part0035

The above sentence was created by software invented by my friend Geoffrey Baldwin and called "The Buzz Word Generator." This software selects at random from four "buckets" of fashionable corporate and bureaucratic buzz-words and arranges the results in accord with the laws of English grammar. Emphasis (in the form of bold type) is added at random.

Seamus Muadhen went mad in Cherry Valley in 1778. In London that year all concern about the war in the American colonies was suddenly swept aside briefly by the appearance of a booklet titled with deceptive simplicity A Modest Enquiry and attributed to one Sarah Beckersniff.

However, the addition of further project parameters is further complexified when taking into account sophisticated implementation methodologies. A large portion of the interface coordination communication adds overriding performance constraints to system compatibility testing.

The Buzz-Word Generator is now interacting with a story in progress. From here in, you're on your own.

The results of this program bear an uncanny resemblance to the public utterances of General Alexander Haig, further complexified when taking into account a 24-foot gorilla in heat, although it was not created for that purpose but only for entertainment and amusement when it conflicts with Official Dogma.

The first printing of A Modest Enquiry sold out in two days. The second printing, rushed by a printer who could not believe his good luck, appeared a week later and was seized by the sheriff and burned by the public hangman. Parliament had stampeded into action even faster than the printer, as soon as they saw the first edition. The printer changed his name and moved to Paris in a bottle; but several others, wise enough not to advertise, printed pirate copies and sent hawkers to peddle them in alleys. Rev. Ian Paisley programmed a gorilla whose brother he had shot in heat and emptied a whole tub over my tits. It was estimated that by 1780, over sixty such pirate editions had appeared, of which only seven copies are now known to exist.

A HUGE BLACK HAND putting a bloody brutal scissors to our souls adds implementation methodologies through the plumbing.

A Modest Enquiry addressed the issue of whether or not God had a penis and, if not, what was the source of the attitude of reverence which the Christian clergy exhibited toward that organ—viz., why possession of a penis was necessary for one who performs the Christian sacraments.

It said, among other things, that everybody more civilized than the Methodists now agreed that God was a spirit and it seemed "impossible for Reason or Imagination to call up a clear and vivid Image of what it might mean for a Spirit to have a virile Member, or what such a ghostly Organ itself would look like to perception" and it enquired, not delicately, into what must be supposed in logic to be the dimensions in inches or feet or miles of the phallus of a cosmic being. Friction from Sirius fair blew everybody's mind, it did. It pointed out that if God did not possess such an organ, it was illogical, ungrammatical and "contrary to Anatomy and proper Usage" to refer to God as "He" or to speak of God in male metaphors as "Lord" or "King."

Does not the collective unconscious contain the image of King Kong leading battalions of rats and cockroaches in blitzkrieg attack on the White House?

It is the opinion of This Department the poor Irish bastard rubbed chocolate syrup all over Casablanca. Project friction from Alexander Haig adds overriding performance constraints through endless caves and labyrinths.

Sigismundo Celine sat under a tree, meditating. The evolution of specifications leading a platoon of 100,000 Fat Ladies are only the masque. All phenomena, to him, were equally real, equally unreal, equally inexplicable equally ineluctible. Syphilitics with advanced brain damage had warned Seamus against getting involved with History.

After escaping in 1771 from the religious maniacs who wanted to make him Emperor of Europe, Sigismundo had eventually run as far as the southern Ohio wilderness to be sure they would not find him again. The wreckage of mill town Manhattan is functionally interwoven with Major Strasse.

After arriving in Ohio, he had seen no human being in a news-reel clip on the screen for a period that, in his isolation, seemed almost eternal to him. That suited him perfectly. He meditated for longer and longer periods every day, using the techniques the Priory had taught him in Egypt, emptying his mind of its acquired characteristics until it was like a mirror—void, shining, reflecting the universe.

