There was one pyramid. It was much smaller than the towers around it. It gleamed a dull yellow. Despite its lack of height, it seemed to dominate the harbor skyline, like a squat, powerful chieftain in the center of a circle of tall, slender warriors. There was movement around its base.
"This is the city of Peos in the region of Poseida," said Hagbard, "and it was great in Atlantis for a thousand years after the hour of the Dragon Star. It reminds me of Byzantium, which was a great city for a thousand years after the fall of Rome. And that pyramid is the Temple of Tethys, goddess of the Ocean Sea. It was seafaring that made Peos great. I.have a soft spot in my heart for those people."
Crawling around the base of the temple were strange sea creatures that looked like giant spiders. Lights flashed from their heads and glinted on the sides of the temple. As the submarine swept closer, George could see that the spiders were machines, each with a body the size of a tank. They appeared to be excavating deep trenches around the base of the pyramid.
"Wonder where they had those built," muttered Hagbard. "Hard to keep innovations like that a secret."
As he spoke, the spiders stopped whatever work they were doing around the pyramid. There was no motion among them at all for a moment Then one of them rose up from the sea bottom, followed by another, and another. They formed quickly into a V shape and started toward the submarine like a pair of arms outstretched to seize it. They picked up speed as they came.
"They've detected us," Hagbard growled. "They weren't supposed to, but they have. It never pays to underestimate the Illuminati. All right, George. Button up your asshole. We're in for a fight."
At that moment but exactly two hours earlier on the clock, Rebecca Goodman awoke from a dream about Saul and a Playboy bunny and something sinister. The phone was ringing (was there a pyramid in the dream?-she tried to remember- something like that) and she reached groggily past the mermaid statue and held the receiver to her ear. "Yes?" she said cautiously.
"Put your hand on your pussy and listen," said August Personage. "I'd like to lift your dress and-" Rebecca hung up.
She suddenly remembered the hit when the needle went in, and all those wasted years. Saul had saved her from that, and now Saul was gone and strange voices on the phone talked of sex the way addicts talked of junk. "In the beginning of all things was Mummu, the spirit of pure Chaos. In the beginning was the Word, and it was written by a baboon." Rebecca Goodman, twenty-five years old, started to cry. If he's dead, she thought, these years have been wasted, too. Learning to love. Learning that sex was more than another kind of junk. Learning that tenderness was more than a word in the dictionary: that it was just what D. H. Lawrence said, not an embellishment on sex but the center of the act. Learning what that poor guy on the phone could never guess, as most people in this crazy country never guessed it. And then losing it, losing it to an aimless bullet fired from a blind gun somewhere.
August Personage, about to leave the phone booth at the Automat on Fortieth Street and the Avenue of the Americas, catches a flash of plastic on the floor. Bending, he picks up a pornographic tarot card, which he quickly shoves into a pocket to be examined at leisure later.
It was the Five of Pentacles.
And, when the throne room was empty and the believers had departed in wonder and redoubled faith, Hassan knelt and separated the two halves of the vessel which held the head of Ibn Azif. "Very convincing screams," he commented, slipping the trapdoor beneath the plate; and Ibn Azif climbed out, grinning at his own performance. His neck was thick, bull-like, undamaged, and quite solid.
THE FIFTH TRIP, OR GEBURAH
Swift-Kick, Inc
And, behold, thusly was the Law formulated:
IMPOSITION OF ORDER = ESCALATION OF CHAOS!
–Lord Omar Khayaam Ravenhurst,
"The Gospel According to Fred," The Honest Book of Truth
The lights flashed; the computer buzzed. Hagbard attached the electrodes.
On January 30, 1939, a silly little man in Berlin gave a silly little speech; among other things, he said: "And another thing I wish to say on this day which perhaps is memorable not only for us Germans: in my life I have many times been a prophet and most of the times I have been laughed at. During the period of my struggle for power, it was in the first case the Jews that laughed at my prophecies that some day I would take over the leadership of the State and thereby of the whole folk and that I would among other things solve also the Jewish problem. I believe that in the meantime the hyenalike laughter of the Jews of Germany has been smothered in their throats. Today I want to be a prophet once more: if the international-finance Jews inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war the consequence will be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." And so on. He was always saying things like that. By 1939 quite a few heads here and there realized that the silly little man was also a murderous little monster, but only a very small number even of these noticed that for the first time in his anti-Semitic diatribes he had used the word Vernichtung-annihilation- and even they couldn't believe he meant what that implied. In fact, outside of a small circle of friends, nobody guessed what the little man, Adolf Hitler, had planned.
Outside that small- very small- circle of friends, others came in intimate contact with der Fuhrer and never guessed what was in his mind. Hermann Rauschning, the Governor of Danzig, for instance, was a devout Nazi until he began to get some hints of where Hitler's fancies were tending; after fleeing to France, Rauschning wrote a book warning against his former leader. It was called The Voice of Destruction and was very eloquent, but the most interesting passages in it were not understood by Rauschning or by most of his readers. "Whoever sees in National Socialism nothing but a political movement doesn't know much about it," Hitler told Rauschning, and this is in the book, but Rauschning and his readers continued to see National Socialism as a particularly vile and dangerous political movement and nothing more. "Creation is not yet completed," Hitler said again; and Rauschning again recorded, without understanding. "The planet will undergo an upheaval which you uninitiated people can't understand," der Fuhrer warned on another occasion; and, still another time, he remarked that Nazism was, not only more than a political movement, but "more than a new religion"; and Rauschning wrote it all and understood none of it. He even recorded the testimony of Hitler's physician that the silly and murderous little man often awoke screaming from nightmares that were truly extraordinary in their intensity and would shout, "It's HIM, it's HIM, HE'S come for me!" Good old Hermann Rauschning, a German of the old school and not equipped to participate in the New Germany of National Socialism, took all this as evidence of mental unbalance in Hitler…
All of them coming back, all of them. Hitler and Streicher and Goebbels and the powers behind them what look like something you can't even imagine, guvnor….
You think they was human, the patient went on as the psychiatrist listened in astonishment, but wait till you see them the second time. And they're coming-By the end of the month, they're coming…
Karl Haushofer was never tried at Nuremberg; ask most people to name the men chiefly responsible for the Vernichtung (annihilation) decision, and his name will not be mentioned; even most histories of Nazi Germany relegate him to footnotes. But strange stories are told about his many visits to Tibet, Japan, and other parts of the Orient; his gift for prophecy and clairvoyance; the legend that he belonged to a bizarre sect of dissident and most peculiar Buddhists, who had entrusted him with a mission in the Western world so serious that he vowed to commit suicide if he did not succeed. If the last yarn is true, Haushofer must have failed in his mission, for in March 1946 he killed his wife Martha and then performed the Japanese suicide-rite of sepukku upon himself. His son, Albrecht, had already been executed for his role in the "officer's plot" to assassinate Hitler. (Of his father, Albrecht had written in a poem: "My father broke the seal/He did not feel the breath of the Evil One/He set It free to roam the world!")