"Oh, you think you have cojones." The fat man's breath stank of bourbon and cheap cigars. "Rabbit cojones. I have terrified you unto death, boy, and you know it and I know it, yet you find it in your heart to speak of warrants. Next you'll want to see the American Civil Liberties Union." He pulled aside the jacket of an iridescent gray summer suit that might have been new when Heartbreak Hotel was the top of the hit parade. A silver five-pointed star decorated his pink shirt pocket and a .45 automatic stuck in his pants-top dented the fat of his belly. "That is all the law I need when dealing with your type in Mad Dog. Walk careful with me, son, or you won't have nothing to grab onto next time one of us pigs as you choose to call us in your little articles, busts in on you. Which is not likely to happen in the next forty years, while you rot and grow old in our state prison." He seemed immensely pleased with his own oratorical style, like one of Faulkner's characters. George thought:

It is forbidden to dream again; We maim our joys or hide them; Horses are made of chromium steel And little fat men shall ride them.

He said, "You can't hit me with forty years for possession. And grass is legal in most other states. This law is archaic and absurd."

"Shit and onions, boy, you got too much of the killer weed there to call it mere possession. I call it possession with intent to sell. And the laws of this state are stern, and they are just and they are our laws. We know what that weed can do. We remember the Alamo and Santa Anna's troops losing all fear because they were high on Rosa Maria, as they called it in those days. Get on your feet. And don't ask to talk to a lawyer, neither."

"Can I ask who you are?"

"I am Sheriff Jim Cartwright, nemesis of all evil in Mad Dog and Mad Dog County."

"And I'm Tiny Tim," said George, immediately saying to himself, Shut the fuck up, you're too goddamn high. And he went right on and said, "Maybe your side would have won if Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie got stoned, too. And, by the way, Sheriff, how did you know you could catch me with pot? Usually an underground journalist would make it a point to be clean when he comes into this godforsaken part of the country. It wasn't telepathy that told you I had pot on me."

Sheriff Cartwright slapped his thigh. "Oh, but it was. It was telepathy. Now just what made you think it wasn't telepathy brung me here?" He laughed, seized George's arm in a grip of iron, and pushed him toward the hotel-room door. George felt a bottomless terror as if the pit of hell were opening beneath his feet and Sheriff Jim Cartwright were about to pitchfork him into the bubbling sulfur. And I must admit that was more or less the case; there are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.

("Keep on hanging out with those wild boys from Passaic and you'll end up in jail," George's mother said. "You mark my words, George." And, another time, at Columbia, after a very late meeting, Mark Rudd said soberly, "A lot of us are going to spend some time in the Man's jails before this shit-storm is over"; and George, together with the others, nodded glumly but bravely. The marijuana he had been smoking was raised in Cuernavaca by a farmer named Arturo Jesus Maria Ybarra y Mendez, who had sold it in bulk to a young Yanqui named Jim Riley, the son of a Dayton, Ohio, police officer, who in turn smuggled it through Mad Dog after paying a suitable bribe to Sheriff Jim Cartwright. After that it was resold to a Times Square dealer called Rosetta the Stoned and a Miss Walsh from Confrontation's research department bought ten ounces from her, later reselling five ounces to George, who then carried it back to Mad Dog without any suspicion that he was virtually completing a cycle. The original seed was part of that strain recommended by General George Washington in the famous letter to Sir John Sinclair in which he writes, "I find that, for all purposes, the Indian hemp is in every way superior to the New Zealand variety previously cultivated here." In New York, Rebecca Goodman, deciding that Saul will not be home tonight, slips out of bed, dons a robe and begins to browse through her library. Finally she selects a book on Babylonian mythology and begins to read: "Before all of the gods, was Mummu, the spirit of Pure Chaos. . . ," In Chicago, Simon and Mary Lou Servix sit naked on her bed, legs intertwined in the yabyum lotus position. "No," Simon is saying, "You don't move, baby; you wait for u to move you." Clark Kent and His Supermen swing into a reprise: "We're gonna rock around the clock tonight . . . We're gonna ROCK ROCK ROCK till broad day light.")

George's cell mate in Mad Dog County Jail had a skull-like face with large, protruding front teeth. He was about six and a half feet tall and lay curled up on his cell bunk like a coiled python.

"Have you asked for treatment?" George asked him.

"Treatment for what?"

"Well, if you think you're an assassin-"

"I don't think, baby brother. I've killed four white men and two niggers. One in California, the rest down here. Got paid for every one of them."

"Is that what you're in for?" My God, they don't stick murderers in the same cell with potheads, do they?

"I'm in for vagrancy," said the man scornfully. "Actually, I'm just here for safekeeping, till they give me my orders. Then it's good-bye to whoever-President, civil rights leader, enemy of the people. Someday I'll be famous. I'm gonna write a book about myself someday, Ace. Course, I'm no good at writing. Look, maybe we can do a deal. I'll have Sheriff Jim bring you some writing paper if you'll write about my life. They gonna keep you here forever, you know. I'll come and visit you between assassinations, and you'll write the book, and Sheriff Jim'11 keep it safe till I retire. Then you have the book published and you'll make a lot of money and be real comfortable in jail. Or maybe you can even hire a lawyer to get you out."

"Where will you be?" said George. He was still scared, but he was feeling sleepy, too, and he was deciding that this was all bullshit, which had a calming effect on his nerves. But he'd better not go to sleep in the cell while this guy was awake. He didn't really believe this assassin talk, but it was safe to assume that anybody you met in prison was homosexual.

As if reading his mind, his cell mate said, "How'd you like to let a famous assassin shove it up to you? How would that be, huh, Ace?"

"Please," said George. "That's not my bag, you know? I really couldn't do it."

