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 Dorn 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: ifs 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 be handed Joe a card saying

Burroughs, incidentally, although he discovered the 23 synchronicity principle, is unaware of the correlation with 17. This makes it even more interesting that his date for the invasion of earth by the Nova Mob (in Nova Express) is September 17, 1899. When I asked him how he picked that date, he said it just came to him out of the air.

Damn. I was just interrupted by another woman, collecting for the Mothers March Against Hernia. I only gave her a dime.

W, the 23rd letter, keeps popping up in all this. Note: Weishaupt, Washington, William S. Burroughs, Charlie Workman, Mendy Weiss, Len Weinglass in the Conspiracy Trial, and others who will quickly come to mind. Even more interesting, the first physicist to apply the concept of synchronicity to physics, after Jung published the theory, was Wolfgang Pauli.

Another suggestive letter-number transformation: Adam Weishaupt (A.W.) is 1-23, and George Washington (G.W.) is 7-23. Spot the hidden 17 in there? But, perhaps, I grow too imaginative, even whimsical. . . .

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.

Mavis strode onto the balcony, pulling the door shut behind her. She was wearing forest-green tights with white patent leather boots and a wide white belt. Her small but well-shaped breasts jiggled naturally under her blouse. George found himself thinking back to the scene on the beach. That was only this morning, and what time was it anyway? What time where? Back in Florida it was probably two or three in the afternoon. Which would make it one P.M. in Mad Dog, Texas. And probably about six out here in the Atlantic. Did time zones extend beneath the water? He supposed they did. On the other hand, if you were at the North Pole, you could skip around the Pole and be in a different time zone every few seconds. And cross the International Date Line every five minutes if you wanted to. Which would not, he reminded himself, make it possible to travel hi time. But if he could go back to this morning and replay Mavis's demand for sex, this time he would respond! He now wanted her desperately.

Well and good, but why did she say he was not a schmuck, why did she imply admiration for him because he would not fuck her? If he had fucked her because she asked him and he felt he should but without wanting to, he would have been a pure and simple schmuck. But he could have pronged her simply because she would have been nice to fuck, regardless of whether she would have admired him or despised him. But that was their game—Mavis's and Hagbard's game of saying I do what I want to do, and I don't give a damn what you think. George cared a great deal about what other people thought, so not fucking Mavis at the time was at least honest, even if he was beginning to see some merit in the Discordian (he supposed it was Discordian) attitude of super self-sufficiency.

Mavis smiled at him. "Well, George, had your baptism of fire?"

George shrugged. "Well, there was the Mad Dog jail. And I've been in a few other bad scenes." For instance, there was the time I held a pistol to my head and pulled the trigger.

She'd sucked his cock, he'd watched her in manic masturbation, but he was desperate to get inside her, all the way, up the womb, riding her ovarian trolley to the wonderful land of fuck, as Henry Miller said. What the hell was so special about Mavis's cunt? Especially after that induction ceremony scene. Hell, Stella Marls seemed like a less neurotic woman and was certainly a classic lay. After Stella Maris, who needed Mavis?

A sudden question struck him. How did he know he'd laid Stella? It could have been Mavis inside that golden apple. It could have been some woman he'd never met. He was pretty sure it was a woman, unless it was a goat or a cow or a sheep. Best not put that kind of joke past Hagbard either. But even if it was a woman, why visualize Stella or Mavis or somebody like them? It was probably some diseased old Etruscan whore that Hagbard kept around for religious purposes. Some Sibyl. Some wop witch. Maybe it was Hagbard's rotten old Sicilian mother with no teeth, a black shawl, and three kinds of VD. No, it was Hagbard's father who was Sicilian. His mother was Norwegian.

"What color were they?" he said suddenly to Hagbard.

"Who?"

'The Atlanteans."

"Oh." Hagbard nodded. "They were covered with fur over most of their bodies, like any normal ape. At least, the High Atlanteans were. A mutation occurred around the time of the Hour of the Evil Eye— the catastrophe that destroyed High Atlantis. Later Atlanteans, like modern humans, were hairless. Those of the oldest Atlantean ancestry tend to be rather furry." George couldn't help looking down at Hagbard's hand as it rested on the railing. It was covered with thick black hair.

"All right," said Hagbard, "it's time to head back to our North American base. Howard? You out there?"

The long, streamlined shape performed a somersault on their right. "What's happening, Hagbard?"

"Have some of your people keep an eye on things here. We've got work to do on land. And—Howard, as long as I live I will be in debt to your people for the four who died to save me."

"Haven't you and the Lief Erickson saved us from several kinds of deaths planned for us by the shore people?" said Howard. "We'll keep watch over Atlantis for you. And the seas in general, and that which Atlantis has spawned. Hail and farewell, Hagbard and other friends—

"The sea is wide and the sea is deep But warm as blood through it there rolls A tide of friendship that will keep us close in Ocean's blackest holes."

He was gone. "Lift off," Hagbard called. George felt the surge of the sub's colossal engines, and they were sailing high above the hills and valleys of Atlantis. With the special lighting of Hagbard's television screen system, it seemed much like flying in a jet plane over one of the continents above the ocean's surface.

