Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

PARAREALISME

The big news of the 1985 season in the art world was that Francois Loup-Garou had abandoned Neo-Surrealism and founded a new school of art called Pararealisme.

This was only partly the result of the Rehnquist in the Lobster Newburg; it was also a matter of economics.

For nearly a century, it had been very important for an artist to belong to a "school," and it was even better to be the founder of a "school." This was not just a case of "In Union There Is Strength"; it was also a shrewd marketing strategy. It might take an individual painter ten or twenty years to be "discovered"-if he were original, it might take much longer, and he might not be alive to enjoy it-but when a School of Art was formed, that was News, and all members of the school were discovered simultaneously.

There had been an Impressionist school, a Post-Impressionist school, an Expressionist school, an Abstract Expressionist school, a Cubist school, a Futurist school, a Pop school and an Op school, and so on. Francois Loup-Garou had noticed that the commercial life of each school was getting shorter all the time, due to the accelerated intensity of competition: Neo-Surrealism was already being eclipsed, as an object of news and debate, by the Neo-Cubism of the American, Burroughs.

He decided it was time to launch a new school.

After the experience of the Rehnquist in the Lobster Newburg, Pararealisme seemed appropriate to him.

According to Standard Operating Procedure, he got a few friends together and they began issuing Proclamations denouncing all other schools (especially Neo-Cubism) as obsolete and reactionary. This got them into the Art Journals and into some newspapers.

Then they held their own first show, and that got them into the international news magazines.

They were news; it didn't really matter if their paintings were any good at all.

In fact, their paintings were rather good, in a fey sort of way.

They had revived traditional "representational" art (everything they did was as naturalistic as a news photograph), but with a difference that made a difference.

The largest canvas at the first Pararealiste show was Loup-Garou's own What Do You Make of This, Professor? An enormous work it was, covering two walls, bent in the middle on a special hinged frame. It showed a cerulean-blue sky, with hailstones: thousands and thousands of hailstones, six months' painstaking labor, and each hailstone had a tiny image of the Virgin Mary on it.

Puzzled viewers might have found some enlightenment in the First Pararealiste Manifesto:

We of the Pararealiste movement, recognizing the meaninglessness of this chaos that fools call life, find the relevance of existence only in its monstrosities.

But we are not Existentialists or anything of that sort, thank God; and besides, the perversities of humanity have grown boring. After the Fernando Poo Incident, what can a mere man do that will shock us? It is the abnormalities of nature that we find illuminating; that is what distinguishes us from sadists, New Leftists, and other intellectual hoodlums.

We are delighted that Pluto, Mickey, and Goofy are all at odd angles from the plane of the eight inner planets. We are thrilled with Bohr's great principle of Relativity, which shows that to look out into space is also to look backward in time. WE ARE THE DAY AFTER YESTERDAY!!!

Some said that the Pararealistes were even better at writing manifestos than at painting pictures; but they meant what they said. The hailstones in What Do You Make of This, Professor? were no image of dream or delirium-"We spit on surrealism! Fantasy is every bit as dreary as Logic! It is the REAL that we seek!" the First Manifesto had also declared. What Loup-Garou had so painstakingly depicted was an occurrence that actually happened at Lyons in 1920. Xeroxes of the old newspaper stories about the event ("PEASANTS SEE VIRGIN ON HAILSTONES") were distributed to the press, emphasizing again that Pararealistes only painted the real, or as they always wrote, the REAL.

Little Pierre de la Nuit-Pierrot le Fou, he styled himself-was Loup-Garou's best friend and had contributed seventeen canvases to the first show. Magnificent, monstrous things they were, of course-flying saucers, all of them: blue and gold and silver and green and bright orange, shaped like doughnuts or boomerangs or ellipsoids or cones. Every one of them had been reported in the sky by somebody or other in the past forty years.

Loup-Garou circulated news stories about each sighting, you can be sure, to demonstrate again pararealisme's devotion to the REAL.

Then there was Jean Cul's The Sheep-Cow; some claimed it was the greatest of all Pararealiste paintings. It portrayed an animal half-sheep and half-cow, a veritable insult to the laws of genetics. Such an animal had been born in Simcoe, Ontario, in 1888. They circulated news stories about it.