"Shit, piss, and corruption," said the assassin. He suddenly uncoiled and slid off the bunk. "I been wasting my time with you. Now bend the hell over and drop your pants. You are getting it, and there ain't no further way about it." He stepped toward George, fists clenched.

"Guard! Guard!" George yelled. He grabbed the cell door in both hands and began rattling it frantically.

The man caught George a cuff across the face. Another blow to the jaw knocked George against the wall.

"Guard!" he screamed, his head spinning with pot and panic.

A man in a blue uniform came through the door at the end of the corridor. He seemed miles away and vastly disinterested, like a god who had grown bored with his creations.

"Now, what the hell is all this yelling about in here?" he asked, his hand en the butt of his revolver, his voice still miles away.

George opened his mouth, but his cell mate spoke first 'This little long-haired communist freak won't drop his pants when I tell him. Ain't you supposed to make sure I'm happy in here?" The voice shifted to a whine. "Make him do what I say."

"You've got to protect me," said George. "You've got to get me out of this cell."

The god-guard laughed. "Well, now, you might say this is a very enlightened prison we have here. You come down from New York and you probably think we're pretty backward. But we ain't. We got no police brutality. Now, if I interfered between you and Harry Coin here, I might have to use force to keep him away from your young ass. I know you people believe all cops ought to be abolished. Well, in this here situation I hereby abolish myself. Furthermore, I know you people believe in sexual freedom, and I do, too. So Harry Coin gonna have his sexual freedom without any interference or brutality from me." His voice was still distant and disinterested, almost dreamy.

"No," said George.

The guard drew his pistol. "Now, sonny. You take down your pants and bend over. You are gonna get it up the ass from Harry Coin here, and no two ways about it And I am gonna watch and see that you let him do it right. Otherwise, you get no forty years. You get killed, right now. I put a bullet in you and I say you are resisting arrest. Now make up your mind what it's gonna be. I really will kill you if you don't do like he tells you to. I really will. You are totally expendable and he ain't. He's a very important man, and it's my job to keep him happy."

"And I'll fuck you either way, dead or alive," the demented Coin laughed, like an evil spirit. "So there's no way you can escape it, Ace."

The door at the end of the corridor clanged, and Sheriff Jim Cartwright and two blue-uniformed policemen strode down to the cell. "What's going on here?" said the Sheriff.

"I caught this queer punk George Dorn here trying to commit homosexual rape on Harry," said the guard. "Had to draw my pistol to stop him."

George shook his head. "You guys are unbelievable. If you're acting out this little game for my benefit, you can quit now, because you're certainly not fooling each other, and you're not fooling me."

"Dorn," said the Sheriff, "you've been attempting unnatural acts in my jail, acts forbidden by the Holy Bible and the laws of this state. I don't like that. I don't like it one little bit. Come on out here. I wanna have a little talk with you. We goin' to the main interrogation room for some speakin' together."

He unlocked the cell door and motioned George to precede him. He turned to the two policemen who had accompanied him. "Stay behind and take care of that other little matter." The last words were strangely emphasized.

George and the Sheriff walked through a series of corridors and locked doors until at last they came to a room whose walls were made of embossed sheet tin painted bottle-green. The Sheriff told George to sit on one chair, while he straddled the back of the chair facing him.

"You're a bad influence on my prisoners," he said. "I got a good mind to see that some kind of accident happens to you. I don't want to see you corrupting prisoners in my jail-mine or anyone's-for forty years."

"Sheriff," said George. "What do you want from me? You got me on a pot charge. What more do you want? Why did you stick me in that cell with that guy? What's all this scare stuff and threats and questioning for?"

"I wanna know some things," said the Sheriff. "I want to find out everything you can tell me about certain matters. So, from this moment be prepared to tell me only the truth. If you do, maybe things will go easier on you, after."

"Yes, Sheriff," said George. Cartwright squinted at him. He really does look like a pig, thought George. Most do. Why do so many of them get so fat and have such little eyes?

"Well, then," said the Sheriff. "What was your purpose in coming down here from New York?"

"I'm simply on an assignment from Confrontation, the magazine-"

"I know it. It is a smutty magazine, and a communist magazine. I have read it"

"You're using loaded words. It's a left-wing libertarian magazine, to be exact"

"My pistol is loaded, too, boy. So talk straight All right Tell me what you came down here to write about"

"Sure. You ought to be as interested in this as I am, if you're really interested in law and order. There have been rumors circulating throughout the country for more than a decade now that all the major political assassinations in America-Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers, Medgar Evers, King, Nixon, maybe even George Lincoln Rockwell-are the work of a single, conspiratorial, violence-oriented right-wing organization, and that this organization has its base right here in Mad Dog. I came down to see what I could find out about this group."

"That's what I figured," said the Sheriff. "You poor, sad little turd. You come down here with your long hair and you expect to get, as you put it, a line on a right-wing organization. Why, it's lucky for you you didn't meet any of our real right-wingers, like God's Lightning for instance. The ones around here would have tortured you to death by this tune, boy. You really are dumb. OK, I'm not gonna waste any more of my time with you. Come on, I'll take you back to your cell. You might as well get used to looking at the moon through bars."

They walked back the same way they had come. At the entrance to the corridor where George's cell was, the Sheriff opened the door and yelled, "Come and get him, Charley."

George's guard, his face pale and his mouth set in a lipless line, took George by the arm. The corridor door clanged shut behind the Sheriff. Charley took George to his cell and pushed him in wordlessly. But at least he was three-dimensional now and less like a marijuana phantom.

Harry Coin wasn't there. The cell was empty. George became aware of a shadow in the corner of his vision. Something in the cell next to him. He turned: His heart stopped. There was a man hanging from a pipe on the ceiling. George went over and stared through the bars. The body was swaying slightly. It was attached to the pipe by a leather belt which was buckled around the neck. The face, with the staring eyes, was that of Harry Coin. George's glance went lower. Something was coming out of

Harry Coin's midsection and was dangling down to the floor. It wasn't suicide. They had disemboweled Harry Coin, and someone had thoughtfully moved a shit-can under him for his bloody intestines to dangle into.

