Holds the Bishop of Boston in slavery.
'Midst hootings and howls-"
He broke down again, then went on:
" 'Midst hootings and howls
He deflowers young owls,
Which he keeps in an underground aviary!"
Hassan looked at him with paranoid suspicion. "Very funny," he said, unsmiling, and hastened out to his limousine.
"Back uptown?" the chauffeur asked.
"Broad Street," Hassan said, giving an address. He was in mild first-circuit anxiety all the way to his destination.
He remembered his first conversation with Washy Bridge. "How many?" he had asked, not in shock or in; outrage but in simple unbelief, inability to believe. They are our creation: we are their creation.
"Fifty-seven of us." The scientist was perspiring with anxiety, now that the secret was finally out, the reason he had fled Project Pan.
"Fifty-seven," Hassan said hollowly. Heinz 57 Varieties, he remembered absently from the advertisements. "And all of them with Ph.D.'s and M.D.'s and more diplomas than a dog has fleas…"
"You've got to realize it works," Washy said then. "You just can't understand if you don't keep that in mind. It works."
"And two hundred to three hundred years in jail for each of you if it ever gets out," Hassan added harshly. "You just better keep that in mind too."
"That's why I'm here," the scientist said.
Hassan had paced the room briefly. "Wheels within wheels," he said once. "Wheels within wheels within wheels." Once he grinned. "At least I know why the Cincinnati cocaine market is thriving," he said with a lewd chuckle. "Cincinnati," he repeated, shaking his head. "What do they call it again?"
"Knights of Christianity United in Faith."
A habit obscene and unsavory, Hassan remembered suddenly, jostled back into present time. He had arrived at his destination.
The man to whom he spoke then was a stockbroker according to public knowledge but pursued certain other careers in a private and clandestine manner.
'Frank Sullivan,' " Hassan said. "I want to know everything about him. Everything."
The part-time stockbroker turned ashy-white. He got up, glared suspiciously at a window washer outside his office, and walked over to check that the window was closed all the way.
"Impossible," he said then, in a near whisper. "If I told you the one most amusing and interesting fact about him, I'd be dead tomorrow."
"That hot?" Hassan asked.
The man leaned back in his chair and gazed absently toward the ceiling. He recited some names, beginning with Jack Ruby of Dallas and ending with a senator whose private plane had crashed just the week before, on Christmas Eve. "Those are just a few," he ended, "who happened to find out too much about Frank Sullivan."
Hassan spoke only once during the drive back to Harlem.
"Secrecy!" he said with a profound grimace.
The chauffeur looked back nervously. He had never heard so much obscene emphasis in a single word.
GWB-666
He knows when you are sleeping
He knows when you're awake
Within three days the storm had become a blizzard in most of the Northeast and Roy Ubu was feeling snowed under in every sense of the phrase, driving with extreme caution, thinking that the new Head of Programming for the Beast, whatzisname, Moon, really seemed to take some kind of fiendish pleasure in producing reams and reams of records to prove that the records were all defective…
The snow whipped Ubu again as he parked and skittered into GWB to find Moon once again cheerfully perusing printouts that demonstrated, for the thirty-third time, that every single one of the missing scientists had simply stopped leaving ink or magnetic tape traces sometime between summer '81 and spring '82. Which was impossible in the age of bureaucracy: It was like an animal not leaving footprints on a wet beach.
"But the Beast is supposed to know," Ubu had protested once.
"GWB-666 knows everything that has been recorded," Moon said patiently. "It does not know what has never been recorded. You can't see behind your head; GWB-666 can't scan what was never recorded anywhere."
"But dammit nobody can do anything in this country dammit without making a record."
"Nobody but these 132 very elusive men and women," Moon replied placidly. "If you'll notice, I marked the bios where it deals with experience in programming. Seventy-eight out of the 132 have such experience. They obviously learned a great deal about Erase and Cancel codes…"
Roy Ubu made a despairing gesture. "How many bits can this thing access?" he asked wearily.
"Over one hundred twenty billion bytes," Simon said. "Nearly a trillion bits. There's never been an information system like this in all history," he added with some pride.
"But it has amnesia where these scientists are concerned," Ubu said bitterly.
The robot whose passport said "Frank Sullivan" was in Washington that weekend and reported to a high official in Naval Intelligence, who suspected him of being a double agent infiltrating them for Air Force Intelligence.
After the usual sordid business was disposed of, "Sullivan" asked casually if N.I. had any interest in Hassan i Sabbah X.
"Good Lord and Aunt Agnes, no!" said the official emphatically. "Congress will have our ass if we get into anything domestic." Then he asked, elaborately disinterested, "What did you happen to pick up?"
"Well, if there's no real interest…" Pseudo-Sullivan gazed off into space absently.
There was a short silence.
"If it's something big…" the official said finally.
"Sullivan" held out his hand. Another commercial transaction took place.
"It's about a government scientist named George Washington Bridge…" pseudo-Sullivan began…
"Miska-what?" Roy Ubu demanded.
"Miskatonic," Special Agent Tobias Knight repeated. "Here's their catalog." He held up a booklet blazoned with a Gothic sketch of book, candle, inverse pentagram, and the motto:
MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY
founded 1692
EX IGNORANTIA AD SAPIENTAM
EX LUCE AD TENEBRAS
"Where the hell is that?" Ubu asked.
"New England, somewhere in Massachusetts… ah, here it is, Arkham, Massachusetts."
"And how many of the 132 were students there?" Ubu was hot on the scent.
"Sixty-seven of them," Knight said triumphantly. "All in the classes of'66 through '69…"
"By God, it's a live one," Ubu cried. "Two or three might be happenstance, even ten might be coincidence, but Jumpin' Jesus sixtyfuckinseven means something. Let's look into this Miskatonic U. and find out what was going on back there in '66 to '69, besides dope."
'cause Santa Claus is coming
to tooooooown!
GORILLA THEATER
Mounty Babbit took a walk in Lincoln Park one day in 1969, trying to relax and calm his mind. Every tree spoke to him; the lions looked at him as a brother; the nervous armadillo pacing its cage stopped to stare at him, and he received clearly the message, "How did we get trapped in these ridiculous bodies?"
"We need bodies," Fed Xing replied, "just as we need minds, to function in this three-dimensional continuum. Surely you remember that we are actually n-dimensional?"
"Oh, yes," the armadillo signaled, "how could I have forgotten?"
Socrates had his daemon, Mounty thought in despair; Jesus had the Father in Heaven; Elwood P. Dowd had his giant white rabbit, Harvey; but why do I have to have a crazy Vietnamese Buddhist?
"You make the napalm," Fed Xing told him.