trip at all. The noncommittal expressions of Muldoon and Goodman did not deceive him at all-he had long ago learned the black art of surviving in a white world, which is the art of reading not what is on a face but what is behind the face. The cops were worried and excited, like any hunters on the track of something both large and dangerous. Joe was right about the assassination plot, and his disappearance and the bombing were part of it. And that meant George Dorn was in danger, too, and Peter liked George even if he was a snotty kid in some ways and an annoying ass-kisser about the race thing like most young white radicals. Mad Dog, Texas, Peter thought: that sure sounds like a bad place to be in trouble.

(Almost fifty years before, a habitual bank robber named Harry Pierpont approached a young convict in Michigan City Prison and asked him, "Do you think there might be a true religion?")

But why is George Dorn screaming while Saul Goodman is reading the memos? Hold on for another jump, and this one is a shocker. Saul is no longer human; he's a pig. All cops are pigs. Everything you've ever believed is probably a lie. The world is a dark, sinister, mysterious and totally frightening place. Can you digest all that quickly? Then, walk into the mind of George Dorn for the second time, five hours before the explosion at Confrontation (four hours before, on the clock) and suck on the joint, suck hard and hold it down. ("One o'clock . . . two o'clock . . . three o'clock . . . ROCK!"). You are sprawled on a crummy bed in a rundown hotel, and a neon light outside is flashing pink and blue patterns into your room. Exhale slowly, feel the hit of the weed and see if the wallpaper looks any brighter yet, any less Unintentional Low Camp. It's hot, Texas-dry hot, and you push your long hair back from your forehead and haul out your diary, George Dorn, because reading over what you wrote last sometimes helps you to learn what you're really getting into. As the neon splotches the page with pink and blue, read this:

April 23

How do we know whether the universe is getting bigger or the objects in it are getting smaller? You can't say that the universe is getting bigger in relation to anything outside it, because there isn't any outside for it to relate to. There isn't any outside. But if the universe doesn't have an out-side, then it goes on forever. Yeah, but, its inside doesn't go on forever. How do you know it doesn't, shithead? You're just playing with words, man.

-No I'm not. The universe is the inside without an outside, the sound made by one


There was a knock at the door.

The Fear came over George. Whenever he was high, the least little detail wrong in his world would bring the Fear, irresistible, uncontrollable. He held his breath, not to contain the smoke in his lungs, but because terror had paralyzed the muscles in his chest. He dropped the little notebook in which he wrote his thoughts daily and clutched at his penis, a habitual gesture in moments of panic. The hand holding the roach drifted, automatically, over the hollowed-out copy of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, which lay beside him on the bed, and he dropped the half-inch twist of paper and marijuana on top of the plastic Baggie full of green grains. Instantly a brown smoldering dime-sized hole opened up on the bag, and the pot near the coal started to smoke.

"Stupid," said George, as his thumb stabbed the smoking coal to crush it, and he drew back his lips in a grim-ace of pain.

A short fat man walked into the room, Law Officer written in every mean line of his crafty little face. George shrank back and started to close It Can't Happen Here; like lightning, three stiff, concrete-hard fingers drove into his forearm. He screamed and the book jumped out of his hand, spilling pot all over the bedspread.

"Don't touch that," said the fat man. "An officer will be in to gather it up for evidence. I went easy with that karate punch. Otherwise you'd be nursing a compound fracture of the left arm in Mad Dog County Jail tonight, and no right-thinking doctor likely to have a mind to come out and treat you."
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 1:57 am

Part 2 of 2

"You got a warrant?" George tried to sound defiant.

"Oh, you think you have cojones." The fat man's breath stank of bourbon and cheap cigars. "Rabbit cojones. I have terrified you unto death, boy, and you know it and I know it, yet you find it in your heart to speak of warrants. Next you'll want to see the American Civil Liberties Union." He pulled aside the jacket of an iridescent gray summer suit that might have been new when Heartbreak Hotel was the top of the hit parade. A silver five-pointed star decorated his pink shirt pocket and a .45 automatic stuck in his pants-top dented the fat of his belly. "That is all the law I need when dealing with your type in Mad Dog. Walk careful with me, son, or you won't have nothing to grab onto next time one of us pigs as you choose to call us in your little articles, busts in on you. Which is not likely to happen in the next forty years, while you rot and grow old in our state prison." He seemed immensely pleased with his own oratorical style, like one of Faulkner's characters. George thought:

It is forbidden to dream again; We maim our joys or hide them; Horses are made of chromium steel And little fat men shall ride them.

He said, "You can't hit me with forty years for possession. And grass is legal in most other states. This law is archaic and absurd."

"Shit and onions, boy, you got too much of the killer weed there to call it mere possession. I call it possession with intent to sell. And the laws of this state are stern, and they are just and they are our laws. We know what that weed can do. We remember the Alamo and Santa Anna's troops losing all fear because they were high on Rosa Maria, as they called it in those days. Get on your feet. And don't ask to talk to a lawyer, neither."

"Can I ask who you are?"

"I am Sheriff Jim Cartwright, nemesis of all evil in Mad Dog and Mad Dog County."

"And I'm Tiny Tim," said George, immediately saying to himself, Shut the fuck up, you're too goddamn high. And he went right on and said, "Maybe your side would have won if Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie got stoned, too. And, by the way, Sheriff, how did you know you could catch me with pot? Usually an underground journalist would make it a point to be clean when he comes into this godforsaken part of the country. It wasn't telepathy that told you I had pot on me."

Sheriff Cartwright slapped his thigh. "Oh, but it was. It was telepathy. Now just what made you think it wasn't telepathy brung me here?" He laughed, seized George's arm in a grip of iron, and pushed him toward the hotel-room door. George felt a bottomless terror as if the pit of hell were opening beneath his feet and Sheriff Jim Cartwright were about to pitchfork him into the bubbling sulfur. And I must admit that was more or less the case; there are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.

("Keep on hanging out with those wild boys from Passaic and you'll end up in jail," George's mother said. "You mark my words, George." And, another time, at Columbia, after a very late meeting, Mark Rudd said soberly, "A lot of us are going to spend some time in the Man's jails before this shit-storm is over"; and George, together with the others, nodded glumly but bravely. The marijuana he had been smoking was raised in Cuernavaca by a farmer named Arturo Jesus Maria Ybarra y Mendez, who had sold it in bulk to a young Yanqui named Jim Riley, the son of a Dayton, Ohio, police officer, who in turn smuggled it through Mad Dog after paying a suitable bribe to Sheriff Jim Cartwright. After that it was resold to a Times Square dealer called Rosetta the Stoned and a Miss Walsh from Confrontation's research department bought ten ounces from her, later reselling five ounces to George, who then carried it back to Mad Dog without any suspicion that he was virtually completing a cycle. The original seed was part of that strain recommended by General George Washington in the famous letter to Sir John Sinclair in which he writes, "I find that, for all purposes, the Indian hemp is in every way superior to the New Zealand variety previously cultivated here." In New York, Rebecca Goodman, deciding that Saul will not be home tonight, slips out of bed, dons a robe and begins to browse through her library. Finally she selects a book on Babylonian mythology and begins to read: "Before all of the gods, was Mummu, the spirit of Pure Chaos. . . ," In Chicago, Simon and Mary Lou Servix sit naked on her bed, legs intertwined in the yabyum lotus position. "No," Simon is saying, "You don't move, baby; you wait for u to move you." Clark Kent and His Supermen swing into a reprise: "We're gonna rock around the clock tonight . . . We're gonna ROCK ROCK ROCK till broad day light.")

George's cell mate in Mad Dog County Jail had a skull-like face with large, protruding front teeth. He was about six and a half feet tall and lay curled up on his cell bunk like a coiled python.

"Have you asked for treatment?" George asked him.

"Treatment for what?"

"Well, if you think you're an assassin-"

"I don't think, baby brother. I've killed four white men and two niggers. One in California, the rest down here. Got paid for every one of them."

"Is that what you're in for?" My God, they don't stick murderers in the same cell with potheads, do they?

"I'm in for vagrancy," said the man scornfully. "Actually, I'm just here for safekeeping, till they give me my orders. Then it's good-bye to whoever-President, civil rights leader, enemy of the people. Someday I'll be famous. I'm gonna write a book about myself someday, Ace. Course, I'm no good at writing. Look, maybe we can do a deal. I'll have Sheriff Jim bring you some writing paper if you'll write about my life. They gonna keep you here forever, you know. I'll come and visit you between assassinations, and you'll write the book, and Sheriff Jim'11 keep it safe till I retire. Then you have the book published and you'll make a lot of money and be real comfortable in jail. Or maybe you can even hire a lawyer to get you out."

"Where will you be?" said George. He was still scared, but he was feeling sleepy, too, and he was deciding that this was all bullshit, which had a calming effect on his nerves. But he'd better not go to sleep in the cell while this guy was awake. He didn't really believe this assassin talk, but it was safe to assume that anybody you met in prison was homosexual.

As if reading his mind, his cell mate said, "How'd you like to let a famous assassin shove it up to you? How would that be, huh, Ace?"

"Please," said George. "That's not my bag, you know? I really couldn't do it."

"Shit, piss, and corruption," said the assassin. He suddenly uncoiled and slid off the bunk. "I been wasting my time with you. Now bend the hell over and drop your pants. You are getting it, and there ain't no further way about it." He stepped toward George, fists clenched.

"Guard! Guard!" George yelled. He grabbed the cell door in both hands and began rattling it frantically.

The man caught George a cuff across the face. Another blow to the jaw knocked George against the wall.

"Guard!" he screamed, his head spinning with pot and panic.

A man in a blue uniform came through the door at the end of the corridor. He seemed miles away and vastly disinterested, like a god who had grown bored with his creations.

"Now, what the hell is all this yelling about in here?" he asked, his hand en the butt of his revolver, his voice still miles away.

George opened his mouth, but his cell mate spoke first 'This little long-haired communist freak won't drop his pants when I tell him. Ain't you supposed to make sure I'm happy in here?" The voice shifted to a whine. "Make him do what I say."

"You've got to protect me," said George. "You've got to get me out of this cell."

The god-guard laughed. "Well, now, you might say this is a very enlightened prison we have here. You come down from New York and you probably think we're pretty backward. But we ain't. We got no police brutality. Now, if I interfered between you and Harry Coin here, I might have to use force to keep him away from your young ass. I know you people believe all cops ought to be abolished. Well, in this here situation I hereby abolish myself. Furthermore, I know you people believe in sexual freedom, and I do, too. So Harry Coin gonna have his sexual freedom without any interference or brutality from me." His voice was still distant and disinterested, almost dreamy.

"No," said George.

The guard drew his pistol. "Now, sonny. You take down your pants and bend over. You are gonna get it up the ass from Harry Coin here, and no two ways about it And I am gonna watch and see that you let him do it right. Otherwise, you get no forty years. You get killed, right now. I put a bullet in you and I say you are resisting arrest. Now make up your mind what it's gonna be. I really will kill you if you don't do like he tells you to. I really will. You are totally expendable and he ain't. He's a very important man, and it's my job to keep him happy."

"And I'll fuck you either way, dead or alive," the demented Coin laughed, like an evil spirit. "So there's no way you can escape it, Ace."

The door at the end of the corridor clanged, and Sheriff Jim Cartwright and two blue-uniformed policemen strode down to the cell. "What's going on here?" said the Sheriff.

"I caught this queer punk George Dorn here trying to commit homosexual rape on Harry," said the guard. "Had to draw my pistol to stop him."

George shook his head. "You guys are unbelievable. If you're acting out this little game for my benefit, you can quit now, because you're certainly not fooling each other, and you're not fooling me."

"Dorn," said the Sheriff, "you've been attempting unnatural acts in my jail, acts forbidden by the Holy Bible and the laws of this state. I don't like that. I don't like it one little bit. Come on out here. I wanna have a little talk with you. We goin' to the main interrogation room for some speakin' together."

He unlocked the cell door and motioned George to precede him. He turned to the two policemen who had accompanied him. "Stay behind and take care of that other little matter." The last words were strangely emphasized.

George and the Sheriff walked through a series of corridors and locked doors until at last they came to a room whose walls were made of embossed sheet tin painted bottle-green. The Sheriff told George to sit on one chair, while he straddled the back of the chair facing him.

"You're a bad influence on my prisoners," he said. "I got a good mind to see that some kind of accident happens to you. I don't want to see you corrupting prisoners in my jail-mine or anyone's-for forty years."

"Sheriff," said George. "What do you want from me? You got me on a pot charge. What more do you want? Why did you stick me in that cell with that guy? What's all this scare stuff and threats and questioning for?"

"I wanna know some things," said the Sheriff. "I want to find out everything you can tell me about certain matters. So, from this moment be prepared to tell me only the truth. If you do, maybe things will go easier on you, after."

"Yes, Sheriff," said George. Cartwright squinted at him. He really does look like a pig, thought George. Most do. Why do so many of them get so fat and have such little eyes?

"Well, then," said the Sheriff. "What was your purpose in coming down here from New York?"

"I'm simply on an assignment from Confrontation, the magazine-"

"I know it. It is a smutty magazine, and a communist magazine. I have read it"

"You're using loaded words. It's a left-wing libertarian magazine, to be exact"

"My pistol is loaded, too, boy. So talk straight All right Tell me what you came down here to write about"

"Sure. You ought to be as interested in this as I am, if you're really interested in law and order. There have been rumors circulating throughout the country for more than a decade now that all the major political assassinations in America-Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers, Medgar Evers, King, Nixon, maybe even George Lincoln Rockwell-are the work of a single, conspiratorial, violence-oriented right-wing organization, and that this organization has its base right here in Mad Dog. I came down to see what I could find out about this group."

"That's what I figured," said the Sheriff. "You poor, sad little turd. You come down here with your long hair and you expect to get, as you put it, a line on a right-wing organization. Why, it's lucky for you you didn't meet any of our real right-wingers, like God's Lightning for instance. The ones around here would have tortured you to death by this tune, boy. You really are dumb. OK, I'm not gonna waste any more of my time with you. Come on, I'll take you back to your cell. You might as well get used to looking at the moon through bars."

They walked back the same way they had come. At the entrance to the corridor where George's cell was, the Sheriff opened the door and yelled, "Come and get him, Charley."

George's guard, his face pale and his mouth set in a lipless line, took George by the arm. The corridor door clanged shut behind the Sheriff. Charley took George to his cell and pushed him in wordlessly. But at least he was three-dimensional now and less like a marijuana phantom.

Harry Coin wasn't there. The cell was empty. George became aware of a shadow in the corner of his vision. Something in the cell next to him. He turned: His heart stopped. There was a man hanging from a pipe on the ceiling. George went over and stared through the bars. The body was swaying slightly. It was attached to the pipe by a leather belt which was buckled around the neck. The face, with the staring eyes, was that of Harry Coin. George's glance went lower. Something was coming out of

Harry Coin's midsection and was dangling down to the floor. It wasn't suicide. They had disemboweled Harry Coin, and someone had thoughtfully moved a shit-can under him for his bloody intestines to dangle into.

George screamed. There was no one around to answer him. The guard had vanished like Hermes.

(But in Cherry Knolls mental hospital in Sunderland, England, where it was already eleven the following morning, a schizophrenic patient who hadn't spoken in ten years abruptly began exhorting a ward attendant: "They're all coming back-Hitler, Goering, Streicher, the whole lot of them. And, behind them, the powers and persons from the other spheres who control them. . . ." But Simon Moon in Chicago still calmly and placidly retains the lotus position and instructs Mary Lou sitting in his lap: "Just hold it, hold it with your vaginal wall like you'd hold it with your hand, gently, and feel its warmth, but don't think about orgasm, don't think about the future, not even a minute ahead, think about the now, the only now, the only now, the only now that we'll ever have, just my penis in your vagina now and the simple pleasure of it, not a greater pleasure to work toward. . . ." "My back hurts," Mary Lou said.)

WE'RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TO NIGHT

There are Swedish and Norwegian kids, Danes, Italian and French kids, Greeks, even Americans. George and Hagbard move through the crowd trying to estimate its number-200,000? 300,000? 500,000? Peace symbols dangling about every neck, nudes with body paint, nudes without body paint, long and dangling hair on boys and girls alike, and over all of it the hypnotic and unending beat. "Woodstock Europa," Hagbard says dryly. "The last and final Walpurgisnacht and Adam Weishaupt's Erotion finally realized."

WE'RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT

"It's a League of Nations," George says, "a young people's League of Nations." Hagbard isn't listening. "Up there," he points, "to the Northwest is the Rhine, where die Lorelei was supposed to sit and sing her deadly songs. There will be deadlier music on the Danube tonight."

WE'RE GONNA ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TONIGHT

(But that was still seven days in the future, and now

George lies unconscious in Mad Dog County Jail. And it began-that phase of the operation, as Hagbard called it-over thirty years before when a Swiss chemist named Hoffman climbed on his bicycle and pedaled down a country road into new dimensions.)

"And will they all come back?" George asked.

"All of them," Hagbard answered tightly. "When the beat reaches the proper intensity . . . unless we can stop it."

("Now I'm getting it," Mary Lou cried. "It's not what I expected. It's different from sex, and better." Simon smiled benignly. "It is sex, baby," he said. "What you've had before wasn't sex. Now we can start moving . . . but slowly ... the Gentle Way ... the Way of Tao. . . ." They're all coming back; they never died-the lunatic raved at the startled attendant-You wait, guvnor. You just wait. You'll see it.)

The amplifiers squealed suddenly. There was too much feedback, and the sound went off into a pitch beyond endurance. George winced, and saw others hold their ears. ROCK, ROCK, ROCK, AROUND THE CLOCK. The key missed the lock, turned and cut Muldoon's hand. "Nerves," he said to Saul. "I always feel like a burglar when I do this."

Saul grunted. "Forget burglary," he said. "We might be hanged for treason before this is over. If we don't become national heroes."

"A fanfuckingtastic case," Muldoon grinned. He tried another way.

They were in an old brownstone on Riverside Drive, trying to break into the apartment of Joseph Malik. And they were not merely looking for evidence, both tacitly admitted-they were hiding from the FBI.

The call had come from headquarters just as they were finishing the questioning of associate editor Peter Jackson. Muldoon had gone out to his car to take it, while Saul finished getting a full physical description of both Malik and George Dorn. Jackson had just left and Saul was picking up the fifth memo, when Muldoon returned, looking as if his doctor had just told him his Wasserman was positive.

"Two special agents from the FBI are coming over to help us," he said woodenly.

"Still ready to play a hunch?" Saul asked calmly, pushing all the memos back in the metal box.

Muldoon merely called Pricefixer back into the cafeteria and told him, "Two feds will be here in a few minutes. Tell them we went back to headquarters. Answer any question they ask, but don't tell them about this box."

Pricefixer looked at the two older officers carefully and then said to Muldoon, "You're the boss."

He's either awfully dumb and trusting, Saul had thought, or he's so damned smart he's going to be dangerous someday.

"Now," he asked Muldoon nervously, "is that the last key?"

"No, I've got five more beauties here and one of them will-here it is!" The door opened smoothly.

Saul's hand drifted toward his revolver as he stepped into the apartment and felt for a light switch. Nobody was revealed when the light came on, and Saul relaxed. "You look around for the dogs." he said. "I want to sit down and go over the rest of these memos."

The room was used for work as well as living and was untidy enough to leave no room for doubt that Malik had been a bachelor. Saul pushed the typewriter back on the writing desk, set down the memo box and then noticed something odd. The whole wall, on this side of the room, was covered with pictures of George Washington. Standing to examine them more closely, he saw that each had a label-half of them saying "G.W." and the others, "A.W."

Odd-but the whole case had overtones that smelled as fishy as those dead Egyptian mouth-breeders.

Saul sat down and took a memo from the box.

Muldoon came back into the living room and said, "No dogs. Not a goddam dog anywhere in the whole apartment."

"That's interesting," Saul remarked thoughtfully. "You say the landlord had complaints from several other tenants about the dogs?" ;

"He said everybody in the building was complaining. The rule is no pets and he enforced it. People wanted to know why they had to get rid of their kittens when Malik could have a whole pack of dogs up here. They said there must have been ten or twelve from the noise they made."

"He sure must love those animals, if he took them all with him when he went into hiding," Saul mused. The pole vaulter in his unconscious was jumping again. "Let's look in the kitchen," he suggested mildly.

Barney followed as Saul methodically ransacked the refrigerator and cupboards, finishing up with a careful examination of the garbage.

"No dog food," Saul said finally.

"I noticed."

"And no dog dishes either. And no empty dog-food tins in the garbage."

"What wild notion are you following now?"

"I don't know," Saul said thoughtfully. "He doesn't mind the neighbors hearing the dogs-probably he's the land of left-wing individualist who likes nothing better than quarreling with his landlord and the other tenants about some issue like the no-pets rule. So he wasn't hiding anything until he ducked out And then he not only took the dogs but hid all evidence that they'd ever been here. Even though he must have known that the neighbors would all talk about them."

"Maybe he was feeding them human flesh," Muldoon suggested ghoulishly.

"Lord, I don't know. You look around for anything of interest. I'm going to read those Illuminati memos." Saul returned to the living room and began:

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #5

7/26

J.M.:

Sometimes you find things in the damnedest places. The following is from a girl's magazine ('The Conspiracy" by Sandra Glass, Teenset, March 1969, pages 34-40).

Simon proceeded to tell me about the Bavarian Illuminati. The nightmarish story begins in 1090 A.D. in the Middle East when Hassan i Sabbah founded the Ismaelian Sect, or Hashishism, so called because of their use of hashish, a deadly drug derived from the hemp plant which is better known as the killer weed marijuana. . . . The cult terrorized the Moslem world until Genghis Khan's Mongols brought law and order to the area. Cornered in their mountain hideaway, the Hashishism dope fiends proved no match for the clean-living Mongol warriors, their fortress was destroyed, and their dancing girls shipped

to Mongolia for rehabilitation. The heads of the cult fled westward. . . .

"The Illuminati surfaced next in Bavaria in 1776," Simon told me. . . . "Adam Weishaupt, a student of the occult, studied the teachings of Hassan i Sabbah and grew hemp in his backyard. On February 2, 1776, Weishaupt achieved illumination. Weishaupt officially founded the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria on May 1st, 1776. Their slogan was 'Ewige Blumenkraft.' . . . They attracted many illustrious members such as Goethe and Beethoven. Beethoven tacked up an Ewige Blumenkraft poster on the top of the piano on which he composed all nine of his symphonies."

The last paragraph of the article is, however, the most interesting of all:

Recently I saw a documentary film on the Democratic Convention of 1968, and I was struck by the scene in which Senator Abraham Ribicoff made a critical remark provoking the anger of the Mayor of Chicago. In the ensuing tumult it was impossible to hear the Mayor's shouted retort, and there has been much speculation about what he actually said. To me it seemed his lips were forming the words that by this time become frighteningly familiar: "Ewige Blumenkraft!"

The further I dig, the wilder the whole picture looks. When are we going to tell George about it?

Pat

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #6

7/26

J.M.:

The John Birch Society has looked into the subject and they have a theory of their own. The first source I've found on this is a pamphlet "CFR: Conspiracy to Rule the World" by Gary Alien, associate editor of the Birchers' magazine, American Opinion. Alien's thesis is that Cecil Rhodes created a secret society to establish English domination of the world in 1888. This society acts through Oxford University, the Rhodes Scholarships and-hold your breath-the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit foundation for the study of International Affairs headquartered right here on Sixty-eighth Street in New York. Seven out of nine of our last Secretaries of State were recruited from the CFR, Alien points out, and dozens of other leading politicians as well-including Richard Nixon. It is also implied, but not directly stated, that William Buckley, Jr. (an old enemy of the Birchers) is another tool of the CFR; and the Morgan and Rothschild banking interests are supposed to be financing the whole thing.

How does this tie in with the Illuminati? Mr. Alien merely drops hints, linking Rhodes to John Ruskin, and Ruskin to earlier internationalists, and finally stating that "the originator on the profane level of this type of secret society" was Adam Weishaupt, whom he calls "the monster who founded the Order of the Illuminati on May 1, 1776."

Pat

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #7

7/27

J.M.:

This is from a small left-wing newspaper in Chicago (The RogerSPARK Chicago, July 1969, Vol. 2, No. 9: "Daley Linked With Illuminati," no author's name given):

No historian knows what happened to Adam Weishaupt after he was exiled from Bavaria in 1785, and entries in "Washington's" diary after that date frequently refer to the hemp crop at Mount Vernon.

The possibility that Adam Weishaupt killed George Washington and took his place, serving as our first President for two terms, is now confirmed. . . . The two main colors of the American flag are, excluding a small patch of blue in one corner, red and white: these are also the official colors of the Hashishism. The flag and the Illuminati pyramid both have thirteen horizontal divisions: thirteen is, of course, the traditional code for marijuana . . . and is still used in that sense by Hell's Angels among others.

Now, "Washington" formed the Federalist party.

The other major party in those days, The Democratic Republicans, was formed by Thomas Jefferson [and] there are grounds for accepting the testimony of the Reverend Jedediah Morse of Charleston, who accused Jefferson of being an Illuminati agent. Thus, even at the dawn of our government, both parties were IIluminati fronts. ...

This story later repeats the Teenset report that Mayor Daley used the phrase "Ewige Blumenkraft" during his incoherent diatribe against Abe Ribicoff.

Pat

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #8

7/27

J.M.: More on the Washington-Weishaupt theory:

In spite of the fact that his face appears on billions of stamps and dollar bills, and his portrait hangs in every public building in the country, no one is quite sure what Washington looks like. A "Project 20" script, "Meet George Washington" will be seen tonight at 7:30 on Channel (fill in by local stations). The program offers contemporary portraits of the first President, some of which do not even seem to be the same man.

This is a press release sent out by NEC on April 24, 1969. Some of the portraits can be found in Encyclopedia Britannica and the resemblance to portraits of Weishaupt is undeniable.

Incidentally, Barbara called my attention to this: the letter in Playboy asking about the Illuminati was signed "R.S., Kansas City, Missouri." According to the Kansas City newspapers, a Robert Stanton of that city was found dead on March 17, 1969 (about a week after the April Playboy appeared on the newsstands) with his throat torn as if by the talons of some enormous beast. No animal was reported missing from any of the local zoos.

Pat


Saul looked up at the pictures of Washington on the wall. For the first time, he noticed the strange half-smile on the most famous of them all, the one by Gilbert Stuart that appears on one-dollar bills. "As if by the talons of some enormous beast," he quoted to himself, thinking again of Malik's disappearing dogs.

"What the hell are you grinning about?" he asked sourly.

Congressman Koch, he remembered suddenly, in a speech years and years ago when marijuana was illegal everywhere, said something about Washington's hemp crop. What was it? Yes: it was about the entries in the General's diary-they showed that he separated the female hemp plants from the males before fertilization. That was botanically unnecessary if he was growing the crop for rope, but it was standard practice in cultivating hemp for marijuana, Koch pointed out.

And "illumination" was one of the words hippies were always using to describe the experience one obtains from the highest grade of grass. Even the more common term, "turning on," had the same meaning as "illumination," when you stopped to think about. Wasn't that what the crown of light around Jesus' head in Catholic art was supposed to mean? And Goethe-if he was really part of this-might have been referring to the experience in his last words, as he lay dying: "More light!"

I should have become a rabbi, like my father wanted, Saul thought bemusedly. Police work is getting to be too much for me.

In a few minutes I'll be suspecting Thomas Edison.

ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT


Slowly, Mary Lou Servix swam back to consciousness, like a shipwreck victim reaching a raft.

"Good Lord," she breathed softly.

Simon kissed her neck. "Now you know," he whispered.

"Good Lord," she repeated. "How many times did I come?"

Simon smiled. "I'm not an anal-compulsive type-I wasn't counting. Ten or twelve, something like that, I guess."

"Good Lord. And the hallucinations. Was that what you were doing to my nervous system, or was it the grass?"

"Just tell me about what you saw."

"Well, you got a halo around you, sort of. A big blue halo. And then I saw that it was around me, too, and that

it had all sorts of little blue dots dancing in sort of whorls inside it. And then there wasn't even that anymore. Just light. Pure white light."

"Suppose I told you I have a friend who's a dolphin and he exists in that kind of limitless light all the time."

"Oh, don't start jiving me. You've been so nice, until now."

"I'm not jiving you. His name is Howard. I might arrange for you to meet him."

"A fish?"

"No, baby. A dolphin is a mammal. Just like you and me."

"You are either the world's greatest brain or the world's craziest motherfucker, Mr. Simon Moon. I mean it. But that light. . . My God, I will never forget that light."

"And what happened to your body?" Simon asked casually.

"You know, I didn't know where it was. Even in the middle of my orgasms I didn't know where my body was. Everything was just. . . the light. . . ."

ROCK ROCK ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TONIGHT


And leaving Dallas that much-discussed November 22 afternoon in 1963, the man using the name "Frank Sullivan" brushes past McCord and Barker at the airport, but no foreshadowing of Watergate darkens his mind.. (Back at the Grassy Knoll, Howard Hunt's picture is being snapped and will later turn up in the files of New Orleans D.A. Jim 'The Jolly Green Giant" Garrison: not that Garrison ever came within light years of the real truth. . . .)

"Here, kitty-kitty-kitty,"Hagbard calls.

But now we are going back, again, to April 2 and Las Vegas; Sherri Brandi (nee Sharon O'Farrell) arriving home finds Carmel in her living room at four in the morning. It doesn't surprise her; he often made these unexpected visits. He seems to enjoy invading other people's territory like some kinda creepy virus. "Darling," I cried, rushing to kiss him as he expected. I wish the creep would drop dead, I thought as our mouths met.

"An all-night John?" he asked casually.

"Yeah. One of those scientists who works at that place out in the desert we're all supposed to pretend we don't know about. A freak."

"He wanted something special?" Carmel asked quickly. "You charged him extra?" At times I thought I could really see dollar signs in his eyes.

"No," I said, "he just wanted a lay. But afterward he wouldn't let me go. Just kept jawing." I yawned, looking around at the nice furniture and the nice paintings; I had managed to get everything in shades of pink and lavender, really beautiful, if that creep hadn't been sitting there on the couch looking like a hungry dead rat. I always wanted pretty things and I think I could have been some kind of artist or designer if all my luck wasn't always lousy. Christ, who ever told Carmel a blue turtleneck would go with a brown suit? If it wasn't for women, in my honest-to-Pete opinion, men would all go around looking like that. That's what I think. Insensitive. A bunch of cavemen, or Meander Thralls, or whatever you call them. "This John had a lot on his mind," I said before old candy-bar could start cross examining me about something else. "He's against fluorides in drinking water and the Catholic church and faggots and he thinks the new birth-control pill is as bad as the old one and I should use a diaphragm instead. Christ, he's got the inside dope on everything under the sun, he thinks, and I hadda listen to it all. That kind of John."

Carmel nodded. "Scientists are schmucks," he said.

I pulled the dress over my head and hung it in the closet (it was the nice green one with the spangles and the new style where my nipples stick out through little holes, which is a pain in the ass because they're always rubbing against something and getting raw, but it really turns on the Johns, and, like I always say, that's the name of the game, in this sonofabitching town with all the lousy luck, the only way to heavy scratch is go out there, girl, and sell your snatch) and then I grabbed my robe quick before old blow-job bobo decided it was time for his weekly Frenching. "He's got a nice house, though," I said to distract the creep. "He doesn't have to live out there on the base, he's too important for rules and regularities. Nice to look at, I mean. Redwood walls and burnt orange decor, you know? Pretty. He hates it, though. Acts as if he thinks it's haunted by Count Frankenstein or somebody. Keeps jumping up and walking around like he's looking for something. Something that'll bite his head off in one gulp if he finds it." I decided to let the top of the robe hang open a little. Carmel was either horny or he wanted something else, and something else with him generally means he thinks you've been holding back some cash. Him and his damned belt. Of course, sometimes with that I go queer all over for a flash and I guess that's like the come that men have, the orgasm, but it ain't worth the pain, believe me. I wonder if it's true some women get it in intercourse? Really get it? I don't think so. I've never known anybody in the business who gets it, from a man, only from Rosy Palm and her five sisters, sometimes, and if none of us do, how could some straight nicey-nicey get it?

"Bugs," Carmel said, looking shrewd and clever, off on his usual shtick of proving he was more hip to everything than anybody else on God's green earth. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

"What do you mean, bugs?" I asked. It was better than talking about money.

"The John," he said with a know-it-all grin. "He's important, you said. So his house has bugs. He probably keeps taking them out, and the FBI keeps coming back and putting in new ones. I bet he was very quiet when he was making it with you, right?" I nodded, remembering. "See. He couldn't stand the thought of those Feds eavesdropping on the other end of the wire. Just like Mal- like a guy I know in the Syndicate. He's so afraid of bugs he won't hold a business talk anywhere but the bathroom in his hotel suite with all four faucets going full blast and both of us whispering. Running water screws up a bug more than playing loud music on the radio, for some scientific reason."

"Bugs," I said suddenly. "That's it." The other kind of bugs. I was remembering Charley raving about fluoridation: "And we're all classified as mental cases, because a few right-wing nuts fifteen or twenty years ago who said fluoridation was a communist plot to poison us. Now, anybody who criticizes fluoridation is supposed to be just as bananas as God's Lightning. Good Lord, if anybody wants to do us in without firing a shot, I could-" and he caught himself, hid something that almost showed on his face, and ended like his brain was walking on one foot, "I could point to a dozen things in any chemistry book more effective than fluoride." But he wasn't thinking of chemicals, he was thinking of those little bugs, microbes is the word, and that's what he was working on. I could feel that flash I always get when I read something in a John, like if he had more money than he let on, or he'd caught his wife spreading for the milkman and was doing it to get even, or he was really a faggola and was just proving to himself that he wasn't completely a faggola.

"My God," I said, "Carmel, I read about those microbe bugs in the Enquirer, If they have an accident out there, this whole town goes, and the state with it, and God knows how many other states. Jesus, no wonder he keeps washing his hands!"

"Germ warfare?" Carmel said, thinking fast. "God, I'll bet this town is crawling with Russian spies trying to find out what's going on out there. And I've got a direct lead for them. But how the hell do you meet a Russian spy, or a Chinese spy for that matter? You can't just advertise in a newspaper. Hell. Maybe if I went down to the university and talked to some of those freaking commie students. ..."

I was shocked. "Carmel! You can't sell your own country like that!"

"The hell I can't. The Statue of Liberty is just another broad, and I'll take what I can get for her. Don't be a fool." He reached in his jacket pocket and took out a caramel candy like he always did when he was excited. "I'll -bet somebody in the Mob will know. They know everything. Jesus, there has to be some way of cashing in on this."

The Presidents actual television broadcast was transmitted to the world at 10:30 P.M. EST, March 31. The Russians and Chinese were given twenty-four hours to get out of Fernando Poo or the skies over Santa Isobel would begin raining nuclear missiles: "This is darn serious," the Chief Executive said, "and America will not shirk its responsibility to the freedom-loving people of Fernando Poo!" The broadcast concluded at 11 P.M. EST, and within two minutes people attempting to get reservations on trains, planes, busses or car pools to Canada had virtually every telephone wire in the country overloaded.

In Moscow, where it was ten the next morning, the Premier called a conference and said crisply, "That character in Washington is a mental lunatic, and he means it. Get our men out of Fernando Poo right away, then find out who authorized sending them in there in the first place and transfer him to be supervisor of a hydroelectric works in Outer Mongolia."

"We don't have any men in Fernando Poo," a commissar said mournfully. 'The Americans are imagining things again."

"Well, how the hell can we withdraw men if we don't have them there in the first place?" the Premier demanded.

"I don't know. We've got twenty-four hours to figure that out, or-" the commissar quoted an old Russian proverb which means, roughly, that when the polar bear excrement interferes with the fan belts, the machinery overheats.

"Suppose we just announce that our troops are coming out?" another commissar suggested. "They can't say we're lying if they don't find any of our troops there afterward."

"No, they never believe anything we say. They want to be shown," the premier said thoughtfully. "We'll have to infiltrate some troops surreptitiously and then withdraw them with a lot of fanfare and publicity. That should do it."

"I'm afraid it won't end the problem," another pommissar said funereally. "Our intelligence indicates that there are Chinese troops there. Unless Peking backs down, we're going to be caught in the middle when the bombs start flying and-" he quoted a proverb about the man in the intersection when two manure trucks collide.

"Damn," the Premier said. "What the blue blazes do the Chinese want with Fernando Poo?"

He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on schizophrenia; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of America and China.

And, banishing Thomas Edison and his light bulbs from mind, Saul Goodman looks back over the first eight memos briefly, using the conservative and logical side of his personality, rigidly holding back the intuitive functions. It was a habitual exercise with him, and he called it expansion-and-contraction: leaping in the dark for the connection that must exist between fact one and fact two, then going back slowly to check on himself.

The names and phrases flow past, in review: Fra Dol-cino-1508-Roshinaya-Hassan i Sabbah-1090-Weis-haupt-assassinations-John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King-Mayor Daley-Cecil Rhodes-1888 -George Washington....

Choices: (1) it is all true, exactly as the memos suggest; (2) it is partly true, and partly false; (3) it is all false, and there is no secret society that has endured from 1090 A.D. to the present.

Well, it isn't all true. Mayor Daley never said "Ewige Blumenkraft" to Senator Ribicoff. Saul had read, in the Washington Post, a lip-reader's translation of Daley's diatribe and there was no German in it, although there was obscenity and anti-Semitism. The Weishaupt-Washington impersonation theory also had some flaws-in those days, before plastic surgery, such an undetected assumption of the identity of a well-known figure was especially hard to credit, despite the circumstantial evidence quoted in the memos-two strong arguments against choice one. The memos are not all true.

How about choice three? The Illuminati might not be a straight unbroken line from the first recruit gathered by old Hassan i Sabbah to the person who bombed Confrontation-it might have died and lain dormant for a term, like the Ku Klux Klan between 1872 and 1915; and it might have gone through such breakups and resurrections more than once in eight centuries-but linkages of some sort, however tenuous, reached from the eleventh century to the twentieth, from the Near East to Europe and from Europe to America. Saul's dissatisfaction with official explanations of recent assassinations, the impossibility of making any rational sense out of current American foreign policy, and the fact that even historians who vehemently distrusted all "conspiracy theories" acknowledged the pivotal role of secret Masonic lodges in the French Revolution: all these added weight to the rejection of choice 3. Besides, the Masons were the first group, according to at least two of the memos, infiltrated by Weishaupt.

Choice 1 is definitely out, then, and choice 3 almost certainly equally invalid; choice 2, therefore, is most probably correct. The theory in the memos is partly true and partly false. But what, in essence, is the theory-and which part of it is true, which part false?

Saul lit his pipe, closed his eyes, and concentrated.

The theory, in essence, was that the Illuminati recruited people through various "fronts," turned them on to some sort of illuminizing experience through marijuana (or some special extract of marijuana) and converted them into fanatics willing to use any means necessary to "illuminize" the rest of the world. Their aim, obviously, is nothing less than the total transformation of humanity itself, along the lines suggested by the film 2007, or by Nietzsche's concept of the Superman. In the course of this conspiracy the Illuminati, according to Malik's hints to Jackson, were systematically assassinating every popular political figure who might interfere with their program.

Saul thought, suddenly, of Charlie Manson, and of the glorification of Manson by the Weatherman and Morituri bombers. He thought of the popularity of pot smoking and of the slogan "by any means necessary" with contemporary radical youth, even outside Weatherman. And he thought of Neitzsche's slogans, "Be hard. . . . Whatever is done for love is beyond good and evil. . . . Above the ape is man, and above man, the Superman. . . . Forget not thy whip. ..." In spite of his own logic, which had proved that Malik's theory was only partly true, Saul Goodman, a lifelong liberal, suddenly felt a pang of typically right-wing terror toward modern youth.

He reminded himself that Malik seemed to think the conspiracy emanated chiefly from Mad Dog-and that was God's Lightning country down there. God's Lightning had no fondness for marijuana, or for youth, or for the definitely anti-Christian overtones of the Illuminati philosophy.

Besides, Malik's sources were only partly trustworthy.

And there were other possibilities: the Shriners, for instance, were part of the Masonic movement, were generally right-wing, had their own hidden rites and secrets, and used Arabic trappings that might well derive from Hassan i Sabbah or the Roshinaya of Afghanistan. Who could say what secret plots were hatched at Shriner conventions?

No, that was the intuitive pole vaulter in the right lobe at work again; and right now Saul was concerned with the plodding logician in the left lobe.

The key to the mystery was in getting a clearer definition of the purpose of the Illuminati. Identify the change they were trying to accomplish-in man and in his society-and then you would be able to guess, at least approximately, who they were.