"Too bad we don't have time to get deeper into Atlantis," said Hagbard. "There are many mighty cities to see. Though of course none of them can approach the cities that existed before the Hour of the Evil Eye."

"How many of these Atlantean civilizations were there?" asked George.

"Basically, two. One leading up to the Hour, and one afterward. Before the Hour, there was a civilization of about a million human beings on this continent. Technically, they were further advanced than the human race is today. They had atomic power, space travel, genetic technology and much else. This civilization was struck a death blow in the Hour of the Evil Eye. Two-thirds of them were killed —almost half the human population of the planet at that time. After the Hour, something made it impossible for them to make a comeback. The cities that came through the first catastrophe relatively undamaged were destroyed in later disasters. The inhabitants of Atlantis were reduced to savagery in a generation. Part of the continent sank under the sea, which was the beginning of the process that ended when all of Atlantis was under water, as it is today."

"Was this the earthquakes and tidal waves that you always read about?" George asked.

"No," said Hagbard with a curious closed expression. "It was manmade. High Atlantis was destroyed in a kind of war. Probably a civil war, since there was no other power on the planet that could have matched them."

"Anyway, if there'd been a victor, they'd still be around now," said George.

"They are," said Mavis. "The victors are still around. Only they're not what you might visualize. Not a conquering nation. And we are the descendants of the defeated."

"Now," said Hagbard, "I'm going to show you something I promised when we first met. It has to do with the catastrophe I've been talking about. Look there."

The submarine had risen high above the continent, and it was possible to see landscapes stretching for hundreds of miles. Looking in the direction in which Hagbard pointed, George saw a vast expanse of black, glazed plain. Out of its center jutted something white and pointed, like a canine tooth.

"It is said of them that they even controlled the comets in their courses." said Hagbard. He pointed again.

The submarine sailed closer to the jutting white object It was a four-sided white pyramid.

"Don't say it," said Mavis, giving him a warning look, and George remembered the tattoo he had seen between her breasts. He looked down again. They were above the pyramid now and George could see the side that had been hidden from him as they approached. He saw what he had half-feared, half-expected to see: a blood-red design in the shape of a baleful eye.

"The Pyramid of the Eye," Hagbard said. "It stood in the center of the capital of High Atlantis. It was built in the last days of that civilization by the founders of the world's first religion. It doesn't look very big from up here, but it's five times the size of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, which was modeled after it. It's made of an imperishable ceramic substance which repels even ocean sediment. As if the builders knew that to last it would have to survive tens of thousands of years of ocean burial. And maybe— depending on who they were— they did know that. Or maybe they just built well in those days. Peos, as you saw, was a pretty durable city, and that was built after High Atlantis fell, by the second civilization I spoke of. That second civilization reached a level somewhat more advanced than that of the Greeks and Romans, but it was nothing like its predecessor. And some malevolent force seemed bent on destroying it, too, and it was destroyed, about ten thousand years ago. Of that civilization we have the evidence of ruins. But of High Atlantis we have only records and legends dug up from the later civilization— and, of course, poetry from the Porpoise Corpus. This is the only artifact, this pyramid. But its existence and durability prove that as long ago as ten Egypts, a race of men existed whose technology was far advanced beyond what we know today. So advanced that it took twenty thousand years for that civilization's successor culture to disappear completely. The men who destroyed High Atlantis did their best to make it disappear. But they couldn't quite manage it. The Pyramid of the Eye, for instance, is indestructible. Though it's probable that they didn't want to destroy it."

Mavis nodded somberly. "That is their most sacred shrine."

"In other words," said George, "you're telling me that the people who destroyed Atlantis still exist. Do they have the powers they had then?"

"Substantially, yes," said Hagbard.

"Is this the Illuminati you told me about?"

"Illuminati, or Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria is one of the names they have used, yes."

"So they didn't start in seventeen seventy-six— they go a long way back before that, right?"

"Right," said Mavis.

"Then why did you lie to me about their history? And why the hell haven't they taken over the world by now, if they're all that powerful? When our ancestors were savages, they could have dominated them completely."

Hagbard replied, "I lied to you because the human mind can only accept a little of the truth at a time. Also, initiation into Discordianism has stages. The answer to the other question is complicated. But I'll try to give it to you simply. There are five reasons. First, there are organizations like the Discordians which are almost as powerful and which know almost as much as the Illuminati and which are able to thwart them. Second, the Illuminati are too small a group to enjoy the creative cross-fertilization necessary to progress of any kind, and they have been unable to advance much beyond the technological level they reached thirty thousand years ago. Like Chinese Mandarins. Third, the Illuminati are hamstrung in their actions by the superstitious beliefs that set them apart from the other Atlanteans. As I told you, they're the world's first religion. Fourth, the Illuminati are too sophisticated, ruthless and decadent to want to take over the world— it amuses them to play with world. Fifth, the Illuminati do rule the world and everything that happens, happens by their sufferance."

"Those reasons contradict each other," said George.

"That's the nature of logical thought. AH propositions are true in some sense, false in some sense and meaningless in some sense." Hagbard didn't smile.

The submarine had described a great arc as they talked and now the Pyramid of the Eye was far behind them. The eye itself, since it faced eastward, was no longer visible. Below, George could see the ruins of several small cities at the edges of tall cliffs that fell away into darker depths— cliffs that doubtless had been the seacoast of Atlantis at one time.

