Hagbard's System

"Hagbard's System," Stella said, "is very simple. He just gives you a good look at your own face in a mirror. He lets you see the puppet strings. It's still up to you to break them. He's never forced anyone to do anything that goes against their heart. Of course," she frowned in concentration, "he does sort of maneuver you into places where you have to find out in a hurry just what Your Heart is saying to you. Did he ever tell you about the Indians?"

"The Shoshone?" George asked. "The cesspool gag?"

"Let's Play A Game," Com interrupted, sinking lower in his chair as the hash hit him harder. "One of Us in this room is  A Martian, and we've got to guess from the conversation which one it is."

"Okay," Stella said easily. "Not the Shoshone," she told George, "the Mohawk."

"You're not the Martian," Coin giggled. "You stick to the subject, and that's a human trait."

George, trying to decide if the octopus on the wall was somehow connected with the Martian riddle, said, "I want to hear about Hagbard and the Mohawk. Maybe that will help us identify The Martian. You think up good games," he added kindly, "for a guy who was sent on seven assassination missions and fucked up every one of them."

"I'm dumb but I'm lucky," Coin said. "There was always somebody else there blasting away at the same time. Politicians are awfully unpopular these days, Ace."

This was a myth, Hagbard had confided to George. Until Harry Coin had completed his course in The Celine System, it was better if he believed himself the world's most unsuccessful assassin rather than face The Truth : that he had goofed only on his first job (Dallas, November 22, 1963) and really had killed five men since then. Of course, even if Hagbard wasn't a holy man any longer, he was still tricky : maybe Harry had, indeed, missed every time. Perhaps Hagbard was keeping the image of Harry as mass murderer in George's mind to see if George could relate to the man's present instead of being hung up on his "past."

At least I've learned this much, George thought. The word "past" is always in quotes for me, now.

"The Mohawk," Stella said, leaning back lazily (George's male organ or penis or dick or whatever the hell is the natural word, if there is a natural word, well, my cock, then, my delicious ever-hungry cock rose a centimeter as her blouse tightened on her breasts, Lord God, we'd been humping like wart hogs in rutting season for hours and hours and hours and I was still horny and still in love with her and I probably always would be, but then again maybe I'm The Martian). Well, in fact, the old pussy hunter didn't rise more than a millimeter, not a centimeter, and he was as slow, as an old man getting out of bed in January. I had just about fucked until my brains came out my ears, even before Harry brought in the hash and wanted to talk. Looking for the Martian. Looking for The Governor of Dorn. Looking for the Illuminati. Krishna chasing his tail around the curved space of the Einsteinian universe until he disappears up his own ass, leaving behind a behind: the back of the void: The Dorn Theory of circutheosodomognosis. 

"Owned some land," she continued. That beautiful black face, like ebon melody : yes, no painter could show but Bach could hint the delight of those purple-tinted lips in that black face, saying, "And the government wanted to steal the land. To build a dam." The inside of her cunt had that purple hue to it, also, and there was a tawny beige in her palm, like a Caucasian's skin, there were so many delights in her body, and in mine, too, treasures that couldn't be spent in a million years of the most tender and violent fucking. 

"Hagbard was The Engineer hired to build The Dam, but when he found out that The Indians would be dispossessed and relocated on less fertile ground, he refused the job."

Eris, Eros spelled sideways. "He broke his contract, so the government sued him," she said. "That's how he got to be a close friend with the Mohawk."

Which was all pure crapperoo. Obviously, Hagbard had gone to court as A Lawyer for The Indians, but that one touch of shame in him had kept him from admitting to Stella that he had once been A Lawyer, so he made up that bit about being The Engineer on The Dam to explain how he got involved in the case.

"He helped them move when they were dispossessed." I could see bronze men and women moving in twilight, a hill in the background. "This was a long time ago, back in the '50s, I think. (Hagbard was a hell of a lot older than he looked.) One Indian was carrying A Raccoon he said was His Grandfather. He was a very old man himself. He said Grandfather could remember General Washington and how he changed after he became President. (He  would  be  there  tonight,  that  being  who  had  once  been  George Washington and Adam Weishaupt: he of whom Hitler had said, "He is already among us. He is intrepid and terrible. I am afraid of him.") Hagbard says he kept thinking of Patrick  Henry,  the  one  man  who  saw  what  had  happened  at  the  Constitutional Convention. It was Henry who had looked at the Constitution and said right away, 'I smell a rat. It squints toward Monarchy.' The Old Indian, whose name was Uncle John Feather, said that Grandfather, when he was a man, could speak to all animals. He said the Mohawk Nation was more than the living, it was the soul and the soil joined together. When the land was taken, some of the soul died. He said that was why he couldn't speak to all animals but only to those who had once been part of His Family." 

