The illuminatus! trilogy (85 page)

“I salute you in the name of the porpoise horde,” said Howard. “Hail and farewell.” He swam away.

A little later, sailing on, they saw in the distance an enormous reptile with four paddles for swimming and a neck twice the length of its body. It was in hot pursuit of a school of blind fish.

“The Loch Ness monster,” said Hagbard, and George remembered his little joke about Howard’s surfacing in Lake Totenkopf. “One of Gruad’s genetic experiments with reptiles,” Hagbard went on. “He was really queer for reptiles. He filled the Sea of Valusia with these plesiosaurlike things. Blind, of course, so they could navigate in darkness. Think about that—eyes are a liability under certain conditions. Graud figured monsters like that would be another protection against anybody finding Agharti. But the
Leif Erikson
is too big for Nessie to tangle with, and she knows it.”

At last there was a column of yellow light ahead. This was the light let into the Sea of Valusia by Lake Totenkopf. Hagbard explained that the lake was simply a place where the ceiling of rock over the Sea of Valusia had been soft and unstable enough to collapse. The resulting hole, being at sea level, filled with water. Debris falling down through the bottom of the lake had formed a mountain below the place where the roof of the Sea of Valusia was punctured.

“The Jesuits, of course, always knew that Lake Totenkopf
connected with the Sea of Valusia and thus made possible easy contact with Agharti,” Hagbard said. “That’s why, when they gave Weishaupt the assignment of founding an overt branch of the Illuminati, they sent him to Ingolstadt, which is right by Lake Totenkopf. And there’s the mountain under the lake.”

It loomed ahead of them, dark and forbidding. As the submarine sailed over it, George saw a cloud of dolphins circling in the distance. The mountain top had been sheared off in a fashion that seemed too precise to be natural; it formed a plateau about two miles long and one mile wide. There were what appeared to be dark squares on this gray plateau. The submarine swooped down, and George saw that the squares were huge formations of men. In a moment they were hovering over the army, like a helicopter observing troops on parade. George could clearly see the black uniforms, the green tanks with black-and-white crosses painted on them, the long, dark, upjutting snouts of big guns. They stood there silent and immobile, thousands of feet below the surface of the lake.

“That’s the weapon the Illuminati plan to use to immanentize the Eschaton?” asked George. “Why don’t we destroy them now?”

“Because they’re under a protective biomystic field,” said Hagbard, “and we can’t. I did want you to see them, though. When the electrical, Astral, and orgonomic vibrations of the American Medical Association, amplified by the synergetic clusters of sound, image, and emotional energy of all these young people responding to the beat, bring that Nazi legion back to life, it will call for nothing less than the appearance on the field of battle of the goddess Eris Herself to save the day.”

“Hagbard,” George protested disgustedly. “Are you telling me Eris is real?
Really real
and not just an allegory or symbol? I can’t buy that any more than I can believe Jehovah or Osiris is really real.”

But Hagbard answered very solemnly, “When you’re dealing with these forces or powers in a philosophic and scientific way, contemplating them from an armchair, that rationalistic approach is useful. It is quite profitable then to regard the gods and goddesses and demons as projections of the human mind or as unconscious aspects of ourselves. But every truth is a truth only for one place and one time, and
that’s a truth, as I said, for the armchair. When you’re actually dealing with these figures, the only safe, pragmatic, and operational approach is to treat them as having a being, a will, and a purpose entirely apart from the humans who evoke them. If the Sorcerer’s Apprentice had understood that, he wouldn’t have gotten into so much trouble.”

SHE’LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS

SHE’LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS

SHE’LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS WHEN SHE COMES

Approaching the outskirts of the crowd, Fission Chips saw a group of musicians who were obviously English, from their dress and hair style. Their name, he saw on the biggest drum, was Calculated Tedium, and the guitar player had a canteen strapped to his hip. It reminded 00005 of how thirsty he was, and he asked, “Pardon me, do you know where I could get some water or a soft drink?”

