The illuminatus! trilogy (37 page)

They dropped down among buildings deeply buried in sediment, and at the bottom of their television globe George saw two huge claws reach out, seemingly from nowhere—actually he guessed, from the underside of the submarine—and pick up four gleaming gold statues that lay half-buried in the mud.

Suddenly a bell rang and a red flash lit up the interior of the bubble. “We’re under attack again,” said Hagbard. Oh, no, George thought. Not when I’m starting to believe that all this is real. I won’t be able to stand it. Here goes Dora doing his world-famous coward act again…. Hagbard pointed. A white globe hovered like an underwater moon above a distant range of mountains. On its pale surface a red emblem was painted, a glaring eye inside a triangle.

“Give me missile visibility,” said Hagbard, flicking a switch. Between the white globe and the
Lief Erickson
four orange lights appeared in the water rushing toward them.

“It just doesn’t pay to underestimate them—ever,” said Hagbard. “First it turns out they can detect me when they shouldn’t have equipment good enough to do that, now I find that not only do they have small craft in the vicinity, they’ve got the
Zwack
herself coming after me. And the
Zwack
is firing underwater missiles at me, though I’m supposed to be indetectable. I think we might be in trouble, George.”

George wanted to close his eyes, but he also didn’t want to show fear in front of Hagbard. He wondered what death at the bottom of the Atlantic would feel like. Probably something like being under a pile driver. The water would hit them, engulf them, and it wouldn’t be like any ordinary water—it would be like liquid steel, every drop striking with the force of a ten-ton truck, prying cell apart from cell and crushing each cell individually, reducing the body to a protoplasmic dishrag. He remembered reading about the disappearance of an atomic submarine called the
Thresher
back in the ’60s, and he recalled that the
New
York Times
had speculated that death by drowning in water under extreme pressure would be exceedingly painful, though brief. Every nerve individually being crushed. The spinal cord crushed everywhere along its length. The brain squeezed to death, bursting, rupturing, bleeding into the steel-hard water. The human form would doubtless be unrecognizable in minutes. George thought of every bug he had ever stepped on, and bugs made him think of the spider ships. That’s what we did to
them
. And I define them as enemies only on Hagbard’s say so. Carlo was right. I can’t kill.

Hagbard hesitated, didn’t he? Yes, but he did it. Any man who can cause a death like that to be visited upon other men is a monster. No, not a monster, only too human. But not my kind of human. Shit, George, he’s your kind of human, all right. You’re just a coward. Cowardice doth make consciences for us all.

Hagbard called out, “Howard, where the hell are you?”

The torpedo shape appeared on the right side of the bubble. “Over here, Hagbard. We’ve got more mines ready. We can go after those missiles with mines like we did the spider ships. Think that would work?”

“It’s dangerous,” said Hagbard, “because the missiles might explode on contact with the metal and electronic equipment in the mines.”

“We’re willing to try,” said Howard, and without another word he swam away.

“Wait a minute,” Hagbard said. “I don’t like this. There’s too much danger to the porpoises.” He turned to George and shook his head. “I’m not risking a goddamned thing, and they stand to be blown to bits. It’s not right. I’m not that important.”

“You are risking something,” said George, trying to control the quaver in his voice. “Those missiles will destroy us if the dolphins don’t stop them.”

At that moment, there were four blinding flashes where the orange lights had been. George gripped the railing, sensing that the shock wave of these explosions would be worse than that caused by the destruction of the spider ships. It came. George had been readying himself for it, but unable to tell when it would come, and it still took him by surprise. Everything shook violently. Then the bottom dropped out of his stomach, as if the submarine had suddenly
leaped up. George grabbed the railing with both arms, clinging to it as the only solid thing near him. “O God, we’re gonna be killed!” he cried.

“They got the missiles,” Hagbard said. “That gives us a fighting chance. Laser crew, attempt to puncture the
Zwack
. Fire at will.

Howard reappeared outside the bubble. “How did your people do?” Hagbard asked him.

“All four of them were killed,” said Howard. “The missiles exploded when they approached them, just as you predicted.”

George, who was standing up straight now, thankful that Hagbard had simply ignored his episode of terror, said, “They were killed saving our lives. I’m sorry it happened, Howard.”

“Laser-beam firing, Hagbard,” a voice announced. There was a pause. “I think we hit them.”

“You needn’t be sorry,” said Howard. “We neither look forward to death in fear nor back upon it in sorrow. Especially when someone has died doing something worthwhile. Death is the end of one illusion and the beginning of another.”

“What other illusion?” asked George. “When you’re dead, you’re dead, right?”

“Energy can neither be created nor destroyed,” said Hagbard. “Death itself is an illusion.”

These people were talking like some of the Zen students and acid mystics George had known. If I could feel that way, he thought, I wouldn’t be such a goddamned coward. Howard and Hagbard must be enlightened. I’ve got to become enlightened. I can’t stand living this way any more. Whatever it took, acid alone wasn’t the answer. George had tried acid already, and he knew that, while the experience might be wholly remarkable, for him it left little residue in terms of changed attitudes or behavior. Of course, if you
thought
your attitudes and behavior should change, you mimicked other acidheads.

“I’ll try to find out what’s happening to the
Zwack,”
said Howard, and swam away.

“The porpoises do not fear death, they do not avoid suffering, they are not assailed by conflicts between intellect and feeling and they are not worried about being ignorant of things. In other words, they have not decided that they
know the difference between good and evil, and in consequence they do not consider themselves sinners. Understand?”

“Very few humans consider themselves sinners nowadays,” said George. “But everyone is afraid of death.”

