Then Justin discovered the semantic environment. He learned to read and watch TV. The books seemed clumsy and sententious compared to the immediacy of the tube. He took a visual-electronic imprint on the semantic circuit, like most of his generation.
Case's sociosexual circuit was imprinted by Playboy, Sexual Revolution, weed, Rock, yippies, protest, the Generation Gap, Women's Lib, and General Confusion. He was a bachelor who had heterosexual couplings as often as he felt the need, with the minimum possible human involvement.
If you're interested in superficialities, he looked like a gay intellectual or a college professor or a little bit of both. He already had a bald spot. He dressed in conservative good taste. And every four years he went to a polling booth and carefully printed with a heavy felt-tip pen, "NONE OF THE ABOVE."
This was his one flicker of Social Consciousness.
Case had one Weird Experience in his whole life. It happened in 1973 when he went to see the famous mentalist, psychic, escape artist, and comedian Cagliostro the Great, at a nightclub called Von Neumann's Catastrophe.
Cagliostro began his act with a few traditional tricks- being locked in one box and then reappearing out of another at the opposite side of the room, that kind of routine. This was followed by one of his bitingly sarcastic monologues about the tricksters in other professions, such as the clergy and the government. This was all as Case had expected from the Most Controversial Magician in Show Biz history. Then came the psychic stunts, which were sometimes frighteningly impressive.
"B.W.," Cagliostro called out. "Will you please stand up?" Case saw the unbearable bore, Blake Williams, standing at a ringside table.
"B.W.," Cagliostro repeated, "you will never finish your twelve-volume study of quantum psychology. Not ever, in this universe. The twitches in your leg from the polio can be cured by Valerian Root tea. The incident at the Vandivoort Street incinerator is still haunting you. Your investments are all wrong-there's no future in space industry. And as for Project Pan, Doctor-Project Pan- naughty, naughty, naughty!"
Case could see that Williams had turned pale.
"J.C.," Cagliostro called out suddenly, "don't stand. This is private." Justin Case squirmed, half-afraid, half-skeptical, totally vulnerable. "J.C.," Cagliostro repeated, "you have created this movie that you call reality. Stay out of Chinatown…
"S.M.," the magician went on, "S.M., about the Beast, now… that's in your future…"
POE
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
–poe
In July 1968, immediately after the Democratic Convention, held behind barbed wire to prevent the people from interfering in their own affairs, a letter appeared in The Seed, a Chicago radical newspaper. The letter said:
Brothers and Sisters:
The final struggle is upon us. The big racist-imperialist forces that control Amerika have taken off their fake "liberal" mask and shown their true fascist nature. Look at the record: the assassinations of John and Bobby and Martin Luther King. The unending war against the people of Vietnam. The brutalities of the local police, right on television with the whole world watching, during the recent Demokratic Convention. Is it not obvious that the multinational corporations no longer even care to pretend that democracy still exists and are ready to kill us to the last man and woman if we continue to resist?
Weather Underground has chosen the wrong path, romantically allowing themselves to be known and defying the authorities to catch them.
We of POE have organized quietly. Our numbers are not for publication, nor our identities. We will not take "credit" for our actions, unlike the Weather romantics. We will not recruit new members. We will send no further communiques to the press. We will work and study to strike the most crippling blows possible against the fascist monster.
If you agree with us, do not seek to find us and join us. Do as we have done.
Peace On Earth.
John Brown
Some readers of The Seed thought this was a put-on. Others claimed it was the work of an FBI agent provocateur. A few wondered if POE actually existed, and what it would do.
Everybody, of course, assumed that the initials POE stood for the slogan in the last line of the letter-"Peace On Earth." They were wrong. POE stood for "purity of essence." The group had deliberately taken as their model General Jack D. Ripper in the film Dr. Strangelove, who launches a nuclear war to protect "the purity of essence of our precious bodily fluids" against fluorides. POE honestly felt that sanity had failed to save the world and that only insanity remained as a viable alternative.
Nor were they alone in this attitude. The same year POE was formed, the American people elected Richard Milhous Nixon to the White House, guided by a similar gut-level feeling that somebody like Jack D. Ripper was needed to confront the growing chaos of the planet with some strong counterchaos.*
The real name of the founder of POE was not "John Brown" of course. That was a pseudonym.
The original John Brown had been a fervent Idealist, which was why POE admired him. They were all fervent Idealists too.
John Brown, motivated by Idealism, had set out to abolish slavery in Unistat in the nineteenth century. On one of his first raids he murdered a whole family of slave owners. An associate, who was less Idealistic, had suggested sparing the children, but John Brown refused.
"Nits grow up to be lice," he said.
Idealists were like that. You were much safer falling into the hands of the Cynics. The Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt. That was the attitude for instance, of Tobias Knight and the other old hands at the FBI.
The Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.
*Galactic Archives: At the time of this story the Unistat government had 1,700 atomic bombs for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Since a person can die only once, historians have been at a loss to explain what the Unistaters expected to do with the surplus 1,699 bombs for each human being. Galactical primatologists inform us that similar irrational behavior has been observed among domesticated apes on several thousand planets.
The six-legged majority on Terra had never developed Idealism or Cynicism, nor had they ever thought of sin or corruption. They had a simple, pragmatic outlook. People could be recognized because they all had six legs. Good people smelled right and were part of the same hive or colony. Bad people smelled wrong and were not part of the hive; they should be eaten at once, or driven off.
Two-legged and four-legged critters weren't people at all and to hell with them.
The four-legged residents of Terra were, for the most part, equally simpleminded. People had four legs. Six-legged critters were food, or else they were not worth noticing. Two-legged critters were dangerous, and should be avoided.
Only the dogs, among all the four-legged Terrans, recognized the two-legged primates as being people.
Some of the primates also recognized the dogs as being people.
One-tenth of one percent of the domesticated primates recognized all the life-forms on their planet as people.
The one-tenth of one percent of the primates who recognized non-primates as people were in violent disagreement with each other about everything else. About one-third of them were Mystics and suffered from Permanent Brain Damage brought on by fasting, yoga, or other masochistic practices. They had attained understanding of the Intelligence of all living beings through an ecstatic-agonizing experience of ego loss brought on by their masochistic excesses. They went around talking about this genetic Intelligence and calling it "God" and telling everybody it was too smart to make mistakes and incidentally talking a lot of nonsense, also brought on by their excesses.