Hagbard said, "I've got a job for you, George. You're going to like it, and you're going to want to do it, but it is going to make you shit a brick. We'll talk about it when we get to Chesapeake Base. Now, though, let's go down into the hold and have a look at our acquisitions." He flicked a switch. "FUCKUP, get your finger out of your ass and drive this thing for a while."

"I'll see the statues later," said Mavis. "I've got other things to do just now."

George followed Hagbard down carpeted staircases and halls paneled in glowing, polished oak. At last they came to a large hall which was apparently paved with marble flagstones. A group of men and women wearing horizontally striped nautical shirts similar to Hagbard's were clustered around four tall statues in the center of the room. When Hagbard entered the room they stopped talking and stepped away to give him a clear look at the sculptures. The floor was covered with puddles of water and the statues themselves were dripping.

"No wiping them dry," Hagbard said. "Every molecule is precious just as it is, and the less disturbed the better." He stepped closer to the nearest one and looked at it for a long moment. "What do you say about a thing like this? It's beyond exquisite. Can you imagine what their art was like before the disaster? And to think the Unbroken Circle destroyed every trace of it, except for that crude, stupid pyramid."

"Which is the greatest piece of ceramic technology in the history of the human race," said one of the women. George looked around for Stella Maris, but she wasn't there.

"Where's Stella?" he asked Hagbard.

"Upstairs minding the store. She'll see them later."

The sculptures were unlike the work of any culture George knew, which was to be expected, after all. They were at once realistic, fanciful and abstractly intellectual. They bore resemblance to Egyptian and Mayan, Classical Greek, Chinese and Gothic, combined with a surprisingly modern-looking note. There were some qualities in the statues that were totally unique, though, qualities doubtless lost by the civilizations to which Atlantis was ancestral, but that might have been found in known world art, had there been other civilizations to preserve and emphasize them. This, George realized, was the Ur-Art; and looking at the statues was like hearing a sentence in the first language spoken by men.

An elderly sailor pointed at the statue farthest from where they were standing. "Look at that beatific smile. A woman thought of that statue, I'll bet. That's every woman's dream— to be totally self-sufficient."

"Some of the time, Joshua," said the Oriental woman who had spoken before, "but not all of the time. Now what I prefer is that." She pointed to another statue.

Hagbard laughed. "You think that's just nice, healthy oragenitalism, Tsu-Hsi. But the child in the woman's arms is the Son Without a Father, the Self-Begotten, and the couple at the base represent the Unbroken Circle of Gruad. Usually it's a serpent with its tail in its mouth, but in some of the earlier representations the couple in oral intercourse symbolizes sterile lust. The Unloved Mother has her foot on the man's head to indicate that she conquers lust. The whole sculpture is the product of the foulest cult to come out of Atlantis. They originated human sacrifice. First they practiced castration, but then they escalated to killing men instead of just cutting off their balls. Later, when women were subjugated, the sacrifice became a virgin female, supposedly to give her to the Unloved Ones while she was still pure."

"That halo around the child's head looks like the peace symbol," said George.

"Peace symbol, my ass," said Hagbard. "That's the oldest symbol of evil there is. Of course, in the cult of the Unbroken Circle it was a symbol of good, but that's the same difference."

"They can't have been so vicious if they produced that statue," said the Oriental woman stubbornly.

"Could you deduce the Spanish Inquisition from a painting of the manger at Bethlehem?" said Hagbard. "Don't be naive, Miss Mao." He turned to George, "The value of any one of these statues is beyond calculation. But not many people know that. I'm sending you to one who does—Robert Putney Drake. One of the finest art connoisseurs in the world, and the head of the American branch of the world crime syndicate. You're going to see him with a gift from me— these four statues. The Illuminati were planning to buy his support with gold from the Temple of Tethys. I'm going to get to him first."

"If they only needed four statues, why were they trying to raise the whole temple?" George asked.

"I think they wanted to remove the temple to Agharti, their stronghold under the Himalayas, for safekeeping. I haven't been any closer to the Temple of Tethys than we were today, but I suspect it's a treasure-house of evidence of High Atlantis. As such, it would be something the Illuminati would want to remove. Until now there was no reason to, because no one had access to the sea bottom other than the Illuminati. Now I can get around down here just as well, better in fact, than they can, and pretty soon others will be following. Several nations and many groups of private persons are exploring the undersea world. It's time for the Illuminati to finish taking away whatever tells of High Atlantis."

"Will they destroy that city we saw? And what about the Pyramid of the Eye?"

Hagbard shook his head. "They'd be willing to let later Atlantean ruins to be found. That wouldn't say anything about their existence. As for the Pyramid of the Eye, I suspect they have a real problem with that. They can't destroy it, and even if they could they wouldn't want to. But it's a dead giveaway to the existence of a supercivilization in the past."

"Well," said George, not at all wanting to meet the head of the American crime syndicate, "what we ought to do is go back and raise the Temple of Tethys ourselves, before the Illuminati grab it."

"Good grief," said Miss Mao. "This happens to be the most critical moment in the history of this civilization. We don't have time to fiddle-fuck around with archeology."

