More (there was always more, with Hagbard), he had been impressed, on reading Weishaupt's Uber Strip Schnipp-Schnapp, Weltspielen and Funfwissenschaft, by the passage on the Order of Assassins, which read:

Surrounded by Moslem maniacs on one side and Christian maniacs on the other, the wise Lord Hassan preserved his people and his cult by bringing the art of assassination to esthetic perfection. With just a few daggers strategically placed in exactly the right throats, he found Wisdom's alternative to war, and preserved the peoples by killing their leaders. Truly, his was a most exemplary life of grandmotherly kindness.

"Grossmutterlich Gefalligkeit," muttered Hagbard, who had been reading this in the original German, "now where have I heard that before?"

In a second, he remembered: the Mu-Mon-Kan or "Gateless Gate" of Rinzai Zen contained a story about a monk who kept asking a Zen Master, "What is the Buddha?" Each time he asked, he got hit upside the head with the Master's staff. Finally discouraged, he left and sought enlightenment with another Master, who asked him why he had left the previous teacher. When the poor gawk explained, the second Master gave him the ontological hotfoot: "Go back to your previous Master at once," he cried, "and apologize for not showing enough appreciation of his grandmotherly kindness!"

Hagbard was not surprised that Weishaupt evidently knew, in 1776 when Uber Strip Schnipp-Schnapp was written, about a book which hadn't yet been translated into any European tongue; he was astonished, however, that even the evil Ingolstadt Zauberer had understood the rudiments of the Tar-Baby Principle. It never pays to underestimate the Illuminati, he thought then— for the first time. He was to think it many times in the next two and a half decades.

On April 24, when he told Stella to deliver some Kallisti Gold to George's stateroom, Hagbard had already asked FUCKUP the odds that Illuminati ships would arrive in Peos within the time he intended to be there. The answer was better than 100-to-l. He thought about what that meant, then buzzed to have Harry Coin sent in.

Harry swaggered to a chair, trying to look insolent, and said, "So you're the leader of the Discordians, eh?"

"Yes," Hagbard said evenly, "and on this ship, my word is law. Wipe that silly grin off your face and sit up straight." He observed the involuntary stiffening of Harry's body before the man caught himself and remembered to maintain his slouch. Typical: Coin could resist the key conditioning phrases, but only with effort. "Listen," he said softly "/ will tell you only one more time"—another Bavarian Fire Drill, that—"This is my ship. You will address me as Captain Celine. You will come to attention when I talk to you. Otherwise . . ." he let the phrase trail off.

Slowly, Coin shifted to a more respectful kinesic posture— immediately modifying it by grinning more insolently. Well, that was good; the streak of rebellion ran deep. The breathing was not bad for a professional criminal: the only block seemed to be at the bottom of the exhalation. The grin was a defense against tears, of course, as with most chronic American smilers. Hagbard attempted a probe: Harry's father was the kind who pretended to consider the case and to toy with forgiveness before he would administer the thrashing.

"Is that better?" Harry asked, accentuating his respectful posture and grinning more sarcastically.

"A little," Hagbard said, sounding mollified. "But I don't know what I'm going to do with you, Harry. That's a bad bunch you've been mixed up with, very un-American." He paused to get a reaction to the word; it came at once.

"Their money is as good as anyone's," Harry said defiantly. His shoes crept backwards, as he spoke, and his neck decreased an inch— the turtle reflex, Hagbard called it; and it was a sure sign of the repressed guilt denied by the man's voice.

"You were born pretty poor, weren't you?" Hagbard asked, in a neutral tone.

"Poor? We was white niggers."

"Well, I guess there's some excuse for you . . ." Hagbard watched: the grin grew wider, the body imperceptibly moved back toward slouching. "But, to turn on your own country, Harry. That's bad. That's the lowest thing a human being can do. It's like turning against your own mother." The toes curled inward again, tentatively. What did Harry's father say before wielding the belt? Hagbard caught it: "Harry," he repeated it gravely, "you haven't been acting like a proper white man. You've been acting like you got nigger blood."

The grin stretched to the breaking point and became a grimace, the body stiffened to the most respectful possible posture. "Now, look here, sir," Harry began, "you got no call to talk to me that way—"

"And you're not even ashamed," Hagbard ran over him. "You don't show any remorse." He shook his head with profound discouragement. "I can't let you wander around loose, committing more crimes and treasons. I'm going to have to feed you to the sharks."

"Listen, Captain Celine, sir, I've got a money belt under this shirt and it's full of more hundred-dollar bills than you ever saw at one time . . ."

"Are you trying to bribe me?" Hagbard asked sternly; the rest of the scene would be easy, he reflected. Part of his mind drifted to the Illuminati ships he would meet at Peos. There was no way to use the Celine System without communicating, and he knew the crew would be "protected" against him by some Illuminati variation on the ear wax of Ulysses' men passing the Sirens. The money would go in the giant clam-shell ashtray, a real shocker for a man like Coin, but what would he do about the Illuminati ships?

