The Sociological Aspect of The Mysterious Law of Fives.

George had always thought there was something witchy about Sicilians.

"Do we sign this in blood?" said Drake, removing the cloth-of-gold ribbon from the parchment and unrolling it.

George laughed nervously. "Pen and ink will do fine."

Saul's angry, triumphant eyes stare into mine, and I look away guiltily. Let me explain, I say desperately. / really am trying to help you. Your mind is a bomb.

"What Weishaupt discovered that night of February second, seventeen seventy-six," Hagbard Celine explained to Joe Malik in 1973, on a clear autumn day in Miami, about the same time that Captain Tequilla y Mota was reading Luttwak on the coup d'etat and making his first moves toward recruiting the officer's cabal that later seized Fernando Poo, "was basically a simple mathematical relationship. It's so simple, in fact, that most administrators and bureaucrats never notice it. lust as the householder doesn't notice the humble termite, until it's too late

Here, take this paper and figure for yourself. How many permutations are there in a system of four elements?"

Joe, recalling his high school math, wrote 4x3x2x1, and read aloud his answer "Twenty-four."

"And if you're one  of the elements, the  number of coalitions—or to be sinister, conspiracies—that you may have to confront would be twenty-three. Despite Simon Moon's obsessions, the twenty-three has no particularly mystic significance," Hagbard added quickly. "Just consider it pragmatically—it's a number of possible relationships which the brain can remember and handle. But now suppose the system has five elements . . . ?."

Joe wrote 5x4x3x2x1 and read aloud, "One hundred and twenty." "You see? One always encounters jumps of that size when dealing with permutations and combinations. 

But, as I say, administrators as a rule aren't aware of this. Korzybski pointed out, back in  the  early  thirties,  that  nobody  should  ever directly supervise  more  than  four subordinates, because the twenty-four possible coalitions ordinary office politics can create are enough to tax any brain. When it jumps up to one hundred and twenty, the administrator is lost. That, in essence, is the sociological aspect of the mysterious Law of Fives. The Illuminati always has five leaders in each nation, and five international Illuminati Primi supervising all of them, but each runs his own show more or less independent of the other four, united only by their common commitment to the Goal of Gruad." Hagbard paused to relight his long, black Italian cigar.

"Now," he said, "put yourself in the position of the head of any counterespionage organization. Imagine, for instance, that you're poor old McCone of the CIA at the time of the first of the New Wave of Illuminati assassinations, ten years ago, in sixty-three. Oswald was, of course, a double agent, as everybody always knew. The Russians wouldn't have let him out of Russia without getting a commitment from him to do 'small jobs,' as they're called in the business, although he'd be a 'sleeper.' That is, he'd go about his ordinary business most of the time, and only be called on occasionally when he was in the right place at the right time for a particular 'small job.' Now, of course, Washington knows this; they know that no expatriate comes back from Moscow without some such agreement And Moscow knows the other side: that the State Department wouldn't take him back unless he accepted a similar status with the CIA. 

Then, November twenty-second, Dealy Plaza—blam! the shit hits the fan. Moscow and Washington both want to know, the sooner the quicker, who was he working for when he did it, or was it his own idea? Two more possibilities loom at once: could a loner with confused politics like him have been recruited by the Cubans or the Chinese? And, then, the kicker: could he be innocent? Could another group—to avoid the obvious, let's call them Force X—have stage-managed the whole thing? So, you've got MVD and CIA and FBI and who-all falling over each other sniffing around Dallas and New Orleans for clues. And Force X gets to seem more and more implausible to all of them, because it is intrinsically incredible. It is incredible because it has no skeleton, no shape, no flesh, nothing they can grab hold of. The reason is, of course, that Force X is the Illuminati, working through five leaders with five times four times three times two times one, or one hundred and twenty different basic vectors. A conspiracy with one hundred and twenty vectors doesn't look like a conspiracy: it looks like chaos. The human mind can't grasp it, and hence declares it nonexistent. You see, the Illuminati is always careful to keep a random element in the one hundred and twenty vectors. They didn't really need to recruit  both  the leaders of the  ecology  movement and the executives  of  the  worst  pollution-producing  corporations.  They  did  it  to  create ambiguity. Anybody who tries to describe their operations sounds like a paranoid. What clinched it," Hagbard concluded, "was a real stroke of luck for the Weishaupt gang: there were two other elements involved, which nobody had planned or foreseen. One was the Syndicate."