"He's just a legionnaire," said Hagbard. "Though after this mission he'll know the Fairest and become a deacon. He'll understand more then. George, I want you to act as a go-between for the Discordian movement and the Syndicate. You're going to bring these four statues to Robert Putney Drake and tell him there are more where they came from. Ask Drake to stop working for the Illuminati, to take the heat off our people, wherever he's after them, and to drop the assassination project the Illuminati have been working on with him. And as an earnest of good faith, he's to snuff twenty-four Illuminati agents for us in the next twenty-four hours. Their names will be contained in a sealed envelope which you'll give him."

FIVES. SEX. HERE is WISDOM. The mumble of the breast is the mutter of man.

State's Attorney Milo A. Flanagan stood on the roof of the high rise condominium on Lake Shore Drive in which he lived, scanning blue-gray Lake Michigan with powerful binoculars. It was April 24, and Project Tethys should be completed. At any moment Flanagan expected to sight what would look like another Great Lakes freighter heading for the Chicago River locks. Only this one would be carrying a dismantled Atlantean temple crated in its hold. The ship would be recognizable by a red triangle painted on the funnel.

After being inspected by Flanagan (whose name in the Order was Brother Johann Beghard) and after his report had been sent on to Vigilance Lodge, the North American command center, the crated temple would be moved downriver to Saint Louis, where, by prior agreement with the President of the United States, it would be trucked overland to Fort Knox under the guard of the U.S. Army. The President didn't know with whom he was dealing. The CIA had informed him that the source of the artifacts was the Livonian Nationalist Movement, now behind the Iron Curtain, and that the crates would contain Livonian art treasures. Certain high officers in the CIA did know the real nature of the organization which the U.S. was helping, because they were members of it. Of course, the Syndicate (without even a cover story) was keeping three-quarters of its gold in with the government store at Fort Knox these days. "Where could you find a safer place?" Robert Putney Drake once asked.

But the freighter was behind schedule. The wind battered at Flanagan, whipping his wavy white hair and the well-tailored jacket sleeves and trouser legs. The goddamned Chicago wind. Flanagan had been fighting it all his life. It had made him the man he was.

Police Sergeant Otto Waterhouse emerged from the doorway to the roof. Waterhouse was a member of Flanagan's personal staff, which meant he was on the Police Department payroll, the Syndicate payroll, and another payroll that regularly deposited a fixed sum in the account of Herr Otto Wasserhaus in a Bavarian bank. Waterhouse was a six-and-a-half-foot-tall black man who had made a career for himself in the Chicago Police Department by being more willing and eager to harass, torture, maim, and kill members of his race than the average Mississippi sheriff. Flanagan had early spotted Waterhouse's ice-cold, self-hating love affair with death, and had attached him to his staff.

"A message from CFR communications center in New York," said Waterhouse. "The word has come through from Ingolstadt that Project Tethys was aborted."

Flanagan lowered his binoculars and turned to look at Waterhouse. The State's Attorney's florid face with its bushy pepper-and-salt eyebrows was shrewd and distinguished, the sort of face people vote for, especially in Chicago. It was a face that had once belonged to a kid who had run with the Hamburgers in Chicago's South Side Irish ghetto and bashed out the brains of black men with cobblestones for the fun of it. It was a face that had come from that primitive beginning to knowing about ten-thousand-year-old sunken temples, spider ships, and international conspiracies. It was stamped indelibly with the lines of Milo A. Flanagan's ancestors, the ancestors of the Gauls, Britons, Scots, Picts, Welsh, and Irish. Around the time the Temple of Tethys was sinking into the sea, they had been driven forth on orders from Agharti from that thick ancient forest that is now the desert country of Outer Mongolia. But Flanagan was only a Fourth-degree Illuminatus and not fully instructed in the history. Though he did not display much emotion there were blue-white flames of murderous madness burning deep in his eyes. Water-house was one of the few people in Chicago who could meet Flanagan's baleful stare head-on.

"How did it happen?" Flanagan asked.

"They were attacked by porpoises and an invisible submarine. The spider craft were all blown to bits. The Zwack came in and counterattacked, was damaged by a laser beam and forced to disengage."

"How did they find out we had spider ships at the temple site?"

"Maybe the porpoises told them."

Flanagan looked at Waterhouse coldly and thoughtfully. "Maybe it leaked at this end, Otto. There are JAMs active in this town, more here than anywhere in the country right now. Dillinger has been spotted twice in the last week. By Gruad, how I'd like to be the one to really get him, once and for all! What would Hoover's ghost say then, huh, Otto?" Flanagan grinned, one of his rare genuine smiles, exposing prominent canine teeth. "We know there's a JAM cult center somewhere on the North Side. Someone's been stealing hosts from my brother's church for the past ten years— even at times when I've had as many as thirty men staked out there. And my brother says that there have been more cases of demonic possession in his parish in the last five years than in all of Chicago in all its previous history. One of our sensitives has reported emanations of the Old Woman in this area at least once a month during the past year. It's long past time we found them. They could be reading our minds, Otto. That could be the leak. Why haven't we got a fix on them?"