When the time came to produce the gun, he slipped the safety off viciously. If I'm going to join the ancient brotherhood of killers, he thought morosely, maybe I should have the stomach to start with a visible target. "Three days and three minutes are both too long," he said, trying to sound casual, "if you're ever going to get it, you're going to get it now." They would be at Peos in less than an hour, he thought, as Coin involuntarily cried "Mama." Like Dutch Schultz, Hagbard reflected; like how many others? It would be interesting to interview doctors and nurses and find out how many people passed out with that primordial cry for the All-Protector on their lips . . . but Harry finally surrendered, abdicated, left the robot running itself according to the biogram. He was no longer sitting in an insolent slouch, a respectful attention, a guilty cramp ... He was simply sitting. He was ready for death.

"Good enough," Hagbard said. "You've got more on the ball than either of us realized." The man would now transfer his submissive reflexes to Hagbard; and the next stage would be longer and harder, before he learned to stop playing roles entirely and just manifest as he had in the face of extinction.

The gun gambit was variation #2 of the third basic tactic in the Celine System; it had five usual sequels. Hagbard picked the most dangerous one— he usually did, since he didn't much like the gun gambit at all, and could only stomach it if he gave most of the subjects a chance at the other role. This time, however, he knew he had another motive: somewhere, deep inside, a coward in him hoped Harry Coin was crazier than he had estimated and would, in fact, shoot; that way Hagbard could avoid the decision awaiting him in Peos.

"You win, you bastard," Coin's voice said; Hagbard came back and quickly rushed through a small verbal game involving Hell images picked up from Harry's childhood. When he had Coin sent back to his room, under light security, he slouched in his chair and rubbed his eyes tiredly. He probed for Dorn and found the Dealy Lama was on that channel, broadcasting.

— Leave the kid alone, he beamed. It's my turn now. Go contemplate your navel, you old fraud.

A shower of rose petals was the nonverbal answer. The Lama faded out. George went on rapping to himself on the themes planted by the ELF leader: Odd, the big red one. Eye think it was his I. The eye of Apollo. His luminous I.

— Aye, trust me not, Hagbard beamed. Trust not a man who's rich in flax— his morals may be sadly lax. (Some of my own doubts getting in here, he thought.) Her name is Stella Maris. Black star of the seas. (I won't tell him who she and Mavis really are.) George, I want you in the captain's control room.

George should start with variation #1, the Liebestod or orgasm-death trip, Hagbard decided. Make him aware of the extent to which he treats women as objects— and, of course, give him some mystical hogwash later to gloss it over temporarily, so the doubt will be pushed into the unconscious for a while. Yes: George was already on a pornography trip, very similar to Atlanta Hope and Smiling Jim Treponema, except that in his case it was egodystonic.

"That was a good trick," George said a few moment's later in the captain's control room, "how you got me up on the bridge with that telepathy thing."

Hagbard, still thinking about the decision in Peos, tried to look innocent when he replied, "I called you on the intercom." He realized that he was whistling and pissing at once, worrying about Peos as well as about George, and brought himself back sharply. "Absurd" was the word in George's mind— absurd innocence. Well, Hagbard thought, I fucked that one up.

"You think I can't tell a voice in my head from a voice in my ears?" George demanded. Hagbard roared with laughter, totally in the present again; but after George had been sent to the chapel for his initiation, the problem returned. Either the Demonstration failed, or the Demonstration failed. Double bind. Damned both ways. It was infuriating, but all the books had warned him long ago: "As ye give, so shall ye get." He had used the Celine System on quite a few people over nearly three decades, and now he was in the middle of a classic Celine Trap himself. There was no correct answer, except to give up trying.

When the moment came, though, he found that part of him had not given up trying. "Ready for destruction of enemy ships," said Howard.

Hagbard shook his head. George was remembering some crazy incident in which he had tried to commit suicide while standing by the Passaic River, and Hagbard kept picking up parts of that bum trip while trying to clear his own head. "I wish we could communicate with them," he said aloud, realizing that he was possibly blowing the guru game by revealing his inner doubts to George. "I wish I could give them a chance to surrender ..."

"You don't want them too close when they go," said Howard.

"Are your people out of the way?" Hagbard asked in agony.

"Of course," the dolphin replied irritably. "Quit this hesitating. This is no time to be a humanitarian."

"The sea is crueler than the land," Hagbard protested, but then he added "sometimes."

"The sea is cleaner than the land," Howard replied. Hagbard tried to focus— the dolphin was obviously aware of his distress, and soon George would be (no: a quick probe showed George had retreated from the scene into the past and was shouting, "You silly sons of bitches," at somebody named Carlo). "These people have been your enemies for thirty thousand years."

"I'm not that old," Hagbard said wearily. The Demonstration had failed. He was committed, and others with him were now committed. Hagbard reached out a brown finger, let it rest on a white button on the railing in front of him, then pressed it decisively. "That's all there is to it," he said quietly.

("Be a wise-ass then! When you start flunking half your subjects, perhaps you'll come back to reality." A voice long, long ago ... at Harvard . . . And once, in the South, he had been moved by a very simple, a ridiculously simple, Fundamentalist hymn:

Jesus walked this lonesome valley. He had to walk it all alone. Nobody else could walk there for Him. He had to walk it by Himself.

