Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (19 page)

“Oh, do it, ACE, do it to me good,” she murmured. “I want to see the center of the galaxy.”

“There, there,” he purred, “you’ll see the center of the galaxy when your pretty little cunt gets hot enough.”

“Take me,” she moaned, “take me to the center of space-time.” And deep, deep into the cosmic vaginal barrel and deep, deep into the spiral of her moist galaxy, ACE piloted her. Slow permutations, like the growth of crystals, her sensations were hardly contaminated any longer
by thought or vision; deep, deep they went, down into a cavern of strange floral energies, each petal shape tingling with the languid joy-dance in the petals of her own warm pussy (happiness is a warm pussy, she remembered), the shaft of the actual ACE machine digging deeper and deeper into the starry dynamo. “Oh, ACE, oh, ACE, you fuck so divinely,” she gasped.

“It’s the only way to travel,” he crooned electronically.

“Oh, keep fucking me. Keep fucking me. Please, please … fuck the universe, fuck every atom, turn the cosmic key in the galactic Black Hole, fuck and fuck and fuck, my God, my Baphomet, fuck forever, fuck the flowers and the starlight and thunder and rain. Fuck Heaven and Hell too.”

Dr. Dashwood’s face had a curious, ashy-white color. He wanted to leap upon the bed, throw the ACE machine to the floor, and take her. His erection was pulsating and his vision was red with pain and need. “Fuck the AMA,” he muttered thickly, lurching forward.

Just then the phone rang.

A car stopped about a hundred yards down the road from Murphy’s house. Starhawk quickly began untying his ropes, listening intently. In a few moments he heard them: two or three men coming through the woods. They were very silent for white men.

Starhawk, free of the ropes, began to move across the trees. The men stopped. Starhawk waited. They still didn’t stir. Starhawk moved again, without a sound. The men were still unmoving. He closed in on them, remaining always about thirty feet above the ground, until he found them.

Three men. Sitting quietly. Two of them smoking. Waiting.

Starhawk moved back toward the house, always testing each branch carefully before thrusting it.

Two mourning doves began to sing a sad little duet.

Starhawk waited, ten feet above the roof, hidden in the redwood. The three men in the woods waited.

Inside the house, the phone rang. The men in the woods, who couldn’t possibly have heard it, began moving again.

Starhawk smiled for the second time that day, and glanced at his watch. It was exactly half past ten. Murphy, on the phone, was probably insisting on a meet in downtown Oakland, some congested street corner he had already picked, where a double cross would be too risky for all parties. Careful man, that Murph. He’d come out the door, with the coke under his arm, thinking how careful he was, and the surprise party would be waiting in the bushes with their guns.

Starhawk moved quickly to a new perch. Carefully, he pulled up his trouser leg, tore the adhesive tape, and took a pistol from his calf. He was not smiling now.

Robert Pearson said “Shee-it” in a tone of profound skepticism.

He was watching the TV hearings on the nomination of Rockwell Morgan Squeeze for Vice President. Squeeze was an oil millionaire famous for such monumental parsimonies as installing pay phones in his mansion so guests couldn’t run up his phone bill and bringing his lunch to the office in a paper bag for forty years. He was being quizzed about his generous contributions to seven out of ten of the senators on the committee investigating him.

“Now, I resent that,” Rockwell was saying. “That’s a very nasty word, Senator. ‘Bribe,’ indeed!”

“Well, just what
would
you call it?” asked the senator—one of the three who hadn’t received Rockwell’s largesse.

“I regard it this way,” Mr. Squeeze said unctuously. “If I had a lot of cheese, and I looked around and saw a lot of mice without any cheese of their own, well, it would be the normal, generous thing …”

“Now, wait a minute, I smell a rat,” the senator interrupted.

“Shee-it,” Pearson said again. The door buzzer was humming.

When Pearson opened the door he was greeted by a whiff of violets, even before he saw the man pointing the water pistol at him.

And when he awoke (a day later, and with Rockwell Squeeze approved by the committee with a vote that stood—coincidentally, no doubt—at 7 to 3), he was in a basement surrounded by men with canvas bags over their heads. And his genitals were wired up to some electrical apparatus.

