The fourth week was, to be frank about it, definitely bizarre. Canvera discoursed at length on the lost civilization that once existed in the Gobi Desert and denounced those, such as Brion Gysin, who believed it had destroyed itself in atomic war. Rather, he asserted, it had been obliterated when the Illuminati arrived from the planet Vulcan in flying saucers. "Remember the Alamo" was now replaced by "Remember Carcosa," Canvera having discerned that both Ambrose Bierce and H. P. Lovecraft were describing this tragic Gobian society in their fiction. The hippies were again delighted- this was the funky kind of trip that had originally made Canvera a mock folk hero among them- and they especially appreciated his call for the U.S. to abandon the next moon shot and launch a punitive expedition to Vulcan both to wipe out Illuminism at its source and to avenge poor Carcosa. The WHORE regulars, however, were again upset; all that concern with Carcosa struck them as creeping one-worldism.

The fifth week, Canvera took a new turn, denouncing the masses for their stupidity and proclaiming that the boobs probably deserved being governed by the Illuminati since most of them were too dumb to find their own behinds in a dark room even using both hands. He had been browsing through a volume of H. L. Mencken (sent to him over a year earlier by El Haj Stackerlee Mohammed, ne Pearson, after one of his put-prayers-back-in-the-public-schools tirades); but he had also been pondering an invitation to join the Illuminati. This document, which came in an envelope with no return address, informed him that he was too smart to stay with the losers all his life and ought to climb on the winning side before it was too late. It added that membership dues were $3125, which should be put in a cigar box and buried in his back yard, after which it promised "one of our underground agents will contact you." At first, Canvera had considered this a hoax- he received many put-ons in the mail, together with pornography, Rosicrucian pamphlets, illustrated with the eye-and-pyramid design, and pretended fan letters signed by such names as Eldridge Cleaver, Fidel Castro, Anton Szandor Levay or Judge Crater, all of course cooked up by his Lincoln Avenue audience. Later, however, it struck him that 3125 was five to the fifth power and that convinced him a True Illuminatus was indeed communicating with him. He took the $3125 out of his savings account, buried it as instructed, made a pro-Illuminati recording as a gesture of good faith and waited. The next day he was shot, several times, in the head and shoulders, dying of natural causes as a result.

(In present time again, Rebecca Goodman enters the Hotel Tudor lobby in answer to the second mysterious phone call of the day, while Hagbard decides George Dorn needs to be illuminized further before Ingolstadt, and Esperando Despond clears his throat and says, "I want to explain the mathematics of plague to you men…")

Actually, poor old Canvera's death had nothing to do with the Illuminati or with his former compatriots in WHORE. The man had been practicing the libertine philosophy of his post-AUM phone editorials and had tampered with Cassandra Acconci, the beloved daughter of Ronald Acconci, Chicago Regional Commander of God's Lightning and a long-time contributor to KCUF. Acconci arranged, via State's Attorney Milo A. Flanagan, for the local Maf to do a hit on Canvera. But there are no endings, any more than there are any beginnings; it next developed that Canvera's seed lived on in wedlock with Cassandra's ovum and was in danger of becoming a human being within her previously trim abdomen.

Saul Goodman had no idea that the room he was in had last been rented to George Dorn; he was conscious only of his impatience, not knowing that Rebecca was at that moment on an elevator approaching his floor… And a mile north, Peter Jackson, still trying to put together the July issue of Confrontation virtually singlehanded, dives into the slush pile (which is the magazine industry's elegant name for unsolicited manuscripts) and comes up with more fallout from the Moon-Malik AUM project of 1970. "Orthodox Science: The New Religion," he reads. Well, lets sample it, what the hell. Opening at random he finds:

Einstein's concept of spherical space, furthermore, suffers from the same defect as the concept of a smoothly or perfectly spherical earth: it rests upon the use of the irrational number, ?. This number has no operational definition; there is no place on any engineer's scale to which one can point and say "This is exactly ?," although these scales are misleadingly marked with such a spot. ?, in fact, can never be found in the real world, and there are historical and archeological reasons to believe it was created by a Greek mathematician under the influence of the mind-warping hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria. It is pure surrealism. You cannot write ? as a real number; you can only approximate it, as 3.1417… etc. Chemistry knows no such units: three atoms of an element may combine with four atoms of another element, but you will never find ? atoms combining with anything. Quantum physics reveals that an electron may jump three units or four units, but it will not jump ? units. Nor is ? necessary to geometry, as is sometimes claimed; R. Buckminster Fuller has created an entire geometric system, at least as reliable as that of the ancient Greek dope fiends, in which ? does not appear at all. Space, then, may be slanted or kiltered in various ways, but it cannot be smoothly spherical…

"What the ring-tailed rambling hell?" Peter Jackson said aloud. He flipped to the end:

In conclusion, I want to thank a strange and uncommon man, James Mallison, who provided the spark which set me thinking about these matters. In fact, it was due to my meeting with Mr. Mallison that I sold my hardware business, returned to college and majored in cartography and topology. Although he was a religious fanatic (as I was at the time of our meeting) and would, therefore, not appreciate many of my discoveries, it is due to this man's perverse, peculiar and yet brilliant prodding that I embarked on the search which has lead to this new theory of a Penta-hedroidal Universe.

W. Clement Cotex, Ph.D

"Far fucking out," Peter muttered. James Mallison was a pen name Joe Malik sometimes used, and here was another James Mallison inspiring this guy to become a Ph.D. and invent a new cosmological theory. What was the word Joe used for such coincidences? Synch-something…

("1472," Esperando Despond concludes his gloomy mathematical calculations. "That's the number of plague cases we might have right now, at noon, if the girl had only two contacts after leaving Dr. Mocenigo. Now, if she had three contacts…" The assembled FBI agents are gradually turning a pale greenish color from the neck up. Cannel, the only actual contact, is busy two blocks away stuffing money into a briefcase.)

"That's him!" Mrs. Edward Coke Bacon cried excitedly, addressing Basil Banghart, another FBI agent, in an office in Washington. She is pointing at a photo of Albert "the Teacher" Stern. "Ma'am," Banghart says kindly, "that can't be him. 1 don't even know why his picture's still in the file. That's a no-account junkie who once got on our most-wanted list because he confessed to a murder he didn't even commit." In Cincinnati, an FBI artist is completing a portrait under the direction of the widow of a slain TV repairman: the face of the killer, gradually emerging, combines various features of Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, George Dorn and the lead vocalist of the American Medical Association, which group was at that moment boarding a plane at Kennedy International Airport for the Ingolstadt gig. Rebecca Goodman, rising in the Hotel Tudor elevator, has a flash memory of a nightmare of the night before: Saul being shot by the same vocalist, dressed as a monk, in red-and-white robes, while a Playboy bunny danced in front of some kind of giant pyramid. In Princeton, New Jersey, a nuclear physicist named Nils Nosferatu-one of the few survivors of the early morning shootings- babbles to the detective and police stenographer at his bedside, "Tlaloc sucks. You can't trust them. The midget is the one to watch. We'll be moved, all right, when the tear gas hits. Fun is fun. Omega. George's brother met the dolphins first, and that was the psychic hook that brought George in. She's at the door. She's buried in the desert. Any deviation will result in termination. Unify the forces. You hold the hose. I'll get Mark."