I will walk this lonesome valley, Hagbard thought bitterly, all by myself, all the way to Ingolstadt and the final confrontation. But it's meaningless now, the Demonstration has failed; all I can do is pick up the pieces and salvage what I can. Starting with Dorn right here and right now.)

Hate, like molten lead, drips from the wounded sky . . . they call it air pollution . . . August Personage dials slowly, with the cunt-starved eyes of a medieval saint. . . "God lies!" Weishaupt cried in the middle of his first trip, "God is Hate!" . . . Harry Coin is crumpled in his chair . . . George's head hangs at an angle, like a doll with a broken spring . . . Stella doesn't move. . . They are not dead but stoned . . .

Abe Reles blew the whistle on the entire Murder Inc. organization in 1940 . . . He named Charley Workman as the chief gun in the Dutch Schultz massacre ... He gave the details proving the roles of Lepke (who was executed) and Luciano (who was imprisoned and, later, exiled) ... He kept his mouth shut about certain other things, however . . . But Drake was worried. He gave orders to Maldonado, who conveyed them to a capo, who passed them on to some soldiers . . . Reles was guarded by five policemen but nonetheless he went out his hotel window and spread like jam on the ground below . . . There were mutterings in the press . . . The coroner's jury couldn't believe that five cops were on the take from the Syndicate . . . Reles's. death was declared to be suicide . . . But in 1943, as the Final Solution moved into high gear, Lepke announced he wanted to talk before his execution . . . Tom Dewey, alive by grace of the Dutchman's death, was governor, and he granted a stay of execution . . . Lepke spent twenty-four hours with Justice Department officials and it was announced later that he refused to reveal anything of significance . . . One of the officials had been brought back from State to work with Justice because of his background on Schultz and the Big Six Syndicate ... He said little, but Lepke read a lot in his eyes . . . His name, of course, was Winifred . . . Lepke understood: as Bela Lugosi once said, there are worse things than dying . . .

In 1932 the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped . . . Already at that time, a heist of that dimension could not be permitted in the Northeast without the consent of a full-fledged don of the Mafia . . . Even a capo could not authorize it alone . . . The aviator's father, Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr., had been an outspoken critic of the Federal Reserve monopoly . . . Among other things, he had charged on the floor of Congress, "Under the Federal Reserve Act panics are scientifically created; the present one is the first scientifically created one worked out as we figure a mathematical problem ..." The go-between in delivering the ransom money was Jafsie Condon, Dutch Schultz's old high school principal . . . "It's got to be one of them coincidences," as Marty Krompier said later....

John Dillinger arrived in Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963, and rented an Avis at the airport. He drove out to Dealy Plaza and scouted the terrain. The Triple Underpass where Harry Coin was supposed to stand when doing the job was under observation from a railroadman's shack, he noted; it occurred to him that the man in that shack would not have a long life expectancy. There would be a lot of other eyewitnesses, he realized, and the JAMs couldn't protect them all, not even with the help of the LDD. It was going to be bad all around ... In fact, the man in the railroad shack, S. M. Holland, told a story that didn't jibe with the Earl Warren version, and later died when his car went off the road under circumstances that aroused speculation among those given to speculating; the coroner's jury called it an accident. . . Dil-linger found his spot in the thickly wooded part of the Grassy Knoll and waited until Harry Coin appeared on the Underpass. He made himself relax and looked around to be sure that he was invisible from everywhere but a helicopter (there were no helicopters: the Illuminati's top double agent within the Secret Service had seen to that). A movement in the School Book Depository caught Ms eye. Something not kosher up there. He swung his binoculars . . . and caught another head, ducking quickly, atop the Dal-Tex building. An Italian, very young . . . That was bad. If one of Maldonado's soldiers was here, either the Illuminati were aware they had a double agent in their midst and had hired two assassins, or else the Syndicate was acting on its own. John panned back to the School Book Depository: whoever that clown was, he had a rifle, too, and he was being cagey: definitely not Secret Service.

This was a piss-cutter.

John's original plan was to plug Harry Coin before Coin could get a bead on the young Hegelian from Boston. Now, he had three men to knock out at once. It couldn't be done. There was no human way of hitting more than two of those targets— all three of them in different areas and at different elevations— before the fuzz were swarming all over him. The third would have time to do the job while that was happening. It was what Hagbard called an existential koan.

"Shit, piss and industrial waste," John muttered, quoting another Celinism.

Well, save what you can, as Harry Pierpont always said when a bank job went sour in the middle. Save what you can and haul ass out of that place.

If Kennedy had to die, and obviously it was in the cards or in the I Ching at least (which probably explained why Hagbard, after consulting that computer of his, refused to get involved in this caper), then "save what you can" could only be applied, in this case, to mean: screw the Illuminati. He would give them a mystery they would never solve.