George screamed. There was no one around to answer him. The guard had vanished like Hermes.

(But in Cherry Knolls mental hospital in Sunderland, England, where it was already eleven the following morning, a schizophrenic patient who hadn't spoken in ten years abruptly began exhorting a ward attendant: "They're all coming back-Hitler, Goering, Streicher, the whole lot of them. And, behind them, the powers and persons from the other spheres who control them. . . ." But Simon Moon in Chicago still calmly and placidly retains the lotus position and instructs Mary Lou sitting in his lap: "Just hold it, hold it with your vaginal wall like you'd hold it with your hand, gently, and feel its warmth, but don't think about orgasm, don't think about the future, not even a minute ahead, think about the now, the only now, the only now, the only now that we'll ever have, just my penis in your vagina now and the simple pleasure of it, not a greater pleasure to work toward. . . ." "My back hurts," Mary Lou said.)

WE'RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TO NIGHT

There are Swedish and Norwegian kids, Danes, Italian and French kids, Greeks, even Americans. George and Hagbard move through the crowd trying to estimate its number-200,000? 300,000? 500,000? Peace symbols dangling about every neck, nudes with body paint, nudes without body paint, long and dangling hair on boys and girls alike, and over all of it the hypnotic and unending beat. "Woodstock Europa," Hagbard says dryly. "The last and final Walpurgisnacht and Adam Weishaupt's Erotion finally realized."

WE'RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT

"It's a League of Nations," George says, "a young people's League of Nations." Hagbard isn't listening. "Up there," he points, "to the Northwest is the Rhine, where die Lorelei was supposed to sit and sing her deadly songs. There will be deadlier music on the Danube tonight."

WE'RE GONNA ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TONIGHT

(But that was still seven days in the future, and now

George lies unconscious in Mad Dog County Jail. And it began-that phase of the operation, as Hagbard called it-over thirty years before when a Swiss chemist named Hoffman climbed on his bicycle and pedaled down a country road into new dimensions.)

"And will they all come back?" George asked.

"All of them," Hagbard answered tightly. "When the beat reaches the proper intensity . . . unless we can stop it."

("Now I'm getting it," Mary Lou cried. "It's not what I expected. It's different from sex, and better." Simon smiled benignly. "It is sex, baby," he said. "What you've had before wasn't sex. Now we can start moving . . . but slowly ... the Gentle Way ... the Way of Tao. . . ." They're all coming back; they never died-the lunatic raved at the startled attendant-You wait, guvnor. You just wait. You'll see it.)

The amplifiers squealed suddenly. There was too much feedback, and the sound went off into a pitch beyond endurance. George winced, and saw others hold their ears. ROCK, ROCK, ROCK, AROUND THE CLOCK. The key missed the lock, turned and cut Muldoon's hand. "Nerves," he said to Saul. "I always feel like a burglar when I do this."

Saul grunted. "Forget burglary," he said. "We might be hanged for treason before this is over. If we don't become national heroes."

"A fanfuckingtastic case," Muldoon grinned. He tried another way.

They were in an old brownstone on Riverside Drive, trying to break into the apartment of Joseph Malik. And they were not merely looking for evidence, both tacitly admitted-they were hiding from the FBI.

The call had come from headquarters just as they were finishing the questioning of associate editor Peter Jackson. Muldoon had gone out to his car to take it, while Saul finished getting a full physical description of both Malik and George Dorn. Jackson had just left and Saul was picking up the fifth memo, when Muldoon returned, looking as if his doctor had just told him his Wasserman was positive.

"Two special agents from the FBI are coming over to help us," he said woodenly.

"Still ready to play a hunch?" Saul asked calmly, pushing all the memos back in the metal box.

Muldoon merely called Pricefixer back into the cafeteria and told him, "Two feds will be here in a few minutes. Tell them we went back to headquarters. Answer any question they ask, but don't tell them about this box."

Pricefixer looked at the two older officers carefully and then said to Muldoon, "You're the boss."

He's either awfully dumb and trusting, Saul had thought, or he's so damned smart he's going to be dangerous someday.

"Now," he asked Muldoon nervously, "is that the last key?"

"No, I've got five more beauties here and one of them will-here it is!" The door opened smoothly.

Saul's hand drifted toward his revolver as he stepped into the apartment and felt for a light switch. Nobody was revealed when the light came on, and Saul relaxed. "You look around for the dogs." he said. "I want to sit down and go over the rest of these memos."

The room was used for work as well as living and was untidy enough to leave no room for doubt that Malik had been a bachelor. Saul pushed the typewriter back on the writing desk, set down the memo box and then noticed something odd. The whole wall, on this side of the room, was covered with pictures of George Washington. Standing to examine them more closely, he saw that each had a label-half of them saying "G.W." and the others, "A.W."

Odd-but the whole case had overtones that smelled as fishy as those dead Egyptian mouth-breeders.

Saul sat down and took a memo from the box.

Muldoon came back into the living room and said, "No dogs. Not a goddam dog anywhere in the whole apartment."

"That's interesting," Saul remarked thoughtfully. "You say the landlord had complaints from several other tenants about the dogs?" ;

"He said everybody in the building was complaining. The rule is no pets and he enforced it. People wanted to know why they had to get rid of their kittens when Malik could have a whole pack of dogs up here. They said there must have been ten or twelve from the noise they made."

"He sure must love those animals, if he took them all with him when he went into hiding," Saul mused. The pole vaulter in his unconscious was jumping again. "Let's look in the kitchen," he suggested mildly.

Barney followed as Saul methodically ransacked the refrigerator and cupboards, finishing up with a careful examination of the garbage.

