The illuminatus! trilogy (36 page)

“It’s a dreadfully long monster of a book,” Wildeblood says pettishly, “and I certainly won’t have time to read it, but I’m giving it a thorough
skimming
. The authors are utterly incompetent—no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of
ghastly
boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell,
I’m sure, and the authors—whom I’ve
never
heard of— have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be
sure
I won’t waste time reading such rubbish, but I’ll have a perfectly devastating review ready for you by tomorrow noon.”

“Well, we don’t expect you to read every book you review,” Peter says mollifyingly, “just so long as you can be entertaining about them.”

“The Foot Fetishist Liberation Front will be participating in the rally at the UN building,” Joe Malik said, as George and Peter and he were affixing their black armbands.

“Christ,” Jackson said disgustedly.

“We can’t afford to take that attitude,” Joe said severely. “The only hope for the Left at this time is coalition politics. We can’t exclude anybody who wants to join us.”

“I’ve got nothing against faggots personally,” Peter begins (“Gays,” Joe says patiently). “I’ve got nothing against Gays personally,” Peter goes on, “but they are a bringdown at rallies. They just give God’s Lightning more evidence to say we’re all a bunch of fruits. But, OK, realism is realism, there are a lot of them, and they swell our ranks, and all that, but, Jesus, Joe. These
toe freaks
are a splinter within a splinter. They’re microscopic.”

“Don’t call them toe freaks,” Joe says. “They don’t like that.”

The color television set in the Three Lions Pub in the Tudor Hotel at Forty-second Street and Second Avenue shows the white-helmeted men carrying wooden crosses fall back as the blue-helmeted men carrying billy clubs move forward. The CBS camera pans over the plaza. There are five bodies on the ground scattered like flotsam tossed on a beach by a receding wave. Four of them are moving, making slow efforts to get up. The fifth is not moving at all.

George said, “I think that’s the guy we saw getting clubbed. My God, I hope he isn’t dead.”

Joe Malik said, “If he is dead, it may get people to demand that something be done about God’s Lightning.”

Peter Jackson laughed mirthlessly. “You still think some honky peacenik getting killed is going to make people indignant. Don’t you understand, nobody in this country
cares
what happens to a peace freak. You’re in the same boat with the niggers now, you silly sons-of-bitches.”

Carlos looked up in astonishment as I burst into the room, still wet from the Passaic, and threw the gun at his feet, screaming, “You silly sons-of-bitches, you can’t even make bombs without blowing yourselves up, and when you buy a gun the motherfucker is defective and misfires. You can’t expel me—I quit!” You silly sons-of-bitches
….

“You silly sons-of-bitches!” Simon shouted. Joe woke as the VW swerved amid a flurry of Hell’s Angels bike roaring by. He was back in “real” time again—but the word had quotes around it, in his mind, now, and it always would.

“Wow,” he said, “I was in Chicago again, and then at that rock festival … and then I was in somebody else’s lifeline…. ”

“Goddam Harley-Davidsons,” Simon mutters as the last Angel thunders by. “When fifty or sixty of them swarm by like that, it’s as bad as trying to drive on the sidewalk in
Times Square at high noon without hitting a pedestrian.”

“Later-for-that,” Joe said, conscious of his growing ease in using Simon’s own language. “This tomorrow-today-yesterday time is beginning to get under my skin. It’s happening more and more often. …”

Simon sighed, “You want words to put around it. You can’t accept it until it has labels dangling off it, like a new suit. OK. And your favorite word-game is science. Fine, right on! Tomorrow we’ll drop by the Main Library and you can look up the English science journal
Nature
for Summer nineteen sixty-six. There’s an article in there by the University College physicist F. R. Stannard about what he calls the Faustian Universe, He tells how the behavior of K-mesons can’t be explained assuming a one-way time-track, but fits into a neat pattern if you assume our universe overlaps another where time runs in the opposite direction. He calls it the Faustian universe, but I’ll bet he has no idea that Goethe wrote
Faust
after experiencing that universe directly, just as you’re doing lately. Incidentally, Stannard points out that everything in physics is symmetrical, except our present concept of one-way time. Once you admit two-way time traffic, you’ve got a completely symmetrical universe. Fits the Occamite’s demand for simplicity. Stannard’ll give you lots of
words
, man. Meanwhile, just settle for what Abdul Alhazred wrote in the
Necronomicon:
‘Past, present, future: all are one in Yog-Sothoth.’ Or what Weishaupt wrote in his
Konigen, Kirchen und Dummheit:
‘There is but one Eye and it is all eyes; one Mind and it is all minds; one time and it is Now.’ Grok?” Joe nods dubiously, faintly hearing the music:

RAMA RAMA RAMA HAAAAARE

Two big rhinoceroses, three big rhinoceroses
…

Dillinger made contact with the mind of Richard Belz, forty-three-year-old professor of physics at Queens College, as Belz was being loaded into an ambulance to be taken to Bellevue Hospital where X rays would reveal severe skull fractures. Shit, Dillinger thought, why does somebody have to be half dead before I can reach him? Then he concentrated on his message: Two universes flowing in opposite directions. Two together form a third entity which is synergetically more than the sum of its two parts. Thus two always leads to three. Two and Three. Duality and trinity. Every unity is a duality and a trinity. A pentagon. Sheer energy, no matter involved. From the pentagon
depend five more pentagons, like the petals of a flower. A white rose. Five petals and a center: six. Two times three. The flower interlocks with another flower just like it, forming a polyhedron made of pentagons. Each such polyhedron could have common surfaces with other polyhedrons, forming infinite latticeworks based on the pentagonal unit. They would be immortal. Self-sustaining. Not computers. Beyond computers. Gods. All space for their habitation. Infinitely complex.