"It always starts with nonsense," Simon is telling Joe in another time-track, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in 1969. "Weishaupt discovered the Law of Fives while he was stoned and looking at one of those shoggoth pictures you saw in Arkham. He imagined the shoggoth was a rabbit and said, 'du hexen Hase,' which has been preserved as an in-joke by Illuminati agents in Hollywood. It runs through the Bugs Bunny cartoons: 'You wascal wabbitl' But out of that schizzy mixture of hallucination and logomania, Weishaupt saw both the mystic meaning of the Five and its pragmatic application   as   a   principal   of   international   espionage,  using   permutations   and combinations that I'll explain when we have a pencil and paper. That same mixture of revelation and put-on is always the language of the supra-conscious, whenever you contact it, whether through magic, religion, psychedelics, yoga, or a spontaneous brain nova.  Maybe  the  put-on  or  nonsense  part  comes  by  contamination  from  the unconscious, I don't know. But it's always there. That's why serious people never discover anything of real importance."

"You mean the Mafia?" Joe asks.

"What? I didn't say anything about the Mafia. Are you in another time-track again?"

"No, not the Mafia alone," Hagbard says. "The Syndicate is much bigger than the Maf." 

The room returns to focus: it is a restaurant. A seafood restaurant. On Bis-cayne Avenue, facing the bay. In Miami. In 1973. The walls are decorated with undersea motifs, including a huge octopus. Hagbard, undoubtedly, had chosen this meeting place just because he liked the decor. Crazy bastard thinks he's Captain Nemo. Still: we've got to deal with him. As John says, the JAMs can't do it alone. Hagbard, grinning, seemed to be noting Joe's return to present time. "You're reaching the critical stage," he said changing the subject. "You now only have two mental states: high on drugs and high without drugs. That's very good. But as I was saying, the Syndicate is more than just the Maf. The only Syndicate, up until October twenty-third, nineteen thirty-five,  was nothing more than the Mafia, of course. But then they killed the Dutchman, and a young psychology student, who also happened to be a psychopath with a power drive like Genghis Khan, was assigned to do a paper on how the Dutchman's last words illustrate the similarity between somatic damage and schizophrenia. The Dutchman had a bullet in his gut while the police interviewed him, and they recorded everything he said, but on the surface it was all gibberish. This psychology student wrote the paper that his professor  expected,  and  got  an  A  for  the  course—but  he  also  wrote  another interpretation of the Dutchman's words, for his own purposes

They're all coming back —

 

(But in Cherry Knolls mental hospital in Sunderland, England, where it was already eleven the following morning, a schizophrenic patient who hadn't spoken in ten years abruptly began exhorting a ward attendant: "They're all coming back - Hitler, Goering, Streicher, the whole lot of them. And, behind them, the powers and persons from the other spheres who control them " But Simon Moon in Chicago still calmly and placidly retains the lotus position and instructs Mary Lou sitting in his lap: "Just hold it, hold it with your vaginal wall like you'd hold it with your hand, gently, and feel its warmth, but don't think about orgasm, don't think about the future, not even a minute ahead, think about the now, the only now, the only now, the only now that we'll ever have, just my penis in your vagina now and the simple pleasure of it, not a greater pleasure to work toward " "My back hurts," Mary Lou said.)

WE'RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TO NIGHT

There are Swedish and Norwegian kids, Danes, Italian and French kids, Greeks, even Americans. George and Hagbard move through the crowd trying to estimate its number - 200,000? 300,000? 500,000? Peace symbols dangling about every neck, nudes with body paint, nudes without body paint, long and dangling hair on boys and girls alike, and over all of it the hypnotic and unending beat. "Woodstock Europa," Hagbard says drily.  "The  last  and  final  Walpurgisnacht  and  Adam  Weishaupt's Erotion  finally realized."

WE'RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT

"It's a League of Nations," George says, "a young people's League of Nations." Hagbard isn't listening. "Up there," he points, "to the Northwest is the Rhine, where die Lorelei was supposed to sit and sing her deadly songs. There will be deadlier music on the Danube tonight."

WE'RE GONNA ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TONIGHT (But that was still seven days in the future, and now George lies unconscious in Mad Dog County Jail. And it began-that phase of the operation, as Hagbard called it-over thirty years before when a Swiss chemist named Hoffman  climbed  on  his  bicycle  and  pedaled  down  a  country  road  into  new dimensions.)

"And will they all come back?" George asked.

"All of them," Hagbard answered tightly. "When the beat reaches the proper intensity . . . unless we can stop it."

("Now I'm getting it," Mary Lou cried. "It's not what I expected. It's different from sex, and better." Simon smiled benignly. "It is sex, baby," he said. "What you've had before wasn't sex. Now we can start moving . . . but slowly ... the Gentle Way ... the Way of Tao " They're all coming back; they never died-the lunatic raved at the startled attendant-You wait, guvnor. You just wait. You'll see it.)