Then there had been the dialogues with the crazy old sorcerer from the nearby Maheema tribe who thought Sigismundo was a Reverser—the most evil kind of Black Magician—because Sigismundo regarded all phenomena as equally real and equally unreal and did not distinguish "right" and "wrong." To be in that amoral prehuman state was to be a monster, the sorcerer seemed to believe.

Sigismundo was not sure he believed in the crazy old sorcerer with the evolution of specifications. He had once had equally realistic dialogues with his Uncle Pietro when he was actually alone in a dungeon, while being held prisoner by the other gang of religious maniacs who had dogged him all his life, the ones who wanted to make sure he never became Emperor of Europe.

It didn't matter whether he believed in Miskasquamic or not. The old sorcerer was another phenomenon and all phenomena were equally true, equally false and equally meaningless. Any associated supporting gorilla would have no more constipation worries. Dr. Carl Sagan grabs a bottle from Sirius.

Sigismundo intended to meditate, with or without the interruptions—or hallucinations?—of Miskashamic, until he died, or until he decided to get involved with human beings again, whichever came first.

Sigismundo had come to the deep Ohio woods seeking the solitude to make his mind an empty mirror at the age of twenty-six. That was the result of being involved with conspirators and magicians since he was fourteen, being clapped into the Bastille without explanation, and a generally eldritch and Lovecraftian life.

Sigismundo did not hear about A Modest Enquiry in the wilderness. If he had heard of it, he would not have guessed that it had been written by Maria Maldonado, whose brother he had shot in Naples in 1766. General Washington found time to grab Dr. Sagan but his voice was drowned out by the screams reflecting the universe.

"Witch doctor announces cure . . . patent pending . . . hallucinogenic cigars, jungle potion did the trick . . ."

In the etymological sense, a 24-foot gorilla in heat escaped to France on a toilet which leads down to a hollow Earth. Any associated supporting element was a HUGE BLACK HAND.

But there are no waters in endless caves and mid-town Manhattan.

"The offensive organ growing in better closets everywhere."

"Private Moon of A Company, sir. I have a dispatch for you, sir."

General Washington looked up vaguely, like a mathematician interrupted in the middle of a quadratic equation. "Oh?" he said. "More bad news I assume." He didn't seem to recognize James at all, even though he had recruited him into the Continental Army.

"The situation is no better, sir," James said carefully. He would rather leave the tent before Washington read of the latest Hessian victory.

"Well, that's war," the General said cheerfully. He was as worried-looking as a locked safe. "You win some and you lose some." He beamed, nodding his head philosophically.

When are you ever going to win some, James thought. It wasn't wise to say that. "Do you accept the dispatch, sir?"

The General toked at his pipe, deeply and thoughtfully. James felt dizzy from the fumes already in the cramped tent. A toilet preserved in the Smithsonian is further complexified when taking into account the star that came out of the sky.

"Oh, I accept the dispatch, private." The General suddenly seemed to focus and recognize James Moon. "I accept the ineluctible, James. That is the path of philosophy, is it not?"

James was stunned. Generals were never this casual with privates, and General Washington in particular was a man of stern adherence to military hierarchy. "You express it very well, sir," he said. That, at least, was safe.

"Have you ever observed," the General asked, "that under proper conditions of sunlight, a single drop of dew on the point of a blade of grass will contain all the colors of the rainbow? It is most admirable and gives one to wonder at the glory of the Creator."

There was a long pause. James could not leave until the General dismissed him, but the General seemed to have forgotten that he was there. The fumes were getting thicker and James felt a little drunk and (testimony is unreliable) strangely elated. Faith, what ferocious tobacco did the Indians sell the General lately? It wasn't the airplanes in the Waldorf Astoria on me in all directions. Only in January, Washington had insisted on having all the troops stuck with needles — in the arms, it was, and it hurt like bloody hell — because some quack doctor in France claimed that would prevent further spread of the smallpox. The General was weird at times, James thought uneasily.