All of this created so much international discussion that the Pararealistes immediately released the second Manifesto. (They had learned something about P.R. from the early surrealists.)

They denounced those who did not like their paintings as fools. They then denounced those who did like their paintings as damned fools, for liking them for the wrong reasons. They went on to fulminate against everybody in general:

We renounce and hurl invective upon the rationalist conducting experiments in his laboratory. Every instrument he uses is a creation of human narcissism; it emerges from the human ego as Athene from the head of Zeus. The rationalist imposes his own order on these instruments; they impose order on the data; and he then proclaims that the universe is as constipated and mechanistic as his own mind! What has this epistemo-logical masturbation to do with the REAL?

And we abominate and cast fulminations upon the irrationalist, also. Behold him, in his drugged stupor, maddened by opium or hashish, gazing inward and depicting his childish dream and nightmares on canvas. He is as limited by the human unconscious as the rationalist is by the human conscious. Neither of them can see the REAL!!!

It reads better in the original French. But it would have been a top news story if it hadn't been eclipsed by the singularly obscene "miracle" at Canterbury Cathedral that week.

The details of the alleged "miracle" had been censored and covered up by high Church officials from the very beginning. Newspapers, at first, printed only short items saying that something strange caused the Archbishop of Canterbury to turn a ghastly white during Mass and stumble so badly that he fell off the altar.

Of course some cynics immediately assumed that His Eminence was as drunk as a skunk. There are always types like that, believing the worst of everybody.

Then the rumors started to circulate. Those who had been in the Cathedral said that the Most Reverend Archbishop had not so much stumbled as jumped, and that his expression was one of such fear and loathing that all present felt at once that something distinctly eldritch and unholy had invaded the church. Others, imaginative types and religious hysterics, claimed to have felt something cold and clammy moving in the air, or to have seen "auras."

By the time the rumors had gone three times around the United Kingdom and twice around Europe, there were details that came out of the Necronomicon or the grim fictions of Stoker, Machen, Walpole. Horned men, Things with tentacles, and Linda Lovelace were prominently featured in these embroidered versions of the Canterbury Horror, as it was beginning to be called.

The press, of course, got more interested at this point, and the Reverend Archbishop was constantly besieged to conform or deny the most outlandish and distasteful reports about what had occurred. At first His Eminence refused to speak to the press at all, but finally, by the time some scandal sheets were claiming that Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god of Khem, had appeared on the altar bellowing Cthulhu fthagn!, the Archbishop issued a terse statement through his Press Secretary.

"Nothing untoward happened. His Eminence merely tripped on the altar rug, and any further discussion would be futile."

This merely fanned the flames of Rumor, of course.

One legend circulated even more than the others, perhaps because it appealed to prurient interest, or maybe just because it was the version given by a few people who had actually been in the Cathedral during Mass.

According to this yarn, a miraculous flying Rehnquist- just like the ones in the murals at Pompeii, except that it didn't have wings-had soared across the front of the church, barely missing His Eminence's high episcopal nose.

The judicious, of course, did not credit this wild rumor. They were all coming around, as the judicious usually do, to the view of the cynics. The Archbishop, they said, had been stewed to the gills.

His Eminence was no fool, however. After the first shock, he had begun his own investigation, aided by a few trusted deacons.

They found the slingshot, abandoned, on the floor of the first pew, to the right. That was the direction the Rehnquist had come from, and they all breathed a sigh of relief.

The Archbishop told them, then, the rumors he had heard about the incident of the Unistat Ambassador who had to be put on morphine after finding It, wrapped in pink ribbon, on a staircase.

"We are dealing with a deranged mind," His Eminence said, "but not with anything 'supernatural,' thank God."

They never found the Rehnquist, but as the Archbishop pointed out, "the perpetrator may have confederates."

