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:
The tribes of the porpoise are fearless and strong
Our land is the ocean, our banner’s a song
Our weapon is speed and our noses like rock
No foe can withstand our terrible shock.
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. Tha
t 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.”
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.”
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 28