Carmel sprawled back in the easy chair, his eyes still closed. Sherri fetched the towel she had been warming over the radiator and completed the transaction, drying him and gently kissing his ugly wand before tucking it back inside his fly and zippering him up. He does look like a gaddam frog, she thought bitterly, or a nasty-tempered chipmunk.

"Terrif," he said finally. The johns really get their money's worth from you, kid. Now tell me about Charley and his bugs."

Sherri, still feeling cramped, pulled over a footstool and perched on its edge. "Well," she said, "you know I gotta be careful. If he knows I'm pumping him, he might drop me and take up with some other girl…"

"So you were too damn cautious and you didn't get anything out of him?" Carmel interrupted accusingly.

"Oh, he's over the loop," she answered, still vague. "I mean, really crazy now. That must be… uh, important… if you have to deal with him…" She came back into focus. "How I know is, he thinks he's going to other planets in his dreams. Some planet called Atlantis. Do you know which one that is?"

Carmel frowned. This was getting stickier: first, find a commie: then, find out how to get the info out of Charley despite the FBI and CIA and all the other government people; and now, how to deal with a maniac… He looked up and saw that she was out of focus again, staring into space. Dopey broad, he thought, and then watched as she slid slowly off the stool onto a neat sleeping position on the floor.

"What the hell?" he said out loud.

When he knelt next to her and listened for her heart, his own face paled. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, he thought standing up, now I got to get rid of a fucking corpus delectus. The damned bitch went and died.

"I can see the fnords!" Barney Muldoon cried, looking up from the Miami Herald with a happy grin.

Joe Malik smiled contentedly. It had been a hectic day- especially since Hagbard had been tied up with the battle of Atlantis and the initiation of George Dorn- but now, at last, he had the feeling their side was winning. Two minds set on a death trip by the Illuminati had been successfully saved. Now if everything worked out right between George and Robert Putney Drake…

The intercom buzzed and Joe answered, calling across the room without rising, "Malik."

"How's Muldoon?" Hagbard's voice asked.

"Coming all the way. He sees the fnords in a Miami paper."

"Excellent," Hagbard said dustractedly. "Mavis reports that Saul is all the way through, too, and just saw the fnords in the New York Times. Bring Muldoon up to my room. We've located that other problem- the sickness vibrations that FUCKUP has been scanning since March. It's somewhere around Las Vegas and it's at a critical stage. We think there's been one death already."

"But we've got to get to Ingolstadt before Walpurgia night…" Joe said thoughtfully.

"Revise and rewrite," Hagbard said. "Some of us will go to Ingolstadt. Some of us will have to go to Las Vegas. It's the old Illuminati one-two punch- two attacks from different directions. Get your asses in gear, boys. They're immanentizing the Eschaton."

WEISHAUPT. Fnords? Prffft!

Another interruption. This time it was the Mothers March Against Muzak. Since that seems to be the most worthwhile cause I've been approached for all day, I gave the lady $1. I think that if Muzak can be stamped out, alot of our other ailments will disappear too, since they're probably stress symptoms, caused by noise pollution.

Anyway, it's getting late and I might as well conclude this. One month before our KCUF experiment- that is, on September 23, 1970- Timothy Leary passed five federal agents at O'Hare Airport here in Chicago. He had vowed to shoot rather than go back to jail, and there was a gun in his pocket. None of them recognized him… And, oh, yes, there was a policeman named Timothy O'Leary in the hospital room where Dutch Schultz dies on October 23, 1935.

I've been saving the best for last. Aldous Huxley, the first major literary figure illuminated by Leary, died the same day as John F. Kennedy. The last essay he wrote revolved around Shakespeare's phrase, "Time must have a stop"- which he had previously used for the title of a novel about life after death. "Life is an illusion," he wrote, "but an illusion which we must take seriously." Two years later, Laura, Huxley's widow, met the medium, Keith Milton Rhinehart. As she tells the story in her book, This Timeless Moment, when she asked if Rinehart could contact Aldous, he replied that Aldous wanted to transmit "classical evidence of survival," a message, that is, which could not be explained "merely" as telepathy, as something Rinehart picked out of her mind. It had to be something that could only come from Aldous's mind.

Later that evening, Rinehart produced it: instructions to go to a room in her house, a room he hadn't seen and find a particular book, which neither he nor she was familiar with. She was to look on a certain page and a certain line. The book was one Aldous had read but she had never even glanced at; it was an anthology of literary criticism. The line indicated-I have memorized it- was: "Aldous Huxley does not surprise us in this admirable communication in which paradox and erudition in the poetic sense and the sense of humor are interlaced in such an efficacious form." Need I add that the page was 17 and the line was, of course, line 23?

(I suppose you've read Seutonius and know that the late J. Caesar was rendered exactly 23 stab wounds by Brutus and Co.)

Brace yourself, Joe. Worse attacks on your Reason are coming along. Soon, you'll see the fnords.

Hail Eris,

p.s. Your question about the vibes and telepathy is easily answered. The energy is always moving in us, through us, and out of us. That's why the vibes have to be right before you can read someone without static. Every emotion is a motion.

The Golden Apple

There is no god but man.

Man has the right to live by his own law- to live in the way that he wills to do; to work as he will; to play as he will; to rest as he will; to die when and how he will.

Man has the right to eat what he will; to drink what he will; to dwell where he will; to move as he will on the face of the earth.

Man has the right to think what he will; to speak what he will; to write what he will; to draw, paint, carve, etch, mold, build as he will; to dress as he will.

Man has the right to love as he will.

Man has the right to kill those who thwart these rights.

–The Equinox: A Journal of Scientific Illuminism, 1922 (edited by Aleister Crowley)

BOOK THREE: UNORDNUNG

Believe not one word that is written in The Honest Book of Truth by Lord Omar nor any that be in Principia Discordia by Malaclypse the Younger; for all that is there contained are the most pernicious and deceptive truths.

–"Epistle to the Episkopi," The Dishonest Book of Lies, by Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S.