Everybody tried to remember who had been sitting in the extreme right of the first pew. They carefully made up a list, including everybody's separate memories, half-memories, or pseudo-memories. The list looked like this:

Lord and Lady Bugge

the Hon. Guy Fawkeshunt, M.P. and

Eva Gebloomenkraft

Ken Campbell and Eva Gebloomenkraft

the Hon. Fission Chips, F.R.S. and

Eva Gebloomenkraft

"One name seems to stand out, doesn't it?" asked His Eminence.

"Eva Gebloomenkraft," said a deacon. "Isn't she that Jet Set millionairess who got into so much trouble in Unistat two years ago for putting laughing gas in the air conditioning system at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?"

The sudden death of Bonny Benedict created waves of confusion and apprehension far beyond what ordinarily would have resulted from such a tragic accident.

The first one affected was Polly Esther Doubleknit, who called down from her executive office to the City Desk at once.

"What the hell happened to Bonny?" she demanded.

The City Editor spoke in a hoarse croak. "It seems to be what the TV news said, a heart attack." He was beginning to feel that he'd be the next victim, since his blood pressure seemed to be rising every minute.

"A heart attack?" Polly Esther was dumbfounded. "But what about the man?"

"He's being held, of course," the City Editor said. "But God knows what they'll charge him with-manslaughter, negligent homicide, who knows? There's never been a case like this before."

"They had better charge him with something," Polly Esther said crisply. "Or this paper will land on the D.A.'s office with all four feet. Do I make myself clear?"

Admiral Babbit nearly jumped out of his skin when the news reached Washington.

"It's those Briggsing Bryanting faggots from Alexandria!" he screamed. "And they're gonna try to pin it on us!"

This was a defensive over-reaction caused by the fact that Old Iron Balls had been contemplating various ways of bringing about the demise of Ms. Benedict. But he distrusted Einstein and neuroanalysis-"Jewish egghead stuff"-and never realized that most of his mentations consisted of defensive over-reactions.

"I'll fix those Rehnquist-suckers," he said to an aide. "Get old de la Plume, and tell him I've got a big job for him."

This referred to Mr. Shemus de la Plume, Naval Intelligence's ace handwriting forger.

And so, within thirty-six hours, the Washington Post had come into possession of a diary, allegedly written by John Disk, the man who had killed Bonny Benedict. The diary only looked cryptic at first glance. With a little study, anybody with at least two inches of forehead could figure out, from the abbreviations and clumsy codes used, that Disk had been an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.

This was quite a shock to both Disk and the CIA, who had never had any connection with each other.

Actually, Disk had been raised in the True Holy Roman Catholic Church, a bizarre fascistoid splinter group which had broken with the Vatican during the reign of Pope Stephen of Dublin.

When Disk reached his adolescence in the early 1970s, however, strange things began to happen to him. At first he thought it was demons-he had seen The Exorcist and believed every bit of it-but his priest told him it was all because he kept Lourding himself.

Disk went to Confession every time he gave in to the temptation to Lourde-off, which was five times a week after he reached seventeen, and the priest kept telling him to use Self-Control and take cold showers. The priest also said that all the demons were in hell and Johnny should stop worrying about them.

The only people who believed in demonic possession, the priest said, were the benighted fanatics in the Orthodox Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Everybody in the True Holy Roman Catholic Church despised and hated the members of the Orthodox Holy Roman Catholic Church, which was another splinter group that had broken away from the Vatican during the reign of Pope Stephen. The members of the Orthodox Holy Roman Catholic Church hated them back, you can be sure. In fact, in the typical manner of splinter groups, they each hated the other more than they hated the common enemy, the heretics in the Vatican.

John Disk finally decided that what was wrong with him was not caused by demons and-since he was able to cut down on his Lourding-off to only twice a week after he passed twenty-it wasn't entirely caused by Sin, either.

He was being poisoned.

The reason he had cycles of agitation and elation, followed by cycles of anxiety and growing fear that everything was somehow unreal, was because he was eating an Impure diet.

The reason there were wars and rumors of wars, and revolutions and depressions, and pornography and lewd, sinful women in immodest clothing on every street was because all the food was full of toxic, mind-destroying chemicals.