The soul is in the blood, moving the blood. It is in the night especially. Nutley is a typical Catholic-dominated New Jersey town, and the Dorns are Baptists, so I was hemmed in two ways, but even as a boy I used to walk along the Passaic looking for Indian  arrowheads,  and  the  soul  would  move  when I  found one. Who was the anthropologist who thought the Ojibway believed all rocks were alive? A chief had straightened him out: "Open your eyes," he said, "and you'll see which rocks are alive." 

We haven't had our Frobenius yet, American anthropology is like virgins writing about sex.

"I know who the Martian is," Coin crooned in a singsong. "But I'm not telling. Not yet." That man who was either the most successful or the most unsuccessful assassin of the 20th century and who had raped me (which was supposed to destroy my manhood forever according to some idiots) was smashed out of his skull and he looked so happy that I was happy for him.

"Hagbard," Stella went on, "stood there like a tree. He was paralyzed. Finally, old Uncle John Feather asked what was the matter."

Stella leaned forward, her face more richly black against the golden octopus on the wall. "Hagbard had foreseen the ecological catastrophe. He had seen the rise of the Welfare State, Warrior Liberalism (as he calls it) and the spread of Marxism out of Russia across the world. He saw why it all had to happen, with or without the Illuminati helping it along. He understood The Snafu Principle."

He had worked all that night, after explaining to Uncle John Feather that he was troubled in his heart at the tragedy of the Mohawk (not mentioning the more enormous tragedy coming at the planet, the tragedy which the old man understood already in his own terms); hard work, carrying pitiful cheap furniture from cabins onto trucks, tying whole households' possessions with tough ropes; he was sweating and winded when they finished shortly before dawn. The next day, he had burned his naturalization papers and put the ashes in an envelope addressed to the President of the United States, with a brief  note:  "Everything  relevant  is  ruled  irrelevant.  Everything  material  is  ruled immaterial. An ex-citizen." The ashes of his Army Reserve discharge went to the Secretary of Defense with a briefer note: "Non serviam. An ex-slave." That year's income tax form went to the Secretary of the Treasury, after he wiped his ass on it; the note said: "Try robbing a poor box. Der Einziege." His fury still mounting, he grabbed his copy of Das Kapital off the bookshelf, smiling bitterly at the memory of his sarcastic marginal notes, scrawled "Without private property there is no private life" on the flyleaf, and mailed it to Josef Stalin in the Kremlin. Then he buzzed his secretary, gave her three months pay in lieu of notice of dismissal and walked out of his law office forever. He had declared war on all governments of the world.

His afternoon was spent giving away his savings, which at that time amounted to seventy thousand dollars. Some he gave to drunks on the street, some to little boys or little girls in parks; when the Stock Exchange closed, he was on Wall Street, handing out fat bundles of bills to the wealthiest-looking men he could spot, telling them, "Enjoy it. Before you die, it won't be worth shit." That night he slept on a bench hi Grand Central Terminal; in the morning, flat broke, he signed on as A.B.S. aboard a merchant ship to Norway.

That summer he tramped across Europe working as tourist guide, cook, tutor, any odd job that fell his way, but mostly talking and listening. About politics. He heard that the Marshall Plan was a sneaky way of robbing Europe under the pretense of helping it; that Stalin would have more trouble with Tito than he had had with Trotsky; that the Viet Minh would surrender soon and the French would retake Indo-China; that nobody in Germany was a Nazi anymore; that everybody in Germany was still a Nazi; that Dewey would unseat Truman easily.

During his last walking tour of Europe, in the 1930s, he had heard that Hitler only wanted Czechoslovakia and would do anything to avoid war with England; that Stalin's troubles with Trotsky would never end; that all Europe would go socialist after the next war; that America would certainly enter the war when it came; that America would certainly stay out of the war when it came.

One idea had remained fairly constant, however, and he heard it everywhere. That idea was that more government, tougher government, more honest govern-ment was the answer to all human problems.