"No dog food," Saul said finally.

"I noticed."

"And no dog dishes either. And no empty dog-food tins in the garbage."

"What wild notion are you following now?"

"I don't know," Saul said thoughtfully. "He doesn't mind the neighbors hearing the dogs-probably he's the land of left-wing individualist who likes nothing better than quarreling with his landlord and the other tenants about some issue like the no-pets rule. So he wasn't hiding anything until he ducked out And then he not only took the dogs but hid all evidence that they'd ever been here. Even though he must have known that the neighbors would all talk about them."

"Maybe he was feeding them human flesh," Muldoon suggested ghoulishly.

"Lord, I don't know. You look around for anything of interest. I'm going to read those Illuminati memos." Saul returned to the living room and began:

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #5

7/26

 J.M.:

Sometimes you find things in the damnedest places. The following is from a girl's magazine ('The Conspiracy" by Sandra Glass, Teenset, March 1969, pages 34-40).

Simon proceeded to tell me about the Bavarian Illuminati. The nightmarish story begins in 1090 A.D. in the Middle East when Hassan i Sabbah founded the Ismaelian Sect, or Hashishism, so called because of their use of hashish, a deadly drug derived from the hemp plant which is better known as the killer weed marijuana. . . . The cult terrorized the Moslem world until Genghis Khan's Mongols brought law and order to the area. Cornered in their mountain hideaway, the Hashishism dope fiends proved no match for the clean-living Mongol warriors, their fortress was destroyed, and their dancing girls shipped

to Mongolia for rehabilitation. The heads of the cult fled westward. . . .

"The Illuminati surfaced next in Bavaria in 1776," Simon told me. . . . "Adam Weishaupt, a student of the occult, studied the teachings of Hassan i Sabbah and grew hemp in his backyard. On February 2, 1776, Weishaupt achieved illumination. Weishaupt officially founded the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria on May 1st, 1776. Their slogan was 'Ewige Blumenkraft.' . . . They attracted many illustrious members such as Goethe and Beethoven. Beethoven tacked up an Ewige Blumenkraft poster on the top of the piano on which he composed all nine of his symphonies."

The last paragraph of the article is, however, the most interesting of all:

Recently I saw a documentary film on the Democratic Convention of 1968, and I was struck by the scene in which Senator Abraham Ribicoff made a critical remark provoking the anger of the Mayor of Chicago. In the ensuing tumult it was impossible to hear the Mayor's shouted retort, and there has been much speculation about what he actually said. To me it seemed his lips were forming the words that by this time become frighteningly familiar: "Ewige Blumenkraft!"

The further I dig, the wilder the whole picture looks. When are we going to tell George about it?

Pat

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #6

7/26

 J.M.:

The John Birch Society has looked into the subject and they have a theory of their own. The first source I've found on this is a pamphlet "CFR: Conspiracy to Rule the World" by Gary Alien, associate editor of the Birchers' magazine, American Opinion. Alien's thesis is that Cecil Rhodes created a secret society to establish English domination of the world in 1888. This society acts through Oxford University, the Rhodes Scholarships and-hold your breath-the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit foundation for the study of International Affairs headquartered right here on Sixty-eighth Street in New York. Seven out of nine of our last Secretaries of State were recruited from the CFR, Alien points out, and dozens of other leading politicians as well-including Richard Nixon. It is also implied, but not directly stated, that William Buckley, Jr. (an old enemy of the Birchers) is another tool of the CFR; and the Morgan and Rothschild banking interests are supposed to be financing the whole thing.

How does this tie in with the Illuminati? Mr. Alien merely drops hints, linking Rhodes to John Ruskin, and Ruskin to earlier internationalists, and finally stating that "the originator on the profane level of this type of secret society" was Adam Weishaupt, whom he calls "the monster who founded the Order of the Illuminati on May 1, 1776."

Pat

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #7

7/27

 J.M.:

This is from a small left-wing newspaper in Chicago (The RogerSPARK Chicago, July 1969, Vol. 2, No. 9: "Daley Linked With Illuminati," no author's name given):

No historian knows what happened to Adam Weishaupt after he was exiled from Bavaria in 1785, and entries in "Washington's" diary after that date frequently refer to the hemp crop at Mount Vernon.

The possibility that Adam Weishaupt killed George Washington and took his place, serving as our first President for two terms, is now confirmed. . . . The two main colors of the American flag are, excluding a small patch of blue in one corner, red and white: these are also the official colors of the Hashishism. The flag and the Illuminati pyramid both have thirteen horizontal divisions: thirteen is, of course, the traditional code for marijuana . . . and is still used in that sense by Hell's Angels among others.

Now, "Washington" formed the Federalist party.

The other major party in those days, The Democratic Republicans, was formed by Thomas Jefferson [and] there are grounds for accepting the testimony of the Reverend Jedediah Morse of Charleston, who accused Jefferson of being an Illuminati agent. Thus, even at the dawn of our government, both parties were IIluminati fronts. ...

This story later repeats the Teenset report that Mayor Daley used the phrase "Ewige Blumenkraft" during his incoherent diatribe against Abe Ribicoff.

Pat

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #8

7/27

 J.M.: More on the Washington-Weishaupt theory:

In spite of the fact that his face appears on billions of stamps and dollar bills, and his portrait hangs in every public building in the country, no one is quite sure what Washington looks like. A "Project 20" script, "Meet George Washington" will be seen tonight at 7:30 on Channel (fill in by local stations). The program offers contemporary portraits of the first President, some of which do not even seem to be the same man.

This is a press release sent out by NEC on April 24, 1969. Some of the portraits can be found in Encyclopedia Britannica and the resemblance to portraits of Weishaupt is undeniable.

