"Lord in Heaven," Harry Coin said softly. "That was what my first session with him was all about. I tried dominance signals to bluff him, and it didn't work. So I tried submissive signals, which is the only other gimmick I ever knew, and that didn't work either. So I just gave up."
"Your brain gave up," Stella corrected. "The strategy center, for dealing with human relations in authoritarian society, was exhausted. It had nothing left to try. Then the Robot took over. The biogram. You acted from the heart."
"But what has redundance got to do with this?" George asked.
"Here's the passage," Stella said. She began to read aloud:
People exist on a spectrum from the most redundant to the most flexible. The latter, unless they are thoroughly trained in psychodynamics, are always at a disadvantage to the former in social interactions. The redundant do not change their script; the flexible continually keep changing, trying to find a way of relating constructively. Eventually, the flexible ones find the "proper" gambit, and communication, of a sort, is possible. They are now on the set created by the redundant person, and they act out his or her script.
The steady exponential growth of bureaucracy is not due to Parkinson's Law alone. The State, by making itself ever more redundant, incorporates more people into its set and forces them to follow its script.
"That's heavy," George said, "but I'll be damned if I can see how it applies to Jesus or Emperor Norton."
"Exactly!" Harry Coin chortled. "And that ends the game. You've just proven what I suspected all along. You're the Martian!"
"Don't raise your voices," Galley said drowsily from the floor. "I can see hundreds of blissful Buddhas floating through the air…"
A single blissful Buddha, meanwhile- together with an inverted Satanic cross, a peace symbol, a pentagon and the Eye in the Triangle- were taking up Danny Pricefixer's attention, back in New York. He had finally decided to play his hunch about the Confrontation bombing and the five associated disappearances. The decision came after he and the acting head of Homicide received a thorough ass-chewing from the Police Commissioner himself. "Malik is gone. The Walsh woman is gone. This Dora kid was taken right out of a jail in Texas. Two of my best men, Goodman and Muldoon, are gone. The Feds are nasty and I can tell they know something that makes this case even more important than five possible murders alone would account for. I want you to report some kind of progress before the day is over, or I'll replace you with Post-Toasties Junior G-Men."
When they escaped into the hall, Pricefixer asked the man from Homicide, Van Meter, "What are you going to do?"
"Go back and give my men the same ass-chewing. They'll produce." Van Meter didn't really sound convinced. "What are you going to do?" he added lamely.
"I'm going to play a hunch," Danny said, and he walked down to Bunco-Fraud, where he exchanged some words with a detective named Sergeant Joe Friday who always insisted on trying to act like his namesake in the famous television series.
"I want a mystic," Danny said.
"Palmist, crystal-gazer, witch, astrologer… any preference?" Friday asked.
"The technique doesn't matter. I want one you've never been able to pin anything on. One you investigated and found a little scary… as if she or he really did have something on the ball."
"I know the one you want," Friday said emphatically, hitting the intercom button on his phone. "R amp; I," he said and waited. "Carella? Send up the package on Mama Sutra."
The package, when it shot out of the interoffice tube, proved to be all that Danny had hoped for. Mama Sutra had no arrests. She had been investigated several times- usually at the demand of rich husbands who thought she had too much influence over their wives, and once at the demand of the board of directors of a public utility who thought the president of the firm consulted too often with her- but none of her activities involved any claims that could be construed to be in violation of the fraud laws. Furthermore, she had dealt with the extremely wealthy for many years and had never played any games remotely like an okanna borra or Gypsy Switch on any of them. Her business card, included in the package, modestly offered only "spiritual insight," but she evidently delivered it in horse doctor's doses: one detective, after interviewing her, quit the force and entered a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, a second became questionable and finally useless in the eyes of his superiors because of an incessant series of memos he wrote urging that New York be the first American city to experiment with the English system of unarmed policemen, and a third announced that he had been a closet queen for two decades and began sporting a Gay Liberation button, necessitating his immediate transfer to the Vice Squad.
"This is my woman," Pricefixer said; and an hour later, he sat in her waiting room studying the blissful Buddha and other occult accessories, feeling like a horse's ass. This was really going way out on a limb, he knew, and his only excuse was that Saul Goodman frequently cracked hopeless cases by making equally bizarre jumps. Danny was ready to jump: the disappearance of Professor Marsh, in Arkham, was connected with the Confrontation mystery, and both were connected with Fernando Poo and the gods of Atlantis.
The receptionist, an attractive young Chinese woman named Mao something-or-other, put down her phone and said, "You can go right in."
Danny opened the door and walked into a completely austere room, white as the North Pole. The white walls had no paintings, the white rug was solid white without any design in it, and Mama Sutra's desk and the Danish chair facing it were also white. He realized that the total lack of occult paraphernalia, together with the lack of color, was certainly more impressive than heavy curtains, shadows, smoldering candles and a crystal ball.
Mama Sutra looked like Maria Ouspenskaya, the old actress who was always popping up on the late late show to tell Lon Chaney Jr. that he would always walk the "thorny path" of lycanthropy until "all tears empty into the sea."
"What can I do for you?" she asked in a brisk, businesslike manner.
"I'm a detective on the New York Police," Danny said, showing her his badge. "I'm not here to hassle you or give you any trouble. I need knowledge and advice, and I'll pay for it out of my own pocket."
She smiled gently. "The other officers, who investigated me for fraud in the past, must have created quite a legend at police headquarters. I promise no miracles, and my knowledge is limited. Perhaps I can help you; perhaps not There will be no fee, in either case. Being in a sensitive profession, I would like to keep on friendly terms with the police."