The amplifiers squealed suddenly. There was too much feedback, and the sound went off into a pitch beyond endurance. George winced, and saw others hold their ears. 

ROCK, ROCK, ROCK, AROUND THE CLOCK. The key missed the lock, turned and cut Muldoon's hand. "Nerves," he said to Saul. "I always feel like a burglar when I do this."

Saul grunted. "Forget burglary," he said. "We might be hanged for treason before this is over. If we don't become national heroes."

"A fanfuckingtastic case," Muldoon grinned. He tried another way.

They were in an old brownstone on Riverside Drive, trying to break into the apartment of Joseph Malik. And they were not merely looking for evidence, both tacitly admitted - they were hiding from the FBI.

You Could Never Hope to Grasp The Source of Our Power —

XANDER: 

What's after me....? 

GILES: 

It's because of What We Did, 

I know that. 

(Takes a bite of The Apple) 

XANDER : 

(shakes his head in confusion) 

What We Did?

*******

 Joyce enters, wearing a bathrobe.

JOYCE SUMMERS: 

I'm, uh, guessing I missed some fun? 

WILLOW : 

The Spirit of The First Slayer 

tried to kill us in Our Dreams. 

JOYCE SUMMERS : 

Oh! You want some hot chocolate..?

GILES: 

Somehow our joining with ... Buffy and ... invoking The Essence of The, The Slayer's Power 

was an affront to 

The  SOURCE of That Power. 

BUFFY: 

You know, you could have brought that up to us before we did it. 

GILES: 

I did! I said there could be Dire Consequences. 

BUFFY: 

Yes, but you say that about chewing too fast. 

"I know that Dolphins communicate. 

I mean, They send signals. 

You don't think that if A Shark was destroyed, that another shark could... 

Could come and..."

"Sharks don't take things personally, Mr. Brody."

"...The very first sentence of Moby Dick tells you he's a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah, but you cant find a single Melville scholar who has followed up that lead— in spite of Ahab being a truncated anagram of Sabbah. He even tells you,  again and again, directly and indirectly, that Moby Dick and Leviathan are the same creature, and that Moby Dick is often seen at the same time in two different parts of The World, but not one reader in a million groks what he's hinting at. 

There's a whole chapter on whiteness and why white is really more terrifying than black; all the critics miss the point"

" 'Osiris is a Black God,' " Joe quoted.

 Giles :

Certainly no lack of supplies —

I only wish I knew which ones would kill Adam.

 

Buffy : 

According to Riley, his power source is a Uranium core embedded somewhere inside his chest. 

Probably near the spine. 

Xander: 

Great, so we just ask him to lie down quietly while we do some exploratory surgery. 

Willow: 

What about Magick?

 Some kind of, I don't know...

Uranium extracting spell? 

Everyone looks at her in disbelief. 

Willow: 

I know. I'm reaching. 

Giles stands up. 

Giles: 

Perhaps a paralyzing spell. 

He walks over to the bookshelf and pulls a book off. 

Giles: 

Only I can't perform the incantation for this. 

Willow: 

Right. Don't you have to speak it in Sumerian or something?

 

Giles:

I DO Speak Sumerian. It's not that.

Only a...an experienced witch can incant it, and you'd have to be within striking distance of this object.

 

Xander:

See what you get for takin' French instead of Sumerian?

 

Buffy:

What was I thinking?

 

Xander:

So no problem, all we need is ComboBuffy — 

Her with Slayer strength, 

Giles' multi-lingual know how, 

and Willow's witchy power.

Giles looks at him.

 

Xander :

Yeah, don't tell me.

'I'm just full of helpful suggestions.'

 

Giles :

As a Matter of Fact -- you are.

 

********

Buffy : 

Look, I'm the only one who can stop him now. 

Just let me handle this. 

Get Your People out of here. 

Colonel : 

All right, you men follow me. 

We gotta take the Armory now. 

Soldier #3 : 

Sir. 

Buffy: 

Colonel.

 

 

Colonel: 

These people are under arrest, do you understand?

 

Soldier #4:

 Yes, sir. 

The soldiers and the Colonel all leave. 

A soldier stands up. Buffy gives him a kick to the chest. 

Another soldier tries to attack her, and she bangs his head into the desk, then hits him in the face, knocking him out cold.

 

Buffy:

We've gotta find Adam.

 

Willow:

On it. She goes over to the computer, and sits down.

 

Giles:

The Enjoining spell 

(cut to Buffy) 

is extremely touchy. 

