A bunny passed Drake a 1923 Thompson machine gun, the model that had been called an automatic rifle because the Army had no funds to buy submachine guns that year. "What's this for?" Drake asked, confused. "We have to defend ourselves," the bunny said. "The mob is at the gates. The hungry mob. An astronaut named Spartacus is leading them." Drake handed the gun to Maldonado and crept upstairs to his private heliport. He passed through the lavatory to the laboratory (where Dr. Frankenstein was attaching electrodes to Linda Lovelace's jaws) and entered the golf course again, where the door opened to the airplane cabin.

He was escaping in his 747 jet, and below he could see Black Panthers, college kids, starving coal miners, Indians, Viet Cong, Brazilians, an enormous army pillaging his estate. "They must have seen the fnords," he said to the pilot. But the pilot was his mother and the sight of her threw him into a rage. "Leaving me alone!" he screamed. "Always leaving me alone to go to your damned parties with father. I never had a mother, just one nigger maid after another acting as mothers. Were the parties that fucking important?"

"Oh," she said reddening, "how can you use that word in front of your own mother?"

"To hell with that. All I remember is your perfume hanging in the air, and some strange black face coming when I called for you."

"You're such a baby," she said sadly. "All your life, you've always been a big baby." It was true: he was wearing diapers. A vice president of Morgan Guarantee Trust stared at him incredulously. "I say, Drake, do you really think that is appropriate garb for an important business meeting?" Beside him Linda Lovelace bent in ecstasy to kiss the secret ardor of Ishmael. "A whale of a good time," the vice president said, suddenly giggling inanely.

"Oh, fuck you all," Drake screamed. "I've got more money than any of you."

"The money is gone," Carl Jung said, wearing Freud's beard. "What totem will you use now to ward off insecurity and the things that go bump in the night?" He sneered. "What childish codes! M.A.F.I.A.-Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela. French Canadian bean so up- the Five Consecrated Bavarian Seers. Annuit Coeptis Novus Or do Seclorum-Anti-Christ Now Our Savior. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim-Asmodeus Belial Hastur Nyarlathotep Wotan Niggurath Dholes Azathoth Tind-alos Kadith. Child's play! Glasspielen!"

"Well, if you're so damned smart, who are the inner Five right now?" Drake asked testily.

"Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and Gummo," Jung said, riding off on a tricycle. "The Illuminati is your mother's breast, sucker," added Albert Hoffman, peddling after Jung on a bicycle.

Drake awoke as the Eye closed. It was all clear in an instant, without the labor he had spent working over the Dutchman's words. Maldonado stood by the bedside, his face Karloff's, and said, "We deserve to be dead." Yes: that was what it was like when you discovered you were a robot, not a man, like Karloff in the last scene of Bride of Frankenstein.

Drake awoke again and this time he was really awake. It was clear, crystal clear, and he had no regrets. Far away over Long Island Sound came the first distant rumble of thunder, and he knew this was no storm that any scientist less heretical than Jung or Wil-helm Reich would ever understand. "Our job," Huxley wrote before death, "is waking up."

Drake put on his robe quickly and stepped out into the dark Elizabethan hallway. Five hundred thousand dollars this house and grounds had cost, including the cottages, and it was only one of his eight estates. Money. What did it mean when Nyarlathotep appeared and "the wild beasts followed him and licked his hands" as that damned stupid-smart Lovecraft wrote? What did it matter when "the blind idiot God Chaos blew earth's dust away"?

Drake pushed open the dark paneled doorway of George's room. Good: Tarantella was gone. The thunder rumbled again, and Drake's own shadow looming over the bed reminded him once more of a Karloff movie.

He bent over the bed and shook George's shoulder gently. "Mavis," the boy said. Drake wondered who the hell Mavis was; somebody terrific, obviously, if George could be dreaming about her after a session with the Illuminati-trained Tarantella. Or was Mavis another ex-Illuminatus? There were a lot of them with the Discordians lately, Drake had surmised. He shook George's shoulder again, more vigorously.

"Oh, no, I can't come again," George said. Drake gave another shake, and two weary and frightened eyes opened to look at him.

"What?"

"Up," Drake grunted, grabbing George under the arms and pulling him to a sitting position. "Out of bed," he added, panting, rolling the boy to the edge.

Drake was looking through waves upward at George. Damn it, the thing has already found my mind. "You've got to get out," he repeated. "You're in danger here."

October 23, 1935: Charley Workman, Mendy Weiss and Jimmy the Shrew charge through the door of the Palace Chop House and, according to orders, cowboy the joint.. Lead pellets like rain; and rain like lead pellets hitting George's window, "Christ, what is it?" he asked. Drake stood him up stark naked and handed him his drawers, repeating "Hurry!" Charley the Bug looked over the three bodies: Abadaba Berman, Lulu Rosenkrantz and somebody he didn't recognize. None of them was the Dutchman. "My God, we fucked up," he said, "Dutch ain't here." But a commotion has started in the alleys of the dream: Albert Stern, taking his last fix of the night, suddenly recalls his fantasy of killing somebody as important as John Dillinger. "The can," Mendy Weiss says excitedly; he had a hard-on, like he always did on this kind of job. "Man is a giant," Drake says, "forced to live in a pigmy's hut." "What does that mean?" George asks. "It means we're all fools," Drake says excitedly, smelling the old whore Death, "especially those of us who try to act like giants by bullying the others in the hut instead of knocking the goddam walls down. Carl Jung told me that, only in more elegant language." George's dangling penis kept catching his eye: homosexuality (an occasional thing with Drake), heterosexuality (his normal state) and the new lust for the old whore Death were all tugging at him. The Dutchman dropped his penis, urine squirting his shoes, and went for his gun as he heard the shots in the barroom. He turned quickly, unable to stop pissing, and Albert Stern came through the door, shooting before Dutch could take aim. Falling forward, he saw that it was really Vince Coll, a ghost. "Oh, mama mama mama," he said, lying in his urine.

"Which way do we go?" George asked, buttoning his shirt.

"You go," Drake said. "Down the stairs and out the back, to the garage. Here's the key to my Silver Wraith Rolls Royce. It won't be any use to me anymore."

"Why aren't you coming?" George protested.

"We deserve to be dead," Drake said, "all of us in this house."

"Hey, that's crazy. I don't care what you've done, a guilt trip is always crazy."

"I've been on a crazier trip, as you'd call it, all my life," Drake said calmly. "The power trip. Now, move!"

"George, don't make no bull moves," the Dutchman said. "He's talking," Sergeant Luke Conlon whispered at the foot of the hospital bed; the police stenographer, F. J. Long, began taking notes. "What have you done with him?" the Dutchman went on. "Oh, mama, mama, mama. Oh, stop it. Oh, oh, oh, sure. Sure, mama." Drake sat down in the window seat and, too nervous for a cigar, lit one of his infrequent cigarettes. One hundred and fifty-seven, he thought, remembering the last entry in his little notebook. One hundred and fifty-seven rich women, one wife, and seventeen boys.

And never once did I really make contact, never once did I smash the walls… The wind and the rain were now deafening outside… Fourteen billion dollars, thirteen billion illegal and tax-free; more than Getty or Hunt, even if I could never publicize the fact. And that Arab boy in Tangier who picked my pocket after he blew me, my mother's perfume, hours and hours in Zurich puzzling over the Dutchman's words.