The motorcade was already in front of the School Book Depository, and the gazebo up there might start blasting at any minute, if Harry Coin or the Mafiosos weren't quicker. Dillinger hoisted his rifle, quickly sighted on John F. Kennedy's skull, and thought briefly, Even if it falls through and doesn't remain an enigma to bug the Illuminati, think of those wild headlines when I'm caught: PRESIDENT SHOT BY JOHN DILLINGER, people will think Orson Welles is publishing the papers now, and then he tightened his finger.

("Murder?" George asked. "It's hard not to think of Good and Evil when a man's games get that hairy."

"During the Kali Yuga," Stella replied, "almost all our games are played with live ammunition. Haven't you noticed?")

The three shots blew brains into Jackie Kennedy's lap and Dillinger, whirling in amazement, saw the man start to run out of the Grassy Knoll down into the street. John set off in pursuit and caught a glimpse of the face as the killer mingled in the crowd below.

"Christ!" John said. "Him?"

Stella toked again— she never seemed to think she I was sufficiently stoned. "Wait," she said. "There's a I passage in Never Whistle While You're Pissing that goes into this a bit." She got up, walking quite slowly like all potheads, and rummaged among the books on the wall shelf. "You know the old saying, 'different strokes for different folks'?" she asked over her shoulder. "Hagbard and FUCKUP have classified sixty-four thousand personality types, depending on which strokes, or gambits, they use most often in relating to others." She found the book and carefully walked back to her chair. "For instance," she said slowly. "Right now, you can intersect my life line in a number of ways, from kissing my hand to slitting my throat. Between those extremes, you can, let's say, carry on an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation underneath it, or an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation and also with kinesic signals indicating that the flirtation is only a game and you don't really want me to respond, and on an even deeper level you can be sending other signals indicating that actually you do want me to respond after all but you're not ready to admit that to yourself. In authoritarian society, as we know it, people are usually sending either very simple dominance signals— 'I'm going to master you, and you better accept it before I get really nasty'— or submissive signals— 'You're going to master me, and I'm reconciled to it.'"

"Lord in Heaven," Harry Coin said softly. "That was what my first session with him was all about. I tried dominance signals to bluff him, and it didn't work. So I tried submissive signals, which is the only other gimmick I ever knew, and that didn't work either. So I just gave up."

"Your brain gave up," Stella corrected. "The strategy center, for dealing with human relations in authoritarian society, was exhausted. It had nothing left to try. Then the Robot took over. The biogram. You acted from the heart."

"But what has redundance got to do with this?" George asked.

"Here's the passage," Stella said. She began to read aloud:

People exist on a spectrum from the most redundant to the most flexible. The latter, unless they are thoroughly trained in psychodynamics, are always at a disadvantage to the former in social interactions. The redundant do not change their script; the flexible continually keep changing, trying to find a way of relating constructively. Eventually, the flexible ones find the "proper" gambit, and communication, of a sort, is possible. They are now on the set created by the redundant person, and they act out his or her script.

The steady exponential growth of bureaucracy is not due to Parkinson's Law alone. The State, by making itself ever more redundant, incorporates more people into its set and forces them to follow its script.

"That's heavy," George said, "but I'll be damned if I can see how it applies to Jesus or Emperor Norton."

"Exactly!" Harry Coin chortled. "And that ends the game. You've just proven what I suspected all along. You're the Martian!"

"Don't raise your voices," Galley said drowsily from the floor. "I can see hundreds of blissful Buddhas floating through the air ..."

A single blissful Buddha, meanwhile— together with an inverted Satanic cross, a peace symbol, a pentagon and the Eye in the Triangle— were taking up Danny Pricefixer's attention, back in New York. He had finally decided to play his hunch about the Confrontation bombing and the five associated disappearances. The decision came after he and the acting head of Homicide received a thorough ass-chewing from the Police Commissioner himself. "Malik is gone. The Walsh woman is gone. This Dora kid was taken right out of a jail in Texas. Two of my best men, Goodman and Muldoon, are gone. The Feds are nasty and I can tell they know something that makes this case even more important than five possible murders alone would account for. I want you to report some kind of progress before the day is over, or I'll replace you with Post-Toasties Junior G-Men."

When they escaped into the hall, Pricefixer asked the man from Homicide, Van Meter, "What are you going to do?"

"Go back and give my men the same ass-chewing. They'll produce." Van Meter didn't really sound convinced. "What are you going to do?" he added lamely.

"I'm going to play a hunch," Danny said, and he walked down to Bunco-Fraud, where he exchanged some words with a detective named Sergeant Joe Friday who always insisted on trying to act like his namesake in the famous television series.

"I want a mystic," Danny said.

"Palmist, crystal-gazer, witch, astrologer . . . any preference?" Friday asked.

"The technique doesn't matter. I want one you've never been able to pin anything on. One you investigated and found a little scary ... as if she or he really did have something on the ball."

"I know the one you want," Friday said emphatically, hitting the intercom button on his phone. "R & I," he said and waited. "Carella? Send up the package on Mama Sutra."