Incidentally, Barbara called my attention to this: the letter in Playboy asking about the Illuminati was signed "R.S., Kansas City, Missouri." According to the Kansas City newspapers, a Robert Stanton of that city was found dead on March 17, 1969 (about a week after the April Playboy appeared on the newsstands) with his throat torn as if by the talons of some enormous beast. No animal was reported missing from any of the local zoos.

Pat

Saul looked up at the pictures of Washington on the wall. For the first time, he noticed the strange half-smile on the most famous of them all, the one by Gilbert Stuart that appears on one-dollar bills. "As if by the talons of some enormous beast," he quoted to himself, thinking again of Malik's disappearing dogs.

"What the hell are you grinning about?" he asked sourly.

Congressman Koch, he remembered suddenly, in a speech years and years ago when marijuana was illegal everywhere, said something about Washington's hemp crop. What was it? Yes: it was about the entries in the General's diary-they showed that he separated the female hemp plants from the males before fertilization. That was botanically unnecessary if he was growing the crop for rope, but it was standard practice in cultivating hemp for marijuana, Koch pointed out.

And "illumination" was one of the words hippies were always using to describe the experience one obtains from the highest grade of grass. Even the more common term, "turning on," had the same meaning as "illumination," when you stopped to think about. Wasn't that what the crown of light around Jesus' head in Catholic art was supposed to mean? And Goethe-if he was really part of this-might have been referring to the experience in his last words, as he lay dying: "More light!"

I should have become a rabbi, like my father wanted, Saul thought bemusedly. Police work is getting to be too much for me.

In a few minutes I'll be suspecting Thomas Edison.

ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT

Slowly, Mary Lou Servix swam back to consciousness, like a shipwreck victim reaching a raft.

"Good Lord," she breathed softly.

Simon kissed her neck. "Now you know," he whispered.

"Good Lord," she repeated. "How many times did I come?"

Simon smiled. "I'm not an anal-compulsive type-I wasn't counting. Ten or twelve, something like that, I guess."

"Good Lord. And the hallucinations. Was that what you were doing to my nervous system, or was it the grass?"

"Just tell me about what you saw."

"Well, you got a halo around you, sort of. A big blue halo. And then I saw that it was around me, too, and that

it had all sorts of little blue dots dancing in sort of whorls inside it. And then there wasn't even that anymore. Just light. Pure white light."

"Suppose I told you I have a friend who's a dolphin and he exists in that kind of limitless light all the time."

"Oh, don't start jiving me. You've been so nice, until now."

"I'm not jiving you. His name is Howard. I might arrange for you to meet him."

"A fish?"

"No, baby. A dolphin is a mammal. Just like you and me."

"You are either the world's greatest brain or the world's craziest motherfucker, Mr. Simon Moon. I mean it. But that light. . . My God, I will never forget that light."

"And what happened to your body?" Simon asked casually.

"You know, I didn't know where it was. Even in the middle of my orgasms I didn't know where my body was. Everything was just. . . the light. . . ."

ROCK ROCK ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TONIGHT

And leaving Dallas that much-discussed November 22 afternoon in 1963, the man using the name "Frank Sullivan" brushes past McCord and Barker at the airport, but no foreshadowing of Watergate darkens his mind.. (Back at the Grassy Knoll, Howard Hunt's picture is being snapped and will later turn up in the files of New Orleans D.A. Jim 'The Jolly Green Giant" Garrison: not that Garrison ever came within light years of the real truth. . . .)

"Here, kitty-kitty-kitty,"Hagbard calls.

But now we are going back, again, to April 2 and Las Vegas; Sherri Brandi (nee Sharon O'Farrell) arriving home finds Carmel in her living room at four in the morning. It doesn't surprise her; he often made these unexpected visits. He seems to enjoy invading other people's territory like some kinda creepy virus. "Darling," I cried, rushing to kiss him as he expected. I wish the creep would drop dead, I thought as our mouths met.

"An all-night John?" he asked casually.

"Yeah. One of those scientists who works at that place out in the desert we're all supposed to pretend we don't know about. A freak."

"He wanted something special?" Carmel asked quickly. "You charged him extra?" At times I thought I could really see dollar signs in his eyes.

"No," I said, "he just wanted a lay. But afterward he wouldn't let me go. Just kept jawing." I yawned, looking around at the nice furniture and the nice paintings; I had managed to get everything in shades of pink and lavender, really beautiful, if that creep hadn't been sitting there on the couch looking like a hungry dead rat. I always wanted pretty things and I think I could have been some kind of artist or designer if all my luck wasn't always lousy. Christ, who ever told Carmel a blue turtleneck would go with a brown suit? If it wasn't for women, in my honest-to-Pete opinion, men would all go around looking like that. That's what I think. Insensitive. A bunch of cavemen, or Meander Thralls, or whatever you call them. "This John had a lot on his mind," I said before old candy-bar could start cross examining me about something else. "He's against fluorides in drinking water and the Catholic church and faggots and he thinks the new birth-control pill is as bad as the old one and I should use a diaphragm instead. Christ, he's got the inside dope on everything under the sun, he thinks, and I hadda listen to it all. That kind of John."

Carmel nodded. "Scientists are schmucks," he said.