It's, uh, 

(cut to Willow) 

volatile. 

We--We can't risk it 

(cut to Buffy) 

being interrupted. 

We need a place that's 

(cut to Giles and Xander) 

close to you and quiet. 

Cut to the screen. 

Xander:

 Uh...quiet? 

*****

Cut to the inside of 314. 

Buffy: 

Okay, it should be over here. 

They move a cart in front of the door. 

She opens up two doors. 

Buffy: 

Once I'm in, barricade the door behind me. 

Is this place okay to be Magic Central? 

Giles: 

It, uh, should do. 

Willow: 

As long as we don't get blowed up or nothin'. 

Xander: 

What're the odds of that? 

Buffy: 

How long before the ritual kicks in?

Giles: 

Five minutes, give or take. 

Xander: 

Buffy, I still don't like you going in alone. 

Buffy: 

I won't be. 

Willow

Cut to the inside of 314. Giles lights a candle.

 

Willow:

(chanting)

"The Power of The Slayer and all who yield it.

Last to Ancient First, We Invoke Thee.

 

Grant us Thy Domain and Primal Strength.

Accept Us in The Power We Possess.

Make Us Mind and Heart and Spirit Joined.

 

Let The Hand Encompass Us. Do Thy Will."

 

 

Cut back to the lower level of The Initiative.

 

Cut to the inside of 314. 

 

Willow: 

Spiritus...Spirit. 

 

She hands a card to Xander. 

 

Xander: 

Animus...Heart. 

 

She hands a card to Giles. 

 

Giles: 

Sophus...Mind. 

 

Willow: 

And Manus... 

 

Cut to Buffy punching Forrest. 

 

Willow: (o.s.) 

The Hand. 

 

Cut to the inside of 314. 

The camera view is fading. 

Willow: 

We enjoin that We may inhabit The Vessel -- 

The Hand... Daughter of Sineya...

First of The Ones... 

Cut to Adam's area in the Initiative. 

Buffy: 

Fun, isn't it? 

 

Adam: 

I do appreciate violence. 

 

Buffy: 

Good. 

 

Buffy tries to run toward him, but he punches her, sending her backwards. 

 

She rolls, gets up, and kicks him. 

 

She begins punching him in the face. 

 

Adam grabs her hand, and throws her into the wall. 

 

His skewer comes out. 

 

He tries to stab Buffy, but she snaps it with her knee and punches him in the face. 

 

Buffy: 

Broke your arm. 

 

Adam: 

Got another. 

 

His hand sprouts into a mini-gun. 

 

Adam: 

I've been upgrading. 

 

He begins firing at her. 

She dives over the computer console. 

He stops.

 

Cut to the inside of 314. 

 

Willow: 

We implore Thee, admit us, 

Bring Us to The Vessel, Take us NOW...!

Cut to Adam's room at the Initiative. 

Buffy gets out from her hiding place and sees Adam. 

He blows up the console. 

Adam looks for Buffy. 

She stands up, eyes glowing orange. 

 

Adam: 

You can't last much longer. 

 

Buffy: 

(speaking simultaneous) 

We can. We are Forever. 

 

Cut to Adam. 

 

 

Cut to Buffy. 

 

Buffy: 

(Speaking Sumerian) 

Adam: 

Interesting. 

 

Adam fires at Buffy, but it generates some sort of force field. 

 

Buffy : 

(Continues speaking Sumerian) 

Adam : 

Very interesting. 

He is still firing his mini-gun at Buffy. 

He fires a rocket at her, but she holds her hand up. 

Buffy :

(Sumerian) 

Kur. 

 

The rocket then bursts into 3 birds.

 

She holds her hand up again, 

and Adam's rocket goes back inside him. 

Adam tries to attack her, but she blocks every punch.

 She kicks him in the stomach, and he falls. 

She grabs his head. 

 

Adam: 

How...can you-- 

 

Dissolve to the inside of 314. 

 

Xander : 

You could never hope to grasp The Source --

 

Superimpose Adam's room at the Initiative. 

 

ComboBuffy : 

-- of Our Power. 

 

She uppercuts him, sending him flying to the ground. 

She picks him up and kicks him against the wall. 

 

She reaches into him and pulls out the uranium. 

 

ComboBuffy : 

.....but Yours is Right Here.

 

Adam :

(groans)

 

He falls to the ground. 

Riley walks up. 

Riley: 

Buffy. 

The Uranium begins levitating. 

A Woman begins speaking Sumarian, 

and the Uranium disappears. 

Buffy's eyes go normal and she faints, 

but Riley catches her.