The people responsible for this were the Triangular Commission, the Power Elite, the Elders of Zion, the Bavarian Illuminati, and the American Medical Association.

He had learned this by reading books on Organic Diet from bookstores run by the John Birch Society, the Natural Hygienists, the Purity of Ecology Party, and various other groups who were inclined to go through cycles of agitation, elation, anxiety, feelings of unreality, etc., and had realized this was caused by Impurity of Essence in their food.

John Disk read a great deal of this literature and changed his mind about twenty times before he finally decided which school of "correct nutrition" was really correct.

He decided Purity of Ecology was the group that really knew what the hell was going on. He believed every word in Unsafe Wherever You Go by POE's founder, Furbish Lousewart.

By the age of twenty-three, Disk was a typical POE member. When not putting in his thirty hours a week working in their printing plant-where he received lodging and an Organic Diet in lieu of pay-he was out on the streets selling their newspaper, Doom, or giving away their four-page mini-pamphlets, which had titles like Poison in Every Pot; Science: Satan's Plot Against God and Man; and Jimmy Carter, Servant of the Jesuit-Zionist Conspiracy.

POE hated President Carter because he had defeated Furbish Lousewart in the 1980 election. But, with the typical logic of splinter groups, they did not hate Carter nearly as much as they hated Eve Hubbard, of the Libertarian Immortalist Party, who also got more votes than Lousewart, even though she came in third.

The POE people hated the Libertarian Immortalists for another reason, which was that the LIP platform was blasphemous and unpatriotic.

Hubbard's slogan was "No more death and taxes."

She planned to end taxes by running the government like a profit-sharing corporation, terminating all interference in the internal affairs of other countries (thus allowing the military budget to be cut every year, instead of growing every year), and paying each citizen a dividend on the profits the Unistat Corporation earned through investing in space colonization to tap into the vast energy and resources of Free Space.

Hubbard planned to end death by investing the profits from space in longevity research, which the majority of scientists in the field were now convinced could lead to doubling or tripling the human life span in the first generation, and could lead to indefinite expansion thereafter.

The POE people realized that these proposals were scientific and rational.

They therefore regarded them as Satanic.

After three years in POE, John Disk still had cycles of agitation and unreality; but the leaders of the cult assured him that it took at least that long for the poisons in his previous diet to leave his system totally. If he stayed on the correct POE diet, they insisted, he would become as serene as they were.

Still, things were getting to be more unreal more of the time. Disk looked in the mirror one morning, combing his hair, and seemed to see a middle-aged man looking out at him. It was only a flash, a single crack in the fabric of time, but it was unnerving. When the face turned back to his own-young, black-haired, pale-he wondered for a wild moment if he were truly a young man who had had a vision of himself twenty years older or a middle-aged man who was now having a hallucination of himself twenty years younger.

But that was only a short fugue, for in a moment he recognized that the face in the mirror was not his twenty-years-later, but rather a face that had adorned the cover of Time magazine a few months ago. It was the face of Dr. Francis Dashwood, president of Orgasm Research Inc., Commie pervert Satanist sinner who spent most of his time observing things that John would like to do but was afraid to do because of twenty years of conditioning by the True Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Which was bad enough, certainly, but not as bad as what was to come: voices at first so faint as to be barely perceptible, but slowly and insidiously growing louder, voices which were female and kept saying You are George Dorn and Imagine you can see my Brownmillers through my sweater and The interpenetration of the universes has begun, but mostly saying over and over You are George Dorn.

And there were occasions, only a second in external time but stretching to infinity in a multiple of new dimensions he found or created within, when the Sages would gather him into their Maybe realm ("In addition to a Yes and a No, the universe contains a Maybe" was the password to pass the Lurker at the Threshold) and there would be Jesus saying "Is it not written, Ye are Gods?" and Emperor Norton saying "I just made myself Emperor of Unistat, Protector of Mexico, and King of the Jews," and Fed Xing saying "There are many universes and mind-states" and Beethoven singing the evolutionary scenario in eight cycles and Great Chtulhu's Starry Wisdom Band and Glorious Lucifer Son of the Morning who had never fallen because the message of the scriptures was written backward in a mirror and then Linda Lovelace would come in and start doing disgusting immoral things and he would be back, the splinter of eternity contracting the Euclidean 3-D, standing on a street handing out Poison in Every Pot and wondering if he was losing his mind.