I pulled the dress over my head and hung it in the closet (it was the nice green one with the spangles and the new style where my nipples stick out through little holes, which is a pain in the ass because they're always rubbing against something and getting raw, but it really turns on the Johns, and, like I always say, that's the name of the game, in this sonofabitching town with all the lousy luck, the only way to heavy scratch is go out there, girl, and sell your snatch) and then I grabbed my robe quick before old blow-job bobo decided it was time for his weekly Frenching. "He's got a nice house, though," I said to distract the creep. "He doesn't have to live out there on the base, he's too important for rules and regularities. Nice to look at, I mean. Redwood walls and burnt orange decor, you know? Pretty. He hates it, though. Acts as if he thinks it's haunted by Count Frankenstein or somebody. Keeps jumping up and walking around like he's looking for something. Something that'll bite his head off in one gulp if he finds it." I decided to let the top of the robe hang open a little. Carmel was either horny or he wanted something else, and something else with him generally means he thinks you've been holding back some cash. Him and his damned belt. Of course, sometimes with that I go queer all over for a flash and I guess that's like the come that men have, the orgasm, but it ain't worth the pain, believe me. I wonder if it's true some women get it in intercourse? Really get it? I don't think so. I've never known anybody in the business who gets it, from a man, only from Rosy Palm and her five sisters, sometimes, and if none of us do, how could some straight nicey-nicey get it?

"Bugs," Carmel said, looking shrewd and clever, off on his usual shtick of proving he was more hip to everything than anybody else on God's green earth. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

"What do you mean, bugs?" I asked. It was better than talking about money.

"The John," he said with a know-it-all grin. "He's important, you said. So his house has bugs. He probably keeps taking them out, and the FBI keeps coming back and putting in new ones. I bet he was very quiet when he was making it with you, right?" I nodded, remembering. "See. He couldn't stand the thought of those Feds eavesdropping on the other end of the wire. Just like Mal- like a guy I know in the Syndicate. He's so afraid of bugs he won't hold a business talk anywhere but the bathroom in his hotel suite with all four faucets going full blast and both of us whispering. Running water screws up a bug more than playing loud music on the radio, for some scientific reason."

"Bugs," I said suddenly. "That's it." The other kind of bugs. I was remembering Charley raving about fluoridation: "And we're all classified as mental cases, because a few right-wing nuts fifteen or twenty years ago who said fluoridation was a communist plot to poison us. Now, anybody who criticizes fluoridation is supposed to be just as bananas as God's Lightning. Good Lord, if anybody wants to do us in without firing a shot, I could-" and he caught himself, hid something that almost showed on his face, and ended like his brain was walking on one foot, "I could point to a dozen things in any chemistry book more effective than fluoride." But he wasn't thinking of chemicals, he was thinking of those little bugs, microbes is the word, and that's what he was working on. I could feel that flash I always get when I read something in a John, like if he had more money than he let on, or he'd caught his wife spreading for the milkman and was doing it to get even, or he was really a faggola and was just proving to himself that he wasn't completely a faggola.

"My God," I said, "Carmel, I read about those microbe bugs in the Enquirer, If they have an accident out there, this whole town goes, and the state with it, and God knows how many other states. Jesus, no wonder he keeps washing his hands!"

"Germ warfare?" Carmel said, thinking fast. "God, I'll bet this town is crawling with Russian spies trying to find out what's going on out there. And I've got a direct lead for them. But how the hell do you meet a Russian spy, or a Chinese spy for that matter? You can't just advertise in a newspaper. Hell. Maybe if I went down to the university and talked to some of those freaking commie students. ..."

I was shocked. "Carmel! You can't sell your own country like that!"

"The hell I can't. The Statue of Liberty is just another broad, and I'll take what I can get for her. Don't be a fool." He reached in his jacket pocket and took out a caramel candy like he always did when he was excited. "I'll -bet somebody in the Mob will know. They know everything. Jesus, there has to be some way of cashing in on this."

The Presidents actual television broadcast was transmitted to the world at 10:30 P.M. EST, March 31. The Russians and Chinese were given twenty-four hours to get out of Fernando Poo or the skies over Santa Isobel would begin raining nuclear missiles: "This is darn serious," the Chief Executive said, "and America will not shirk its responsibility to the freedom-loving people of Fernando Poo!" The broadcast concluded at 11 P.M. EST, and within two minutes people attempting to get reservations on trains, planes, busses or car pools to Canada had virtually every telephone wire in the country overloaded.

In Moscow, where it was ten the next morning, the Premier called a conference and said crisply, "That character in Washington is a mental lunatic, and he means it. Get our men out of Fernando Poo right away, then find out who authorized sending them in there in the first place and transfer him to be supervisor of a hydroelectric works in Outer Mongolia."

"We don't have any men in Fernando Poo," a commissar said mournfully. 'The Americans are imagining things again."

"Well, how the hell can we withdraw men if we don't have them there in the first place?" the Premier demanded.

"I don't know. We've got twenty-four hours to figure that out, or-" the commissar quoted an old Russian proverb which means, roughly, that when the polar bear excrement interferes with the fan belts, the machinery overheats.

"Suppose we just announce that our troops are coming out?" another commissar suggested. "They can't say we're lying if they don't find any of our troops there afterward."

"No, they never believe anything we say. They want to be shown," the premier said thoughtfully. "We'll have to infiltrate some troops surreptitiously and then withdraw them with a lot of fanfare and publicity. That should do it."

"I'm afraid it won't end the problem," another pommissar said funereally. "Our intelligence indicates that there are Chinese troops there. Unless Peking backs down, we're going to be caught in the middle when the bombs start flying and-" he quoted a proverb about the man in the intersection when two manure trucks collide.

"Damn," the Premier said. "What the blue blazes do the Chinese want with Fernando Poo?"

He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on schizophrenia; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of America and China.

And, banishing Thomas Edison and his light bulbs from mind, Saul Goodman looks back over the first eight memos briefly, using the conservative and logical side of his personality, rigidly holding back the intuitive functions. It was a habitual exercise with him, and he called it expansion-and-contraction: leaping in the dark for the connection that must exist between fact one and fact two, then going back slowly to check on himself.

The names and phrases flow past, in review: Fra Dol-cino-1508-Roshinaya-Hassan i Sabbah-1090-Weis-haupt-assassinations-John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King-Mayor Daley-Cecil Rhodes-1888 -George Washington....

