– Aye, trust me not. Trust not a man who's rich in flax- his morals may be sadly lax. Her name is Stella. Stella Maris. Black star of the sea.

The joint was down to the last half inch. He put it down and crushed it out. With grass flowing like tobacco around here, it was a luxury he could afford. He wasn't going to light another one. That wasn't a high, that was a trip! A Saturn rocket, right out of the world. And back, just as fast.

– George, I want you in the captain's control room.

Clearly, this hallucinating of voices and images meant he wasn't all the way back. Reentry was not completed. He now saw a vision of the layout of that part of the submarine between his stateroom and the captain's control room. He stood up, stretched, shook his head, his hair swirling around his shoulders. He walked to the door, slid it back, and walked on down the hall.

A little later, he stepped through a door onto a balcony which was a reproduction of the prow of a Viking ship. Above, below, in front, to the sides, was green-blue ocean. They seemed to be in a glass globe projecting into the ocean. A long-necked red-and-green dragon with golden eyes and a spiky crest reared above George and Hagbard.

"My approach is fanciful, rather than functional," Hagbard said. "If I weren't so intelligent, it would get me into a lot of trouble." He patted the dragon figurehead with a black-furred hand. Some Viking, George thought. A Neanderthal Viking, perhaps.

"That was a good trick," George said, feeling shrewd but still high. "How you got me up on the bridge with that telepathy thing."

"I called you on the intercom," Hagbard said, with a look of absurd innocence.

"You think I can't tell a voice in my head from a voice in my ears?"

Hagbard roared with laughter, so loud that it made George feel a little uncertain. "Not when you've had your first taste of Kallisti Gold, man."

"Who am I to call a man a liar when he's just turned me on with the best shit I ever had?" said George with a shrug. "I suspect you of making use of telepathy. Most people who have that power would not only not try to hide it, they'd go on television."

"Instead, I put the ocean on television." said Hagbard. He gestured at the globe surrounding their Viking prow. "What you see is simply color television with a few adaptations and modifications. We are inside the screen. The cameras are all over the surface of the sub. The cameras don't use ordinary light, of course. If they did, you wouldn't be able to see anything. The submarine illuminates the sea around us with an infrared laser-radar to which our TV cameras are sensitive. The radiations are of a type that is more readily conducted by the hydrogen in water than by any other element. The result is that we can see the ocean bottom almost as clearly as if it were dry land and we were in a plane flying above it."

"That'll make it easy to see Atlantis when we get to it," George said. "By the way, why did you say we're going-to Atlantis, again? I didn't believe it when you told me, and now I'm too stoned to remember."

"The Illuminati are planning to loot one of the greatest works of art in the history of man- the Temple of Tethys. It happens to be a solid-gold temple, and their intention is to melt it down and sell the gold to finance a series of assassinations in the U.S. I intend to get there before them."

The reference to assassinations reminded George that he'd gone down to Mad Dog, Texas, on Joe Malik's hunch that he'd find a clue there to an assassination conspiracy. If Joe knew that the clue was leading 20,000 leagues under the sea and eons back through time, would he believe it? George doubted it. Malik was one of those hard-nosed "scientific" leftists. Though he had been acting and talking a little strangely lately.

"Who did you say was looting this temple?" he asked Hagbard.

"The Illuminati. The real force behind all communist and fascist movements. Whether you're aware of it or not, they're also already in control of the United States government."

"I thought everybody in your crowd was a right-winger-"

"And I told you spacial metaphors are inadequate in discussing politics today," Hagbard interrupted.

"Well, you sound like a gang of right-wingers. Up until the last minute, all I've heard from you and your people was that the Illuminati were commies, or were behind the commies. Now you say they're behind fascism and behind the current government in Washington, too."

Hagbard laughed. "We came on like right-wing paranoids, at first, to see how you'd react. It was a test."

"And?"

"You passed. You didn't believe us- that was obvious- but you kept your eyes and ears open and were willing to listen. If you were a right-winger, we would have done our pro-communist rap. The idea is to find out if a new man or woman will listen, really listen, or just shut their minds at the first really shocking idea."

"I'm listening, but not uncritically. For instance, if the Illuminati control America already, what's the purpose of the assassinations?"

"Their grip on Washington is still pretty precarious. They've been able to socialize the economy. But if they showed their hand now and went totalitarian all the way, there would be a revolution. Middle-readers would rise up with right-wingers, and left-libertarians, and the Illuminati aren't powerful enough to withstand that kind of massive revolution. But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution."

"What sort of tools?"

"More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason- or are manipulated into reasoning- that the entire populace must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted. Targets for assassination will be mavericks of left or right who are either not part of the Illuminati conspiracy or have been marked as unreliable. The Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, for example, were capable of mobilizing a somewhat libertarian left-right-black-white populist movement. But the assassinations that have occurred so far are nothing compared to what will take place. The next wave will be carried out by the Mafia, who will be paid in Illuminati gold."

"Not Moscow gold," said George with a smile.

"The puppets in the Kremlin have no idea that they and the puppets in the White House are working for the same people. The Illuminati control all sorts of organizations and national governments without any of them being aware that others are also controlled. Each group thinks it is competing with the others, while actually each is playing its part in the Illuminati plan. Even the Morituri- the six-person affinity groups which splintered from the SDS Weathermen, because the Weathermen seemed too cautious- are under the control of the Illuminati. They think they're working to bring down the government, but actually they are strengthening its hand. The Black Panthers are also infiltrated. Everything is infiltrated. At present rate, within the next few years the Illuminati will have the American people under tighter surveillance than Hitler had the Germans. And the beauty of it is, the majority of the Americans will have been so frightened by Illuminati-backed terrorist incidents that they will beg to be controlled as a masochist begs for the whip."