Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (56 page)

“This is blasphemous and disgusting, as well as criminal,” Knight said. “You, Dr. Dashwood, are as crazy as a loon.”

“Why do you feel ‘good’ during and after sex?” Dashwood went on. “Just nature’s way of tricking us into reproducing the species? Yes, that is part of it. But nature loves to economize, to do several things at once. You feel high and powerful because you are raising your mental energy—the
Kundalini
of the Hindu metaphor. With the proper ritual and proper training, the energy can be raised to the point where your Will and Imagination are illuminated with power and you can create a new Reality. Literally. You walk over the line between the state marked ‘real’ as far as you dare to go into the ‘unreal,’ and you make your new line. Until you have the courage to try again and go even farther out….”

“Crazy as a loon,” Knight repeated.

DeAct put out his cigarette and lit another. “I want to thank you, Dr. Dashwood,” he said formally, “for being so open with us and ah taking us into your confidence so fully. You will understand, of course, that we cannot ah buy your argument at ah first glance. It is startling and ah very unorthodox and ah that is, well, I’m sure the jury will understand, a brilliant mind and probably the factor of overwork and too much imagination.”

Dashwood stood up. “I see,” he said. “Well, it’s time I tried it—the one experiment I was always afraid of.”

“Grab him, Tobias!” DeAct shouted.

But he was too late.

Dashwood opened his mouth to its maximum extension, breathed in deeply, and then bellowed:

CHAPEL PERILOUS
PRICE OF ADMISSION: YOUR MIND
S. MUSS SINE, PROPRIETOR

Dashwood passed through the lavatory into the laboratory, where Patrick Knowles and Lon Chaney were turning
switches and throwing relays wildly as Bela Lugosi, with Karloff’s old makeup, tried to pretend he was the Frankenstein monster, while Ilona Masey huddled in a corner, looking worried.

It seemed that some refurbishing and rebuilding had been going on in the downtown area, for Union Square was much bigger than Dashwood remembered and there were several new buildings surrounding it, most of them built in hyperbolic and non-Euclidean curves. Chinatown was now facing directly onto the Square instead of being two blocks downhill and to the right, but there was a huge sign on the Chinatown Gate, saying:

CLOSED FOR ALTERATIONS
FU MANCHU, PROPRIETOR

Claude Shannon of Bell Laboratories and Tristan Tzara, the pioneer Dadaist, were picking random words out of people’s mouths as they passed and gluing them to a huge billboard where they had already formed the pseudosentence:

AMERICAN LIFE BOMB WENT AUTHORITARIAN IN FRONTAL ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH AUTHOR

“We’re discovering the information/redundance ratio in random signals,” Shannon explained, waving a program-able calculator.

“We’re creating a new Art Form!” Tzara shouted.

The Tin Woodman of Oz went by, with some of the boys from the Heavy Metal Mob.

There were only two doors leading back out to the Bureau of Common Sense. One had a picture of Christ on the cross and bore the legend LOVE ONE ANOTHER;
but the other had a picture of Captain Ahab and bore the legend I’D STRIKE THE SUN IF IT INSULTED ME.

“Do I have to make a choice?” Babbitt asked. All this was going by too fast for him—one minute he was driving home from work and passed the billboard on Howard Street with the eye-on-the-pyramid, and the next minute he was in this place.

The lights began to go out all over San Francisco, first in ones and twos, then in dozens and scores, and then in hundreds, until a stygian blackness descended in which Punk Rock groups and transvestites could be seen dimly as they marched in robot hordes toward the Bay.

“UFOs over the power stations!” somebody shouted. “A major blackout!”

And behind the Gate of Chinatown the drums of Fu Manchu began.

The Punk Rock groups led the parade downhill, through Chinatown, to the Ocean.

“Turn back, turn back!” screamed an effete intellectual snob. “The sea is NOT our home! Beware of the rising rivers of blood, beware of the Robot Animal Within. Turn back, turn back!”

