DASHWOOD: Well, actually science has been studying orgasms for quite some time now, but what's new about our work is certain psychological intangibles…!
CAROL CHRISTMAS. Marvin, has anyone seen Marvin…
BENEDICT: Well if I were Vlad I know who I'd impale…
CAROL CHRISTMAS: Are you sure he isn't in the kitchen? Marvin, are you out here in the kitchen?
MALIK: That was when I stopped the experiment. There I was, totally at one with Middle America, totally inside the Reader's Digest, and then I came to that title: "No Wife, No Whores, No Mustache."
DASHWOOD: Shattering into atoms is male and undulating is female, but balloons bursting is common to both.
MALIK: I closed the magazine and threw it in the fire. The title was too good to be ruined by an explanation.
NATALIE DREST: Ooh I get that undulating a lot especially when some er guy is you know giving me you… know… head…
DASHWOOD: Yes sixty-eight percent of the females report an undulating experience during cunnilingus…
But at this point Williams realized that he would never recapture the audience previously listening to his outer-space theories, and he also wanted some air. He edged crabwise to the balcony and stood breathing deeply, raising his eyes to study the southern sky and then pick out the bright red glare of Sirius.
"Is Marvin out here on the balcony?" asked a contralto. It was Carol Christmas.
"I'm afraid not," Williams said. "I think he left the party already."
"Oh, did he take all the coke with him?"
"I guess so."
Alone again, Blake Williams communed briefly with the Big Dipper and asked himself what the hell Malik had been talking about: No wife? No whores? No mustache?
"WHO SHIT???" Benny Benedict was yelling inside.
The actual title of the Reader's Digest article had been "No Wife, No Horse, No Mustache," not "No Wife, No Whores, No Mustache." Joe Malik, as he had been trying to explain amid the din of the Wildeblood soiree, had been engaged in neuroprogramming research, trying to become one with the Reader s Digest, when he found that wonderful title, which led him to immediately abort the experiment. He knew, intuitively, that the mystery of a title like that was much better than the solution, the explanation of the title, could ever be.
Joe, whose experiments with hashish had always been guided by the sixth-circuit metaprogramming theories of Hagbard Celine, had brainwashed himself on numerous occasions to become one with not just the Reader's Digest, but with publications and even cassette tapes put out by such organizations as the John Birch Society, Theosophy, the Trotskyists, various assassination buffs, UFO societies, Buddhism, the First Bank of Religiosophy, Scientific American, the Rosicrucians, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the Flat Earth Society, the Missouri Synod Lutherans, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and anybody and everybody who lived in a tunnel-reality different from that of his environment. Thus, where most people look at the world through the grid of a single reality map, Joe Malik perceived cosmos through dozens of such grids, changing focus at will. This was not quite the no-ego experience of Zen, he would cheerfully admit, but rather a multiego experience and therefore an alternative way to escape from the stupidity of a single self.
Joe had learned how to move the walls of his neurological reality-tunnel, and even how to wander from one tunnel to another without being infected with Chaneyitis, schizophrenia, mysticism, or the other pathological forms of this sixth-circuit Relativistic consciousness.»
He was one of the pioneers of the HEAD Revolution.
He called it a simulation of satori.
Once, while very stoned, he had even gone so far as to call the experience "I-opening."
DEFECTION
How many Zen Masters does it take to change a light bulb?
Two: One to change it and one not to change it.
–Private Japes of Mr. G.
NOVEMBER 23, 1983:
"Defection," said Roy Ubu. "That must be it."
Ubu was a darkish man: his hair was brown, his skin was tan, and he had a penchant for brown suits with matching cinnamon-colored ties and socks. He looked about forty, but was actually sixty-eight. Like Joe Malik, Ubu had been using FOREVER from the day it came on the market.
"They're not in Russia or China," said Sylvia Goldfarb, Scientific Advisor to the President. "You can forget all about that. We know everything about them these days."
"They couldn't have gone to Hell," Ubu ventured.
Sylvia Goldfarb raised a sardonic eyebrow. It had been a witless suggestion.
"They couldn't have," Ubu repeated, as if she had confirmed his judgment. "We can rule that out."
Sylvia Goldfarb waited. There was something ominous in her waiting. Ubu cleared his throat.
"I'll put five men on it right away," he said.
The chair squeaked screeee as Ms. Goldfarb leaned forward impatiently. "Five won't do it," she said. "This is a priority investigation. We can't have over a hundred scientists just disappear off the face of the earth. Not when they're as important as these women and men."
"The thing that I can't figure out," Ubu said, "is why now? There's never been an administration so favorable to science-never so many huge grants, not just for work on the space-cities and life-extension, but in computers and transplants and cloning and all over the shop. Why would a group of scientists pick this time to jump ship?"
Dr. Goldfarb smiled. "Well," she said, "I'll tell you my guess. They found something to investigate, something that really excited them, but unfortunately something too far out for the government, even in 1983. That's what I suspect, and that's what I hope you'll find. But until we know for sure, we have to assume that something dangerous may be afoot. Just find one of them, Mr. Ubu, and prove that she or he is doing something harmless, and you will begin to take a great load off my mind."
"Yes, ma'am," Ubu said, looking sharp.
He was thinking: This is going to be a pisscutter.
One of President Hubbard's first acts on assuming office had been to abolish the FBI-thereby throwing Roy Ubu out of work.
"The American people survived one hundred fifty years without secret police opening their mail and tapping their phones," Hubbard said. "They can survive without it again."
Most of Ubu's colleagues fled Washington, seeking employment in police departments and private detective agencies. Roy had stuck around, shrewdly convinced that he understood government better than Hubbard. Within a month he was hired by the newly formed National Bureau of Information.
The ostensible purpose of the NBI was to collect data for the Beast-GWB-666, the computer that had virtually become a fourth branch of government, since its memory was searched before any important decision was made.
Actually, since bureaucracies have learned, like other gene pools, to survive over aeons, the NBI replaced many of the functions of the FBI. This was so intricately concealed in the budget figures that neither Hubbard nor any of her close advisors ever found it. (Bureaucracies do not die when terminated; they change names: Gilhooley's First Fundamental Finding.)
Still, there was an important difference. Since Hubbard had abolished prisons, the only citizens who had anything to fear from government were those increasingly rare, bizarrely imprinted biots who committed violence against others, and they were only sent to Hell.
M.O.Q.
Rhesus monkeys, like other higher primates, are intensely affected by their social environments-an isolated monkey will repeatedly pull a lever with no reward other than the sight of another monkey.