But the good parts of it were so good, Jesus and the weird but wise Emperor Norton and some of the Space Brothers, that he wished it would continue, if only it didn't keep turning into that sinful and disgusting business about Linda Lovelace; but he was beginning to figure it out; he was not the fool they thought him-not by a long shot. He knew that, now that the poisons in the food were beginning to wear off They had started aiming an electronic Thought Control machine at his brain, so he did not pay attention no matter how many times the seductive female voice said YOU ARE GEORGE DORN YOU ARE GEORGE DORN YOU ARE GEORGE DORN.

So when he had read that bitch, that Briggsing Bryanting whore for the Big Corporations and the Sex Educators and Cattle Mutilators of the Satanist-Vatican-Zionist conspiracy, that lying tool of the Establishment, that contemptible Bonny Benedict claiming that Furbish Lousewart was a hypocrite and a meat-eater, claiming it when he knew it was not, could not be, true, damn her, the pig whore of the Jew-Jesuit money powers, as if a real Christian American like Furbish would pollute his body, the temple of God, with the flesh of a dead animal, the lying whore, he knew he would fix her and fix her good and proper, and show them all, the demonic jackal-headed lot of them with their laser beams flashing into his brain saying YOU ARE GEORGE DORN YOU ARE GEORGE DORN.

So he knew the perfect thing, the only way to express total contempt for the pig Establishment, the great lessons of the sages of the Clownological Counter-Culture, the attack that frightened, punished, and humiliated all at once and yet had to be endured as "only a joke," the bitch, that would fix her.

So he bought the pie, a Boston Cream special that was "rich and thick," according to the sign in the bakery, and waited for her in the morning outside the New York News-Times-Post-etc., and when the bitch, the lying whore, got out of her limousine, he was ready, he stepped forward, and he let her have it SMASH right in the face.

But then the old lady-my God, she looked like his mother, he realized-started choking and wheezing and fell down on the sidewalk and he knew. He knew even before the cop arrived from the corner, even before the crowd told the cop in great anger and outrage what had happened, even before the ambulance arrived, even before the doctor said, "She's gone."

And then the cop looked at him and he knew all the rest of it, the booking and the fingerprinting and the mug shot and then being alone in the cell all night with the voices saying YOU ARE GEORGE DORN.

Things were coming to a head.

Nathaniel F. X. Drest, secret chief of the Unistat Sector CIA, had felt uneasy for a long time. Since the death of President Carter, in fact. It wasn't just that the then-Vice President, now-President, Hugh Crane, was right out of nowhere, a total unknown, not one of THEM; similar situations had arisen a few times in the past, and the novice had easily been initiated into the secret science of Strange Loops and Mind Control, seduced-without the necessity of bribery, cajolery, or threats-into gladly becoming one of THEM. No: the unsettling thing was that Carter's death was unplanned, random, a surprise to everyone; it might even have been due to natural causes.

Yes: things were definitely and bodaciously coming to a head.

Nathaniel Drest had not lasted as secret chief of the CIA for thirty years without acquiring great pragmatic savvy about the spooky side of predestination. "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action" had been the motto of one of the great masters of Strange Loops, lan Fleming himself; but Drest knew that what was really going on was far weirder than even Fleming could comprehend.

Behind the mild, professorial, bespectacled facade of Nathaniel Drest, officially listed as economics researcher in the budget reports, was the one man capable of serving as secret chief of the Unistat CIA through thirty long years, while one dummy after another posed as the official head of the clandestine organization. Drest was a philosopher and a visionary; he had forged, from Machiavelli, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Mussolini, Nietzsche, Napoleon, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Three Legendary Sages- Turing, Fleming, Wheatley-the coldly logical, existential, pragmatic strategy for eternal rule by himself and his friends in THEM, and total extermination and eradication of all possibility of rebellion by the rest of humanity.

He had been told once, by a sociobiologist, that he was a giant DNA robot, programmed to advance the growth and expansion of his gene pool. He thought that was an amusing, although limited, view of what was going on; and he certainly had no interest in such evolutionary theories as justifications of what he did. He needed no justifications; that his goals were rationally desirable to him was all that was necessary or profitable to contemplate.

The world certainly deserved to be ruled by his gene pool, by those White Anglo-Saxon Presbyterians and Episcopalians who had gone to Groton and Harvard, and occasionally there would be room for a bright boy from Yale, and this was so obvious that it needed no long-range evolutionary justifications. You just had to look around the world to see that no other gene pool was smart enough, tough enough, and fundamentally liberal enough to do the job justly and wisely.

John Ruskin and Cecil Rhodes had seen the choice a century ago; a world ruled by one Anglo oligarchy on scientific and socialist principles, or a world of anarchy and chaos, with constant wars and revolutions. Of course, there had been some anarchy, chaos, wars, and revolutions since Drest had taken over, but that was due to surviving ideological poisons on the international system and would be cured when the planet had been on the correct, Drest-directed mental diet for a few more decades. But things were coming to a head. The damned Ruskies still obstinately clung to their obsolete Adam Smith economics, and much of the Islamic world was unruly and rebellious. But worst of all was the Discordian Society.

Drest knew all about the Discordian Society, or thought he did. He was convinced they were behind this latest attempt to discredit the Company with that forged diary linking them to the Bonny Benedict "Cream Pie" murder. He also believed that they were the secret organization behind all the lesser conspiracies that annoyed and sometimes frustrated him-the malignantly nihilistic Network that had Potter Stewarted his own computer and God knows how many other computers, the dupes in POE and the Libertarian Immortalist Party, the damned moralistic meddlesome Stephenites, Weather Underground, the traitors over at Naval Intelligence, the sinister Invisible Hand Society, the terroristic Morituri, and the damned Ruskies and Arabs.

Drest had first learned about the Discordian Society in a strange, obscene, subversive novel called Illuminatus! He was convinced it was all fiction at first. But then he discovered that the alleged Bible of the Discordians, the perverse and paradoxical Principia Discordia, actually existed. When he put two men on the case they soon reported that copies of the Principia could be found in many science-fiction and libertarian bookstores all over Unistat, and that it could be ordered through the mail from a company absurdly and disarmingly named Loom-panics Unlimited in Port Townsend, Washington.

Of course he wanted to believe that was all there was to it, just a small, oddball cult no more likely to influence events than the Libertarian Immortalists were. But then bit by bit the damning details accumulated. Emperor Joshua Norton, King of the Jews, was a Discordian saint, and Emperor Norton was also inexplicably becoming an "in" person. There was a play about Emperor Norton running in San Francisco, posters celebrating him for sale all over the country. The Discordian mantra "Fnord" was seen scrawled on walls in more and more places, and on the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill. Characters in Illuminatus!, who he had assumed were fictional, often appeared writing book or movie reviews for various magazines, and a check showed that they had been writing letters to the Playboy Forum and the Chicago newspapers since the early 1960s. Discordian cabals appeared in England, Germany, Japan, Australia, and the most unlikely places.

Drest had made a careful study of the Discordian philosophy and realized it was the kind of outlandish nonsense that would appeal to the kind of people who made all the trouble in history-brilliant, intellectual, slightly deranged dope fiends and oddball math-and-technology buffs. Many of the pioneer Discordians were computer programmers (he remembered that fact every time the Company's computer answered a simple program with GIVE ME A COOKIE or THE GOVERNMENT SUCKS) and others had documented links with the Libertarian Immortalists, the LSD subculture, and groups as sinister as the witches and the anarchists.

The Discordians believed that God was a Crazy Woman. For the Woman part of it, they used the usual Taoist and Feminist arguments about the Creative Force being dark, female, subtle, fecund, and in every way opposite to Male Authoritarianism. For the Crazy part, they pointed to Pickering's Moon, which goes around backward, to rains of crabs and periwinkles and live snakes, to the paradoxes of quantum theory, and to the religious and political behavior of humanity itself, all of which, they claimed, demonstrated that the fabric of reality was a mosaic of chaos, confusion, deception, delusion, and Strange Loops.