The package, when it shot out of the interoffice tube, proved to be all that Danny had hoped for. Mama Sutra had no arrests. She had been investigated several times— usually at the demand of rich husbands who thought she had too much influence over their wives, and once at the demand of the board of directors of a public utility who thought the president of the firm consulted too often with her— but none of her activities involved any claims that could be construed to be in violation of the fraud laws. Furthermore, she had dealt with the extremely wealthy for many years and had never played any games remotely like an okanna borra or Gypsy Switch on any of them. Her business card, included in the package, modestly offered only "spiritual insight," but she evidently delivered it in horse doctor's doses: one detective, after interviewing her, quit the force and entered a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, a second became questionable and finally useless in the eyes of his superiors because of an incessant series of memos he wrote urging that New York be the first American city to experiment with the English system of unarmed policemen, and a third announced that he had been a closet queen for two decades and began sporting a Gay Liberation button, necessitating his immediate transfer to the Vice Squad.

"This is my woman," Pricefixer said; and an hour later, he sat in her waiting room studying the blissful Buddha and other occult accessories, feeling like a horse's ass. This was really going way out on a limb, he knew, and his only excuse was that Saul Goodman frequently cracked hopeless cases by making equally bizarre jumps. Danny was ready to jump: the disappearance of Professor Marsh, in Arkham, was connected with the Confrontation mystery, and both were connected with Fernando Poo and the gods of Atlantis.

The receptionist, an attractive young Chinese woman named Mao something-or-other, put down her phone and said, "You can go right in."

Danny opened the door and walked into a completely austere room, white as the North Pole. The white walls had no paintings, the white rug was solid white without any design in it, and Mama Sutra's desk and the Danish chair facing it were also white. He realized that the total lack of occult paraphernalia, together with the lack of color, was certainly more impressive than heavy curtains, shadows, smoldering candles and a crystal ball.

Mama Sutra looked like Maria Ouspenskaya, the old actress who was always popping up on the late late show to tell Lon Chaney Jr. that he would always walk the "thorny path" of lycanthropy until "all tears empty into the sea."

"What can I do for you?" she asked in a brisk, businesslike manner.

"I'm a detective on the New York Police," Danny said, showing her his badge. "I'm not here to hassle you or give you any trouble. I need knowledge and advice, and I'll pay for it out of my own pocket."

She smiled gently. "The other officers, who investigated me for fraud in the past, must have created quite a legend at police headquarters. I promise no miracles, and my knowledge is limited. Perhaps I can help you; perhaps not There will be no fee, in either case. Being in a sensitive profession, I would like to keep on friendly terms with the police."

Danny nodded. "Thanks," he said. "Here's the story . . ."

"Wait." Mama Sutra frowned. "I think I am picking up something already. Yes. District Attorney Wade. Clark. The ship is sinking. 2422. If I can't live as please, let me die when I choose. Does any of that mean anything to you?"

"Only the first part," Danny said, perplexed. "I suspect that the matter I'm investigating goes back at least as far as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The man who handled the original investigation of that killing, in Dallas, was District Attorney Henry Wade. The rest of it doesn't help at all, though. Where did you get it from?"

"There are ... vibrations . . . and I register them." Mama Sutra smiled again. "That's the best explanation I can offer. It just happens, and I've learned how to use it. Somewhat. I hope someday before I die a psychologist will go far enough out in his investigations to find something that will explain to me what I do. The sinking ship is meaningless? How about the date, June 15, 1904? That seems to be on the same wave."

Pricefixer shook his head. "No help, as they say in poker."

"Wait," Mama Sutra said. "It means something to me. There was an Irish writer, James Joyce, who studied the theosophy of Blavatski and the mysticism of the Golden Dawn Society. He wrote a novel in which all the action takes place on June 16, 1904. The novel is called Ulysses, and is impregnated on every page with coded mystical revelations. And, yes, now I remember, there is a shipwreck mentioned in it. Joyce made all the background details historically accurate, so he included what was actually in the Dublin papers that day— the book takes place in Dublin, you see— and one of the stories concerned the sinking of the ship, General Slocum, in New York Harbor the day before, June 15."

"Did you say Golden Dawn?" Pricefixer demanded excitedly.

"Yes. Does that help?"

"It just adds to the confusion, but at least it shows you're on the right track. The case I'm working on seems to be connected with the disappearance of a professor from a university in Massachusetts several years ago, and he left behind some notes that mentioned the Golden Dawn Society and . . . let's see ... some of its members. Aleister Crowley is one name I remember."

"To Mega Theiron," Mama Sutra said slowly, beginning to pale slightly. "Young man, what you are involved in is very serious. Much more than an ordinary police officer could understand. But you are not an ordinary police officer or you wouldn't have come to me in the first place. Let me tell you flatly, then, that what you have stumbled upon is something that could very easily involve both James Joyce's mysticism and the assassination of President John Kennedy. But to understand it you will have to stretch your mind to the breaking point. Let me suggest that you wait while I have my receptionist make you a rather stiff drink."

"Can't drink on duty, ma'am," Danny said sadly. Mama Sutra took a deep breath. "Very well. You'll have to take it cold and struggle with it as best you can."

"Does it involve the lloigor?" Danny asked hesitantly.