“Take a snort from my canteen,” the guitarist said affably, passing it over. He pointed to the west. “See that geodesic plywood dome there? It’s a bleeding giant Kool-Aid station set up by the Kabouters and guaranteed to hold out even if the crowd doubles in size before this is over. I just filled the canteen from there, so it’s fresh. You can get more over there any time you need it.”

“Thanks,” 00005 said warmly, taking a long, cold, delightful swallow.

He had a very low threshhold for LSD. The world began to seem brighter, stranger, and more colorful within only a few minutes.

(The joker was actually Rhoda Chief, the vocalist who sang with the Heads of Easter Island, and who had inspired much admiration in the younger generation—and much horror in the older—when she named her out-of-wedlock baby Jesus Jehovah Lucifer Satan Chief. A former Processene and Scientologist, currently going the Wicca route, the buxom Rhoda was renowned through show biz for “giving head like no chick alive,” a reputation which often provoked certain Satanists on the Linda Lovelace for President Committee to send very deadly vibes in her direction, all of which bounced off due to her Wicca shield. She was also possibly the greatest singer of her generation, and firmly believed that most human problems would be solved if the whole world could be turned on to acid. She had been preparing for the Ingolstadt festival for several months, buying
only the top-quality tabs from the most reliable dealers, and she had crept into the geodesic Kool-Aid station only a few moments earlier, dumping enough pure lysergic acid diethylamide to blow the minds of the population of a small country. Actually, the idea had been subtly planted in her consciousness by the leader of her Wiccan, an astonishingly beautiful woman with flaming red hair and smoldering green eyes who had once played a starring role in a Black Mass celebrated by Padre Pederastia at 2323 Lake Shore Drive. This woman called herself Lady Velkor, and often made jokes about her memories of 18th-century Bavaria, which Rhoda assumed were references to reincarnation.)

On April 10, while Howard made his discovery in the ruins of Atlantis and Tlaloc grinned in Mexico D.F., Tobias Knight, in his room at the Hotel Pan Kreston in Santa Isobel, concluded a broadcast to the American submarine in the Bight of Biafra. “The Russkies and Chinks have completed their withdrawal, and Generalissimo Puta is definitely friendly to our side, besides being popular with both the Bubi and the Fang. My work is definitely finished, and I’ll await orders to return to Washington.”

“Roger. Over and out.”

(Frank Sullivan, capitalizing on his only real asset, was operating in Havana as a Cuban Superman, using the name Papa Piaba, when the Brotherhood spotted his resemblance to John Dillinger. “Gosh,” he said when they made their offer, “five thousand dollars just to take two ladies to a movie one night? And it’s only a practical joke, you say?” “It’ll be a very funny joke,” Jaicapo Mocenigo promised him. And the Smithsonian acquired Mr. Sullivan’s asset as one of their most interesting relics.)

WE’LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER

(Hagbard was accompanied by Joe Malik when he returned to the stateroom. “You go to the beer hall in Munich,” he was saying, “and steal any item, anything at all, as long as it’s obviously old enough to have been there the night he tried the
Putsch
. Then you rejoin the rest of us in Ingolstadt. Understood?”

WE’LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER

Lady Velkor, wearing a green peasant blouse and green hotpants, looked around the geodesic Kool-Aid dome. A man in a green turtleneck sweater and green slacks caught
her eye, and she walked over to him, asking, “Are you a turtle?”

“You bet your sweet ass I am,” he answered eagerly and so she had failed to make contact—and owed this oaf a free drink also. But she smiled pleasantly and concealed her annoyance.

WE’LL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER WHEN SHE COMES

Robinson and Lehrman of the Homicide Department actually started the last phase of the operation. I was in New York to see Hassan i Sabbah X about a new phase of Laotian opium operation (I had just come from Chicago, after staging that conversation with Waterhouse for Miss Servix’s benefit), and I decided to check with them for those little nuances that can’t go into an official report We met in Washington Square and found a bench far enough from the chess nuts to give us some privacy.