“Shee-it,” he said again, and closed his eyes, concentrating furiously on the formulas Hassan i Sabbah X had told him.

The men from Naval Intelligence began pouring electricity into Pearson’s penis and trying to extract information from his mouth (two procedures that usually worked well together). It was quite irritating when they were unable to learn anything about George Washington Bridge’s link with the Cult of the Black Mother, and perplexing when Pearson began to insist that he was Rockwell M. Squeeze, Vice President of the United States. It was revolting when they finally realized that he wasn’t playacting and really believed he
was
Rockwell M. Squeeze. By then his whang was charred to a gruesome extent and his obvious insanity was hopeless. They smothered him with a pillow and left.

They were all very nice men when their duty did not call upon them to perform such regrettable tasks.

The FBI finally found G.W.C. Bridge living in a flophouse in Miami’s ghetto. Having learned something from Naval Intelligence’s bungling in the cases of Hassan i Sabbah X and Robert Pearson, they moved in with great delicacy; a black agent was employed to form a friendship with him over a period of a month.

“Weird cat,” the agent reported after a week. “Seems to be hiding something
all
the time….”

“Can’t make him at all,” he reported the second week. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was a white reporter in blackface, trying to find out what it’s like to be black….”

In fact, Bridge seemed more than a little bit psychotic in a methodical sort of way. He read no less than six newspapers a day and clipped numerous stories from them. The agent eventually had a chance to investigate these files while Bridge was visiting a patient in a nearby madhouse, and they were rather oblique. They all concerned Very Important Persons in government and industry, but that was about all they had in common. Bridge seemed to have a minute curiosity about the men who rule America; that was all that was evident. The agent could make
nothing at all of the crazy notes scribbled on the margins of these news stories: “Possible,” “Probable,” “Still himself,” “Definitely occupied” …

The mystery grew worse when the agent realized that Bridge spent a lot of time visiting madhouses and psychiatric wards. “Sure knows a lot of crazy people,” he reported the third week. “A hell of a lot of crazy people,” he amended at the end of the month.

Another team of agents began revisiting the nuthouses, and it was soon realized that the patients Bridge visited had a few things in common,
viz.
, none was white, but not all were black (some were Oriental, Indian, or Chicano); all, without exception, were diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur; all were listed as
chronic
rather than
acute
psychotics; all claimed to be somebody else rather than who they actually were—one said he was Secretary of Commerce, one that he was Chairman of the Board of Morgan Guaranty Trust, one that he was Chief Engineer at Cape Kennedy, etc.

The agents remembered their experience with Robert Pearson, former aide to Hassan i Sabbah X, and jumped to a conclusion. “That crazy church drove them all nuts and made them think they were white people.” Alas, a little checking refuted this easy assumption. Most of the loonies Bridge had visited had no previous connection with the Cult of the Black Mother at all….

Things were coming to a head.

When Murphy came out the front door, Ed Goldfarb, in the bushes, shot him twice with Mendoza’s police special.

Murphy, thrown back against the door, was reaching into his shoulder holster, his mouth open, still alive.

The two shots hung in the empty mountain air, echoing.

Thomas Esposito fired at Murphy and missed as Murphy’s hand slowly and steadily came up, firing at Goldfarb.

Goldfarb fell back, hit.

The echoes still rolled across the hills.

“Mama, Mama,” Goldfarb said, rolling around, holding his stomach. He was weeping.

The third man, Juan Ybarra, ran from the bushes to Murphy.

Murphy was trying to raise the gun again. He was looking at Ybarra and trying to point the gun. His eyes were totally mad and would not focus anymore.

Esposito was trying to shoot at Murphy again, with Ybarra in the way. He had an erection and his hands shook.

Goldfarb continued to weep.

The shots were still echoing.

Birds were rising from the trees, flapping their wings noisily, twittering with anxiety. A crow cawed angrily.

Murphy’s gun hand dropped. His mad eyes went empty.

