Schrodinger's cat trilogy - By Robert Anton Wilson Page 0,45

head. The key was no key.

Hassan had other things on his mind that weekend; he was well aware that “Frank Sullivan” (probably, in his estimation, a double agent for both Washington and Peking) had recognized “Washy” Bridge and that opened a very wiggly can of worms, indeed. Ever since Washy had told him about Project Pan, in fact, Hassan had felt increasingly like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in the legend. A line from an H. P. Lovecraft story came back to his consciousness over and over again: “Do not, I beseech you, call up any that you cannot put down.” Like many another occultist before him, Hassan i Sabbah X now wished he had taken that warning a bit more seriously a bit sooner….

Even before he left Bhavani Imports he was startled by an incident that seemed a definite Santaria synchromesh. “Hey, listen, man,” an art appraiser cried, catching his sleeve, “I’ve just heard the greatest limerick. Listen, just listen: ‘A habit obscene and unsavory—’” He broke down, laughing, caught himself, and repeated urgently, “Listen.” He tried again:

“A habit obscene and unsavory

Holds the Bishop of Boston in slavery.

’Midst hootings and howls—”

He broke down again, then went on:

“’Midst hootings and howls

He deflowers young owls,

Which he keeps in an underground aviary!”

Hassan looked at him with paranoid suspicion. “Very funny,” he said, unsmiling, and hastened out to his limousine.

“Back uptown?” the chauffeur asked.

“Broad Street,” Hassan said, giving an address. He was in mild first-circuit anxiety all the way to his destination.

He remembered his first conversation with Washy Bridge. “How many?” he had asked, not in shock or in outrage but in simple unbelief, inability to believe. They are our creation: we are their creation.

“Fifty-seven of us.” The scientist was perspiring with anxiety, now that the secret was finally out, the reason he had fled Project Pan.

“Fifty-seven,” Hassan said hollowly. Heinz 57 Varieties, he remembered absently from the advertisements. “And all of them with Ph.D.’s and M.D.’s and more diplomas than a dog has fleas …”

“You’ve got to realize it works,” Washy said then. “You just can’t understand if you don’t keep that in mind. It works.”

“And two hundred to three hundred years in jail for each of you if it ever gets out,” Hassan added harshly. “You just better keep that in mind too.”

“That’s why I’m here,” the scientist said.

Hassan had paced the room briefly. “Wheels within wheels,” he said once. “Wheels within wheels within wheels.” Once he grinned. “At least I know why the Cincinnati cocaine market is thriving,” he said with a lewd chuckle. “Cincinnati,” he repeated, shaking his head. “What do they call it again?”

“Knights of Christianity United in Faith.”

A habit obscene and unsavory, Hassan remembered suddenly, jostled back into present time. He had arrived at his destination.

The man to whom he spoke then was a stockbroker according to public knowledge but pursued certain other careers in a private and clandestine manner.

“‘Frank Sullivan,’” Hassan said. “I want to know everything about him. Everything.”

The part-time stockbroker turned ashy-white. He got up, glared suspiciously at a window washer outside his office, and walked over to check that the window was closed all the way.

“Impossible,” he said then, in a near whisper. “If I told you the one most amusing and interesting fact about him, I’d be dead tomorrow.”

“That hot?” Hassan asked.

The man leaned back in his chair and gazed absently toward the ceiling. He recited some names, beginning with Jack Ruby of Dallas and ending with a senator whose private plane had crashed just the week before, on Christmas Eve. “Those are just a few,” he ended, “who happened to find out too much about Frank Sullivan.”

Hassan spoke only once during the drive back to Harlem.

“Secrecy!” he said with a profound grimace.

The chauffeur looked back nervously. He had never heard so much obscene emphasis in a single word.

GWB-666

He knows when you are sleeping

He knows when you’re awake

Within three days the storm had become a blizzard in most of the Northeast and Roy Ubu was feeling snowed under in every sense of the phrase, driving with extreme caution, thinking that the new Head of Programming for the Beast, whatzisname, Moon, really seemed to take some kind of fiendish pleasure in producing reams and reams of records to prove that the records were all defective….

The snow whipped Ubu again as he parked and skittered into GWB to find Moon once again cheerfully perusing printouts that demonstrated, for the thirty-third time, that every single one of the missing scientists had simply stopped leaving ink or magnetic