" A little old man— he was five foot seven exactly, Joe remembered from the FBI files— opened the door.

"Here's our new recruit," Simon said simply.

"Come in," John Dillinger said, "and tell me how an asshole egghead like you can help us beat the shit out of those motherfucking Illuminati cocksuckers."

("They fill their books with obscene words, claiming that this is realism," Smiling Jim shouted to the KCUF assembly. "It's not my idea of realism. I don't know anybody who talks in that gutter language they call realism. And they describe every possible perversion, acts against nature that are so outrageous I wouldn't sully this audiences' ears by even mentioning their medical names. Some of them even glorify the criminal and the anarchist. I'd like to see one of these hacks come up to me and look me in the eye and say, 'I didn't do it for money. I was honestly trying to tell a good, honest story that would teach people something of value.' They couldn't say that. The lie would stick in their throats. Who can doubt where they get their orders from? What person in this audience needs to be

told what group is behind this overflowing sewer of smut and filth?")

"May storms and rains and typhoons beat them," Howard sang on. "May Great Cthulhu rise and eat them"

"I got into the JAMs in Michigan City Prison," Dillinger, much relaxed and less arrogant, was saying as he, Simon, and Joe sat in his living room drinking Black Russians.

"And Hoover knew, from the beginning?" Joe asked.

"Of course. I wanted the bastard to know— him and every other high-ranking Mason and Rosicrucian and Illuminati front-man in the country." The old man laughed harshly; except for his unmistakable eyes, which still held the strange blend of irony and intensity that Joe had noted in the 1930s photos, he was indistinguishable from any other elderly fellow who had come to California to enjoy his last years in the sun.

 "The first bank job I pulled off, in Daleville, Indiana, I used the line that I always repeated: 'Lie down on the floor and keep calm.' Hoover couldn't miss it. That's been the motto of the JAMs ever since Diogenes the Cynic. He knew no ordinary bank robber would be quoting an obscure Greek philosopher. The reason I repeated it on every heist was just to rub it in and let him know I was taunting him."

"But going back to Michigan City Prison . . ." Joe prompted, sipping his drink.

"Pierpont was the one who initiated me. He'd been with the JAMs for years by then. I was just a kid, you know— in my early twenties — and I had only pulled one job, a real botch. I couldn't understand why I got such a stiff sentence, after the D.A. promised me clemency if I'd plead guilty, and I was kind of bitter. But old Harry Pierpont saw my potential.

"At first I thought he was just another big-house faggot, when he started tracking me around and asking me all sorts of personal questions. But he was what I wanted to become — a successful bankrobber — so I played along. To tell you the truth, I was so horny it wouldn't have mattered if he was a faggot. You have no idea how horny a man gets in prison. That's why Baby-Face Nelson and a lot of other guys preferred to die rather than go back to the big house again. Hell, if you haven't been there, you can't understand. You just don't know what being horny is.

"Well, anyway, after a lot of bull about Jesus and Jehovah and the Bible and all that, Harry just asked me point-blank one day in the prison yard: 'Do you think it's possible there might be a true religion?'

I was about to say, 'Bullshit — like there might be an honest cop,' but something stopped me. 

I realized he was dead serious, and a lot might depend on my answer. So I was cautious. 

I said, 'If there is, I haven't heard about it.' 

And he just came back, real quiet, 

'Most people haven't.'

"It was a couple of days afterward that he brought the subject up again. Then, he went right on with it, showed me the Sacred Chao and everything. It took my breath away." The old man's voice trailed off, as he sank into silent memories.

"And it really does go back to Babylon?" Joe prompted.

"I'm not much of an intellectual," Dillinger replied. "Action is my arena. Let Simon tell you that part."

Simon was eager to leap into the breach. "The basic book to confirm our tradition," he said, "is The Seven Tablets of Creation, which is dated at about 2500 B.C. the time of Sargon. It describes how Tiamat and Apsu, the first gods, were coexisting in Mummu, the primordial chaos. Von Junzt, in his Unausprechlichen Kulten, tells how the Justified Ancients of Mummu originated, just about the time the Seven Tablets were inscribed. You see, under Sargon, the chief deity was Marduk. I mean, that was what the high priests gave out to the public — in private, of course, they worshipped lok-Sotot, who became the Yog-Sothoth of the Necronomicon. 

But maybe I'm going too fast. 

Getting back to the official religion of Marduk, it was based on usury. The priests monopolized the medium of exchange and were able to extract interest for lending it. They also monopolized the land, and extracted tribute for renting it. It was the beginning of what we laughingly call civilization, which has always rested on rent and interest. The old Babylonian con.