Waterhouse, who only a few years ago had known nothing more unconventional than how to turn a homicide into "killed while resisting arrest," looked back calmly at Flanagan and said, "We need ten sensitives of the fifth grade to form the pentacle, and we've only got seven."

Flanagan shook his head. "There are seventeen fifth graders in Europe, eight in Africa, and twenty-three scattered around the rest of the world. You'd think they could spare us three for a week. That's all it would take."

Waterhouse said, "Maybe you've got enemies in the higher circle. Maybe somebody wants to see us get it."

"Why the hell do you say things like that, Waterhouse?"

"Just to fuck you up, man."

Eight floors below, in an apartment which was regularly used for black masses, a North Clark street hippie named Skip Lynch opened his eyes and looked at Simon Moon and Padre Pederastia. "Time's getting very short," he said. "We've got to finish off Flanagan soon."

"It can't be too soon for me," said Padre Pederastia. "If Daddy hadn't favored him so outrageously he'd be the priest today and I'd be State's Attorney."

Simon nodded. "But then we'd be snuffing you instead of Milo. Anyway, I believe George Dorn will be taking care of the problem for us right now."

Squinks? It all began with the squinks- and that sentence is more true than you will realize until long after this mission is over, Mr. Muldoon.

It was the night of February 2, 1776, and it was dark and windy in Ingolstadt; in fact, Adam Weishaupt's study looked like a set for a Frankenstein movie, with its windows rattling and candles flickering, and old Adam himself casting terrifying shadows as he paced back and forth with his peculiar lurching gait. At least the shadows were terrifying to him, because he was flying high on the new hemp extract that Kolmer had brought back from his last visit to Baghdad. To calm himself, he was repeating his English vocabulary-building drill, working on the new words for that week. "Tomahawk . . . Succotash . . . Squink. Squink?" He laughed out loud. The word was "skunk," but he had short-circuited from there to "squid" and emerged with "squink." A new word: a new concept. But what would a squink look like? Midway between a squid and a skunk, no doubt: it would have eight arms and smell to hoch Himmel. A horrible thought: it reminded him, uncomfortably, of the shoggoths in that damnable Necronomicon that Kolnier was always trying to get him to read when he was stoned, saying that was the only way to understand it.

He lurched over to the Black Magic and Pornography section of his bookshelves— which he kept, sardonically, next to his Bible commentaries— and took down the long-forbidden volume of the visions of the mad poet Abdul Alhazred. He turned to the first drawing of a shoggoth. Strange, he thought, how a creature so foul could also, from certain angles and especially when you were high, look vaguely like a crazily grinning rabbit. "Du haxen Hase," he chortled to himself. . . .

Then his mind made the leap: five sides on the borders on the shoggoth sketches . . . five sides, always, on all the shoggoth sketches . . . and "squid" and "skunk" both had five letters in them. . . .

He held up his hands, looked at the five fingers on each, and began to laugh. It was all clear suddenly: the Sign of the Horns made by holding up the first two fingers in a V and folding the other three down: the two, the three and their union in the five. Father, Son and Holy Devil . . . the Duality of good and evil, the Trinity of the Godhead ... the bicycle and the tricycle. ... He laughed louder and louder, looking— despite his long, thin face— like the Chinese statues of the Laughing Buddha.

While the gas chambers were operating, other features of life in the camps were also contributing to the Final Solution. At Auschwitz, for instance, many perished from beatings and other forms of ill treatment, but the general neglect of elementary sanitary and health precautions had the most memorable results. First there was spotted fever, then paratyphoid fever and abdominal typhus erysipelas. Tuberculosis, of course, was rampant, and— particularly amusing to certain of the officers— incurable diarrhea brought death to many inmates, degrading as it killed. No attempt was made, either, to prevent the ubiquitous camp rats from attacking those too ill to move or defend themselves. Never before witnessed by twentieth-century doctors, noma also appeared and was recognized only from the descriptions in old textbooks: it is the complication of malnutrition which eats holes in the cheeks until you can see right through to the teeth. "Vernichtung," a survivor said later, "is the most terrible word in any language."

Even so, the Aztecs grew more frantic toward the end, increasing the number of sacrifices, doubling and tripling the days of the year that called for spilled blood. But nothing saved them: just as Eisenhower's army advanced across Europe to end the ovens of Auschwitz, Cortez and his ships moved toward the great pyramid, the statue of Tlaloc, the confrontation.

Seven hours after Simon spoke of George Dorn to Padre Pederastia, a private jet painted gold landed at Kennedy International Airport. Four heavy crates were moved by crane from the belly of the plane into a truck which bore on its side the sign "GOLD & APPEL TRANSFERS." A young man with shoulder-length blond hair, wearing a fashionable cutaway and knee breeches of red velvet with bottle-green silk stockings, stepped down from the plane and climbed into the cab of the truck. Holding an alligator briefcase in his lap, he sat silently beside the driver.

Tobias Knight, the driver, kept his thoughts to himself and asked no questions.

George Dorn was frightened. It was a feeling he was getting used to, so accustomed in fact that it no longer seemed to stop him from doing insane things. Besides, Hagbard had given him a talisman against harm, assuring him that it was 100 percent infallible. George slipped it out of his pocket and glanced at it again, curiously and with a wan hope. It was gold-tinted card with the strange glyphs:

It was probably another of Hagbard's jokes, George decided. It might even be Etruscan for "Kick this boob in the ass." Hagbard's refusal to translate it suggested some such Celinean irony, and yet he had seemed very sober— almost religious— about the symbols.

