"Kallisti," said Celine, saluting the girl.

"All hail Discordia," she answered.

"Aum Shiva," I contributed, trying to enter the spirit of the game.

Celine led me down a long corridor, saying, "You'll find this submarine is opulently furnished. I have no need to live in monklike surroundings like those masochists who become naval officers. No Spartan simplicity for me. This is more like an ocean liner or a grand European hotel of the Edwardian era. Wait till you see my suite. You'll like your stateroom, too. To please myself, I built this thing on the grand scale. No finicky naval architects or parsimonious accountants in my business. I believe you've got to spend money to make money and spend the money you make to enjoy money. Besides, I have to live in the damned thing."

"And what precisely is your business, Mr. Celine?" I asked. "Or should I call you Captain Celine?"

"You should certainly not. No bullshit authority titles for me. I'm Freeman Hagbard Celine, but the conventional Mister is good enough. I'd prefer you called me by my first name. Hell, call me anything you want to. If I don't like it, I'll punch you in the nose. If there were more bloody noses, there'd be fewer wars. I'm in smuggling mostly. With a spot of piracy, just to keep ourselves on our toes. But that only against the Illuminati and their communist dupes. We aim to prove that no state has the right to regulate commerce in any way. Nor can it, when it is up against free men. My crew are all volunteers. We have among us liberated sailors who were indentured to the navies of America, Russia, and China. Excellent fellows. The governments of the world will never catch us, because free men are always cleverer than slaves, and any man who works for a government is a slave."

"Then you're a gang of Objectivists, basically? I've got to warn you, I come from a long line of labor agitators and Reds. You'll never convert me to a right-wing position."

Celine reared back as if I had waved offal under his nose. "Objectivists?" he pronounced the word as if I had accused him of being a child-molester. "We're anarchists and outlaws, goddam it. Didn't you understand that much? We've got nothing to do with right-wing, left-wing or any other half-assed political category. If you work within the system, you come to one of the either/or choices that were implicit in the system from the beginning. You're talking like a medieval serf, asking the first agnostic whether he worships God or the Devil. We're outside the system's categories. You'll never get the hang of our game if you keep thinking in flat-earth imagery of right and left, good and evil, up and down. If you need a group label for us, we're political non-Euclideans. But even that's not true. Sink me, nobody of this tub agrees with anybody else about anything, except maybe what the fellow with the horns told the old man in the clouds: Non serviam."

"I don't know Latin," I said, overwhelmed by his outburst.

"'I will not serve,'" he translated. "And here's your room."

He threw open an oaken door, and I entered a living room furnished in handsome teak and rosewood Scandinavian, upholstered in bright solid colors. He hadn't been exaggerating about the scale: you could have parked a Greyhound bus in the middle of the carpet and the room would still seem uncluttered. Above an orange couch hung a huge oil painting in an elaborate gilt frame easily a foot deep on all sides. The painting was essentially a cartoon. It showed a man in robes with long, flowing white hair and beard standing on a mountaintop staring in astonishment at a wall of black rock. Above his head a fiery hand traced flaming letters with its index finger on the rock. The words it wrote were:

THINK FOR YOURSELF, SCHMUCK!

As I started to laugh, I felt, through the soles of my feet, an enormous engine beginning to throb.

And, in Mad Dog, Jim Cartwright said into a phone with a scrambler device to evade taps, "We let Celine's crowd take Dorn, according to plan, and, Harry Coin is, ah, no longer with us."

"Good," said Atlanta Hope. 'The Four are heading for Ingolstadt. Everything is GO." She hung up and dialed again at once, reaching Western Union. "I want a flat rate telegram, same words, twenty-three different addresses," she said crisply. "The message is, 'Insert the advertisement in tomorrow's newspapers.' Signature, ' Atlanta Hope.'" She then read off the twenty-three addresses, each located in a large city in the United States, each a regional headquarters of God's Lightning. (The following day, April 25, the newspapers in those cities ran an obscure ad in the personals columns; it said "In thanks to Saint Jude for favors granted. A.W." The plot, accordingly, thickened.)

And then I sat back and thought about Harry Coin. Once I imagined I could make it with him: there was something so repulsive, so cruel, so wild and psychopathic there… but, of course, it hadn't worked. The same as every other man. Nothing. "Hit me," I screamed. "Bite me. Hurt me. Do something." He did everything, the most agreeable sadist in the world, but it was the same as if be had been the gentlest, most poetic English instructor at Antioch. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing… The closest miss was that strange banker, Drake, from Boston. What a scene. I'd gotten into his office on Wall Street, seeking a contribution for God's Lightning. Old white-haired buzzard, between sixty and seventy: typical of our wealthier members, I thought. I started the usual spiel, communism, sexism, smut, and all the time his eyes were bright and hard as a snake's. It finally hit me that he didn't believe a word of it, so I started to cut it off, and then he pulled out his checkbook and wrote and held it up so I could see it. Twenty thousand dollars. I didn't know what to say, and I started something about how all true Americans would appreciate this great gesture and so on, and he said, "Rubbish. You're not rich but you're famous. I want to add you to my collection. Deal?" The coldest bastard I ever met, even Harry Coin was human by comparison, yet his eyes were such a clear blue I couldn't believe they could be so frightening, a real madman in a perfectly sane way, not even a psychopath but something they don't have a name for, and it clicked, the humiliation of whoredom and the predatory viciousness in his face plus the twenty grand; I nodded. He took me into a private suite off of his business office and he touched one button, the lights dimmed, another button, down came a movie screen, a third button, and I was watching a pornographic movie. He didn't approach me, just watched, and I tried to get excited, wondering if the actress was really making it or just faking it, and then a second film began, four of them this time in permutations and combinations, he led me to the couch, every time I opened my eyes I could still see the film over his shoulder, and it was the same, the same, as soon as he got his thing inside me, nothing, nothing, nothing, I kept looking at the actors trying to feel something, and then, as he came, be whispered in my ear, "Heute die Welt, Morgans das Sonnen-system!" That was the only time I almost made it Sheer terror that this maniac knew…

Later, I tried to find out about him, but nobody above me in the Order would say a word, and those below me didn't know anything. But I finally found out: he was very big in the Syndicate, maybe the top. And that's how I figured out that the old rumor was true, the Syndicate was run by the Order, too, just like everything else…

But that cold sinister old man never said another word about it. I kept waiting while we dressed, when he gave me the check, when he escorted me to the door, and even his expression seemed to deny that he had said it or knew what it meant. When he opened the door for me, he put an arm on my shoulder and spoke, so his secretary could hear it, "May your work hasten the day when America returns to purity." Even his eyes weren't mocking and his voice sounded completely sincere. And yet he had read me to the core, knew I was faking, and guessed that terror alone could unlock my reflexes: maybe he even knew that I had already tried physical sadism and it hadn't worked. Out on Wall Street in the crowd, I saw a man with a gas mask- they were still rare that year- and I felt the whole world was moving faster than I could understand and that the Order wasn't telling me nearly as much as I needed to know.