The illuminatus! trilogy (53 page)

“Fuck!” George shouted at the screen. He didn’t recall TV newscasters being that obnoxious. Must be a fairly recent development, something that had happened after he left for Mad Dog—maybe a late outgrowth of the Fernando Poo crisis. It was in this very hotel, George remembered, just after the bloody Fernando
Poo demonstrations at the UN that Joe Malik had first broached the subject of Mad Dog. Now Joe had disappeared, not unlike those people who, as George knew, the Syndicate had snuffed in earnest of their good intentions, having accepted Hagbard’s gift of objets d’art. Not unlike Inspector Saul Goodman who perhaps had gone down the same rabbit hole as Joe,

There was a knock at the door. George went to it, turning off the TV set in passing. It was Stella Maris.

“Well, glad to see you, baby. Strip off that dress and come over to the bed, so we can reaffirm my initiation rites.”

Stella put her hands on his shoulders. “Never mind that now, George. We’ve got things to worry about. Robert Putney Drake and Banana Nose Maldonado are dead. Come on. We’ve got to get back to Hagbard right away.”

Traveling first by helicopter, then by executive jet and finally by motorboat to Hagbard’s Chesapeake Bay submarine base, George was exhausted and dazed in terror’s aftermath. He rallied when he saw Hagbard again.

“You motherfucker! You sent me to get goddam killed!”

“And that has given you the courage to tell me off,” said Hagbard with an indulgent smile. “Fear is a funny thing, isn’t it, George? If we weren’t afraid of dying of diseases, we’d never develop the science of microbiology. That science in turn creates the possibility of germ warfare. And each superpower is so afraid that the others may wage germ warfare against it, each develops its own plagues to wipe out the human race.”

“Your mind is wandering, you stupid old fart,” said Stella. “George isn’t kidding about nearly being killed.”

“The fear of death is the beginning of slavery,” Hagbard said simply.

Even though it was early, George found himself on the verge of collapse, ready to sleep for twenty-four hours or more. The submarine’s engines vibrated under
his feet as he trudged to his cabin, but he wasn’t even curious about where they were going. He lay down on his bed, and picked a book off the headpost bookshelf, part of his getting-ready-for-sleep ritual.
Sexuality, Magic and Perversion
said the binder. Well, that sounded juicy and promising. Author named Francis King, whoever that is. Citadel Press, 1972. Only a few years ago.

Well, then. George opened at random:

George blinked.
Several
Illuminati? He had to ask Hagbard about this. But he was already beginning to visualize into hypnogogic revery and sleep was coming.

In less than a half-hour, Joe had distributed ninety-two paper cups of tomato juice containing AUM, the drug that promised to turn neophobes into neophiles. He stood in Pioneer Court, just north of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, at a table from which hung a poster reading free tomato juice. Each person who took a cupful was invited to fill out a short questionnaire and leave it in a box on Joe’s table. However, Joe explained, the questionnaire was optional, and anyone who wanted to drink the tomato juice and run was welcome to do so.

AUM would work just as well either way, but the questionnaire would give ELF an opportunity to trace its effect on some of the subjects.

A tall black policeman was suddenly standing in front of the table. “You got a permit for this?”

“You bet,” said Joe with a quick smile. “I’m with the General Services Corporation, and we’re running a test on a new brand of tomato juice. Care to try some, officer?”

“No thanks,” said the cop unsmilingly. “We had a bunch of yippies threatening to put LSD in the city’s water supply two years ago. Let’s just see your credentials.” There was something cold, hard and homicidal in this cop’s eyes, Joe thought. Something beyond the ordinary. This would be a unique guy, and the stuff would affect him uniquely. Joe looked down at the nameplate on the policeman’s jacket, which read waterhouse. The line behind Patrolman Waterhouse was getting longer.

Joe found the paper Malaclypse had given him. He handed it to Waterhouse, who glanced at it and said, “This isn’t enough. You apparently didn’t tell them you were going to set up your stand in Pioneer Court You’re blocking pedestrian traffic here. This is a busy area. You’ll have to move.”

