"Don't think about that, you might get so excited you'll talk about it in your sleep. The thing is, you just got to tell Murph about this Syndicate gun from L.A. and how funny he thinks it is, that this crooked cop is trying to sell some hot snow to Maldonado's boys and they just went and brought up this gorilla to take it from him, no down payment, no monthly installments, for free."
Malloy was grinning broadly. "Murph'll shit," he said. "He'll absolutely shit a brick."
"Yeah," Starhawk said. "I kind of think he will. You like it?"
"Kiddo," Malloy said, "if I wasn't so broke this week, I'd do it free. Just to watch him trying not to look like the cop I'm telling him about. The fat prick."
"I sort of figured you'd like it," Starhawk said. "Me, the only thing I regret is I can't be there to see his face myself."
"Yeah," Malloy said. "The fat prick."
IS VLAD A SYMBOL?
A class made up solely of intellectuals will always have a guilty conscience.
–furbish lousewart V, Unsafe Wherever You Go
"Defection?" Ubu suggested at the second conference on the Brain Drain. "Russia or China…"
"The CIA was the first agency into this," Babbit said, "and they say it's impossible. They know what color drawers every commissar wears these days with the latest surveillance techniques. One hundred thirty-two top American scientists are not working over there unknown to the CIA. Take that as axiomatic." Babbit was firm.
"Well there are only twelve people in HOME…"
"They haven't left the planet," Babbit said briefly. "People of that caliber do not travel about without somebody noticing-Intelligence, newspapers, TV, other scientists, somebody. It is as if they have crawled into a hole and dragged the ground in after them." His chair creaked screeee as he leaned forward for emphasis.
"Hell, they're not loose inside the country sir," Ubu said firmly. "Americans can't just disappear these days. Why to cash a check any kind of check you've got to write both your Social Security number and your GWB number and have them both scanned by the Beast. Sir there's never been a people better watched and protected than the American people of November 1983. And we expect to do even better sir when the new circuits are put in the Beast next month."
He's gonna find out who's naughty or nice
But the snow falls thicker, making a blanket of foam against the window of Babbit's office and piles against the door of The Upstart Crow bookstore off Dupont Circle across town, where Marvin Gardens is autographing copies of Vlad Victorious.
"I never got a real live autograph from a real live author Mr. Gardens tell me why did you write two books about a man like Vlad?"
"To make money," Marvin said in his Peter Lorre cokehead voice. He had prepared for the ordeal of the seventeenth autograph party in twenty-three days by snorting more than his usual morning quantity of the snow and was in no mood to conceal his divinity from the blind uncoked Earthlings. "I have always been possessed by a mad, passionate, almost erotic desire for a very large bank account. In fact, I love the feel of money the crisp crinkle of bills the metal solidity of coin the visual impact of a large check with seven figures,"
"Is it true John Wayne will play Vlad again in the sequel?"
"That's just in the talking stage now and frankly I don't care if they cast Raquel Welch the important thing is cash on the barrelhead my agent is asking a million for the screen rights and we won't settle for a penny less… Yes?"
"Is Vlad really a symbol?"
The twelve people in HOME-High Orbital Mini-Earth-were construction engineers, six male and six female. They had originally been sent there to build, with materials shipped from Lunar Mining, HOME II, a space village for 10,000 occupants. This program had been canceled as "non-ec" by President Lousewart and the twelve colonists restricted to "ec" research, mostly astronomical, which President Lousewart turned over to his astrologers for a mystical interpretation.
HOME was located in the area called Libration Point 5, where the gravitational fields of Luna and Terra were equally balanced. This null-gravity area had been mathematically discovered by the astronomer Lagrange and was therefore sometimes called the Lagrange Area. The name for the space town, HOME, had been coined by psychologist Timothy Leary in 1977.
A friend of Leary's named Robert Anton Wilson, who wrote overly complicated novels, had suggested a team song for the colonists, "HOME on Lagrange." To popularize this idea, he had written letters about it to many space research groups and included it in a novel called The Trick Top Hat. Still, by 1984, the song hadn't caught on with the twelve colonists. They were not at home on Lagrange because they feared that the whole project would soon be classified as "non-ec" and they would be dragged back to the womb-planet.
ULYSSES AT HOME
My dog understands perfectly everything I say to him. I am the one who does not understand.
–furbish lousewart V, Unsafe Wherever You Go
Mary Margaret Wildeblood's parties were the place to go that winter because of the penile adornment above the mantelpiece. Some even began to suspect that Wildeblood had undergone the transsex operation only to engage in the most flagrant excess of exhibitionism in world history.
This was an uncharitable oversimplification. Wildeblood's mind was vast, not simple, and had more kinks than a Pollack painting; SHe was not deep, but wide and complex. SHe actually intended to become a nun. When SHe quoted from the gospel of hir youth, "Humility is endless," SHe really meant it. Submission was salvation; and who is more submissive than a nun? Above all, SHe longed to embrace the Lamb, all woolly and fleecy and pure, but very definitely horned and Ram-signed with Pentecostal fire. SHe had the hots for Divine intercourse. Where Natalie Drest was merely cock-mad, Mary Margaret Wildeblood was possessed by the god Priapus.
The idea of mounting and, so to speak, enshrining Ulysses occurred to Mary Margaret at her very first reception after returning from Johns Hopkins.
Benny "Eggs" Benedict started it by suggesting, "Norman Mailer might try to get revenge for some of your reviews by raping you."
"Let the male chauvinist pig try it,' Mary Margaret said demurely. "I've been studying kung fu."
"Oh, are you planning to join Women's Lib?" Justin Case inquired.
"I have given it some thought," Mary Margaret replied, practicing her new simpery-Marilyn-Monroe smile and positively reveling in the feel of the nylons on his, no dammit her, thighs.
"JUST A GODDAM MINUTE," a booming masculine voice cut in. This was Josephine Malik, chairperson of God's Lightning-an outfit long suspected of terrorist fire-bombings against porny movie houses, adult bookstores, and other sexist enterprises. Jo was an ideological descendant of those who thought copulation was bad for the crops. "I don't know about lib-lab wishy-washy groups like NOW," she went on, "but God's Lightning certainly isn't accepting any members who weren't born female."
"Oh, now," a fluty feminine voice intervened-"Figs" Newton, spokesperson for the Necrophile Liberation Front, sporting a lapel button that said, OUT OF THE MAUSOLEUMS, INTO THE STREETS. "That's hardly fair," he pronounced-like most Terrestrials, he regarded himself as an expert on morality. "People are what they make themselves," he said, good Existentialist that he was. "To hold the accidents of birth against them is practically racism, isn't it?"