As Wolfgang himself had said, "If you need an outward sign to know your own, you don't really belong."

"They give me the creeps," said Joe.

"What did you think when the Beatles first came out?" said Peter.

Joe shrugged. "They gave me the creeps. They looked ugly and sexless and like teenage werewolves with all that hair. And they seemed to be able to mesmerize twelve-year-old girls."

Peter nodded. "The bulk of the AMA's fans are even younger. So you might as well start conditioning yourself to them now. They're going to be around for a long time."

"Peter, let's you and me have lunch," Joe said. "Then I'm going to get some work done, and then I'm going to leave here at four to go to this plastic martini party. First of all, though, hold the chair for me while I take down the Stones and put up the American Medical Association."

The DeMolay Freres group wasn't kidding, he found. There were martinis, olives and all (or cocktail onions for those who preferred them) in transparent plastic bags that were shaped like nude women. Pretty terrible taste the manufacturer had, thought Joe. Briefly, Joe wondered if it would be a good idea to infiltrate this company so as to get dosages of AUM in all the plastic nude martinis. But then he remembered the emblem and thought maybe this company was already infiltrated. But by which side?

There was a beautiful Oriental girl in the room. She had black hair that reached all the way down to the small of her back, and when she raised her arms to adjust a head ornament, Joe was surprised to see thick black hair in her armpits. Orientals did not normally have much body hair, he thought. Could she be some relation to the hairy Ainu of northern Japan? It intrigued him, turned him on as he'd never thought armpit hair would, and he went over to her to talk. The first thing he noticed was that the headband she wore had a golden apple with the letter K printed on it right in the center of her forehead. She is one of Us, he thought. His hunch about coming to this party was right.

"These martini bags sure have a silly shape," said Joe.

"Why? Don't you care for nude women?"

"Well, this has about as much to do with nude women as any other piece of plastic," said Joe. "No, my point is that it's in such execrable taste. But, then, all of American industry is nothing but a giant obscene circus to me. What's your name?"

The black eyes fixed his intently. "Mao Tsu-hsi."

"Any relation?"

"No. My name means 'cat' in Chinese. His doesn't. His name is Mao but mine is Mao." Joe was enchanted by her enunciation of the two different tones.

"Well, Miss Cat, You are the most attractive woman I've met in ages."

She responded with a silent flirtation of her own and they were soon in a wonderfully interesting conversation- which he could never remember afterwards. Nor did he notice the pinch of powder she dropped into his drink. He began feeling strangely groggy. Tsu-hsi took his arm and led him to the checkroom. They got their coats, left the building and hailed a cab. In the back seat they kissed for a long time. She opened her coat and he pulled the zipper that went all the way down the front of her dress. He felt her breasts and stroked her belly, then dropped his head into her bush. She was wearing no underwear. She draped her legs over his, using her coat to screen what was going on from the cab driver, and helped him expose his erect penis. With a few quick, agile movements she had swept her skirt out of the way, raised her little seat into the air and slid her well-lubricated cunt down over his cock and was fucking him sidesaddle. It could have been difficult and awkward, but she was so light and well coordinated that she managed to bring herself to orgasm easily and voluptuously. She drew in her breath sharply through her teeth and a shudder ran through her body. She rested her head momentarily on his shoulder, then raised herself slightly and helped Joe to a pleasant climax with a rotary motion of her ass.

The experience, Joe realized, would have been more exquisite a few months, or a few years, earlier. Now, with his growing sensitivity, he was conscious of what had been missing: the actual energetic contact. The effect of the JAMs and the Discordians on him, he reflected, had been paradoxical by ordinary standards. He was no more puritanical than before they started tinkering with his nervous system (he was less), but at the same time casual sex was less appealing to him. He remembered Atlanta Hope's diatribes against "sexism" in her book Telemachus Sneezed-the Bible of the God's Lightning Movement-and he suddenly saw some weird kind of sense in her rantings. "The Sexual Revolution in America was as much of a fraud as the Political Revolutions in China and Russia," Atlanta had written with her usual exuberant capitalization; she was, in a way, quite right. People today were still wrapped in a cellophane of false ego, and even if they fucked and had orgasms together the cellophane was still there and no real contact had been made.

And yet if Mao was what he suspected she would know this even better than he did. Was this quick, cool spasm some kind of test or some lesson or demonstration? If so, how was he supposed to respond?

And then he remembered that she had not given an address to the driver. The cab had been waiting only for them to take them to a predetermined place, for reasons unknown.

I've seen the fnords, he thought; now I'm going to see more.

The cab stopped on a narrow, heavily shadowed street that seemed to be all empty stores, factory buildings, loading docks and warehouses.

With Miss Mao leading, they entered an old dilapidated-looking loft building with the aid of a key she had in her handbag, climbed some clanging cast-iron stairs, walked hand in hand down a long dark corridor and came at last through a series of anterooms, each better appointed than the last, to a splendid boardroom. Joe shook his head, amazed at what he saw, but there was something- he suspected a drug- that was keeping him docile and passive.

Around a table sat men and women costumed from various eras of human history. Joe recognized Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Mongol and Polynesian dress, also classical Greek and Roman, medieval and Renaissance. There were other outfits more difficult to recognize at first glance. A flying Dutch board meeting, Joe thought to himself. They were talking about the Illuminati, the Discordians, the JAMs and the Erisians.

A man wearing a steel breastplate and helmet with gold inlay and a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee said, "It is now possible to predict with ninety-eight percent probability of accuracy that the Illuminati are setting up Fernando Poo for an international crisis. The question is, do we raid the island and get the records now, making sure they're not endangered, or do we wait and take advantage of the trouble as a cover for our raid?"

A man in a dragon-embroidered red silk robe said, "There will be no way to take advantage of the trouble, in my opinion. It will seem like chaos on the surface, but underneath the Illuminati will have everything very much under control. Now is the time to move."

A woman in a translucent silk blouse whose little vest did not hide her dark, rounded breasts, said, "You realize this could be a lovely scoop for your magazine, Mr. Malik. You could send a reporter there to look into conditions on Fernando Poo. Equatorial Guinea has all the usual problems of a developing African nation. Will tribal rivalries flare up between the Bubi and the Fang, preventing the further development of national cooperation? Will the poverty of the mainland province lead to attempts to expropriate the wealth of Fernando Poo? And what of the army? What, for example, of a certain Captain Jesus Tequila y Mota? An interview with the captain might prove to be a journalistic coup three years from now."