Hagbard began making notes for the treatise that! later became Never Whistle While You're Pissing. He| began with a section that he later moved to the middle of the book:It is now theoretically possible to link the human nervous system into a radio network so that, micro-miniaturized receivers being implanted in people's brains, the messages coming out of these radios would be indistinguishable to the subjects from the voice of their own thoughts. One central transmitter, located in the nation's capital, could broadcast all day long what the authorities wanted the people to believe. The average man on the receiving end of these broadcasts would not even know he was a robot; he would think it was his own voice he was listening to. The average woman could be treated similarly.

It is ironic that people will find such a concept both shocking and frightening. Like Orwell's 1984, this is not a fantasy of the future but a parable of the present. Every citizen in every authoritarian society already has such a "radio" built into his or her brain. This radio is the little voice that asks, each time a desire is formed, "Is it safe? Will my wife (my husband/my boss/my church/my community) approve? Will people ridicule and mock me? Will the police come and arrest me?" This little voice the Freudians call "The Superego," with Freud himself vividly characterized as "The Ego's harsh master." With a more functional approach, Peris, Hefferline and Goodman, in Gestalt Therapy, describe this process as "a set of conditioned verbal habits."

This set, which is fairly uniform throughout any authoritarian society, determines the actions which will, and will not, occur there. Let us consider humanity a biogram {the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of "conditioned verbal habits"). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. When the logogram reinforces the biogram, we have a libertarian society, such as still can be found among some American Indian  tribes.  Like Confucianism  before  it  became  authoritarian  and  rigidified, American Indian ethics is based on speaking from the heart and acting from the heart— 'that is, from the biogram.

No authoritarian society can tolerate this. All authority is based on conditioning men and women to act from the logogram, since the logogram is a set created by those in authority.

Every authoritarian logogram divides society, as it divides the individual, into alienated halves. Those at the bottom suffer what I shall call the burden of nescience. The natural sensory activity of the biogram—what the person sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels, and, above all, what the organism as a whole, or as a potential whole, wants —is always irrelevant  and  immaterial.  The  authoritarian  logogram,  not  the  field  of  sensed experience, determines what is relevant and material. This is as true of a highly paid advertising copywriter as it is of an engine lathe operator. The person acts, not on personal experience and the evaluations of the nervous system, but on the orders from above. Thus, personal experience and personal judgment being nonoperational, these functions become also less "real." They exist, if at all, only in that fantasy land which Freud called the Unconscious. Since nobody has found a way to prove that the Freudian Unconscious really exists, it can be doubted that personal experience and personal judgment exist; it is an act of faith to assume they do. The organism has become, as Marx said, "a tool, a machine, a robot."

Those at the top of the authoritarian pyramid, however, suffer an equal and opposite burden of omniscience. All that is forbidden to the servile class—the web of perception, evaluation and participation in the sensed universe—is demanded of the members of the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and decision-making for the whole society.

But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually  going  on  in  the  world where  the  actual  productivity  of  society  occurs. 

Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.

The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society.

I call this the Snafu Principle.

That autumn, Hagbard settled in Rome. He worked as a tourist guide, amusing himself by combining authentic Roman history with Cecil B. DeMille (none of the tourists ever caught him out); he also spent long hours scrutinizing the published reports of Interpol. 

His Wanderjahr was ending; he was preparing for action. Never subject to guilt or masochism, he had one reason only for his dispersal of his savings: to prove to himself that what he intended could be done starting from zero. When winter arrived, his studies were complete: Interpol's crime statistics had very kindly provided him with a list of those commodities which, either because of tariffs intended to stifle competition or because of "morals" laws, could become the foundation of a successful career in smuggling.

One year later, in the Hotel Claridge on Forty-fourth Street in New York, Hagbard was placed under arrest by two U.S. narcotics agents named Galley and Eichmann. "Don't take it too hard," Galley said. "We're only following orders."

"It's okay," Hagbard said, "don't feel guilty. But what are you going to do with my cats?"

Galley knelt on the floor and examined the kittens thoughtfully, scratching one under the chin, rubbing the ear of the other. "What's their names?" he asked.

"The male is called Vagina," Hagbard said. "The female I call Penis." "The male is called what?" Eichmann asked, blinking.

"The male is Vagina, and the female is Penis," Hagbard said innocently, "but there's a metaphysic behind it. First, you have to ask yourself, which appeared earlier on this planet, life or death? Have you ever thought about that?"

