And Eris said, "As men and women are actors on a stage of our devising, so are we actors on the stage devised by the Five Fates. You had to believe in Good and Evil and pass judgments on your creatures, the men and women below. It was a curse the Fates put upon you! But now you have come to the Great Doubt and you are free."

The Olympians thereupon lost interest in the god-game and soon were forgotten by humanity. For She had shown them a great Light, and a great Light destroys shadows; and we are all, gods and mortals, nothing else but gliding shadows. Do you believe that?

"No," said Fission Chips.

"Very well," the Dealy Lama said somberly. "Begone, back to the world of maya!"

And Fission Chips whirled head over heels into a vortex of bleatings and squealings, as tune and space were given another sharp tug and, nearly a month later, head over heels, the Midget is up and tottering across Route 91 as the rented Ford Brontosaurus shrieks to a stop and Saul and Barney are out the doors (every cop instinct telling them that a man who runs from an accident is hiding something) but John Dillinger, driving toward Vegas from the north, continues to hum "Good-bye forever, old sweethearts and gals, God… bless… you.. " and the same tug in space-time grips Adam Weishaupt two centuries earlier, causing him to abandon his planned soft sell and blurt out to an astonished Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Spielen Sie Strip Schnipp-Schnapp?" and Chips, hearing Weishaupt's words, is back in the graveyard at Ingolstadt as four dark figures move away in dusk.

"Strip Schnipp-Schnapp?" Goethe asks, putting hand on chin in a pose that was later to become famous, "Das ist dein hoch Zauberwerk?"

"Ja, ja," Weishaupt says nervously, "Der Zweck heiligte die Mittel."

Ingolstadt always reminds me of the set of a bleeding Frankenstein movie, and, after Saint Toad and that shoggoth chap and the old Lama with his wog metaphysics, it was no help at all to have an invisible voice ask me to join him in a bawdy card game. I've faced some weird scenes in H.M. Service but this Fernando Poo caper was turning out to be outright unwholesome, in fact unheimlich as these krauts would say. And, hi the distance, I began to hear wog music, but with a Yank beat to it, and suddenly I knew the worst: that blasted Lama or Saint Toad or somebody, had lifted nearly a month out of my life. I had walked into Saint Toad's after midnight on March 31 (call it April 1, then) and this would be April 30 or May 1. Walpur-gisnacht. When all the kraut ghosts are out. And I was probably considered dead back in London. And if I called in and tried to explain what had happened, old W. would be downright psychiatric about the matter, oh, he'd be sure I was well around the bend. It was a rum go either way.

Then I remembered that the old Lama in Dallas had said he was sending me to the final battle between Good and Evil. This was probably it, right here, right now, this night in Ingolstadt. A bit breathtaking to think of that. I wondered when the Angels of the Lord would appear: bloody soon, I hoped. It would be nice to have them around when Old Nick unleashed the shoggoth and Saint Toad and that lot.

So I toddled out into the streets of Ingolstadt and started sniffing around for the old sulphur and brimstone.

And half a mile below and twelve hours earlier, George Dorn and Stella Maris were smoking some Alamout Black hash with Harry Coin.

"You haven't got a bad punch for an intellectual," Coin said with warm regard.

"You're pretty good at rape yourself," George replied, "for the world's most incompetent assassin."

Coin started to draw back his lips in an angry snarl, but the hash was too strong. "Hagbard told you, Ace?" he asked bashfully.

"He told me most of it," George said. "I know that everybody on this ship once worked for the Illuminati directly or for one of their governments. I know that Hagbard has been an outlaw for more than two decades-"

"Twenty-three years exactly," Stella said archly.

"That figures," George nodded. "Twenty-three years, then, and never killed anybody until that incident with the spider ships four days ago."

"Oh, he killed us," Harry said dreamily, drawing on the pipe. "What he does is worse than capital punishment, while it's going on. I can't say I'm the same man I was before. But it's pretty bad until you come through."

"I know," George grinned. "I've had a few samples myself."

"Hagbard's system," Stella said, "Is very simple. He just gives you a good look at your own face in a mirror. He lets you see the puppet strings. It's still up to you to break them. He's never forced anyone to do anything that goes against their heart. Of course," she frowned in concentration, "he does sort of maneuver you into places where you have to find out in a hurry just what your heart is saying to you. Did he ever tell you about the Indians?"

"The Shoshone?" George asked. "The cesspool gag?"

"Let's play a game," Coin interrupted, sinking lower in his chair as the hash hit him harder. "One of us in this room is a Martian, and we've got to guess from the conversation which one it is."

"Okay," Stella said easily. "Not the Shoshone," she told George, "the Mohawk."

"You're not the Martian," Coin giggled. "You stick to the subject, and that's a human trait."

George, trying to decide if the octopus on the wall was somehow connected with the Martian riddle, said, "I want to hear about Hagbard and the Mohawk. Maybe that will help us identify the Martian. You think up good games," he added kindly, "for a guy who was sent on seven assassination missions and fucked up every one of them."

"I'm dumb but I'm lucky," Coin said. "There was always somebody else there blasting away at the same time. Politicians are awfully unpopular these days, Ace."

This was a myth, Hagbard had confided to George. Until Harry Coin had completed his course in the Celine System, it was better if he believed himself the world's most unsuccessful assassin rather than face the truth: that he had goofed only on his first job (Dallas, November 22, 1963) and really had killed five men since then. Of course, even if Hagbard wasn't a holy man any longer, he was still tricky: maybe Harry had, indeed, missed every time. Perhaps Hagbard was keeping the image of Harry as mass murderer in George's mind to see if George could relate to the man's present instead of being hung up on his "past."

At least I've learned this much, George thought. The word "past" is always in quotes for me, now.

"The Mohawk," Stella said, leaning back lazily (George's male organ or penis or dick or whatever the hell is the natural word, if there is a natural word, well, my cock, then, my delicious ever-hungry cock rose a centimeter as her blouse tightened on her breasts, Lord God, we'd been humping like wart hogs in rutting season for hours and hours and hours and I was still horny and still in love with her and I probably always would be, but then again maybe I'm the Martian). Well, in fact, the old pussy hunter didn't rise more than a millimeter, not a centimeter, and he was as slow, as an old man getting out of bed in January. I had just about fucked until my brains came out my ears, even before Harry brought in the hash and wanted to talk. Looking for the Martian. Looking for the governor of Dorn. Looking for the Illuminati. Krishna chasing his tail around the curved space of the Einsteinian universe until he disappears up his own ass, leaving behind a behind: the back of the void: the Dorn theory of circutheosodomognosis. "Owned some land," she continued. That beautiful black face, like ebon melody: yes, no painter could show but Bach could hint the delight of those purple-tinted lips in that black face, saying, "And the government wanted to steal the land. To build a dam." The inside of her cunt had that purple hue to it, also, and there was a tawny beige in her palm, like a Caucasian's skin, there were so many delights in her body, and in mine, too, treasures that couldn't be spent in a million years of the most tender and violent fucking. "Hagbard was the engineer hired to build the dam, but when he found out that the Indians would be dispossessed and relocated on less fertile ground, he refused the job." Eris, Eros spelled sideways. "He broke his contract, so the government sued him," she said. "That's how he got to be a close friend with the Mohawk."