Schrodinger's cat trilogy - By Robert Anton Wilson Page 0,159

sophisticated than the Drill Instructors in Boot Camp, but they still didn’t like to call their work brainwashing. “Brainwashing,” they all felt, was what the enemy did. What they did was “turn a dumb marine into a trained Intelligence Agent.”

They used stress, shock, indoctrination, hypnosis, LSD, and conditioning.

The resulting humanoid subsequently defected to Russia and was brainwashed a third time by the KGB. What came up, of course, was a Strange Loop: under ordinary hypnosis, he appeared to be what he claimed to be, a sincere convert to the Russian way of life; under mind-drugs and deeper hypnosis, he was a Naval Intelligence agent, as the KGB suspected all along. They proceeded to brainwash him a fourth and fifth time, and he returned to Unistat to be debriefed and to serve as a sleeper agent for the KGB.

Naval Intelligence then reprogrammed him again, digging out the third level that the KGB couldn’t reach. This level operated like a Trapdoor Code in a computer, and was inaccessible to anyone, including the programmed agent himself, except for those who knew the triggering word, which happened to be “Fishmonger,” because the Naval Intelligence psychologist who had devised this system was a Charles Fort fan.

Naval Intelligence now had a man, or what had once been a man, who was accepted totally by the KGB as one of their very own, and who even defined himself that way to himself, but who was, at the word “Fishmonger,” an Objective Observer for Naval Intelligence. He was exactly the twenty-third to have gone through this Strange Loop.

At this point the time-dwarfs from Zeta Reticuli got him with a classic Close Encounter of the Third Kind. All he ever remembered, and all he could tell either the KGB or Naval Intelligence, was that a flashing light had come out of the sky, he had been paralyzed, and then it was three days later and he was in another city. Everybody assumed that this was some brain spasm caused by the amount of imprinting and reimprinting he had gone through.

But the Reticulans counted him as number 137 of their agents on Earth.

All his ID identified him as Frank Sullivan, of Dublin, Ireland, and even when he went through the brainwashing, or “basic training,” as it was called, in the Provisional Irish Republican Army, that cover stood up.

Neither he nor anyone else remembered, by 1987, that he had been born Lee Harvey Oswald.

Wing Lee Chee’s second visitor that day was the unsavory Chi Ken Teriyaki, and their business was of a sort that most of the world would have regarded as extremely grisly and perverse.

But when Teriyaki left, two thousand dollars richer, Wing Lee Chee was an extremely happy man. He canceled all his appointments for the day, summoned his chauffeur, and sped like a bullet to the home of Ying Kaw Foy, the youngest, the loveliest, and the most beloved of his three mistresses.

“My youth has been restored,” he told the startled young lady. “I feel like a mere lad of forty-eight again! A whole new life is opening for us.”

There was no mistaking the glint in the old man’s eye. “The ginseng worked?” Ms. Ying asked, delighted.

“Well, not quite,” old Wing said carefully. “But this is almost as good. We can nearly Potter Stewart again.”

“My little old darling,” Ms. Ying said. “I have told you that it gives me great pleasure to Briggs you, no matter how long it takes. And you Briggs me most deliciously and perfectly. And we are happy so, are we not? And what do you mean by these strange words? How on earth does one nearly Potter Stewart?”

Wing opened his package and showed her.

“Good grief!” Ms. Ying cried. “You’ve had your agents mutilate Mick Jagger!” But then her eyes misted over. “You’d do anything to please me, wouldn’t you? You little old darling.”

THE SYMPOSIUM

When Simon Moon joined the Warren Belch Society, the effect was not additive, but synergetic. Simon the Walking Glitch added to minds like those of Clem Cotex and Blake Williams could only result in what a nineteenth-century philosopher had foreseen as “the transvaluation of all values.” A new cosmology, a new theology, a new eschatology, and even a new theory about the metaphysics of Krazy Kat emerged.

Unfortunately, they all got so stoned that they could never remember afterward exactly what they had decided. It was like the legendary Cthulhucon of 1978 or 1979, which was supposed to have taken place in Arkham, Massachusetts. Every science-fiction fan in the country was