'This guy is nuts," Galley told Eichmann.

"You've got to realize," Hagbard went on, "that life is a coming apart and death is a coming together. Does that help?"

("I never know whether Hagbard is talking profundity or asininity," George said dreamily, toking away.)

"Reincarnation works backward in time," Hagbard went on, as the narcs opened drawers and peered under chairs. "You always get reborn into an earlier historical period. 

Mussolini is a witch in the 14th century now, and catching hell from the Inquisitors for his bum karma in this age. People who 'remember' the past are all deluded. The only ones who really remember past incarnations remember the future, and they become science-fiction writers."

(A little old lady from Chicago walked into George's room with a collection can marked Mothers March Against Phimosis. He gave her a dime and she thanked him and left. After the door closed, George wondered if she had been a hallucination or just a woman who had fallen through a space-time warp and landed on the Leif Erikson.)

"What the hell are these?" Eichmann asked. He had been searching Hagbard's closet and found some red, white and blue bumper stickers. The top half of each letter was blue with white stars, and the bottom half was red-and-white stripes; they looked patriotic as all get-out. The slogan formed this way was

LEGALIZE ABORTION PREGNANCY IS A JEWISH PLOT!

Hagbard had been circulating these in neighborhoods like the Yorkville section of Manhattan, the western suburbs of Chicago, and other places where old-fashioned Father Coughlin-Joe McCarthy style Irish Catholic fascism was still strong. This was a trial run on the logogram-biogram double-bind tactic out of which the Dealy Lama later developed Operation Mindfuck.

"Patriotic stickers," Hagbard explained.

"Well, they look patriotic . . ." Eichmann conceded dubiously.

("Did a little woman from Chicago just walk through this room?" George asked.

"No," Harry Coin said, toking again. "I didn't see any woman from Chicago. But I know who the Martian is.")

"What the hell are these?" Galley asked. He had found some business-size cards saying RED in green letters and GREEN in red letters.

("When you're out of it all the way, on the mountain," George asked, "that's neither the biogram nor the logogram, right? What the hell is it, then?")

"An antigram," Hagbard explained, still helpful.

"The cards are an antigram?" Eichmann repeated, bewildered.

"I may have to place you under arrest and take you downtown," Hagbard warned. "You've both been very naughty boys. Breaking and entering. Pointing a gun at me— that's technically assault with a deadly weapon. Seizing my narcotics—that's theft. All sorts of invasion of privacy. Very, very naughty."

"You can't arrest us," Eichmann whined. "We're supposed to arrest you." "Which is red and which is green?" Hagbard asked.

"Look again," They looked and RED was now really red and GREEN was really green. (Actually, the tints changed according to the angle at which Hagbard held the card, but he wasn't giving away his secrets to them.) "I can also change up and down," he added. 

"Worse yet, I clog zippers. Neither one of you can open your fly right now, for instance. 

My real gimmick, though, is reversing revolvers. Try to shoot me and the bullets will come out the back and you'll never use your good right hand again. Try it and see if I'm bluffing."

"Can't you go a little easy on us, officer?" Eichmann took out his wallet. "A cop's salary ain't the greatest in the world, eh?" He nudged Hagbard insinuatingly.

"Are you trying to bribe me?" Hagbard asked sternly.

"Why not?" Harry Coin whined. "You got nothing to gain by killing me. Take the money and put me off the sub at the first island you pass."

"Well," Hagbard said thoughtfully, counting the money. 

"I can get more," Harry added. "I can send it to you."

"I'm sure." Hagbard put the money in his clam-shell ashtray and struck a match. There was  a  brief,  merry  blaze,  and  Hagbard  asked  calmly,  "Do  you  have  any  other inducements to offer?"

"I'll tell you anything you want to know about the Illuminati!" Harry shrieked, really frightened now, realizing that he was in the hands of a madman to whom money meant nothing.

"I know more about the Illuminati than you do," Hagbard replied, looking bored. "Give me a philosophic reason, Harry. Is there any purpose in allowing a specimen like you to go on preying on the weak and innocent?"

"Honest, I'll go straight. I'll join your side. I'll work for you, kill anybody you want."

