In July FEMFREE, a drug which allegedly removed mothering impulses, was banned by the FDA, and UFO cultists and Christians clashed in Belfast.

In August astronomer Bertha Van Ation discovered two new planets in the solar system, and bootleg FEMFREE at ten times the free market price began to circulate through Women's Lib groups coast to coast.

In September UFO cultists and Moslems clashed in Cairo.

In October landlords were lynched in three more American cities, the first human brain transplant was accomplished, and UFO cultists clashed with Maoists in Peking.

In November, Mae Brussell on KPFA-Berkeley charged that Jesus had been killed by a CIA plot.

A HIT ON THE HEAD

Every society encourages some behaviors and punitively forbids others. Thus, although cultures were not scientifically designed, they act much like computers programmed for specific results. One can look at their cultural structure and predict: this one will have a high murder rate, this one will have many schizophrenics, this one will remain Stone Age unless interfered with, this one is going to the stars.

–marilyn chambers, Neuro-Anthropology

Benny "Eggs" Benedict never got home from Epicene Wildeblood's party that night. On the corner of Lexington and Twenty-third, Benny was hit by a heavy lead pipe, which smashed his skull and killed him. The pipe did not fall by accident; it was wielded deliberately by a man named Francesco "Pablo" Gomez. Pablo did not hate Benny or have any personal feelings toward him at all and he did not grin sadistically. Pablo hit Benny with the pipe because Benny was well dressed and probably had money in his pockets. When Benny was comatose but not yet dead, Pablo dragged him into an alley and went through his pockets, finding to his delight that his surmise had been correct and Benny was actually carrying more than $50; he had $52, to be exact. Benny died while Pablo was rifling the wallet.

To Pablo, $52 was a lot of money. He went home humming happily.

That's the way things were in Unistat at the height of the Revolution of Lowered Expectations.

CLUES

Every string which has one end also has another end.

–finagle's first fundamental finding

Clem Cotex had been nosing about the Lincoln Park Zoo for several days and was more puzzled than ever. The facts were undeniable: The zoo had, indeed, purchased over 200 gorillas in the past decade and only two of them were on exhibit; 198 were missing. Any sort of casual questioning of the primate house attendants brought instantly vague answers in a well-rehearsed manner. They were all in on the cover-up. The public was being protected against all knowledge of the inexplicable, the weird, the surrealistic. All part of the usual governmental pretense that human affairs were rationally administered by experts who knew what was really going on. They feared that if people ever discovered that those in power were as confused by this inexplicable universe as those out of power, then the whole charade might collapse.

There was no Black Hole in the zoo; Cotex was sure of that. All gravity conditions were normal. The gorillas were not falling through a Schwartzchild radius into the universe next door or anything really spooky like that. They were simply teleporting somewhere… maybe back to their homelands in Africa. Although, considering the unpredictability of teleportive currents as documented by Charles Fort-who had recorded cases of snakes landing in Memphis, Tennessee, and coconuts being deposited in Worcester, England-the gorillas might actually be reappearing anywhere.

Since anything might be a clue in such occult enigmas, Clem had carefully copied all the graffiti in the men's room at the primate house. It was the usual jumble of disparate and ambiguous signals: "Black P. Stone Run It," "For a good blow job call 555-1717 and ask for Father James Flanagan," "Help Prevent Von Neumann's Catastrophe!," "Arm the Unemployed," "Free our four-legged brothers and sisters. A zoo is a child's heaven and an animal's hell," "Save the Whales-Harpoon a Honda," "Off the Landlords," "Stamp Out Sizeism."

Probably, Cotex thought morosely, there is an important signal in there and I'm just not imaginative enough to see it.

God bless America.

THE ALTRUIST

God bless America.

–last words of G. I. gurdjieff

Everybody who had been at Wildeblood's party felt compelled to attend Benedict's funeral, even though none of them enjoyed it. Benny had been one of the funniest writers of his time, at least in the daily press, and it would have been appropriate to send him off with a showing of old Laurel and Hardy films or something equally in his own metier. Primate decorum forbade this. They packed him in with a dull and depressing "religious" ceremony.

"I am the Resurrection and the Life," intoned a primate with his collar on backward. Nobody knew what the hell that meant, if anything, but they tried to feel better when they heard it.

At the time Benny was buried a window washer was at work on the seventeenth floor of the Morgan Guaranty Trust at 23 Wall Street. He was an expert lip-reader and knew more of the secrets of Wall Street than anybody outside the Illuminati. In fact, the second reason he had become a window washer was to get work in the Wall Street district and pick up useful information.

The main reason he had taken the job would have been even more unnerving to Morgan Guaranty had they known about it. The window washer was a member of Purity of Essence and had already managed to place 333 homemade nuclear weapons on ledges so high nobody but a pigeon was ever likely to see them.

All of the weapons were set to go off at a signal from the POE computer-another homemade contraption but awesomely efficient. POE was full of science grads who had dropped out of the career game in horror and revulsion at the uses to which science was being put in their universe. At this point POE had twenty-eight American cities mined. The window washer hoped that, when push came to shove, POE wouldn't have to detonate more than one of those cities. He was an altruist, like everybody else in Puritv of Essence.

TAKE WHAT THOU HAST

Take what thou hast and give it to the poor.

–attributed to some longhair commie freak

The letter was sent out May 1, 1984, to the New York Times-News-Post, the Chicago Sun, the Los Angeles Times-Free Press, NEC News, CBS News, the White House, Mae Brussel, the Berkeley Barb, KPFA, ABC News, the London Times, Zodiac News Service, The Christian Science Monitor, the Archdioceses of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and St. Louis, the Church of Scientology, Mark Lane, Paul Krassner, Dick Gregory, Chase Manhattan Bank, the Bad Ass Bugle, the Nihilist Anarchist Horde, Norman Mailer, and 237 miscellaneous other institutions and celebrities. POE wanted to be sure that their message would get out to the general public with the minimum of distortion by the Establishment.

The letter said:

May God forgive us. May history judge as charitably.

We have placed tactical nuclear bombs in over 1,700 locations throughout the United States. The targets are all enemies of the people: large banks, multinational corporations, government facilities. We will trigger one of these bombs at noon tomorrow, somewhere in the eastern United States, to demonstrate that we are not bluffing.

All of the other nuclear bombs will be triggered in succession until our demands are met. If any attempt is made to apprehend and arrest us-any attempt at all- all the remaining bombs will be detonated at once.