Their aim was English domination of the world, and they were Rhodes Scholars-according to the Birchers. That idea, obviously, belonged with Saul's own whimsey about a worldwide Shriner conspiracy. What then? The Italian llluminati, under Fra Dolcino, wanted to redistribute the wealth-but the International Bankers, mentioned in the Playboy letter, presumably wanted to hold onto their wealth. Weishaupt was a "freethinker" according to the Britannica, and so were Washington and Jefferson- but Sabbah and Joachim of Florence were evidently heretical mystics of the Islamic and Catholic traditions respectively.

Saul picked up the ninth memo, deciding to get more facts (or pretended facts) before analyzing further-and then it hit him.

Whatever the Illuminati were aiming at had not been accomplished. Proof: If it had, they would not still be conspiring in secret.

Since almost everything has been tried in the course of human history, find out what hasn't been tried (at least not on a large scale)-and that will be the condition to which the Illuminati are trying to move the rest of mankind.

Capitalism had been tried. Communism has been tried. Even Henry George's Single Tax has been tried, in Australia. Fascism, feudalism and mysticism have been tried. Anarchism has never been tried.

Anarchism was frequently associated with assassinations. It had an appeal for freethinkers, such as Kropotkin and Bakunin, but also for religious idealists, like Tolstoy and Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement. Most anarchists hoped, Joachim-like, to redistribute the wealth, but Rebecca had once told him about a classic of anarchist literature, Max Stirner's The Ego and His Own, which had been called "the Billionaire's Bible" because it stressed the advantages the rugged individualist would gain in a stateless society-and Cecil Rhodes was an adventurer before he was a banker. The Illuminati were anarchists.

It all fit: the pieces of the puzzle slipped together smoothly.

Saul was convinced. He was also wrong.

"We'll just get our troops out of Fernando Poo," the Chairman of the Chinese Communist party said on April 1. "A place that size isn't worth world war."

"But we don't have any troops there," an aide told him, "it's the Russians who do."

"Oh?" the Chairman quoted a proverb to the effect that there was urine in the rosewater. "I wonder what the hell the Russians want with Fernando Poo?" he added thoughtfully.

He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of America and Russia.

("And it's not only a sin against God," Mr. Mocenigo shouts, "but it gives you germs, too." It is 1950, early spring on Mulberry Street, and young Charlie Mocenigo raises terrified eyes. "Look, look," Mr. Mocenigo goes on angrily, "don't believe your own father. See what the dictionary says. Look, look at the page. Here, see. 'Masturbation: self-pollution.' Do you know what self-pollution means? Do you know how long those germs last?" And in another spring, 1955, Charles Mocenigo, a pale, skinny, introverted genius, registers for his first semester at MIT and, coming to the square on the form that says "Religion," writes in careful block capitals, ATHEIST. He has read Kinsey and Hirschfeld and almost all the biologically oriented sexological treatises by this time-studiously ignoring psychoanalysts and such unscientific types-and the only visible remnant of that early adolescent terror is a habit of washing his hands frequently when under tension, which earns him the nickname "Soapy.")

General Talbot looks at Mocenigo pityingly and raises his pistol to the scientist's head. . . .

On August 6, 1902, the world produced its usual crop of new humans, all programmed to act more or less 'alike, all containing minor variations of the same basic DNA blueprint; of these, approximately 51,000 were female and 50,000 were male; and two of the males, born at the same second, were to play a large role in our story, and to pursue somewhat similar and anabatic careers. The first, born over a cheap livery stable in the Bronx, New York, was named Arthur Flegenheimer and, at the other end of his life, spoke very movingly about his mother (as well as about bears and sidewalks and French Canadian Bean Soup); the second, born in one of the finest old homes on Beacon Hill in Boston, was named Robert Putney Drake and, at the other end of his life, thought rather harshly of his mother . . . but when the paths of Mr. Flegenheimer and Mr. Drake crossed, in 1935, one of the links was formed which led to the Fernando Poo Incident.

And, in present time, more or less, 00005 was summoned to meet W. in the headquarters of a certain branch of British Intelligence. The date was March 17, but being English, neither 00005 nor W. gave a thought to blessed Saint Patrick; instead, they spoke of Fernando Poo.

"The Yanks," W. said crisply, "are developing evidence that the Russians or the Chinese, or both of them, are behind this Tequilla y Moto swine. Of course, even if that were true, it wouldn't matter a damn to Her Majesty's government; what do we care if a speck of an island that size turns Red? But you know the Yanks, 00005-they're ready to go to war over it, although they haven't announced that publicly yet."

"My mission," 00005 asked, the fault lines of cruelty about his mouth turning into a most engaging smile, "is to hop down to Fernando Poo and find out the real politics of this Tequilla y Mota bloke and if he is Red overthrow him before the Yanks blow up the world?"

"That's the assignment. We can't have a bloody nuclear war just when the balance of payments is almost straightened out and the Common Market is finally starting to work. So, hop to it, straightaway. Naturally, if you're captured, Her Majesty's government will have to disavow any knowledge of your actions."

"It always seems to work out that way," 00005 said ironically. "I wish for once you'd give me a mission where Her Majesty's bleeding government would stand behind me in a tight spot."

But 00005, of course, was merely being witty; as a loyal subject, he would follow orders under any circumstances, even if it required the death of every soul on Fernando Poo and himself as well. He rose, in his characteristic debonair fashion, and headed for his own office, where he began his preparations for the Fernando Poo mission. His first step was to check his personal worldwide travel notebook, seeking the bar in Santa Isobel which came closest to serving a suitable martini and the restaurant most likely to prepare an endurable lobster Newburg. To his horror, there was no such bar and no such restaurant. Santa Isobel was bereft of social graces.

"I say," 00005 muttered, "this is going to be a bit thick."

But he cheered up quickly, for he knew that Fernando Poo would be equipped at least with a bevy of tawny-skinned or coffee-colored females, and such women were the Holy Grail to him. Besides, he had already formed his own theory about Fernando Poo: he was convinced that BUGGER-Blowhard's Unreformed Gangsters, Goons, and Espionage Renegades, an international conspiracy of criminals and double agents, led by the infamous and mysterious Eric "the Red" Blowhard-was behind it all. 00005 had never heard of the Illuminati.

In fact, 00005, despite his dark hair combed straight back, his piercing eyes, his cruel and handsome face, his trim athlete's body, and his capacity to penetrate any number of females and defenestrate any number of males in the course of duty, was not really an ideal intelligence agent. He had grown up reading Ian Fleming novels and one day, at the age of twenty-one, looked in the mirror, decided he was everything a Fleming hero should be, and started a campaign to get into the spy game. After fourteen years in bureaucratic burrowing, he finally arrived in one of the intelligence services, but it was much more the kind of squalid and bumbling organization in which Harry Palmer had toiled his cynical days away than it was a berth of Bondage. Nevertheless, 00005 did his best to refurbish and glamorize the scene and, perhaps because God looks after fools, he hadn't managed to get himself killed in any of the increasingly bizarre missions to which he was assigned. The missions were all weird, at first, because nobody took them seriously-they were all based on wild rumors that had to be checked out just in case there be some truth in them-but later it was realized that 00005's peculiar schizophrenia was well suited to certain real problems, just as the schizoid of the more withdrawn type is ideal for a "sleeper" agent since he could easily forget what was conventionally considered his real self. Of course, nobody at any time ever took BUGGER seriously, and, behind his back, 00005's obsession with this organization was a subject of much interdepartmental humor.

"Wonderful as it was," Mary Lou said, "some of it was scary."

'Why?" Simon asked.

"All those hallucinations. I thought I might be losing my mind."

Simon lit another joint and passed it over to her. "What makes you think, even now, that it was just hallucinations?" he asked.

ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT


"If that was real," Mary Lou said firmly, "everything else in my life has been a hallucination."

Simon grinned. "Now," he said calmly, "you're getting the point."
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 2:01 am

Part 1 of 2

THE SECOND TRIP, OR CHOKMAH

Hopalong Horus Rides Again

Hang on for some metaphysics. The Aneristic Principle is that of ORDER, the Eristic Principle is that of DISORDER. On the surface, the Universe seems (to the ignorant) to be ordered; this is the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Actually, what order is "there" is imposed on primal chaos in the same sense that a person's name is draped over his actual self. It is the job of the scientist, for example, to implement this principle in a practical manner and some are quite brilliant at it. But on closer examination, order dissolves into disorder, which is the ERISTIC ILLUSION.

-Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., Principia Discordia


And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above. In Las Vegas, Dr. Charles Mocenigo woke from another nightmare and went to the toilet to wash his hands. He thought of his date the next night with Sherri Brandi and, quite mercifully, had no inkling that it would be his last contact with a woman. Still seeking calm, he went to the window and looked at the stars-being a specialist, with no interest beyond his own field, he imagined he was looking up rather than out at them. In New Delhi aboard the afternoon TWA flight for Hong Kong, Honolulu, and Los Angeles, R. Buckminster Fuller, one of the few people to be aware that he lived on a spaceship, glanced at his three watches, showing local time (5:30 P.M.), time at Honolulu, his point of destination (2:30 A.M. the next morning) and present time in his home at Carbondale, Illinois (3:30 A.M. the previous morning.) In Paris, the noon crowds were jostled by hordes of young people distributing leaflets glowingly describing the world's greatest Rock Festival and Cosmic Love Feast to be celebrated on the shores of Lake Totenkopf near Ingolstadt at the end of the month. At Sunderland, England, a young psychiatrist left his lunch to rush to the chronic ward and listen to weird babble proceeding from a patient who had been decade-silent: "On Walpurgasnacht it's coming. That's when His power is strongest. That's when you'll see Him. Right at the very stroke of midnight." In the middle of the Atlantic, Howard the porpoise, swimming with friends in the mid-morning sun, encountered some sharks and had a nasty fight. Saul Goodman rubbed tired eyes in New York City as dawn crept over the windowsill, and read a memo about Charlemagne and the Courts of the Illuminated; Rebecca Goodman, meanwhile, read how the jealous priests of Bel-Marduk betrayed Babylon to the invading army of Cyrus because their young king, Belshazzar, had embraced the love-cult of the goddess Ishtar. In Chicago, Simon Moon was listening to the birds begin to sing and waiting for the first cinnamon rays of dawn, as Mary Lou Servix slept beside him; his mind was active, thinking about pyramids and rain-gods and sexual yoga and fifth-dimensional geometries, but thinking mostly about the Ingolstadt Rock Festival and wondering if it would all happen as Hagbard Celine had predicted.

(Two blocks north in space and over forty years back in time, Simon's mother heard pistol shots as she left Wobbly Hall-Simon was a second-generation anarchist-and followed the crowd to gather in front of the Biograph Theatre where a man lay bleeding to death in the alley. And the next morning-July 23, 1934-Billie Freschette, in her cell at Cook County Jail, got the news from a matron. In this White Man's Country, I am the lowliest of the lowly, subjugated because I am not white, and subjugated again because I am not male. I am the embodiment of all that is rejected and scorned-the female, the colored, the tribe, the earth-all that has no place in this world of white male technology. I am the tree that is cut down to make room for the factory that poisons the air. I am the river filled with sewage. I am the Body that the Mind despises. I am the lowliest of the lowly, the mud beneath your feet. And yet of all the world John Dillinger picked me to be his bride. He plunged within me, into the very depths of me. I was his bride, not as your Wise Men and Churches and Governments know marriage, but we were truly wed. As the tree is wed to the earth, the mountain to the sky, the sun to the moon. I held his head to my breast, and tousled his hair as if it were sweet as fresh grass, and I called him "Johnnie." He was more than a man. He was mad but not mad, not as a man may go mad when he leaves his tribe and lives among hostile strangers and is mistreated and scorned. He was not mad as all other white men are mad because they have never known a tribe. He was mad as a god might be mad. And now they tell me he is dead. 'Well," the matron asked finally, "aren't you going to say anything? Aren't you Indians human?" She had a real evil shine in her eye, like the eye of the rattlesnake. She wants to see me cry. She stands there and waits, watching me through the bars. "Don't you have any feelings at all? Are you some kind of animal?" I say nothing. I keep my face immobile. No white shall ever see the tears of a Menominee. At the Biograph Theatre, Molly Moon turns away in disgust as souvenir hunters dip their handkerchiefs in the blood. I turn away from the matron and look up, out the barred window, to the stars, and the spaces between them seem bigger than ever. Bigger and emptier. Inside me there is a space like that now, big and empty, and it will never be filled again. When the tree is torn out by its roots, the earth must feel that way. The earth must scream silently, as I screamed silently.) But she understood the sacramental meaning of the handkerchiefs dipped in blood; as Simon understands it.

Simon, in fact, had what can only be called a funky education. I mean, man, when your parents are both anarchists the Chicago public school system is going to do your head absolutely no good at all. Feature me in a 1956 classroom with Eisenhower's Moby Dick face on one wall and Nixon's Captain Ahab glare on the other, and in between, standing in front of the inevitable American rag, Miss Doris Day or her older sister telling the class to take home a leaflet explaining to their parents why it's important for them to vote.

"My parents don't vote," I say.

"Well, this leaflet will explain to them why they should," she tells me with the real authentic Doris Day sunshine and Kansas cornball smile. It's early in the term and she hasn't heard about me from the last-semester teacher.

"I really don't think so," I say politely. "They don't think it makes any difference whether Eisenhower or Stevenson is in the White House. They say the orders will still come from Wall Street."

It's like a thundercloud. All the sunshine goes away. They never prepared her for this in the school where they turn out all these Doris Day replicas. The wisdom of the Fathers is being questioned. She opens her mouth and closes it and opens and closes it and finally takes such a deep breath that every boy in the room (we're all on the cusp of puberty) gets a hard-on from watching her breasts heave up and slide down again. I mean, they're all praying (except me, I'm an atheist, of course) that they won't get called on to stand up; if it wouldn't attract attention, they'd be clubbing their dicks down with their geography books. "That's the wonderful thing about this country," she finally gets out, "even people with opinions like that can say what they want without going to jail."

"You must be nuts," I say. "My dad's been in and out of jail so many times they should put in a special revolving door just for him: My mom, too. You oughta go out with subversive leaflets in this town and see what happens."

Then, of course, after school, a gang of patriots, with the odds around seven-to-one, beat the shit out of me and make me kiss their red-white-and-blue totem. It's no better at home. Mom's an anarcho-pacifist, Tolstoy and all that, and she wants me to say I didn't fight back. Dad's a Wobbly and wants to be sure that I hurt some of them at least as bad as they hurt me. After they yell at me for a half hour, they yell at each other for two. Bakunin said this and Kropotkin said that and Gandhi said the other and Martin Luther King is the savior of America and Martin Luther King is a bloody fool who's selling his people an opium Utopia and all that jive. Go down to Wobbly Hall or Solidarity Bookstore and you'll still hear the same debate, doubled, redoubled, in spades, and vulnerable.

So naturally I start hanging out on Wall Street and smoking dope and pretty soon I'm the youngest living member of what they called the Beat Generation. Which does not improve my relations with school authorities, but at least it's a relief from all that patriotism and anarchism. By the time I'm seventeen and they shot Kennedy and the country starts coming apart at the seams, we're not beatniks anymore, we're hippies, and the thing to do is go to Mississippi. Did you ever go to Mississippi? You know what Dr. Johnson said about Scotland-"The best thing you can say for it is that God created it for some purpose, but the same is true of Hell." Blot Mississippi; it's not part of this story anyway. The next stop was Antioch in dear old Yellow Springs where I majored in mathematics for reasons you will soon guess. The pot there grows wild in acres and acres of beautiful nature preserve kept up by the college. You can go out there at night, pick your own grass for the week from the female of the hemp species and sleep under the stars with a female of your own species, then wake up in the morning with birds and rabbits and the whole lost Thomas Wolfe America scene, a stone, a leaf, and unfound door and all of it, then make it to class really feeling good and ready for an education. Once I woke up with a spider running across my face, and I thought, "So a spider is running across my face," and brushed him off gently, "it's his world, too." In the city, I would have killed him. What I mean is Antioch is a stone groove but that life is no preparation for coming back to Chicago and Chemical Warfare. Not that I ever got maced before '68, but I could read the signs; don't let anybody tell you it's pollution, brothers and sisters. It's Chemical Warfare. They'll kill us all to make a buck.

I got stoned one night and went home to see what it would be like relating to Mom and Dad in that condition. It was the same but different. Tolstoy coming out of her mouth, Bakunin out of his. And it was suddenly all weird and super-freaky, like Goddard shooting a Kafka scene: two dead Russians debating with each other, long after they were dead and buried, out of the mouths of a pair of Chicago Irish radicals. The young frontal-lobe-type anarchists in the city were in their first surrealist revival just then and I had been reading some of their stuff and it clicked.

"You're both wrong," I said. "Freedom won't come through Love, and it won't come through Force. It will come through the Imagination." I put in all the capital letters and I was so stoned that they got contact-high and heard them, too. Their mouths dropped open and I felt like William Blake telling Tom Paine where it was really at. A Knight of Magic waving my wand and dispersing the shadows of Maya.

Dad was the first to recover. "Imagination," he said, his big red face crinkling in that grin that always drove the cops crazy when they were arresting him. "That's what comes of sending good working-class boys to rich people's colleges. Words and books get all mixed up with reality in their heads. When you were in that jail in Mississippi you imagined yourself through the walls, didn't you? How many times an hour did you imagine yourself through the walls? I can guess. The first time I was arrested, during the GE strike of thirty-three, I walked through those walls a million times. But every time I opened my eyes, the walls and the bars were still there. What got me out finally? What got you out of Biloxi finally? Organization. If you want big words to talk to intellectuals with, that's a fine big word, son, just as many syllables as imagination, and it has a lot more realism in it."

That's what I remember best about him, that one speech, and the strange clear blue of his eyes. He died that year, and I found out that there was more to the Imagination than I had known, for he didn't die at all. He's still around, in the back of my skull somewhere, arguing with me, and that's the truth. It's also the truth that he's dead, really dead, and part of me was buried with him. It's uncool to love your father these days, so I didn't even know that I loved him until they closed the coffin and I heard myself sobbing, and it comes back again, that same emptiness, whenever I hear "Joe Hill":

"The copper bosses lulled you, Joe."
"I never died," said he.

Both lines are true, and mourning never ends. They didn't shoot Dad the clean way, like Joe Hill, but they ground him down, year after year, burning out his Wob fires (and he was Aries, a real fire sign) with their cops, their courts, their jails, and their taxes, their corporations, their cages for the spirit and cemeteries for the soul, their plastic liberalism and murderous Marxism, and even as I say that I have to pay a debt to Lenin for he gave me the words to express how I felt when Dad was gone. "Revolutionaries," he said, "are dead men on furlough." The Democratic Convention of '68 was coming and I knew that my own furlough might be much shorter than Dad's because I was ready to fight them in the streets. All spring Mom was busy at the Women for Peace center and I was busy conspiring with surrealists and Yippies. Then I met Mao Tsu-hsi.

It was April 30, Walpurgasnacht (pause for thunder on the soundtrack), and I was rapping with some of the crowd at the Friendly Stranger. H.P. Lovecraft (the rock group, not the writer) was conducting services in the back room, pounding away at the door to Acid Land in the gallant effort, new and striking that year, to break in on waves of sound without any chemical skeleton key at all and I am in no position to evaluate their success objectively since I was, as is often the case with me, 99 and 44/100ths percent stoned out of my gourd before they began operations. I kept catching this uniquely pensive Oriental face at the next table, but my own gang, including the weird faggot-priest we nicknamed Padre Pederastia, had most of my attention. I was laying it on them heavy. It was my Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade period.

"The head-trip anarchists are as constipated as the Marxists," I was giving forth; you recognize the style by now. "Who speaks for the thalamus, the glands, the cells of the organism? Who sees the organism? We cover it with clothes to hide its apehood. We won't have liberated ourselves from servitude until people throw all their clothes in the closet in spring and don't take them out again until winter. We won't be human beings, the way apes are apes and dogs are dogs, until we fuck where and when we want to, like any other mammal. Fucking in the streets isn't just a tactic to blow minds; it's recapturing our own bodies. Anything less and we're still robots possessing the wisdom of the straight line but not the understanding of the organic curve." And so on. And so forth. I think I found a few good arguments for rape and murder while I was at it.

"The next step beyond anarchy," somebody said cynically. "Real chaos."

"Why not?" I demanded. "Who works at a straight job here?" None of them did, of course; I deal dope myself. "Will you work at a straight job for something that calls itself an anarchist syndicate? Will you run an engine lathe eight unfucking hours a day because the syndicate tells you the people need what the lathe produces? If you will, the people just becomes a new tyrant."

"To hell with machines," Kevin McCool, the poet, said enthusiastically. "Back to the caves!" He was as stoned as me.

The Oriental face leaned over: she was wearing a strange headband with a golden apple inside a pentagon. Her black eyes somehow reminded me of my father's blue eyes. "What you want is an organization of the imagination?" she asked politely.

I flipped. It was too much, hearing those words just then.

"A man at the Vedanta Society told me that John Dillinger walked through the walls when he made his escape from Crown Point Jail," Miss Mao went on in a level tone. "Do you think that is possible?"

You know how dark coffee houses are. The Friendly Stranger was murkier than most. I had to get out. Blake talked to the Archangel Gabriel every morning at breakfast, but I wasn't that heavy yet.

"Hey, where you going, Simon?" somebody called. Miss Mao didn't say anything, and I didn't look back at that polite and pensive face-it would have been much easier if she looked sinister and inscrutable. But when I hit Lincoln and started toward Fullerton, I heard steps behind me. I turned and Padre Pederastia touched my arm gently.

"I asked her to come and listen to you," he said. "She was to give a signal if she thought you were ready. The signal was more dramatic than I expected, it seems. A conversation out of your past that had some heavy emotional meaning to you?"

"She's a medium?" I asked numbly.

"You can name it that." I looked at him in the light from the Biograph marquee and I remembered Mom's story about the people dipping their handkerchiefs in Dillinger's blood and I heard the old hymn start in my head ARE YOU WASHED are you washed ARE you WASHED in the BLOOD of the Lamb and I remembered how we all thought he hung out with us freaks in the hope of leading us back to the church holy Roman Catholic and apostolic as Dad called it when he was drunk and bitter. It was obvious that whatever the Padre was recruiting for had little to do with that particular theological trade union.

"What is this?" I asked. "And who is that woman?"

"She's the daughter of Fu Manchu," he said. Suddenly, he threw his head back and laughed like a rooster crowing. Just as suddenly, he stopped and looked at me. Just looked at me.

"Somehow," I said slowly, "I've qualified for a small demonstration of whatever you and she are selling. But I don't qualify for any more until I make the right move?" He gave the faintest hint of a nod and went on watching me.

Well, I was young and ignorant of everything outside ten million books I'd gobbled and guilty-unsure about my imaginative flights away from my father's realism and of course stoned of course but I finally understood why he was watching me that way, it was (this part of it) pure Zen, there was nothing I could do consciously or by volition that would satisfy him and I had to do exactly that which I could not not do, namely be Simon Moon. Which led to deciding then and there without any time to mull it over and rationalize it just what the hell being Simon Moon or, more precisely SimonMooning, consisted of, and it seemed to be a matter of wandering through room after room of my brain looking for the owner and not finding him anywhere, sweat broke out on my forehead, it was becoming desperate because I was running out of rooms and the Padre was still watching me.

"Nobody home," I said finally, sure that the answer wasn't good enough.

"That's odd," he said. "Who's conducting the search?"

And I walked through the walls and into the Fire.

Which was the beginning of the larger and funkier part of my (Simon's) education, and where we cannot, as yet, follow him. He sleeps now, a teacher rather than a learner, while Mary Lou Servix awakes beside him and tries to decide whether it was just the pot or if something really spooky happened last night. Howard sports in the Atlantic; Buckminster Fuller, flying above the Pacific, crosses the international date line and slips back into April 23 again; it is dawn in Las Vegas and Mocenigo, the nightmares and anxieties of night forgotten, looks forward cheerfully to the production of the first live cultures of Anthrax-Leprosy-Pi, which will make this a memorable day in more ways than he expects; and George Dorn, somewhere outside this time system, is writing in his journal. Each word, however, seems magically to appear by itself as if no volition on his part were necessary to its production. He read the words his pencil scrawled, but they appeared the communications of another intelligence. Yet they picked up where he had left off in his hotel room and they spoke with his private idiom:

. . . the universe is the inside without any outside, the sound made by one eye opening. In fact, I don't even know that there is a universe. More likely, there are many multiverses, each with its own dimensions, times, spaces, laws and eccentricities. We wander between and among these multiverses, trying to convince others and ourselves that we all walk together in a single public universe that we can share. For to deny that axiom leads to what is called schizophrenia.

Yeah, that's it: every man's skin is his own private multiverse, just like every man's home is supposed to be his castle. But all the multiverses are trying to merge, to create a true universe such as we have only imagined previously. Maybe it will be spiritual, like Zen or telepathy, or maybe it will be physical, one great big gang-fuck, but it has to happen: the creation of a universe and the one great eye opening to see itself at last. Aum Shiva!

-Oh, man, you're stoned out of your gourd. You're writing gibberish.

No, I'm writing with absolute clarity, for the first time in my life.

-Yeah? Well what was that business about the universe being the sound of one eye opening?

Never mind that. Who the hell are you and how did you get into my head?

"Your turn now, George."

Sheriff Cartwright stood in the door, a monk in a strange red and white robe beside him, holding some kind of wand the deep color of a fire engine.

"No-no-" George started to stammer. But he knew.

"Of course you know," the Sheriff said kindly-as if he were suddenly sorry about it all. "You knew before you left New York and came down here."

They were at the foot of the gallows. ". . . each with its own times, spaces, laws and eccentricities," George was thinking wildly. Yes: if the universe is one big eye looking at itself, then telepathy is no miracle, for anyone who opens his own eyes fully can then look through all other eyes. (For a moment, George looks through the eyes of John Ehrlichman as Dick Nixon urges lewdly, "You can say I don't remember. You can say I can't recall. I can't give any answer to that that I can recall." I can't give any answer to that that I can recall) "All flesh will see it in one instant": who wrote that?

"Gonna miss you, boy," the Sheriff said, offering an embarrassed handshake. Numbly, George clasped the man's hot, reptilian palm.

The monk walked beside him up the gallows' steps. Thirteen, George was thinking, there are always thirteen steps on a gallows. . . . And you always cream in your jeans when your neck breaks. It has something to do with the pressure on the spinal cord being transmitted through the prostate gland. The Orgasm-Death Gimmick, Burroughs calls it.

At the fifth step, the monk said suddenly: "Hail Eris."

George stared at the man dumbfounded. Who was Eris? Somebody in Greek mythology, but somebody very important. . . .

"It all depends on whether the fool has wisdom enough to repeat it."

"Quiet, idiot-he can hear us!"

I got some bad pot, George decided, and I'm still back on the hotel bed, hallucinating all this. But he repeated, uncertainly: "Hail Eris."

Immediately, just like his one and only acid trip, dimension began to alter. The steps grew larger, steeper-ascending them seemed as perilous as climbing Mount Everest. The air was suddenly lit with reddish flame- Definitely, George thought, some weird and freaky pot. ...

And then, for some reason, he looked upward.

Each step was now higher than an ordinary building. He was near the bottom of a pyramidal skyscraper of thirteen colossal levels. And at the top. . . . And at the top....

And at the top One Enormous Eye-a ruby and demonic orb of cold fire, without mercy or pity or contempt -looked at him and into him and through him.

The hand reaches down, turns on both bathtub faucets full-power, then reaches upward to do the same to the sink faucets. Banana-Nose Maldonado leans forward and whispers to Carmel, "Now you can talk."

(The old man using the name "Frank Sullivan" was met, at Los Angeles International Airport, November 22, 1963, by Mao Tsu-Hsi, who drove him to his bungalow on Fountain Avenue. He gave his report in terse, unemotional sentences. "My God," she said when he finished, "what do you make of it?" He thought carefully and grunted, "It beats the hell out of me. The guy on the triple underpass was definitely Harry Coin. I recognized him through my binoculars. The guy in the window at the Book Depository very likely was this galoot Oswald that they've arrested. The guy on the grassy knoll was Bernard Barker from the CIA Bay of Pigs gang. But I didn't get a good look at the gink on the County Records building. One thing I'm sure of: we can't keep all this to ourselves. At the very least, we pass the word on to ELF. It might alter their plans for OM. You've heard of OM?" She nodded, saying, "Operation Mindfuck. It's their big project for the next decade or so. This is a bigger Mindfuck than anything they had planned.")

"Red China?" Maldonado whispers incredulously. "You musta been reading the Readers Digest. We get all our horse from friendly governments like Laos. The CIA would have our ass otherwise." Straining to be heard over the running water, Carmel asks despondently, "Then you don't know how I could meet a Communist spy?"

Maldonado stares at him levelly. "Communism doesn't have a good image right now," he says icily; it is April 3, two days after the Fernando Poo Incident.

Bernard Barker, former servant of both Batista and Castro, dons his gloves outside the Watergate; in a flash of memory he sees the grassy knoll, Oswald, Harry Coin, and, further back, Castro negotiating with Banana-Nose Maldonado.

(But this present year, on March 24, Generalissimo Tequilla y Mota finally found the book he was looking for, the one that was as precise and pragmatic about running a country as Luttwak's Coup d'Etat had been about seizing one. It was called The Prince and its author was a subtle Italian named Machiavelli; it told the Generalissimo everything he wanted to know-except how to handle American hydrogen bombs, which, unfortunately, Machiavelli had lived too soon to foresee.)

"It is our duty, our sacred duty to defend Fernando Poo," Atlanta Hope was telling a cheering crowd in Cincinnati that very day. "Are we to wait until the godless Reds are right here in Cincinnati?" The crowd started to scream their unwillingness to wait that long-they had been expecting the godless Reds to arrive in Cincinnati since about 1945 and were, by now, convinced that the dirty cowards were never going to come and would have to be met on their own turf-but a group of dirty, longhaired, freaky-looking students from Antioch College began to chant, "I Don't Want to Die for Fernandoo Poo." The crowd turned in fury: at last, some real reds to fight. . . . Seven ambulances and thirty police cars were soon racing to scene....

(But only five years earlier Atlanta had a different message. When God's Lightning was first founded, as a splinter off Women's Liberation, it had as its slogan "No More Sexism," and its original targets were adult bookstores, sex-education programs, men's magazines, and foreign movies. It Was only after meeting "Smiling Jim" Trepomena of Knights of Christianity United in Faith that Atlanta discovered that both male supremacy and orgasms were part of the International Communist Conspiracy. It was at that point, really, that God's Lightning and orthodox Women's Lib totally parted company, for the orthodox faction, just then, were teaching that male supremacy and orgasms were part of the International Kapitalist Conspiracy.)

"Fernando Poo," the President of the United States told reporters even as Atlanta was calling for all-out war, "will not become another Laos, or another Costa Rica."

"When are we going to get our troops out of Laos?" a reporter from the New York Times asked quickly; but a man from the Washington Post asked just as rapidly, "And when are we going to get our troops out of Costa Rica?"

"Our Present Plans for Withdrawal are going Forward according to an Orderly Schedule," the President began; but in Santa Isabel itself, as Tequilla y Mota underlined a passage in Machiavelli, 00005 concluded a shortwave broadcast to a British submarine lying 17 miles off the coast of the island: "The Yanks have gone absolutely bonkers, I'm afraid. I've been here nine days now and I am absolutely convinced there is not one Russian or Chinese agent in any way involved with Generalissimo Tequilla y Mota, nor are there any troops of either of those governments hiding anywhere in the jungles. However, BUGGER is definitely running a heroin smuggling ring here, and I would like permission to investigate that." (The permission was to be denied; old W., back at Intelligence HQ in London, knew that 00005 was a bit bonkers about BUGGER himself and imagined that it was involved in every mission he undertook.)

At the same time, in a different hotel, Tobias Knight, on special loan from the FBI to the CIA, concluded his nightly shortwave broadcast to an American submarine 23 miles off the coast: "The Russian troops are definitely engaged in building what can only be a rocket-launching site, and the Slants are constructing what seems to be a nuclear installation. . . ."

And Hagbard Celine, lying 40 miles out in the Bight of Biafra in the Lief Erickson, intercepted both messages, and smiled cynically, and wired P. in New York: ACTIVATE MALIK AND PREPARE DORN.

(While the most obscure, seemingly trivial part of the whole puzzle appeared in a department store in Houston. It was a sign that said:

NO SMOKING. NO SPITTING.
THE MGT.


This replaced an earlier sign that had hung on the main showroom wall for many years, saying only

NO SMOKING
THE MGT.


The change, although small, had subtle repercussions. The store catered only to the very wealthy, and this clientele did not object to being told that they could not smoke. The fire hazard, after all, was obvious. On the other hand, that bit about spitting was somehow a touch offensive; they most certainly were not the sort of people who would spit on somebody's floor-or, at least, none of them had done such a thing at any time since about one month or at most one year after they became wealthy. Yes, the sign was definitely bad diplomacy.

Resentment festered. Sales fell off. And membership in the Houston branch of God's Lightning increased. Wealthy, powerful membership.

(The odd thing was that the Management had nothing at all to do with the sign.)

George Dorn awoke screaming.

He lay on the floor of his cell in Mad Dog County Jail. His first frantic, involuntary glance told him that Harry Coin had vanished completely from the adjoining cell. The shit-pot was back in its corner and he knew, without being able to check, that there would be no human intestines in it.

Terror tactics, he thought They were out to break him-a task which was beginning to look easy-but they were covering up the evidence as they went along.

There was no light through the cell window; it was, therefore, still night. He hadn't slept but merely fainted.

Like a girl.

Like a long-haired commie faggot. Oh, shit and prune juice, he told himself sourly, cut it out. You've known for years that you're no hero. Don't take that particular sore out and rub sandpaper on it now. You're not a hero, but you're a goddam stubborn, pigheaded, and determined coward. That's why you've stayed alive on assignments like this before.

Show these redneck mammyjammers just how stubborn, pig-headed, and determined you can be.

George started with an old gimmick. A piece torn off the tail of his shirt gave him a writing.tablet. The point of his shoelace became a temporary pen. His own saliva, spat onto the polish of the shoes themselves, created a substitute ink.

Laboriously, after a half hour, be had his message written:

WHOEVER FINDS THIS $50 TO CALL JOE MALIK, NEW YORK CITY, AND TELL HIM GEORGE DORN HELD WITHOUT LAWYER MAD DOG COUNTY JAIL


The message shouldn't land too close to the jail, so George began looking for a weighted object. In five minutes, he decided on a spring from the bunk mattress; it took him seventeen minutes more to pry it loose.

After the missile was hurled out toe window-probably, George knew, to be found by somebody who would immediately turn it over to Sheriff Jim Cartwright-he began thinking of alternate plans.

He found, however, that instead of devising schemes for escape or deliverance, his mind insisted on going off in an entirely different direction. The face of the monk from his dream pursued him. He had seen that face somewhere before, he knew; but where? Somehow, the question was important. He began trying in earnest to re-create the face and identify it-James Joyce, H. P. Lovecraft, and a monk in a painting by Fra Angelico all came to mind. It was none of them, but it looked somehow a little like each of them.

Suddenly tired and discouraged, George slouched back on the bunk and let his hand lightly clutch his penis through his trousers. Heroes of fiction don't jack off when the going gets rough, he reminded himself. Well, hell, he wasn't a hero and this wasn't fiction. Besides, I wasn't going to jack-off (after all, They might be watching through a peephole, ready to use this natural jailhouse weakness to humiliate me further and break my ego). No, I definitely wasn't going to jack-off: I was just going to hold it, lightly, through my trousers, until I felt some life-force surging back into my body and displacing fear, exhaustion and despair. Meanwhile, I thought about Pat back in New York. She was wearing nothing but her cute black lace bra and panties, and her nipples are standing up pointy and hard. Make it Sophia Loren, and take the bra off so I can see the nipples directly. Ah, yes, and now try it the other way: she (Sophia, no make it Pat again) is wearing the bra but the panties are off showing the pubic bush. Let her play with it, get her fingers in there, and the other hand on a nipple, ah, yes, and now she (Pat-no, Sophia) is kneeling to unzipper my fly. My penis grew harder and her mouth opened in expectation. I reached down and cupped her breast with one hand, taking the nipple she had been caressing, feeling it harden more. (Did James Bond ever do this in Doctor No's dungeon?) Sophia's tongue (not my hand, not my hand) is busy and hot, sending pulsations through my entire body. Take it, you cunt. Take it, O God, a flash of the Passaic and the gun at my forehead, and you can't call them cunts nowadays, ah, you cunt, you cunt, take it, and it is Pat, it's that night at her pad when we were both zonked on hashish and I never never never had a blow-job like that before or since, my hands were in her hair, gripping her shoulders, take it, suck me off (get out of my head, mother), and her mouth is wet and rhythmic and my cock is just as sensitive as that night zonked on the hash, and I pulled the trigger and then the explosion came just as I did (pardon the diction) and I was on the floor coughing and bouncing, my eyes watering. The second blast lifted me again and threw me with a crunch against the wall.

Then the machine-gun fire started.

Jesus H. Particular Christ on a crutch, I thought frantically, whatever it is that's happening they're going to find me with come on the front of my trousers.

And every bone in my body broken, I think.

The machine gun suddenly stopped stuttering and I thought I heard a voice cry "Earwicker, Bloom and Craft."-I've still got Joyce on my mind, I decided. Then the third explosion came, and I covered my head as parts of the ceiling began falling on me.

A key suddenly clanked against his cell door. Looking up, I saw a young woman in a trench coat, carrying a tommy gun, and desperately trying one key after another in the lock.
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 2:02 am

Part 2 of 2

From somewhere else in the building there came a fourth explosion.

The woman grinned tensely at the sound. "Commie motherfuckers," she muttered, still trying keys.

"Who the hell are you?" I finally asked hoarsely.

"Never mind that now," she snapped. "We've come to rescue you-isn't that enough?"

Before I could think of a reply, the door swung open.

"Quick," she said, "this way."

I limped after her down the hall. Suddenly she stopped, studied the wall a moment, and pressed against a brick. The wall slid smoothly aside and we entered what appeared to be a chapel of some sort.

Good weeping Jesus and his brother Irving, I thought, I'm still still dreaming.

For the chapel was not anything that a sane man would expect to find in Mad Dog County Jail. Decorated entirely in red and white-the colors of Hassan i Sabbah and the Assassins of Alamout, I remembered incredulously-it was adorned with strange Arabic symbols and slogans in German: "Heute die Welt, M or gens das Sonnensystem," "Ewige Blumenkraft Und Ewige Schlangekraft!" "Gestern Hanf, Heute Hanf, Immer Hanf."

And the altar was a pyramid with thirteen ledges-with a ruby-red eye at the top.

This symbol, I now recalled with mounting confusion, was the Great Seal of the United States.

"This way," the woman said, motioning with her tommy gun.

We passed through another sliding wall and found ourselves in an alley behind the jail.

A black Cadillac awaited us. "Everybody's out!" the driver shouted. He was an old man, more than sixty, but hard and shrewd-looking.

"Good," the woman said. "Here's George."

I was pushed into the back seat-which was already full of grim-looking men and grimmer-looking munitions of various sorts-and the car started at once.

"One for good measure," the woman in the trench coat shouted and threw another plastic bomb back at the jail.

"Right," the driver said. "It fits, too-that makes ft five."

"The Law of Fives," another passenger chuckled bitterly. "Serves the commie bastards right. A taste of their own medicine."

I could restrain myself no longer.

"What the hell is going on?" I demanded. "Who are you people? What makes you think Sheriff Cartwright and his police are communists? And where are you taking me?"

"Shut up," said the woman who had unlocked my cell, nudging me none too affectionately with her machine gun. "We'll talk when we're ready. Meanwhile, wipe the come off your pants."

The car sped into the night.