“Muldoon is on to us,” Robinson told me right off. He was wearing a beard; I figured that meant he was currently in a Weather Underground group, since he was too old to pass for under twenty-one and get into Morituri.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

He made the usual reply: “Who’s ever sure of anything in this business? But Barney is pure cop through and through,” he added, “and his instincts are like dowsing rods. Everybody on the force knows we’ve infiltrated them by now, anyway. They even make jokes about it ‘Who’s the CIA man in your department?’—that kind of thing.”

“Muldoon is on to us, all right,” Lehrman agreed. “But he’s not the one I worry about”

“Who is?” I brushed my walrus mustache nervously; being the first pentuple agent in the history of espionage was starting to grind me down. I really wasn’t sure which of my bosses should hear about this, although the CIA certainly had to be told, since for all I know Robinson and Lehrman might be reporting to them twice, having another contact as a fail-safe check on my own integrity.

“The head of Homicide North,” Lehrman said. “An old geezer named Goodman. He’s so damned smart, I sometimes wonder if
he’s
a double agent for the Eye themselves. His mind jumps ahead of facts just like an Adeptus Exemptus in the Order.”

I looked up at the statue of Garibaldi, remembering the old NYU myth that he would pull his sword the rest of the
way out of the scabbard if a virgin ever walked through Washington Park. “Tell me more about this Goodman,” I said.

(“Check out the pair on that chick,” a Superman said enthusiastically.

(“Watermelons,” a second Superman agreed enthusiastically. “And you know how us
cullud folk
dig watermelons,” he added, licking his lips.

(“Skin!” the first cried.

(“Skin!” the second agreed.

(They slapped palms, and Clark Kent came out of his reverie. Having sampled the Kool-Aid a while earlier, he was beginning to float a little, although not yet aware of what was happening—he just felt a rather unusual tug of memory from his days as an anthropologist, and was deeply concerned with a new insight about the relationship between the black Virgin of Guadalupe, the Greek goddess Persephone, and his own sexual proclivities—and he came out of it with a start, looking at the woman whose breasts had inspired such reverence.

(“Son of a
bitch,”
he said piously, his mouth spreading in a grin.)

Rebecca Goodman left the house at 3 P.M., hauling a shopping cart and walking past the garage. The nearest supermarket was a good ten minutes on foot, and big enough to keep her busy for a half-hour finding what she wanted and getting through one of those checkout lines. I slipped out of the car and walked right to the back of the house, perfectly secure from neighboring eyes in my Bell Telephone overalls.

The kitchen door had an easy slip-lock, and I didn’t even need my keys. A playing card did the job, and I was in.

My first thought was to head for the bedroom—the old man from Vienna was right, and that’s where you’ll find the real clues to a man’s character—but one chair in the kitchen stopped me. The vibes were so strong that I closed my eyes and psychometered it according to the difficult Third Alko of the
. It was Rebecca herself: She had sat there and thought about shooting heroin. It faded fast, before I could read what had stopped her.

The bedroom almost knocked me over when I found it “Who would have thought the old man had so much hot blood in him?” I paraphrased, backing out. It was a profanation
to read too much in there, and what I did scan was enough. As Miss Mao would say, this man was Tao-Yin (Beta prime in the terminology of the I). No wonder Robinson kept talking about his “intuition.”

The living room had a statue of the Mermaid of Copenhagen that stopped me. I read it and chuckled; Lord, the hangups we all have.

One wall was a built-in bookcase, but Rebecca seemed to be the reader in the family. I started scanning experimentally and found Saul’s vibes on a shelf of detective stories and a
Scientific American
anthology of mathematical and logical puzzles. The man had no concept of his own latent powers, and thought only in terms of solving riddles. Sherlock Holmes, without even the violin and the dope for relief from all that cortical activity. Everything else went into his marriage, that hothouse bedroom upstairs.