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"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, begi
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 tape traces sometime between summer '81 and spring '82. Which was impossible in the age of bureaucracy: It was like an animal not leaving footprints on a wet beach.
"But the Beast is supposed to know," Ubu had protested once.
"GWB-666 knows everything that has been recorded," Moon said patiently. "It does not know what has never been recorded. You can't see behind your head; GWB-666 can't scan what was never recorded anywhere."
"But dammit nobody can do anything in this country dammit without making a record."
"Nobody but these 132 very elusive men and women," Moon replied placidly. "If you'll notice, I marked the bios where it deals with experience in programming. Seventy-eight out of the 132 have such experience. They obviously learned a great deal about Erase and Cancel codes…"
Roy Ubu made a despairing gesture. "How many bits can this thing access?" he asked wearily.
"Over one hundred twenty billion bytes," Simon said. "Nearly a trillion bits. There's never been an information system like this in all history," he added with some pride.
"But it has amnesia where these scientists are concerned," Ubu said bitterly.
The robot whose passport said "Frank Sullivan" was in Washington that weekend and reported to a high official in Naval Intelligence, who suspected him of being a double agent infiltrating them for Air Force Intelligence.
After the usual sordid business was disposed of, "Sullivan" asked casually if N.I. had any interest in Hassan i Sabbah X.
"Good Lord and Aunt Agnes, no!" said the official emphatically. "Congress will have our ass if we get into anything domestic." Then he asked, elaborately disinterested, "What did you happen to pick up?"
"Well, if there's no real interest…" Pseudo-Sullivan gazed off into space absently.
There was a short silence.
"If it's something big…" the official said finally.
"Sullivan" held out his hand. Another commercial transaction took place.
"It's about a government scientist named George Washington Bridge…" pseudo-Sullivan began…
"Miska-what?" Roy Ubu demanded.
"Miskatonic," Special Agent Tobias Knight repeated. "Here's their catalog." He held up a booklet blazoned with a Gothic sketch of book, candle, inverse pentagram, and the motto:
MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY
founded 1692
EX IGNORANTIA AD SAPIENTAM
EX LUCE AD TENEBRAS
"Where the hell is that?" Ubu asked.
"New England, somewhere in Massachusetts… ah, here it is, Arkham, Massachusetts."
"And how many of the 132 were students there?" Ubu was hot on the scent.
"Sixty-seven of them," Knight said triumphantly. "All in the classes of'66 through '69…"
"By God, it's a live one," Ubu cried. "Two or three might be happenstance, even ten might be coincidence, but Jumpin' Jesus sixtyfuckinseven means something. Let's look into this Miskatonic U. and find out what was going on back there in '66 to '69, besides dope."
'cause Santa Claus is coming
to tooooooown!
GORILLA THEATER
Mounty Babbit took a walk in Lincoln Park one day in 1969, trying to relax and calm his mind. Every tree spoke to him; the lions looked at him as a brother; the nervous armadillo pacing its cage stopped to stare at him, and he received clearly the message, "How did we get trapped in these ridiculous bodies?"
"We need bodies," Fed Xing replied, "just as we need minds, to function in this three-dimensional continuum. Surely you remember that we are actually n-dimensional?"
"Oh, yes," the armadillo signaled, "how could I have forgotten?"
Socrates had his daemon, Mounty thought in despair; Jesus had the Father in Heaven; Elwood P. Dowd had his giant white rabbit, Harvey; but why do I have to have a crazy Vietnamese Buddhist?
"You make the napalm," Fed Xing told him.
Thoroughly agitated, Babbit wandered into the primate house, not noticing the sign which said "CLOSED TODAY." There he saw two grim-faced men, in green uniforms, and a gorilla, in a blue uniform, going through a most remarkable pantomime. One of the men would raise a sign saying "WE DEMAND JUSTICE" and the gorilla would then spray him with a can of shaving cream; the other man would then feed the gorilla.
Operant conditioning. But what the hell…
Even Fed Xing was confused by that one.
WHERE THE FUCK?
The night watchman at Bhavani Imports, a Puerto Rican poet and Santaria initiate named Hugo de Naranja, was reading a novel called Illuminatus! when the mysterious incident occurred. Hugo was so absorbed in the book, which he considered the greatest novel since Don Quixote, that he didn't notice the strange sound at first. Gradually the sound s persistence invaded his consciousness, dragged him out of the most aesthetically exquisite blow job in all modern fiction, jerked him into an alert awareness that out there in the darkness there was something odd going on.
Rats, he thought.
No, the quick trot of rat paws was different.
A thief with soft slippers, or in his stockings…
Not that, either.
Hugo put down his book and picked up flashlight in left hand groping right-handedly and then finding pistol in holster. Something was going on in the vast darkness of the warehouse and he had to go and look for it and do something about it. He wished he hadn't read so many Women's Lib diatribes against machismo and Papa Hemingway. He wished he could still believe in the macho values. He wished he had more cojones or another job.
Then he walked out of his cubbyhole office, flashing the light ahead of him, and quoted to himself from his favorite philosopher. "The ordinary man has problems. The warrior only has challenges." Then he saw the intruder.
A cat. It was only a cat, held for one moment in his lightbeam, then skittering away into deeper darkness as the light raced after it. Then it was caught again, higher up, standing for Christ's sake on the ghastly amputated penis plaque, its golden eyes glittering half-whitely in the flashed lightray. A cat standing on a penis, something right out of Surrealism or Dada.