"That's a possibility," Hagbard conceded. "It's a slim one, though. The world is full of killers and potential killers. Thanks to the Illuminati and their governments, there's hardly an adult male alive who hasn't had some military training. What makes you think I couldn't go out on the streets of any large city and find ten better-qualified killers than you inside an afternoon?"

"Okay, okay," Harry said, breathing hard. "I don't have no college education, but I'm not a fool either. Your men dragged me from Mad Dog Jail to this submarine. You want something, Ace. Otherwise, I'd be dead already."

"Yes, I want something." Hagbard leaned back in his chair. "Now you're getting warm, Harry. I want something but I won't tell you what it is. You've got to produce it and show it to me without any clues or hints. And if you can't do that, I really will have you killed. I shit you not, fellow. This is my version of a trial for your past crimes. I'm the judge and the jury and you've got to win an acquittal without knowing the rules. How do you like that game?"

"It ain't fair."

"It's more of a chance than you gave any of the men you shot, isn't it?"

Harry Coin licked his lips. "I think you're bluffing," he ventured finally. "You're some chicken-shit liberal who doesn't believe in capital punishment. You're looking for an excuse to not kill me."

"Look into my eyes, Harry. Do you see any mercy in them?"

Coin began to perspire and finally looked down into his lap. "Okay," he said hollowly. "How much tune do I have?"

Hagbard opened his drawer and took out his revolver. He cracked it open, showing the bullets, and quickly snapped it closed again. He slipped the safety catch—a procedure he later found unnecessary with George Dorn, who knew nothing about guns— and aimed at Harry's belly. "Three days and three minutes are both too long," he said casually. "If you're ever going to get it, you're going to get it now."

"Mama," Coin heard himself exclaim.

"You're going to shit your pants in a moment," Hagbard said coldly. "Better not. I find bad smells offensive, and I might shoot you just for that. And mama isn't here, so don't call her again."

Coin saw himself lunging across the room, the gun roaring in mid-leap, but at least trying to get his hands on this bastard's throat before dying.

"Pointless," Hagbard grinned icily. "You'd never get out of the chair." His finger tightened slightly, and Coin's gut churned; he knew enough about guns to know how easy it was to have an accident, and he thought of the gun going off even before the bastard Celine intended it to, maybe even as he was on the edge of guessing the goddam riddle, the pointlessness of it was the final horror, and he looked again into those eyes without guilt or pity or any weakness he could exploit; then, for the first time in his life, Harry Coin knew peace, as he relaxed into death.

"Good enough," Hagbard said from far away, snapping the safety back in place. "You've got more on the ball than either of us realized."

Harry slowly came back and looked at that face and those eyes. "God," he said.

"I'm going to give you the gun in a minute," Hagbard went on. "Then it's my turn to sweat. Of course, if you kill me you'll never get off this sub alive, but maybe you'll think that's worthwhile, just for revenge. On the other hand, maybe you'll be curious about that instant of peace—and you'll wonder if there's an easier way to get back there and if I can teach it to you. Maybe. One more thing, before I toss you the gun. Everybody who joins me does it by free choice. When you said you'd come over to my side just because you were afraid of dying, you had no value to me at all. Here's the gun, Harry. Now, I want you to check it. There are no gimmicks, no missing firing pin or anything like that. No other tricks, either—nobody watching you through a peephole and ready to gun you down the minute you aim at me, or anything like that. I'm totally at your mercy. What are you going to do?"

Harry examined the gun carefully, and looked back at Hagbard. He had never studied kinesics and orgonomy as Hagbard had, but he could read enough of the human face and body to know what was going on in the other man. Hagbard had that same peace he himself had experienced for a moment.

"You win, you bastard," Harry said, tossing the gun back. "I want to know how you do it."

"Part of you already knows," Hagbard smiled gently, putting the gun back in the drawer. "You just did it, didn't you?"

"What would he have done if I did block?" Harry asked Stella in present time.

"Something. I don't know. A sudden act of some sort that scared you more than the gun. He plays it by ear. The Celine System is never twice the same."

"Then I was right, he wouldn't have killed me. It was all bluff."

"Yes and no." Stella looked past Harry and George, into the distance. "He wasn't acting with  you,  he  was  manifesting.  The  mercilessness  was  quite real. There was no sentimentality involved in saving you. He did it because it's part of his Demonstration."

"His Demonstration?" George asked, thinking of geometry problems and the neat Q.E.D. at the bottom, back in Nutley years and years ago.

