ERNEST: You pass a thousand heroes on the street every day and never know how well they are carrying their burdens.
FRANK: I know. The woman with the Mongoloid child. The blind man who makes you so uncomfortable. The rape victim pulling herself together and refusing to go mad. The dumb cop with a hernia yet who goes down an alley after a hopped-up thief who is also armed. I'm not blind, myself. You only see their moments of heroism. You don't choose to watch how blow follows blow until heroism becomes meaningless and they all give up, one by one, and join the universal chorus of despair.
ERNEST: I have seen some who never gave up. A pig squeals when he sees the ax coming. A man can look right at the ax all his life and not squeal.
FRANK: The ax falls, anyway, does it not? Isn't your refusal to squeal just a big act, a gigantic lie? It's more honest to squeal with the other swine.
ERNEST: I still decline to admit that men are no more than swine.
FRANK: You are a Romantic, you old fool. If you had been honest enough to squeal like the rest of the swine, people would have seen the truth sooner. Every war since your day has been partly your fault, you know. If everybody squealed and ran away, there'd be no wars.
Of course nobody wanted to publish this kind of ranting- although it took Marvin nearly ten years to learn that.
In 1979 he set out grimly to write the worst, most tasteless, most vulgar book possible. He had arrived at that stage of psychological masochism where one must prove one's most pessimistic assumptions are true, for the sheer delight of knowing once and for all that the universe is really a pisspoor proposition all around. "Public taste is a misanthropist's heaven and a humanitarian's hell," he said bitterly. For his hero he elected a monster so monstrous as to be a mockery of all human hope, but one so obscure that he did not possess any of the evil glamour that surrounds a Hitler, a Nixon, or a Jack the Ripper. He picked Vlad Teppis-Vlad the Impaler-a fourteenth-century Hungarian religious fanatic who had executed 100,000 people for differing with his own extremely odd theological notions.
Marvin's novel not only justified Vlad, but positively glorifed him; it was full of denunciations of liberalism, permissiveness, and the opponents of capital punishment. It also had the most violent rape scenes Marvin could conjure out of his misogynistic imagination.
Vlad the Barbarian was a blatant incitement to violence, garbed in the most reactionary moralistic prejudices imaginable. It was bought by the first New York publisher to whom it was submitted, for a higher advance than Albert Speer's memoirs or any of the confessionals of the Watergate felons. A movie sale was negotiated even before the book was released, and John Wayne starred as Vlad, looking really sincere every time he explained why murder and rape were the highest human virtues.
Marvin was immediately commissioned to write a sequel, Vlad Victorious.
Actually, because Marvin really was, in his own odd way, a philosopher of sorts, Vlad the Barbarian was not totally bad. In researching it Marvin had stumbled upon the enigma that makes Vlad Teppis somewhat interesting to students of the human mind in general and the ruling-class mind in particular. The mystery was this: Two early, approximately contemporary and seemingly authentic accounts tell one particular story about Vlad, but each tells it differently. There is thus no scientific way of saying which account is true.
The disputed story is that two monks on a journey stopped at Vlad's castle one night and begged shelter from the elements. Vlad set out for them a magnificent banquet and then afterward asked them what the people of Hungary really thought about him. The first monk answered diplomatically and falsely that everybody said Vlad was a stern but just ruler. The second monk boldly told the truth: that everybody said Vlad was a homicidal maniac. Vlad thereupon had one of the monks impaled. The problem is that the first seemingly authentic account says he executed the flattering liar, and the other seemingly authentic account claims he executed the honest monk.
Marvin left this mystery unsolved in his book, and it was, perhaps, one reason that the novel became fashionable even with intellectuals.
Everybody, it appeared, had some intuitive, prelogical feeling about which monk a man of the caliber of Vlad Teppis would impale. Some were quite sure that a dingaling of that sort would kill the one who dared to tell him the truth. Others, however, were just as sure that Vlad would find a special sadistic relish, and a moral justification to boot, in surprising both monks by executing the flatterer.
Arguing about Vlad's choice, as it was soon called, spread from coast to coast.
"What would you do if you were one of the monks?" was a favorite question in these arguments.
"I'd do what the first monk did," Simon Moon said, in an argument with other programmers who worked with the Beast. "I'd tell Vlad he was the very model of a Christian statesman-which, in fact, he was."
"I'd tell the truth," said Markoff Chancy, on a Greyhound bus, "just to prove that little men have big balls."
"I'd lie," Dr. Frank Dashwood admitted at a posh Nob Hill party in San Francisco. "The most dangerous thing in the world is to tell the truth to a government official who is a primitive barbarian, in fourteenth-century Transylvania or twentieth-century America."
Professor Fred ("Fidgets") Digits, who always kept his connection with the Warren Belch Society a secret and, hence, retained academic respectability, finally published a paper in Technology Review analyzing the problem from the perspective of the von Neumann-Morgenstern game theory. The monks, in this context, basically confront a problem in prediction. Each must decide, before speaking, what Vlad's reaction will be: Will he be grateful for an accurate report or angered by it? Every person in an authoritarian situation faces this dilemma daily, and it haunts corporations, armies, and government bureacracies. "It is the classic disinformation situation," Digits concluded, satisfied that he had identified the problem, even if he couldn't solve it.
Others pointed out the similar logic of the notorious "Snafu Principle" proposed by the eccentric businessman Hagbard Celine in his witty, perverse little booklet Never Whistle While You're Pissing. According to the Snafu Principle, accurate, honest communication is possible only between equals, and every power matrix is a disinformation situation.
Since this seems to challenge the very principle of power and leads directly to anarchy, many were sorry that Mad Marvin had ever posed the Vlad Enigma.
STRANGE AEONS
Gestorben ist nicht, was fur ewig ruht, und mit unbekannten Aonen mag sogar der Tod noch sterben.
–VON JUNZT
As a scientist, Washy Bridge, of course, regarded Von Junzt as a mental case and the Necronomicon as the ravings of a deranged cannabis abuser. Nonetheless, that one gaunt German sentence found in 1971 stuck with him, taunted him, provoked him, eventually goaded him. He began studying the origins of the Frankenstein idea within the Promethean ambience of the Shelley-Byron circle. He researched the early Resuscitation Society. He traveled to Michigan to talk to H. C. E. Coppinger, the far-out physicist who had started the cryonics movement with his astonishing book The Aspects of Immortality. The idea just wouldn't let go of him. In 1974 he even, somewhat shamefacedly, looked into the writings of a strange Providence, Rhode Island, mystic who had written much on the metaphysics of the Necronomicon. Washy found in this man's weird writings a better translation than that of Von Junzt: