MR. CELINE: You steal land, and you will not hear yourselves called bandits. You order men with guns and clubs to hold us down, and you will not hear yourselves called thugs. You don't act from the heart; where the hell do you act from? What in God's name does motivate you?

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Restrain him, Marshal.

MR. CELINE: (Indistinguishable.)

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Fifteen-minute recess.

BAILIFF: All rise.

ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #19

8/9

J.M.:

I wish you would explain to me how your interest in the numbers 5 and 23 fit in with this Illuminati project.

This is all I've been able to unearth so far on the number mystery, and I hope you find it enlightening. It's from a book of mathematical and logical paradoxes: How to Torture Your Mind, edited by Ralph L. Woods, Funk and Wagnalls, New York, 1969, page 128.

2 and 3 are even and odd;

2 and 3 are 5;

Therefore, 5 is both even and odd.

The damned book, by the way, provides no solutions to the paradoxes. I could sense the fallacy in that one right away, but it took me hours (and a headache) before I could state it in precise words. Hope this helps you. Anyway, for me, it was a relief from the really frightening stuff I've been tracking down lately.

Pat

There were two further memos in the box, on different stationeries and by different typewriters. The first was brief:

April 4

RESEARCH DEPARTMENT:

I am seriously concerned about Pat's absence from the office, and the fact that she doesn't answer the phone when we call her. Would you send somebody to her apartment to talk to the landlord and try to find out what has happened to her?

Joe Malik Editor

The last memo was the oldest in the lot and already yellowing at the edges. It said:

Dear Mr. "Mallory:"

The information and books, you requested are enclosed, at length. In case you are rushed, here is a quick summary.

1. Billy Graham was in Australia, making public appearances all through last week. There is no way he could have gotten to Chicago.

2. Satanism and witchcraft both still exist in the modern world. The two are often confused by orthodox Christian writers, but objective observers agree that there is a difference. Satanism is a Christian heresy- the ultimate heresy, one might say- but witchcraft is pre-Christian in origin and has nothing to do with the Christian God or the Christian Devil. The witches worship a goddess called Dana or Tana (who goes back to the Stone Age probably).

3. The John Dillinger Died For You Society has its headquarters in Mad Dog, Texas, but was founded in Austin, Texas several years ago. It's some kind of poker-faced joke and is affiliated with the Bavarian Illuminati, another bizarre bunch at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. The Illuminati pretend to be a cabal of conspirators who run the whole world behind the scenes. If you suspect either of these groups of being involved in something sinister, you have probably just fallen for one of their put-ons.

W.H.

"So this thing was already linked to Mad Dog several years ago," Saul said thoughtfully. "And Malik was already assuming an alternative identity, since the letter is obviously addressed to him. And, also as I've begun to suspect as we read this stuff, the Illuminati have their own brand of humor."

"Deduce me one more deduction," Barney said. "Who the hell is this W.H.?"

"People have been asking that for three hundred years," Saul said absently.

"Huh?"

"I'm being whimsical. Shakespeare's sonnets are dedicated to a Mr. W.H., but I don't think we have to worry that this is the same one. This case is as nutty as a-squirrel's dinner, but I don't really think it's that nutty." He added, "We can be grateful for one thing at least: the Illuminati doesn't really run the world. They're just trying."

Barney frowned, perplexed. "How did you make that one?"

"Simple. Same way I know they're a right-wing organization, not left-wing."

"We're not all geniuses," Barney said. "Take it a step at a time, will you?"

"How many contradictions did you spot in these memos? I counted thirteen. This researcher, Pat, saw it, too: the evidence is deliberately warped and twisted. All of it- not just that East Village Other chart- is a mixture of fact and fiction." Saul lit his pipe and settled back in his chair (in 1921, reading Arthur Conan Doyle, he first began playing these scenes, in imagination).

"In the first place, either the Illuminati want publicity or they don't. If they control everything, and want publicity, they'd be on billboards more often than Coca-Cola and on TV more often than Lucille Ball. On the other hand, if they control everything, and don't want publicity, none of these magazines and books would have survived- they would have disappeared from libraries, book stores and publisher's warehouses. This researcher, Pat, never would have found them.

"In the second place, if you want to recruit people into a conspiracy, besides idealism and whatever other noble motives you might exploit in them, you would always exploit hope. You would exaggerate the size and power of the conspiracy, because most people want to join the winning side. Therefore, all assertions about the actual strength of the Illuminati should be regarded, a fortiori, as suspect, like the voters' polls released by candidates before elections.

"Finally, it always pays to frighten the opposition. Therefore a conspiracy will exhibit the same behavior that ethnologists have observed in animals under attack: it will puff itself up and try to look bigger. In short, potential or actual recruits and potential and actual enemies will both be given the same false impression: that the Illuminati is twice, or ten times, or a hundred times, its actual size. This is logical, but my first point was empirical- the memos do exist- and therefore logic and empiricism confirm each other: the Illuminati are not able to control everything. What then? They've been around a long time and they are as tireless as the Russian mathematician who worked out pi to the one-thousandth place. The probability, then, is that they control some things and influence a hell of a lot more. This probability increases as you think back over the memos. The two chief Arabic branches- the Hashishim and the Roshinaya- were both wiped out; the Italian Illuminati were 'crushed' in 1507; Weishaupt's order was suppressed by the Bavarian government in 1785; and so forth. If they were behind the French Revolution, they influenced rather than controlled, because Napoleon undid everything the Jacobins started. That they had a hand in both Soviet Communism and German Fascism is plausible, considering the many similarities between the two; but if they controlled both, why did the two take opposite sides in the Second World War? And, if they ran both the Federalist party, through Washington, and the Democratic Republicans, through Jefferson, what was the purpose of the Aaron Burr counterrevolution, which they are also supposed to be behind? The picture I get is not a grand Puppet Master moving everybody on invisible strings, but some sort of million-armed octopus -a millepus, let's call it- constantly reaching out tentacles, and often drawing back nothing but a bloody stump, crying, 'Foiled again!'

"But the millepus is very busy and quite resourceful. If it controlled the planet, it could choose either operating in the open or retaining secrecy, but since it doesn't have that omnipotence yet, it must choose to be as anonymous as possible. Therefore, many of its tentacles will be probing around in the areas of publication and communications. It wants to know when somebody is investigating it or getting ready to publicize an investigation he has already completed. Finding such a person, it then has two choices: kill him or neutralize him. Killing may be resorted to in certain emergencies, but will be avoided when possible: you never know when a person of that sort has stashed extra copies of his documents in various unexpected places to be released in the event of his death. Neutralization is best, almost always."