"Yes. You already have a large part of the puzzle if you know that much."

"Ma'am," Danny said, "I think I'll have that drink. Bourbon, if you have it."

2422, he thought while Mama Sutra spoke to the receptionist, that's even crazier than the rest of this. 2 plus 4 plus 2 plus 2. Adds up to 10. The base of the decimal system. What the hell does that mean? Or 24 plus 22 adds up to 46. That's two times 23, the number missing in between 24 and 22. Another enigma. And 2 times 4 times 2 times 2 is, let's see, 32. Law of falling bodies. High school physics class. 32 feet per second per second. And 32 is 23 backwards. Nuts.

Miss Mao entered with a tray. "Your drink, sir," she said softly. Danny took the glass and watched her gracefully walk back toward the door. Mao is Chinese for cat, he remembered from his years in Army Intelligence, and she certainly moved like a cat. Mao: onomatopoeia they call that. Like kids calling a dog "woof-woof." Come to think of it, that's how we got the word "wolf." Funny, I never thought of that before. Oh, the pentagram outside, and the pentagram in those old Lon Chaney Wolf Man movies. Malik's mystery mutts. Enough of that.

He took a stiff wallop of the bourbon and said, "Go ahead. Start. I'll take some more of the medicine when my mind starts crumbling."

"I'll give it to you raw," Mama Sutra said quietly. "The earth has already been invaded from outer space. It is not some threat in the future, for writers to play with. It happened, a long time ago. Fifty million years ago, to be exact."

Danny took another belt of his drink. "The lloigor," he said.

"That was their generic name for themselves. There were several races of them. Shoggoths and Tcho-Tchos and Dholes and Tikis and Wendigos, for instance. They were not entirely composed of matter as we understand it, and they do not occupy space and time in the concrete way that furniture does. They are not sound waves or radio waves or anything like that either, but think of them that way for a while. It's better than not having any mental picture of them at all. Did you take any physics in high school?"

"Nothing like relativity," Danny said, realizing that he was believing all this.

"Sound and light?" she asked.

"A little."

"Then you probably know two elementary experiments. Project a white light through a prism and a spectrum appears on the screen behind the prism. You've seen that?"

"Yes."

"And the experiment with a glass tube that has a thin layer of colored powder on the bottom, when you send a sound wave through it?"

"Yeah. And the wave leaves little marks at each of its valleys and you can see them in the powder." The track of the invisible wave in a visible medium.

"Very well. Now you can picture, perhaps, how the lloigor, although not made of matter as we understand it, can manifest themselves in matter, leaving traces that show, let us say, a cross section of what they really are."

Danny nodded, totally absorbed.

"From our point of view," Mama Sutra went on, "they are intolerably hideous in these manifestations. There is a reason for that. They were the source of the worst terrors experienced by the first humans. Our DNA code still carries an aversion and terror toward them, and this activates a part of our minds which the psychologist Jung called the Collective Unconscious. That is where all myth and art come from. Everything frightening, loathsome and terrible—in the folklore, in the paintings and statues, in the legends and epics of every people on earth—contains a partial image of a manifestation of the lloigor. 'As a foulness shall ye know Them,' a great Arab poet wrote."

"And they've been at war with us through all history?" Danny asked unhappily.

"Not at all. Are the stockyards at war with the cattle? It's nothing like war at all," Mama Sutra said sinply. "It's just that they own us."

"I see," Danny said. "Yes, of course. I see." He looked into his empty glass dismally. "Could I have another?" he murmured.

After Miss Mao had brought him another bourbon, he took a huge swallow and slouched forward in his chair. "There's nothing we can do about it?" he asked.

"There is one group that has been trying to liberate humanity," Mama Sutra said. "But lloigor have great powers to warp and distort minds. This group is the most maligned, slandered and hated people on earth. All the evil they seek to prevent has been attributed to them. They operate in secret because otherwise they would be destroyed. Even now, the John Birch Society and various other fanatics— including an evil genius named Hagbard Celine— struggle ceaselessly to combat the group of whom I speak. They have many names, the Great White Brotherhood, the Brethren of the Rosy Cross, the Golden Dawn . . . usually, though they are known as the Illuminati."

"Yes!" Danny cried excitedly. "There was a whole bunch of memos about them at the scene of the crime that started this case."

"And the memos, I would wager, portrayed them in an unfavorable light?"

"Sure did," Danny agreed. "Made them seem the worst bastards in history. Pardon me, ma'am." I'm getting drunk, he thought.

"That is how they are usually portrayed," Mama Sutra said sadly. "Their enemies are many, and they are few . . ."

"Who are their enemies?" Danny leaned forward eagerly.

"The Cult of the Yellow Sign," Mama Sutra replied. "This is a group serving one particular lloigor called Hastur. They live in such terror of this being that they usually call him He Who Is Not To Be Named. Hastur resides in a mysterious place called Hali, which was formerly a lake but is now just desert. Hali was by a great city in the lost civilization of Carcosa. You look as if those names mean something to you?"

"Yes. They were in the notes of the professor who disappeared. The other case that I was convinced was connected with this one."