Joe looked out at the street where crowds walked back and forth, at the bridge across the green, greasy Chicago river and at the buildings surrounding Pioneer Court. The brick-paved area was an ample public square, and there was clearly room for everyone. Joe smiled at Waterhouse. He was in Chicago and knew what to do. He took a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket, folded it twice lengthwise and wrapped it around a cup of the tomato juice, which he deftly filled from the plastic jug on his table. Waterhouse drained the tomato juice without comment, and when he tossed the cup into the wastebasket the ten-dollar bill was gone.

A bunch of baldheaded, cackling small-town businessman types was lined up in front of the table. Each one wore an acetate-covered badge bearing a red
Crusaders’ cross, the letters KCUF and the words,

“Dominus Vobiscum! My name is —.” Joe smilingly handed them cups of tomato juice, noting that the lapels of several bore an additional decoration, a square white plastic cross with the letters CL printed across it. Any of these men, Joe knew, would love to put him in jail for the rest of his life because he was the publisher of a radical magazine that occasionally got very explicit about sex and several times had published what Joe considered very beautiful erotica. The Knights of Christianity United for the Faith were rumored to be behind the firebombing of two theaters in the Midwest and the lynching of a news dealer in Alabama. And, of course, they had close ties with Atlanta Hope’s God’s Lightning Party.

AUM would be strong medicine for this bunch, Joe thought. He wondered if it would get them off their censorship kick or just make them more formidable. In either case, they would be bound to bust loose from Illuminati control for a time. If only there were a way he and Simon could get into their convention and administer AUM to more of them …

Behind the KCUF contingent there was a small man who looked like a rooster with a gray comb. When Joe read the questionnaire later, he found out that he had administered AUM to Judge Caligula Bushmanra shining ornament of the Chicago judiciary.

There followed a succession of faces Joe did not find memorable. They all had that complex, stupid, shrewd, angry, defeated, cynical, gullible look characteristic of Chicago, New York and other big cities. Then he found himself confronting a tall redhead whose features seemed to combine the best of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. “Any vodka in that?” she asked him.

“No, ma’am, just straight tomato juice,” said Joe.

“Too bad,” she said as she tossed it down.” “I could use one.”

Caligula Bushman, known as the toughest judge on the Chicago bench, was trying six people who were
charged with attacking a draft board, destroying all its furniture, ruining its files and dumping a wheelbarrow full of cow manure on the floor. Suddenly Bushman interrupted the trial about halfway through the prosecution’s presentation of its case with the announcement that he was going to hold a sanity hearing. To the bewilderment of all, he then asked State’s Attorney Milo A. Flanagan a series of rather odd questions:

“What would you think of a man who not only kept an arsenal in his home, but was collecting at enormous financial sacrifice a second arsenal to protect the first one? What would you say if this man so frightened his neighbors that they in turn were collecting weapons to protect themselves from him? What if this man spent ten times as much money on his expensive weapons as he did on the education of his children? What if one of his children criticized his hobby and he called that child a traitor and a bum and disowned it? And he took another child who had obeyed him faithfully and armed that child and sent it out into the world to attack neighbors? What would you say about a man who introduces poisons into the water he drinks and the air he breathes? What if this man not only is feuding with the people on his block but involves himself in the quarrels of others in distant parts of the city and even in the suburbs? Such a man would clearly be a paranoid schizophrenic, Mr. Flanagan, with homicidal tendencies. This is the man who should be on trial, though under our modern, enlightened system of jurisprudence we would attempt to cure and rehabilitate him rather than merely punish.

“Speaking as a judge,” he continued, “I dismiss this case on several grounds. The State is clinically insane as a corporate entity and is absolutely unfit to arrest, try and incarcerate those who disagree with its policies. But I doubt that this judgment, though obvious to any man of common sense, quite fits into the rules of our American jurisprudential game. I also rule, therefore, that the right to destroy government property is protected
by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and therefore the crime with which these people are charged is not a crime under the Constitution. Government property belongs to all of the people, and the right of any of the people to express displeasure with their government by destroying government property is precious and shall not be infringed.” This doctrine had come to Judge Bushman suddenly while he was speaking without his robe. It startled him, but he had noticed that his mind was working better and faster this afternoon.

He went on, “The State does not exist as a person or thing exists, but is a legal fiction. A fiction is a form of communication. Anything said to be owned by a form of communication must also thereby be itself a form of communication. Government is a map and government paper is a map of the map. The medium, in this case, is definitely the message, as any semanticist would agree. Furthermore, any physical act directed against a communication is itself a communication, a map of the map of the map. Thus, destruction of government property is protected by the First Amendment. I will issue a more ample written opinion on this point, but I feel now that the defendants need suffer in durance no longer. Case dismissed.”

Many spectators trooped out of the courtroom sullenly, while those who loved the defendants surrounded them with tears, laughter and hugs. Judge Bushman, who stepped down from the bench but remained in the courtroom, was the benign center of a cluster of reporters. (He was thinking that his opinion would be a map of the map of the map of the map, or a fourth-order map. How many potential further orders of symbolism were there? He barely heard the praises showered on him. Of course, he knew his decision would be overturned; but the judge business already bored him. It would be interesting to get into mathematics, really
deep.)

Harold Canvera had not bothered to fill out a questionnaire and therefore was not under observation and
was not protected. He returned to his home, and his job as an accountant, and his avocation, which was recording telephone spiels against the Illuminati, the Communists, the Socialists, the Liberals, the Middle-of-the-Roaders and all insufficiently conservative Republicans. (Mr. Canvera also mailed out similar pamphlets whenever anybody was intrigued enough by his phone messages to send him twenty-five cents for additional information. He performed these worthy educational services for a group calling itself White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism, which was a splinter off Taxpayers Warring Against Tyranny, which was a splinter off God’s Lightning.) In the following weeks, however, strange new ideas began to appear in Canvera’s taped phone messages.

“Lower
taxes aren’t enough,” he said, for instance. “When you hear some so-called conservative Bircher or some follower of William Buckley Jr. call for lower taxes,
beware
. There’s a man who’s
squishy soft
on Illuminism. All taxes are robbery. Instead of attacking Joan Baez, a real American should support her for refusing to pay any more money into the Illuminati treasury in Washington.”

The next week was even more interesting: “White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism has often told you that there’s no real difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Both are pawns of the Illuminati scheme to destroy private property and make everybody a slave of the State, so the International Bankers
of a certain minority group
can run everything. Now it’s time for all thinking patriots to take an even more skeptical look than ever before at the so-called anti-Illuminati John Birch Society. Why are they always putting up those stickers saying, ‘Support Your Local Police’? Ever wonder about that? What’s the most important thing to a police state? Isn’t it police? And if we got rid of the police, how could we ever have a police state? Think about it, fellow Americans, and Remember the Alamo!”

A few of these new strange ideas had come from
various right-wing anarchist periodicals (all secretly subsidized by Hagbard Celine) that Canvera had mysteriously received three months earlier and hadn’t glanced at until swallowing the AUM. The periodicals had been mailed by Simon Moon, as a joke, in an envelope with the return address Illuminati International, 34 East 68th Street, New York City—the headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations, long regarded by the Birchers as an Illuminati hotbed. “Remember the Alamo,” Canvera had picked up from
Bowie Knife
, a publication of the Davy Crockett Society, a paramilitary right-wing fascist group which had splintered off God’s Lightning when their leader, a Texas oil millionaire of gigantic paranoias, became convinced that many apparent Mexicans were actually Red Chinese agents in slight disguise. Later, the dogma became retroactive and he claimed that the Chinese had always been Communists,
all
Mexicans had always been Chinese, and the attack on the Alamo was the first Communist assault against American capitalism.