“All human beings consider themselves sinners. It’s just about the deepest, oldest, and most universal human hangup there is. In fact, it’s almost impossible to speak of it in terms that don’t confirm it. To say that human beings have a universal hangup, as I just did, is to restate the belief that all men are sinners in different languages. In that sense, the Book of Genesis—which was written by early Semitic opponents of the Illuminati—is quite right. To arrive at a cultural turning point where you decide that all human conduct can be classified in one of two categories, good and evil, is what creates all sin—plus anxiety, hatred, guilt, depression, all the peculiarly human emotions. And, of course, such a classification is the very antithesis of creativity. To the creative mind there is no right or wrong. Every action is an experiment, and every experiment yields its fruit in knowledge. To the moralist, every action can be judged as right or wrong—and, mind you,
in advance
—without knowing what its consequences are going to be—depending upon the mental disposition of the actor. Thus the men who burned Giordano Bruno at the stake
knew
they were doing good, even though the consequence of their actions was to deprive the world of a great scientist.”

“If you can never be sure whether what you are doing is good or bad,” said George, “aren’t you liable to be pretty Hamlet-like?” He was feeling much better now, much less afraid, even though the enemy was still presumably out there trying to kill him. Maybe he was getting
darshan
from Hagbard.

“What’s so bad about being Hamlet-like?” said Hagbard. “Anyway, the answer is no, because you only become hesitant when you believe there is such a thing as good and evil, and that your action may be one or the other, and you’re not sure which. That was the whole point about Hamlet, if you remember the play. It was his
conscience
that made him indecisive.”

“So he should have murdered a whole lot of people in the first act?”

Hagbard laughed. “Not necessarily. He might have decisively
killed his uncle at the earliest opportunity, thus saving the lives of everyone else. Or he might have said, ‘Hey, am I really obligated to avenge my father’s death?’ and done nothing. He was due to succeed to the throne anyway. If he had just bided his time everyone would have been a lot better off, there would have been no deaths, and the Norwegians would not have conquered the Danes, as they did in the last scene of the last act. Though being Norwegian myself I would hardly begrudge Fortinbras his triumph.”

At that moment Howard appeared again outside their bubble. “The
Zwack
is retreating. Your laser beam punctured the outer shell, causing a leak in the fuel-storage cells and putting excessive stress on the pressure-resisting system. They were forced to climb to higher levels, which put them so far away from you that they’re now heading south toward the tip of Africa.”

Hagbard expelled a great sigh of relief. “That means they’re heading for their home base. They’ll enter a tunnel in the Persian Gulf which will bring them into the great underground Sea of Valusia, which is deepest beneath the Himalayas. That was the first base they established. They were preparing it even before the fall of High Atlantis. It’s devilishly well defended. One day we’ll penetrate it though.”

The thing that puzzled Joe most after his illuminization was John Dillinger’s penis. The rumors about the Smithsonian Institute, he knew, were true: even though any casual phone-caller would get a flat denial from Institute officials, certain high-placed government people could provide a dispensation and the relic would be shown, in the legendary alcohol bottle, all legendary 23 inches of it. But if John was alive, it wasn’t his, and, if it wasn’t his, whose was it?

“Frank Sullivan’s,” Simon said, when Joe finally asked him.

“And who the hell was Frank Sullivan to have a tool like that?”

But Simon only answered, “I don’t know. Just some guy who looked like John.”

Atlantis also bothered Joe, after he saw it the first time Hagbard took him for a ride in the
Lief Erikson
. It was all too pat, too plausible, too good to be true, especially the ruins of cities like Peos, with their architecture that obviously
combined Egyptian and Mayan elements.

“Science has been flying on instruments, like a pilot in a fog, ever since nineteen hundred,” he said casually to Hagbard on the return trip to New York. (This was in ’72, according to his later recollections. Fall of ’72—almost two years exactly after the test of AUM in Chicago.)

“You’ve been reading Bucky Fuller,” was Hagbard’s cool reply. “Or was it Korzybski?”

“Never mind who I’ve been reading,” Joe said directly. “The thought in my head is that I never saw Atlantis, any more than I ever saw Marilyn Monroe. I saw moving pictures which you told me were television reception of cameras outside your sub. And I saw moving pictures of what Hollywood assured me was a real woman, even though she looked more like a design by Petty or Vargas. In the Marilyn Monroe case, it is reasonable to believe what I am told: I don’t believe a robot that good has been built yet. But Atlantis … I know special-effects men who could build a city like that on a tabletop, and have dinosaurs walking through it. And your cameras trained on it.”

“You suspect me of trickery?” Hagbard asked raising his eyebrows.

“Trickery is your metier,” Joe said bluntly. “You are the Beethoven, the Rockefeller, the Michelangelo of deception. The Shakespeare of the gypsy switch, the two-headed nickel, and the rabbit in the hat. What little liver pills are to Carter, lies are to you. You dwell in a world of trapdoors, sliding panels, and Hindu ropetricks. Do I suspect you? Since I met you, I suspect
everybody.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Hagbard grinned. “You are well on your way to paranoia. Take this card and keep it in your wallet. When you begin to understand it, you’ll be ready for your next promotion. Just remember:
it’s not true unless it makes you laugh
. That is the one and sole and infallible test of all ideas that will ever be presented to you.” And he handed Joe a card saying

There was a click. George turned. All the time he’d been in the control center with Hagbard, he had never looked back at the door through which he had come. He was surprised to see that it looked like an opening in thin air—or thin water. On either side of the doorway was blue-green water and a dark horizon which was actually the ocean bottom. Then, in the center, the doorway itself and a golden light silhouetting the figure of a beautiful woman.