But the Punkers marched, and everybody fell in step behind them. First came the Ludes and the Creepers, then the Dirks and the Blunt Instruments, then more and more: the Problem of Anxiety, the Daggers, the Funny Farm, the Noon’s Repose, and the Troubled Midnight. And now it was not separate trickles, but one huge rushing stream: the Leapers, the Laughing Academy, the Foamix Culprits, the Mail Cover, Dr. Terror’s House of Ill Repute, the Keyhole Peepers, the Wire Tappers, the Whoopee Casket Company. And over the shrieks and howls of their music, from deep inside the hidden recesses of Chinatown, the drums of Fu Manchu grew louder.

And more and more were coming, still: Dashwood recognized
the Muggers, the Synthesizers, Moses and Monotheism, Reefer Madness, Crazy Artie’s Crisis Intervention Center, the Junior College of Cardinals, Totem and Taboo, the Things on the Doorstep, the Hoods, the Lanovacs, Six Flags over the Vatican, the Sleepers, the Beepers, the Roofers, the Cokers, the Thundering Hoofs, the Framis Stand, the Power to Cloud Men’s Minds, and the Croakers.

Pickering’s Moon circled the Earth, going backward.

And still the Punks came: the Chocolate Mouse, the Tax Writeoff, the Welfare Bums, the Primal Scream, Baphomet’s Witnesses, the Black Rabbit of Inlé, the Vegetables, the Fruits, the Nuts, the First Church of Satan Scientist, the Tantric Presbyterians, the Huns, the Creatures from the Back Ward, the Special Children, the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Looters, the Shooters, the Scooters, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy Revisited, the Thousand Kim, the Seeds of Discord, the Benton Harbor Rat-Weasel, the Bloodshot Pyramid, the Wascal Wabbits, Crescendo, the Diabolic Variations, Skinnerball, the Committee for the Elimination of Death, the Weird Made Flesh, the Poor Golems, the Wretched Refuse, the Alluminum Bavariati, the Double Helix, the Goons, the Thugs, the Teeming Shore, the Unnatural Act, the Solitary Vice, the Morose Delectation, the Wrist Slashers, the Window Jumpers, the Kryptonite Kids, the Stay-Free Mini-Pads, the Elect Cohens, the Corpse-Eaters of Leng, the Miniature Sled, the Hash Brownies, the Boston Blackies, Kadath in the Cold Waste, the Neanderthal Tails, the Giant Slugs, the Sloths, the Disadvantaged Youth, the Albert de Salvo Fan Club, the Dead Kennedys, the Molotov Cocktails, and, loudest and most eldritch of all, Great Cthulhu’s Starry Wisdom Band.

And overall there was a smell of fried onions.

It was dark in the room. His mother sang that song. She wore a perfume that smelled like lily-of-the-valley.

Dashwood cut through an alley where two ancient Egyptian priestesses were leading a captured UFOnaut in chains past a Dog-Headed God.

“Maybe Acid would help,” somebody muttered.

SDATE YOUR BIZNIZ PLEEZ, the computer insisted. HOOKUP UZING IMPROVED EQUIPMEND TO AVOID FEEDBACK. SDAY TUNED.

A Dominican monk marched past carrying a sign that said:

JEWES WE KILLE
TO SERVE GOD’S WILLE

Strange messages were appearing on the computer console: SL LR MS ASK GREEN DREAMS TK X1826PCS M.Y.O.B. (MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS)

Simon Moon seized the microphone and began a long, unintelligible speech about the Drug Problem. In each of our major cities, he seemed to be saying, there are thousands of people who desperately need dope. For all practical purposes these people simply cannot live unless they get “high.” He estimated the number of afflicted adults in the nation at well over 125,000,000, and said their habits included, but were not limited to, Valium, marijuana, Miltown, uppers, downers, acid, cigarettes, booze, aspirin, DMT, cocaine, peyote, and Coca-Cola. He called upon all concerned citizens to donate their surplus dope to a huge pile in the center of each city, to be called the Public Trough, from which the needy could take what was necessary to keep them functioning.

