And that was the third Vision.
Now they saw trains, many trains, all of them running on time, and the trains criss-crossed Europe and ran 24 hours a day, and they all came to a few destinations that were alike. There, the human cargo was stamped, catalogued, processed, executed with gas, tabulated, recorded, stamped again, cremated and disposed.
"This is Bureaucracy," said Dionysus, and he smashed his wine jug in anger; beside him, his lynx glared balefully.
And then they saw the man who had ordered this, Adolf Hitler, wearing still the mask of Oliver Hardy, and he turned to a certain rich man, Baron Rothschild, wearing the mask of Stanley Laurel, and they knew this was the world created by the god Hegel and the angel Thesis was meeting the demon Antithesis. Then Hitler spoke the eternal words: "Now look what you made me do," he said.
And that was the fourth Vision.
They did then look further and, lo, high as they were they saw the founding of a great republic and proclamations hailing new gods named Due Process and Equal Rights for All. And they saw many in high places in the republic form a separate cult and worship Mammon and Power. And the Republic became an Empire, and soon Due Process and Equal Rights for All were not worshipped, and even Mammon and Power were given only lip-service, for the true god of all was now the impotent What Can I Do and his dull brother What We Did Yesterday and his ugly and vicious sister Get Them Before They Get Us.
"This is Aftermath," said Hera, and her bosom shook with tears for the fate of the children of that nation.
And they saw many bombings, many riots, many rooftop snipers, many Molotov cocktails. And they saw the capital city in ruins, and the leader, wearing the face of Stanley Laurel, taken prisoner amid the rubble of his palace. And they saw the chief of the revolutionaries look about at the rubble and the streets full of corpses, and they heard him sigh, and then he addressed the leader, and he spoke the eternal words: "Now look what you made me do," he said.
And that was the fifth Vision.
And now the Olympians were coming down and they looked at each other in uncertainty and dismay. Zeus himself spoke first.
"Man," he said, "that was Heavy Grass."
"Far fuckin out," Hermes agreed solemnly.
"Tree fuckin mendous," added Dionysus, petting his lynx.
"We were really fuckin into it," Hera summed up, for all.
And they turned their eyes again on the Golden Apple and read the word Our Lady Eris had written upon it, that most multiordinal of all words, Kallisti. And they knew that each god and goddess, and each man and woman, was in the privacy of the heart, the prettiest one, the fairest; the most innocent, the Best. And they repented themselves of not having invited Our Lady Eris to their party, and they summoned her forth and asked her, "Why did you never tell us before that all categories are false and all Good and Evil a delusion of limited perspective?"
And Eris said, "As men and women are actors on a stage of our devising, so are we actors on the stage devised by the Five Fates. You had to believe in Good and Evil and pass judgments on your creatures, the men and women below. It was a curse the Fates put upon you! But now you have come to the Great Doubt and you are free."
The Olympians thereupon lost interest in the god-game and soon were forgotten by humanity. For She had shown them a great Light, and a great Light destroys shadows; and we are all, gods and mortals, nothing else but gliding shadows. Do you believe that?
"No," said Fission Chips.
"Very well," the Dealy Lama said somberly. "Begone, back to the world of maya!"
And Fission Chips whirled head over heels into a vortex of bleatings and squealings, as tune and space were given another sharp tug and, nearly a month later, head over heels, the Midget is up and tottering across Route 91 as the rented Ford Brontosaurus shrieks to a stop and Saul and Barney are out the doors (every cop instinct telling them that a man who runs from an accident is hiding something) but John Dillinger, driving toward Vegas from the north, continues to hum "Good-bye forever, old sweethearts and gals, God… bless… you.. " and the same tug in space-time grips Adam Weishaupt two centuries earlier, causing him to abandon his planned soft sell and blurt out to an astonished Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Spielen Sie Strip Schnipp-Schnapp?" and Chips, hearing Weishaupt's words, is back in the graveyard at Ingolstadt as four dark figures move away in dusk.
"Strip Schnipp-Schnapp?" Goethe asks, putting hand on chin in a pose that was later to become famous, "Das ist dein hoch Zauberwerk?"
"Ja, ja," Weishaupt says nervously, "Der Zweck heiligte die Mittel."
Ingolstadt always reminds me of the set of a bleeding Frankenstein movie, and, after Saint Toad and that shoggoth chap and the old Lama with his wog metaphysics, it was no help at all to have an invisible voice ask me to join him in a bawdy card game. I've faced some weird scenes in H.M. Service but this Fernando Poo caper was turning out to be outright unwholesome, in fact unheimlich as these krauts would say. And, hi the distance, I began to hear wog music, but with a Yank beat to it, and suddenly I knew the worst: that blasted Lama or Saint Toad or somebody, had lifted nearly a month out of my life. I had walked into Saint Toad's after midnight on March 31 (call it April 1, then) and this would be April 30 or May 1. Walpur-gisnacht. When all the kraut ghosts are out. And I was probably considered dead back in London. And if I called in and tried to explain what had happened, old W. would be downright psychiatric about the matter, oh, he'd be sure I was well around the bend. It was a rum go either way.
Then I remembered that the old Lama in Dallas had said he was sending me to the final battle between Good and Evil. This was probably it, right here, right now, this night in Ingolstadt. A bit breathtaking to think of that. I wondered when the Angels of the Lord would appear: bloody soon, I hoped. It would be nice to have them around when Old Nick unleashed the shoggoth and Saint Toad and that lot.
So I toddled out into the streets of Ingolstadt and started sniffing around for the old sulphur and brimstone.
And half a mile below and twelve hours earlier, George Dorn and Stella Maris were smoking some Alamout Black hash with Harry Coin.
"You haven't got a bad punch for an intellectual," Coin said with warm regard.
"You're pretty good at rape yourself," George replied, "for the world's most incompetent assassin."
Coin started to draw back his lips in an angry snarl, but the hash was too strong. "Hagbard told you, Ace?" he asked bashfully.
"He told me most of it," George said. "I know that everybody on this ship once worked for the Illuminati directly or for one of their governments. I know that Hagbard has been an outlaw for more than two decades-"
"Twenty-three years exactly," Stella said archly.
"That figures," George nodded. "Twenty-three years, then, and never killed anybody until that incident with the spider ships four days ago."
"Oh, he killed us," Harry said dreamily, drawing on the pipe. "What he does is worse than capital punishment, while it's going on. I can't say I'm the same man I was before. But it's pretty bad until you come through."
"I know," George grinned. "I've had a few samples myself."
"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?"