"I've known Hagbard longer than she has," Eich-mann said. "In fact, Galley and I were among the first people he enlisted. I've watched him over the years, and I still don't understand him. But I understand the Demonstration."

"You know," George said absently, "when you two first came in, I thought you were a hallucination."

"You never saw us at dinner, because we work in the kitchen," Galley explained. "We eat after everybody else."

"Only a small part of the crew are former criminals," Stella told George, who was looking confused. "Rehabilitating a Harry Coin—pardon me, Harry— doesn't really excite Hagbard much. Rehabilitating policemen and politicians, and teaching them useful trades, is work that really turns Hagbard on."

"But   not   for  sentimental   reasons,"   Eichmann  emphasized.   "It's  part   of   his Demonstration."

"It's his Memorial to the Mohawk Nation, too," Stella said. "That trial set him off. He tried a direct frontal assault that time, attempting to cut through the logogram with a scalpel. It didn't work, of course; it never does. Then he decided: 'Very well, I'll put them where words can't help, and see what they do then.' That's his Demonstration."

Hagbard, actually—well, not actually; this is just what he told me—had started with two handicaps, intending to prove that they weren't handicaps. The first was that he would have a bank balance of exactly $00.00 at the beginning, and the second was that he would never kill another human being throughout the Demonstration. That which was to be proved (namely, that government is a hallucination, or a self-fulfilling prophecy) could be shown only if all his equipment, including money and people, came to him through honest trade or voluntary association. Under these rules, he could not shoot even in self-defense, for the biogram of government servants was to be preserved, and only their logograms could be disconnected, deactivated and defused. The Celine System was a consistent, although flexible, assault on the specific conditioned reflex— that which compelled people to look outside themselves, to a god or a government, for direction or strength. The servants of government all carried weapons; Hagbard's insane scheme depended on rendering the weapons harmless. He called this the Tar-Baby Principle ("You Are Attached To What You Attack").

Being a man of certain morbid self-insight, he realized that he himself exemplified the Tar-Baby Principle and that his attacks on government kept him perpetually attached to it. It was his malign and insidious notion that government was even more attached to him; that his existence qua anarchist qua smuggler qua outlaw aroused greater energetic streaming in government people than their existence aroused in him: that, in short, he was the Tar Baby on which they could not resist hurling themselves in anger and fear: an electrochemical reaction in which he could bond them to himself just as the Tar Baby captured anyone who swung a fist at it.

More (there was always more, with Hagbard), he had been impressed, on reading Weishaupt's Uber Strip Schnipp-Schnapp, Weltspielen and Funfwissenschaft, by the passage on the Order of Assassins, which read:

Surrounded by Moslem maniacs on one side and Christian maniacs on the other, the wise Lord Hassan preserved his people and his cult by bringing the art of assassination to esthetic perfection. With just a few daggers strategically placed in exactly the right throats, he found Wisdom's alternative to war, and preserved the peoples by killing their leaders. Truly, his was a most exemplary life of grandmotherly kindness.

"Grossmutterlich Gefalligkeit," muttered Hagbard, who had been reading this in the original German, "now where have I heard that before?"

In a second, he remembered: the Mu-Mon-Kan or "Gateless Gate" of Rinzai Zen contained a story about a monk who kept asking a Zen Master, "What is the Buddha?" 

Each time he asked, he got hit upside the head with the Master's staff. Finally discouraged, he left and sought enlightenment with another Master, who asked him why he had left the previous teacher. When the poor gawk explained, the second Master gave him the ontological hotfoot: "Go back to your previous Master at once," he cried, "and apologize for not showing enough appreciation of his grandmotherly kindness!"

Hagbard was not surprised that Weishaupt evidently knew, in 1776 when Uber Strip Schnipp-Schnapp was written, about a book which hadn't yet been translated into any European tongue; he was astonished, however, that even the evil Ingolstadt Zauberer had understood the rudiments of the Tar-Baby Principle. It never pays to underestimate the Illuminati, he thought then —for the first time. He was to think it many times in the next two and a half decades.

On April 24, when he told Stella to deliver some Kallisti Gold to George's stateroom, Hagbard had already asked FUCKUP the odds that Illuminati ships would arrive in Peos within the time he intended to be there. The answer was better than 100-to-l. He thought about what that meant, then buzzed to have Harry Coin sent in.

