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"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."