(In a Bentley limousine, Fedrico "Banana Nose" Mal-donado drew on his cigar and relaxed as his chauffeur drove him toward Robert Putney Drake's mansion in Blue Point, Long Island. In back of his eyes, almost forgotten, Charlie "The Bug" Workman, Mendy Weiss, and Jimmy the Shrew listen soberly, on October 23, 1935, as Banana Nose tells them: "Don't give the Dutchman a chance. Cowboy the son of a bitch." The three guns nod stolidly; cowboying somebody is messy, but it pays well. In an ordinary hit, you can be precise, even artistic, because after all the only thing that matters is that the person so honored should be definitely dead afterwards. Cowboying, in the language of the profession, leaves no room for personal taste or delicacy: the important thing is that there should be a lot of lead in the air and the victim should leave a spectacularly gory corpse for the tabloids, as notification that the Brotherhood is both edgy and short-tempered and everybody better watch his ass. Although it wasn't obligatory, it was considered a sign of true enthusiasm on a cowboy job if the guest of honor took along a few innocent bystanders, so everybody would understand exactly how edgy the Brotherhood was feeling. The Dutchman took two such bystanders. And in a different world that is still this world, Albert "The Teacher" Stern opens his morning paper on July 23, 1934, and reads FBI SHOOTS DILLINGER, thinking wistfully If I could kill somebody that important, my name would never be forgotten. Further back, back further: February 7, 1932, Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll looks through the phone-booth door and sees a familiar face crossing the drugstore and a tommy-gun in the man's hand. "The god-damned pig-headed Dutchman," he howled, but nobody heard him because the Thompson gun was already systematically spraying the phone-booth up and down, right and left, left and right, and up and down again for good measure . . . But tilt the picture another way and-this emerges: On November 10, 1948, the "World's Greatest Newspaper," the Chicago Tribune announced the election to the Presidency of the United States of America of Thomas Dewey, a man who not only was not elected but would not even have been alive if Banana Nose Maldonado had not given such specific instructions concerning the Dutchman to Charlie the Bug, Mendy Weiss and Jimmy the Shrew.)

Who shot you? the police stenographer asked. Mother is the best bet, Oh mama mama mama. I want harmony. 1 don't want harmony, is the delirious answer. Who shot you? the question is repeated. The Dutchman still replies: Oh mama mama mama. French Canadian bean soup.

We drove till dawn. The car stopped on a road by a beach of white sand. Tall, skinny palm trees stood black against a turquoise sky. This must be the Gulf of Mexico, I thought. They could now load me with chains and drop me in the gulf, hundreds of miles from Mad Dog, without involving Sheriff Jim. No, they had raided Sheriff Jim's jail. Or was that a hallucination? I was going to have to keep more of an eye on reality. This was a new day, and I was going to know facts hard and sharp-edged in the sunlight and keep them straight.

I was stiff and sore and tired from a night of driving. The only rest I'd gotten was fitful dozing in which cyclopean ruby eyes looked at me till I awoke in terror. Mavis, the woman with the tommy gun, had put her arms around me several times when I screamed. She would murmur soothingly to me, and once her lips, smooth, cool and soft, had brushed my ear.

At the beach, Mavis motioned me out of the car. The sun was as hot as the bishop's jock strap when he finished his sermon on the evils of pornography. She stepped out behind me and slammed the door.

"We wait here," she said. "The others go back."

"What are we waiting for?" I asked. Just then the driver of the car gunned the motor. The car swung round in a wide U-turn. In a minute its rear end had disappeared beyond a bend in the Gulf highway. We were alone with the rising sun and the sand-strewn asphalt.

Mavis motioned me to walk down the beach with her. A little ways ahead, far back from the water, was a small white-painted frame cabana. A woodpecker landed wearily on its roof like he had flown more missions than Yossarian and never intended to go up again.

"What's the plan, Mavis? A private execution on a lonely beach in another state so Sheriff Jim can't get blamed?"

"Don't be a dummy, George. We blew up that commie bastard's jail."

"Why do you keep calling Sheriff Cartwright a commie? If ever a man had KKK written all over his forehead, it was that reactionary redneck prick."

"Don't you know your Trotsky? 'Worse is better.' Slobs like Cartwright are trying to discredit America to make it ripe for a left-wing takeover."

"I'm a left-winger. If you're against commies, you've got to be against me." I didn't care to tell her about my other friends in Weatherman and Morituri.

"You're just a liberal dupe."

"I'm not a liberal, I'm a militant radical."

"A radical is nothing but a liberal with a big mouth. And a militant radical is nothing but a big-mouthed liberal with a Che costume. Balls. We're the real radicals, George. We do things, like last night Except for Weatherman and Morituri, all the militant radicals in your crowd ever do is take out the Molotov cocktail diagram that they carefully clipped from The New York Review of Books, hang it on the bathroom door and jack-off in connection with it. No offense meant." The woodpecker turned his head and watched us suspiciously like a paranoid old man.

"And what are your politics, if you're such a radical?" I asked.

"I believe that government governs best of all that governs least of all. Preferably not at all. And I believe in the laissez faire capitalist economic system."

"Then you must hate my politics. Why did you rescue me?"

"You're wanted," she said.

"By whom?"

"Hagbard Celine."

"And who is Hagbard Celine?" We had reached the cabana and were standing beside it, facing each other, glaring at each other. The woodpecker turned his head and looked at us with the other eye.

"What is John Guilt?" Mavis said. I might have guessed, I thought, a Hope fiend. She went on, "It took a whole book to answer that one. As for Hagbard, you'll learn by seeing. Enough for now that you know that he's the man who requested that we rescue you."

"But you personally don't like me and would not have gone out of your way to help me?"

"I don't know about not liking you. That splotch of come on your trousers has had me horny ever since Mad Dog. Also the excitement of the raid. I've got some tension to burn off. I'd prefer to save myself for a man who completely meets the criteria of my value system. But I could get awfully horny waiting for him. No regrets, no guilt, though. You're all right. You'll do." "What are you talking about?" "I'm talking about your fucking me, George." "I never knew a girl-I mean woman-who believed in the capitalist system who was any kind of a good fuck."

"What has your pathetic circle of acquaintances got to do with the price of gold? I doubt you ever met a woman who believed in the real laissez faire capitalist system. Such a woman is not likely to be caught traveling in your left-liberal circles." She took me by the hand and led me into the cabana. She shrugged out of her trench coat and spread it carefully on the floor. She was wearing a black sweater and a pair of blue jeans, both tight-fitting. She pulled the sweater off over her head. She was wearing no bra, and her breasts were apple-sized cherry-tipped cones. There was some sort of dark red birthmark between them.

"Your kind of capitalist woman was a Nixonette in 1972, and she believes in that half-ass corporate socialist bastard fascist mixed economy Frank Roosevelt blessed these United States with." She unbuckled her wide black belt and unzipped her jeans. She tugged them down over her hips. I felt my hardon swelling up inside my pants. "Libertarian women are good fucks, because they know what they want, and what they want they like a lot." She stepped out of her jeans to reveal, of all things, panties made of some strange metallic-looking synthetic material that was gold in color.

How can I know facts hard and sharp-edged in the sunlight and keep them straight when this happens? "You really want me to fuck you right now on this public beach in broad daylight?" The woodpecker went to work above us just then, banging away like a rock drummer, I suddenly remembered from high school:

The Woodpecker pecked on the out-house door; He pecked and he pecked till his pecker was sore....

"George, you're too serious. Don't you know how to play? Did you ever think that life is maybe a game? There is no difference between life and a game, you know. When you play, for instance, playing with a toy, there is no winning or losing. Life is a toy, George, I'm a toy. Think of me as a doll. Instead of sticking pins in me, you can stick your thing in me. Fm a magic doll, like a voodoo doll. A doll is a work of art. Art is magic. You make an image of the thing you want to possess or cope with, so you can cope with it. You make a model, so you have it under control. Dig? Don't you want to possess me? You can, but just for a moment."

I shook my head. "I can't believe you. The way you're talking-it's not real."

"I always talk like this when I'm horny. It happens that at such times I'm more open to the vibrations from outer space. George, are unicorns real? Who made unicorns? Is a thought about unicorns a real thought? How is it different from the mental picture of my pussy-which you've never seen-that you've got in your head at this minute? Does the fact that you can think of fucking me and I can think of fucking with you mean we are going to fuck? Or is the universe going to surprise us? Wisdom is wearying, folly is fun. What does a horse with a single long horn sticking straight out of its head mean to you?"

My eyes went from the pubic bulge under her gold panties, where they'd strayed when she said "pussy," to the mark between her breasts.

It wasn't a birthmark. I felt like a bucket of ice water hit my groin.

I pointed. "What does a red eye inside a red-and-white triangle mean to you?"

Her open hand slammed against my jaw. "Motherfucker! Never speak to me about that!"

Then she bowed her head. "I'm sorry, George. I had no right to do that. Hit me back, if you want."

"I don't want. But I'm afraid you've turned me off sexually."

"Nonsense. You're a healthy man. But now I want to give you something without taking anything from you." She knelt before me on her trench coat, her knees parted, unzipped my fly, reached in with quick, tickling fingers, and pulled my penis out. She slipped her mouth around it. It was my jail fantasy coming true.

"What are you doing?"

She took her lips away from my penis, and I looked down and saw that the head was shiny with saliva and swelling visibly in rapid throbs. Her breasts-my glance avoided the Masonic tattoo-were somewhat fuller, and the nipples stuck out erect.

She smiled. "Don't whistle while you're pissing, George, and don't ask questions when you're getting blowed. Shut up and get hard. This is just quid pro quo."

When I came I didn't feel much juice jetting out through my penis; I'd used a lot up whacking off in jail. I noted with pleasure that what there was of it she didn't spit out. She smiled and swallowed it.

The sun was higher and hotter in the sky and the woodpecker celebrated by drumming faster and harder. The Gulf sparkled like Mrs. Aster's best diamonds. I peered out at the water: just below the horizon there was a flash of gold among the diamonds.

Mavis suddenly struck her legs out in front of her and dropped onto her back. "George! I can't give without taking. Please, quick, while it's still hard, get down here and slip it to me."

I looked down. Her lips were trembling. She was tugging the gold panties away from her black-escutcheoned crotch. My wet cock was already beginning to droop. I looked down at her and grinned.

"No," I said. "I don't like girls who slap you one minute and get the hots for you the next minute. They don't meet the criteria of my value system. I think they're nuts." Carefully and deliberately I stuffed my pecker back into my trousers and stepped away from her. It was sore anyway, like in the rhyme.

"You're not such a schmuck after all, you bastard," she said through gritted teeth. Her hand was moving rapidly between her legs. In a moment she arched her back, eyes clenched tight, and emitted a little scream, like a baby seagull out on its first flight, a strangely virginal sound.

She lay relaxed for a moment, then picked herself up off the cabana floor and started to dress. She glanced out at the water and I followed her eyes. She pointed at the distant glint of gold.

"Hagbard's here."

A buzzing sound floated across the water. After a moment, I spotted a small black motorboat coming toward us. We watched in silence as the boat grounded its bow on the white beach. Mavis motioned at me, and I followed her down the sand to the water's edge. There was a man in a black turtleneck sweater sitting in the stern of the boat. Mavis climbed in the bow and turned to me with a questioning look. The woodpecker felt bad vibes and took off with a flapping and cawing like the omen of Doom.

What the hell am I getting into, and why am I so crazy as to go along? I tried to see what it was out there that the motorboat had come from, but the sun on the gold metal was flashing blindingly and I couldn't make out a shape. I looked back at the black motorboat and saw that there was a circular gold object painted on the bow and there was a little black flag flying at the stern with the same gold object in its center. I pointed at the emblem on the bow.

"What's that?"

"An apple," said Mavis.

People who chose a golden apple as their symbol couldn't be all bad. I jumped into the boat, and its pilot used an oar to push off. We buzzed over the smooth water of the Gulf toward the golden object on the horizon. It was still blinding from reflected sunlight, but I was now able to make out a long, low silhouette with a small tower in the center, like a matchbox on top of a broomstick. Then I realized that I had my judgment of distances wrong. The ship, or whatever it was, was much more distant than I'd first realized.

It was a submarine-a golden submarine-and it appeared to be the equivalent of five city blocks long, as big as the biggest ocean liner I had ever heard of. The conning tower was about three stories high. As we drew up beside it I saw a man on the tower waving to us. Mavis waved back. I waved halfheartedly, supposing somehow that it was the thing to do. I was still thinking about that Masonic tattoo.

A hatch opened in the submarine's side, and the little motorboat floated right in. The hatch closed, the water drained out, and the boat settled into a cradle. Mavis pointed to a door that looked like an entrance to an elevator.

"You go that way," she said. "I'll see you later, maybe."

She pressed a button and the door opened, revealing a carpeted gilt cage. I stepped in and was whisked up three stories. The door opened and I stepped out into a small room where a man was waiting, standing with a grace that reminded me of a Hindu or an American Indian. I thought at once of Metternich's remark about Talleyrand: "If somebody kicked him in the backside, not a muscle would move in his face until he decided what to do."

He bore a striking resemblance to Anthony Quinn; he had thick black eyebrows, olive skin, and a strong nose and jaw. He was big and burly, powerful muscles bulging under his black-and-green striped nautical sweater. He held out his hand.

"Good, George. You made it. I'm Hagbard Celine."

We shook hands; he had a grip like King Kong. "Welcome aboard the Lief Erickson, named after the first European to reach America from the Atlantic side, may my Italian ancestors forgive me. Fortunately, I have Viking ancestors, as well. My mother is Norwegian. However, blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin are all recessive. My Sicilian father creamed my mother in the genes."

"Where the hell did you get this ship? I wouldn't have believed a submarine like this could exist without the whole world knowing about it."

"The sub's my creation, built in accordance with my design in a Norwegian fjord. This is what the liberated mind can do. I am the twentieth-century Leonardo, except that I'm not gay. I've tried it, of course, but women interest me more. The world has never heard of Hagbard Celine. That is because the world is stupid and Celine is very smart. The submarine is radar and sonar transparent. It is superior to the best either the American or Russian government even has on the drawing board. It can go to any depth in any ocean. We've sounded the Atlantic Trench, the Mindinao Deep, and a few holes in the floor of the sea that no one's ever heard of or named. Lief Erickson is capable of meeting the biggest, most ferocious, and smartest monsters of the deep, of which we've found God's plenty. I'd even risk her in battle with Leviathan himself, though I'm just as pleased that we've only seen him from afar hitherto."

"You mean whales?"

"I mean leviathan, man. That fish-if fish it be-that is to your whale what your whale is to your meanest guppy. Don't ask me what Leviathan is-I haven't even gotten close enough to tell you his shape. There's only one of him, her, or it in all that world that's water. I don't know how it reproduces-maybe it doesn't have to reproduce-maybe it's immortal. It may be neither plant nor animal for all I know, but it's alive, and it's the biggest living thing there is. Oh, we've seen monsters, George. We've seen, in Lief Erickson, the sunken ruins of Atlantis and Lemuriaor Mu, as it's known to keepers of the Sacred Chao."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" I asked, wondering if I was in some crazy surrealist movie, wandering from telepathic sheriffs to homosexual assassins, to nympho lady Masons, to psychotic pirates, according to a script written in advance by two acid-heads and a Martian humorist.

"I'm talking about adventure, George. I'm talking about seeing things and being with people that will really liberate your mind-not just replacing liberalism with Marxism so you can shock your parents. I'm talking about getting altogether off the grubby plane you live on and taking a trip with Hagbard to a transcendental universe. Did you know that on sunken Atlantis there is a. pyramidal structure built by ancient priests and faced with a ceramic substance that has withstood thirty thousand years of ocean burial so that the pyramid is clean and white as polished ivory-except for the giant red mosaic of an eye at its top?"

"I find it hard to believe that Atlantis ever existed," I said. "In fact"-I shook my head angrily-"you're conning me into qualifying that. The fact is I simply don't believe Atlantis ever existed. This is pure bullshit."

"Atlantis is where we're going next, friend. Do you trust the evidence of your senses? I hope so, because you'll see Atlantis and the pyramid, just as I said. Those bastards, the Illuminati, are trying to get gold to further their conspiracies by looting an Atlantean temple. And Hagbard is going to foil them by robbing it first. Because I fight the Illuminati every chance I get. And because I'm an amateur archeologist. Will you join us? You're free to leave right now, if you wish. I'll put you ashore and even supply you with money to get back to New York."

I shook my head. "I'm a writer. I write magazine articles for a living. And even if ninety percent of what you say is bullshit, moonshine, and the most elaborate put-on since Richard Nixon, this is the best story I've ever come across. A nut with a gigantic golden submarine whose followers include beautiful guerrilla women who blow up southern jails and take out the prisoners. No, I'm not leaving. You're too big a fish to let get away."

Hagbard Celine slapped me on the shoulder. "Good man. You've got courage and initiative. You trust only the evidence of your eyes and believe what no man tells you. I was right about you. Come on down to my stateroom." He pressed a button and we entered the golden elevator and sank rapidly till we came to an eight-foot-high archway barred by a silver gate. Celine pressed a button and the elevator door and the gate outside both slid back. We stepped out into a carpeted room with a lovely black woman sitting at one end under an elaborate emblem concocted of anchors, seashells, Viking figureheads, lions, ropes, octopi, lightning bolts, and, occupying the central position, a golden apple.

"Kallisti," said Celine, saluting the girl.

"All hail Discordia," she answered.

"Aum Shiva," I contributed, trying to enter the spirit of the game.

Celine led me down a long corridor, saying, "You'll find this submarine is opulently furnished. I have no need to live in monklike surroundings like those masochists who become naval officers. No Spartan simplicity for me. This is more like an ocean liner or a grand European hotel of the Edwardian era. Wait till you see my suite. You'll like your stateroom, too. To please myself, I built this thing on the grand scale. No finicky naval architects or parsimonious accountants in my business. I believe you've got to spend money to make money and spend the money you make to enjoy money. Besides, I have to live in the damned thing."

"And what precisely is your business, Mr. Celine?" I asked. "Or should I call you Captain Celine?"

"You should certainly not. No bullshit authority titles for me. I'm Freeman Hagbard Celine, but the conventional Mister is good enough. I'd prefer you called me by my first name. Hell, call me anything you want to. If I don't like it, I'll punch you in the nose. If there were more bloody noses, there'd be fewer wars. I'm in smuggling mostly. With a spot of piracy, just to keep ourselves on our toes. But that only against the Illuminati and their communist dupes. We aim to prove that no state has the right to regulate commerce in any way. Nor can it, when it is up against free men. My crew are all volunteers. We have among us liberated sailors who were indentured to the navies of America, Russia, and China. Excellent fellows. The governments of the world will never catch us, because free men are always cleverer than slaves, and any man who works for a government is a slave."

"Then you're a gang of Objectivists, basically? I've got to warn you, I come from a long line of labor agitators and Reds. You'll never convert me to a right-wing position."

Celine reared back as if I had waved offal under his nose. "Objectivists?" he pronounced the word as if I had accused him of being a child-molester. "We're anarchists and outlaws, goddam it. Didn't you understand that much? We've got nothing to do with right-wing, left-wing or any other half-assed political category. If you work within the system, you come to one of the either/or choices that were implicit in the system from the beginning. You're talking like a medieval serf, asking the first agnostic whether he worships God or the Devil. We're outside the system's categories. You'll never get the hang of our game if you keep thinking in flat-earth imagery of right and left, good and evil, up and down. If you need a group label for us, we're political non-Euclideans. But even that's not true. Sink me, nobody of this tub agrees with anybody else about anything, except maybe what the fellow with the horns told the old man in the clouds: Non serviam."

"I don't know Latin," I said, overwhelmed by his outburst.

"'I will not serve,'" he translated. "And here's your room."

He threw open an oaken door, and I entered a living room furnished in handsome teak and rosewood Scandinavian, upholstered in bright solid colors. He hadn't been exaggerating about the scale: you could have parked a Greyhound bus in the middle of the carpet and the room would still seem uncluttered. Above an orange couch hung a huge oil painting in an elaborate gilt frame easily a foot deep on all sides. The painting was essentially a cartoon. It showed a man in robes with long, flowing white hair and beard standing on a mountaintop staring in astonishment at a wall of black rock. Above his head a fiery hand traced flaming letters with its index finger on the rock. The words it wrote were:

THINK FOR YOURSELF, SCHMUCK!


As I started to laugh, I felt, through the soles of my feet, an enormous engine beginning to throb.

And, in Mad Dog, Jim Cartwright said into a phone with a scrambler device to evade taps, "We let Celine's crowd take Dorn, according to plan, and, Harry Coin is, ah, no longer with us."

"Good," said Atlanta Hope. 'The Four are heading for Ingolstadt. Everything is GO." She hung up and dialed again at once, reaching Western Union. "I want a flat rate telegram, same words, twenty-three different addresses," she said crisply. "The message is, 'Insert the advertisement in tomorrow's newspapers.' Signature, 'Atlanta Hope.'" She then read off the twenty-three addresses, each located in a large city in the United States, each a regional headquarters of God's Lightning. (The following day, April 25, the newspapers in those cities ran an obscure ad in the personals columns; it said "In thanks to Saint Jude for favors granted. A.W." The plot, accordingly, thickened.)

And then I sat back and thought about Harry Coin. Once I imagined I could make it with him: there was something so repulsive, so cruel, so wild and psychopathic there . . . but, of course, it hadn't worked. The same as every other man. Nothing. "Hit me," I screamed. "Bite me. Hurt me. Do something." He did everything, the most agreeable sadist in the world, but it was the same as if be had been the gentlest, most poetic English instructor at Antioch. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. . . . The closest miss was that strange banker, Drake, from Boston. What a scene. I'd gotten into his office on Wall Street, seeking a contribution for God's Lightning. Old white-haired buzzard, between sixty and seventy: typical of our wealthier members, I thought. I started the usual spiel, communism, sexism, smut, and all the time his eyes were bright and hard as a snake's. It finally hit me that he didn't believe a word of it, so I started to cut it off, and then he pulled out his checkbook and wrote and held it up so I could see it. Twenty thousand dollars. I didn't know what to say, and I started something about how all true Americans would appreciate this great gesture and so on, and he said, "Rubbish. You're not rich but you're famous. I want to add you to my collection. Deal?" The coldest bastard I ever met, even Harry Coin was human by comparison, yet his eyes were such a clear blue I couldn't believe they could be so frightening, a real madman in a perfectly sane way, not even a psychopath but something they don't have a name for, and it clicked, the humiliation of whoredom and the predatory viciousness in his face plus the twenty grand; I nodded. He took me into a private suite off of his business office and he touched one button, the lights dimmed, another button, down came a movie screen, a third button, and I was watching a pornographic movie. He didn't approach me, just watched, and I tried to get excited, wondering if the actress was really making it or just faking it, and then a second film began, four of them this time in permutations and combinations, he led me to the couch, every time I opened my eyes I could still see the film over his shoulder, and it was the same, the same, as soon as he got his thing inside me, nothing, nothing, nothing, I kept looking at the actors trying to feel something, and then, as he came, be whispered in my ear, "Heute die Welt, Morgans das Sonnen-system!" That was the only time I almost made it Sheer terror that this maniac knew. . . .

Later, I tried to find out about him, but nobody above me in the Order would say a word, and those below me didn't know anything. But I finally found out: he was very big in the Syndicate, maybe the top. And that's how I figured out that the old rumor was true, the Syndicate was run by the Order, too, just like everything else. . . .

But that cold sinister old man never said another word about it. I kept waiting while we dressed, when he gave me the check, when he escorted me to the door, and even his expression seemed to deny that he had said it or knew what it meant. When he opened the door for me, he put an arm on my shoulder and spoke, so his secretary could hear it, "May your work hasten the day when America returns to purity." Even his eyes weren't mocking and his voice sounded completely sincere. And yet he had read me to the core, knew I was faking, and guessed that terror alone could unlock my reflexes: maybe he even knew that I had already tried physical sadism and it hadn't worked. Out on Wall Street in the crowd, I saw a man with a gas mask- they were still rare that year- and I felt the whole world was moving faster than I could understand and that the Order wasn't telling me nearly as much as I needed to know.

Brother Beghard, who is actually a politician in Chicago under his "real" name, once explained the Law of Fives to me in relation to the pyramid-of-power principle. Intellectually, I understand: it's the only way we can work, each group a separate vector so that the most any infiltrator can learn is a small part of the design. Emotionally, though, it does get frightening at times: do the Five at the top really have the whole picture? I don't know, and I don't see how they can predict a man like Drake or guess what he's planning next There's a paradox here, I know:

I joined the Order seeking power, and now I am more a tool, an object, than ever before. If a man like Drake ever thought that, he might tear the whole show apart.

Unless the Five really do have the powers they claim; but I'm not gullible enough to believe that bull. Some of it's hypnotism, and some is plain old stage magic, but none of it is really supernatural. Nobody has sold me on a fairy tale since my uncle got into me when I was twelve with his routine about stopping the bleeding. If my parents had only told me the truth about menstruation in advance ...

Enough of that. There was work to be done. I hit the buzzer on my desk and my secretary, Mr. Mortimer, came in. As I'd guessed, it was past nine o'clock and he'd been out there in the reception area straightening up and worrying about my mood for God knows how long, while I was daydreaming. I studied my memo pad, while he waited apprehensively. Finally, I noticed him and said, "Be seated." He sank into the dictation chair, putting his head right under the point of the lightning bolt on the wall- an effect I always enjoyed- and opened his pad.

"Call Zev Hirsch in New York," I said watching his pencil fly to keep up with my words. "The Foot Fetishist Liberation Front is having a demonstration. Tell bun to cream them; I won't be satisfied unless a dozen of the perverts are put in the hospital, and I don't care how many of our people get arrested doing it The bail fund is available, if they need it. If Zev has any objections, I'll talk to him, but otherwise you handle it. Then make up the standard number-two press release, where I deny any knowledge of illegal activities-by that chapter and promise we will investigate and expel anybody guilty of mob action— have that ready for release this afternoon. Then get me the latest sales figures on Telemachus Sneezed. . . ." Another busy day at the national headquarters of God's Lightning was started; and Hagbard Celine, feeding Mavis's report on George's sexual and other behavior into FUCKUP, came out with a coding of C-1472-B-2317A, which caused him to laugh immoderately.

"What's so damned funny?" Mavis asked.

"From out of the west come the thundering hooves of the great horse, Onan," Hagbard grinned. "The lonely stranger rides again!"

"What the hell does all that mean?"

"We've got sixty-four thousand possible personality types," Hagbard explained, "and I've only seen that reading once before. Guess who it was?"

"Not me," Mavis said quickly, beginning to color.

"No, not you." Hagbard laughed again. "It was Atlanta Hope."

Mavis was startled. "That's impossible. She's frigid for one thing."

"There are many kinds of frigidity," Hagbard said. "It fits, believe me. She joined women's liberation at the same age George joined Weatherman, and they both split after a few months. And you'd be surprised how similar their mothers were, or how the successful careers of their older brothers annoy them—"

"But George is a nice guy, underneath it all."

Hagbard Celine knocked an ash off his long Italian cigar. "Everybody is a nice guy, underneath it all," he said. "What we become when the world is through messing us over is something else."

At Chateau Thierry, in 1918, Robert Putney Drake looked around at the dead bodies, knew he was the last man alive in the platoon, and heard the Germans start to advance. He felt the cold wetness on his thighs before he realized he was urinating in his pants; a shell exploded nearby and he sobbed. "O God, please, Jesus. Don't let them kill me. I'm afraid to die. Please, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . ."

Mary Lou and Simon are eating breakfast in bed, still naked as Adam and Eve. Mary Lou spread jam on toast and asked, "No, seriously: which part was hallucination and which part was real?"

Simon sipped at his coffee. "Everything in life is a hallucination," he said simply. "Everything in death, too," he added. "The universe is just putting us on. Handing us a line."
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 2:05 am

Part 1 of 2

THE THIRD TRIP, OR BINAH

The Purple Sage cursed and waxed sorely pissed and cried out in a loud voice: A pox upon the accursed Illuminati of Bavaria; may their seed take no root.

May their hands tremble, their eyes dim and their spines curl up, yea, verily, like unto the backs of snails; and may the vaginal orifices of their women be clogged with Brillo pads.

For they have sinned against God and Nature; they have made of life a prison; and they have stolen the green from the grass and the blue from the sky.

And so saying, and grimacing and groaning, the Purple Sage left the world of men and women and retired to the desert in despair and heavy grumpiness.

But the High Chapperal laughed, and said to the Erisian faithful: Our brother torments himself with no cause, for even the malign Illuminati are unconscious pawns of the Divine Plane of Our Lady.

—Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S.,
"The Book of Contradictions," Liber 555


October 23, 1970, was the thirty-fifth anniversary of the murder of Arthur Flegenheimer (alias "The Dutchman," alias "Dutch Schultz"), but this dreary lot has no intention of commemorating that occasion. They are the Knights of Christianity United in Faith (the group in Atlantis were called Mauls of Lhuv-Kerapht United for the Truth; see what I mean?) and their president, James J. (Smiling Jim) Treponema, has noted a bearded and therefore suspicious young man among the delegates. Such types were not likely to be KCUF members and might even be dope fiends. Smiling Jim told the Andy Frain ushers to keep a watchful eye on the young man so no "funny business" could occur, and then went to the podium to begin his talk on "Sex Education: Communist Trojan Horse in Our Schools." (In Atlantis, it was "Numbers: Nothingarian Squid-Trap in Our Schools." The same drivel eternally.) The bearded young man, who happened to be Simon Moon, adviser to Teenset magazine on II-luminati affairs and instructor in sexual yoga to numerous black young ladies, observed that he was being observed (which made him think of Heisenberg) and settled back in his chair to doodle pentagons on his note pad. Three rows ahead, a crew-cut middle-aged man, who looked like a suburban Connecticut doctor, also settled back comfortably, awaiting his opportunity: the funny business that he and Simon had in mind would be, he hoped, very funny indeed.

WE SHALL NOT WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED


There is a road going due east from Dayton, Ohio, toward New Lebanon and Brookville, and on a small farm off that road lives an excellent man named James V. Riley, who is a sergeant on the Dayton police force. Although he grieves the death of his wife two years back in '67 and worries about his son, who seems to be in some shady business involving frequent travel between New York City and Cuernavaca, the sergeant is basically a cheerful man; but on June 25, 1969, he was a bit out of sorts and generally not up to snuff because of his arthritis and the seemingly endless series of pointless and peculiar questions being asked by the reporter from New York. It didn't make sense- who would want to publish a book about John Dillinger at this late date? And why would such a book deal with Dillinger's dental history?

"You're the same James Riley who was on the Mooresville, Indiana, Force when Dillinger was first arrested, in 1924?" the reporter had begun.

"Yes, and a smart-alecky young punk he was. I don't hold with some of these people who've written books about him and said the long sentence he got back then is what made him bitter and turned him bad. He got the long sentence because he was so snotty to the judge. Not a sign of repentence or remorse, just wisecracks and a know-it-all grin spread all over his face. A bad apple from the start. And always hellbent-for-leather. In a hurry to get God knows where. Sometimes folks used to joke that there were two of him, he'd go through town so fast.

Rushing to his own funeral. Young punks like that never get long enough sentences, if you want my opinion. Might slow them down a bit"

The reporter— what was his name again? James Mallison, hadn't he said?—was impatient. "Yes, yes, I'm sure we need stricter laws and harsher penalties. But what I want to know was where was Dillinger's missing tooth— on the right side or the left side of his face?"

"Saints in Heaven! You expect me to remember that after all these years?"

The reporter dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief— very nervous he seemed to be. "Look, Sergeant, some psychologists say we never forget anything, really; it's all stored somewhere inside our brain. Now, just try to picture John Dillinger as you remember him, with that know-it-all grin as you called it Can you get the picture into focus? Which side is the missing tooth on?"

"Listen, I'm due to go on duty in a few minutes and I can't be—"

Mallison's faced changed, as if in desperation which he was trying to conceal. "Well, let me ask you a different question. Are you a Mason?"

"A Mason? Bejesus, no—I've been a Catholic all my life, I'll have you know."

"Well, did you know any Masons in Mooresville? I mean, to talk to?"

"Why would I be talking to the likes of them, with the terrible things they're always saying about the church?"

The reporter plunged on, "All the books on Dillinger say that the intended victim of that first robbery, the grocer B. F. Morgan, summoned help by giving the Masonic signal of distress. Do you know what that is?"

"You'd have to ask a Mason, and I'm sure they wouldn't be telling. The way they keep their secrets, by the saints, I'm sure even the FBI couldn't find out."

The reporter finally left, but Sergeant Riley, a methodical man, filed his name in memory: James Mallison — or had he said Joseph Mallison? A strange book he claimed to be writing about Dillinger's teeth and the bloody atheistic Freemasons. There was more to this than met the eye, obviously.

LIKE A TREE THAT'S PLANTED BY THE WATER WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED


Miskatonic University, in Arkham, Massachusetts, is not a well-known campus by any means, and the few scholarly visitors who come there are an odd lot, drawn usually by the strange collection of occult books given to the Miskatonic Library by the late Dr. Henry Armitage. Miss Doris Horus, the librarian, had never seen quite such a strange visitor though, as this Professor J. D. Mallison who claimed to come from Dayton, Ohio, but spoke with an unmistakable New York accent. Considering his fur-tiveness, she found it no surprise that he spent the whole day (June 26, 1969) pouring over the rare copy of Dr. John Dee's translation of the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred. That was the book most of the queer ones went for; that or The Book of Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage.

Doris didn't like the Necronomicon, although she considered herself an emancipated and free-thinking young woman. There was something sinister, or to be downright honest about it, perverted about that book and not in a nice, exciting way, but in a sick and frightening way. All those strange illustrations, always with five-sided borders just like the Pentagon in Washington, but with those people inside doing all those freaky sex acts with those other creatures who weren't people at all. It was frankly Doris's opinion that old Abdul Alhazred had been smoking some pretty bad grass when he dreamed up those things. Or maybe it was something stronger than grass: she remembered one sentence from the text: "Onlie those who have eaten a certain alkaloid herb, whose name it were wise not to disclose to the unilluminated, maye in the fleshe see a Shoggothe." I wonder what a "Shoggothe" is, Doris thought idly; probably one of those disgusting creatures that the people in the illustrations are doing those horny things with. Yech.

She was glad when J. D. Mallison- finally left and she could return the Necronomicon to its position on the closed shelves. She remembered the brief biography of crazy old Abdul Alhazred that Dr. Armitage had written and also given to the library: "Spent seven years in the desert and claimed to have visited Irem, the city forbidden in the Koran, which Alhazred asserted was of pre-human origin. . . ." Silly! Who was around to build cities before there were people? Those Shoggothes? "An indifferent Moslem, he worshipped beings whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu."

And that insidious line: "According to contemporary historians, Alhazred's death was both tragic and bizarre, since it was asserted that he was eaten alive by an invisible monster in the middle of the market-place." Dr. Armitage had been such a nice old man, Doris remembered, even if his talk about cabalistic numbers and Masonic symbols was a little peculiar at times; why would he collect such icky books by creepy people?

The Internal Revenue Service knows this much about Robert Putney Drake: during the last fiscal year, he earned $23,000,005 on stocks and bonds in various defense corporations, $17,000,523 from the three banks he controlled, and $5,807,400 from various real-estate holdings. They did not know that he also banked (in Switzerland) over $100,000,000 from prostitution, an equal amount from heroin and gambling, and $2,500,000 from pornography. On the other hand, they didn't know either about certain legitimate business expenses which he had not cared to claim, including more than $5,000,000 in bribes to various legislators, judges and police officials, in all 50 states in order to maintain the laws which made men's vices so profitable to him, and $50,000 to Knights of Christianity United in Faith as a last-ditch effort to stave off total legalization of pornography and the collapse of that part of his empire.

"What the deuce do you make of this?" Barney Muldoon asked. He was holding an amulet in his hand. "Found it in the bedroom," he explained, holding it for Saul to examine the strange design:

Image

"Part of it is Chinese," Saul said thoughtfully. "The basic design— two interlocking commas, one pointing up and the other down. It means that opposites are equal."

"And what does that mean?" Muldoon asked sarcastically. "Opposites are opposite, not equal. You'd have to be a Chinaman to think otherwise."

Saul ignored the comment. "But the pentagon isn't in the Chinese design— and neither is the apple with the K in it. . . ." Suddenly, he grinned. "Wait, I'll bet I know what that is. It's from Greek mythology. There was a banquet on Olympus, and Eris wasn't invited, because she was the Goddess of Discord and always made trouble. So, to get even, she made more trouble: she created a beautiful golden apple and wrote on it Kallisti. That means 'for the prettiest one' in Greek. It's what the K stands for, obviously. Then she rolled it into the banquet hall, and, naturally, all the goddesses there immediately claimed it, each one saying that she was 'the prettiest one.' Finally, old man Zeus himself, to settle the squabble, allowed Paris to decide which goddess was the prettiest and should get the apple. He chose Aphrodite, and as a reward she gave him an opportunity to kidnap Helen, which led to the Trojan War."

"Very interesting," Muldoon said. "And does that tell us what Joseph Malik knew about the assassinations of the Kennedys and this Illuminati bunch and why his office was blown up? Or where he's disappeared to?"

"Well, no," Saul said, "but it's nice to find something in this case that I can recognize. I just wish I knew what the pentagon means, too. . . ."

"Let's look at the rest of the memos," Muldoon suggested.

The next memo, however, stopped them cold:

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #9

7/28

J.M.:

The following chart appeared in the East Village Other, June 11, 1969, with the label "Current Structure of the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy and the Law of Fives":

Image

The chart hangs at the top of the page, the rest of which is empty space— as if the editors originally intended to publish an article explaining it, but decided (or were persuaded) to suppress all but the diagram itself.

Pat


"This one has to be some damned hippie or yippie hoax," Muldoon said after a long pause. But he sounded uncertain.

"Part of it is," Saul said thoughtfully keeping certain thoughts to himself. "Typical hippie psychology: mixing truth and fantasy to blow the fuses of the Establishment. The Elders of Zion section is just a parody of Nazi ideology. If there really was a Jewish conspiracy to run the world, my rabbi would have let me in on it by now. I contribute enough to the schule."

"My brother's a Jesuit," Muldoon added, pointing at the Society of Jesus square, "and he never invited me into any worldwide conspiracy."

"But this part is almost plausible," Saul said, pointing to the Sphere of Aftermath. "Aga Khan is the head of the Ishmaelian sect of Islam, and that sect was founded by Hassan i Sabbah, the 'old man of the mountains' who led the Hashishism in the eleventh century. Adam Weishaupt is supposed to have originated the Bavarian Illuminati after studying Sabbah, according to the third memo, so this part fits together— and Hassan i Sabbah is supposed to be the first one to introduce marijuana and hashish to the Western world, from India. That ties in with Weishaupt's growing hemp and Washington's having a big hemp crop at Mount Vernon."

"Wait a minute. Look at how the whole design revolves around the pentagon. Everything else sort of grows out of it"

"So? You think the Defense Department is the international hub of the Illuminati conspiracy?"

"Let's just read the rest of the memos," Muldoon suggested.

(The Indian Agent at the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin knows this: from the time Billie Freschette returned there until her death in 1968, she received mysterious monthly checks from Switzerland. He thinks he knows the explanation; despite all stories to the contrary, Billie did help to betray Dillinger and this is the payoff. He is convinced of this. He is also quite wrong.)

". . . children seven and eight years old," Smiling Jim Trepomena is telling the KCUF audience, "are talking about penises and vaginas—and using those very words! Now, is this an accident? Let me quote you Lenin's own words...." Simon yawns.

Banana-Nose Maldonado evidently had his own brand of sentimentality or superstition, and in 1936 he ordered his son, a priest, to say one hundred masses for the salvation of the Dutchman's soul. Even years afterward, he would defend the Dutchman in conversation: "He was OK, Dutch was, if you didn't cross him. If you did, forget it; you were finished. He was almost a Siciliano about that. Otherwise, he was a good businessman, and the first one with a real CPA mind in the whole organization. If he hadn't gotten that crazy-head idea about gunning down Tom Dewey, he'd still be a big man. I told him myself. 'You kill Dewey,' I said, 'and the shit hits the fan everywhere. The boys won't take the risk; Lucky and the Butcher want to cowboy you right now.' But he wouldn't listen. 'Nobody fucks with me,' he said. 'I don't care if his name is Dewey, Looey, or Phooey. He dies' A real stubborn German Jew. You couldn't talk to him. I even told him how Capone helped set up Dillinger for the Feds just because of the heat those bank-heists were bringing down.

You know what he said? He said: 'You tell Al that Dillinger was a lone wolf. I have my own pack.' Too bad, too bad, too bad. I'll light another candle for him at church Sunday."

HAND IN HAND TOGETHER WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED


Rebecca Goodman closes her book wearily and stares into space, thinking about Babylon. Her eyes focus suddenly on the statue Saul had bought her for her last birthday: the mermaid of Copenhagen. How many Danes, she wonders, know that this is one form of representation of the Babylonian sex goddess Ishtar? (In Central Park, Perri the squirrel is beginning to hunt for the day's food. A French poodle, held on a leash by a mink-coated lady, barks at him, and he runs three times around a tree.) George Dorn looks at the face of a corpse: it is his own face. "In Wyoming, after one sex-education class in a high school, the teacher was raped by seventeen boys. She said later she would never teach sex in school again." Making sure he is alone in the Meditation Room of the UN building, the man calling himself Frank Sullivan quickly moves the black plinth aside and descends the hidden stairs into the tunnel. He is thinking, whimsically, that hardly anybody realizes that the shape of the room is the same as the truncated pyramid on the dollar bill, or guesses what that means. "In Wilmette, Illinois, an 8-year-old boy came home from a sensitivity training class and tried to have intercourse with his 4-year-old sister." Simon gave up on his pentagons and began doodling pyramids instead.

Above, beyond Joe Malik's window, Saul Goodman gave up on the line of thought which had led him to surmise that the Illuminati were a front for the International Psychoanalytical Society, conspiring to drive everyone paranoid, and turned back to the desk and the memos. Barney Muldoon came in from the bedroom, carrying a strange amulet, and asked, "What do you make of this?" Saul looked at a design of an apple and a pentagon . . . and, several years earlier, Simon Moon looked at the same medallion.

"They call it the Sacred Chao," Padre Pederastia said. They sat alone at a table pulled off to the corner; the Friendly Stranger was the same as ever, except that a new group, the American Medical Association (consisting, naturally, of four kids from Germany), had replaced H. P. Lovecraft in the back room. (Nobody knew that the AMA was going to become the world's most popular rock group within a year, but Simon already thought they were superheavy). Padre Pederastia was, as on the night Simon met Miss Mao, very serious and hardly camping at all.

"Sacred Cow?" Simon asked.

"It's pronounced that way, but you spell it c-h-a-o. A chao is a single unit of chaos, they figure." The Padre smiled.

"Too much, they're nuttier than the SSS," Simon objected.

"Never underestimate absurdity, it is one door to the Imagination. Do I have to remind you of that?"

"We have an alliance with them?" Simon asked.

"The JAMs can't do it alone. Yes, we have an alliance, as long as it profits both parties. John— Mr. Sullivan himself authorized this."

"OK. What do they call themselves?"

"The LDD." The Padre permitted himself a smile. "New members are told the initials stand for Legion of Dynamic Discord. Later on, quite often, the leader, a most fetching scoundrel and madman named Celine, sometimes tells them it really stands for Little Deluded Dupes. That's the pans asinorum, or an early pans asinorum, in Celine's System. He judges them by how they react to that."

"Celine's System?" Simon asked warily.

"It leads to the same destination as ours— more or less— by a somewhat wilder and woollier path."

"Right-hand or left-hand path?"

"Right-hand," the priest said. "All absurdist systems are right-hand. Well, almost all. They don't invoke You-Know-Who under any circumstances. They rely on Discordia... do you remember your Roman myths?

"Enough to know that Discordia is just the Latin equivalent of Eris. They're part of the Erisian Liberation Front, then?" Simon was beginning to wish he were stoned; these conspiratorial conversations always made more sense when he was slightly high. He wondered how people like the President of the U.S. or the Chairman of the Board of GM were able to plot such intricate games without being on a trip at the time. Or did they take enough tranquilizers to produce a similar effect?

"No," the priest said flatly. "Don't ever make that mistake. ELF is a much more, um, esoteric outfit than the LDD. Celine is on the activist side, like us. Some of his capers make Morituri or God's Lightning look like Trappists by comparison. No, ELF will never get on Mr. Celine's trip."

"He's got an absurdist yoga and an activist ethic?" Simon reflected. "The two don't mix."

"Celine is a walking contradiction. Look at his symbol again."

"I've been looking at it and that pentagon worries me. Are you sure he's on our side?"

The American Medical Association came to some kind of erotic or musical climax and the priest's answer was drowned out. "What?" Simon asked, after the applause died down.

"I said," Padre Pederastia whispered, "that we're never sure anybody is on our side. Uncertainty is the name of the game."

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #10

7/28

J.M.:

On the origin of the pyramid-and-eye symbol, test your credulity on the following yarn from Flying Saucers in the Bible by Virginia Brasington (Saucerian Books, 1963, page 43.):

The Continental Congress had asked Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to arrange for a seal for the United States of America. . . . None of the designs they created or which were submitted to them, were suitable. . . .

Fairly late at night, after working on the project all day, Jefferson walked out into the cool night air of the garden to clear his mind. In a few minutes he rushed back into the room, crying, jubilantly: "I have it! I have it!" Indeed, he did have some plans in his hands. They were the plans showing the Great Seal as we know it today.

Asked how he got the plans, Jefferson told a strange story. A man approached him wearing a black cloak that practically covered him, face and all, and told him that he (the stranger) knew they were trying to devise a Seal, and that he had a design which was appropriate and meaningful. . . .

After the excitement died down, the three went into the garden to find the stranger, but he was gone. Thus, neither these Founding Fathers, nor anybody else, ever knew who really designed the Great Seal of the United States!

Pat

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO

7/29

J.M.:

The latest I've found on the eye-and-pyramid is in a San Francisco underground paper (Planet, San Francisco, July 1969, Vol. I, No.4.), suggesting it as a symbol for Timothy Leary's political party when he was running for governor of California instead of just running:

The emblem is a tentative design for the Party's campaign button. One wag suggests that everyone cut out the circle from the back of a dollar bill and send the wholly dollar to Governor Leary so he can wallpaper his office with them. Then paste the emblem on your front door to signify your membership in the party.

Translations: The year of the beginning New Secular Order

Both translations are wrong, of course. Annuit Coeptis means "he blesses our beginning" and Novus Ordo Se~ clorem means "a new order of the ages." Oh, well, scholarship was never the hippies' strong point. But — Tim Leary an Illuminatus?

And pasting the Eye on the door — I can't help but think of the Hebrews marking their doorways with the blood of a lamb so that the Angel of Death would pass by their houses.

Pat

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #12

8/3

J.M.:

I've finally found the basic book on the Illuminati: Proofs of a Conspiracy by John Robison (Christian Book Club of America, Hawthorn, California, 1961; originally published in 1801). Robison was an English Mason who discovered through personal experience that the French Masonic lodges— such as the Grand Orient— were Illuminati fronts and were the main instigators of the French Revolution, His whole book is very explicit about how Weishaupt worked: every infiltrated Masonic group would have several levels, like an ordinary Masonic lodge, but as candidates advanced through the various degrees they would be told more about the real purposes of the movement. Those at the bottom simply thought they were Masons; in the middle levels, they knew they were engaged in a great project to change the world, but the exact nature of the change was explained to them according to what the leaders thought they were prepared to know. Only those at the top knew the secret, which— according to Robison— is this: the Illuminati aims to overthrow all government and religion, setting up an anarcho-communist free-love world, and, because "the end justifies the means" (a principle Weishaupt acquired from his Jesuit youth), they didn't care how many people they killed to accomplish that noble purpose. Robison knows nothing of earlier Illuminati movements, but does say specifically that the Bavarian Illuminati was not destroyed by the government's crackdown in 1785 but was, in fact, still active, both in England and France and possibly elsewhere, when he wrote, in 1801. On page 116, Robison lists their existing lodges as follows: Germany (84 lodges); England (8 lodges); Scotland (2); Warsaw (2); Switzerland (many); Rome, Naples, Ancona, Florence, France, Holland, Dresden (4); United States of America (several). On page 101, he mentions that there are 13 ranks in the Order; this may account for the 13 steps on their symbolic pyramid. Page 84 gives the code name of Weishaupt, which was Spartacus; his second-in-command, Freiherr Knigge, had the code name Philo (page 117); this is revealed in papers seized by the Bavarian government in a raid on the home of a lawyer named Zwack, who had the code name Cato. Babeuf, the French revolutionary, evidently took the name Gracchus in imitation of the classical style of these titles. Robison's conclusion, page 269, is worth quoting:

Nothing is as dangerous as a mystic Association. The object remaining a secret in the hands of the managers, the rest simply put a ring in their own noses, by which they may be led about at pleasure; and still panting after the secret they are the more pleased the less they see.

Pat


At the bottom of the page was a note in pencil, scrawled with a decisive masculine hand. It said: "In the beginning was the Word and it was written by a baboon."

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #13

8/5

J.M.:

The survival of the Bavarian Illuminati throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth is the subject of World Revolution by Nesta Webster (Constable and Company, London, 1921). Mrs. Webster follows Robison fairly closely on the early days of the movement, up to the French Revolution, but then veers off and says that the Illuminati never intended to create their Utopian anarcho-communist society: that was just another of their masks. Their real purpose was dictatorship over the world, and so they soon formed a secret alliance with the Prussian government. All subsequent socialist, anarchist, and communist movements are mere decoys, she argues, behind which the German General Staff and the Illuminati are plotting to overthrow other governments, so Germany can conquer them. (She wrote right after England fought Germany in the First World War). I see no way of reconciling this with the Birchers"" thesis that the Illuminati has become a front for the Rhodes Scholars to take over the world for English domination. Obviously— as Robison states— the Illuminati say different things to different people, to get them into the conspiracy. As for the links with modern communism, here are some passages from her pages 234-45:

But now that the (First) Internationale was dead it became necessary for the secret societies to reorganize, and it is at this crisis that we find that "formidable sect" springing to life again—the original llluminati of Weishaupt. . . . What we do know definitely is that the society was refounded in Dresden in 1880. . . . That it was consciously modelled on its eighteenth century predecessor is clear from the fact that its chief, one Leopold Engel, was the author of a lengthy panegyric on Weishaupt and his Order, entitled Geschichte des Illuminaten Ordens (published in 1906). . . .

... In London a lodge called by the same name . . . carried on the rite of Memphis— founded, it is said, by Cagliostro on Egyptian models— and initiated adepts into illuminized Freemasonry. . . .

Was it ... a mere coincidence that in July 1889 an International Socialist Congress decided that May 1, which was the day on which Weishaupt founded the Illuminati, should be chosen for an annual International Labour demonstration?

Pat

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #14

8/6

J.M.:

And here's still another version of the origin of the Illuminati, from the Cabalist Eliphas Levi (The History of Magic by Eliphas Levi, Borden Publishing Company, Los Angeles, 1963, page 65). He says there were two Zoroasters, a true one who taught white "right hand" magic and a false one who taught black "left hand" magic. He goes on:

To the false Zoroaster must be referred the cultus of material fire and that impious doctrine of divine dualism which produced at a later period the monstrous Gnosis of Manes and the false principles of spurious Masonry. The Zoroaster in question was the father of that materialized Magic which led to the massacre of the Magi and brought their true doctrine at first into proscription and then oblivion. Ever inspired by the spirit of truth, the Church was forced to condemn— under the names of Magic, Manicheanism, Illuminism and Masonry— all that was in kinship, remote or approximate, with the primitive profanation of the mysteries. One signal example is the history of the Knights Templar, which has been misunderstood to this day.

Levi does not elucidate that last sentence; it is interesting, however, that Nesta Webster (see memo 13) also traced the Illuminati to the Knights Templar, whereas Daraul and most other sources track them Eastward to the Hashishim. Is all this making me paranoid? I'm beginning to get the impression that the evidence has not only been hidden in obscure books but also made confusing and contradictory to discourage the researcher. . . .

Pat


Scrawled on the bottom of this memo was a series of jottings in the same masculine hand (Malik's, Saul guessed) that had jotted the baboon reference on memo 12. The jottings said:

Check on Order of DeMolay
Eleven-fold DeMolay Cross. Eleven intersections, therefore 22 lines. The 22 Atus of Tahuti?

Image

Why not 237?
TARO = TORA = TROA = ATOR = ROTA !?????
Abdul Alhazred = A:.A:.??!


"Oh, Christ," Barney groaned. "Oh, Mary and Joseph. Oh, shit. We'll end up either become mystics or going crazy before this case is over. If there's any difference."

"The Order of DeMolay is a Masonic society for boys," Saul commented helpfully. "I don't know what the Atus of Tahuti are, but that sounds Egyptian. Taro, usually spelled t-a-r-o-t, is the deck of cards Gypsy fortune tellers use— and the word 'Gypsy' means Egyptian. Tora is the Law, in Hebrew. We keep coming back to something that has roots in both Jewish mysticism and Egyptian magic. . . ."

"The Knights Templar were kicked out of the church," Barney said, "for trying to combine Christian and Moslem ideas. Last year, my brother— the Jesuit— gave a lecture about how modern ideas are just old heresies from the Middle Ages warmed over. I had to go for politeness' sake. I remember something else he said about the Templars. They were engaged in what he called 'unnatural sex acts.' In other words, they were faggots. Do you get the impression that all these groups related to the Illuminati are all male? Maybe the big secret they're hiding so fanatically is that they're all some vast worldwide homosexual plot. I've heard show-biz people complain about what they call the 'homintern,' a homo organization that tries to keep all the best jobs for other fruits. How does that sound?"

"It sounds plausible," Saul said ironically. "But it also sounds plausible to say the Illuminati is a Jewish conspiracy, a Catholic conspiracy, a Masonic conspiracy, a communist conspiracy, a banker's conspiracy, and I suppose we'll eventually find evidence to suggest it's an interplanetary scheme masterminded from Mars or Venus. Don't you see, Barney? Whatever they're really up to, they keep creating masks so all sorts of scapegoat groups will get the blame for being the 'real' Illuminati." He shook his head dismally. "They're smart enough to know they can't operate indefinitely without a few people eventually realizing something's there, so they've taken that into account and arranged for an inquisitive outsider to get all sorts of wrong ideas about who they are."

"They're dogs," Muldoon said. "Intelligent talking dogs from the dog star, Sirius. They came here and ate Malik. Just like they ate that guy in Kansas City, except that time they didn't get to finish the job." He turned back and read from memo 8: "'. . . with his throat torn as if by the talons of some enormous beast. No animal was reported missing from any of the local zoos.'" He grinned. "Lord God, I'm almost ready to believe it."

"They're werewolves." Saul answered, grinning also. "The pentagon is the symbol of the werewolf. Look at the Late Late Show some tune."

"That's the pentagram, not the pentagon." Barney lit a cigarette, adding. "This is really getting on our nerves, isn't it?"

Saul looked up wearily and glanced around the apartment almost as if he were looking for its absent owner. "Joseph Malik," he said aloud, "what can of worms have you opened? And how far back does it go?"

WE SHALL NOT

WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED


In fact, for Joseph Malik the beginning was several years earlier, in a medley of teargas, hymn singing, billy clubs, and obscenity, all of which were provoked by the imminent nomination for President of a man named Hubert Horatio Humphrey. It began in Lincoln Park on the night of August 25, 1968, while Joe was waiting to be teargassed. He did not know then that anything was beginning; he was only conscious, in an acid, gut-sour way, of what was ending: his own faith in the Democratic party.

He was sitting with the Concerned Clergymen under the cross they had erected. He was thinking, bitterly, that they should have erected a tombstone instead. It should have said: Here lies the New Deal.

Here lies the belief that all Evil is on the other side, among the reactionaries and Ku Kluxers. Here lies twenty years of the hopes and dreams and sweat and blood of Joseph Wendall Malik. Here lies American Liberalism, clubbed to death by Chicago's heroic peace officers.

"They're coming," a voice near him said suddenly. The Concerned Clergymen immediately began singing, "We shall not be moved."

"We'll be moved, all right," a dry sardonic, W.C. Fields voice said quietly. "When the teargas hits, we'll be moved." Joe recognized the speaker: it was novelist William Burroughs with his usual poker face, utterly without anger or contempt or indignation or hope or faith or any emotion Joe could understand. But he sat there, making his own protest against Hubert Horatio Humphrey by placing his body in front of Chicago's police, for reasons Joe could not understand.

How, Joe wondered, can a man have courage without faith, without belief? Burroughs believed in nothing, and yet there he sat stubborn as Luther. Joe had always had faith in something—Roman Catholicism, long ago, then Trotskyism at college, then for nearly two decades mainstream liberalism (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, "Vital Center") and now, with that dead, he was trying desperately to summon up faith in the motley crowd of dope-and-as-trology-obsessed Yippies, Black Maoists, old-line hardcore pacifists, and arrogantly dogmatic SDS kids who had come to Chicago to protest a rigged convention and were being beaten and brutalized unspeakably for it.

Alien Ginsberg— sitting amid a huddle of Yippies off to the right— began chanting again, as he had all evening: "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare. . . ." Ginsberg believed; he believed in everything— in democracy, in socialism, in communism, in anarchism, in Ezra Pound's idealistic variety of fascist economics, in Buckminster Fuller's technological Utopia, in D. H. Lawrence's return to preindustrial pastoralism, and in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Voodoo, astrology magic; but, above all, in the natural goodness of man.

The natural goodness of man . . . Joe hadn't fully believed in that, since Buchenwald was revealed to the world in 1944, when he was seventeen.

"KILL! KILL! KILL!" came the chant of the police,—exactly like the night before, the same neolithic scream of rage that signaled the beginning of the first massacre. They were coming, clubs in hand, spraying the teargas before them. "KILL! KILL! KILL!"

Auschwitz, U.S.A., Joe thought, sickened. If they had been issued Zyklon B along with the teargas and Mace, they would be using it just as happily.

Slowly, the Concerned Clergymen came to their feet, holding dampened handkerchiefs to their faces. Unarmed and helpless, they prepared to hold their ground as long as possible before the inevitable retreat. A moral victory, Joe thought bitterly: All we ever achieve are moral victories. The immoral brutes win the real victories.

"All hail Discordia," said a voice among the clergymen— a bearded young man named Simon, who had been arguing in favor of anarchism against some SDS Maoists earlier in the day.

And that was the last sentence Joe Malik remembered clearly, for it was gas and clubs and screams and blood from then on. He had no way of guessing, at the time, that hearing that sentence was the most important thing that happened to him in Lincoln Park.

(Harry Coin curls his long body into a knot of tension, resting on his elbows and sighting the Remington rifle carefully, as the motorcade passes the Book Depository and heads toward his perch on the triple underpass. He could see Bernard Barker from the CIA down on the grassy knoll. If he carried this off right, they promised him more jobs; it would be the end of petty crime for him, the beginning of big-time money. In a way he was sorry: Kennedy seemed like a nice enough young fellow—Harry would like to make it with both him and that hot-looking wife of his at the same tune— but money talks and sentiment is only for fools. He released the bolt action, ignoring the sudden barking of a dog, and took aim— just as the three shots resounded from the grassy knoll.

"Jesus Motherfuckin' Christ," he said; and then he caught the glint of the rifle in the Book Depository window. Great God Almighty, how the fuck many of us are there here?" he cried out, scampering to his feet and starting to run.)

It was almost a year after being clubbed—June 22, 1969—that Joe returned to Chicago, to witness another rigged convention, to suffer further disillusionment, to meet Simon once more and to hear the mysterious phrase "All hail Discordia" again.

The convention this time was the last ever held by the Students for a Democratic Society, and from the first hour after it opened, Joe realized that the Progressive Labor faction had stacked all the cards in advance. It was the Democratic party all over again— and it would have been equally bloody if the PL boys had their own police force to "deal with" the dissenters known then as RYM-I and RYM-II. Lacking that factor, the smoldering violence remained purely verbal, but when it was all over another part of Joe Malik was dead and his faith in the natural goodness of man was eroded still further. And so he found himself, aimlessly searching for something that was not totally corrupt, attending the Anarchist Caucus at the old Wobbly Hall on North Halsted Street.

Joe knew nothing about anarchism, except that several famous anarchists—Parsons and Spies of Chicago's Hay-market riot in 1888, Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts, and the Wobbly's own poet-laureate, Joe Hill— had been executed for murders which they apparently hadn't really committed. Beyond that, anarchists wanted to abolish government— a proposition so evidently absurd that Joe had never bothered to read any of their theoretical or polemical works. Now, however, eating the maggoty meat of his growing disillusionment with every conventional approach to politics, he began to listen to the Wobblies and other anarchists with acute curiosity. After all, the words of his favorite fictional hero, "When you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true."

The anarchists, Joe found, were not going to quit SDS—"We'll stay in and do some righteous ass-kicking," one of them said, to the applause and cheers of the others.

Beyond that, however, they seemed to be in a welter of ideological disagreement. Gradually, he began to identify the conflicting positions expressed: the individualist-anarchists, who sounded like right-wing Republicans (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); the anarcho-syndicalists and Wobblies, who sounded like Marxists (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); the anarcho-pacifists, who sounded like Gandhi and Martin Luther King (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); and a group who were dubbed, rather affectionately, "the Crazies"—whose position was utterly unintelligible. Simon was among the Crazies.

In a speech that Joe followed only with difficulty, Simon declared that "cultural revolution" was more important than political revolution; that Bugs Bunny should be adopted as the symbol of anarchists everywhere; that Hoffman's discovery of LSD in 1943 was a manifestation of direct intervention by God in human affairs; that the nomination of the boar hog Pigasus for President of the United States by the Yippies had been the most "transcendentally lucid" political act of the twentieth century; and that "mass orgies of pot-smoking and fucking, on every street-corner" was the most practical next step in liberating the world from tyranny. He also urged deep study of the tarot, "to fight the real enemy with their own weapons," whatever that meant. He was launching into a peroration about the mystic significance of the number 23— pointing out that 2 plus 3 equals 5, the pentad within which the Devil can be invoked "as for example in a pentacle or at the Pentagon building in Washington," while 2 divided by 3 equals 0.666, "the Number of The Beast, according to that freaked-out Revelation of Saint John the Mushroom-head," that 23 itself was present esoterically "because of its conspicuous exoteric absence" in the number series represented by the Wobbly Hall address, which was 2422 North Halsted— and that the dates of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, November 22 and 24, also had a conspicuous 23 absent in between them— when he finally was shouted down, the conversation returned to a more mundane level.

Half in whimsy and half in despair, Joe decided to perform one of his chronic acts of faith and convince himself, at least for a while, that there was some kind of meaning in Simon's ramblings. His equally chronic skepticism, he knew, would soon enough reassert itself.

"What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crises," Simon had said, "and insanity is the only viable alternative." That was a paradox worth some kind of consideration.

"About that 23," Joe said, approaching Simon tentatively after the meeting broke up.

"It's everywhere," was the instant reply. "I just started to scratch the surface. All the great anarchists died on the 23rd day of some month or other—Sacco and Vanzetti on August 23, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow on May 23, Dutch on October 23—and Vince Coll was 23 years old when he was shot on 23rd Street—and even though John Dillinger died on the 22nd of July, if you look it up, like I did, in Toland's book, The Dillinger Days, you'll find he couldn't get away from the 23 Principle, because 23 other people died that night in Chicago, too, all from heat prostration. 'Nova heat moving in,' dig? And the world began on October 23, in 4004 B.C., according to Bishop Usher, and the Hungarian Revolution started on October 23, too, and Harpo Marx was born on November 23, and—"

There was more of it, much more, and Joe patiently listened to all of it, determined to continue his experiment in applied schizophrenia at least for this one evening. They retired to a nearby restaurant, the Seminary, on Fullerton Street, and Simon rambled on, over beers, proceeding to the mystic significance of the letter W—23rd in the alphabet— and its presence in the words "woman" and "womb" as well as in the shape of the feminine breasts and spread-eagle legs of the copulating female. He even found some mystic meaning in the W in Washington, but was strangely evasive about explicating this.

"So, you see," Simon was explaining when the restaurant was starting to close, "the whole key to liberation is magic. Anarchism remains tied to politics, and remains a form of death like all other politics, until it breaks free from the defined 'reality' of capitalist society and creates its own reality. A pig for President. Acid in the water supply. Fucking in the streets. Making the totally impossible become the eternally possible. Reality is thermoplastic, not thermosetting, you know: I mean you can reprogram it much more than people realize. The hex hoax— original sin, logical positivism, those restriction and constriction myths— all that's based on a thermosetting reality. Christ, man, there are limits, of course— nobody is nutty enough to deny that—but the limits are nowhere near as rigid as we've been taught to believe. It's much closer to the truth to say there are no practical limits at all and reality is whatever people decide to make it. But we've been on one restriction kick after another for a couple thousand years now, the world's longest head-trip, and it takes real negative entropy to shake up the foundations. This isn't shit; I've got a degree in mathematics, man."

"I studied engineering myself, a long time ago." Joe said. "I realize that part of what you say is true. . . ."

"It's all true. The land belongs to the landlords, right now, because of magic. People worship the deeds in the government offices, and they won't dare move onto a square of ground if one of the deeds says somebody else owns it. It's a head-trip, a kind of magic, and you need the opposite magic to lift the curse. You need shock elements to break up and disorganize the chains of command in the brain, the 'mind-forg'd manacles' that Blake wrote about. That's the unpredictable elements, dads: the erratic, the erotic, the Eristic. Tim Leary said it: 'People have to go out of their minds before they can come to their senses.' They can't feel and touch and smell the real earth, man, as long as the manacles in the cortex tell them it belongs to somebody else. If you don't want to call it magic, call it counter-conditioning, but the principle is the same. Breaking up the trip society laid on us and starting our own trip. Bringing back old realities that are supposed to be dead. Creating new realities. Astrology, demons, lifting poetry off of the written page into the acts of your daily life. Surrealism, dig? Antonin Artaud and Andre Breton put it in a nutshell in the First Surrealist Manifesto: 'total transformation of mind, and all that resembles it.' They knew all about the Illuminated Lodge, founded in Munich in 1923, and that it controlled Wall Street and Hitler and Stalin, through witchcraft. We gotta get into witchcraft ourselves to undo the hex they've cast on everybody's mind. All hail Discordia! Do you read me?"

When they finally parted, and Joe headed back for his hotel, the spell ended. I've been listening to a spaced-out acid-head all night, Joe thought in his cab headed south toward the Loop, and almost managing to believe him. If I keep on with this little experiment, I will believe him. And that's how insanity always begins: you find reality unbearable and start manufacturing a fantasy alternative. With an effort of will, he forced himself back into his usual framework; no matter how cruel reality was, Joe Malik would face it and would not follow the Yippies and Crazies in the joy ride to Cloud Cuckoo Land.

But when he arrived at his hotel door, and noticed for the first time that he had Room 23, he had to fight the impulse to call Simon on the phone and tell him about the latest invasion of surrealism into the real world.

And he lay awake in his bed for hours remembering 23s that had occurred in his own life . . . and wondering about the origin of that mysterious bit of 1929 slang, "23 Skidoo. ..."

After being lost for an hour in Hitler's old neighborhood, Clark Kent and His Supermen finally found Ludwigstrasse and got out of Munich. "About forty miles and we'll be in Ingolstadt," Kent-Mohammed-Pearson said. "At last," one of the Supermen groaned. Just then a tiny Volkswagen inched past their VW bus, like an infant running ahead of its mother, and Kent looked bemused. "Did you check out that cat at the wheel? I saw him once before, and never forgot it because he was acting so weird. It was in Mexico City. Funny seeing him again, halfway around the world and umpteen years later." "Go catch him," another Superman commented. "With the AMA and the Trashers and other heavy groups we're going to get buried alive. Let's make sure that at least he knows we were in Ingolstadt for this gig."
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 2:10 am

Part 2 of 2

JUST LIKE A TREE THAT'S STANDING BY THE WAAAAA-AATER


The morning after the Wobbly meeting Simon telephoned Joe.

"Listen," he asked, "do you have to fly back to New York today? Can you possibly stay over a night? I've got something I'd like you to see. It's time we started reaching people in your generation and really showing you instead of just telling you. Are you game?"

And Joe Malik—ex-Trotskyist, ex-engineering student, ex-liberal, ex-Catholic—heard himself saying, "Yes." And heard a louder voice, unspeaking, uttering a more profound "yes" deep inside himself. He was game— for astrology, for I Ching, for LSD, for demons, for whatever Simon had to offer as an alternative to the world of sane and rational men who were sanely and rationally plotting their course toward what could only be the annihilation of the planet.

(WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED)


"God is dead," the priest chanted.

"God is dead," the congregation repeated in chorus.

"God is dead: we are all absolutely free," the priest intoned more rhythmically.

"God is dead," the congregation picked up the almost hypnotic beat, "we are all absolutely free."

Joe shifted nervously in his chair. The blasphemy was exhilarating, but also strangely disturbing. He wondered how much fear of Hell still lingered in the back corridors of his skull, left over from his Catholic boyhood.

They were in an elegant apartment, high above Lake Shore Drive—"We always meet here," Simon had explained, "because of the acrostic significance of the street name"—and the sounds of the automobile traffic far below mingled strangely with the preparations for what Joe already guessed was a black Mass.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," the priest chanted.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," Joe repeated with the rest of the congregation.

The priest— who was the only one who had not removed his clothes before the beginning of the ceremony— was a slightly red-faced middle-aged man in a Roman collar, and part of Joe's discomfort derived from the fact that he looked so much like every Catholic priest he had known in his childhood, It had not helped matters that he had given his name, when Simon introduced Joe to him, as "Padre Pederastia"—which he pronounced with a very campy inflection, looking flirtatiously directly in Joe's eyes.

The congregation divided, in Joe's mind, into two easily distinguishable groups: poor full-time hippies, from the Old Town area, and rich part-time hippies, from Lake Shore Drive itself and, no doubt, also from the local advertising agencies on Michigan Avenue. There were only eleven of them, however, including Joe, and Padre Pederastia made twelve— where was the traditional thirteenth?

"Prepare the pentad," Padre Pederastia commanded.

Simon and a rather good-looking young female, both quite unselfconscious in their nakedness, arose and left the group, walking toward the door which Joe had assumed led to the bedroom area. They stopped to take some chalk from a table on which hashish and sandal-wood incense were burning in a goats-head taper, then squatted to draw a large pentagon on the blood-red rug. A triangle was then added to each side of the pentagon, forming a star— the special kind of star, Joe knew, which was known as pentagram, symbol of werewolves and also of demons. He found himself remembering the corny old poem from the Lon Chancy, Jr., movies, but it suddenly didn't sound like kitsch anymore:

Even a man who is pure of heart
And says his prayers by night
Can turn to a wolf when the wolf bane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright

"I-O," the priest chanted raptly.

"I-O," the chorus came.

"I-O, E-O, Evoe," the chant rose weirdly.

"I-O, E-O, Evoe," the rhythmic reply came in cadence.

Joe felt a strange, ashy, acrid taste gathering in his mouth, and a coldness creeping into his toes and fingers. The air, too, seemed suddenly greasy and unpleasantly, mucidly moist.

"I-O, E-O, Evoe, HE!" the priest screamed, in fear or in ecstasy.

"I-O, E-O, Evoe, HEr Joe heard himself joining the others. Was it imagination, or were all their voices subtly changing, in a bestial and pongoid fashion?

"Ol sonuf vaoresaji," the priest said, more softly.'

"Ol sonuf vaoresaji," they chorused.

"It is accomplished," the priest said. "We may pass the Guardian."

The congregation arose and moved toward the door. Each person, Joe noticed, was careful to step into the pentagram and pause there a moment gathering strength before actually approaching the door. When it was his turn, he discovered why. The carving on the door, which had seemed merely obscene and ghoulish from across the room, was more disturbing when you were closer to it. It was not easy— to convince yourself that those eyes were just a trick of trompe I'oeil. The mind insisted on feeling that they very definitely looked at you, not affectionately, as you passed.

This—thing—was the Guardian which had to be pacified before they could enter the next room.

Joe's fingers and toes were definitely freezing, and auto-suggestion didn't seem a very plausible explanation. He seriously wondered about the possibility of frostbite. But then he stepped into the pentagram and the cold suddenly decreased, the eyes of the Guardian were less menacing, and a feeling of renewed energy flowed through his body, such as he had experienced in a sensitivity-training session after he had been cajoled by the leader into unleashing a great deal of pent-up anxiety and rage by kicking, screaming, weeping, and cursing.

He passed the Guardian easily and entered the room where the real action would occur.

It was as if he had left the twentieth century. The furnishings and the very architecture were Hebraic, Arabic, and medieval European, all mixed together in a most disorienting way, and entirely unrelieved by any trace of the modern or functional.

A black-draped altar stood in the center, and upon it lay the thirteenth member of the coven. She was a woman with red hair and green eyes— the traits which Satan supposedly relished most in mortal females. (There had been a time, Joe remembered, when any woman having those features was automatically suspected of witchcraft.) She was, of course, naked, and her body would be the medium through which this strange sacrament would be attempted.

What am I doing here? Joe thought frantically. Why don't 1 leave these lunatics and get back to the world I know, the world where all the horrors are, after all, merely human?

But he knew the answer.

He could not— literally could not —attempt to pass the Guardian until all those present gave their consent.

Padre Pederastia was speaking. "This part of the ceremony," he said, camping outrageously, "is very distasteful to me, as you all know. If only Our Father Below would allow us to substitute a boy on the altar when I'm officiating —but, alas, He is, as we all know, very rigid about such things. As usual, therefore, I will ask the newest member to take my place for this rite."

Joe knew, from the Malleus malificarum and other grimoires, what the rite was, and he was both excited and frightened.

He approached the altar nervously, noting the others forming a pentagon around the nude woman and himself. She had a lovely body with large breasts and fine nipples, but he was still too nervous to become aroused physically.

Padre Pederastia handed him the Host. "I stole this from the church myself," he whispered. "You can be sure it is fully consecrated and completely potent. You know what to do?"

Joe nodded, unable to meet the priest's lascivious eyes.

He took the Host and spat upon it quickly.

The greasiness and electrically charged quality of the air seemed to increase sharply. The light seemed harsher, like the glint of a sword, just as schizophrenics often described light as a hostile or destructive force.

He stepped forward and placed the Host upon the thighs of the Bride of Satan.

Immediately, she moaned softly, as if the simple touch were more erotic than one momentary contact could possibly be. Her legs spread voluptuously and the middle of the Host crumpled as it sunk slightly into her red pubic hair. The effect was, at once, powerful; her whole body shuddered and the Host was drawn farther into her obviously moist cunt. Using his ringer, Joe pushed it the rest of the way in, and she began breathing in a hoarse staccato rhythm.

Joe Malik knelt to complete the rite. He felt like a fool and a pervert; he had never performed oral sex, or any kind of sex, in front of an audience before. He wasn't even turned on erotically. He went ahead just to find out if there was any real magic in this revolting lunacy.

As soon as his tongue entered her, she began heaving and he knew her first orgasm would arrive rapidly. His penis finally began swelling; he began licking the Host caressingly. Inside his temple, a drum seemed to be beating hollowly; he hardly noticed it when she came. His senses spun and he licked more, aware only that she flowed more heavily and thickly than any woman he had known. He put his thumb in her anus, and his middle finger in her vagina, keeping his tongue in the clitoral area, doing it up right— this was the technique occultists call the Rite of Shiva. (Irreverently, he remembered that swingers call it the One-Man Band.) He felt an unusual electrical quality in her pubic hair and was aware of a heaviness and tension in his penis more powerful than he had ever known in his life, but all else was drowned out by the drumming in his head, the cunt-taste, cunt-smell, cunt-warmth. . . . She was Ishtar, Aphrodite, Venus; the experience was so intense he began to feel a real religious dimension to it. Hadn't some nineteenth century anthropologist argued that cunt-worship was the earliest religion? He didn't even know this woman and yet he had an emotion beyond love: true reverence. Trippy, as Simon would say.

How many times she came, he never knew; he came himself, without once touching his penis, when the Host was finally dissolved.

He staggered back dizzily, and the air now seemed as resistant to motion as brackish water.

"Yogge Sothothe Neblod Zin," the priest began chanting. "By Ashtoreth, by Pan Pangenitor, by the Yellow Sign, by the gifts I have made and the powers I have purchased, by He Who Is Not to Be Named, by Rabban and by Azathoth, by Samma-El, by Amon and Ra, vente, vente, Lucifer, lux fiat!"

Joe never saw it: he felt it— and it was like chemical Mace, blinding and numbing him at once.

"Come not in that form!" the priest screamed. "By Jesu Elohim and the Powers that You fear, I command thee: come not in that form! Yod He Vah He—come not in that form."

One of the women began weeping in fear.

"Quiet, you fool," Simon shouted at her. "Don't give it more Power."

"Your tongue is bound, until I release it," the priest said to her— but the distraction of his attention had its cost; Joe felt It growing in potency again, and so did the others, judging from their sudden involuntary gasps.

"Come not in that form!" the priest shouted. "By the Cross of Gold, and by the Rose of Ruby, and by Mary's Son, I command and demand it of thee: come not in that form! By thy Master, Chronzon! By Pangenitor and Panphage, come not in that form!"

There was a hiss, like air pouring into a vacuum, and the atmosphere began to clear— but it also dropped abruptly in temperature.

MASTER, CALL NO MORE UPON THOSE NAMES. I MEANT NOT TO ALARM THEE.


The Voice was the most shocking experience of the night for Joe. It was oily, flattering, obscenely humble, but there was still within it a secret strength that revealed all too well that the priest's power over it, however obtained, was temporary, that both of them knew it, and that the price of that power was something it longed to collect

"Come not in that form either," said the priest, more stern and more confident. "Ye know full well that such tones and manners are also intended to frighten, and I like not such jokes. Come in this form which thou habitually wearest in thy current earthly activities, or I shall banish thee back to that realm of which you like not to imagine. I command. I command. I command." There was nothing campy about the Padre now.

It was just a room again— an odd, medieval, mideastern room, but just a room. The figure that stood among them could not have looked less like a demon.

"OK," it said in a pleasant American voice, "we don't have to get touchy and hostile with each other over a little theatrics, do we? Just tell me what sort of business 'transaction you went and dragged me here for, and I'm sure we can work out all the details in a down-home, businesslike, cards-on-the-table fashion, with no hard feelings and mutual satisfaction all around."

It looked like Billy Graham.

("The Kennedys? Martin Luther King? You are fantastically naive still, George. It goes back much, much farther." Hagbard was relaxing with some Alamout Black hash, after the Battle of Atlantis. "Look at the pictures of Woodrow Wilson in his last months: The haggard look, the vague eyes, and, in fact, symptoms of a certain slow-acting and undetectable poison. They slipped it to him at Versailles. Or look into the Lincoln caper. Who opposed the greenback plan— the closest thing to flaxscript America ever had? Stanton the banker. Who ordered all roads out of Washington closed, except one? Stanton the banker. And Booth went straight for that road. Who got ahold of Booth's diary afterward? Stanton the banker. And turned it over to the Archives with seventeen pages missing? Stanton the banker. George, you have so much to learn about real history. . . .")

The Reverend William Helmer, religious columnist for Confrontation, stared at the telegram. Joe Malik was supposed to be in Chicago covering the SDS convention; what was he doing in Providence, Rhode Island, and what was he involved in that could provoke such an extraordinary communication? Helmer reread the telegram carefully:

Drop next month's column. Will pay large bonus for prompt answers to these questions. First, trace all movements of Reverend Billy Graham during last week and find out if he could possibly have gotten to Chicago surreptitiously. Second, send me a list of reliable books on Satanism and witchcraft in the modern world. Tell nobody else on the magazine about this. Wire me c/o Jerry Mallory, Hotel Benefit, Providence, Rhode Island. P.S. find out where The John Dillinger Died for You Society has its headquarters. Joe Malik.

Those SDS kids must have turned him on with acid, Helmer decided. Well, he was still the boss, and he paid nice bonuses when he was pleased. Helmer reached for the phone.

(Howard, the dolphin, was singing a very satirical song about sharks, as he swam to meet the Lief Erikson at Peos.)

James Walking Bear had no great love for palefaces most of the time, but he had just dropped six peyote buttons before this Professor Mallory arrived and he was feeling benevolent and forgiving. After all, the Road Chief once said at a very sacred midsummer peyote festival that the line about forgiving those who trespass against us had a special meaning for Indians. Only when we all forgave the whites, he had said, would our hearts be totally pure, and when our hearts were pure the Curse would be lifted— the white men would cease to trespass, go home to Europe, and vex one another instead of persecuting us. James tried to forgive the professor for being white and found, as usual, that peyote made forgiveness easier.

"Billie Freschette?" he said. "Hell, she died back in sixty-eight."

"I know that," the professor said. "What I'm looking for is any photographs she may have left."

Sure. James knew what kind of photographs.

"You mean ones that had Dillinger in them?"

"Yes, she was his mistress, virtually his common-law wife, for a long time, and—"

"No soap. You're years too late. Reporters bought up everything she had that showed even the back of Dillinger's head, way back, long before she came here to the reservation to die."

"Well, did you know her?"

"Sure." James was careful not be spiteful and didn't add: all Menominee Indians know one another, in a way you whites can't understand "knowing."

"Did she ever converse about Dillinger?"

"Of course. Old women always talk about their dead men. Always say the same thing, too: never was another man as good as him. Except when they say there never was another man as bad as him. They only say that when they're drunk, though."

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.

"Did she ever say anything about John's attitude toward the Masons?"

Why shouldn't people turn colors? All the trouble in 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.

"I said, did she ever mention John's attitude toward the Masons?"

"Oh. Oh, yes. Funny you should ask that." The man had a halo around his head now, and James wondered what that meant. Every time he took peyote alone things like that would happen, and he'd end up wishing there were a Road Chief or some other priest around to explain these signs properly. But what about the Masons? Oh, yes. "Billie said the Masons were the only people John Dillinger really hated. He said they railroaded him to prison the first time, and they owned all the banks, so he was getting even by robbing them."

The professor's mouth dropped open in surprise and delight— and James thought it was kind of funny to see that, especially with the halo turning from pink to blue to pink to blue to pink again at the same time.

("A big mouth, a tiny brain/He only thinks of blood and pain," Howard sang.)

Notes found by a TWA stewardess in a seat vacated by a Mr. "John Mason" after a Madison, Wisconsin, to Mexico City flight June 29, 1969: one week after the last SDS convention of all time:

"We only robbed from the banks what the banks robbed from the people"—Dillinger, Crown Point Jail, 1934. Could have come from any anarchist text.
Lucifer— bringer of light.
Weishaupt's "illumination" & Voltaire's "enlightenment": from the Latin "lux" meaning light.
Christianity all in 3s (Trinity, etc.) Buddhism in 4s. Illuminism in 5s. A progression?
Hopi teaching: all men have 4 souls now, but in future will have 5 souls. Find an anthropologist for more data on this.
Who decided the Pentagon building should have that particular shape?
"Kick out the Jams"??? Cross-check.
"Adam," the first man; "Weis," to know; "haupt," chief or leader. "The first man to be a leader of those who know." Assumed name from the beginning?
lok-Sotot in Pnakotic manuscripts. Cd. be Yog-Sothoth?
D.E.A.T.H.—Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn. Does Pynchon know?
Must get Simon to explain the Yellow Sign and the Aklo chants. Might need protection.
C. says the h. neophobe type outnumbers us 1000-to-l. If so, all this is hopeless.
What gets me is how much has been out in the open for so long. Not just in Lovecraft, Joyce, Melville, etc., or in the Bugs Bunny cartoons but in scholarly works that pretend to explain. Anybody who wants to go to the trouble can find out, for instance, that the "secret' of the Eleusinian Mysteries was the words whispered to the novice after he got the magic mushroom: "Osiris is a black God!" Five words (of course!) but no historian, archeologist, anthropologist, folklorist, etc. has understood. Or, those who did understand, didn't care to admit it. Can I trust C.? For that matter, can I trust Simon?
This matter of Tlaloc should convince me, one way or the other.

("He only thinks of blood and slaughter/The shark should live on land not water.")

("To hell with the shark and all his kin/And fight like hell when you see his fin.")

When Joe Malik got off the plane at Los Angeles International Airport, Simon was waiting for him.

"We'll talk in your car," Joe said briefly.

The car, being Simon's, was naturally a psychedelic Volkswagen. "Well?" he asked as they drove out of the airport onto Central Avenue.

"It all checks out," Joe said with an odd calm. "It did rain blue cats when they dug up Tlaloc. Mexico City has had unusual and unseasonable rains ever since. The missing tooth was on the right, and the corpse at the Biograph Theatre had a missing tooth on the left. Billy Graham couldn't have gotten to Chicago by any normal means, so that was either the best damned makeup job in the history of show business and plastic surgery or I witnessed a genuine miracle. And all the rest of it, the law of Fives and all. I'm sold. I no longer claim membership in the liberal intellectual guild. You behold in me a horrible example of creeping mysticism."

"Ready to try acid?"

"Yes," Joe said. "I'm ready to try acid. I only regret that I have but one mind to lose for my Shivadarshana."

"Right on! First, though, you'll meet him. I'll drive right to his bungalow— it's not far from here." Simon began humming as he drove; Joe recognized the tune as the Fugs' "Rameses II Is Dead, My Love."

They drove for a while in silence, and Joe finally asked, "How old is . . . our little group . . . exactly?"

"Since 1888." Simon said. "That's when Rhodes horned in and they 'kicked out the Jams,' like I told you in Chicago after the Sabbath."

"And Karl Marx?"

"A schmuck. A dupe. A nebbish from the word Go." Simon made an abrupt turn. "Here we are at his house. The greatest headache they had since Harry Houdini knocked out their spiritualist fronts." He grinned. "How do you think you'll feel talking to a dead man?"

"Weird," Joe said, "but I've felt weird for the last week and a half."

Simon parked the car and held the door open. "Just think," he said. "Hoover sitting there every day with the death-mask on his desk, and half-suspecting, deep down in his bones, how we suckered him."

They crossed the yard of the small, modest bungalow. "What a front, eh?" Simon chuckled. He knocked.

A little old man— he was five foot seven exactly, Joe remembered from the FBI files— opened the door.

"Here's our new recruit," Simon said simply.

"Come in," John Dillinger said, "and tell me how an asshole egghead like you can help us beat the shit out of those motherfucking Illuminati cocksuckers."

("They fill their books with obscene words, claiming that this is realism," Smiling Jim shouted to the KCUF assembly. "It's not my idea of realism. I don't know anybody who talks in that gutter language they call realism. And they describe every possible perversion, acts against nature that are so outrageous I wouldn't sully this audiences' ears by even mentioning their medical names. Some of them even glorify the criminal and the anarchist. I'd like to see one of these hacks come up to me and look me in the eye and say, 'I didn't do it for money. I was honestly trying to tell a good, honest story that would teach people something of value.' They couldn't say that. The lie would stick in their throats. Who can doubt where they get their orders from? What person in this audience needs to be told what group is behind this overflowing sewer of smut and filth?")

"May storms and rains and typhoons beat them," Howard sang on. "May Great Cthulhu rise and eat them"

"I got into the JAMs in Michigan City Prison," Dillinger, much relaxed and less arrogant, was saying as he, Simon, and Joe sat in his living room drinking Black Russians.

"And Hoover knew, from the beginning?" Joe asked.

"Of course. I wanted the bastard to know— him and every other high-ranking Mason and Rosicrucian and Illuminati front-man in the country." The old man laughed harshly; except for his unmistakable eyes, which still held the strange blend of irony and intensity that Joe had noted in the 1930s photos, he was indistinguishable from any other elderly fellow who had come to California to enjoy his last years in the sun. "The first bank job I pulled off, in Daleville, Indiana, I used the line that I always repeated: 'Lie down on the floor and keep calm.' Hoover couldn't miss it. That's been the motto of the JAMs ever since Diogenes the Cynic. He knew no ordinary bank robber would be quoting an obscure Greek philosopher. The reason I repeated it on every heist was just to rub it in and let him know I was taunting him."

"But going back to Michigan City Prison . . ." Joe prompted, sipping his drink.

"Pierpont was the one who initiated me. He'd been with the JAMs for years by then. I was just a kid, you know— in my early twenties— rand I had only pulled one job, a real botch. I couldn't understand why I got such a stiff sentence, after the D.A. promised me clemency if I'd plead guilty, and I was kind of bitter. But old Harry Pierpont saw my potential.

"At first I thought he was just another big-house faggot, when he started tracking me around and asking me all sorts of personal questions. But he was what I wanted to become —a successful bank-robber —so I played along. To tell you the truth, I was so horny it wouldn't have mattered if he was a faggot. You have no idea how horny a man gets in prison. That's why Baby-Face Nelson and a lot of other guys preferred to die rather than go back to the big house again. Hell, if you haven't been there, you can't understand. You just don't know what being horny is.

"Well, anyway, after a lot of bull about Jesus and Jehovah and the Bible and all that, Harry just asked me point-blank one day in the prison yard: 'Do you think it's possible there might be a true religion?' I was about to say, 'Bullshit— like there might be an honest cop,' but something stopped me. I realized he was dead serious, and a lot might depend on my answer. So I was cautious. I said, 'If there is, I haven't heard about it.' And he just came back, real quiet, 'Most people haven't.'

"It was a couple of days afterward that he brought the subject up again. Then, he went right on with it, showed me the Sacred Chao and everything. It took my breath away." The old man's voice trailed off, as he sank into silent memories.

"And it really does go back to Babylon?" Joe prompted.

"I'm not much of an intellectual," Dillinger replied. "Action is my arena. Let Simon tell you that part."

Simon was eager to leap into the breach. "The basic book to confirm our tradition," he said, "is The Seven Tablets of Creation, which is dated at about 2500 B.C. the time of Sargon. It describes how Tiamat and Apsu, the first gods, were coexisting in Mummu, the primordial chaos. Von Junzt, in his Unausprechlichen Kulten, tells how the Justified Ancients of Mummu originated, just about the time the Seven Tablets were inscribed. You see, under Sargon, the chief deity was Marduk. I mean, that was what the high priests gave out to the public— in private, of course, they worshipped lok-Sotot, who became the Yog-Sothoth of the Necronomicon. But maybe I'm going too fast. Getting back to the official religion of Marduk, it was based on usury. The priests monopolized the medium of exchange and were able to extract interest for lending it. They also monopolized the land, and extracted tribute for renting it. It was the beginning of what we laughingly call civilization, which has always rested on rent and interest. The old Babylonian con.

"The official story was that Mummu was dead, killed in the war between the gods. When the first anarchist group arose, they called themselves Justified Ancients of Mummu. Like Lao-Tse and the Taoists in China, they wanted to get rid of usury and monopoly and all the other pigshit of civilization and go back to a natural way of life. So, grok, they took the supposedly dead god, Mummu, and claimed he was still alive and was actually stronger than all the other gods. They had a good argument 'Look around,' they'd say, "what do you see most of? Chaos, right? Therefore, the god of Chaos is the strongest god, and is still alive.'

"Of course, we got our ass whipped good. We were just no match for the Illuminati in those days. Didn't have a clue, about how they performed their 'miracles,' for instance. So we got our asses whipped again, in Greece, when the JAMs got started again, as part of the Cynic movement. By the tune the whole thing was happening again in Rome— usury and monopoly and the whole bag of tricks— the truce took place. The Justified Ancients became part of the Illuminati, a special group still keeping our own name, but taking orders from the Five. We thought we'd humanize them, like the anarchists who stayed in SDS after last year. And so it went until 1888. Then Cecil Rhodes started the Circle of Initiates and the big schism occurred. Every meeting would have a faction of Rhodes boys carrying signs that said 'Kick out the JAMs!' It was the parting of the ways. They just didn't trust us— or maybe they were afraid of being humanized.

"But we had learned a lot by our long participation in the Illuminati conspiracy, and now we know how to fight them with their own weapons."

"Fuck their weapons," Dillinger interrupted. "I like to fight them with my weapons."

"You are behind the big unsolved bank robberies of the last few years—"

"Sure. Just in the planning, though. I'm too old to vault over tellers' cages and carry on like I did back in the thirties."

"John is also fighting on another front," Simon interjected.

Dillinger laughed. "Yes," he said. "I'm the president of Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Inc. You've seen them— 'If it's not an LBJP it's NOT an L.P.'?

"Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus?" Joe exclaimed. "My God, you put out the best rock in the country! The only rock a man my age can listen to without wincing."

"Thanks," Dillinger said modestly. "Actually, the Illuminati own the companies that put out most of the rock. We started Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus to counterattack. We were ignoring that front until they got the MC-5 to cut a disc called 'Kick Out The Jams' just to taunt us with old, bitter memories. So we came back with our own releases, and the next thing I knew I was making bales of money from it. We've also fed information, through third parties, to Christian Crusade in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so they could expose some of what the Illuminati are doing in the rock field. You've seen the Christian Crusade publications—Rhythm, Riots and Revolution, and Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, and so forth?"

"Yes," Joe said absently. "I thought it was nut literature. It's so hard," he added, "to grasp the whole picture."

"You'll get used to it," Simon smiled. "It just takes awhile to sink in."

"Who really did shoot John Kennedy?" Joe asked.

"I'm sorry," Dillinger said. "You're only a private in our army right now. Not cleared for that kind of information yet. I'll just tell you this much: his initials are H.C.—so don't trust anybody with those initials, no matter where or how you meet him."

"He's being fair," Simon told Joe. "You'll appreciate it later."

"And advancement is rapid," Dillinger added, "and the rewards are beyond your present understanding."

"Give him a hint, John," Simon suggested with an anticipatory grin. "Tell him how you got out of Crown Point Jail."

"I've read two versions of that," Joe said. "Most of the sources claim you carved a fake gun out of balsa wood and dyed it black with your shoe polish. Toland's book says that you made that story up and leaked it out to protect the man who really managed the break for you —a federal judge that you bribed to smuggle in a real gun. Which was it?"

"Neither," Dillinger said. "Crown Point was known as the 'escape-proof jail' before I crashed out of it, and, believe me, it deserved the name. Do you want to know how I did it? I walked through the walls. Listen. . . ."

HARE KRISHNA HARE HARE


The sun beat down on the town of Daleville on July 17, 1933, like a rain of fire.

Motoring down the main street, John Dillinger felt the perspiration on his neck. Although he had been paroled three weeks earlier, he was still pale from his nine years in prison, and the sunlight was cruel on his almost albino-tinted skin.

I'm going to have to walk through that door all by myself, he thought. All alone.

And fighting every kind of fear and guilt that has been beaten into me from childhood on.

'The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology," Pierpont had said. "Remember that. We've got the Second Law of Thermodynamics on our side. Chaos steadily increases, all over the universe. All 'law and order' is a kind of temporary accident."

But I've got to walk through that door all alone. The Secret of the Five depends on it. This time it's my turn to be the goat.

Pierpont and Van Meter and the others were still back in Michigan City Prison. It was all in his hands—being the first one paroled, he had to raise the money to finance the jail-break that would get the others out. Then, having proved himself, he would be taught the JAM "miracles."

The bank suddenly loomed before him. Too suddenly. His heart skipped a beat.

Then, calmly, he drove his Chevrolet coupe over to the curb and parked.

I should have prepared better. This car should be souped-up like the ones Clyde Barrow uses. Well, I'll know that the next time.

He left his hands on the steering wheel and squeezed, hard. He took a deep breath and repeated the Formula: "23 Skidoo."

It helped a little— but he still wanted to get the hell out of there. He wanted to drive straight back to his father's farm in Mooresville and find a job and learn all the straight things again, how to kiss a boss's ass and how to look the parole officer straight in the eye and be like everybody else.

But everybody else was an Illuminati puppet and didn't know it. He did know it and was going to liberate himself.

Hell, that's what a younger John Dillinger thought back in 1924—except that he hadn't known about the Illuminati or the JAMs, then— but he was trying to liberate himself, in his own way, when he held up that grocer. And what did it lead to? Nine years of misery and monotony and almost going mad with horniness in a stinking cell.

It'll be nine years more if I fuck up today.

"The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology."

He got out of the car and forced his feet and legs to move and he walked straight for the bank door.

"Fuck it," he said, "23 Skidoo."

He walked through the do or—and then he did the thing the bank tellers remembered after and told the police. He reached up and adjusted his straw hat to the most dapper and debonair angle— and he grinned.

"All right, this is a stick-up," he said clearly, taking out his pistol. "Everybody lie down on the floor and keep calm. None of you will get hurt."

"Oh, God," a female teller gasped, "don't shoot. Please don't shoot."

"Don't worry, honey," John Dillinger said easily, "I don't want to hurt anybody. Just open the vault."

LIKE A TREE THAT'S PLANTED BY THE WATER


"That afternoon," the old man said, "I met Calvin Coolidge in the woods near my father's farm at Mooresville. I gave him the haul —twenty thousand dollars— and it went into the JAM treasury. He gave me twenty tons of hempscript."

"Calvin Coolidge?" Joe Malik exclaimed.

"Well, of course, I knew it wasn't really Calvin Coolidge. But that was the form he chose to appear in. Who or what he really is, I haven't learned yet."

"You met him in Chicago," Simon added gleefully. "He appeared as Billy Graham that time."

"You mean the Dev—"

"Satan," Simon said simply "is just another of the innumerable masks he wears. Behind the mask is a man and behind the man is another mask. It's all a matter of merging multiverses, remember? Don't look for an Ultimate Reality. There isn't any."

"Then this person— this being—" Joe protested, "really is supernatural—"

"Supernatural, schmupernatural," Simon grimaced. "You're still like the people in that mathematical parable about Flatland. You can only think in categories of right and left, and I'm talking about up and down, so you say 'supernatural.' There is no 'supernatural'; there are just more dimensions than you are accustomed to, that's all. If you were living in Flatland and I stepped out of your plane into a plane at a different angle, it would look to you as if I vanished 'into thin air.' Somebody looking down from our three-dimensional viewpoint would see me going off at a tangent from you, and would wonder why you were acting so distressed and surprised about it."

"But the flash of light—"

"It's an energy transformation," Simon explained patiently. "Look, the reason you can only think three-dimensionally is because there are only three directions in cubical space. That's why the Illuminati— and some of the kids they've allowed to become partially illuminized lately— refer to ordinary science as 'square.' The basic energy-vector coordinates of Universe are five-dimensional —of course— and can best be visualized in terms of the five sides of the Illuminati Pyramid of Egypt."

"Five sides?" Joe objected. "It only has four."

"You're ignoring the bottom."

"Oh. Go on."

"Energy is always triangular, not cubical. Bucky Fuller has a line on this, by the way: he's the first one outside the Illuminati to discover it independently. The basic energy transformation we're concerned with is the one Fuller hasn't discovered yet, although he's said he's looking for it— the one that ties Mind into the matter-energy continuum. The pyramid is the key. You take a man in the lotus position and draw lines from his pineal gland— the Third Eye, as the Buddhists call it— to his two knees, and from each knee to the other, and this is what you get. . . ." Simon sketched rapidly in his notepad and passed it over to Joe:

Image

"When the Pineal Eye opens —after fear is conquered; that is, after your first Bad Trip— you can control the energy field entirely," Simon went on. "An Irish Illuminatus of the ninth century, Scotus Ergina, put it very simply— in five words, of course —when he said Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt: 'All things that are, are lights.' Einstein also put it into five symbols when he wrote e = mc2?. The actual transformation doesn't require atomic reactors and all that jazz, once you learn how to control the mind vectors, but it always lets off one hell of a flash of light, as John can tell you."

"Damn near blinded me and knocked me on my ass, that first time in the woods," Dillinger agreed. "But I was sure glad to know the trick. I was never afraid of being arrested after that, 'cause I could always walk out of any jail they put me in. That's why the Feds decided to kill me, you know. It was embarrassing to always find me wandering around loose again a few days after they locked me up. You know the background to the Biograph Theatre scam— they killed three guys in Chicago, without giving them a chance to surrender, because they thought I was one of them. Well, those three were all wanted in New York for armed robbery, so nobody criticized the cops much for that caper. But then up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, they shot three very respectable businessmen, and one of them went and died, and Hoover's Heroes caught all sorts of crap from the newspapers. So I knew where it was at; I could never again surrender and walk away a few days later. We had to produce a body for them." The old man looked suddenly sad. "There was one possibility that we hated to think about. . . . But, luckily it didn't come to that. The gimmick we finally worked out was perfect."

"And everything really follows the Fives' law?" Joe asked.

"More than you guess," Dillinger remarked blandly.

"Even when you're dealing with social fields," Simon added. "We've run studies of cultures where the Illuminati were not in control, and they still follow Weishaupt's five-stage pattern: Verwirrung, zweitracht, Unordnung, Beamtenherrschaft and Grummet. That is: chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and aftermath. America right now is between the fourth and fifth stages. Or you might say that the older generation is mostly in Beamtenherrschaft and the younger generation is moving into Grummet rapidly."

Joe took another stiff drink and shook his head. "But why do they leave so much of it out in the open? I mean, not merely the really shocking things you told me about the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but putting the pyramid on the dollar bill where everybody sees it almost every day—"

"Hell," Simon said, "look what Beethoven did when Weishaupt illuminated him. Went right home and wrote the Fifth Symphony. You know how it begins: da-da-da-DUM. Morse code for V—the Roman numeral for five. Right out in the open, as you say. It amuses the devil out of them to confirm their low opinion of the rest of humanity by putting things up front like that and watching how almost everybody misses it. Of course, if somebody doesn't miss something, they recruit him right away. Look at Genesis: 'lux fiat' —right on the first page. They do it all the time. The Pentagon Building. '23 Skidoo.' The lyrics of rock songs like 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'— how obvious can you get? Melville was one of the most outrageous of the bunch; the very first sentence of Moby Dick tells you he's a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah, but you cant find a single Melville scholar who has followed up that lead— in spite of Ahab being a truncated anagram of Sabbah. He even tells you, again and again, directly and indirectly, that Moby Dick and Leviathan are the same creature, and that Moby Dick is often seen at the same time in two different parts of the world, but not one reader in a million groks what he's hinting at. There's a whole chapter on whiteness and why white is really more terrifying than black; all the critics miss the point"

" 'Osiris is a black god,' " Joe quoted.

"Right on! You're going to advance fast," Simon said enthusiastically. "In fact, J think it's time for you to get off the verbal level and really confront your own 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' —your own lady Isis."

"Yes," Dillinger said. "The Leif Erikson is laying offshore near California right now; Hagbard is running some hashish to the students at Berkeley. He's got a new black chick in his crew who plays the Lucy role extremely well. We'll have him send her ashore for the Rite. I suggest that you two drive up to the Norton Lodge in Frisco and I'll arrange for her to meet you there."

"I don't like dealing with Hagbard," Simon said. "He's a right-wing nut, and so is his whole gang."

"He's one of the best allies we have against the Illuminati," Dillinger said. "Besides, I want to exchange some hempscript for some of his flaxscript. Right now, the Mad Dog bunch won't accept anything but flaxscript —they think Nixon is really going to knock the bottom out of the hemp market. And you know what they do with Federal Reserve notes. Every time they get one, they burn it. Instant demurrage, they call it."

"Puerile," Simon pronounced. "It will take decades to undermine the Fed that way."

"Well," Dillinger said, "Those are the kinds of people we have to deal with. The JAMs can't do it all alone, you know."

"Sure," Simon shrugged. "But it bugs me." He stood up and put his drink on the table.

"Let's go," he said to Joe. "You're going to be illuminized."

Dillinger accompanied them to the door, then leaned close to Joe and said, "A word of advice about the Rite."

"Yes?"

Dillinger lowered his voice. "Lie down on the floor and keep calm," he said, and his old, impudent grin flashed wickedly.

Joe stood there looking at the mocking bandit, and it seemed to him a freeze and a frieze in time: a moment that would linger, as another stage of illumination, forever in his mind. Sister Cecilia, back in Resurrection School, spoke out of the abyss of memory: "Stand in the corner, Joseph Malik!" And he remembered too, the chalk that he crumbled slowly between his fingers, the feeling of needing to urinate, the long wait, and then Father Volpe entering the classroom, his voice like thunder: "Where is he? Where is the boy who dared to disagree with the good Sister that God sent to instruct him?" And the other children, led out of the classroom and across the street to the church to pray for his soul, while the priest harangued him: "Do you know how hot hell is? Do you know how hot the worst part of hell is? That's where they send people who have the good fortune to be born into the church and then rebel against it, misled by Pride of Intellect." And five years later, those two faces came back: the priest, angry and dogmatic, demanding obedience, and the bandit, sardonic, encouraging cynicism, and Joe understood that he might someday have to kill Hagbard Celine. But more years had to pass, and the Fernando Poo incident had to pass, and Joe had to plan the bombing of his own magazine with Tobias Knight before he knew that he would, in fact, kill Celine without compunction if it were necessary. . .

But on March 31, in that year of fruition for all the Illuminati's plans, while the President of the United States went on the air to threaten "all-out thermonuclear heck," a young lady named Concepcion Galore lay nude on a bed in the Hotel Durrutti in Santa Isobel and said, "It's a lloigor."

"What's a lloigor?" asked her companion, an Englishman named Fission Chips, who had been born on Hiroshima Day and named by a father who cared more for physics than for the humanities.

The room was in the luxury suite of the Hotel Durrutti, which meant that it was decorated in abominable Spanish-Moorish decor, the sheets were changed daily (to a less luxurious suite), the cockroaches were minimal, and the plumbing sometimes worked. Concepcion contemplated the bullfight mural on the opposite wall, Manolete turning an elegant Veronica on an unconvincingly drawn bull, and said thoughtfully, "Oh, a lloigor is a god of the black people. The natives. A very bad god."

Chips glanced at the statue again and said, more to himself than to the peasant girl, "Looks vaguely like Tlaloc in Mexico City, crossed with one of those Polynesian Cthulhu tikis."

"The Starry Wisdom people are very interested in these statues," Concepcion said, just to be making conversation, since it was obvious that Chips wasn't going to be ready to prong her again for at least another half hour.

"Indeed?" Chips said, equally bored. "Who are the Starry Wisdom people?"

"A church. Down on Tequilla y Mota Street. What used to be Lumumba Street and was Franco Street when I was a girl. Funny church." The girl frowned, thinking about them. "When I worked in the telegraph office I was always seeing their telegrams. All in code. And never to another church. Always to banks all over Europe and North and South America."

"You don't say," drawled Chips, no longer bored but trying to sound casual; his code number in British Intelligence was, of course, 00005. "Why are they interested in these statues?" He was thinking that statues, properly hollowed out, could transport heroin; he was already sure that Starry Wisdom was a front for BUGGER.

(In 1933, at Harvard, Professor Tochus told his Psychology 101 class, "Now, the child feels frightened and inferior, according to Adler, because he is, in fact, physically smaller and weaker than the adult. Thus, he knows he has no chance of successful rebellion, but nevertheless he dreams about it. This is the origin of the Oedipus Complex in Adler's system: not sex, but the will to power itself. The class will readily see the influence of Neitzsche . . ." Robert Putney Drake, glancing around the room, was quite sure that most of the students would not readily see anything; and Tochus himself didn't really' see either. The child, Drake had decided—it was the cornerstone of his own system of psychology —was not brainwashed by sentimentality, religion, ethics, and other bullshit. The child saw clearly that, in every relationship, there is a dominant party and a submissive party. And the child, in its quite correct egotism, determined to become the dominant party. It was that simple; except, of course, that the brainwashing takes effect eventually in most cases and, by about this time, the college years, most of them were ready to become robots and accept the submissive role. Professor Tochus droned on; and Drake, serene in his lack of superego, continued to dream of how he would seize the dominant role. ... In New York, Arthur Flegenheimer, Drake's psychic twin, stood before seventeen robed figures, one wearing a goats-head mask, and repeated, "I will forever hele, always conceal, never reveal, any art or arts, part or parts. . . .")

You look like a robot, Joe Malik says in a warped room in a skewered time in San Francisco. I mean, you move and walk like a robot.

Hold onto that, Mr. Wabbit, says a bearded young man with a saturnine smile. Some trippers see themselves as robots. Others see the guide as a robot. Hold that perspective. Is it a hallucination, or is a recognition of something we usually black out?

Wait, Joe says. Part of you is like a robot. But part of you is alive, like a growing thing, a tree or a plant.. ..

The young man continues to smile, his face drifting above his body toward the mandala painted on the ceiling. Well? he asks. Do you think that might be a good poetic shorthand: that part of me is mechanical, like a robot, and part of me is organic, like a rosebush? And what's the difference between the mechanical and the organic? Isn't a rosebush a kind of machine used by the DNA code to produce more rosebushes?

No, Joe says. Everything is mechanical, but people are different. A cat has a grace that we've lost, or partly lost.

How do you think we've lost it?

And Joe sees the face of Father Volpe and hears the voice screaming about submission. . . .

The SAC bases await the presidential order to take off for Fernando Poo, Atlanta Hope addresses a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, protesting the gutless appeasement of the comsymp administration in not threatening to bomb Moscow and Peking the same time as Santa Isobel, the Premier of Russia rereads his speech nervously as the TV cameras are set up in his office ("and, in socialist solidarity with the freedom-loving people of Fernando Poo"), the Chairman of the Chinese Communist party, having found the thought of Chairman Mao of little avail, throws the I Ching sticks and looks dismally at Hexagram 23, and 99 percent of the peoples of the world wait for their leaders to tell them what to do; but in Santa Isobel itself, three locked doors across the suite from the now-sleeping Concepcion, Fission Chips says angrily into his shortwave,

"Repeat none. Not one Russian or Chinese anywhere on the bloody island. I don't care what Washington says. I'm telling you what I have seen. Now, about the BUGGER heroin ring here—"

"Sign off," the submarine tells him. "HQ is not interested in BUGGER or heroin right now."

"Damn and blast!" Chips stares at the shortwave set. That bloody well tore it. He would just have to proceed on his own, and show those armchair agents back in London, especially that smug W., how little they actually knew about the real problem in Fernando Poo and the world.

Storming, he charged back to the bedroom. I'll just get dressed, he thought furiously, including my smoke bombs and Luger and laser ray, and toddle over to this Starry Wisdom church and see what I can nose out. But when he tore open the bedroom door he stopped, momentarily stunned. Concepcion still lay in the bed but she was no longer sleeping. Her throat was neatly cut and a curious dagger with a flame design on it stuck into the pillow beside her.

"Damn, blast and thunder!" cried 00005. "Now that absolutely does tear it. Every time I find a good piece of ass those fuckers from BUGGER come along and shaft her!"

Ten minutes later, the GO signal came from the White House, a fleet of SAC bombers headed for Santa Isobel with hydrogen bombs, and Fission Chips, fully dressed, toddled over to the Starry Wisdom church where he encountered, not BUGGER, but something on an entirely different plane.
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 2:13 am

Part 1 of 3

BOOK TWO: ZWEITRACHT

"It must have a 'natural' cause."
"It must have a 'supernatural' cause."
Let these two asses be set to grind corn.

—Frater Perdurabo, O.T.O., "Chinese Music," The Book of Lies


THE FOURTH TRIP, OR CHESED

Jesus Christ On A Bicycle

Mister Order, he runs at a very good pace
But old Mother Chaos is winning the race

—Lord Omar Khayaam Ravenhurst, K.S.C., "The Book of Advice," The Honest Book of Truth


Among those who knew that the true faith of Mohammed was contained in the Ishmaelian teachings, most were sent out into the world to seek positions in the governments of, the Near East and Europe. Since it pleased Allah to decree this task for them, they obeyed willingly; many served thus for their whole lives. Some, however, after five or ten or even twenty years of such fealty to a given shah or caliph or king, would receive, through surreptitious channels, a parchment bearing the symbol: That night, the servant would strike, and disappear like smoke; and the master would be found in the morning, throat cut, with the emblematic Flame Dagger of the Ishmaelians lying beside him. Others were chosen to serve in a different manner, maintaining the palace of Hassan i Sabbah himself at Alamout. These were especially fortunate, for it was their privilege to visit more often than others the Garden of Delights, in which the Lord Hassan himself would, through his command of magic chemicals, transfer them into heaven while they still lived in the body. One day in the year 470 (known to the uncircumcised Christian dogs as 1092 A.D.) another proof of the Lord Hassan's powers was given to them, for they were all summoned to the throne room and there sat the Lord Hassan in all his glory, while before him on the floor lay a plate bearing the head of the disciple Ibn Azif.

"This deluded one," the Lord Hassan declared, "has disobeyed a command— the one crime that cannot be forgiven in our Sacred Order. I show you his head to remind you of the fate of traitors in this world. More; I will instruct you on the fate of such dogs in the next world." So saying, the good and wise Lord Hassan rose from his throne, walking with his characteristic lurching gait, and approached the head. "I command thee," he said. "Speak."

The mouth opened and the head emitted a scream such that all the faithful covered their ears and turned their eyes away, many of them muttering prayers.

"Speak, dog!" the wise Lord Hassan repeated. "Your whine is of no interest to us. Speak!"

"The flames," the head cried. "The terrible flames. Allah, the flames . . ." it babbled on as a soul will in extreme agony. "Forgiveness," it begged. "Forgiveness, O mighty Lord."

"There is no forgiveness for traitors," said the all-wise Hassan. "Return to hell!" And the head immediately silenced. All bowed down and prayed to Hassan and Allah alike; of the many miracles they had seen this was certainly the greatest and most terrible.

The Lord Hassan then dismissed everyone, saying, "Forget not this lesson. Let it stay in your hearts longer than the names of your fathers."

("We want to recruit you," Hagbard said, 900-odd years later, "because you are so gullible. That is, gullible in the right way.")

Jesus Christ went by on a bicycle. That was my first warning that I shouldn't have taken acid before coming down to Balbo and Michigan to see the action. But it really seemed right, on another level: acid was the only way to relate to that whole Kafka-on-a-bummer example of quote democratic process in action unquote. I found Hagbard in Grant Park, cool as usual, with a bucket of water and a pile of handkerchiefs for the teargas victims. He was near the General Logan statue, watching the more violent confrontations across the street at the Hilton, sucking one of his Italian cigars and looking like Ahab finally finding the whale . . . Hagbard, in fact, was remembering Professor Tochus at Harvard: "Damn it, Celine, you can't major in naval engineering and law both. You're not Leonardo da Vinci, after all." "But I am," he had replied, poker-faced. "I recall all my past incarnations in detail and Leonardo was one of them." Tochus almost exploded: "Be a wise-ass, then! When you start flunking half your subjects, perhaps you'll come back to reality." The old man had been terribly disappointed to see the long row of As. Across the street, the demonstrators advanced toward the Hilton and the police charged again, clubbing them back; Hagbard wondered if Tochus had ever realized that a professor is a policeman of the intellect. Then he saw the Padre's new disciple, Moon, approaching. . . . "You haven't been clubbed yet," I said, thinking that in a sense Jarry's old presurrealist classic, "The Crucifixion of Christ Considered as an Uphill Bike Race," was really the best metaphor for the circus Daley was running. "Neither have you, I'm glad to see," Hagbard replied: "Judging from your eyes, though; you got teargassed in Lincoln Park last night." I nodded, remembering that I had been thinking of him and his weird Discordian yoga when it happened. Malik, the dumb social-democratic-liberal that John wanted to recruit soon, was only a few feet away, and Burroughs and Ginsberg were near me on the other side. I could see, suddenly, that we were all chessmen, but who was the chessmaster moving us? And how big was the board? Across the street, a rhinoceros moved ponderously, turning into a jeep with a barbed-wire crowd-sticker on the front of it. "My head's leaking," I said.

"Do you have any idea who's picking it up?" Hagbard asked. He was remembering a house lease in Professor Orlock's class. "What it amounts to, in English," Hagbard had said, "is that the tenant has no rights that can be successfully defended in court, and the landlord has no duties on which he cannot, quite safely, default." Orlock looked pained, and several students were shocked, as if Hagbard had suddenly jumped up and exposed his penis in front of the class. "That's putting it too baldly," Orlock said finally. . . . "It might be somebody years in the future," I said, "or the past." I wondered if Jarry was picking it up, in Paris, half a century before; that would account for the resemblance. Abbie Hoffman went by just then, talking to Apollonius of Tyana. Were we all in Jarry's mind, or Joyce's? We even have a Sheriff Wood riding herd on us and Rubin's horde of Jerry men. . . . "Fuller's car is a stunt, a showpiece," Professor Caligari fumed, "and, anyway, it has nothing to do with naval architecture." Hagbard looked at him levelly and said, "It has everything to do with naval architecture." As in law school, the other students were disturbed. Hagbard began to understand: they are not here to learn, they are here to acquire a piece of paper that would make them eligible for certain jobs....

"There are only a few more memos." Saul said to Mul-doon. "Let's skim them and then call headquarters to see if Danny found this 'Paf who wrote them,"

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #15

8/6

J.M.:

Here's the weirdest version of the Illuminati history that I've found so far. It's from a publication written, edited and published by somebody named Philip Campbell Argyle-Stuart, who holds that the conflicts in the world are due to an age-old war between Semitic "Khazar" peoples and Nordic "Faustian" peoples. This is the essence of his thinking:

My theory is that an extremely devilish imposed overcrust was added to the Khazar population consisting of humanoids who arrived by flying saucer from the planet Vulcan, which I assume to be not in intra-Mercurial orbit around the sun, but rather in the earth's orbit, behind the Sun, forever out of sight to earthlings, always six months behind or ahead of the earth in orbital travel....

Likewise for the Gothic Faustian Western Culture. The previously comparatively inert and purposeless migrating population streams known as Franks, Goths, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Swabians, Alemani, Lombards, Vandals, and Vikings suddenly had an overcrust added consisting of Norman-Martian-Varangians, arriving from Saturn by way of Mars in flying saucers. . . .

After 1776 it (the Khazar-Vulcanian conspiracy) used the Illuminati and Grand Orient Masons. After 1815 it used the financial machinations of the House of Rothschild and after 1848 the Communist movement and after 1895 the Zionist movement. . . .

One more thing needs to be mentioned. Mrs. Helena Petrovna Blavatski (nee Hahn in Germany), 1831-1891, founder of Theosophy . . . was both hypocritical and devilish, a true witch of great evil power allied with Illuminati, Grand Orient Masons, Russian Anarchists, British Israel Theorists, Proto-Zionists, Arabian Assassins and Thuggi from India.

Source: The High I.Q. Bulletin, Vol. IV, No. 1, January 1970. Published by Philip Campbell Argyle-Stuart, Colorado Springs, Colorado. I

Pat


"What was that word?" Private Celine asked eagerly.

"SNAFU," Private Pearson told him. "You mean to say you never heard it before?" He sat up in his bunk and stared.

"I'm a naturalized citizen," Hagbard said. "I was born in Norway." He pulled his shirt away from his back again; the Fort Benning summer was much too hot for the Nordic half of his genes. "Situation Normal, All Fucked Up," he repeated. "That really sums it up. That really says it."

"Wait'll you've been in This Man's Army a little longer," the black man told him vehemently. "Then you'll really appreciate the application of that word, dads. Oh, man, will you appreciate it."

"It's not just the army," Hagbard said thoughtfully. "It's the whole world."

Actually, after they immanentized the Eschaton, I found out where my head was leaking that night (and a few other nights, too.) Into poor George Dorn. The leak almost gave him water on the brain. He kept wondering where all that Joyce and surrealism was coming from. I'm seven years older than he is, that we're on the same valence because of similar grammar school experiences and revolutionary fathers. That's why Hagbard never really understood either of us, fully: he had private tutors until he hit college, and by that stage Official Education is beginning to make some partial concessions to reality so the victims have at least a chance of surviving on the outside. But I didn't know any of that in Grant Park that night or how the Army helped Hagbard understand college, because I was working out this new notion of the total valence of the set remaining constant. It would mean that I would have to leave when George came on, or say, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield had to do the pill or auto-wreck shticks before there was room for Racquel Welch's vibes.

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #16

8/7

J.M.:

I think I've found the clue as to how Zoroaster, flying saucers and all that lunatic-fringe stuff fits into the Illuminati puzzle. Dig this, boss-man:

The Nazi Party was founded as the political appendage of the Thule Society, an extremist fringe of the Illuminated Lodge of Berlin. This lodge, in turn, was made up of Rosicrucians -high Freemasons— and its preoccupation was mourning the death of the feudal system. Masons of this time were, like the Federalist Party in post-revolutionary America, working diligently to prevent "anarchy" and preserve the old values by bringing about Christian Socialism. Indeed, the Aaron Burr conspiracy, which Professor Hofstadter notes was allegedly Masonic in origin, was an American prototype of German intrigues of a century later. To their external scientific socialism these Masons added mystic concepts which were thought to be "gnostic" in origin. One of these was the concept of "Gnosticism" itself, called Illumination— which held that heavenly beings directly or indirectly gave humanity its great ideas and would come back to Earth after mankind had achieved sufficient progress. Illumination was a brand of Pentecostalism which was persecuted by orthodox Christianity for centuries and had become lodged in Freemasonry through a complex historical process which is impossible to explain without a major digression. It is sufficient to say that the Nazis, being "Illuminated," felt themselves to be divinely inspired and therefore felt justified in rewriting the rules of good and evil to suit their own purposes.

(According to Nazi theory) the heavenly beings, before the present Moon was captured, had lived on the highest ground, in Peru, Mexico, Condor (Ethiopia), Himalaya, Atlantis and Mu, forming the Uranian Confederation. This was taken quite seriously and British intelligence actually combated it with the Tolkien fantasy called the "Silmarillion," basis for the famous "Hobbit" books. . . .

Both J. Edgar Hoover and Congressman Otto Passman are high-ranking Masons and both, significantly, reflect this philosophy and its Manichean attitude. The chief danger in Masonic thinking aside from the "divine right of government" is, of course, Manicheanism, the belief that your opponent is opposing God's will and is therefore an agent of Satan. This is the extreme application and Mr. Hoover usually reserves it for "Godless Communism" but it is almost always present to some degree.

Source: "The Nazi Religion: Views on Religious Statism in Germany and America" by J. F. C. Moore, Libertarian American, Vol. III, No. 3, August 1969.

Pat


They were using Mace now, and I saw one photographer snapping a picture of a cop while the cop was still Macing him (Heisenberg rides again! From out of the west come the thundering hooves of the great hearse, Joint Phenomenon! Except that I was on acid; if I'd been on weed, then it would really, royally, be a Joint Phenomenon). And I heard later that the photographer got an award for that shot. Right then, he didn't look like he was getting an award. He looked like they had just taken off his skin and touched each raw nerve with a dentist's drill. "Christ," I said to Hagbard, "look at that poor bastard. I hope I come out of this with just another teargassing or two. I don't want any of that Mace." But acid is placid, you know, and a minute later I was on Joyce's juices again and thinking of a drama called 'Their Mace and My Gripes." I made the first line fruity, in honor of Padre Pederastia: "What a botch of a pair to plumb this hour's gripes."

"Bism'allah," Hagbard said. "Our karma is made by our deeds, not by our prayers. You're on the set, so you take the action as it comes."

"Oh, cut out that Holy Man craperoo and stop reading my mind," I protested. "You don't have to go on impressing me." But I was off on another tangent, which went something like this: If this set is Mayor Daley's circus, then Mayor Daley is the ringmaster. If the things below are the things above, as Hermes hermetically hinted, then this set is the bigger set. Mr. Microcosm, meet Mr. Macrocosm. "Hi, Mike!" "Hi, Mac." Conclusion: Mayor Daley, in a small way, is what Krishna is, in a large way. QED.

Just then some SDS kids who'd been teargassed across the street came running our way, and Hagbard got busy handing out wet handkerchiefs. They needed them: they were half-blind, like Joyce splitting his Adam into wise hopes. And I wasn't much help, because I was tod busy crying myself.

"Hagbard," I gasped in ecstasy. "Mayor Daley is Krishna."

"Worse luck for him," he said curtly, distributing the handkerchiefs. "He doesn't suspect it."

I thought, suddenly:

Hubert the Hump has coughed and hawked And spat on the streets that Lincoln walked

The water turned to blood (Hagbard was a joking jolting Jesus: you expected wine maybe?) and I remembered my mother's story about Dillinger at the Biograph. We all sit there, like him, in the Biograph Theatre, dreaming the drama of our lives, then walk outside to the grandmotherly kindness of the lead kisses that wake us back to our slipping beatitude. Except that he found a way to come back. What was it Charley Mordecai said: "First as tragedy, then as farce?" Marxism-Lennonism: Ed Sanders of the Fugs, the night before, talking about fucking in the streets as if he had read my mind (or had I read his?) and Lennon's "Why Don't We Do It in the Road" was recorded a year in the future. The Marx and our groupies. The bloody handkerchiefs dipped into water, or wine, and the mass rite went on, the mass went Right On, the Mace they rowed. Capone set it up for the Feds, but John was fed up and left the set, so an extra named Frank Sullivan got the bullets. The Autobiograph Theatre, a drama house and a trauma, yes. I maybe should have taken only half a tab instead of the full 500 mikes, because at that point the SDS kids, all of them siding with RYM-I at the split next year, looked like they had altarboy robes on and I thought Hagbard was distributing communion wafers, not handkerchiefs. He looked at me, suddenly, with that hawk-faced Egyptian glare, and I observed that he had observed, Hopalong Horus Heisenberg, just where I was at You don't have to be a waterman, I thought, to know which way my mind is blowing.

There was a sound from the crowd, like a subway opening all its doors with a suck of air, and I saw the police coming, crossing the street to clear the park.

"Here we go again," I said. "All hail Discordia,"

"Snafu ueber alles," Hagbard grinned, starting to trot beside me.

We headed North, figuring that the ones who retreated eastward would get trapped against the wall and creamed. "Democracy in action," I said, panting along.

'There thou might'st behold the very image of Authority," he quoted, shifting his water bucket to keep it in balance. I caught the Shakespearean reference and looked back: my mind had already: each policeman indeed looked like Shakespeare's dog. I remembered the frantic semantics at the LBJ anti-birthday party, when Burroughs insisted Chicago Cops were more like dogs than pigs, in contradiction to the SDS rhetoric. Terry Southern, taking his usual maniacal middle course, claimed they were more akin to the purple-assed mandrill, most surly of the baboon family. But most of them hadn't discovered writing yet.

"Authority?" I asked, realizing I'd lost something along the way. We were slowing to a walk, the action was behind us.

"A is not A," Hagbard explained with that tiresome patience of his. "Once you accept A is A, you're hooked. Literally hooked, addicted to the System."

I caught the references to Aristotle, the old man of the tribe with his unfortunate epistemological paresis, and also to that feisty little lady I always imagine is really the lost Anastasia, but I still didn't grok. "What do you mean?" I asked, grabbing a wet handkerchief as some of the teargas started to drift to our end of the park.

"Chairman Mao didn't say half of it," Hagbard replied holding a handkerchief to his own face. His words came through muffled: "It isn't only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So does a whole definition of reality. A set. And the action that has to happen on that particular set and on none other."

"Don't be so bloody patronizing," I objected, looking around a corner in time and realizing this was the night I would be Maced. "That's just Marx: the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ideology of the whole society."

"Not the ideology. The Reality." He lowered his handkerchief. "This was a public park until they changed the definition. Now, the guns have changed the Reality. It isn't a public park. There's more than one kind of magic."

"Just like the Enclosure Acts," I said hollowly. "One day the land belonged to the people. The next day it belonged to the landlords."

"And like the Narcotics Acts," he added. "A hundred thousand harmless junkies became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress, in nineteen twenty-seven. Ten years later, in thirty-seven, all the pot-heads in the country became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. And they really were criminals, when the papers were signed. The guns prove it. Walk away from those guns, waving a joint, and refuse to halt when they tell you. Their Imagination will become your Reality in a second."

And I had my answer to Dad, finally, just as a cop jumped out of the darkness screaming something about freaking motherfucking fag commies and Maced me, as was certain to happen (I knew it as I crumbled in pain) on that set.

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #16

8/7

J.M.:

Here's some more info on how Blavatsky, theosophy and the motto under the great pyramid on the U.S. Seal fit into the Illuminati picture (or don't fit into the picture. It's getting more confusing the further I dig into it!) This is an article defending Madame Blavatsky, after Truman Capote had repeated the John Birch Society's charge that Sirhan Sirhan was inspired to murder Robert Kennedy by reading Blavatsky's works: "Sirhan Blavatsky Capote" by Ted Zatlyn, Los Angeles Free Press, July 26, 1968:

Birchers that attack Madame Blavatsky, though smaller in number and as crazy as ever, find a new home in an atmosphere of suspicion and violence. Truman Capote takes them seriously. . . .

Does Mr. Capote know that the Illuminati (according to sacred Birch doctrine) began in the Garden of Eden when Eve made it with the snake and gave birth to Cain? That all the descendants of snake-man Cain belong to a super-secret group known as the Illuminati, dedicated to absolutely nothing but the meanest low down evil imagined in the Satanic mind of man?

Anti-Illuminati John Steinbacher writes in his unpublished book, Novus Ordo Seclorum (The New Order of the Ages): "Today in America, many otherwise talented people are flirting with disaster by associating with those same evil forces . . . Madame Blavatsky's doctrine was strikingly similar to that of Weishaupt. . . ."

The author also gives his version of the Bircher's version of what the Illuminati are actually trying to accomplish:

Their evil goal is to transcend materiality, and to bring about one world, denying the sovereignty of nations and the sanctity of private property.

I don't think I can believe, or even understand, this, but at least it explains how both the Nazis and the Communists can be pawns of the Illuminati. Or does it?

Pat


"Property is theft," Hagbard said, passing the peace pipe.

"If the BIA helps those real estate developers take our land," Uncle John Feather said, "that will be theft. But if we keep the land, that is certainly not theft."

Night was falling in the Mohawk reservation, but Hagbard saw Sam Three Arrows nod vigorously in the gloom of the small cabin. He felt, again, that American Indians were the hardest people in the world to understand. His tutors had given him a cosmopolitan education, in every sense of the word, and he usually found no blocks in relating to people of any culture, but the Indians did puzzle him at times. After five years of specializing in handling the legal battles of various tribes against the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the land pirates it served, he was still conscious that these people's heads were someplace he couldn't yet reach. Either they were the simplest, or the most sophisticated, society on the planet; maybe, he thought, they were both, and the ultimate simplicity and the ultimate sophistication are identical.

"Property is liberty," Hagbard said. "I am quoting the same man who said property is theft. He also said property is impossible. I speak from the heart. I wish you to understand why I take this case. I wish you to understand in fullness."

Sam Three Arrows drew on the pipe, then raised his dark eyes to Hagbard's. "You mean that justice is not known like a dog who barks in the night? That it is more like the unexpected sound in the woods that must be identified cautiously after hard thinking?"

There it was again: Hagbard had heard the same concreteness of imagery in the speech of the Shoshone at the opposite end of the continent. He wondered, idly, if Ezra Pound's poetry might have been influenced by habits of speech his father acquired from the Indians—Homer Pound had been the first white man born in Idaho. It certainly went beyond the Chinese. And it came, not from books on rhetoric, but from listening to the heart— the Indian metaphor he had himself used a minute ago.

He took his time about answering: he was beginning to acquire the Indian habit of thinking a long while before speaking.

"Property and justice are water," he said finally. "No man can hold them long. I have spent many years in courtrooms, and I have seen property and justice change when a man speaks, change as the caterpillar changes to the butterfly. Do you understand me? I thought I had victory in my hands, and then the judge spoke and it went away. Like water running through the fingers."

Uncle John Feather nodded. "I understand. You mean we will lose again. We are accustomed to losing. Since George Washington promised us these lands 'as long as the mountain stands and the grass is green,' and then broke his promise and stole part of them back in ten years— in ten years, my friend!— we have lost, always lost. We have one acre left of each hundred promised to us then."

"We may not lose," Hagbard said. "I promise you, the BIA will at least know they have been in a fight this time. I learn more tricks, and get nastier, each time I go into a courtroom. I am very tricky and very nasty by now. But I am less sure of myself than I was when I took my first case. I no longer understand what I am fighting. I have a word for it— the Snafu Principle, I call it— but I do not understand what it is."

There was another pause. Hagbard heard the lid on the garbage can in back of the cabin rattling: that was the raccoon that Uncle John Feather called Old Grandfather come to steal his evening dinner. Property was theft, certainly, in Old Grandfather's world, Hagbard thought.

"I am also puzzled," Sam Three Arrows said finally. "I worked, long ago, in New York City, in construction, like many young men of the Mohawk Nation. I found that whites were often like us, and I could not hate them one at a time. But they do not know the earth or love it. They do not speak from the heart, usually. They do not act from the heart. They are more like the actors on the movie screen. They play roles. And their leaders are not like our leaders. They are not chosen for virtue, but for their skill at playing roles. Whites have told me this, in plain words. They do not trust their leaders, and yet they follow them. When we do not trust a leader, he is finished. Then, also, the leaders of the whites have too much power. It is bad for a man to be obeyed too often. But the worst thing is what I have said about the heart. Their leaders have lost it and they have lost mercy. They speak from somewhere else. They act from somewhere else. But from where? Like you, I do not know. It is, I think, a kind of insanity." He looked at Hagbard and added politely. "Some are different."

It was a long speech for him, and it stirred something in Uncle John Feather. "I was in the army," he said. "We went to fight a bad white man, or so the whites told us. We had meetings that were called orientation and education. There were films. It was to show us how this bad white man was doing terrible things in his country. Everybody was angry after the films, and eager to fight. Except me. I was only there because the army paid more than an Indian can earn anywhere else. So I was not angry, but puzzled. There was nothing that this white leader did that the white leaders in this country do not also do. They told us about a place named Lidice. It was much like Wounded Knee. They told us of families moved thousands of miles to be destroyed. It was much like the Trail of Tears. They told us of how this man ruled his nation, so that none dared disobey him. It was much like the way white men work in corporations in New York City, as Sam has described it to me. I asked another soldier about this, a black white man. He was easier to talk to than the regular white man. I asked him what he thought of the orientation and education. He said it was shit, and he spoke from the heart! I thought about it a long time, and I knew he was right. The orientation and education was shit. When the men from the BIA come here to talk, it is the same. Shit. But let me tell you this: the Mohawk Nation is losing its soul. Soul is not like breath or blood or bone and it can be taken in ways no man understands. My grandfather had more soul than I have, and the young men have less than me. But I have enough soul to talk to Old Grandfather, who is a raccoon now. He thinks as a raccoon and he is worried about the raccoon nation, more than I am worried about the Mohawk Nation. He thinks the raccoon nation will die soon, and all the nations of the free and wild animals. That is a terrible thing and it frightens me. When the nations of the animals die, the earth will also die. That is an old teaching and I cannot doubt it. I see it happening, already. If they steal more of our land to build that dam, more of our soul will die, and more of the souls of the animals will die! The earth will die, and the stars will no longer shine! The Great Mother herself may die!" The old man was crying unashamedly. "And it will be because men do not speak words but speak shit!"

Hagbard had turned pale beneath his olive skin. "You're coming into court," he said slowly, "and you're going to tell the judge that, in exactly those words."

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #17

8/8

J.M.: You may remember that the East Village Other's chart of the Illuminati Conspiracy (Memo #9) listed "The Holy Vehm" as an Illuminati front. I have finally found out what The Holy Vehm is (or, rather was). My source is Eliphas Levy's History of Magic, op. cit., pages 199-200:

They were a kind of secret police, having the right of life and death. The mystery which surrounded their judgments, the swiftness of their executions, helped to impress the imagination of people still in barbarism. The Holy Vehm assumed gigantic proportions; men shuddered in describing apparitions of masked persons, of summonses nailed to the doors of nobles in the very midst of their watch-guards and their orgies, of brigand chiefs found dead with the terrible cruciform dagger in their breasts and on the scroll attached thereto an extract from the sentence of the Holy Vehm. The Tribunal affected most fantastic forms of procedure: the guilty person, cited to appear at some discredited cross-road, was taken to the assembly by a man clothed in black, who bandaged his eyes and led him forward in silence. This occurred invariably at some unseemly hour of the night, for judgment was never pronounced except at midnight. The criminal was carried into a vast underground vault, where he was questioned by one voice. The hoodwink was removed, the vault was illuminated in all its depth and height, and the Free Judges sat masked and wearing black vestures.

The Code of the Vehmic Court was found in the ancient archives of Westphalia and has been printed in the Reichstheater of Muller, under the following title: "Code and Statutes of the Holy Secret Tribunal of Free Courts and Free Judges of Westphalia, established in the. year 772 by the Emperor Charlemagne and revised in 1404 by King Robert, who made those alterations and additions requisite for the administration of justice in the tribunals of the illuminated, after investing them with his own authority."

A note on the first page forbade any profane person to glance at the book under penalty of death. The word "illuminated", here given to the associates of the Secret Tribunal, unfolds their entire mission: they had to track down in the shadows those who worshipped the darkness; they counterchecked mysteriously those who conspired against society in favour of mystery; but they were themselves the secret soldiers of light, who cast the light of day on criminal plottings, and it is this which was signified by a sudden splendour illuminating the Tribunal when it pronounced sentence.

So now we have to add Charlemagne to the list of the Illuminated— along with Zoroaster, Joachim of Floris, Jefferson, Washington, Aaron Burr, Hitler, Marx, and Ma-dame Blavatsky. Could this all be a hoax?

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #18

8/9

J.M.:

My last memo may have been too hasty in using the past tense in speaking about the Holy Vehm. I find that Darual thinks they may still exist (History of Secret Societies, op. cit., p. 211):

These terrible courts were never formally abolished. They were reformed by various monarchs, but even in the nineteenth century it was said that they still existed, though very much underground. The Nazi werewolves and resistance organizations fighting the Communist occupation of East Germany claimed that they were carrying on the tradition of the "Chivalrous and Holy Vehm." Perhaps they still are.

Pat


Federal Court for the 17th District of New York State. Plaintiffs: John Feather, Samuel Arrows, et al. Defendants: Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior, and President of the United States. For plaintiffs: Hagbard Celine. For the defendants: George Kharis, John Alucard, Thomas Moriarity, James Moran. Presiding: Justice Quasimodo Immhotep.

MR. FEATHER (concluding): And it will be because men do not speak words but speak shit!

MR. KHARIS: Your honor, I move that the last speech be stricken from the record as irrelevant and immaterial. We are dealing here with a practical question, the need of the people of New York for this dam, and Mr. Feather's superstitions are totally beside the point.

MR. CELINE: Your honor, the people of New York have survived a long time without a dam in that particular place. They can survive longer without it. Can anything survive, anything worth having, if our words become, as Mr. Feather says, excrement? Can anything we can reasonably call American Justice survive, if the words of our first President, if the sacred honor of George Washington is destroyed, if his promise that the Mohawk could keep these lands "as long as the mountain stands and the grass is green," if all that becomes nothing but excrement?

MR. KHARIS: Counsel is not arguing. Counsel is making speeches.

MR. CELINE: I am speaking from the heart. Are you— or are you speaking excrement that you are ordered to speak by your superiors?

MR. ALUCARD: More speeches.

MR. CELINE: More excrement

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Control yourself, Mr. Celine.

MR. CELINE: I am controlling myself. Otherwise, I would speak as frankly as my client and say that most of the speeches here are plain old shit. Why do I say "excrement" at all, if it isn't, tike you people, to disguise a little what we are all doing? It's shit. Plain shit.

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Mr. Celine, you are coming very close to contempt of court. I warn you.

MR. CELINE: Your honor, we speak the tongue of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Melville. Must we go on murdering it? Must we tear it away from its last umbilical connection with reality? What is going on in this room, actually? Defendants, the U.S. government and its agents, want to steal some land from my clients. How long do we have to argue that they have no justice, no right, no honor, in their cause? Why can't we say highway robbery is highway robbery, instead of calling it eminent domain? Why can't we say shit is shit, instead of calling it excrement? Why do we never use language to convey meaning? Why must we always use it conceal meaning? Why do we never speak from the heart? Why do we always speak words programmed into us, like robots?

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Mr. Celine, I warn you again.

MR. FEATHER: And I warn you. The world will die. The stars will go out. If men and women cannot trust the words spoken, the earth will crack, like a rotten pumpkin.

MR. KHARIS: I call for a recess. Plaintiff and their counsel are both in no emotional state to continue at this time.

MR. CELINE: You even have guns. You have men with guns and clubs, who are called marshals, and they will beat me if I don't shut up. How do you differ from any other gang of bandits, then, except in using language that conceals what you are doing? The only difference is that the bandits are more honest. That's the only difference. The only difference.

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP : Mr. Marshal, restrain the counsel.

MR. CELINE: You're stealing what isn't yours. Why can't you talk turkey for just one moment? Why—

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Just hold him, Marshal. Don't use unnecessary force. Mr. Celine, I am tempted to forgive you, considering that you are obviously much involved with your clients, emotionally. However, such mercy on my part would encourage other lawyers to believe they could follow your example. I have no choice. I find you guilty of contempt of court. Sentencing will take place when court reconvenes after a fifteen-minute recess. You may speak at that time, but only on any mitigating grounds that should lighten the degree of your sentence. I will not hear the United States government called bandits again. That is all.

MR. CELINE: You steal land, and you will not hear yourselves called bandits. You order men with guns and clubs to hold us down, and you will not hear yourselves called thugs. You don't act from the heart; where the hell do you act from? What in God's name does motivate you?

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Restrain him, Marshal.

MR. CELINE: (Indistinguishable.)

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Fifteen-minute recess.

BAILIFF: All rise.

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #19

8/9

J.M.:

I wish you would explain to me how your interest in the numbers 5 and 23 fit in with this Illuminati project.

This is all I've been able to unearth so far on the number mystery, and I hope you find it enlightening. It's from a book of mathematical and logical paradoxes: How to Torture Your Mind, edited by Ralph L. Woods, Funk and Wagnalls, New York, 1969, page 128.

2 and 3 are even and odd;

2 and 3 are 5;

Therefore, 5 is both even and odd.

The damned book, by the way, provides no solutions to the paradoxes. I could sense the fallacy in that one right away, but it took me hours (and a headache) before I could state it in precise words. Hope this helps you. Anyway, for me, it was a relief from the really frightening stuff I've been tracking down lately.

Pat


There were two further memos in the box, on different stationeries and by different typewriters. The first was brief:

April 4

RESEARCH DEPARTMENT:

I am seriously concerned about Pat's absence from the office, and the fact that she doesn't answer the phone when we call her. Would you send somebody to her apartment to talk to the landlord and try to find out what has happened to her?

Joe Malik Editor


The last memo was the oldest in the lot and already yellowing at the edges. It said:

Dear Mr. "Mallory:"

The information and books, you requested are enclosed, at length. In case you are rushed, here is a quick summary.

1. Billy Graham was in Australia, making public appearances all through last week. There is no way he could have gotten to Chicago.

2. Satanism and witchcraft both still exist in the modern world. The two are often confused by orthodox Christian writers, but objective observers agree that there is a difference. Satanism is a Christian heresy— the ultimate heresy, one might say— but witchcraft is pre-Christian in origin and has nothing to do with the Christian God or the Christian Devil. The witches worship a goddess called Dana or Tana (who goes back to the Stone Age probably).

3. The John Dillinger Died For You Society has its headquarters in Mad Dog, Texas, but was founded in Austin, Texas several years ago. It's some kind of poker-faced joke and is affiliated with the Bavarian Illuminati, another bizarre bunch at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. The Illuminati pretend to be a cabal of conspirators who run the whole world behind the scenes. If you suspect either of these groups of being involved in something sinister, you have probably just fallen for one of their put-ons.

W.H.


"So this thing was already linked to Mad Dog several years ago," Saul said thoughtfully. "And Malik was already assuming an alternative identity, since the letter is obviously addressed to him. And, also as I've begun to suspect as we read this stuff, the Illuminati have their own brand of humor."

"Deduce me one more deduction," Barney said. "Who the hell is this W.H.?"

"People have been asking that for three hundred years," Saul said absently.

"Huh?"

"I'm being whimsical. Shakespeare's sonnets are dedicated to a Mr. W.H., but I don't think we have to worry that this is the same one. This case is as nutty as a-squirrel's dinner, but I don't really think it's that nutty." He added, "We can be grateful for one thing at least: the Illuminati doesn't really run the world. They're just trying."

Barney frowned, perplexed. "How did you make that one?"

"Simple. Same way I know they're a right-wing organization, not left-wing."

"We're not all geniuses," Barney said. "Take it a step at a time, will you?"

"How many contradictions did you spot in these memos? I counted thirteen. This researcher, Pat, saw it, too: the evidence is deliberately warped and twisted. All of it— not just that East Village Other chart— is a mixture of fact and fiction." Saul lit his pipe and settled back in his chair (in 1921, reading Arthur Conan Doyle, he first began playing these scenes, in imagination).

"In the first place, either the Illuminati want publicity or they don't. If they control everything, and want publicity, they'd be on billboards more often than Coca-Cola and on TV more often than Lucille Ball. On the other hand, if they control everything, and don't want publicity, none of these magazines and books would have survived— they would have disappeared from libraries, book stores and publisher's warehouses. This researcher, Pat, never would have found them.

"In the second place, if you want to recruit people into a conspiracy, besides idealism and whatever other noble motives you might exploit in them, you would always exploit hope. You would exaggerate the size and power of the conspiracy, because most people want to join the winning side. Therefore, all assertions about the actual strength of the Illuminati should be regarded, a fortiori, as suspect, like the voters' polls released by candidates before elections.

"Finally, it always pays to frighten the opposition. Therefore a conspiracy will exhibit the same behavior that ethnologists have observed in animals under attack: it will puff itself up and try to look bigger. In short, potential or actual recruits and potential and actual enemies will both be given the same false impression: that the Illuminati is twice, or ten times, or a hundred times, its actual size. This is logical, but my first point was empirical— the memos do exist— and therefore logic and empiricism confirm each other: the Illuminati are not able to control everything. What then? They've been around a long time and they are as tireless as the Russian mathematician who worked out pi to the one-thousandth place. The probability, then, is that they control some things and influence a hell of a lot more. This probability increases as you think back over the memos. The two chief Arabic branches— the Hashishim and the Roshinaya— were both wiped out; the Italian Illuminati were 'crushed' in 1507; Weishaupt's order was suppressed by the Bavarian government in 1785; and so forth. If they were behind the French Revolution, they influenced rather than controlled, because Napoleon undid everything the Jacobins started. That they had a hand in both Soviet Communism and German Fascism is plausible, considering the many similarities between the two; but if they controlled both, why did the two take opposite sides in the Second World War? And, if they ran both the Federalist party, through Washington, and the Democratic Republicans, through Jefferson, what was the purpose of the Aaron Burr counterrevolution, which they are also supposed to be behind? The picture I get is not a grand Puppet Master moving everybody on invisible strings, but some sort of million-armed octopus —a millepus, let's call it— constantly reaching out tentacles, and often drawing back nothing but a bloody stump, crying, 'Foiled again!'

"But the millepus is very busy and quite resourceful. If it controlled the planet, it could choose either operating in the open or retaining secrecy, but since it doesn't have that omnipotence yet, it must choose to be as anonymous as possible. Therefore, many of its tentacles will be probing around in the areas of publication and communications. It wants to know when somebody is investigating it or getting ready to publicize an investigation he has already completed. Finding such a person, it then has two choices: kill him or neutralize him. Killing may be resorted to in certain emergencies, but will be avoided when possible: you never know when a person of that sort has stashed extra copies of his documents in various unexpected places to be released in the event of his death. Neutralization is best, almost always."

Saul paused to relight his pipe, and Muldoon thought, The most unrealistic aspect of Doyle's stories is Watson's admiration at these moments. I'm just irritated, because he makes me feel like a chump for not seeing it myself. "Go ahead," he said gruffly, saving his own deductions until Saul was finished.

"The best form of neutralization is recruitment, of course. But any crude and hurried effort at recruitment is known as 'taking your pants down" in the espionage business because it makes you more vulnerable. The safest approach is gradual recruitment, disguised as something else. The best disguise, of course, is the pretense of helping the subject in his investigation. This also opens the second, and preferable, option, which is leading him on a wild goose chase. Sending him looking for Illuminati in organizations which they have never really infiltrated. Feeding him balderdash like that stuff about the Illuminati coming from the planet Vulcan or being descended from Eve and the Serpent. Best of all, though, is telling him the purpose of the conspiracy is something other than it actually is, especially if the story you sell him is in keeping with his own ideals, since this can then shade over into recruitment.

"Now, the sources this Pat unearthed mostly seem to come to one of two conclusions: the Illuminati doesn't exist anymore, or the Illuminati is virtually identical with Russian Communism. The first I reject because Malik and Pat have both disappeared and two buildings, one here in New York and one way down in Mad Dog, have been bombed in a series palpably linked with an investigation of the Illuminati. You've already accepted that, but the next step is just as obvious. If the Illuminati tries to distort whatever publicity cannot be avoided, then we should look at the idea that the Illuminati is communist-oriented as skeptically as we look at the idea that they don't even exist.

"So, let's look at the opposite hypothesis. Could the Illuminati be a far-right or fascist group? Well, if Malik's information was in any way accurate, they seem to have some kind of special headquarters or central office in Mad Dog— and that's Ku Klux and God's Lightning territory. Also, whatever their history before Adam Weishaupt, they seem to have gone through some reformation and revitalization under his leadership. He was a German and an ex-Catholic, just like Hitler. One of his Illuminated Lodges survived long enough to recruit Hitler in 1923, according to a memo that might be the most accurate one in the lot for all we know. Considering the proclivities of the German character, Weishaupt could likely be an anti-Semite. Most historians I've read on Nazi Germany agree to at least the possibility that there was a 'secret doctrine' which only the top Nazis shared among themselves and didn't tell the rest of the party. That doctrine might be pure Illuminism. Take up the many links between Illuminism and Freemasonry, and the known anti-Catholicism of the Masonic movement— add in the fact that ex-Catholics are frequently bitter against the church, and both Weishaupt and Hitler were ex-Catholics—and we get a hypothetical anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, semi-mystical doctrine that

would sell equally well in Germany and in parts of America. Finally, while some left-extremists might want to kill the Kennedys and Reverend King, all three were more likely targets for right-wingers; and the Kennedys would be especially abhorrent to anti-Catholic rightists.

"A last point," Saul said. "Consider the left-wing orientation of Confrontation, The editor, Malik, would probably not give much credence to most of the sources quoted in the memos, since the majority are from rightist publications, and most of them allege that the Illuminati is a leftist plot. His most probable reaction would be to dismiss this as another right-wing paranoia, unless he had other sources besides his own Research Department. Notice how cagey he is. He doesn't tell his associate editor, Peter Jackson, anything about the Illuminati itself— just that he wants a new investigation of the last decade's assassinations. The bottom memo is so old and yellow it suggests he got his first clue several years ago, but didn't act. Pat asks him why he's hiding all this from the reporter, George Dorn. Finally, he disappears. He was getting information from some place else, and it revealed a plot he could believe in and really fear. That would probably be a Fascist plot, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-Negro."

Muldoon grinned. For once I don't have to play Watson, he thought. "Brilliant," he said. "You never cease to amaze me, Saul. Would you glance at this, though, and tell me how it fits in?" He handed over a piece of paper. "I found it in a book on Malik's bedside table."

The paper was a brief scrawl in the same handwriting as the occasional jottings on the bottoms of Pat's memos:

Pres. Garfield, killed by Charles Guiteau, a Roman Catholic. Pres. McKinley, ditto by Leon Czolgosz, a Roman Catholic. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, attempted assassination by John Shrank, a Roman Catholic. Pres. Franklin Roosevelt, attempted assassination by Giuseppe Zangara, a Roman Catholic. Pres. Harry Truman, attempted assassination by Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo, two Roman Catholics. Pres. Woodrow Wilson, somewhat mysterious death while tended by a Roman Catholic nurse. Pres. Warren Harding, another mysterious death (one rumor: it was suicide), also attended by a Catholic nurse. Pres. John Kennedy, assassination inadequately explained. Head of CIA then was John McCone, a Roman Catholic, who helped write the inconclusive and contradictory Warren Report.

(House of Representatives, March 1, 1964—five Congressmen wounded by Lebron-Miranda-Codero-Rod-riguez assassination squad, all Roman Catholics.)


When Saul looked up, Barney said pleasantly, "I found it in a book, like I said. The book was Rome's Responsibility for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by General Thomas M. Harris. Harris points out that John Wilkes Booth, the Suratt family, and all the other conspirators were Catholics, and argues they are acting under orders from the Jesuits." Barney paused to enjoy Saul's expression and went on, "It occurs to me that, using your principle that most of the memos are full of false leads, we might question the idea that the Illuminati uses the Masons as a front to gather recruits. They would probably need some similar organization, though— one that exists all over the world, has mysterious rites and secrets, inner orders to which a select few are recruited, and a pyramidal authoritarian structure compelling everybody to take commands from above whether they understand them or not. One such organization is the Roman Catholic church."

Saul picked up his pipe from the floor. He didn't seem to remember having dropped it. "My turn to say, 'brilliant,' " he murmured finally. "Are you going to stop going to Mass on Sunday? Do you really believe it?"

Muldoon laughed. "After twenty years," he said, "I finally did it. I got one jump ahead of you. Saul, you were standing face-to-face with the truth, eyeball-to-eyeball, nose-to-nose, mouth-to-mouth— but you were so close that your eyes crossed and you saw it backward. No, it's not the Catholic church. You made a good guess in saying it was anti-Catholic as well as anti-Jewish and anti-Negro. But it's inside the Catholic church and always has been. In fact, the church's efforts to root it out have given Holy Mother Rome a very unfortunate reputation for paranoia and hysteria. Its agents make a special effort to enter the priesthood, in order to obtain holy objects for use in their own bizarre rites. They also try to rise as high in the church as they can, to destroy it from within. Many times they have recruited and corrupted whole parishes, whole orders of clergy, even whole provinces. They probably got to Weishaupt when he was still a Jesuit— they've infiltrated that order several times in history and the Dominicans even more. If caught in criminal acts, they make sure that their cover Catholicism, and not their true faith, is publicized, just like this list of assassins. Their God is called the Light-Bearer and that's probably where the word 'illumination' comes from. And Malik asked about them a long time ago and was told by this W.H., quite correctly, that they still exist. I'm talking about the Satanists, of course."

"Of course," Saul repeated softly, "of course. That pentagon that keeps popping up— it's the middle of the pentacle for summoning the Devil. Fascism is only their political facet. Basically, they're a theology— or an anti-theology, I guess. But what in hell— literally in hell— is their ultimate objective, then?"

"Don't ask me," Barney shrugged. "I can follow my brother when he talks about the history of Satanism, but not when he tries to explain its motivations. He uses technical theological terms about 'immanentizing the Eschaton,' but all I can understand is that it has something to do with bringing on the end of the world."

Saul turned ashen. "Barney," he cried, "my God. Fernando Poo!"

"But that was settled—"

"That's just it. Their usual technique of the false front. The real threat is coming from somewhere else, and they mean to do it this time."

Muldoon shook his head. "But they must be crazy!"

"Everybody is crazy," Saul said patiently, "if you don't understand his motives." He held up his tie. "Imagine you arrive in a flying saucer from Mars— or from Vulcan, like the Illuminati did according to one of our allegedly reliable sources. You see me get up this morning and for no clear reason wrap this cloth around my neck, in spite of the heat. What explanation can you think of? I'm a fetishist— a nut, in other words. Most human behavior is that sort, not oriented to survival but some symbol-system that people believe in. Long hair, short hair, fish on Friday, no pork, rising when the judge enters the room— all symbols, symbols, symbols. Sure the Illuminati are crazy, from our point of view. From their point of view, we're crazy. If we can find out what they believe, what their symbols mean to them, we'll understand why they want to kill most of the rest of us, or all of the rest of us. Barney, call your brother. Get him out of bed. I want to find out more about Satanism."
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 2:17 am

Part 2 of 3

("The devil!" the President shouted on March 27. "Nuclear war over an insignificant place like Fernando Poo? You must be mental. The American people are tired of our army policing the whole world. Let Equatorial Guinea fish its own nuts out of the troubled waters, or whatever that expression is." "Wait," said the Director of the CIA, "let me show you these aerial photographs . . .")

Back at the Watergate, G. Gordon Liddy carefully aims his pistol and shoots out the streetlight: in memory, he is in an old castle at Millbrook, New York, eagerly searching for naked women and not finding any. Beside him Professor Timothy Leary is saying with maddening serenity, "But science is the most ecstatic kick of all. The intelligence of the galaxy is revealed in every atom, every gene, every cell." We'll get him back, Liddy thinks savagely, if we have to assassinate the whole Swiss government. That man is not going to remain free. Beside him, Bernard Barker shifts nervously as in right-angular time a future president metamorphoses the plumbers into the cesspool cleaners: but now, inside the Watergate, the Illuminati bug is unnoticed by those planting the CREEP bug, although both were subsequently found by the technicians installing the BUGGER bug. "It's the same Intelligence, making endlessly meaningful patterns," Dr. Leary goes on enthusiastically. ("Here, kitty-kitty," Hagbard repeats for the 109th time.)

"The devil?" Father James Augustine Muldoon repeated. "Well, that's a very complicated story. Do you want me to go all the way back to Gnosticism?"

Saul, listening on the extension phone, nodded a vigorous affirmative.

"Go as far back as you have to," Barney said. "This is a complicated matter we're trying to untangle here."

"OK, I'll try to remember you're not in my theology class at Fordham and keep this as brief as I can." The priest's voice faded, then came back— probably he was shifting the phone as he got out of bed and moved to a chair, Saul guessed.

"There were many approaches to Gnosticism," the voice went on in a moment, "all of them centered on gnosis—direct experience of God— as distinguished from mere knowledge about God. The search for gnosis, or illumination as it was sometimes called, took many odd forms, some of them probably similar to Oriental yogas and some of them using the very same drugs that modern rebels against the slow path of orthodox religion have rediscovered. Naturally, with such a variety of paths to gnosis, different pilots would land at different ports, each insisting he had found the real New Jerusalem. Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries. But I digress.

"What you're interested in, I guess, is Cainism and Manicheanisra. The former regarded Cain as a specially holy figure because he was the first murderer. You have to be a mystic yourself to understand that kind of logic. The notion was that, by bringing murder into the world, Cain created an opportunity for people to renounce murder. But, then, other Cainites went further— paradox always seems to breed more paradox and heresy creates more heresy— and ended up glorifying murder, along with all the other sins. The credo was that you should commit every sin possible, just to give yourself a chance to win a really difficult redemption after repenting. Also, it gave God a chance to be especially generous when He forgave you. Related ideas popped up in Tantric Buddhism about the same time, and it's a great historical mystery which group of lunatics, East or West, was influencing the other. Does any of this help you so far?"

"A bit," Barney said.

"About this gnosis," Saul asked, "is it the orthodox theological position that the illuminations or visions were actually coming from the Devil and not from God?"

"Yes. That's where Manicheanism enters the picture," Father Muldoon said. "The Manicheans made exactly the same charge against the orthodox church. According to their way of looking at it, the God of orthodox Christianity and orthodox Judaism, was the Devil. The god they contacted through their own peculiar rites was the real god. This, of course, is still the teaching of Satanists today."

"And," Saul asked, begining to intuit what the answer would be, "what has all this to do with atomic energy?"

"With atomic energy? Nothing at all. . .at least, nothing that I can see. . . ."

"Why is Satan called the light-bringer?" Saul plunged on, convinced he was on the right track.

"The Manicheans reject the physical universe," the priest said slowly. "They say that the true god, their god, would never lower himself to mess around with matter. The God who created the world- our God, Jehovah— they call panurgia, which has the connotations of a kind of blind, stupid blundering force rather than a truly intelligent being. The realm which their god inhabits is pure spirit of pure light. Hence, he is called the light-bringer, and this universe is always called the realm of darkness. But they didn't know about atomic energy in those days— did they?" The last sentence had started as a statement and ended as a question.

"That's what I'm wondering," Saul said. "Atomic power releases a lot of light, doesn't it? And it sure would immanentize the Eschaton if enough atomic power was unleashed at once, wouldn't it?"

"Fernando Poo!" the priest exclaimed. "Is this connected with Fernando Poo?"

"I'm beginning to think so," Saul said. "I'm also beginning to think we've stayed in one place a long time, using a phone that is almost certainly tapped. We better get moving. Thanks, Father."

"You're quite welcome, although I'm sure I don't know what you're getting at," the priest said. "If you think Satanists control the United States government a few priests would agree with you, especially the Berrigan brothers, but I don't see how this can be a police matter. Does the New York Police Department now maintain a bureau of holy inquisitions?"

"Don't mind him," Barney said softly. "He's very cynical about dogma, like most clergymen these days."

"I heard that," the priest said. "I may be cynical but I really don't think Satanism is a joking matter. And your friend's theory is very plausible, in its way. After all, the Satanist's motive in infiltrating the church, in the old days, was to disgrace the institution thought to represent God on earth. Now that the United States government makes the same claim, well. That may be a joke or a paradox on my part, but it's the way their minds work, too. I am a professional cynic —a theologian must be, these days, if he isn't going to seem a total fool to young people with their skeptical minds— but I'm orthodox, or downright reactionary, about the Inquisitions. I've read all the rationalist historians, of course, and there was certainly an element of hysteria in the church in those days, but, still, Satanism is not any less frightening than cancer or plague. It is totally inimical to human life and, in fact, to all life. The church had good reasons to be afraid of it. Just as people who are old enough to remember have good reasons to be panicky at any hint of a revival of Hitlerism."

Saul thought of the cryptic, evasive phrases in Eliphas Levy: "the monstrous gnosis of Manes . . . the cultus of material fire. . . ." And, nearly ten years ago, the hippies gathered at the Pentagon, hanging flowers on the M.P.'s rifles, chanting "Out, demon, out!" . . . Hiroshima ... the White Light of the Void. . . .

"Wait," Saul said. "Is there more to it than just ideas about killing? Isn't killing a mystical experience to the Satanists?"

"Of course," the priest replied. "That's the whole point— they want gnosis, personal experience, not dogma, which is somebody else's word. Rationalists are always attacking dogma for causing fanaticism, but the worst fanatics start from gnosis. Modern psychologists are just beginning to understand some of this. You know how people in explosive group-therapy sessions talk about sudden bursts of energy occurring in the whole group at once? One can get the same effect with dancing and drum-beating; that's what is called a 'primitive' religion. Use drugs, nowadays, and you're a hippie. Do it with sex, and you're a witch, or one of the Knights Templar. Mass participation in an animal sacrifice has the same effect. Human sacrifice has been used in many religions, including the Aztec cult everybody has heard about, as well as in Satanism. Modern psychologists say that the force released is Freud's libidinal energy. Mystics call it prajna or the Astral Light. Whatever it is, human sacrifice seems to release more of it than sex or drugs or dancing or drum-beating or any less violent method and mass human sacrifice unleashes a ton of it. Now do you understand why I fear Satanism and half apologize for the Inquisition?"