One thing was sure: George was still frightened, but the fear was no longer paralyzing. If I was this casual about fear a few years ago, he thought, there'd be one less cop in New York. And I wouldn't be here either, probably. No, that's not right, either. I would have told Carlo to go fuck himself. I wouldn't have let the fear of being called a copout stop me. George had been scared when he went to Mad Dog, when Harry Coin tried to fuck him up the ass, when Harry Coin was killed, when he escaped from the Mad Dog jail, when he saw his own death just as he was coming, and when the Illuminati spider ships had attacked the Lief Erickson. Being scared was beginning to seem a normal condition to him.

So now he was going to meet the men who ran organized crime in the U.S. He knew practically nothing about the Syndicate and the Mafia, and what little he did know he tended to disbelieve on the grounds that it was probably myth. Hagbard had sketched in a little additional information for him while he was preparing for this flight. But the one thing that George was absolutely certain about was that he was going unprotected among men who killed human beings as easily as a housewife kills silverfish. And he was supposed to negotiate with them. The Syndicate had been working with the Illuminati until now. Now they were supposed to switch over to the Discordians, on George's say-so. With, of course, the help of four priceless statues. Except, what were Robert Putney Drake and Federico Maldonado going to say when they heard these statues had been dredged up from the bottom of the ocean floor out of the ruins of Atlantis? They would probably express their skepticism with pistols and send George back to the place he claimed the statues came from.

"Why me?" George had asked Hagbard earlier that day.

After all that, Hagbard told George he was perfectly free to turn down the mission if he didn't want to go. And George said he would go for the same reason he had agreed to accompany Hagbard on his golden submarine. Because he knew that he would have been a fool to pass up the experience.

A two-hour drive brought the truck to the outskirts of Blue Point, Long Island, to the gates of an estate. Two heavy-set men in green coveralls searched George and the driver, pointed the bell-shaped nozzle of an instrument at the truck and studied some dials, and then waved them through. They drove up a winding, narrow asphalt road through woods just beginning to show the light green budding of early spring. Shadowy figures prowled among the trees. Suddenly the road burst out of the woods and into a meadow. From here there was a long gentle rising slope to the top of a hill that was crowned by houses. From the edge of the woods George could see four large, comfortable-looking cottages, each three stories high, a little smaller than Newport, a little larger than Atlantic City. They were made of brick painted in seaside pastel colors and formed a semicircle on the crest of the hill. The grass of the meadow was cut very short, and halfway up the hill it became a beautifully manicured lawn The woods screened the houses from the road, the meadow made it impossible for anyone emerging from woods to approach the houses without being seen, and the houses themselves constituted the elements of a fortress.

The Gold & Appel truck followed the driveway, which led between two of the houses, rolling over slots in the driveway where a section might be hydraulically raised to form a wall. The driver stopped at a gesture from one of two men in khakis who approached. George could now see the Syndicate fortress consisted of eight separate houses forming an octagon around a lawn. Each house had its own fenced-in yard, and George noticed with surprise that there was play equipment for children in front of several cottages. In the center of the compound was a tall white pole from which Sew an American flag.

George and the driver stepped down from the cab of the truck. George identified himself and was ushered to the far side of the compound. The hill was much steeper on this side, George saw. It sloped down to a narrow boulder-strewn beach drenched by huge Atlantic waves. A nice view, George thought. And eminently secure. The only way Drake's enemies could get at him would be to shell his home from a destroyer.

A slender, blond man— at least sixty and maybe a well-preserved seventy— came down the steps of the house George was approaching. He had a concave nose that ended in a sharp point, a strong, cleft chin, ice-blue eyes. He shook hands vigorously.

"Hi. I'm Drake. The others are inside. Let's go. Oh— is it OK with you if we go ahead and unload your truck?" He gave George a sharp, birdlike look. George realized with a sinking feeling that Drake was saying that they would take the statues regardless of whether any deal went through. Why, then, should they inconvenience themselves by changing sides in this underground war? But he nodded in acquiescence.

"You're young, aren't you?" said Drake as they went into the house. "But that's the way it is nowadays. Boys do men's work." The house was handsome inside, but not as one might expect, incredible. The carpets were thick, the woodwork heavy, dark and polished, the furnishings probably genuine antiques. George didn't see how Atlantean statues would fit into the decor. There was a painting at the top of the stairs to the second floor of a woman who looked slightly like Queen Elizabeth II. She wore a white gown with diamonds at her neck and wrists. Two small, fragile-looking blond boys in navy blue suits with white satin ties stood with her, staring solemnly out of the painting.

"My wife and sons," said Drake with a smile.

They entered a large study full of mahogany, oak paneling, leather bound books and red and green leather furniture. Theodore Roosevelt would have loved it, George thought. Over the desk hung a painting of a bearded man in Elizabethan costume. He was holding a bowling ball in his hand and looking superciliously at a messenger type who pointing out to sea. There were sailing ships in the distant background.