"The official story was that Mummu was dead, killed in the war between the gods. When the first anarchist group arose, they called themselves Justified Ancients of Mummu. 

Like Lao-Tse and the Taoists in China, they wanted to get rid of usury and monopoly and all the other pigshit of civilization and go back to a natural way of life. 

So, grok, they took the supposedly dead god, Mummu, and claimed he was still alive and was actually stronger than all the other gods. 

They had a good argument 'Look around,' they'd say, "what do you see most of? Chaos, right? Therefore, the god of Chaos is the strongest god, and is still alive.'

"Of course, we got our ass whipped good. We were just no match for the Illuminati in those days.

Didn't have a clue, about how they performed their 'miracles,' for instance. So we got our asses whipped again, in Greece, when the JAMs got started again, as part of the Cynic movement. 

By the tune the whole thing was happening again in Rome — usury and monopoly and the whole bag of tricks — the truce took place. 

The Justified Ancients became part of the Illuminati, a special group still keeping our own name, but taking orders from the Five. 

We thought we'd humanize them, like the anarchists who stayed in SDS after last year. 

And so it went until 1888. Then Cecil Rhodes started the Circle of Initiates and the big schism occurred. Every meeting would have a faction of Rhodes boys carrying signs that said 'Kick out the JAMs!' It was the parting of the ways. They just didn't trust us — or maybe they were afraid of being humanized.

"But we had learned a lot by our long participation in the Illuminati conspiracy, and now we know how to fight them with their own weapons."

"Fuck their weapons," Dillinger interrupted. "I like to fight them with my weapons." 

"You are behind the big unsolved bank robberies of the last few years—"

"Sure. Just in the planning, though. I'm too old to vault over tellers' cages and carry on like I did back in the thirties."

"John is also fighting on another front," Simon interjected.

Dillinger laughed. "Yes," he said. "I'm the president of Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Inc. You've seen them— 'If it's not an LBJP it's NOT an L.P.'?

"Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus?" Joe exclaimed. "My God, you put out the best rock in the country! The only rock a man my age can listen to without wincing."

"Thanks," Dillinger said modestly. "Actually, the Illuminati own the companies that put out most of the rock. We started Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus to counterattack. We were ignoring that front until they got the MC-5 to cut a disc called 'Kick Out The Jams' just to taunt us with old, bitter memories. So we came back with our own releases, and the next thing I knew I was making bales of money from it. We've also fed information, through third parties, to Christian Crusade in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so they could expose some of what the Illuminati are doing in the rock field. You've seen the Christian Crusade publications — Rhythm, Riots and Revolution, and Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, and so forth?"

"Yes," Joe said absently. "I thought it was nut literature. It's so hard," he added, "to grasp the whole picture."

"You'll get used to it," Simon smiled. "It just takes awhile to sink in."

"Who really did shoot John Kennedy?" Joe asked.

"I'm sorry," Dillinger said. "You're only a private in our army right now. Not cleared for that kind of information yet. I'll just tell you this much: his initials are H.C. — so don't trust anybody with those initials, no matter where or how you meet him."

"He's being fair," Simon told Joe. "You'll appreciate it later."

"And advancement is rapid," Dillinger added, "and the rewards are beyond your present understanding."

"Give him a hint, John," Simon suggested with an anticipatory grin. "Tell him how you got out of Crown Point Jail."

"I've read two versions of that," Joe said. "Most of the sources claim you carved a fake gun out of balsa wood and dyed it black with your shoe polish. Toland's book says that you made that story up and leaked it out to protect the man who really managed the break for you —a federal judge that you

bribed to smuggle in a real gun. Which was it?"

"Neither," Dillinger said. "Crown Point was known as the 'escape-proof jail' before I crashed out of it, and, believe me, it deserved the name. Do you want to know how I did it? I walked through the walls. Listen. . . ."

HARE KRISHNA HARE HARE

The sun beat down on the town of Daleville on July 17, 1933, like a rain of fire.

Motoring down the main street, John Dillinger felt the perspiration on his neck. Although he had been paroled three weeks earlier, he was still pale from his nine years in prison, and the sunlight was cruel on his almost albino-tinted skin.

I'm going to have to walk through that door all by myself, he thought. All alone.

And fighting every kind of fear and guilt that has been beaten into me from childhood on.

'The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology," Pierpont had said. "Remember that. We've got the Second Law of Thermodynamics on our side. 

Chaos steadily increases, all over the universe. 

All 'law and order' is a kind of temporary accident."

But I've got to walk through that door all alone. The Secret of the Five depends on it. This time it's my turn to be the goat.