The window next door lit up suddenly, showing an ancient Hindu princess in Tantric rapture with a UFOnaut.

“Eternal Serpent Power,” Simon was ranting. “If we all raise the
Kundalini
at once, maybe we can get through the Dark Night of the Soul and see the Golden Dawn. Three
A.M.
is the worst of it—that’s the peak for UFO Contacts, murders, suicides, and Bad Trips.”

A brutal group of Cro-Magnons came over the hill and began clubbing Ancient Astronauts to death. The Cro-Magnons were tall, blond, and Aryan; the Astronauts had the blue skin of Krishna and Quetzalcoatl.

A neon sign flashed:

HALL OF SELF-LOVE
THE AMERICAN DREAM ACHIEVED
DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE
LAW

In the first room George Washington was holding a movie camera on Linda Lovelace as she masturbated and moaned, staring fixedly into the camera-eye. In the second room John Adams was holding a movie camera on Georgina Spelvin as she masturbated and moaned, staring fixedly into the camera-eye. In the third room Thomas Jefferson was holding a movie camera on Annette Haven as she masturbated and moaned, staring fixedly into the camera-eye. In the fourth room James Madison was holding a movie camera on Tina Russell as she masturbated and moaned, staring fixedly into the camera-eye.

“What’s the use of revolution without general masturbation?” sang a Punk Rock group called Dr. Climax’s House of Dildos.

In the fifth room James Monroe was holding a movie camera on Marilyn Chambers as she masturbated and moaned, staring fixedly into the camera-eye, so it would register every expression in her eyes, every involuntary twitch of pleasure around her mouth.

A spastic handed Dashwood a leaflet headed “HELP EPILEPTICS LIVE AND WORK IN DIGNITY.”

A girder fell on the one just man in San Francisco.

Anarchists ran through the streets screaming,
“Aux armes, citoyens!
The government is taking over our country!”

CLEAR FOR LAW-AND-ORDER DAY GREETING! blared the loudspeakers. FOLLOWING IS GREETING FOR LAW-AND-ORDER DAY.

Cotton Mather, Cotton Hawes, and Cotton DeAct paraded past with a sign saying:

YE POPE TO SHUNNE
A BATTLE WUNNE

A girder fell on an unjust man.

George Dorn realized that, amid all this nightmare
imagery from the random circuits, he was coming back together again, a little bit at a time, coming out of the illusion that he was Frank Dashwood.

“Here it is,” Cagliostro the Great said, handing George a book called
The Answer.

George opened the volume eagerly. It had one page and said:

FLOSSING

“Here it is,” Dr. Hugh Crane said, handing George a book called
The Answer.

Frank opened the volume eagerly. It had one page and said:

Out of the sea rose a gigantic, chryselephantine, bodacious, incredible yellow submarine, waving the Black Flag of Anarchy and the Golden Apple of Discord.

Mavis, the woman with the tommy gun, appeared at a window. “Gravity sucks!” she shouted. “The cream of the jest rises to the top. That’s the Law of Levity.”

And the submarine took off and floated over North Beach like a flying saucer.

Mavis threw down a rope. “Grab hold, George!” she shouted. “We’ve come to rescue you!”

And he leapt, and grabbed hold, and they pulled him up, into the Golden Space Ship.

Captain Hagbard Celine (who looked a lot like Hugh
Crane the magician, when you stopped to think about it, and a little bit like Harry Coin, the crazy assassin, and somewhat like Everyman) took his hand. “Good to have you back aboard, George. Was it rough down there?”

He tried to be modest. “Well, you know how it is on primitive planets….”

“They gave you merry hell,” Hagbard said. “I can see it in your face. Well, cheer up, George. It’s over now. We’re heading home.”

And indeed there were thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of them: great golden ships sailing past at the speed of light, heading into the center of the galaxy.

It was the planetary birth process; earth, like a single giant flower, after incubating for four billion years, was discharging its seed.