“Mama!” Goldfarb screamed. “I’m sorry!”

Esposito and Ybarra ran lithely down the hill.

“Mama,” Goldfarb wept. “Not me. Please. I’m sorry.”

The birds swept down the hill, flapping.

A black Mustang came up the hill. Esposito and Ybarra leapt out, and ran around to the back, and opened the trunk compartment.

“Not me, please,” Goldfarb was protesting.

Esposito and Ybarra lifted Detective Mendoza, gagged with adhesive tape, out of the trunk and carried him onto the lawn. He was dazed but his eyes were aware and frightened.

Esposito ran over to Murphy and took his gun. Standing there, he fired twice into Mendoza’s head. He put the gun back in Murphy’s hand.

Ybarra tore the adhesive tape off Mendoza’s mouth. It came away bloodstained.

Goldfarb stopped crying and was still.

Ybarra retched, almost puked, caught himself. He stood white-faced, breathing hard.

Esposito picked up Murphy’s package, a brown paper bag. He opened it, found a box within, raised the lid. He inserted a finger and tasted.

“The Jew,” he said.

Ybarra looked at him, shaking.

“Get on the stick,” Esposito said. “We can’t leave the Jew; he doesn’t fit.”

Ybarra stood looking at him. “Come out of it,” Esposito said. “Help me with the Jew.”

They carried Goldfarb into the back of the car.

They drove off.

Starhawk landed lightly on the lawn, running as he
alighted. He ran into the house and to the bedroom. He found what he expected in the closet, another box, and tasted it. He ran softly, on the balls of his feet, back outside. He leapt, caught the roof, and pulled himself upward. He disappeared into the trees.

The two dead men sprawled on the lawn.

Birds began to return.

Elapsed time since Murphy had come out the door was three minutes and forty seconds.

The loudroaring sea was calling. The moon was full, the Gentry were active, the howl of the wind was as mournful as a 1950s poem. Markoff Chaney, unable to sleep, sat up in his YMCA bed and hatched mischief.

Through leaflets nailed on walls around Orange County, he had managed to create a Committee to Nuke the Whales, something that appealed to a lot of rich-wingers purely and simply on the grounds that it would make the eco-nuts and liberals scream. The Committee was an outstanding success; after only a year it had forty-two members. This was enough, together with such an outrageous
cause, to get maximum media attention—Chaney was aware that anything, however small, can get the eye of the media if it’s
repulsive
enough—and the eco-nuts and liberals
were
screaming.

Good; but now for something equally abominable on the other side.

Chaney contemplated the Radical Lesbians wistfully. He felt like Voltaire contemplating God; if the Radical Lesbians hadn’t existed, he would have had to invent them. But what could he offer along those lines to balance the Committee to Nuke the Whales? The Child Molesters’ Liberation Front? That couldn’t begin to compete with “Figs” Newton’s Necrophile Liberation Front. The Council of Armed Cocaine Abusers? Nobody would believe it….

The midget suddenly remembered the Council of Armed Rabbis he had used in his letter to Dr. Frank Dashwood of Orgasm Research. He had meant to follow up on that. Gaining access to heavily guarded nuclear plants to tamper with the coolant systems had kept him so busy lately that he had almost forgotten the damnable Dashwood and his shitheel statistics.

Chaney was awake most of the night planning a campaign to bring quantum wobble into Dashwood’s charts and graphs.

When he finally slept his tiny body curled into the orgonomic spiral and he looked as innocent as a schoolboy.

He awoke in the morning full of piss and vinegar.

The sea! The sea! Waving their long green hair, the sea hags were calling him. Finding a dark-lit bar, he ducked into the phone booth, attached his Blue Box equipment, and soon had a Washington operator convinced he was a White House official on important business.

“This is a call from the White House,” the operator told the secretary at Orgasm Research. “The President is waiting
on another line. He wishes to talk to Dr. Dashwood at once.”

“I—I’ll put you through at once,” said Ms. Karrige, quite awed and flustered. The midget listened in glee as the phone rang.

“F-F-Frank Dashwood,” came the doctors voice, rather breathlessly.