"No," I told him wondering how many times he'd made that speech tonight.

"Just a moment," said Hagbard, materializing out of the hallway. "I can make bail for this man."

MR. KHARIS: Does Mr. Celine seriously suggest that the United States Government is in need of a guardian?

MR. CELINE: I am merely offering a way out for your client. Any private individual with a record of such incessant murder and robbery would be glad to cop an insanity plea. Do you insist that your client was in full possession of its reason at Wounded Knee? At Hiroshima? At Dresden?

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: You become facetious, Mr. Celine.

MR. CELINE: I have never been more serious.

"What is your relationship to this young man?" Bushman asked angrily. He had been about to come when the cop dragged me off to jail, and he was strangling in some kind of gruesome S-M equivalent of coitus interruptus.

"He's my wife," Hagbard said calmly.

"What?"

"Common-law wife," Hagbard went on. "Homosexual marriage is not recognized in Illinois. But homosexuality per se isn't a crime in this state, either, so don't try to make waves, your honor. Let me pay and take him home."

It was too much. "Daddy," I said, camping like our friend the Padre. "You're so masterful."

Judge Bushman looked like he wanted to lay Hagbard out with a gavel upside of his head, but he controlled himself. "Count the money," he told the bailiff. "Make sure he pays every penny. And then," he told us, "I want the two of you out of this courtroom as quickly as possible. I'll see you September fifteenth," he added, to me.

MR. KHARIS: And we believe we have demonstrated the necessity of this dam. We believe we have shown that the doctrine of eminent domain is on sure constitutional grounds, and has been held to apply in numerous similar cases. We believe we have shown that the resettlement plan offered by the government will be no hardship for the plaintiffs…

"Fuckin' faggots," the cop said as we went out the door.

"All hail Discordia," I told him cheerfully. "Let's get out of this neighborhood," I added to Hagbard.

"My car is right here," he said, pointing to a goddam Mercedes.

"For an anarchist, you sure live a lot like a capitalist," I commented as we got into that beautiful machine crystallized out of stolen labor and surplus value.

"I'm not a masochist," Hagbard replied. "The world makes me uncomfortable enough. I see no reason to make myself more uncomfortable. And I'm damned if I'll drive a broken-down jalopy that spends half its time in a garage being repaired merely because that would make me seem more 'dedicated' to you left-wing simpletons. Besides," he added practically, "the police never stop a Mercedes and search it. How many times a week do you get stopped and harassed, with your beard and your psychedelic Slaveswagon, you damned moralist?"

"Often enough," I admitted, "that I'm afraid to transport dope in it."

"This car is full of dope," he said blithely. "I'm making a big delivery to a dealer up in Evanston, on the Northwestern campus, tomorrow."

"You're in the dope business, too?"

"I'm in every illegal business. Every time a government declares something verboten, two groups! move in to service the black market created: the Mafia and the LDD. That stands for Lawless Delicacy Dealers."

"I thought it stood for Little Deluded Dupes."

He laughed. "Score one for Moon. Seriously, I'm the worst enemy governments have, and the best protection for the average person. The Mafia has no ethics, you know. If it wasn't for my group and our years and years of experience, everything on the black market, from dope to Canadian furs, would be shoddy and unreliable. We always give the customer his or her money's worth. Half the dope you sell probably has passed through my agents on its way to you. The better half."

"What was that homosexual business? Just buggin' old Bushman?"

"Entropy. Breaking the straight line into a curve ball."

"Hagbard," I said, "what the hell is your game?"

"Proving that government is a hallucination in the minds of governors," he said crisply. We turned onto Lake Shore Drive and sped north.

"Thou, Jubela, did he tell you the Word?" asked the goat-headed man.

The gigantic black said, "I beat him and tortured him, but he would not reveal the Word."

"Thou, Jubelo, did he tell you the Word?"

The fishlike creature said, "I tormented and vexed his inner spirit, Master, but he would not reveal the Word."

"And thou, Jubelum, did he tell you the Word?"

The hunchbacked dwarf said, "I cut off his testicles and he was mute. I cut off his penis and he was mute. He did not tell me the Word."

"A fanatic," the goat-head said. "It is better that he is dead."

Saul Goodman tried to move. He couldn't twitch a single muscle: That last drug had been a narcotic, and a powerful one. Or was it a poison? He tried to assure himself that the reason he was paralyzed and laying in a coffin was because they were trying to break down his mind. But he wondered if the dead might tell themselves similar fables, as they struggled to escape from the body before it rotted.

As he wondered, the goat-head leaned over and closed the top of the coffin. Saul was alone in darkness.

"Leave first, Jubela."

"Yes, Master."

"Leave next, Jubelo."

"Yes, Master."

"Leave last, Jubelum."

"Yes, Master."

Silence. It was lonely and dark in the coffin, and Saul couldn't move. Let me not go mad, he thought.

Howard spotted the Lief Erikson ahead and sang: "Oh, groovy, groovy, groovy scene/Once again I'll meet Celine." Maldonado's sleek Bentley edged up the drive to the home of "America's best-known financier-philanthropist," Robert Putney Drake. (Louis marched toward the Red Widow, maintaining his dignity. An old man in a strange robe pushed to the front of the crowd, trembling with exaltation. The blade rose: the mob sucked in its breath. The old man tried to look into Louis's eyes, but the king could not focus them. The blade fell: the crowd exhaled. As the head rolled into the basket, the old man raised his eyes in ecstasy and cried out, "Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged!") Professor Glynn lectured his class on medieval history (Dean Deane was issuing the Strawberry Statement on the same campus at the same time) and said, "The real crime of the Templars, however, was probably their association. with the Hashishim." George Dorn, hardly listening, wondered if he should join Mark Rudd and the others who wanted to close down Columbia entirely.

"And modern novels are the same," Smiling Jim went on. "Sex, sex, sex- and not normal sex even. Every type of perverted, degenerate, unnatural, filthy, deviated, and sick kind of sex. This is how they're gonna bury us, as Mr. Khruschchev said, without even firing a shot."

Sunlight awakened Saul Goodman.

Sunlight and a headache. A hangover from the combination of drugs.

He was in a bed and his clothes were gone. There was no mistaking the garment he wore: a hospital gown. And the room- as he squinted against the sun- had the dull modern-penitentiary look of a typical American hospital.

He hadn't heard the door open, but a weathered-looking middle-aged man in a doctor's smock drifted into the room. He was carrying a clipboard; pens stuck their necks out of his smock pocket; he smiled benignly. His horn rimmed heavily black glasses and crewcut marked him as the optimistic, upward-mobile man of his generation, without either the depression/World War II memories that gave anxiety to Saul's contemporaries or nuclear nightmares that gave rage and alienation to youth. He would obviously think of himself as a liberal and vote conservatively at least half the time.

A hopeless schmuck.

Except that he was probably none of those things, but another of their agents, doing a very convincing performance.