"They have been mentioned— unwisely, I think— by certain writers, such as Bierce and Chambers and Lovecraft and Bloch and Derleth. Carcosa was located where the Gobi Desert is at present. The major cities were Hali, Mnar and Sarnath. The Cult of the Yellow Sign has managed to conceal all this rather thoroughly, although a few archeologists have published some interesting speculations about the Gobi area. Most of the evidence of a great civilization before Sumer and Egypt has been either hidden or doctored so that it seems to point to Atlantis. Actually, Atlantis never existed, but the Cult of the Yellow Sign carefully keeps the myth alive so nobody will discover what went on, and still goes on, in the Gobian wastelands. You see, the Cult of the Yellow Sign still goes there, on certain occasions, to worship and make certain transactions with Hastur, and with Shub Niggurath, a lloigor who is known in mystical literature as the Black Goat with a Thousand Young, and with Nyarlathotep, who appears either as a solid black man, not a Negro but black as an abyss, or else as a gigantic faceless flute player. But I repeat: you cannot understand the lloigor by these manifestations or cross sections into our space-time continuum. Do you believe in God?"

"Yes," Danny answered, startled by the sudden personal question.

"Take a little more of your drink. I must tell you now that your God is another manifestation of some lloigor. That is how religion began, and how the lloigor and their servants in the Cult of the Yellow Sign continue it. Have you ever had what is called a religious or mystical experience?"

"No," Danny said, embarrassed.

"Good. Then your religion is just a matter of believing what you have been told and not of a personal emotional experience. All such experiences come from the lloigor, to enslave us. Revelations, visions, trances, miracles, all of it is a trap. Ordinary, normal people instinctively avoid such aberrations. Unfortunately, due to their gullibility and a concerted effort to brainwash them, they are willing to follow the witches and wizards and shamans who traffic in these matters. You see, and I urge you to take another drink right now, every religious leader in human history has been a member of the Cult of the Yellow Sign and all their efforts are devoted to hoaxing, deluding and enslaving the rest of us."

Danny finished his glass and asked meekly, "May I have more?"

Mama Sutra buzzed for Miss Mao and said, "You're taking this part very well. People who have had religious visions take it very poorly; they don't want to know what foul source those experiences actually came from. The lloigor, of course, can be considered gods— or demons— but it is more profitable, at this point in history, to just consider them another life form cast up by the universe, unfortunately superior to us and even more unfortunately inimical to us. You see, religion is always a matter of sacrifice, and whenever there is a sacrifice there is a victim— and also a person or entity profiting from the sacrifice. There is no religion in the world— not one— that is not a front for the Cult of the Yellow Sign. The Cult itself, like the lloigor, is of prehuman origin. It began among the snake people of Valusia, the peninsula that is now Europe, and then spread eastward to be adopted by the first humans in Carcosa. Always the purpose of the Cult has been to serve the lloigor, at the expense of other human beings. Since the rise of the Illuminati, the Cult has also acted to combat their work and discredit them."

Danny was glad that Miss Mao arrived then with his third stiff bourbon. "And who are the Illuminati and what is their goal?" he asked, belting away a strong swallow.

"Their founder," Mama Sutra said, "was the first man to think rationally about the lloigor. He realized that they were not supernatural, but just another aspect of nature; not all-powerful, but just more powerful than us; and that when they came 'out of the heavens' they came from other worlds like this one. His name has come down to us in certain secret teachings and documents. It was Ma-lik."

"Jesus," Danny said, "that's the name of the guy whose disappearance started all this."

"The name meant 'one who knows' in the Carcosan tongue. Among the Persians and some Arabs today it still exists but means 'one who leads.' His followers, the Illuminati, are those who have seen the light of reason— which is quite distinct from the stupefying and mind- destroying light in which the lloigor sometimes appear to overwhelm and mystify their servants in the Cult of the Yellow Sign. What Ma-lik sought, what the Illuminati still seek, is scientific knowledge that will surpass the powers of the lloigor, end mankind's enslavement and allow us to become self-owners instead of property."

"How large is the Illuminati?"

"Very small. I don't know the exact number." Mama Sutra sighed. "I have never been accepted for membership. Their standards are quite high. One must virtually be a walking encyclopedia to qualify for an initial interview. You must remember that this is the most dedicated, most persecuted, most secret group in the world. Everything they do, if not wiped off the records by the Cult of the Yellow Sign, is always misrepresented and pictured as malign, devious and totally evil. Indeed, any effort to be rational, to think scientifically, to discover or publish a new truth, even by those outside the Illuminati, is always pictured in those colors by the Cult and all the religions which serve as its fronts. All churches, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist or whatever, have always opposed and persecuted science. The Cult of the Yellow Sign even fills the mass media with this propaganda. Their favorite stories are the one about the scientist who isn't fully human until he has a religious insight and recognizes 'the higher powers'— the lloigor, that is— and the other one about the scientist who seeks truth without fear and causes a disaster. 'He meddled with things man should leave alone' is always the punch line on that one. The same hatred of knowledge and glorification of superstition and ignorance permeates all human societies. How much more of this can you stand?" Mama Sutra asked abruptly.