Choices: (1) it is all true, exactly as the memos suggest; (2) it is partly true, and partly false; (3) it is all false, and there is no secret society that has endured from 1090 A.D. to the present.

Well, it isn't all true. Mayor Daley never said "Ewige Blumenkraft" to Senator Ribicoff. Saul had read, in the Washington Post, a lip-reader's translation of Daley's diatribe and there was no German in it, although there was obscenity and anti-Semitism. The Weishaupt-Washington impersonation theory also had some flaws-in those days, before plastic surgery, such an undetected assumption of the identity of a well-known figure was especially hard to credit, despite the circumstantial evidence quoted in the memos-two strong arguments against choice one. The memos are not all true.

How about choice three? The Illuminati might not be a straight unbroken line from the first recruit gathered by old Hassan i Sabbah to the person who bombed Confrontation-it might have died and lain dormant for a term, like the Ku Klux Klan between 1872 and 1915; and it might have gone through such breakups and resurrections more than once in eight centuries-but linkages of some sort, however tenuous, reached from the eleventh century to the twentieth, from the Near East to Europe and from Europe to America. Saul's dissatisfaction with official explanations of recent assassinations, the impossibility of making any rational sense out of current American foreign policy, and the fact that even historians who vehemently distrusted all "conspiracy theories" acknowledged the pivotal role of secret Masonic lodges in the French Revolution: all these added weight to the rejection of choice 3. Besides, the Masons were the first group, according to at least two of the memos, infiltrated by Weishaupt.

Choice 1 is definitely out, then, and choice 3 almost certainly equally invalid; choice 2, therefore, is most probably correct. The theory in the memos is partly true and partly false. But what, in essence, is the theory-and which part of it is true, which part false?

Saul lit his pipe, closed his eyes, and concentrated.

The theory, in essence, was that the Illuminati recruited people through various "fronts," turned them on to some sort of illuminizing experience through marijuana (or some special extract of marijuana) and converted them into fanatics willing to use any means necessary to "illuminize" the rest of the world. Their aim, obviously, is nothing less than the total transformation of humanity itself, along the lines suggested by the film 2007, or by Nietzsche's concept of the Superman. In the course of this conspiracy the Illuminati, according to Malik's hints to Jackson, were systematically assassinating every popular political figure who might interfere with their program.

Saul thought, suddenly, of Charlie Manson, and of the glorification of Manson by the Weatherman and Morituri bombers. He thought of the popularity of pot smoking and of the slogan "by any means necessary" with contemporary radical youth, even outside Weatherman. And he thought of Neitzsche's slogans, "Be hard. . . . Whatever is done for love is beyond good and evil. . . . Above the ape is man, and above man, the Superman. . . . Forget not thy whip. ..." In spite of his own logic, which had proved that Malik's theory was only partly true, Saul Goodman, a lifelong liberal, suddenly felt a pang of typically right-wing terror toward modern youth.

He reminded himself that Malik seemed to think the conspiracy emanated chiefly from Mad Dog-and that was God's Lightning country down there. God's Lightning had no fondness for marijuana, or for youth, or for the definitely anti-Christian overtones of the Illuminati philosophy.

Besides, Malik's sources were only partly trustworthy.

And there were other possibilities: the Shriners, for instance, were part of the Masonic movement, were generally right-wing, had their own hidden rites and secrets, and used Arabic trappings that might well derive from Hassan i Sabbah or the Roshinaya of Afghanistan. Who could say what secret plots were hatched at Shriner conventions?

No, that was the intuitive pole vaulter in the right lobe at work again; and right now Saul was concerned with the plodding logician in the left lobe.

The key to the mystery was in getting a clearer definition of the purpose of the Illuminati. Identify the change they were trying to accomplish-in man and in his society-and then you would be able to guess, at least approximately, who they were.

Their aim was English domination of the world, and they were Rhodes Scholars-according to the Birchers. That idea, obviously, belonged with Saul's own whimsey about a worldwide Shriner conspiracy. What then? The Italian llluminati, under Fra Dolcino, wanted to redistribute the wealth-but the International Bankers, mentioned in the Playboy letter, presumably wanted to hold onto their wealth. Weishaupt was a "freethinker" according to the Britannica, and so were Washington and Jefferson- but Sabbah and Joachim of Florence were evidently heretical mystics of the Islamic and Catholic traditions respectively.

Saul picked up the ninth memo, deciding to get more facts (or pretended facts) before analyzing further-and then it hit him.

Whatever the Illuminati were aiming at had not been accomplished. Proof: If it had, they would not still be conspiring in secret.

Since almost everything has been tried in the course of human history, find out what hasn't been tried (at least not on a large scale)-and that will be the condition to which the Illuminati are trying to move the rest of mankind.

Capitalism had been tried. Communism has been tried. Even Henry George's Single Tax has been tried, in Australia. Fascism, feudalism and mysticism have been tried. Anarchism has never been tried.

Anarchism was frequently associated with assassinations. It had an appeal for freethinkers, such as Kropotkin and Bakunin, but also for religious idealists, like Tolstoy and Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement. Most anarchists hoped, Joachim-like, to redistribute the wealth, but Rebecca had once told him about a classic of anarchist literature, Max Stirner's The Ego and His Own, which had been called "the Billionaire's Bible" because it stressed the advantages the rugged individualist would gain in a stateless society-and Cecil Rhodes was an adventurer before he was a banker. The Illuminati were anarchists.

It all fit: the pieces of the puzzle slipped together smoothly.

Saul was convinced. He was also wrong.

"We'll just get our troops out of Fernando Poo," the Chairman of the Chinese Communist party said on April 1. "A place that size isn't worth world war."

"But we don't have any troops there," an aide told him, "it's the Russians who do."

"Oh?" the Chairman quoted a proverb to the effect that there was urine in the rosewater. "I wonder what the hell the Russians want with Fernando Poo?" he added thoughtfully.