"An ancestor," said Drake simply. He pressed a button in a panel on the desk. A door opened and two men came in, the first a tall young Chinese with a bony face and unruly black hair, the second a short, thin man who bore a faint resemblance to Pope Paul VI.

"Don Federico Maldonado, a man of the greatest respect," said Drake. "And Richard Jung, my chief counselor." George shook hands with both of them. He couldn't understand why Maldonado was known as "Banana-Nose"; his proboscis was on the large side, but bore little resemblance to a banana. It was more like an eggplant. The name must be a sample of low Sicilian humor. The two men took seats on a red leather couch. George and Drake sank into armchairs facing them.

"And how are my favorite musicians doing?" Jung said genially.

Was this some kind of password? George was sure of one thing: his survival depended on sticking absolutely to truth and sincerity with these people, so he said, very sincerely, "I don't know. Who are your favorite musicians?"

Jung smiled back, saying nothing, until George, his heart racing inside his chest like a hamster determined to run clear off the treadmill, reached into his briefcase and took out a parchment scroll.

"This," he said, "is the fundamental agreement proposed by the people I represent." He handed it to Drake. Maldonado, he noticed, was staring fixedly, expressionlessly, at him in the most unnerving way. The man's eyes looked as if they were made of glass. His face was a waxen mask. He was, George decided, a wax dummy of Pope Paul VI which had been stolen from Madame Tussaud's, dressed in a business suit, and brought to life to serve as the head of the Mafia. George had always thought there was something witchy about Sicilians.

"Do we sign this in blood?" said Drake, removing the cloth-of-gold ribbon from the parchment and unrolling it.

George laughed nervously. "Pen and ink will do fine."

Saul's angry, triumphant eyes stare into mine, and I look away guiltily. Let me explain, I say desperately. I really am trying to help you. Your mind is a bomb.

"What Weishaupt discovered that night of February second, seventeen seventy-six," Hagbard Celine explained to Joe Malik in 1973, on a clear autumn day in Miami, about the same time that Captain Tequilla y Mota was reading Luttwak on the coup d'etat and making his first moves toward recruiting the officer's cabal that later seized Fernando Poo, "was basically a simple mathematical relationship. It's so simple, in fact, that most administrators and bureaucrats never notice it. lust as the householder doesn't notice the humble termite, until it's too late. . . . Here, take this paper and figure for yourself. How many permutations are there in a system of four elements?"

Joe, recalling his high school math, wrote 4x3x2x1, and read aloud his answer "Twenty-four."

"And if you're one of-the elements, the number of coalitions— or to be sinister, conspiracies— that you may have to confront would be twenty-three. Despite Simon Moon's obsessions, the twenty-three has no particularly mystic significance," Hagbard added quickly. "Just consider it pragmatically— it's a number of possible relationships which the brain can remember and handle. But now suppose the system has five elements . . . ?."

Joe wrote 5x4x3x2x1 and read aloud, "One hundred and twenty."

"You see? One always encounters jumps of that size when dealing with permutations and combinations. But, as I say, administrators as a rule aren't aware of this. Korzybski pointed out, back in the early thirties, that nobody should ever directly supervise more than four subordinates, because the twenty-four possible coalitions ordinary office politics can create are enough to tax any brain. When it jumps up to one hundred and twenty, the administrator is lost. That, in essence, is the sociological aspect of the mysterious Law of Fives. The Illuminati always has five leaders in each nation, and five international Illuminati Primi supervising all of them, but each runs his own show more or less independent of the other four, united only by their common commitment to the Goal of Gruad." Hagbard paused to relight his long, black Italian cigar.

"Now," he said, "put yourself in the position of the head of any counterespionage organization. Imagine, for instance, that you're poor old McCone of the CIA at the time of the first of the New Wave of Illuminati assassinations, ten years ago, in sixty-three. Oswald was, of course, a double agent, as everybody always knew. The Russians wouldn't have let him out of Russia without getting a commitment from him to do 'small jobs,' as they're called in the business, although he'd be a 'sleeper.' That is, he'd go about his ordinary business most of the time, and only be called on occasionally when he was in the right place at the right time for a particular 'small job.' Now, of course, Washington knows this; they know that no expatriate comes back from Moscow without some such agreement And Moscow knows the other side: that the State Department wouldn't take him back unless he accepted a similar status with the CIA. Then, November twenty-second, Dealy Plaza—blam! the shit hits the fan. Moscow and Washington both want to know, the sooner the quicker, who was he working for when he did it, or was it his own idea? Two more possibilities loom at once: could a loner with confused politics like him have been recruited by the Cubans or the Chinese? And, then, the kicker: could he be innocent? Could another group— to avoid the obvious, let's call them Force X— have stage-managed the whole thing? So, you've got MVD and CIA and FBI and who-all falling over each other sniffing around Dallas and New Orleans for clues. And Force X gets to seem more and more implausible to all of them, because it is intrinsically incredible. It is incredible because it has no skeleton, no shape, no flesh, nothing they can grab hold of. The reason is, of course, that Force X is the Illuminati, working through five leaders with five times four times three times two times one, or one hundred and twenty different basic vectors. A conspiracy with one hundred and twenty vectors doesn't look like a conspiracy: it looks like chaos. The human mind can't grasp it, and hence declares it nonexistent. You see, the Illuminati is always careful to keep a random element in the one hundred and twenty vectors. They didn't really need to recruit both the leaders of the ecology movement and the executives of the worst pollution-producing corporations. They did it to create ambiguity. Anybody who tries to describe their operations sounds like a paranoid. What clinched it," Hagbard concluded, "was a real stroke of luck for the Weishaupt gang: there were two other elements involved, which nobody had planned or foreseen. One was the Syndicate."