"I don't honestly know," Danny said wearily. "It seems if I do get to the bottom of this business, it'll bring every power in this country down on my head. The least that'll happen is that I'll get kicked out of my job. More likely, I'll disappear like the man I'm looking for and the first two detectives on this case. But for my own satisfaction, I'd like to know the rest of the truth, before I bid you good day and look for a hole to hide in. You might also tell me how you can survive, knowing as much as you do."

"I have studied much. I have a Shield. I cannot explain the Shield anymore than I can explain my ESP. I only know that it works. As to answering your other questions, first tell me about your investigation. Then I will be able to relate it to the Illuminati and the Cult of the Yellow Sign."

Danny took another drink, closed his eyes for a minute and launched into his story. He began with the Marsh disappearance in Arkham four years earlier, his perusal of the missing professor's notes, his reading in the books mentioned in those notes and his conclusion that a drug cult was involved. Then he told of the Confrontation bombing, his skimming of the Illuminati memos, the disappearance of Ma-lik, Miss Walsh, Goodman and Muldoon, and the frantic curiosity of the FBI. "That's it," he concluded. "That's about all I know."

Mama Sutra nodded thoughtfully, "It is as I feared," she said finally. "I think I can shed light on the matter, but you will be well advised to leave the police force and seek the protection of the Illuminati after you have heard. You are already, at this very moment, in great peril." She lapsed into silence again, and then said, "You will not see the picture of what is happening now, until I give you more of the background."

For the next hour, Danny Pricefixer sat transfixed as Mama Sutra told him of the longest war in history, the battle for the freedom of the human mind waged by the Illuminati against the forces of slavery, superstition and sorcery.

It began, she repeated, in ancient Carcosa when the first humans were contacted by the serpent people of Valusia. The latter brought with them certain fruits with strange powers. These fruits would be called hallucinogens or psychedelics today, Mama Sutra said, but what they did to the brain of the eater was not in any sense a hallucination. It opened him to invasion by the lloigor. The chief fruit used in these rites was a botanical cousin of the modern apple, yellowish or golden in color, and the snake people promised, "Eat of this and you shall become all-powerful." In fact, the eaters became enslaved by the lloigor, and especially by Hastur, who took up residence in the Lake of Hali; distorted versions of what happened have come down to us in various African legends about people who had commerce with snakes and lost their souls, in the Homeric tale of the lotus eaters, in Genesis, and in the Arabic lore utilized in the fiction of Robert W. Chambers, Ambrose Bierce and others. Soon, the Cult of the Yellow Sign was formed among the eaters of the golden apples, and its first high priest, Gruad, bargained with Hastur for certain powers in return for .which the lloigor were fed on human sacrifices. The people were told that the sacrifices were good for the crops—and this, in fact, was partially true, for the lloigor ate only the energy of the victim, and the body, buried in the fields, gave back its nitrogen to the soil. This was the beginning of religion—and of government. Gruad controlled the Temple, and the Temple soon controlled Hali, and, then, all of Carcosa.

So things went for many thousands of years, until the priests were rich, fat and decadent, while the citizens lived in terror and slavery. The number of sacrifices increased ever, for Hastur grew with each victim whose energy he absorbed and his appetite grew with him. Finally, among the people, there arose one who had been refused admission to the priesthood, Ma-lik, and he taught that humanity could become all-powerful, not through eating the golden apples and sacrificing to the lloigor, but through a process he called rational thought. He was, of course, fed to Hastur as soon as the priests heard of this teaching, but he had followers, and they quickly learned to keep their thoughts private and plan their activities in secret. This was the age of midnight arrests, purge trials and accelerating sacrifices in Carcosa, Mama Sutra said, and eventually the followers of Ma-lik—the few who had escaped extermination—fled to the Thuranian subcontinent, which is now Europe.

There they met little people who had come down from the north after the snake folk had exterminated each other in some form of slow, insidious and stealthy civil war. (Apparently, the snakes never met in a single battle during all this time: the poison in the wine cup, the knife in the back and similar subtle activities had slowly escalated to the deadly level of actual warfare. The serpent people had an aversion to facing an enemy as they killed him.) The little people had had their own experiences with the lloigor, long ago, but all they remembered were confused legends about Ores (whom Mama Sutra identified with the Tcho-Tchos) and a great hero named Phroto who battled a monster called Zaurn (evidently a shoggoth, Mama Sutra said.)

Many millenniums passed, and the little people and the followers of Ma-lik intermarried, producing basically the human race of today. A great law-giver named Kull tried to establish a rational society on Ma-lik's principles, and fought a battle with some of the serpent people who had surprisingly survived in hidden places; most of this got lost in exaggeration and legend. After more thousands of years, a barbarian named Konan or Conan arose, somehow, to the throne of Aquilonia, mightiest kingdom on the Thuranian subcontinent; Konan brooded much about the continuing horrors in Carcosa, which he sensed as a threat to the rest of the world. Finally, he disappeared, abdicating in favor of his son, Conn, and reputedly sailing to the west.