The first dream came to Dr. Charles Oceangoing on February 2-more than a month before FUCKUP picked up the vibrations. He was, as usual with him, aware that he was dreaming, and the vision of a gigantic pyramid which seemed to walk or lumber' about meant nothing and quickly vanished. Now he seemed to be looking at an enlargement of the DNA double helix; it was so detailed that he began searching it for the bonding irregularities at every 23rd Angstrom. To his surprise, they were missing; instead, there were other irregularities at each 17th Angstrom. "What the devil …?" he asked-and the pyramid returned seeming to speak and saying, "Yes, the devil." He jolted awake, with a new concept, Anthrax-Leprosy-Mu, coming into consciousness, and began jotting in his bedside pad.
"What the hell is this Desert Door project?" the President had asked once, scrutinizing the budget. "Germ warfare," an aide explained helpfully. "They started with something called Anthrax Delta and now they've worked their way up to something called Anthrax Mu and… " His voice was drowned out by the rumble of paper shredders in the next room. The President recognized the characteristic sound of the "cesspool cleaners" hard at work. "Never mind," he said. "Those things make me nervous." He scribbled a quick "OK" next to the item and went on to "Deprived Children," which made him feel better. "Here," he said, "this is something we can cut"
He forgot everything about Desert Door, until the Fernando Poo crises. "Suppose, just suppose," he asked the Joint Chiefs on March 29, I go on the tube and threaten all-out thermonuclear heck, and the other side doesn't blink. Have we got something that'll scare them even more?"
The J.C.'s exchanged glances. One of them spoke tentatively. "Out near Las Vegas," he said, "we have this Desert Door project that seems to be way ahead of the Comrades in b-b and b-c-"
"That's biological-bacteriological and biological-chemical," the President explained to the Vice-President, who was frowning. "It has nothing to do with B-B guns." Turning his attention back to the military men, he asked, "What have we got specifically that will curdle Ivan's blood?"
"Well, there's Anthrax-Leprosy-Mu… It's worse than any form of anthrax. More deadly than bubonic and anthrax and leprosy all in one lump. As a matter of fact," the General who was speaking smiled grimly at the thought, "our evaluation suggests that "with death being so quick, the psychological demoralization of the survivors-if there are any survivors-will be even worse than in thermonuclear exchange with maximum 'dirty' fallout."
"By golly," the President said. "By golly. We won't use that out in the open. My speech'll just talk Bomb, but we'll leak it to the boys in the Kremlin that we've got this anthrax gimmick in cold storage, too. By gosh, you just wait and see them back down." He stood up, decisive, firm, the image he always projected on television. "I'm going to see my speech writers right now. Meanwhile, arrange that the brain responsible for this Anthrax-Pi gets a raise. What's his name?" he asked over his shoulder going out the door.
"Mocenigo. Dr. Charles Mocenigo."
"A raise for Dr. Charles Mocenigo," the President called from the hallway.
"Mocenigo?" the Vice-President asked thoughtfully. "Is he a wop?"
"Don't say wop," the President shouted back. "How many times do I have to tell you? Don't say wop or kike or any of those words anymore." He spoke with some asperity, since he lived daily with the dread that someday the secret tapes he kept of all" Oval Room transactions would be released to the public. He had long ago vowed that if that day ever came, the tapes would not be full of "(expletive deleted)" or "(characterization deleted)." He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of Russia and China.
In Central Park, the squirrel woke again as a car honked loudly in passing. Muttering angrily, he leaped to another tree and immediately went back to sleep. At the all-night Bickford's restaurant on Seventy-second Street, a young man named August Personage left a phone booth after making an obscene call to a woman in Brooklyn; he left behind one of his THIS PHONE BOOTH RESERVED FOR CLARK KENT stickers. In Chicago, one hour earlier on the clock but the same instant, the phone booth closed, a rock group called Clark Kent and His Supermen began a revival of "Rock Around the Clock": their leader, a tall black man with a master's degree in anthropology, had been known as El Hajj Starkerlee Mohammed during a militant phase a few years earlier, and his birth certificate said Robert Pearson on it. He was observing his audience and noted that bearded young white cat, Simon, was with a black woman as usual-a fetish Pearson-Mohammed-Kent could understand by reverse psychology, since he preferred white chicks himself. Simon, for once, was not entranced by the music; instead, he was deep in conversation with the girl and drawing a diagram of a pyramid on the table to explain what he meant. " Crown Point," Pearson heard him say over the music. And listening to "Rock Around the Clock" ten years earlier, George Dorn had decided to let his hair grow long, smoke dope and become a musician. He had succeeded in two of those ambitions. The statue of Tlaloc in the Museum of Anthropology, Mexico, D.F., stared inscrutably upward, toward the stars… and the same stars glittered above the 'Carribean where the porpoise named Howard sported in the waves.
The motorcade passes the Texas School Book Depository and moves slowly toward the Triple Underpass. At the sixth-floor window, Lee Harvey Oswald sights carefully through the Carcano-Mannlicher: his mouth is dry, desert dry. But his heartbeat is normal; and no sweat stands out on his forehead. This is the moment, he is thinking, the one moment transcending time and hazard, heredity and environment, the final test and proof of free will and of my right to call myself a man. In this moment, now, as I tighten the trigger, the Tyrant dies, and with him all the lies of a cruel, mendacious epoch. It is a supreme exaltation, this moment and this knowledge: and yet his mouth is dry, dust-dry, dry as death, as if his salivary glands alone rebelled against the murder which his intellect pronounced necessary and just. Now: He recalls the military formula BASS: Breathe, Aim, Slack, Squeeze. He breathes, he aims, he slacks, he starts to squeeze, as a dog barks suddenly-
And his mouth falls open in astonishment as three shots ring out, obviously from the direction of the Grassy Knoll and Triple Underpass.
"Son-of-a-bitch," he said, softly as a prayer. And he began to grin, a rictus not of omnipotence such as he had expected but of something different and unexpected and therefore better-omniscience. That smirk appeared in all the photos during the next day and a half, before his own death, a sneering smile that said so clearly that none dared to read it: I know something you don't know. That grimace only faded Sunday morning when Jack Ruby pumped two bullets into Lee's frail fanatic body, and its secret went with him to the grave. But another part of the secret had already left Dallas on Friday afternoon's TWA Whisperjet to Los Angeles, traveling behind the business suit, gray hair, and only moderately sardonic eyes of a little old man who was listed on the flight manifest as "Frank Sullivan."