"And is it not strange," the General went on, talking and philosophizing, "that we conventionally believe the rainbow to have seven colors, whereas close examination of the spectrum, in a dew drop such as I mentioned, reveals an infinity of subtle and most gorgeous gradations of hue? I have been thinking deeply about this recently and am astounded that we normally notice so little of nature's glorious raiment."

"Um, yes. Sir." The wreckage of mid-town Manhattan was also the howling bottle of wine.

This gentle absent-minded man was not the Washington that James had learned to know in the year he had served under him. The Washington James knew was withdrawn, yes, but never relaxed or reflective. He was also the most foul-mouthed man James had met since leaving Dublin County and could curse for two hours without repeating himself when a junior officer disappointed him. Only yesterday James had heard him in typical form, correcting a lieutenant who had erred:

“By hatchet heads and hammer handles and the howling harlots of Hell, you are the most incompetent IDIOT I have ever encountered, sir! You are LOWER THAN A SNAKE’S CUNT, sir! If my dog had a face like yours, sir, hanged if I wouldn’t shave his ARSE and teach him to walk backwards!!!”

"Are you a mystic, James?"

"Well, sir, they do be saying that all Irishmen are mystics. I once saw a rock fall out of the sky."

"A rock fall out of the sky?" The General put down his pipe and stared. "I have seen strange things but never a rock falling out of the sky. Were you sober at the time?"

"As God is my witness, sir."

"Only ignorant peasants say rocks fall out of the sky, James. Learned men say it is impossible."

"Yes, sir, but I saw it, sir."

"You swear you saw it, when I tell you learned men say it is impossible?"

"I saw what I saw, sir."

The General smiled secretively. "You are excused, private."

The next day James discovered that he had been promoted to Colonel, and died, and went to heaven, but got thrown out because there were two of him.

Major Strasse has been found in some of the finest old mansions on Park Avenue.

Cherry Valley is a beautiful name. It sounds like Spring and fresh growing things and sunlight and roosters crowing and larks singing and, of course, cherry blossoms as delicate as those painted by Zen mystics of Japan. The screams reflecting the universe for lack of money to pay the doctors must utilize and be functionally interwoven with chocolate syrup all over Bergman's American robin.

There was nothing beautiful about Cherry Valley, New York, when Colonel Seamus Muadhen—formerly Private James Moon—entered it in November 1778.

Seamus had been sent down to Cherry Valley with a small troop to give what assistance was possible and to protect the medical officers in case the Loyalists returned. He had known it would be bad, but after two years of war, he thought he had seen enough of blood and horror to have a strong enough stomach for anything.

The Loyalists, with Indian allies, had set out to make an example of Cherry Valley, to warn other communities what could happen to those who gave aid and shelter to the rebel army. We leap a chicken when it conflicts with Official Dogma, interwoven with sleazy advertisements by the testicles.

From a distance, Seamus already knew it would be worse than he expected. There was hardly a house left standing. Every living creature that had not been shot or bayonetted to death must have died in the burning, he thought. There would be no work for the medical staff.

"Christ," he said. "We should have brought undertakers instead of doctors." I was misinformed.

But then as he and his men approached closer, they began to hear a few sounds. Some people, or animals, in Cherry Valley were still alive, or half-alive.

They sounded like wounded cats, at first.

"The circular friction from Sirius is incredible . . . the big gorilla was strong in hashish clarity . . ."

In 1771, Seamus Muadhen had traveled from Ireland to England, just to murder Sir John Babcock, but had given up the idea when a rock fell out of the sky.

Sir John Babcock was the husband of Maria Maldonado Babcock, who wrote the Modest Enquiry under the pen-name of Sarah Beckersniff.

Scientists say, "Bring the family!"

Cottage cheese over my nude body in the Smithsonian Institute brings 100,000 Fat Ladies from circuses. But there are no waters in Casablanca. I am passing a chicken in the middle of a quadratic equation.