He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of America and Russia.

("And it's not only a sin against God," Mr. Mocenigo shouts, "but it gives you germs, too." It is 1950, early spring on Mulberry Street, and young Charlie Mocenigo raises terrified eyes. "Look, look," Mr. Mocenigo goes on angrily, "don't believe your own father. See what the dictionary says. Look, look at the page. Here, see. 'Masturbation: self-pollution.' Do you know what self-pollution means? Do you know how long those germs last?" And in another spring, 1955, Charles Mocenigo, a pale, skinny, introverted genius, registers for his first semester at MIT and, coming to the square on the form that says "Religion," writes in careful block capitals, ATHEIST. He has read Kinsey and Hirschfeld and almost all the biologically oriented sexological treatises by this time-studiously ignoring psychoanalysts and such unscientific types-and the only visible remnant of that early adolescent terror is a habit of washing his hands frequently when under tension, which earns him the nickname "Soapy.")

General Talbot looks at Mocenigo pityingly and raises his pistol to the scientist's head. . . .

On August 6, 1902, the world produced its usual crop of new humans, all programmed to act more or less 'alike, all containing minor variations of the same basic DNA blueprint; of these, approximately 51,000 were female and 50,000 were male; and two of the males, born at the same second, were to play a large role in our story, and to pursue somewhat similar and anabatic careers. The first, born over a cheap livery stable in the Bronx, New York, was named Arthur Flegenheimer and, at the other end of his life, spoke very movingly about his mother (as well as about bears and sidewalks and French Canadian Bean Soup); the second, born in one of the finest old homes on Beacon Hill in Boston, was named Robert Putney Drake and, at the other end of his life, thought rather harshly of his mother . . . but when the paths of Mr. Flegenheimer and Mr. Drake crossed, in 1935, one of the links was formed which led to the Fernando Poo Incident.

And, in present time, more or less, 00005 was summoned to meet W. in the headquarters of a certain branch of British Intelligence. The date was March 17, but being English, neither 00005 nor W. gave a thought to blessed Saint Patrick; instead, they spoke of Fernando Poo.

"The Yanks," W. said crisply, "are developing evidence that the Russians or the Chinese, or both of them, are behind this Tequilla y Moto swine. Of course, even if that were true, it wouldn't matter a damn to Her Majesty's government; what do we care if a speck of an island that size turns Red? But you know the Yanks, 00005-they're ready to go to war over it, although they haven't announced that publicly yet."

"My mission," 00005 asked, the fault lines of cruelty about his mouth turning into a most engaging smile, "is to hop down to Fernando Poo and find out the real politics of this Tequilla y Mota bloke and if he is Red overthrow him before the Yanks blow up the world?"

"That's the assignment. We can't have a bloody nuclear war just when the balance of payments is almost straightened out and the Common Market is finally starting to work. So, hop to it, straightaway. Naturally, if you're captured, Her Majesty's government will have to disavow any knowledge of your actions."

"It always seems to work out that way," 00005 said ironically. "I wish for once you'd give me a mission where Her Majesty's bleeding government would stand behind me in a tight spot."

But 00005, of course, was merely being witty; as a loyal subject, he would follow orders under any circumstances, even if it required the death of every soul on Fernando Poo and himself as well. He rose, in his characteristic debonair fashion, and headed for his own office, where he began his preparations for the Fernando Poo mission. His first step was to check his personal worldwide travel notebook, seeking the bar in Santa Isobel which came closest to serving a suitable martini and the restaurant most likely to prepare an endurable lobster Newburg. To his horror, there was no such bar and no such restaurant. Santa Isobel was bereft of social graces.

"I say," 00005 muttered, "this is going to be a bit thick."

But he cheered up quickly, for he knew that Fernando Poo would be equipped at least with a bevy of tawny-skinned or coffee-colored females, and such women were the Holy Grail to him. Besides, he had already formed his own theory about Fernando Poo: he was convinced that BUGGER-Blowhard's Unreformed Gangsters, Goons, and Espionage Renegades, an international conspiracy of criminals and double agents, led by the infamous and mysterious Eric "the Red" Blowhard-was behind it all. 00005 had never heard of the Illuminati.

In fact, 00005, despite his dark hair combed straight back, his piercing eyes, his cruel and handsome face, his trim athlete's body, and his capacity to penetrate any number of females and defenestrate any number of males in the course of duty, was not really an ideal intelligence agent. He had grown up reading Ian Fleming novels and one day, at the age of twenty-one, looked in the mirror, decided he was everything a Fleming hero should be, and started a campaign to get into the spy game. After fourteen years in bureaucratic burrowing, he finally arrived in one of the intelligence services, but it was much more the kind of squalid and bumbling organization in which Harry Palmer had toiled his cynical days away than it was a berth of Bondage. Nevertheless, 00005 did his best to refurbish and glamorize the scene and, perhaps because God looks after fools, he hadn't managed to get himself killed in any of the increasingly bizarre missions to which he was assigned. The missions were all weird, at first, because nobody took them seriously-they were all based on wild rumors that had to be checked out just in case there be some truth in them-but later it was realized that 00005's peculiar schizophrenia was well suited to certain real problems, just as the schizoid of the more withdrawn type is ideal for a "sleeper" agent since he could easily forget what was conventionally considered his real self. Of course, nobody at any time ever took BUGGER seriously, and, behind his back, 00005's obsession with this organization was a subject of much interdepartmental humor.

"Wonderful as it was," Mary Lou said, "some of it was scary."

Simon lit another joint and passed it over to her. "What makes you think, even now, that it was just hallucinations?" he asked.

ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT

"If that was real," Mary Lou said firmly, "everything else in my life has been a hallucination."

Simon grinned. "Now," he said calmly, "you're getting the point."