"It always starts with nonsense," Simon is telling Joe in another time-track, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in 1969. "Weishaupt discovered the Law of Fives while he was stoned and looking at one of those shoggoth pictures you saw in Arkham. He imagined the shoggoth was a rabbit and said, 'du hexen Hase,' which has been preserved as an in-joke by Illuminati agents in Hollywood. It runs through the Bugs Bunny cartoons: 'You wascal wabbit!' But out of that schizzy mixture of hallucination and logomania, Weishaupt saw both the mystic meaning of the Five and its pragmatic application as a principal of international espionage, using permutations and combinations that I'll explain when we have a pencil and paper. That same mixture of revelation and put-on is always the language of the supra-conscious, whenever you contact it, whether through magic, religion, psychedelics, yoga, or a spontaneous brain nova. Maybe the put-on or nonsense part comes by contamination from the unconscious, I don't know. But it's always there. That's why serious people never discover anything of real importance."

"You mean the Mafia?" Joe asks.

"What? I didn't say anything about the Mafia. Are you in another time-track again?"

"No, not the Mafia alone," Hagbard says. "The Syndicate is much bigger than the Maf." The room returns to focus: it is a restaurant. A seafood restaurant. On Biscayne Avenue, facing the bay. In Miami. In 1973. The walls are decorated with undersea motifs, including a huge octopus. Hagbard, undoubtedly, had chosen this meeting place just because he liked the decor. Crazy bastard thinks he's Captain Nemo. Still: we've got to deal with him. As John says, the JAMs can't do it alone. Hagbard, grinning, seemed to be noting Joe's return to present time. "You're reaching the critical stage," he said changing the subject. "You now only have two mental states: high on drugs and high without drugs. That's very good. But as I was saying, the Syndicate is more than just the Maf. The only Syndicate, up until October twenty-third, nineteen thirty-five, was nothing more than the Mafia, of course. But then they killed the Dutchman, and a young psychology student, who also happened to be a psychopath with a power drive like Genghis Khan, was assigned to do a paper on how the Dutchman's last words illustrate the similarity between somatic damage and schizophrenia. The Dutchman had a bullet in his gut while the police interviewed him, and they recorded everything he said, but on the surface it was all gibberish. This psychology student wrote the paper that his professor expected, and got an A for the course— but he also wrote another interpretation of the Dutchman's words, for his own purposes. He put copies in several bank vaults— he came from one of the oldest banking families in New England, and he was even then under family pressure to give up psychology and go into banking. His name was (Robert Putney Drake visited Zurich in 1935. He personally talked to Carl Jung about the archetypes of the collective unconscious, the I Ching, and the principle of synchronicity. He talked to people who had known James Joyce before that drunken Irish genius had moved to Paris, and learned much about Joyce's drunken claims to be a prophet. He read the published portions of Finnegans Wake and went back for further conversations with Jung. Then he met Hermann Hesse, Paul Klee and the other members of the Eastern Brotherhood and joined them in a mescaline ritual. A letter from his father arrived about then, asking when he was going to give up wasting his time and return to Harvard Business School. He wrote that he would return for the fall semester, but not to study business administration. A great psychologist was almost born then, and Harvard might have had its Timothy Leary scandal thirty years earlier. Except for Drake's power drive.)

I. THE FAUST PARSON, SINGULAR. Napalm sundaes for How Chow Mein, misfortune's cookie.

Josephine Malik lies trembling on the bed, trying to be brave, trying to hide her fear. Where, now, is the mask of masculinity?

This delusion that you are a man trapped in a woman's body can only be cured one way. I might be kicked out of the American Psychoanalystical Association if they knew about my methods. In fact, already had a spot of bother with them when one of my patients cured his Oedipus complex by actually fucking his mother, convincing himself extensionally as the semanticists would say that she really was an old lady and not the woman he remembered from infancy. Nevertheless, the whole world is going bananas as you must have observed, my poor girl, and we have to use heroic measures to save whatever sanity remains in any patient we encounter. (The psychiatrist is now naked. He joins her on the bed.) Now, my little frightened dove, I will convince you that you really are a true-born, honest-to-God woman....

Josephine feels his finger in her cunt and screams. Not at the touch: at the reality of it. She hadn't believed until then that the change was real.

Weishaupt bridge is falling down Falling down Falling down

And modern novels are the same: in the YMCA on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, looking out the window at the radio tower atop Brooklyn Technical High School, a man named Chancy (no relative of the movie family) spreads his pornographic tarot cards across the bed. One of them, he notes, is missing. Quickly, he arranges them in suits, and hunts for the lost card: it is the Five of Pentacles. He curses softly: that was one of his favorite orgy tableux.

Rebecca. The Saint Bernard.