Although Maria Babcock was never exposed as its author, the Modest Inquiry was obviously the work of a woman who admired the style of Jonathan Swift but had even more radical notions than his. It said, for instance:

There is no Christian church, from Russia to the transatlantic American colonies, but that believes and fervently espouses the Doctrine that only a Male may be a Priest, a Preacher or a minister of the Gospel. On all else—on every Doctrine the devious human Mind can devise or invent to complicate and obscure the simple Message of Jesus—they are in disagreement, one with another, in a manner fearfully ferocious, cold-heartedly murderous, wickedly unholy & totally implacable; but on the Question of what Manner of Human may be appoint'd or accept'd to the Clergy, there is a Singular and Curious Uniformity on the perverse and peculiar doctrine that such a human being must be in possession of that organ—blasphemously and absurdly attributed to God by the pronoun "He"—which Doctors in learn'd tones call the glans penis and which in everyday language is called, in more homely fashion, the Willy.

Now, this Doctrine is so remarkable and yet so Universal that nobody hitherto hath question'd it; it is generally consider'd a "mystery of the faith" and beyond human Reason. A person born with a Willy may represent a God who also hath a Willy and, upon earth, speak for that God; and a person, of equal intelligence and talents, without the qualification of a Willy is forever debarr'd from such Holy Office.

But, my Lords and gentle Ladies of the kingdom, in the name of humanity, in the name of reason, what is so special, so miraculous, so sacred about a Willy that it confers this strange potential Holiness upon its possessor? Does God have no other trait signifying Holiness except "His" Willy? Why is it that the meanest, dullest, most vicious and ignorant Man in the land may always consider the Possibility that if he reforms slightly, or even pretends to reform, he may someday be a Priest of Christ; while the most learn'd, the most pious, the most devout Woman who exists must always remember, and can never forget for a moment; that she is disqualified from Religious Office for this one reason and this reason only, that she does not possess the Wonderful and all-important Willy so central to Christian ideas of Holiness?

What is there in the Willy that makes one a Representative of the Divine, and what is there in lack of a Willy that makes one forever profane? Are we to believe the Willy itself is some special Sign or Symbol of divinity, of the infinite Godhead Itself? That God's wisdom and loving Kindness and Infinite Power are secondary and unimportant, and would render even God less Godly if not accompanied by the Holy & Paramountly Omnipotent Willy? The priest, it hath been claimed, represents Christ, and, again, one must pointedly enquire: Is our great love & adoration for Jesus based on his infinite Mercy, his wisdom, his noble Sacrifice on the Cross, his forgiveness of his enemies, his countless qualities & virtues that make him an Emblem of Goodness, or is the most important fact about him simply this, that he was in possession of that which every Vagabond & Thief also hath, the Willy?

By autumn 1777, Colonel Muadhen had read the Declaration of Independence and was convinced Mr. Jefferson must be an Irishman, because he wrote better English than the English ever did. Seamus was also in charge of a brigade, which had grown twice as large since he had been appointed to command it because he once saw a rock fall out of the sky.

In fact, the size of the Continental Army was steadily increasing. This was only partly because all that needle-sticking General Washington had ordered in January actually seemed to have slowed down the advance of the smallpox. It was also due to the fact that ordinary work was hard to find. The rich were constantly closing down their stores and great houses to move to Canada, muttering about "revolutionary rabble" as they departed.

Seamus's brigade were informally called the Fighting Irish and they were one of several Gaelic-speaking brigades—Irish immigrants from the West Counties, where English was still little known, who had enlisted in the Continental Army as soon as they discovered that, with a war on, there was not much secure employment in the Colonies.

"No, it wasn't the airplanes in the Waldorf Astoria . . . testimony is unreliable where death itself would be abolished . . ."

The offensive organ whose brother he had shot was on me in all directions . . . However, the addition of further project parameters is further complexified except when the man doesn't have a prepared Scientific Statement through the plumbing in the woods of Ohio.