"Yes," Saul said absently, "and I'm beginning to share your fear. ..." A song he hated was pounding inside his skull: Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritz. . .

He realized that he was holding the phone and seeing scenes forty years ago in another country. He jerked himself back to attention as Muldoon thanked his brother again and hung up. Saul raised his eyes and the two detectives exchanged glances of mutual dread.

After a long pause, Muldoon said, "We can't trust anybody with this. We can hardly even trust each other."

Before Saul could answer the phone rang. It was Danny Pricefixer at headquarters. "Bad news. There was only one girl in research at Confrontation named Pat. Patricia Walsh to be exact, and—"

"I know," Saul said wearily, "she's disappeared, too."

"What are you going to do now? The FBI is still raising hell and demanding to know where you two are and the Commissioner is having the shits, the fits, and the blind staggers."

'Tell them," Saul said succinctly "that we've disappeared." He hung up carefully and began stuffing the memos back into the box.

"What now?" Muldoon asked.

"We go underground. And we stick to this until we crack it or it kills us."

("How long is this motherfucker?" George asked, gesturing at the Danube six stories below. He and Stella were in their room at the Donau Hotel.

"You won't believe me," Stella replied, smiling. "It's exactly one thousand seven hundred and seventy-six miles in length. One-seven-seven-six, George."

"The same as the date Weishaupt revived the Illuminati?"

"Exactly." Stella grinned. "We keep telling you. Synchronicity is as universal as gravity. When you start looking you find it everywhere.")

"Here's the money," Banana-Nose Maldonado said generously, opening a briefcase full of crisp new bills. (It is now November 23, 1963: they were meeting on a bench near Cleopatra's needle in Central Park: the younger man, however, is nervous.) "I want to tell you that . . . my superior ... is very pleased. This will definitely decrease Bobby's power in the Justice Department and stop a lot of annoying investigations."

The younger man, Ben Volpe, gulps. "Look, Mr. Mal-donado, there's something I've got to tell you. I know how the ... Brotherhood ... is when somebody fucks up and hides it."

"You didn't fuck up," Banana-Nose says, bewildered. "In fact, you lucked out amazingly. That schmuck Oswald is going to fry for it. He came along at just the right time. It was a real Fortuna . . . Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" Banana-Nose sits up straight as the thought hits him. "You mean . . . you mean . . . Did Oswald really do it? Did he shoot before you?"

"No, no," Volpe is miserable. "Let me explain it as clearly as I can. I'm there on top of the Dallas County Records Building like we planned, see? The motorcade turns onto Elm and heads for the underpass. I use my magnifying sight, swinging the whole gun around to look through it, just to make one last check that I have all the Feds spotted. When I face the School Book Depository, I catch this rifle. That was Oswald, I guess. Then I check out the grassy knoll and, goddam, there's another cat with a rifle. I just went cold. I couldn't figure it out. While I'm in this state, like a zombie, a dog barks and just then the guy in the grassy knoll calm and cool as if he was at a shooting range lays three of them right into the car. That's it," Volpe ends miserably. "I can't take the money. The . . . Brotherhood . . . would have my ass if they ever found out the truth."

Maldonado sat silently, rubbing his famous nose as he did when making a hard decision. "You're a good boy, Bennie. I give you ten percent of the money, just for being honest. We need more honest young boys like you in the Brotherhood."

Volpe swallowed again, and said, "There's one more thing I oughta tell you. I went down to the grassy knoll, after the cops run from there to the School Book Depository. I thought I might find the guy who did the shooting still hanging around and tell you what he looked like. He was long gone, though. But here's what so spooky. I ran into another galoot; who was sneaking down from the triple underpass. Long, skinny guy with buck teeth, kind of reminded me of a python or some kind of snake. He just looks at me and my umbrella and guesses what's in it

His mouth falls open. 'Jesus Christ and his black bastard brother Harry,' he says, 'how the fuck many people does it take to kill a President these days?'"

("And they're teaching them about perversions as well," Smiling Jim was building toward his climax. "Homosexuality and lesbianism are being taught in our schools and we're paying for it out of our tax money. Now is that communism or isn't it?")

"Welcome to the Playboy Club," the beautiful blonde said, "I'm your bunny, Virgin."

Saul took his seat in the dark wondering if he had heard correctly. Virgin was an odd name for a bunny; perhaps she had actually said Virginia. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

"How do you wish your steak, sir?" the bunny was asking. A stake through the heart, for a vampire.

"Medium well," Saul said, wondering why his mind was wandering in such odd directions. ("Odd erections," somebody said in the nearby dark— or was it a distorted echo of his own voice?)

"Medium well," the bunny repeated, seemingly speaking to the wall. A medium wall, Saul thought.

Immediately the wall opened and Saul was looking into a combination kitchen and butcher shop. A steer was standing not five feet from him, but before he could recover from this shock a male figure, stripped to the waist and wearing the hood of a medieval executioner, caught his attention. With one stroke of a huge hammer, this figure knocked the steer unconscious and it fell to the floor with a crash. Immediately the executioner produced an axe and chopped its head off; blood gushed in a crimson pool from its neck.

The wall closed, and Saul had the terrifying feeling that the whole scene had been a hallucination— that he was losing his mind.

"All our lunches are educational today," the bunny said in his ear. "We believe every customer should understand fully what's on the end of his fork and how it got there, before he takes a bite."

"Good God," Saul said, getting to his feet. This wasn't a Playboy Club, it was some den of lunatics and sadists. He stumbled toward the door.

"No way out," a man at another table said softly as he passed.

"Saul, Saul," the maitre d' murmured politely, "why dost thou persecute me? Hab' rochmunas."

"It's a drug," Saul said thickly, "you've given me a drug." Of course, that was it— something like mescaline or LSD—and they were guiding his hallucinations by providing proper stimuli. Perhaps they were even faking some of the hallucinations. But how had he fallen into their hands? The last thing he remembered, he was in Joe Malik's apartment with Barney Muldoon. . . . No, there was a voice saying, "Now, Sister Victoria," as they came out the door onto Riverside Drive. . . .

"No man should marry a woman more than thirty years younger than himself," the maitre d' said mournfully. How did they know about that? Had they investigated his whole life? How long had they held him?

"I'm getting out of here," he shouted, pushing the maitre d' aside and bolting for the door.

Hands grasped for him and missed (they weren't really trying, he realized: he was being allowed to reach the door). When he plunged through the doorway, he realized why: he was not on the street but in another room. This was the next ordeal.

A rectangle of light appeared on the wall; somewhere in the darkness there was a projector. A card, light an old silent-movie caption, appeared in the rectangle. It said:

ALL JEW GIRLS LIKE TO BALL WITH BUCK NIGGERS


"Sons of bitches," Saul shouted back at them. They were still working on his feelings about Rebecca. Well, that would get them nowhere: he had ample reason to trust her devotion to him, especially her sexual devotion.

The card moved out of the rectangle, and a picture appeared in its place. It was Rebecca's, in her nightgown, kneeling. Before her stood a naked and enormous black man, six feet six at least, with an equally impressive penis which she held sensuously in her mouth. Her eyes were closed in bliss, like a baby nursing.

"Motherfuckers," Saul screamed. "It's a fake. That's not Rebecca— it's an actress with makeup. You forgot the mole on her hip." They could drug his senses but not his mind.

There was a nasty laugh in the darkness. 'Try this one, Saul," a voice said coldly.

A new picture slid into view: Adolph Hitler, in full Nazi uniform, and a naked Rebecca backing up to him, taking his penis in her rectum. Her face showed both pain and pleasure— and the mole on her hip was visible. Another fake— Rebecca was born years after Hitler died. But they hadn't produced the slide in the thirty seconds after his shout, and that meant they knew her body, intimately. . . . And they also knew how skeptical and quick his mind was, and were prepared to administer a series of jolts until something got past his ability to doubt.

"No comment?" the voice asked mockingly.

"I don't believe a man who died thirty years ago would be buggering any woman today," Saul said dryly. "Your tricks are kind of corny."

"Sometimes, with the vulgar, we must communicate vulgarly," the voice replied— and it was almost gentle and pitying this time.

A new picture appeared— and this time, without doubt, it was Rebecca. But it was Rebecca three years ago, when he first met her. She sat at a table in a cheap East Village pad, wearing the emaciated and self-pitying look he remembered from those days; and she was preparing to inject a needle in her arm. It was the real thing, but the terror was in its implications: they had been watching him that long ago. Perhaps— it was hard to date the picture precisely, although he remembered her apartment in those days— they even knew he would fall in love with her before he knew it himself. No; more likely, a friend of hers in those days had taken the picture and they had somehow found it when they became interested in him. Their resources must be fantastic.

A new card came on the screen;

ONCE A JUNKIE ALWAYS A JUNKIE


A new picture quickly followed: Rebecca, as she looked today, sitting in his kitchen— with the new cafe curtains they had just hung last week— once again injecting a needle into her arm.

"You're the vulgar ones, O mighty Illuminati," Saul said caustically. "I would have noticed the tracks on her arm, if she was shooting up again."

The answer was nonverbal: the picture of Rebecca and the giant black man came back on the screen, and was immediately followed by a close-up of her face, eyes closed, mouth open receiving the penis. It was in perfect focus, the work of an artist with the camera, and he could see no sign of any makeup that would help another woman to pass as Rebecca. He held to his memory that the mole on her hip was missing, but, perversely, his mind tasted at last the other possibility— makeup can change a face, and it can also hide a mole. ... If they wanted him to use his skepticism, so that they could gradually destroy that, and, in the process, undermine his total psyche. . . . Another sign came on the screen:

THAT WE CAN CALL THESE DELICATE CREATURES OURS BUT NOT THEIR APPETITES


Saul remembered, all too well, Rebecca's passion in bed. "Shakespeare," he called hoarsely. "Advertising your erudition at a time like this is worse than vulgarity. It's petit-bourgeois pretentiousness."

The answer was brutal: a whole series of slides, maybe fifteen or twenty in all, cascaded across the screen in such rapid succession that he couldn't examine them carefully, except that the central character was Rebecca, always Rebecca, Rebecca with the black giant in other sexual positions, Rebecca with another woman, Rebecca with Spiro Agnew, Rebecca with a little seven-year-old boy, Rebecca, Rebecca, in a rising crescendo of perversion and abnormality, Rebecca with a Saint Bernard dog— and a peppermint-colored sine-wave, part of the drug still working on him, cutting across the scene. . . .

"The true sadist has style," Saul gasped fighting for control of his voice. "You people are about as evil and frightening as a bad B-movie."

There was a whirring mechanical sound and a movie began in place of the slides. It was Rebecca and the Saint Bernard, with several close-ups, and her expressions were the ones he knew. Could any actress portray another woman's individual style of sexual response? Yes— if necessary, these people would use hypnosis to get the effect letter-perfect.

The movie stopped abruptly and the projector had another message for him, held on the screen for minutes:

ONLY THE MADMAN IS ABSOLUTELY SURE


When he realized that there would be no further progress until he spoke, Saul said coldly, "Very entertaining. Where do I go to crumble into a bundle of neuroses?"

There was no answer. No sound. Nothing happened. He half-saw a latticework of red pentagons, but that was the drug— and it helped identify which drug, for geometric patterns were characteristic of the mescaline experience. As he considered that, the peppermint sine-waves appeared before the pentagons and the screen gave him a new message:

HOW MUCH IS THE DRUG?

HOW MUCH IS OUR TRICKERY?

HOW MUCH IS REALITY?


Suddenly, Saul was in Copenhagen, on a cruise boat, passing the mermaid of the harbor. She turned and looked at him. "This case is fishy," she said— and as she opened her mouth a school of guppies swam out. "I'm a mouth-breeder," she explained.

Saul had a reproduction of that famous statue in his home (which must be the source of the hallucination), yet he was strangely disturbed. Her punning words seemed to conceal a deeper meaning than mere casual references to the Confrontation bombing . . . something that went back . . . back through his whole life . . . and explained why he had purchased the statue in the first place.

I'm about to have one of those famous drug insights that hippies always talk about, he thought. But the mermaid broke apart into pentagons of red, orange, yellow. . . .

And a unicorn winked at him. "Man," it said, "am I ever horny!"

Those sketches I made the other day, Saul thought. . . but the screen asked him:

IS THE THOUGHT OF A UNICORN A REAL THOUGHT?


... and he suddenly understood for the first time what the words "a real thought" meant; what Hegel meant by defining the Absolute Idea as pure thought thinking about pure thought; what Bishop Berkeley meant by denying the reality of the physical world in seeming contradiction of all human experience and common sense; what every detective was secretly attempting to detect, although it was always right out in the open; why he became a detective in the first place; why the universe itself became; why everything; and then he forgot it; caught a fleeting glimpse of it again— it had something to do with the eye at the top of the pyramid; and lost it again in visions of unicorns, stallions, zebras, bars, bars, bars.

Now his whole visual field was hallucinatory . . . octagons, triangles, pyramids, organic shapes of embryos and growing ferns. The drug was taking stronger hold on him. Criminals he had sent to jail appeared— sullen, hating faces— and the screen said

GOODMAN IS A BAD MAN


He laughed to keep from crying. They had touched his deepest doubt about his job— his career, his life's work— precisely at the time the drug also was leading him there, with those damnable accusing faces. It was as if they could read his mind and see his hallucinations. No; it was just one lucky coincidence, because among all their tricks one was statistically likely to occur in tandem with an appropriate drug experience.

WHILE THERE IS A SOUL IN PRISON I AM NOT FREE


Saul laughed again, more wildly, almost hysterically; and knew, even more clearly than before, the tears hiding behind the laughter. Prisons reform nobody; my life is wasted; I offer society a delusion of security but not a real service. Worse yet, I have known it for years, and lied to myself. The sense of total failure and utter bitterness that washed over Saul at that moment was, he knew, not produced but only magnified by the drug. It had been with him a long, long time but always pushed aside, brushed away from his attention by concentrating on something else; the drug merely allowed him (forced him) to look at the emotion honestly and totally for a few wrenching moments.

A doorway suddenly lit up toward his right and a neon light came on above it, saying, "Absolution and Redemption."

"OK," he said icily, "I'll play the next move." He opened the door.

The room was tiny but furnished like the world's most expensive brothel. Above the four poster bed was an illustration of Alice and a mushroom labeled "Eat Me." And on the bed, stripped of her Playboy costume, pinkly and beautifully naked with legs spread in anticipation, was the blonde bunny. "Good evening," she said speaking rapidly and fixing his eyes with her own stare, "I'm your Virgin Bunny. Every man wants a Virgin Bunny, to eat on Easter to celebrate the miracle of the Resurrection. Do you understand the miracle of the Resurrection, sir? Do you know that nothing is true and everything is permissible and that a man who dares to break the robot conditioning of society and commit adultery dies in the moment of orgasm with his whore and wakes resurrected to a new life? Did they teach you that in shule? Or did they just fill you with a lot of monogamous Yiddish horseshit?" Most hypnotists spoke slowly, but she was obtaining the same effect by talking rapidly. "You thought you were going to eat a dead animal, which is disgusting even if this crazy society accepts it as normal, but instead you're going to eat a desirable woman (and fuck her afterward), which is normal even if this crazy society thinks of it as disgusting. You are one of the Illuminated, Saul, but you never knew it. Tonight you are going to learn. You are going to find your real self as you were before your mother and father conceived you. And I'm not talking about reincarnation. I'm talking about something much more marvelous."

Saul found his voice. "Your offer is appreciated but declined," he said. "Frankly, I find your tawdry mysticism even more adolescent than your sentimental vegetarianism and coarse lasciviousness. The trouble with the Illuminati is that you have no sense of true drama and not even a patina of subtlety."

Her eyes widened as he spoke, but not with surprise at his resistance— either she was really alarmed, and sorry for him, or she was a great actress. "Too bad," she said sadly. "You've refused Heaven, so you must travel the harder path through the halls of Hell."

Saul heard a movement behind him, but before he could turn a sharp sensation pricked his neck: a needle, another drug. Just as he was guessing they had given him a stronger psychedelic to escalate the effect, he felt consciousness slipping away. It was a narcotic or a poison.

The wagon started with a jerk: we were off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of arse. What was it Hagbard had said to me, the first time we met, about straight lines, courtrooms, and shit? I couldn't remember, my mind drifted, Joseph K. opening the law books and finding pornographic illustrations (Kafka knew where it was at), deSade keeping a precise mathematical tally in the brothel, how many times he flogged the whores, how many times they flogged him, the Nazis counting every gold filling in the corpses at Auschwitz, Shakespeare scholars debating about that line in Macbeth (was it benches or banks of time?), the prisoner may approach the bench, you can bank on it, buddy, bank on it ... PIGS EAT SHIT PIGS EAT SHIT . . . and Pound wrote "the buggering bank," he rejected Freud, but even so he got a whiff of the real secret... how one homo ominously loopses another....

"My God," the Englishman said. "When do we get out of the teargas area?"

"We're out of it," I told him wearily. "That's regular Chicago air now. Courtesy of Commonwealth Edison and U.S. Steel over in Gary."

The McCarthy woman was weeping quietly, although the Mace had worn off by now. The rest of us rode silently, a little caravan of dried snot and tears, the parmesan cheese odor of stale vomit, some lingering acrid Mace fumes, the urine of somebody who had peed himself, and that high sulphur dioxide and slaughterhouse aroma of Chicago's South Side. The quality of mercy is very strained; it drippeth like the pus from chancre. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Chairman Mao appeared and lectured us: "Ho is just a poetaster. Now, if you want to hear some real socialist verse, consider my latest composition:

There was a young lady from Queens
Who gobbled a plateful of beans
The beans fermented
And she was tormented
By embarrassing sounds in her jeans!

Indicates the anal orientation of capitalist society," he explained, dwindling into a pool of blood on the floor next to the kid with the broken arm.

(In 1923, Adolph Hitler stood beneath a pyramidal altar and repeated the words of a goat-headed man: "Der Zweck heiligte die Mittel." James Joyce, in Paris, scrawled in crayon words that his secretary, Samuel Beckett, would later type: "Pre-Austeric Man in Pursuit of Pan-Hysteric Woman." In Brooklyn, New York, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, returning from a party at which Hart Crane had been perfectly beastly— thereby confirming Mr. Lovecraft's prejudice against homosexuals— finds a letter in his mailbox and reads with some amusement: "Some of the secrets revealed in your recent stories would better be kept out of the light of print. Believe me, I speak as a friend, but there are those who would prefer such half-forgotten lore to remain in its present obscurity, and they are formidable enemies for any man. Remember what happened to Ambrose Bierce. . . ." And, in Boston, Robert Putney Drake screams, "Lies, lies, lies. It's all lies. Nobody tells the truth. Nobody says what he thinks. . . ." His voice trails off.

"Go on," Dr. Besetzung says, "you were doing fine. Don't stop."

"What the use?" Drake replies, drained of anger, turning on the couch to look at the psychiatrist. "To you, this is just abreaction or acting-out or something clinical. You can't believe I'm right."

"Perhaps I can. Perhaps I agree more than you realize." The doctor looks up from his pad and meets Drake's eye. "Are you sure you're not just assuming I'll react like everybody else you've tried to tell this to?"

"If you agreed with me," Drake says carefully, "if you understood what I'm really saying, you'd either be the head of a bank, out there in the jungle with my father, grabbing your own share of the loot, or you'd be a bomb-throwing revolutionary, like those Sacco and Vanzetti fellows. Those are the only choices that make sense."

"The only choices? One must go to one extreme or the other?"

Drake looks back at the ceiling and talks abstractly. "You had to get an M.D. long ago, before you specialized. Do you know any case where germs gave up and went away because the man they were destroying had a noble character or sweet sentiments? Did the tuberculosis bacilli leave John Keat's lungs because he had a few hundred great poems still unwritten inside him? You must have read some history, even if you were never at the front lines like me: do you recall any battle that refutes Napoleon's aphorism about God always being on the side of the biggest cannons and the best tacticians? This bolshie in Russia, Lenin, he has ordered the schools to teach chess to everybody. You know why? He says that chess teaches the lesson that revolutionaries must learn: that if you don't mobilize your forces properly, you lose. No matter how high your morality, no matter how lofty your goal: fight without mercy, use every ounce of intelligence, or you lose. My father understands that. The people who run the world have always understood it. A general who doesn't understand it gets broken back to second lieutenant or worse. I saw a whole platoon wiped out, exterminated like an anthill under a boot. Not because they were immoral or naughty or didn't believe in Jesus. Because at that place, on that day, the Germans had superior fire power. That's the law, the one true law, of the universe, and everything that contradicts it— everything they teach in schools and churches— is a lie." He says the word listlessly now. "Just a lie."

"If you really believe that," the doctor asks, "why do you still have the nightmares and the insomnia?"

Drake's blue eyes stare at the ceiling. "I don't know," he says finally. "That's why I'm here.")

"Moon, Simon," the Desk Sergeant called.

I stepped forward, seeing myself through his eyes: beard, army surplus clothes, stains all over (my own mucus, somebody else's vomit). The archetypical filthy, dirty, disgusting, hippie-commie revolutionary.

"Well," he said, "another bright red rose."

"I usually look neater," I told him calmly. "You get a bit messed over when you're arrested in this town."

"The only way you get arrested in this town," he said, frowning, "is if you break the laws."

"The only way you get arrested in Russia is you break the laws," I replied cheerfully. "Or by mistake," I added.

That didn't set well at all. "Wise guy," he said gently. "We like wise guys here." He consulted my charge-slip. "Nice record for one night, Moon. Rioting, mob action, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, disturbing the peace. Nice."

"I wasn't disturbing the peace," I said. "I was disturbing the war." I stole that one-liner from Ammon Hennacy, a Catholic Anarchist that Mom was always quoting. "The rest of the charges are all bullshit, too."

"Say, I know you," he said suddenly. "You're Tim Moon's son. Well, well, well. A second-generation anarchist. I guess we'll be locking you up as often as we locked him up."

"I guess so," I said. "At least until the Revolution. Afterward, we won't be locking you up, though. We're going to establish nice camps in places like Wisconsin, and send you there free to learn a useful trade. We believe that all policemen and politicians can be rehabilitated. But if you don't want to go to the camp and learn a productive trade, you don't have to. You can live on Welfare."

"Well, well, well," he said. "Just like your old man. I suppose if I looked the other way, while some of the boys took you in back and worked you over a bit, you'd come out still making wisecracks?"

"I'm afraid so," I smiled. "Irish national character, you know! We see the funny side of everything."

"Well," he said thoughtfully (he was awfully fond of that word), "I hope you can see the funny side of what comes next. You're going to be arraigned before Judge Bushman. You'll find yourself wishing you had fallen into a buzz saw instead. Give my regards to your father. Tell him Jim O'Malley says hello."

"He's dead," I said.

He looked down at his charge-slips. "Sorry to hear it," he mumbled. "Nanetti, Fred," he bawled, and the kid with the broken arm came forward.

A patrolman led me to the fingerprint room. This guy was a computer: "Right hand." I gave him my right hand. "Left hand." I gave him my left hand. "Follow the officer." I followed the officer, and they took my picture. We went down some halls to the night court, and in a lonely section the patrolman suddenly hit me in the lower back with his club, the exact spot (he knew his business) to give me liver problems for a month. I grunted but refused to say anything that would set him off and get me another clout, so he spoke. "Yellow-bellied faggot," he said.

Just like Biloxi, Mississippi: one cop is nice, another is just impersonal, a third is a mean bastard— and it doesn't really matter. They're all part of the same machine, and what comes out the end of the gears and levers is the same product, whatever their attitude is. I'm sure Buchenwald was the same: some of the guards tried to be as humane as possible, some of them just did their job, some of them went out of their way to make it worse for the prisoners. It doesn't matter: the machine produces the effect it was designed for.

Judge Bushman (we slipped him AUM two years later, but that's another story, coming up on another trip) gave me his famous King Kong scowl. "Here are the rules," he said. This is an arraignment. You can enter a plea or stand mute. If you enter a plea, you retain the right to change it at your trial. When I set bond, you can be released by paying ten percent to the bailiff. Cash only, no checks. If you don't have the cash, you go to jail overnight. You people have the city tied up in knots and the bail bondsmen are too busy to cover every courtroom, so by sheer bad luck you landed in a courtroom they're not covering." He turned to the bailiff. "Charge sheet," he said. He read the record of my criminal career as concocted by the arresting officer. "Five offenses in one night. You're bad medicine, aren't you, Moon? Trial set for September fifteenth. Bail will be ten thousand dollars. Do you have one thousand dollars?"

"No," I told him wondering how many times he'd made that speech tonight.

"Just a moment," said Hagbard, materializing out of the hallway. "I can make bail for this man."

MR. KHARIS: Does Mr. Celine seriously suggest that the United States Government is in need of a guardian?

MR. CELINE: I am merely offering a way out for your client. Any private individual with a record of such incessant murder and robbery would be glad to cop an insanity plea. Do you insist that your client was in full possession of its reason at Wounded Knee? At Hiroshima? At Dresden?

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: You become facetious, Mr. Celine.

MR. CELINE: I have never been more serious.

"What is your relationship to this young man?" Bushman asked angrily. He had been about to come when the cop dragged me off to jail, and he was strangling in some kind of gruesome S-M equivalent of coitus interruptus.

"He's my wife," Hagbard said calmly.

"What?"

"Common-law wife," Hagbard went on. "Homosexual marriage is not recognized in Illinois. But homosexuality per se isn't a crime in this state, either, so don't try to make waves, your honor. Let me pay and take him home."

It was too much. "Daddy," I said, camping like our friend the Padre. "You're so masterful."

Judge Bushman looked like he wanted to lay Hagbard out with a gavel upside of his head, but he controlled himself. "Count the money," he told the bailiff. "Make sure he pays every penny. And then," he told us, "I want the two of you out of this courtroom as quickly as possible. I'll see you September fifteenth," he added, to me.

MR. KHARIS: And we believe we have demonstrated the necessity of this dam. We believe we have shown that the doctrine of eminent domain is on sure constitutional grounds, and has been held to apply in numerous similar cases. We believe we have shown that the resettlement plan offered by the government will be no hardship for the plaintiffs. . . .

"Fuckin' faggots," the cop said as we went out the door.

"All hail Discordia," I told him cheerfully. "Let's get out of this neighborhood," I added to Hagbard.

"My car is right here," he said, pointing to a goddam Mercedes.

"For an anarchist, you sure live a lot like a capitalist," I commented as we got into that beautiful machine crystallized out of stolen labor and surplus value.

"I'm not a masochist," Hagbard replied. "The world makes me uncomfortable enough. I see no reason to make myself more uncomfortable. And I'm damned if I'll drive a broken-down jalopy that spends half its time in a garage being repaired merely because that would make me seem more 'dedicated' to you left-wing simpletons. Besides," he added practically, "the police never stop a Mercedes and search it. How many times a week do you get stopped and harassed, with your beard and your psychedelic Slaveswagon, you damned moralist?"

"Often enough," I admitted, "that I'm afraid to transport dope in it."

"This car is full of dope," he said blithely. "I'm making a big delivery to a dealer up in Evanston, on the Northwestern campus, tomorrow."

"You're in the dope business, too?"

"I'm in every illegal business. Every time a government declares something verboten, two groups! move in to service the black market created: the Mafia and the LDD. That stands for Lawless Delicacy Dealers."

"I thought it stood for Little Deluded Dupes."

He laughed. "Score one for Moon. Seriously, I'm the worst enemy governments have, and the best protection for the average person. The Mafia has no ethics, you know. If it wasn't for my group and our years and years of experience, everything on the black market, from dope to Canadian furs, would be shoddy and unreliable. We always give the customer his or her money's worth. Half the dope you sell probably has passed through my agents on its way to you. The better half."

"What was that homosexual business? Just buggin' old Bushman?"

"Entropy. Breaking the straight line into a curve ball."

"Hagbard," I said, "what the hell is your game?"

"Proving that government is a hallucination in the minds of governors," he said crisply. We turned onto Lake Shore Drive and sped north.

"Thou, Jubela, did he tell you the Word?" asked the goat-headed man.

The gigantic black said, "I beat him and tortured him, but he would not reveal the Word."

"Thou, Jubelo, did he tell you the Word?"

The fishlike creature said, "I tormented and vexed his inner spirit, Master, but he would not reveal the Word."

"And thou, Jubelum, did he tell you the Word?"

The hunchbacked dwarf said, "I cut off his testicles and he was mute. I cut off his penis and he was mute. He did not tell me the Word."

"A fanatic," the goat-head said. "It is better that he is dead."

Saul Goodman tried to move. He couldn't twitch a single muscle: That last drug had been a narcotic, and a powerful one. Or was it a poison? He tried to assure himself that the reason he was paralyzed and laying in a coffin was because they were trying to break down his mind. But he wondered if the dead might tell themselves similar fables, as they struggled to escape from the body before it rotted.

As he wondered, the goat-head leaned over and closed the top of the coffin. Saul was alone in darkness.

"Leave first, Jubela."

"Yes, Master."

"Leave next, Jubelo."

"Yes, Master."

"Leave last, Jubelum."

"Yes, Master."

Silence. It was lonely and dark in the coffin, and Saul couldn't move. Let me not go mad, he thought.

Howard spotted the Lief Erikson ahead and sang: "Oh, groovy, groovy, groovy scene/Once again I'll meet Celine." Maldonado's sleek Bentley edged up the drive to the home of "America's best-known financier-philanthropist," Robert Putney Drake. (Louis marched toward the Red Widow, maintaining his dignity. An old man in a strange robe pushed to the front of the crowd, trembling with exaltation. The blade rose: the mob sucked in its breath. The old man tried to look into Louis's eyes, but the king could not focus them. The blade fell: the crowd exhaled. As the head rolled into the basket, the old man raised his eyes in ecstasy and cried out, "Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged!") Professor Glynn lectured his class on medieval history (Dean Deane was issuing the Strawberry Statement on the same campus at the same time) and said, "The real crime of the Templars, however, was probably their association. with the Hashishim." George Dorn, hardly listening, wondered if he should join Mark Rudd and the others who wanted to close down Columbia entirely.

"And modern novels are the same," Smiling Jim went on. "Sex, sex, sex— and not normal sex even. Every type of perverted, degenerate, unnatural, filthy, deviated, and sick kind of sex. This is how they're gonna bury us, as Mr. Khruschchev said, without even firing a shot."

Sunlight awakened Saul Goodman.

Sunlight and a headache. A hangover from the combination of drugs.

He was in a bed and his clothes were gone. There was no mistaking the garment he wore: a hospital gown. And the room— as he squinted against the sun— had the dull modern-penitentiary look of a typical American hospital.

He hadn't heard the door open, but a weathered-looking middle-aged man in a doctor's smock drifted into the room. He was carrying a clipboard; pens stuck their necks out of his smock pocket; he smiled benignly. His horn rimmed heavily black glasses and crewcut marked him as the optimistic, upward-mobile man of his generation, without either the depression/World War II memories that gave anxiety to Saul's contemporaries or nuclear nightmares that gave rage and alienation to youth. He would obviously think of himself as a liberal and vote conservatively at least half the time.

A hopeless schmuck.

Except that he was probably none of those things, but another of their agents, doing a very convincing performance.

"Well?" he said brightly. "Feeling better, Mr. Muldoon?"

Muldoon, Saul thought. Here we go— another ride into their kitsch idea of the Heart of Darkness.

"My name is Goodman," he said thinly. "I'm about as Irish as Moishe Dayan."

"Oh, still playing that little game, are we?" the man spoke kindly. "And are you still a detective?"

"Go to hell," Saul said, no longer in mood to fight back with wit and irony. He would dig into his hostility and make his last stand from a foxhole of bitterness and sullen brevity.

The man pulled up a chair and sat down. "Actually," he said, "these remaining symptoms don't bother us much. You were in a much worse state when you were first brought here six months ago. I doubt that you remember that. Electroshock mercifully removes a great deal of the near past, which is helpful in cases like yours. Do you know that you were physically assaulting people on the street, and tried to attack the nurses and orderlies your first month here? Your paranoia was very acute at that point, Mr. Muldoon."

"Up yours, bubi," Saul said. He closed his eyes and turned the other way.

"Such moderate hostility these days," the man went on, bright as a bird in the morning grass. "A few months ago you would have tried to strangle me. Let me show you something." There was a sound of paper.

Curiosity defeated resistance: Saul turned and looked. The man held out a driver's license, from the State of New Jersey, for "Barney Muldoon." the picture was Saul's. Saul grinned maliciously, showing his disbelief.

"You refuse to recognize yourself?" the man asked quietly.

"Where is Barney Muldoon?" Saul shot back. "Do you have him in another room, trying to convince him he's Saul Goodman?"

"Where is . . . ?" the "doctor" repeated, seeming genuinely baffled. "Oh, yes, you admit you know the name but claim he was only a friend. Just like a rapist we had in here a while ago. He said all the rapes were committed by his roommate, Charlie. Well, let's try another tack. All those people you beat up on the street— and that Playboy Club bunny you tried to strangle— do you still believe they were agents of this, um, Prussian Illuminati?"

"This is an improvement," Saul said. "A very intriguing combination of reality and fantasy, much better than your group's previous efforts. Let me hear the rest of it."

"You think that's sarcasm," the man said calmly. "Actually, behind it, your recovery is proceeding nicely. You really want to remember, even as you struggle to keep up this Goodman myth. Very well: you are a sixty-year-old police officer from Trenton, New Jersey. You never were promoted to detective and that is the great grievance of your life. You have a wife named Molly, and three sons— Roger, Kerry, and Gregory. Their ages are twenty-eight, twenty-five, and twenty-three. A few years ago, you started a game with your wife; she thought it was harmless at first and learned to her sorrow that it wasn't. The game was, that you pretended to be a detective and, late at night, you would tell her about the important cases you were working on. Gradually, you built up to the most important case of all— the solution to all the assassinations in America during the past decade. They were all the work of a group called the Illuminati, who were surviving top-level Nazis that had never been captured. More and more, you talked about their leader—Martin Borman, of course— and insisted you were getting a line on his whereabouts. By the time your wife realized that the game had become reality to you, it was too late. You already suspected your neighbors of being Illuminati agents, and your hatred for Nazism led you to believe you were Jewish and had taken an Irish name to avoid American anti-Semitism. This particular delusion, I must say, caused you acute guilt, which it took us a long time to understand. It was, we finally realized, a projection of a guilt you have long felt for being a policeman at all. But perhaps at this point, I might aid your struggle for self-recognition (and abort your equal and opposite struggle for self-escape) by reading you part of a report on your case by one of our younger psychiatrists. Are you game to hear it?"

"Go ahead," Saul said. "I still find this entertaining." The man looked through the papers in his clipboard and smiled disarmingly. "Oh, I see here that it's the Bavarian Illuminati, not the Prussian Illuminati, pardon my mistake." He flipped a few more pages. "Here we are," he said.

"The root of the subject's problems," he began to read, "can be found in the trauma of the primal scene, which was reconstructed under narco-analysis. At the age of three, he came upon his parents in the act of fellatio, which resulted in his being locked in his room for 'spying.' This left him with a permanent horror of being locked up and a pity for prisoners everywhere. Unfortunately, this factor in his personality, which he might have sublimated harmlessly by becoming a social worker, was complicated by unresolved Oedipal hostilities and a reaction formation in favor of 'spying,' which led him to become a policeman. The criminal became for him the father-symbol, who was locked up in revenge for locking him up; at the same time, the criminal was an ego-projection and he received masochistic gratification by identifying with the prisoner. The deep-buried homosexual desire for the father's penis (present in all policemen) was next cathected by denial of the father, via denial of paternal ancestry, and he began to abolish all Irish Catholic traces from ego-memory, substituting those of Jewish culture, since the Jew, as persecuted minority, reinforced his basic masochism. Finally, like all paranoids, the subject fancies himself to be of superior intelligence (actually, on his test for the Trenton Police Force, he rated only one hundred ten on the Stan-ford-Binet IQ index) and his resistance to therapy will take the form of 'outwitting' his doctors by finding the 'clues' which reveal that they, too, are agents of the Illuminati and that his assumed identity as 'Saul Goodman' is, in fact, his actual identity. For therapeutic purposes, I would recommend . . ." The "doctor" broke off. "After that," he said briefly, "it is of no interest to you. Well," he added tolerantly, "do you want to 'detect' the errors in this?"

"I've never been in Trenton in my life," Saul said wearily. "I don't know what anything in Trenton looks like. But you'll just tell me that I've erased those memories. Let's move to a deeper level of combat, Herr Doktor. I am quite convinced that my mother and father never performed fellatio in their lives. They were too old-fashioned." This was the heart of the labyrinth, and their real threat: while he was sure that they could not break down his belief in his own identity, they were also insidiously undermining that identity by suggesting it was pathological. Many of the lines in the Muldoon case history could refer to any policeman and might, conceivably, refer to him; as usual, behind a weak open attack they were mounting a more deadly covert attack.

"Do you recognize these?" the doctor asked, producing a sketchbook open to a page with some drawings of unicorn.

"It's my sketchbook," Saul said. "I don't know how you got it but it doesn't prove a damned thing, except that I sketch in my spare time."

"No?" The doctor turned the book around; a bookplate on the cover identified the owner as Barney Muldoon, 1472 Pleasant Avenue, Trenton, NJ.

"Amateur work," Saul said. "Anybody can paste a bookplate onto a book."

"And the unicorn means nothing to you?" Saul sensed the trap and said nothing, waiting. "You are not aware of the long psychoanalytical literature on the unicorn as symbol of the father's penis? Tell me, then, why did you decide to sketch unicorns?"

"More amateurism," Saul said. "If I sketched mountains, they would be symbols of the father's penis, too."
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Re: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert A. Wil

Postby admin » Fri Dec 15, 2017 2:18 am

Part 3 of 3

"Very well. You might have made a good detective if your— illness— hadn't prevented your promotion. You do have a quick, skeptical mind. Let me try another approach— and I wouldn't be using such tactics if I weren't convinced you were on the road to recovery; a true psychotic would be driven into catatonia by such a blunt assault on his delusions. But, tell me, your wife mentioned that just before the acute stage of your— problem— you spent a lot of money, more than you could afford on a patrolman's salary, on a reproduction of the mermaid of Copenhagen. Why was that?"

"Damn it," Saul exclaimed, "it wasn't a lot of money." But he recognized the displaced anger and saw that the other man recognized it too. He was avoiding the question of the mermaid . . . and her relation to the unicorn. There must be a relationship between fact number one and fact number two. . . . "The mermaid," he said, getting there before the enemy could, "is a mother symbol, right? She has no human bottom, because the male child dare not think about that area of the mother. Is that correct jargon?"

"More or less. You avoid, of course, the peculiar relevance in your own case: that the sex act in which you caught your mother was not a normal one but a very perverted and infantile act, which, of course, is the only sex act a mermaid can perform— as all collectors of mermaid statues or mermaid paintings unconsciously know."

"It's not perverted and infantile," Saul protested. "Most people do it...." Then he saw the trap.

"But not your mother and father? They were different from most people?"

And then it clicked: the spell was broken. Every detail from Saul's notebook, every physical characteristic Peter Jackson had described, was there. "You're not a doctor," he shouted. "I don't know what your game is but I sure as hell know who you are. You're Joseph Malik!"

George's stateroom was paneled in teak, the walls hung with small but exquisite paintings by Rivers, Shahn, De Kooning, and Tanguy. A glass cabinet built into one wall held several rows of books. The floor was carpeted in wine red with a blue stylized octopus in the center, its waving tentacles radiating out like a sunburst. The light fixture hanging from the ceiling was a lucite model of that formidable jellyfish, the Portuguese man-of-war.

The bed was full size, with a rosewood headboard carved with Venetian seashell motifs. Its legs didn't touch the floor; the whole thing was supported on a huge, rounded beam that allowed the bed to seesaw when the ship rolled, the sleeper remaining level. Beside the bed was a small desk. Going to it, George opened a drawer and found several different sizes of writing paper and half a dozen felt-tipped pens in various colors. He took out a legal-size pad and a green pen, climbed on the bed, curled up at the head and began writing.

April 24

Objectivity is presumably the opposite of schizophrenia. Which means that it is nothing but acceptance of everybody else's notion of reality. But nobody's perception of reality is the same as everybody's notion of it, which means that the most objective person is the real schizophrenic.