The howl of a siren reached the unconscious ears of Professor Belz. Consciousness is present in the living body, even in one that is apparently unconscious. Unconsciousness is not the absence of consciousness, but its temporary immobility. It is not a state resembling death. It is not like death at all. Once the necessary complexity of brain-cell interconnections is reached, substantial energy relationships are set up. These can exist independently of the material base that brought them into being.

All of this, of course, is merely visual structural metaphor for interactions on the energy level that cannot be visualized. The siren howled.

In the Three Lions pub, George said to Peter, “What was in that water pistol?”

“Sulphuric acid”

“Acid is just the first stage,” said Simon. “Like matter is the first stage of life and consciousness. Acid launches you. But once you’re out there, if the mission is successful, you jettison the first stage and you’re traveling free of gravity. Which means free of matter. Acid dissolves the barriers which prevent the maximum possible complexity of energy relationships from building up in the brain. At Norton Cabal, we’ll show you how to pilot the second stage.”

(Waving their crosses over their heads and howling in-coherently, the men of God’s Lightning formed wavering ranks and marched around the territory they had conquered. Zev Hirsch and Frank Ochuk carried the banner that read
“LOVE RR OR WE’LL STOMP YOU.”)

Howard sang:

A cloud of porpoise bodies swam out from somewhere behind Hagbard’s submarine. Through the pale blue-green medium which Hagbard’s TV cameras made out of water, they seemed to fly toward the distant spiderlike ships of the Illuminati.

“What’s happening?” said George. “Where’s Howard?”

“Howard is leading them,” said Hagbard. He flipped a toggle on the railing of the balcony on which they stood in the center of a globe that looked like a bubble of air at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. “War room, get missiles ready. We may have to back up the porpoise attack.”

“Da, tovarish Celine,”
came a voice.

The porpoises were too far away to be seen now. George discovered that he was not afraid. The whole thing was too much like watching a science-fiction movie. There was too much illusion involved in this submarine of Hagbard’s. If he were able to realize, in his glands and nerves, that he was in a vulnerable metal ship thousands of feet below the surface of the Atlantic, under such enormous pressure that the slightest stress could crack the hull and send water bursting in that would crush them to death, then he might be afraid. If he were really able to accept the fact that those little distant globes with waving legs appended to them were undersea craft manned by people who intended to destroy the vessel he was in, then he could be afraid. Actually, if he could not see as much as he was seeing, but only feel and sense things and be told what was happening, as in the average airplane flight, then he would be afraid. As it was, the 20,000-year-old city of Peos looked like a tabletop model. And though he might intellectually accept Hagbard’s statement that they were over the lost continent of Atlantis, in his bones he didn’t believe in Atlantis. As a result, he didn’t believe in any of the rest of this, either.

Suddenly Howard was outside their bubble. Or some other porpoise. That was another thing that made this hard to accept. Talking porpoises.

“Ready for destruction of enemy ships,” said Howard.

Hagbard shook his head. “I wish we could communicate with them. I wish I could give them a chance to surrender. But they wouldn’t listen. And they have communications systems on their ships that I can’t get through to.” He turned to George. “They use a type of insulated telepathy to communicate. The very thing that tipped off Sheriff Jim
Cartwright that you were in a hotel room in Mad Dog smoking Weishaupt’s Wonder Weed.”

“You don’t want them too close when they go.” said Howard.

“Are your people out of the way?” said Hagbard.

(Five big rhinoceroses, six big rhinoceroses
….)

“Of course. Quit this hesitating. This is no time to be a humanitarian.”

“The sea is crueler than the land,” said Hagbard, “sometimes.”

“The sea is cleaner than the land,” said Howard. “There’s no hate. Just death when and as needed. These people have been your enemies for twenty thousand years.”

“I’m not that old,” said Hagbard, “and I have very few enemies.”

“If you wait any longer you’ll endanger the submarine and my people.”

George looked out at the red and white striped globes which were moving toward them through the blue-green water. They were much larger now and closer. Whatever was propelling them wasn’t visible. Hagbard reached out a brown finger, let it rest on a white button on the railing in front of him, then pressed it decisively.

There was a bright flash of light, dimmed slightly by the medium through which it traveled, on the surface of each of the globes. It was like watching fireworks through tinted glasses. Next, the globes crumbled as if they were ping-pong balls being struck by invisible sledge hammers.

“That’s all there is to it,” said Hagbard quietly.

The air around George seemed to vibrate, and the floor under him shook. Suddenly he was terrified. Feeling the shock wave from the simultaneous explosions out there in the water made it real. A relatively thin metal shell was all that protected him from total annihilation. And nobody would ever hear from him or know what happened to him.

Large, glittering objects drifted down through the water from one of the nearby Illuminati spider ships. They vanished among the streets of the city that George now knew was real. The buildings in the area near the explosion of the Illuminati ships looked more ruined than they had before. The ocean bottom was churned up in brown clouds. Down into the brown clouds drifted the crushed spider
ships. George looked for the Temple of Tethys. It stood, intact, in the distance.

“Did you see those statues fall out of the lead ship?” said Hagbard. “I’m claiming them.” He hit the switch on the railing. “Prepare for salvage operation.”