Harry swaggered to a chair, trying to look insolent, and said, "So you're the leader of the Discordians, eh?"

"Yes," Hagbard said evenly, "and on this ship, my word is law. Wipe that silly grin off your face and sit up straight." He observed the involuntary stiffening of Harry's body before the man caught himself and remembered to maintain his slouch. Typical: Coin could resist the key conditioning phrases, but only with effort. "Listen," he said softly "/ will tell you only one more time"—another Bavarian Fire Drill, that—"This is my ship. You will address me as Captain Celine. You will come to attention when I talk to you. Otherwise . . ." he let the phrase trail off.

Slowly, Coin shifted to a more respectful kinesic posture—immediately modifying it by grinning more insolently. Well, that was good; the streak of rebellion ran deep. The breathing was not bad for a professional criminal: the only block seemed to be at the bottom of the exhalation. The grin was a defense against tears, of course, as with most chronic American smilers. Hagbard attempted a probe: Harry's father was the kind who pretended to consider the case and to toy with forgiveness before he would administer the thrashing.

"Is that better?" Harry asked, accentuating his respectful posture and grinning more sarcastically.

"A little," Hagbard said, sounding mollified. "But I don't know what I'm going to do with you, Harry. That's a bad bunch you've been mixed up with, very un-American." He paused to get a reaction to the word; it came at once.

"Their money is as good as anyone's," Harry said defiantly. His shoes crept backwards, as he spoke, and his neck decreased an inch—the turtle reflex, Hagbard called it; and it was a sure sign of the repressed guilt denied by the man's voice.

"You were born pretty poor, weren't you?" Hagbard asked, in a neutral tone. "Poor? We was white niggers."

"Well, I guess there's some excuse for you . . ." Hagbard watched: the grin grew wider, the body imperceptibly moved back toward slouching. "But, to turn on your own country, Harry. That's bad. That's the lowest thing a human being can do. It's like turning against your own mother." The toes curled inward again, tentatively. What did Harry's father say before wielding the belt? Hagbard caught it: "Harry," he repeated it gravely, "you haven't been acting like a proper white man. You've been acting like you got nigger blood."

The grin stretched to the breaking point and became a grimace, the body stiffened to the most respectful possible posture. "Now, look here, sir," Harry began, "you got no call to talk to me that way—"

"And you're not even ashamed," Hagbard ran over him. "You don't show any remorse." 

He shook his head with profound discouragement. "I can't let you wander around loose, committing more crimes and treasons. I'm going to have to feed you to the sharks."

"Listen, Captain Celine, sir, I've got a money belt under this shirt and it's full of more hundred-dollar bills than you ever saw at one time . . ."

"Are you trying to bribe me?" Hagbard asked sternly; the rest of the scene would be easy, he reflected. Part of his mind drifted to the Illuminati ships he would meet at Peos. 

There was no way to use the Celine System without communicating, and he knew the crew would be "protected" against him by some Illuminati variation on the ear wax of Ulysses' men passing the Sirens. The money would go in the giant clam-shell ashtray, a real shocker for a man like Coin, but what would he do about the Illuminati ships?

When the time came to produce the gun, he slipped the safety off viciously. If I'm going to join the ancient brotherhood of killers, he thought morosely, maybe I should have the stomach to start with a visible target. "Three days and three minutes are both too long," he said, trying to sound casual, "if you're ever going to get it, you're going to get it 

now." They would be at Peos in less than an hour, he thought, as Coin involuntarily cried "Mama." Like Dutch Schultz, Hagbard reflected; like how many others? It would be interesting to interview doctors and nurses and find out how many people passed out with that primordial cry for the All-Protector on their lips . . . but Harry finally surrendered, abdicated, left the robot running itself according to the biogram. He was no longer sitting in an insolent slouch, a respectful attention, a guilty cramp ... He was simply sitting. He was ready for death.

"Good enough," Hagbard said. "You've got more on the ball than either of us realized." The man would now transfer his submissive reflexes to Hagbard; and the next stage would be longer and harder, before he learned to stop playing roles entirely and just manifest as he had in the face of extinction.

The gun gambit was variation #2 of the third basic tactic in the Celine System; it had five usual sequels. Hagbard picked the most dangerous one—he usually did, since he didn't much like the gun gambit at all, and could only stomach it if he gave most of the subjects a chance at the other role. This time, however, he knew he had another motive: somewhere, deep inside, a coward in him hoped Harry Coin was crazier than he had estimated and would, in fact, shoot; that way Hagbard could avoid the decision awaiting him in Peos.

