Meanwhile, Taffy has hired a private detective named Mickey "Cocktails" Molotov to search for her lost Aryan rapist with hollow cheeks. Before I could get into that, however, I was wondering about the synchronistic implications of the previous section, and called over one of the stewardesses.

"Could you tell me the pilot's name?" I asked.

"Namen?" she replied. "Ja, Gretchen."

"No, not your name," I said, "the pilot's name. Namen wiser, um, Winginmacher?"

"Winginmacher?" she repeated, dubiously, "Bin Augenblick." She went away, while I looked up Augenblick in a pocket German-English dictionary, and another stewardess, with the identical uniform, the identical smile and the identical blue eyes, came over, asking, "Was wollen sie haben?"

I gave up on Winginmacher, obviously a bad guess. "Gibt mir, bitte," I said, "die Namen unser Fliegen-macher." I spread my arms, imitating the plane. "Luft Fliegenmacher," I repeated, adding helpfully, "How about Luft Piloten?"

"It's Pilot, not Piloten," she said wit h lots of teeth. "His name is Captain Clark. Heathcliffe Clark."

"Danke- Thanks," I said glumly, and returned to Telemachus Sneezed, imagining friend Heathcliffe up front there weathering heights of MISSPELLED - soaring and plunging into the ocean because, as Mallory said, it's there. An Englishman piloting a kraut airline, no less, just to remind me that I'm surrounded by the paradoxical paranoidal paranormal parameters of synchronicity. Their wandering ministerial Eye. Lord, I buried myself again in Atlanta Hope's egregious epic.

Cocktails Molotov, the private dick, starts looking for the Great American Rapist, with only one clue: an architectural blueprint that fell out of his pocket while he was tupping Taffy. Cocktails's method of investigation is classically simple: he beats up everybody he meets until they confess or reveal something that gives him a lead. Along the way he meets an effete snob type who makes a kind of William O. Douglas speech putting down all this brutality. Molotov explains, for seventeen pages, one of the longest monologues I ever read in a novel, that life is a battle between Good and Evil and the whole modern world is corrupt because people see things in shades of red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet instead of in clear black and white.

Meanwhile, of course, everybody is still mostly involved in fucking, smoking grass and neglecting to invest their capital in growth industries, so America is slipping backward toward what Atlanta calls "crapulous precapitalist chaos."

At this point, another character enters the book, Howard Cork, a one-legged madman who commands a submarine called the Life Eternal and is battling everybody- the anarchists, the Communists, the Diamond Jim Rhinestone heroin cabal, the Blind Tigers, the Enlightened Ones, the U.S. government-in-exile, the still-nameless patriotic Underground and the Chicago Cubs-since he is convinced they are all fronting for a white whale of superhuman intelligence who is trying to take over the world on behalf of the cetaceans. ("No normal whale could do this," he says after every TV newscast reveals further decay and chaos in America, "but a whale of superhuman intelligence…!") This megalomaniac tub of blubber- the whale, not Howard Cork- is responsible for the release of the famous late-1960s record Songs of the Blue Whales, which has hypnotic powers to lead people into wild frenzies, dope-taking, rape and loss of faith in Christianity. In fact, the whale is behind most of the cultural developments of recent decades, influencing minds through hypnotic telepathy. "First, he introduced W. C. Fields," Howard Cork rages to the dubious first mate, "Buck" Star, "then, when America's moral fiber was sufficiently weakened, Liz and Dick and Andy

Warhol and rock music. Now, the Songs of the Blue Whales!" Star becomes convinced that Captain Cork went uncorked and wigged when he lost his leg during a simple ingrown toenail operation bungled by a hip young chiropodist stoned on mescaline. This suspicion is increased by the moody mariner's insistence on wearing an old cork leg instead of a modern prosthetic model, proclaiming, "I was born all Cork and I'm not going to die only three-fourths Cork!"

Then comes a turnabout scene, and it is revealed that Cork is actually not bananas at all but really a smooth apple. In a meeting with a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression, it develops that the Captain is an agent of the Underground which is called God's Lightning because of Heracleitus's idea that God first manifested himself as a lightning bolt which created the world. Instead of hunting the big white whale, as the crew thinks, the Life Eternal is actually running munitions for the government-in-exile and God's Lightning. When the hollow-cheeked leader leaves, he says to Cork, "Remember: the way up is the way down."

Meanwhile, the Gateless Gate swung creakingly open and I started picking up some of the "real" world. That is, I began to recognize myself, again, as the ringmaster. All of this information gets fed into me, entropy and negentropy all synergized up in a wodge of wonderland, and I compute it as well as my memory banks give it unto me to understand these doings.

But, as Harry Coin, I enter Miss Portinari's suite somewhat diffidently. I am conscious of the ghosts of dead pirates, only partly induced by this room's surrealist variety of Hagbard's nautical taste in murals. In fact, Harry, in his own language, had an asshole tight enough to shit bricks. It was easy, now, to accept that long-haired hippie, George, and even his black girlfriend as equals, but it just didn't seem right to be asked to accept a teenage girl as a superior. A couple days ago I would have been thinking how to get into her panties. Now I was thinking how to get her into my head. That Hagbard and his dope sure have screwed up my sense of values worse than anything since I left Biloxi.

And, for some reason, I could hear the Reverend Hill pounding the Bible and hollering up a storm back there in Biloxi, long ago, "No remission without blood! No remission without blood, brothers and sisters! Saint Paul says it and don't you forget it! No remission without the blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ! Amen."

And Hagbard reads FUCKUP'S final analysis of the strategy and tactics in the Battle of Atlantis. All the evidence is consistent with Assumption A, and inconsistent with Assumption B, the mathematical part of FUCKUP has decided. Hagbard grinds his teeth in a savage grimace: Assumption A is that the Illuminati spider ships were under remote control, and Assumption B is that there were human beings aboard them.

–Trust not a man who's rich in flax-his morals may be sadly lax.

"Ready for destruction of enemy ships," Howard's voice came back to him.

"Are your people out of the way?"

"Of course. Quit this hesitating. This is no time to be a humanitarian."

(Assumption A is that the Illuminati spider ships were under remote control.)

The sea is cruder than the land. Sometimes.

(None of the evidence is consistent with Assumption B.)

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.

But that wasn't all there was to it. He had decided, coolly and in his wrong mind, that if he was a murderer already the final gambit might as well be one that would salvage part of the Demonstration. He had sent: George to Drake (Bob, you're dead now, but did you ever understand, even for a moment, what I tried to tell you? What Jung tried to tell you even earlier?) and then twenty-four real men and women were dead, and now the bloodshed was escalating, and he wasn't sure that any part of the Demonstration could be saved.