And, Drest knew, they were definitely linked with the Network. Although computer specialists only spoke of the Network in whispers, the Company had a detailed file on them. The Network was devoted to the long-suppressed, much persecuted, but persistent underground religion of cocaine founded by the eccentric physician Sigmund Freud. They devoutly believed in the literal truth of Freud's vision of the Superman. ("What is man? A bridge between the primate and the superman-a bridge over an abyss," Freud wrote in his Diary of a Hope Fiend.) To achieve the Superman, the Network was systematically frustrating every other group of conspirators on the planet by glitching the computers, and meanwhile diverting funds from legitimate activities to subsidize dissident scientists engaged in research on immortality and higher intelligence. "Cocaine is a memory of the future" was the sick slogan of this misguided group of deranged intellectuals. "Our minds will function as ecstatically as on cocaine, without the jitters, once we achieve immortality and learn to repro-gram our brains as efficiently as we reprogram our computers," they went on. "When we don't have to die and can constantly increase our awareness of detail," they also said, "we will have no more problems, only adventures." Naturally, every government in the world, even the near-anarchistic Free Market maniacs in Russia, had outlawed this bizarre cult.

An even more sinister Discordian front organization, according to Drest's coldly logical analysis of what was really going on, was the insidious Invisible Hand Society.

What was most devious about the Invisible Hand-ers was that they disdained secrecy and operated right out in the open, telling everybody what they were doing and why and what they hoped to accomplish. They had offices in all major cities and gave free courses in their politico-economic system just like the old Henry George schools at the turn of the century.

It was very hard for Drest to persuade the other eight Unknown Men who ruled the CIA in other parts of the world that the Invisible Hand was the most dangerous sort of conspiracy.

"A conspiracy doesn't operate in the open," they kept reminding him. Sometimes they would tell him he was working too hard and should take a vacation.

"That's what's so subtle and devilish about it," Drest would explain, over and over. "Nobody can recognize a conspiracy that's out in the open. It's a kind of optical illusion that they're using to undermine us."

"But they don't believe we exist," he would be told.

"That's an oversimplification," he would insist. "They admit we exist and occupy space-time and so on. They just teach that all the titles we give ourselves are meaningless and all our acts are futile since the Invisible Hand controls everything, anyway."

The other eight would again suggest that Drest needed a vacation.

Things were coming to a head.

The first lesson given to people who signed up for the course of "Political and Economic Reality" at the Invisible Hand Society, Drest knew, concerned policemen and soldiers.

Two men in blue uniforms would appear on the stage, carrying guns.

"Blue uniforms are Real," the lecturer would say. "Guns are Real. Policemen are a social fiction."

Three men in brown uniforms would appear, carrying rifles.

"Brown uniforms are Real," the lecturer would say. "Rifles are Real. Soldiers are a social fiction."

And so it would go, all through the lecture. Pure mind-rot, and, thank God, most people found it all so absurd, and yet so frightening, that they never came back for any of the subsequent lectures.

But the people who did come back worried Drest; they were the types he loathed and feared. Like Cassius, they had a lean and hungry look and they thought too much.

And they thought about the wrong things.

And now there was the matter of the materializing-and-dematerializing Rehnquist, obviously a Discordian plot, in Drest's estimation. What other group could conceive it, much less organize and accomplish it? Fnord, indeed!

There had been the case of the Ambassador who found it on a staircase; and the antipornography crusader who encountered it, temporarily painted red, white, and blue, floating in a bowl of Fruit Punch; and that unspeakable incident involving His Eminence the Very Reverend Archbishop of Canterbury; and God knows how many other cases the Company had never heard about.

And President Crane was said to be far more of an oddball than anybody had realized, having strange groups for midnight meetings in the Oval Room, where incense was burned in profusion, and the Secret Service men claimed to hear strange chants that sounded, they said, like "Yog-Sothoth NeblodZin." Things were coming to a head.