"You win, you bastard," Coin's voice said; Hagbard came back and quickly rushed through a small verbal game involving Hell images picked up from Harry's childhood. 

When he had Coin sent back to his room, under light security, he slouched in his chair and rubbed his eyes tiredly. He probed for Dorn and found the Dealy Lama was on that channel, broadcasting.

—Leave the kid alone, he beamed. It's my turn now. Go contemplate your navel, you old fraud.

A shower of rose petals was the nonverbal answer. The Lama faded out. George went on rapping to himself on the themes planted by the ELF leader: Odd, the big red one. Eye think it was his I. The eye of Apollo. His luminous I.

—Aye, trust me not, Hagbard beamed. Trust not a man who's rich in flax—his morals may be sadly lax. (Some of my own doubts getting in here, he thought.) Her name is Stella Maris. Black star of the seas. (I won't tell him who she and Mavis really are.) George, I want you in the captain's control room.

George should start with variation #1, the Liebestod or orgasm-death trip, Hagbard decided. Make him aware of the extent to which he treats women as objects—and, of course, give him some mystical hogwash later to gloss it over temporarily, so the doubt will be pushed into the unconscious for a while. Yes: George was already on a pornography trip, very similar to Atlanta Hope and Smiling Jim Treponema, except that in his case it was egodystonic.

"That was a good trick," George said a few moment's later in the captain's control room, "how you got me up on the bridge with that telepathy thing."

Hagbard, still thinking about the decision in Peos, tried to look innocent when he replied, "I called you on the intercom." He realized that he was whistling and pissing at once, worrying about Peos as well as about George, and brought himself back sharply. "Absurd" was the word in George's mind—absurd innocence. Well, Hagbard thought, I fucked that one up.

"You think I can't tell a voice in my head from a voice in my ears?" George demanded. Hagbard roared with laughter, totally in the present again; but after George had been sent to the chapel for his initiation, the problem returned. Either the Demonstration failed, or the Demonstration failed. Double bind. Damned both ways. It was infuriating, but all the books had warned him long ago: "As ye give, so shall ye get." He had used the Celine System on quite a few people over nearly three decades, and now he was in the middle of a classic Celine Trap himself. There was no correct answer, except to give up trying.

When the moment came, though, he found that part of him had not given up trying. "Ready for destruction of enemy ships," said Howard.

Hagbard shook his head. George was remembering some crazy incident in which he had tried to commit suicide while standing by the Passaic River, and Hagbard kept picking up parts of that bum trip while trying to clear his own head. "I wish we could communicate with them," he said aloud, realizing that he was possibly blowing the guru game by revealing his inner doubts to George. "I wish I could give them a chance to surrender ..."

"You don't want them too close when they go," said Howard. 

"Are your people out of the way?" Hagbard asked in agony.

"Of course," the dolphin replied irritably. "Quit this hesitating. This is no time to be a humanitarian."

"The sea is crueler than the land," Hagbard protested, but then he added "sometimes."

"The sea is cleaner than the land," Howard replied. Hagbard tried to focus—the dolphin was obviously aware of his distress, and soon George would be (no: a quick probe showed George had retreated from the scene into the past and was shouting, "You silly sons of bitches," at somebody named Carlo). "These people have been your enemies for thirty thousand years."

"I'm not that old," Hagbard said wearily. The Demonstration had failed. He was committed, and others with him were now committed. Hagbard reached out a brown finger, let it rest on a white button on the railing in front of him, then pressed it decisively. "That's all there is to it," he said quietly.

("Be a wise-ass then! When you start flunking half your subjects,-perhaps you'll come back to reality." A voice long, long ago ... at Harvard . . . And once, in The South, he had been moved by a very simple, a ridiculously simple, Fundamentalist hymn:

Jesus walked this lonesome valley 

He had to walk it all alone 

Nobody else could walk there for Him 

He had to walk it by Himself.

I will walk this lonesome valley, Hagbard thought bitterly, all by myself, all the way to Ingolstadt and the final confrontation. But it's meaningless now, the Demonstration has failed; all I can do is pick up the pieces and salvage what I can. Starting with Dorn right here and right now.)