He knew that Dr. Bridge was called "Washy" by his classmates at Miskatonic.
He knew several thousand similar things, none of them helpful in any way toward explaining why Dr. Bridge had disappeared off the face of the earth at the head of a parade of similar disappearees which now numbered 167. "I knew this case would be a pisscutter," Ubu said, contemplating his data.
The one fact not recorded about Dr. Bridge, and the whole key to his subsequent behavior, was the fact that he had, on November 23, 1971, looked into the infamous Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, in the German translation of Von Junzt (Das Verichteraraberbuch, Ingolstadt, 1848).
Bridge, not Dr. Bridge then, but just Washy, had been turned on to his odd volume by the Miskatonic librarian, Doris Horus, who knew he took his Black Studies seriously. There was one sentence in Das Verichteraraberbuch that turned everything around in Dr. Bridge's head. The sentence was:
Gestorben ist nicht, was fur ewig ruht, und mit unbekannten Aonen mag sogar der Tod noch sterben.
HOMES ON LEGRANGE
GALACTIC ARCHIVES:
The original idea for the L5 space-cities had emerged from Professor Gerard O'Neill and a group of his students at Princeton in 1968. The motion was so radical that it took over five years to get it into print, in Physics Today, in 1973.
Professor O'Neill had simply asked his students a rather basic question-one which occurs inevitably on every planet which evolves beyond the boom-and-bust cycle of planetside life. O'Neill asked:
Is the surface of a planet the right place for an expanding technological civilization?
Once the question had been asked, the correct answer was, of course, inescapable.
Among the symptoms indicating that Closed System planetary industry would have to be transformed into Open System planetary-and-extraplanetary industry were the following:
Rapid exhaustion of the fossil fuels on Terra, leading to a desperate search for new energy sources; The virtually limitless solar energy in space;
Rising population and increasing longevity, leading to an inevitable new period of swarming;
Growing pollution and ecological imbalance, caused by the attempt to provide energy from terrestrial sources for this increasing primate population;
The Revolution of Rising Expectations-a sociological phenomenon brought on by the scientific-technological advances of the previous two centuries-which caused the majority of primates to claim they had the right to a decent standard of living;
The failure of the Revolution of Lowered Expectations, after the smarter primates realized that lowered expectations meant starvation for the majority of the planet;
The Hunger Project started by a circuit-five primate named Erhard, who encouraged people to believe starvation could be eliminated;
The continuous influence of a circuit-six primate named R. Buckminster ("Bucky") Fuller, who insisted the primate brain was designed "for total success in Universe";
And, finally, the debacle of terrestrial-based nuclear energy plants, which continually caused havoc in their environments, and which eventually prompted some of the primates to remember that a science-fiction writer, Robert Anson Heinlein, had foreseen all this in a 1940s story, "Blow-ups Happen," and provided the solution- moving the nuclear plants into space.
By 1984 over a third of Terra's industrial plants had been moved, as O'Neill foresaw, into the L5 area-Legrange point 5, where the gravity fields of earth and moon are balanced. The colonists even had a theme song, invented by another science-fiction writer, Robert Anson Wilson, in a book called The Universe Next Door. The song was "HOMEs on Legrange."
A VISITOR FROM FAIRY LAND
"Participation" is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics; it strikes down the term "observer" of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind a thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. That can't be done, quantum mechanics says.
–wheeler, misner, amp; thorne, Gravitation
MAY 1, 1934:
"They call it liberalism and socialism, the bastards, but really it's their own brand of highway robbery. They been after me and Henry Ford and every independent in the country for a hell of a long time. You remember all this, son; you remember what your father told you. It's a big fortune the Crane holdings and they're going to be trying to take it away from you, just like they're trying to take it away from me. I earned every penny of it, when I invented ORGASMOR, and I don't aim to let them take it away from me or from you. You just remember why all the bankers are Rosenfelt liberals, son; you remember who your real enemies are and don't think it's those idiot socialists and other cranks like Townsend, with his thirty dollars every Thursday. It's those kike bankers who want the whole pie and are just using Rosenfelt as a pawn."
That was old Crane, Tom Crane, the man who invented ORGASMOR, talking to his son, Hugh, in Central Park, where sweet birds sang. Tom Crane was more dinosaur than primate: a tough, unsentimental reptile whose wealth was based on a swindle, pure and simple. He never explicitly claimed in any advertisement that ORGASMOR created more orgasms-just that it was "deliciously enticing" and "stimulating to all body cells and tissues" and the PDA never succeeded in proving that his agents had planted the popular mythology attributing lubricity to a product not very different in chemical content from Coca-Cola. A strict constructionist would certainly say that Crane's customers were being defrauded.
"It doesn't poison anybody," old Crane always answered such nitpickers.
In fact, Hugh Crane-who was only ten in 1934 and would reach twelve before he discovered that the actual pronunciation of the President's name was Roosevelt-was only partially listening to his father's rambling diatribe. He had heard all of it before, many times, and besides, the Mysterious Tramp was much more interesting.
The Mysterious Tramp, perhaps a visitor from fairy land, was stopping each person who passed and asking them something. They all shook their heads and walked by rapidly. This was puzzling to little Hugh: If the answer was negative, why did the Tramp keep asking the question? Didn't he believe the people who had already answered? Was he offering a chance to cross the boundary into magic space and were they all too timid to try?
"You see, son, Rosenfelt and the Rhodes scholars have it all sliced up and they have to get rid of people like me…" Tom Crane was still rambling along his own paranoid yellow-brick road when they finally came abreast of the Tramp. Hugh listened eagerly to catch the Mystery Question.