It is hard to get beyond the accepted beliefs of one's own age. The first man to think a new thought advances it very tentatively. New ideas have to be around a while before anyone will promote them hard. In their first form, they are like tiny, imperceptible mutations that may eventually lead to new species. That's why cultural cross-fertilization is so important. It increases the gene-pool of the imagination. The Arabs, say, have one part of the puzzle. The Franks another. So, when the Knights Templar meet the Hashishim, something new is born.

The human race has always lived more or less happily in the kingdom of the blind. But there is an elephant among us. A one-eyed elephant.


George put the pen down and read the green words with a frown. His thoughts still seemed to be coming from outside his own mind. What was that business about the Knights Templar? He had never felt the slightest interest in that, period since his freshman year in college, when old Morrison Glynn had given him a D for that paper on the Crusades. It was supposed to be a simple research paper displaying one's grasp of proper footnote style, but George had chosen to denounce the Crusades as an early outbreak of Western racist imperialism. He'd even gone to the trouble of finding the text of a letter from Sinan, third leader of the Hashishim, in which he exonerates Richard Coeur de Lion of any complicity in the murder of Conrad of Montferret, King of Jerusalem. George felt the episode demonstrated the essential goodwill of the Arabs. How was he to know that Morrison Glynn was a staunch conservative Catholic? Glynn claimed, among other dyspeptic criticisms, that the letter from the castle called Messiac was well known as a forgery. Why were the Hashishim coming back to mind again? Did it have to do with the weird dream he'd had of the temple in the Mad Dog jail?

The sub's engine was vibrating pleasantly through the floor, the beam, the bed. The trip so far had reminded George of his first flight in a 747—a surge of power, followed by motion so smooth it was impossible to tell how fast or how far they were going.

There was a knock at the stateroom door, and at George's invitation Hagbard's receptionist came in. She was wearing a tight-fitting golden-yellow slack ensemble. She stared compellingly at George, her pupils huge obsidian pools, and smiled faintly.

"Will you eat me if I can't guess the riddle?" George said. "You remind me of a sphinx."

Her lips, the color of ripe grapes, parted in a grin. "I modeled for it. But no riddle, just an ordinary question. Hagbard wants to know if you need anything. Anything but me. I've got work to do now."

George shrugged. "You beat me to the question. I'd like to get together with Hagbard and find out more about him and the submarine and where we're going."

"We are going to Atlantis. He must have told you that." She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, rolling her hips. She had marvelously long legs. "Atlantis is, roughly speaking, about half way between Cuba and the west coast of Africa, at the bottom of the ocean."

"Yeah, well— That's where it's supposed to be, right?"

"Right. Hagbard's going to want you in the captain's control room later. Meanwhile, smoke some of this, if you want. Helps to pass the time." She held out a gold cigarette case. George took it from her, his fingers brushing the velvety black skin of her hand. A pang of desire for her swept through him. He fumbled with the catch of the case and opened it. There were slender white tubes inside, each one stamped with a gold K. He took one out and held it to his nose. A pleasant, earthy smell.

"We've got a plantation and a factory in Brazil," she said.

"Hagbard must be a wealthy man."

"Oh, yeah. He's worth billions and billions of tons of flax. Well, look, George, if you need anything, just press the ivory button on your desk. Someone will come along. We'll be calling you later." She turned with a languid wave and walked down the fluorescent-lit corridor. George's gaze clung to her unbelievable ass till she climbed a narrow flight of carpeted stairs and was out of sight

What was that woman's name? He lay down on the bed, took out a joint, and lit it. It was marvelous. He was up in seconds, not the usual gradual balloon ascent, but a rocket trip, not unlike the effect of amyl nitrate. He might have known this Hagbard Celine would have something special in the way of grass. He studied the sparkles glinting through the Portuguese man-of-war and wiggled his eyeballs rapidly to make the lights dance. All things that are, are lights. The thought came that Hagbard might be evil. Hagbard was like some robber baron out of the nineteenth century. Also like some robber baron out of the eleventh century. The Normans took Sicily in the ninth century. Which gave you mixtures of Viking and Sicilian, but did they ever look like Anthony Quinn? Or his son Greg La Strade? What son? What the sun done cannot be undone but is well dun. The quintessence of evil. Nemesis of all evil. God bless us, every one. Even One. Odd, the big red one. Eye think it was his I. The eye of Apollo. His luminous I. Aum Shiva.

— Aye, trust me not. Trust not a man who's rich in flax— his morals may be sadly lax. Her name is Stella. Stella Maris. Black star of the sea.

The joint was down to the last half inch. He put it down and crushed it out. With grass flowing like tobacco around here, it was a luxury he could afford. He wasn't going to light another one. That wasn't a high, that was a trip! A Saturn rocket, right out of the world. And back, just as fast.

— George, I want you in the captain's control room.

Clearly, this hallucinating of voices and images meant he wasn't all the way back. Reentry was not completed. He now saw a vision of the layout of that part of the submarine between his stateroom and the captain's control room. He stood up, stretched, shook his head, his hair swirling around his shoulders. He walked to the door, slid it back, and walked on down the hall.

A little later, he stepped through a door onto a balcony which was a reproduction of the prow of a Viking ship. Above, below, in front, to the sides, was green-blue ocean. They seemed to be in a glass globe projecting into the ocean. A long-necked red-and-green dragon with golden eyes and a spiky crest reared above George and Hagbard.

"My approach is fanciful, rather than functional," Hagbard said. "If I weren't so intelligent, it would get me into a lot of trouble." He patted the dragon figurehead with a black-furred hand. Some Viking, George thought. A Neanderthal Viking, perhaps.

"That was a good trick," George said, feeling shrewd but still high. "How you got me up on the bridge with that telepathy thing."

"I called you on the intercom," Hagbard said, with a look of absurd innocence.

"You think I can't tell a voice in my head from a voice in my ears?"

Hagbard roared with laughter, so loud that it made George feel a little uncertain. "Not when you've had your first taste of Kallisti Gold, man."

"Who am I to call a man a liar when he's just turned me on with the best shit I ever had?" said George with a shrug. "I suspect you of making use of telepathy. Most people who have that power would not only not try to hide it, they'd go on television."

"Instead, I put the ocean on television." said Hagbard. He gestured at the globe surrounding their Viking prow. "What you see is simply color television with a few adaptations and modifications. We are inside the screen. The cameras are all over the surface of the sub. The cameras don't use ordinary light, of course. If they did, you wouldn't be able to see anything. The submarine illuminates the sea around us with an infrared laser-radar to which our TV cameras are sensitive. The radiations are of a type that is more readily conducted by the hydrogen in water than by any other element. The result is that we can see the ocean bottom almost as clearly as if it were dry land and we were in a plane flying above it."

"That'll make it easy to see Atlantis when we get to it," George said. "By the way, why did you say we're going-to Atlantis, again? I didn't believe it when you told me, and now I'm too stoned to remember."

"The Illuminati are planning to loot one of the greatest works of art in the history of man— the Temple of Tethys. It happens to be a solid-gold temple, and their intention is to melt it down and sell the gold to finance a series of assassinations in the U.S. I intend to get there before them."

The reference to assassinations reminded George that he'd gone down to Mad Dog, Texas, on Joe Malik's hunch that he'd find a clue there to an assassination conspiracy. If Joe knew that the clue was leading 20,000 leagues under the sea and eons back through time, would he believe it? George doubted it. Malik was one of those hard-nosed "scientific" leftists. Though he had been acting and talking a little strangely lately.

"Who did you say was looting this temple?" he asked Hagbard.

"The Illuminati. The real force behind all communist and fascist movements. Whether you're aware of it or not, they're also already in control of the United States government."

"I thought everybody in your crowd was a right-winger—"

"And I told you spacial metaphors are inadequate in discussing politics today," Hagbard interrupted.

"Well, you sound like a gang of right-wingers. Up until the last minute, all I've heard from you and your people was that the Illuminati were commies, or were behind the commies. Now you say they're behind fascism and behind the current government in Washington, too."

Hagbard laughed. "We came on like right-wing paranoids, at first, to see how you'd react. It was a test."

"And?"

"You passed. You didn't believe us— that was obvious— but you kept your eyes and ears open and were willing to listen. If you were a right-winger, we would have done our pro-communist rap. The idea is to find out if a new man or woman will listen, really listen, or just shut their minds at the first really shocking idea."

"I'm listening, but not uncritically. For instance, if the Illuminati control America already, what's the purpose of the assassinations?"

"Their grip on Washington is still pretty precarious. They've been able to socialize the economy. But if they showed their hand now and went totalitarian all the way, there would be a revolution. Middle-readers would rise up with right-wingers, and left-libertarians, and the Illuminati aren't powerful enough to withstand that kind of massive revolution. But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution."

"What sort of tools?"

"More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason— or are manipulated into reasoning— that the entire populace must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted. Targets for assassination will be mavericks of left or right who are either not part of the Illuminati conspiracy or have been marked as unreliable. The Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, for example, were capable of mobilizing a somewhat libertarian left-right-black-white populist movement. But the assassinations that have occurred so far are nothing compared to what will take place. The next wave will be carried out by the Mafia, who will be paid in Illuminati gold."

"Not Moscow gold," said George with a smile.

"The puppets in the Kremlin have no idea that they and the puppets in the White House are working for the same people. The Illuminati control all sorts of organizations and national governments without any of them being aware that others are also controlled. Each group thinks it is competing with the others, while actually each is playing its part in the Illuminati plan. Even the Morituri— the six-person affinity groups which splintered from the SDS Weathermen, because the Weathermen seemed too cautious— are under the control of the Illuminati. They think they're working to bring down the government, but actually they are strengthening its hand. The Black Panthers are also infiltrated. Everything is infiltrated. At present rate, within the next few years the Illuminati will have the American people under tighter surveillance than Hitler had the Germans. And the beauty of it is, the majority of the Americans will have been so frightened by Illuminati-backed terrorist incidents that they will beg to be controlled as a masochist begs for the whip."

George shrugged. Hagbard sounded like a typical paranoid, but there was this submarine and the strange events of the past few days. "So the Illuminati are conspiring to tyrannize the world, is that it? Do you trace them back to the First International?"

"No. They're what happened when the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century collided with German mysticism. The correct name for the organization is Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria. According to their own traditions they were founded or revived in seventeen seventy-six on May first by a man named Adam Weishaupt. Weishaupt was an unfrocked Jesuit and a Mason. He taught that religions and national governments had to be overthrown and the world ruled by an elite of scientifically-minded materialistic atheists, to be held in trust for the masses of mankind who would eventually rule themselves when enlightenment became universal. But this was only Weishaupt's 'Outer Doctrine.' There was also an 'Inner Doctrine,' which was that power is an end in itself, and that Weishaupt and his closest followers would make use of the new knowledge being developed by scientists and engineers to seize control of the world. Back in seventeen seventy-six, things were run largely by the Church and the feudal nobility, with the capitalists slowly getting a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Weishaupt declared that these groups were obsolete, and it was time for an elite with a monopoly on scientific and technological knowledge to seize power. Instead of eventually producing a democratic society, as the 'Outer Doctrine' promised, the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria would saddle mankind with a dictatorship that would last forever."

"Well, it would be logical enough that someone around that time would think of that," said George. "And who more likely than a Mason who was an unfrocked Jesuit?"

"You recognize that what I tell you is relatively plausible," said Hagbard. "That's a good sign."

"A sign that it's plausible." laughed George.

"No, a sign that you're the kind of person I'm always looking for. Well, the Illuminati, after staying above ground long enough to recruit a hard-core membership from Masons and freethinkers and to establish international contacts, allowed it to seem that the Bavarian government had suppressed them. Subsequently, the Illuminati launched their first experimental revolution, in France. Here they suckered the middle class, whose true interests lay in laissez faire free enterprise, to follow the Weishaupt slogan of 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' The catch, of course, is that where equality and fraternity rule, there is no liberty. After the career of Napoleon, whose rise and fall was purely the result of Illuminati manipulations, they started planting the seeds of European socialism, leading to the revolutions of eighteen forty-eight, to Marxism, finally to the seizure of Russia, one-sixth of the earth's land mass. Of course, they had to engineer a world war to make the Russian Revolution possible, but by nineteen seventeen they had become quite good at that. World War Two was an even more clever job and resulted in more gains for them."

"Another thing this explains," George said, "is why orthodox Marxism-Leninism, in spite of all its ideals, always turns out to be not worth a shit. Why it's always betrayed the people wherever it established itself. And it explains why there's such an inevitable quality about America's drift toward totalitarianism."

"Right," said Hagbard. "America is the target now. They've got most of Europe and Asia. Once they get America, they can come out into the open. The world will then be much as Orwell predicted in Nineteen Eighty-four. They bumped him off after it was published, you know. The book hit a little too close to home. He was obviously on to them— the references to Inner and Outer parties with different teachings, O'Brien's speech about power being an end in itself— and they got him. Orwell, you see, ran across them in Spain, where they were functioning quite openly at one point during the Civil War. But artists also arrive at truth through their imaginations, if they let themselves wander freely. They're more likely to arrive at the truth than more scientific-minded people."

"You've just tied two hundred years of world history up in a theory that would make me feel I should have myself committed if I accepted it," said George. "But I'm drawn to it, I admit. Partly intuitively— I feel you are a person who is essentially sane and not paranoid. Partly because the orthodox version of history that I was taught in school never made sense to me, and I know how people can twist history to suit their beliefs, and therefore I assume that the history I've learned is twisted. Partly because of the very wildness of the idea. If I learned one thing in the last few years, it's that the crazier an idea is the more likely it is to be true. Still and all, given all those reasons for believing you, I would like some further sign."

Hagbard nodded. "All right. A sign. So be it. First, a question for you. Assuming your boss, Joe Malik, was on to something— assuming that the place he sent you did have something to do with assassinations and might lead to the Illuminati: what would be likely to happen to Joe Malik?"

"I know what you're suggesting. I don't like to think about it."

"Don't think." Hagbard suddenly pulled a telephone from under the railing of the ship. "We can tap into the Bell System through the Atlantic cable from here. Dial the New York area code and dial any person in New York, any person who could give you up-to-date information on Joe Malik and on Confrontation magazine. Don't tell me who you're dialing. Otherwise, you might suspect I had someone on the ship impersonate the person you want to speak to."

Holding the phone so Hagbard couldn't see, George dialed a number. After a wait of about thirty seconds, after numerous clicks and other strange sounds, George could hear a phone ringing. After a moment, a voice said. "Hello."

"This is George Dorn," said George. "Who is this?"

"Well, who the hell did you think it was? You dialed my number."

"Oh, Christ," said George. "Look, I'm in a place where I don't trust the phones. I have to be sure I'm really talking to you. So I want you to identify yourself without my telling you who you're supposed to be. Do you understand?"

"Of course I understand. You don't have to use that grade school language. This is Peter Jackson, George, as I presume you intended that it should be. Where the hell are you? Are you still in Mad Dog?"

"I'm at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."

"Knowing your bad habits, I'm not surprised. Have you heard about what happened to us? Is that why you're calling?"

"No. What happened?" George gripped the telephone tighter.

"The office was blown up by a bomb early this morning. And Joe has disappeared."

"Was Joe killed?"

"Not as far as we know. There weren't any bodies in the wreckage. How about you- are you okay?"

"I'm getting into an unbelievable story, Peter. It's so unbelievable that I'm not going to try to tell you about it. Not till I get back. If you're still running a magazine there then."

"As of now there's still a magazine, and I'm running it from my apartment," said Peter. "I only hope they don't decide to blow me up."

"Who?"

"Whoever. You're still on assignment. And if this has anything to do with what you've been doing down in Mad Dog, Texas, you're in trouble. Reporters are not supposed to go around getting their boss's magazines bombed."

"You sound pretty cheerful, considering Joe might be dead."

"Joe is indestructible. By the way, George, who's paying for this call?"

"A wealthy friend, I think. He's got a corner on flax or something like that. More on him later. I'm going to sign off now, Pete. Thanks for talking."

"Sure. Take care, baby."

George handed the phone to Hagbard. "Do you know what's happened to Joe? Do you know who bombed Confrontation? You knew about this before I called. Your people are pretty handy with explosives."

Hagbard shook his head. "All I know is, the pot is coming to a boil. Your editor, Joe Malik, was onto the Illuminati. That's why he sent you to Mad Dog. As soon as you show your face down there, you get busted and Malik's office is bombed. What do you think?"

"I think that what you've been telling me is the truth, or a version of it. I don't know whether to trust you completely. But I've got my sign. If the Bavarian Illuminati don't exist, something does. So, then, where do we go from here?"

Hagbard smiled. "Spoken like a true homo neophilus, George. Welcome to the tribe. We want to recruit you, because you are so gullible. That is, gullible in the right way. You're skeptical about conventional wisdom, but attracted to unorthodox ideas. An unfailing mark of homo neophilus. The human race is not divided into the irrational and the rational, as some idealists think. All humans are irrational, but there are two different kinds of irrationally— those who love old ideas and hate and fear new ones, and those who despise old ideas and joyfully embrace new ones. Homo neophobus and homo neophilus. Neophobus is the original human stock, the stock that hardly changed at all for the first four million years of human history. Neophilus is the creative mutation that has been popping up at regular intervals during the past million years, giving the race little forward pushes, the kind you give a wheel to make it spin faster and faster. Neophilus makes a lot of mistakes, but he or she moves. They live life the way it should be lived, ninety-nine percent mistakes and one percent viable mutations. Everyone in my organization is neophilus, George. That's why we're so far ahead of the rest of the human race. Concentrated neophilus influences, without any neophobe dilution. We make a million mistakes, but we move so fast that none of them catch up with us. Before you get any deeper, George, I'd like you to become one of us."

"Which means what?"

"Become a Legionnaire in the Legion of Dynamic Discord."

George laughed. "Now that sounds like a gas. But it's hard to believe that an organization with an absurd name like that could build anything as serious as this submarine, or work for such a serious end as foiling the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria."

Hagbard shook his head. "What's serious about a yellow submarine? It's right out of a rock song. And everybody knows people who worry about the Bavarian Illuminati are crackpots. Will you join the Legion— in whatever spirit you choose?"

"Certainly," said George promptly.

Hagbard clapped him on the back. "Ah, you're our type, all right. Good. Back through the door you came, then turn right and through the golden door."

"Is there someone lifting a lamp beside it?"

'There are no honest men on this voyage. Get along with you now." Hagbard's full lips curled in a leer. "You're in for a treat."

("Every perversion," Smiling Jim screamed. "Men having sex with men. Women having sex with women. Obscene desecrations of religious articles for deviant purposes. Even men and women having sex with animals. Why, friends, the only thing they haven't gotten around to yet is people copulating with fruits and vegetables, and I guess that'll be next. Some degenerate getting his kicks with an apple!" The audience laughed at the wit.)

"You've got to run very fast to catch up with the sun. That's the way it is, when you're lost out here," the old woman said, stressing the last five words in a kind of childish singsong. . . . The woods were incredibly thick and dark, but Barney Muldoon stumbled after her. . . . "It's getting darker and darker," she said darkly, "but's always dark, when you're lost out here". . . . "Why do we have to catch the Sun?" Barney asked, perplexed. "In search of more light," she cackled gleefully. "You always need more light, when you're lost out here"....

Behind the golden door stood the lovely black receptionist. She had changed into a short red leather skirt that left all of her long legs in view. Her hands rested lightly on her white plastic belt.

"Hi, Stella," said George. "Is that your name? Is it really Stella Maris?"

"Sure."

"No honest men on this voyage is right Hagbard was talking to me telepathically. He told me your name."

"I told you my name when you boarded the sub. You must have forgotten. You've been through a lot. And sad to say you'll be going through a lot more. I must ask you to remove your clothing. Just shed it on the floor, please."

George unhesitatingly did as he was told. Total or partial nudity was required in lots of initiation rituals; but a twinge of anxiety ran through him. He was trusting these people simply because they hadn't done anything to him yet. But there was really no telling what kind of freaks they might be, what kind of ritual torture or murder they might involve him in. Such fears were part of initiation rituals, too.

Stella was grinning at him, eyebrows raised, as he dropped his shorts. He understood the meaning of the grin, and he felt the blood rush hot as a blush to his penis, which grew thicker and heavier in an instant. Being aware that he was standing nude with the start of an erection in front of this beautiful and desirable woman, who was enjoying the spectacle, made him swell and harden still more.

"That's a good-looking tool you've got there. Nice and thick and pink and purple." Stella sauntered over to him, reached out and touched her fingers to the underside of his cock, just where it met his scrotum. He felt his balls draw up. Then her middle finger ran down the central cord, flicking the underside of the head. George's penis rose to full staff in salute to her manual dexterity.

"The sexually responsive male," said Stella. "Good, good, good. Now you're ready for the next chamber. Right through that green door, if you please."

Naked, erect, regretfully leaving Stella behind, George walked through the door. These people were too healthy and good-humored to be untrustworthy, he thought. He liked them and you ought to trust your feelings.

But as the green door slammed shut behind him, his anxiety came back even stronger than before.

In the center of the room was a pyramid of seventeen steps, alternating red and white marble. The room was large, with five walls that tapered together in a gothic arch thirty feet above the pentagonal floor. Unlike the pyramid in the Mad Dog jail, this one had no huge eye goggling down at him. Instead there was an enormous golden apple, a sphere of gold the height of a man with a foot-long stem and a single leaf the size of an elephant's ear. Cut into the side of the apple was the word KALLISTI in Greek letters. The walls of the room were draped with enormous gold curtains that looked like they'd been stolen from a Cinerama theater, and the floor was covered with lush gold carpet into which George's bare feet sank deeply.

This is different, George told himself to quiet his fear. These people are different. There's a connection with the others, but they're different.

The lights went out. The golden apple was glowing in the dark like a harvest moon. KALLISTI was etched in sharp black lines.

A voice that sounded like Hagbard boomed at him from all sides of the room: "There is no goddess but Goddess, and she is your goddess."

This is actually an Elks Club ceremony, George thought. But there were strange, un-BPOE fumes drifting into his nostrils. An unmistakable odor. High-priced incense these people use. An expensive religion, or lodge, or whatever it is. But you can afford the best when you're a flax tycoon. Flax, huh? Hard to see how a man could make such big money in the flax biz. Did you corner the market, or what? Now, mutual funds, that was more down to earth than flax. I do believe I'm feeling the effects. They shouldn't drug a man without his consent.

He found he was holding his penis, which had shrunk considerably. He gave it a reassuring pull.

Said the voice, "There is no movement but the Discordian movement, and it is the Discordian movement."

That would appear to be self-evident. George rolled his eyes and watched the giant, golden-glowing apple wheel and spin above him.

"This is a most sacred and a most serious hour for Discordians. It is the hour when the great, palpitating heart of Discordia throbs and swells, when She What Began It All prepares to ingest into her heaving, chaotic bosom another Legionnaire of the Legion of Dynamic Discord. O minerval are ye willing to make a commitment to Discordia?"

Embarrassed at being addressed directly, George let go of his wang. "Yes," he said, in a voice that sounded muffled to him.

"Are ye a human being, and not a cabbage or something?"

George giggled. "Yes."

"That's too bad," the voice boomed. "Do ye wish to better yerself?"

"Yes."

"How stupid. Are ye willing to become philosophically illuminated?"

Why that word, George wondered briefly. Why illuminated? But he said, "I suppose so."

"Very funny. Will ye dedicate yerself to the holy Discordian movement?"

George shrugged, "As long as it suits me."

There was a draft against his belly. Stella Maris, naked and gleaming, stepped out from behind the pyramid. The soft glow from the golden apple illuminated the rich browns and blacks of her body. George felt the blood charging back into his penis. This part was going to be OK. Stella walked toward him With a slow, stately stride, gold bracelets sparkling and tinkling on her wrists. George felt hunger, thirst, and a pressure as if a balloon were slowly being inflated in his bowels. His cock rose, heartbeat by heartbeat. The muscles in his buttocks and thighs tightened, relaxed, and tightened again.

Stella approached with gliding steps and danced around him in a circle, one hand reaching out to brush his bare waist. He stepped forward and held out his hands to her. She danced away on tiptoes, spinning, arms over her head, heavy conical breasts with black nipples tilted upward. For once George understood why some men like big boobs.

His eyes moved to the globes of her buttocks, the long muscular shadows in her thighs and calves. He stumbled toward her. She stopped suddenly, legs slightly apart forming an inverse with her patch of very abundant hair at the Royal Arch, her hips swaying in a gentle circular motion. His tool pulled him to her as if it were iron and she were magnetized; he looked down and saw that a little pearl of fluid, gleaming gold in the light from the apple, had appeared in the eye. Polyphemus wanted very much to get into the cave.

George walked up to her until the head of the serpent was buried in the bushy, prickly garden at the bottom of her belly. He put his hands out and pressed them against the two cones, feeling her ribcage rise and fall with heavy breathing. Her eyes were half closed and her lips slightly open. Her nostrils flared wide.

She licked her lips and he felt her fingers lightly circling his cock, lightly brushing it with a friction strong enough to gently electrify it. She stepped back a bit and pushed her finger into the moisture on his tip. George put his hand into the tangle of her pubic hair, feeling the lips hot and swollen, feeling her juices slathering his fingers. His middle finger slid into her cunt, and he pushed it in past the tight opening all the way up to his knuckle. She gasped, and her whole body writhed around his finger in a spiral motion. "Wow, God!" George whispered. "Goddess!" Stella answered fiercely. George nodded. "Goddess," he said hoarsely, meaning Stella as much as the legendary Discordia.

She smiled and drew away from him. "Try to imagine that this is not me, Stella Maris, the youngest daughter of Discordia. She is merely the vessel of Goddess. Her priestess. Think of Goddess. Think of her entering me and acting through me. I am her now!" All the while she was stroking Polyphemus gently but insistently. It was already ferocious as a stallion, but it seemed to be getting more inflamed, if that were possible.

"I'm going to go off in your hand in a second," George moaned. He gripped her slender wrist to stop her. "I've got to fuck you, whoever you are, woman or goddess. Please."

She stepped back from him, her tan palms turned toward him, her arms held away from her sides in a receiving, accepting gesture. But she said, "Climb the steps now. Climb up to the apple." Her feet twinkling on the thick carpet, she ran backward away from him and disappeared behind the pyramid.

He climbed the seventeen steps, old one-eye still swollen and aching. The top of the pyramid was broad and flat, and he stood facing the apple. He put a hand out and touched it, expecting cold metal, surprised when the softly glowing texture felt warm as a human body to his touch. About half a foot below the level of his waist he saw a dark, elliptical opening in the side of the apple, and a sinister suspicion formed in his mind.

"You got it, George" said the booming voice that presided over his initiation. "Now you're supposed to plant your seeds in the apple. Go to it, George. Give yourself to Goddess."

Shit man, George thought. What a silly idea! They get a guy turned on like this and then they expect him to fuck a goddamn golden idol. He had a good mind to turn his back on the apple, sit down on the top step of the pyramid and jack-off to show them what he thought of them.

"George, would we let you down? It's nice there in the apple. Come on, stick it in. Hurry up."

I am so gullible, thought George. But a hole is a hole. It's all friction. He stepped up to the apple and gingerly placed the tip of his cock in the elliptical opening, half expecting to be sucked in by some mechanical force, half fearing it would be chopped off by a miniature guillotine. But there was nothing. His cock didn't even touch the edges of the hole. He took another small step, and put it halfway in. Still nothing. Then something warm and wet and hairy squirmed up against the tip of his cock. And, whatever it was, he felt it give as he reflexively pushed forward. He pushed some more and it pushed back, and he slid into it. A cunt by all the high hidden Gods, a cunt!— and by the feel it was almost surely Stella's.

George exhaled a deep sigh, planted his hands on the smooth surface of the apple to support himself and began thrusting. The pumping from inside the apple was as fierce. The metal was warm against his thighs and belly. Suddenly the pelvis inside slammed up against the hole, and a hollow scream resounded from the inside of the apple. The echo effect made it seem to hang in the air, containing all the agony, spasm, itch, twitch, moon madness, horror, and ecstasy of life from the ocean's birth to now.

George's prick was stretched like the skin of a balloon about to burst. His lips drew back from his teeth. The delicious electricity of orgasm was building in his groin, in the deepest roots of his penis, in his quick. He was coming. He cried out as he fired his seed into the unseen cunt, into the apple, into Goddess, into eternity.

There was a crash above. George's eyes opened. A nude male body at the end of a rope came hurtling at him from the vaulted ceiling. It jerked to a stop with a horrible crack, its feet quivering above the stem of the apple. Even as the leaps of ejaculation still racked George's body, the penis over his head lifted and spurted thick white gobbets of come, like tiny doves, arcing out over George's uplifted, horrified head to fall somewhere on the side of the pyramid. George stared at the face, canted to one side, the neck broken, a hangman's knot behind the ear. It was his own face.

George went ape. He pulled his penis out of the apple and nearly fell backward down the stairs. He ran down the seventeen steps and looked back. The dead figure was still hanging, through a trap in the ceiling, directly above the apple. The penis had subsided. The body slowly rotated. Enormous laughter boomed out in the room, sounding very much like Hagbard Celine.

"Our sympathies," said the voice. "You are now a legionnaire in the Legion of Dynamic Discord."

The hanging figure vanished soundlessly. There was no trapdoor in the ceiling. A colossal orchestra somewhere began to play Pomp and Circumstance. Stella Maris came round from the back of the pyramid again, this time clothed from head to foot in a simple white robe. Her eyes shone. She was carrying a silver tray with a steaming hot towel on it. She put the tray on the floor, knelt, and wrapped George's relaxing dick in the towel. It felt delicious.

"You were beautiful," she whispered.

"Yeah, but— wow!" George looked up at the pyramid. The golden apple gleamed cheerfully.

"Get up off the floor," he said. "You're embarrassing me."

She stood up smiling at him, the broad grin of a woman whose lover has thoroughly satisfied her.

"I'm glad you liked it," said George, his wildly disparate emotions gradually coalescing as anger. "What was the idea of that last little gag? To turn me off permanently on sex?"

Stella laughed. "George, admit it. Nothing could turn you off sex, right? So don't be such a bad sport."

"Bad sport? That sick trick is your idea of sport? What a goddam rotten dirty motherfucking thing to do to a man!"

"Motherfucking? No, that's for when we ordain deacons."

George shook his head angrily. She absolutely refused to be shamed. He was speechless.

"If you have any complaints, sweet man, take them to Episkopos Hagbard Celine of the Lief Erikson Cabal," said Stella. She turned and started walking back toward the pyramid. "He's waiting for you back the way you came. And there's a change of clothes in the next room."

"Wait a minute!" George called after her. "What the blazes does Kallisti mean?"

She was gone.

In the anteroom of the initiation chamber he found a green tunic and tight black trousers draped over a costumer. He didn't want to put them on. It was probably some sort of uniform of this idiotic cult, and he wanted no part of it. But there weren't any other clothes. There was also a beautiful pair of black boots. Everything fit perfectly and comfortably. There was a full-length mirror on the wall and he looked at himself and grudgingly admitted that the outfit was a gas. A tiny golden apple glinted on the left side of his chest. The only thing was that his hair needed washing. It was getting stringy.

Through two more doors and he was facing Hagbard.

"You didn't like our little ceremony?" said Hagbard with exaggerated sympathy. "That's too bad. I was so proud of it, especially the parts I lifted from William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade."

"It's sick," said George. "And putting the woman inside the apple so I couldn't have any kind of personal sex with her, so I had to use her as a receptacle, as, as an object. You made it pornographic. And sadistic pornography, at that."

"Dig, George," said Hagbard. "Thou art that. If there were no death, there would be no sex. If there were no sex, there would be no death. And without sex, there would be no evolution toward intelligence, no human race. Therefore death is necessary. Death is the price of orgasm. Only one being on all this planet is sexless, intelligent and immortal. While you were pumping your seeds into the symbol of life, I showed you orgasm and death in one image and brought it home to you. And you'll never forget it. It was a trip, George. Wasn't it a trip?"

George nodded reluctantly. "It was a trip."

"And you know— in your bones— a little more about life than you did before, right, George?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, thank you for joining the Legion of Dynamic Discord."

"You're welcome."

Hagbard beckoned George to the edge of the boat-shaped balcony. He pointed down. Far below in the blue-green medium through which they seemed to be flying George could see rolling lands, hills, winding riverbeds— and then, broken buildings. George gasped. Pyramids rose up below, as high as the hills.

"This is one of the great port cities," Hagbard said. "Galleys from the Americas plied their trade to and from this harbor for a thousand years."

"How long ago?"

'Ten thousand years," said Hagbard. "This was one of the last cities to go. Of course, their civilization had declined quite a bit by then. Meanwhile, we've got a problem. The Illuminati are here already."

A large, undulating, blue-gray shape appeared ahead of them, swam toward them, whirled and matched their speed so it seemed to drift alongside. George felt another momentary leap of fright. Was this another of Hagbard's tricks?

"What is that fish? How does it keep up with us?" George asked.

"It's a porpoise, not a fish, a mammal. And they can swim a lot faster than submarines can sail underwater. We can keep up with them, though. They form a film around their bodies that enables them to slide through the water without setting up any turbulence. I learned from them how to do it, and I applied it to this sub. We can cross the Atlantic under water in less than a day."

A voice spoke from the control panel. "Better go transparent. You'll be within range of their detectors when you've gone another ten miles."

"Right," said Hagbard. "We will maintain present course until further notice, so you'll know where we are."

"I'll know," said the voice.

Hagbard slashed his hand through the air disgustedly. "You're so fucking superior."

"Who are you talking to?" said George.

"Howard."

The voice said, "I've never seen machines like this before. They look something like crabs. They've just about got the temple all dug up."

"When the Illuminati do something on their own, they go first class," said Hagbard.

"Who the hell is Howard?" said George.

"It's me. Out here. Hello, Mr. Human," said the voice. "I'm Howard."

Unbelieving, yet knowing quite well what was happening, George slowly turned his head. The dolphin appeared to be looking at him.

"How does he talk to us?" said Hagbard.

"He's swimming alongside the prow of the submarine, which is where we pick up his voice. My computer translates from Delphine to English A mike here in the control room sends our voices to the computer which translates into Delphine and broadcasts the correct sounds through the water to him."

"Lady-oh, oh de-you-day, a new human being has come my way," Howard sang. "He has swum into my ken. I hope he's one of the friendly men."

"They sing a lot," said Hagbard. "Also recite poetry and make it up on the spot. A large part of their culture is poetry. Poetics and athletics— and, of course, the two are very closely related. What they do mostly is swim, hunt, and communicate with each other."

"But we do all with artful complexity and rare finesse," said Howard, looping the loop outside.

"Lead us to the enemy, Howard," said Hagbard.

Howard swam out in front of them, and as he did so, he sang:

Right on, right on, a-stream against the foe
The sallying schools of the Southern seas make their
course to go. Attack, attack, with noses sound as rock
No shark or squid can shake us loose or survive our dour shock.

"Epics," said Hagbard. "They're mad for epics. They have their whole story for the past forty thousand years in epic form. No books, no writing— how could they handle pens with their fins, you know? All memorization. Which is why they favor poetry. And their poems are marvelous, but you must spend years studying their language before you know that. Our computer turns their works into doggerel. It's the best it can do. When I have the time, I'll add some circuits that can really translate poetry from one language to another. When the Porpoise Corpus is translated into human languages, it will advance our culture by centuries or more. It will be as if we'd discovered the works of a whole race of Shakespeares that had been writing for forty millennia."

"On the other hand," said Howard, "your civilizations may be demoralized by culture shock."

"Not likely," said Hagbard grumpily. "We've a few things to teach you, you know."

"And our psychotherapists can help you over the anguish of digesting our knowledge," said Howard.

"They have psychotherapists?" said George.

"They invented psychoanalysis thousands of years ago as a means of passing the time on long migrations. They have highly complex brains and symbol-systems. But their minds are unlike ours in very important ways. They are all in one piece, so to speak. They lack the structural differentiation of ego, superego, and id. There is no repression. They are fully aware, and accepting, of their most primitive wishes. And conscious will, rather than parent-inculcated discipline, guides their actions. There is no neurosis, no psychosis among them. Psychoanalysis for them is an imaginative poetic exercise in autobiography, rather than a healing art. There are no difficulties of the mind that require healing."

"Not quite true," said Howard. "There was a school of thought about twenty thousand years ago that envied humans. They were called the Original Sinners, because they were like the first parents of your human race who, according to some of your legends, envied the gods and suffered for it. They taught that humans were superior because they could do many more things than dolphins. But they despaired, and most ended up by committing suicide. They were the only neurotics in the long history of porpoises. Our philosophers mostly hold that we live in beauty all the days of our lives, as no human does. Our culture is simply what you might call a commentary on our natural surroundings, whereas human culture is at war with nature. If any race is afflicted, it is yours. You can do much, and what you can do, you must do. And, speaking of war, the enemy lies ahead."

In the distance George could make out what appeared to be a mighty city rising on hills surrounding a deep depression which must have been a harbor when Atlantis was on the surface. The buildings marched on and on as far as the eye could see. They were mostly low, but here and there a square tower reared up. The sub was heading for the center of the ancient waterfront. George stared at the buildings; he was able to see them better now. They were angular, very modern in appearance, whereas the other city they'd flown— sailed— over had a mixed Greek-Egyptian-Mayan quality to its architecture. Here there were no pyramids. But the tops of many of the structures were broken off, and many others were heaps of rubble. Still, it was remarkable that a city which had sunk so many thousands of feet to the bottom of the ocean in the course of what must have been an enormous earthquake should be this well preserved. The buildings must be incredibly durable. If New York went through a catastrophe like that there'd be nothing left of its glass-and-alloy skyscrapers.

There was one pyramid. It was much smaller than the towers around it. It gleamed a dull yellow. Despite its lack of height, it seemed to dominate the harbor skyline, like a squat, powerful chieftain in the center of a circle of tall, slender warriors. There was movement around its base.

"This is the city of Peos in the region of Poseida," said Hagbard, "and it was great in Atlantis for a thousand years after the hour of the Dragon Star. It reminds me of Byzantium, which was a great city for a thousand years after the fall of Rome. And that pyramid is the Temple of Tethys, goddess of the Ocean Sea. It was seafaring that made Peos great. I .have a soft spot in my heart for those people."

Crawling around the base of the temple were strange sea creatures that looked like giant spiders. Lights flashed from their heads and glinted on the sides of the temple. As the submarine swept closer, George could see that the spiders were machines, each with a body the size of a tank. They appeared to be excavating deep trenches around the base of the pyramid.

"Wonder where they had those built," muttered Hagbard. "Hard to keep innovations like that a secret."

As he spoke, the spiders stopped whatever work they were doing around the pyramid. There was no motion among them at all for a moment Then one of them rose up from the sea bottom, followed by another, and another. They formed quickly into a V shape and started toward the submarine like a pair of arms outstretched to seize it. They picked up speed as they came.

"They've detected us," Hagbard growled. "They weren't supposed to, but they have. It never pays to underestimate the Illuminati. All right, George. Button up your asshole. We're in for a fight."

At that moment but exactly two hours earlier on the clock, Rebecca Goodman awoke from a dream about Saul and a Playboy bunny and something sinister. The phone was ringing (was there a pyramid in the dream?—she tried to remember— something like that) and she reached groggily past the mermaid statue and held the receiver to her ear. "Yes?" she said cautiously.

"Put your hand on your pussy and listen," said August Personage. "I'd like to lift your dress and—" Rebecca hung up.

She suddenly remembered the hit when the needle went in, and all those wasted years. Saul had saved her from that, and now Saul was gone and strange voices on the phone talked of sex the way addicts talked of junk. "In the beginning of all things was Mummu, the spirit of pure Chaos. In the beginning was the Word, and it was written by a baboon." Rebecca Goodman, twenty-five years old, started to cry. If he's dead, she thought, these years have been wasted, too. Learning to love. Learning that sex was more than another kind of junk. Learning that tenderness was more than a word in the dictionary: that it was just what D. H. Lawrence said, not an embellishment on sex but the center of the act. Learning what that poor guy on the phone could never guess, as most people in this crazy country never guessed it. And then losing it, losing it to an aimless bullet fired from a blind gun somewhere.

August Personage, about to leave the phone booth at the Automat on Fortieth Street and the Avenue of the Americas, catches a flash of plastic on the floor. Bending, he picks up a pornographic tarot card, which he quickly shoves into a pocket to be examined at leisure later.

It was the Five of Pentacles.

And, when the throne room was empty and the believers had departed in wonder and redoubled faith, Hassan knelt and separated the two halves of the vessel which held the head of Ibn Azif. "Very convincing screams," he commented, slipping the trapdoor beneath the plate; and Ibn Azif climbed out, grinning at his own performance. His neck was thick, bull-like, undamaged, and quite solid.
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