Gott took a slow pull from his goblet and felt the scentless vodka bite just enough and his skin shiver and the room waver pleasantly for a moment with shadows chasing across it. Then he swung the pupils of his eyes upward and looked across at the Man in the Black Flannel Suit, noting with approval that he was sitting rigidly on the sofa. Gott conducted his side of the following conversation without making a sound or parting his lips more than a quarter of an inch, just flaring his nostrils from time to time.
black flannel: Now if I may have your attention for a space, Mr. Adler —
gott: Speak when you're spoken to! Remember, I created you.
black flannel: I respect your belief. Have you been getting any messages?
gott: The number 6669 turned up three times today in orders and estimates. I received an airmail advertisement beginning 'Are you ready for big success?' though the rest of the ad didn't signify. As I opened the envelope the minute hand of my desk clock was pointing at the faceless statue of Mercury on the Commerce Building. When I was leaving the office my secretary droned at me, "A representative of the Inner Circle will call on you tonight," though when I questioned her, she claimed that she'd said, "Was the letter to Innes-Burkel and Company all right?" Because she is aware of my deafness, I could hardly challenge her. In any case she sounded sincere. If those were messages from the Inner Circle, I received them. But seriously I doubt the existence of that clandestine organisation. Other explanations seem to me more likely — for instance, that I am developing a psychosis. I do not believe in the Inner Circle.
black flannel (smiling shrewdly — his features have grown tightly handsome though his complexion is still putty gray): Psychosis is for weak minds. Look, Mr. Adler, you believe in the Mafia, the FBI, and the Communist Underground. You believe in upper-echelon control groups in unions and business and fraternal organisations. You know the workings of big companies. You are familiar with industrial and political espionage. You are not wholly unacquainted with the secret fellowships of munitions manufacturers, financiers, dope addicts and procurers and pornography connoisseurs and the brotherhoods and sisterhoods of sexual deviates and enthusiasts. Why do you boggle at the Inner Circle?
gott (coolly): I do not wholly believe in all of those other organisations. And the Inner Circle still seems to me more of a wish-dream than the rest. Besides, you may want me to believe in the Inner Circle in order at a later date to convict me of insanity.
black flannel (drawing a black briefcase from behind his legs and unzipping it on his knees): Then you do not wish to hear about the Inner Circle?
gott (inscrutably): I will listen for the present. Hush!
Heinie was calling out excitedly, "I'm in the stars, Papa! They're so close they burn!" He said nothing more and continued to stare straight ahead.
"Don't touch them," Jane warned without looking around. Her pencil made a few faint five-pointed stars. The Children's Clubhouse would be on a boundary of space, she decided — put it in a tree on the edge of the Old Ravine. She said, "Gott, what do you suppose Heinie sees out there besides stars?"
"Bug-eyed angels, probably," her husband answered, smiling again but still not taking his head out of his book.
black flannel (consulting a sheet of crackling black paper he has slipped from his briefcase, though as far as Gott can see there is no printing, typing, writing, or symbols of any sort in any colour ink on the black bond): The Inner Circle is the world's secret elite, operating behind and above all figureheads, workhorses, wealthy dolts, and those talented exhibitionists we name genius. The Inner Circle has existed sub rosa niger for thousands of years. It controls human life. It is the repository of all great abilities, and they key to all ultimate delights.
gott (tolerantly): You make it sound plausible enough. Everyone half believes in such a cryptic power gang, going back to Sumeria.
black flannel: The membership is small and very select. As you are aware, I am a kind of talent scout for the group. Qualifications for admission (he slips a second sheet of black bond from his briefcase) include a proven great skill in achieving and wielding power over men and women, an amoral zest for all of life, a seasoned blend of ruthlessness and reliability, plus wide knowledge and lightning wit.
gott (contemptuously): Is that all?
black flannel (flatly): Yes. Initiation is binding for life — and for the afterlife: one of our mottos is Ferdinand's dying cry in The Duchess of Malfi. "I will vault credit and affect high pleasures after death." The penalty for revealing organisational secrets is not death alone but extinction — all memory of the person is erased from public and private history; his name is removed from records; all knowledge of and feeling for him is deleted from the minds of his wives, mistresses, and children: it is as if he had never existed. That, by the by, is a good example of the powers of the Inner Circle. It may interest you to know, Mr. Adler, that as a result of the retaliatory activities of the Inner Circle, the names of three British kings have been expunged from history. Those who have suffered a like fate include two popes, seven movie stars, a brilliant Flemish artist superior to Rembrandt ... (As he spins out an apparently interminable listing, the Fifth Person creeps in on hands and knees from the kitchen. Gott cannot see him at first, as the sofa is between Gott's chair and the kitchen door. The Fifth Person is the Black Jester, who looks rather like a caricature of Gott but has the same putty complexion as the Man in the Black Flannel Suit. The Black Jester wears skin-tight clothing of that colour, silver-embroidered boots and gloves, and a black hood edged with silver bells that do not tinkle. He carries a scepter topped with a small death's-head that wears a black hood like his own edged with tinier silver bells, soundless as the larger ones.) the black jester (suddenly rearing up like a cobra from behind the sofa and speaking to the Man in the Black Flannel Suit over the latter's shoulder): Ho! So you're still teasing his rickety hopes with that shit about the Inner Circle? Good sport, brother! — you play your fish skillfully.
gott (immensely startled, but controlling himself with some courage): Who are you? How dare you bring your brabblement into my court?
the black jester: Listen to the old cock crow innocent! As if he didn't know he'd himself created both of us, time and again, to stave off boredom, madness, or suicide.
gott (firmly): I never created you.
the black jester: Oh, yes, you did, old cock. Truly your mind has never birthed anything but twins — for every good, a bad; for every breath, a fart; and for every white, a black.
gott (flares his nostrils and glares a death-spell which hums toward the newcomer like a lazy invisible bee).
the black jester (pales and staggers backward as the death-spell strikes, but shakes it off with an effort and glares back murderously at Gott): Old cock-father, I'm beginning to hate you at last.
Just then the refrigerator motor went on in the kitchen, and its loud rapid rocking sound seemed to Jane to be a voice saying, "Watch your children, they're in danger. Watch your children, they're in danger."