Pierpont and Van Meter and the others were still back in Michigan City Prison. It was all in his hands—being the first one paroled, he had to raise the money to finance the jail-break that would get the others out. Then, having proved himself, he would be taught the JAM "miracles."

The bank suddenly loomed before him. Too suddenly. His heart skipped a beat.

Then, calmly, he drove his Chevrolet coupe over to the curb and parked.

I should have prepared better. This car should be souped-up like the ones Clyde Barrow uses. Well, I'll know that the next time.

He left his hands on the steering wheel and squeezed, hard. He took a deep breath and repeated the

Formula: "23 Skidoo."

It helped a little — but he still wanted to get the hell out of there. He wanted to drive straight back to his father's farm in Mooresville and find a job and learn all the straight things again, how to kiss a boss's ass and how to look the parole officer straight in the eye and be like everybody else.

But everybody else was an Illuminati puppet and didn't know it. He did know it and was going to liberate himself.

Hell, that's what a younger John Dillinger thought back in 1924—except that he hadn't known about the Illuminati or the JAMs, then— but he was trying to liberate himself, in his own way, when he held up that grocer. And what did it lead to? Nine years of misery and monotony and almost going mad with horniness in a stinking cell.

It'll be nine years more if I fuck up today.

"The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology."

He got out of the car and forced his feet and legs to move and he walked straight for the bank door.

"Fuck it," he said, "23 Skidoo."

He walked through the do or— and then he did the thing the bank tellers remembered after and told the police. He reached up and adjusted his straw hat to the most dapper and debonair angle — and he grinned.

"All right, this is a stick-up," he said clearly, taking out his pistol. "Everybody lie down on the floor and keep calm. None of you will get hurt."

"Oh, God," a female teller gasped, "don't shoot. Please don't shoot."

"Don't worry, honey," John Dillinger said easily, "I don't want to hurt anybody. Just open the vault."

LIKE A TREE THAT'S PLANTED BV THE WATER

"That afternoon," the old man said, "I met Calvin Coolidge in the woods near my father's farm at Mooresville. I gave him the haul — twenty thousand dollars — and it went into the JAM treasury. He gave me twenty tons of hempscript."

"Calvin Coolidge?" Joe Malik exclaimed.

"Well, of course, I knew it wasn't really Calvin Coolidge. But that was the form he chose to appear in. Who or what he really is, I haven't learned yet."

"You met him in Chicago," Simon added gleefully. "He appeared as Billy Graham that time."

"You mean the Dev—"

"Satan," Simon said simply "is just another of the innumerable masks he wears. Behind the mask is a man and behind the man is another mask. It's all a matter of merging multiverses, remember? Don't look for an Ultimate Reality. There isn't any."

"Then this person— this being—" Joe protested, "really is supernatural—"

"Supernatural, schmupernatural," Simon grimaced.

"You're still like the people in that mathematical parable about Flatland. You can only think in categories of right and left, and I'm talking about up and down, so you say 'supernatural.' There is no 'supernatural'; there are just more dimensions than you are accustomed to, that's all. If you were living in Flatland and I stepped out of your plane into a plane at a different angle, it would look to you as if I vanished 'into thin air.' Somebody looking down from our three-dimensional viewpoint would see me going off at a tangent from you, and would wonder why you were acting so distressed and surprised about it."

"But the flash of light—"

"It's an energy transformation," Simon explained patiently. "Look, the reason you can only think three-dimensionally is because there are only three directions in cubical space. That's why the Illuminati— and some of the kids they've allowed to become partially illuminized lately— refer to ordinary science as 'square.' The basic energy-vector coordinates of Universe are five-dimensional — of course —  and can best be visualized in terms of the five sides of the Illuminati Pyramid of Egypt."

"Five sides?" Joe objected. "It only has four."

"You're ignoring the bottom."

"Oh. Go on."

"Energy is always triangular, not cubical. Bucky Fuller has a line on this, by the way: he's the first one outside the Illuminati to discover it independently. The basic energy transformation we're concerned with is the one Fuller hasn't discovered yet, although he's said he's looking for it— the one that ties Mind into the matter-energy continuum. The pyramid is the key. You take a man in the lotus position and draw lines from his pineal gland— the Third Eye, as the Buddhists call it— to his two knees, and from each knee to the other, and this is what you get. . . ." Simon sketched rapidly in his notepad and passed it over to Joe:

"When the Pineal Eye opens — after fear is conquered; that is, after your first Bad Trip — you can control the energy field entirely," Simon went on. "An Irish Illuminatus of the ninth century, Scotus Ergina, put it very simply— in five words, of course —when he said Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt:

'All things that are, are lights.' Einstein also put it into five symbols when he wrote e = mc2?. The actual transformation doesn't require atomic reactors and all that jazz, once you learn how to control the mind vectors, but it always lets off one hell of a flash of light, as John can tell you."

"Damn near blinded me and knocked me on my ass, that first time in the woods," Dillinger agreed.

"But I was sure glad to know the trick. I was never afraid of being arrested after that, 'cause I could always walk out of any jail they put me in. That's why the Feds decided to kill me, you know. It was embarrassing to always find me wandering around loose again a few days after they locked me up.

You know the background to the Biograph Theatre scam— they killed three guys in Chicago, without giving them a chance to surrender, because they thought I was one of them. Well, those three were all wanted in New York for armed robbery, so nobody criticized the cops much for that caper.

But then up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, they shot three very respectable businessmen, and one of them went and died, and Hoover's Heroes caught all sorts of crap from the newspapers. So I knew where it was at; I could never again surrender and walk away a few days later. We had to produce a body for them." The old man looked suddenly sad. "There was one possibility that we hated to think about. . . . But, luckily it didn't come to that. The gimmick we finally worked out was perfect."

"And everything really follows the Fives' law?" Joe asked.

"More than you guess," Dillinger remarked blandly.

"Even when you're dealing with social fields," Simon added.

"We've run studies of cultures where the Illuminati were not in control, and they still follow Weishaupt's five-stage pattern: Verwirrung, zweitracht, Unordnung, Beamtenherrschaft and Grummet. That is: chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and aftermath. America right now is between the fourth and fifth stages. Or you might say that the older generation is mostly in Beamtenherrschaft and the younger generation is moving into Grummet rapidly."

Joe took another stiff drink and shook his head. "But why do they leave so much of it out in the open? I mean, not merely the really shocking things you told me about the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but putting the pyramid on the dollar bill where everybody sees it almost every day—"

"Hell," Simon said, "look what Beethoven did when Weishaupt illuminated him. Went right home and wrote the Fifth Symphony. You know how it begins: da-da-da-DUM. Morse code for V—the Roman numeral for five. Right out in the open, as you say. It amuses the devil out of them to confirm their low opinion of the rest of humanity by putting things up front like that and watching how almost everybody misses it. 

Of course, if somebody doesn't miss something, they recruit him right away. Look at Genesis: 'lux fiat' —right on the first page. They do it all the time. The Pentagon Building. '23 Skidoo.' The lyrics of rock songs like 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' —  how obvious can you get? 

Melville was one of the most outrageous of the bunch; the very first sentence of Moby Dick tells you he's a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah, but you cant find a single Melville scholar who has followed up that lead— in spite of Ahab being a truncated anagram of Sabbah. He even tells you,  again and again, directly and indirectly, that Moby Dick and Leviathan are the same creature, and that Moby Dick is often seen at the same time in two different parts of The World, but not one reader in a million groks what he's hinting at. 

There's a whole chapter on whiteness and why white is really more terrifying than black; all the critics miss the point"

" 'Osiris is a black god,' " Joe quoted.

"Right on! You're going to advance fast," Simon said enthusiastically. "In fact, J think it's time for you to get off the verbal level and really confront your own 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' — your own lady Isis."

"Yes," Dillinger said. "The Leif Erikson is laying offshore near California right now; Hagbard is running some hashish to the students at Berkeley. He's got a new black chick in his crew who plays the Lucy role extremely well. We'll have him send her ashore for the Rite. I suggest that you two drive up to the Norton Lodge in Frisco and I'll arrange for her to meet you there."

"I don't like dealing with Hagbard," Simon said. "He's a right-wing nut, and so is his whole gang."

"He's one of the best allies we have against the Illuminati," Dillinger said. "Besides, I want to exchange some hempscript for some of his flaxscript. Right now, the Mad Dog bunch won't accept anything but flaxscript —they think Nixon is really going to knock the bottom out of the hemp market. And you know what they do with Federal Reserve notes. Every time they get one, they burn it. Instant demurrage, they call it."

"Puerile," Simon pronounced. "It will take decades to undermine the Fed that way."

"Well," Dillinger said, "Those are the kinds of people we have to deal with. The JAMs can't do it all alone, you know."

"Sure," Simon shrugged. "But it bugs me." He stood up and put his drink on the table.

"Let's go," he said to Joe. "You're going to be illuminized."

Dillinger accompanied them to the door, then leaned close to Joe and said, "A word of advice about the Rite."

"Yes?"

Dillinger lowered his voice. "Lie down on the floor and keep calm," he said, and his old, impudent grin flashed wickedly.