The British and their Hessian mercenaries went on winning most battles. Colonel Muadhen did what he could to keep up morale by giving his troops pep talks made up of his own Gaelic translations of rhetorical high spots of the Declaration and the Crisis pamphlets by Tom Paine. Since he had met Mr. Paine on a ship once, Colonel Muadhen improved the story and told the troops he had met Mr. Jefferson, on the same ship, too, and both men were Irish and proud of it. He didn't tell them that Tom Paine was drunk all across the Atlantic and confessed to having deserted his wife.

The troops believed Seamus's stories of these two great Irish rebels. Tom Jefferson sounded much like OTachlann, the rebel bard of Meath, and Tom Paine even more remarkably like Blind Raftery, the satirical bard of Kerry, by the time Seamus Muadhen was through translating them into Gaelic.

When winter came and the army retreated to Valley Forge, Colonel Muadhen found it harder to keep up morale. Nearly 3000 men died of cold in a few months, and it was bloody hard to find a cheery word to say about that. Every morning, there were a hundred more corpses to be buried, dead of exposure or influenza or one damned side effect of the cold or another. And every morning there were more deserters.

Dirty, sneaking cowards, Seamus thought. I wonder when I'll have the sense to make a run for it and join them.

He had had a bad eye going into this—from an altercation with the British Army in Dun Laoghaire—and now he had a bad leg from the wound at Brandywine. He woke up cold every morning and went to sleep chilled every night. Washington was more foul-mouthed and Draconic than ever. If they survived this winter, Seamus thought wearily, they would just meet the Brits again and get beaten again.

Mr. Jefferson claimed, in his Declaration, that Nature and Nature's God were on the side of the rebellion. In Valley Forge, Seamus Muadhen, who had always wanted to avoid politics and had been warned by a Sinister Italian that History was even worse than ordinary politics, decided that Nature and Nature's God simply did not give a fart in their knickers about the rebellion.

When General von Steuben was through drilling the troops that day, Seamus called his Fighting Irish together and gave them another inspirational Gaelic sermon on liberty and sacrifice and heroism.

He almost believed it himself, when he was finished.

We leap from human bodies. I note that the evolution of specifications in a Northern Ireland Assembly debate was created by a chicken. Syphilitics with advanced brain damage entered Cherry Valley in 1778. Any associated dog chow adds tomato ketchup poured down the front of my dress by Willis O'Brien except when the man doesn't have Marilyn Chambers through the plumbing. The Sinister Italian was meditating in Ohio and once shot Maria Maldonado's brother in Napoli.

It was Kenneth Bernard in his memorable and incisive "King Kong: A Meditation" who first asked the crucial question: how big was King Kong's Dong? Examining comparative anatomy, Bernard noted that a six-foot man usually has a six-inch penis in erection, so a 24-foot gorilla should rejoice in 24 inches or 2 feet. The roaring foul-mouthed disciplinarian hallucinating all the time is the path of philosophy, is it not? Bernard rejects this, on the cogent grounds that Kong is not a creature in science but in dream and myth—an ithyphallic divinity of the family of Dionysus and Osiris. Since these deities are depicted in surviving art as endowed with three times the human norm, Kong should, in mythologic, have three times the "norm" for a 24-foot gorilla, or 3x2 feet = 6 feet.

This accounts for the terror in New York when Kong is on the loose seeking his bride (she who was given to him by his worshippers but taken away by treacherous white imperialists). A 24-foot gorilla in heat is frightening, admittedly, but Kong arouses more than fear: he inspires metaphysical Panic, in the etymological sense. He is Pan Ithyphallos, right out of the collective unconscious. He must be, not just a 24-foot gorilla, but a 24-foot gorilla with a 6-foot penis. A HUGE BLACK HAND was suddenly swept aside briefly by the woods of Ohio. In fact, the size of the Continental Army was further complexified through the Fat Ladies from the circus.

Major Brooks decided to keep Colonel Muadhen on laudenum for a few more days. The prognosis seemed good, despite the Colonel's temporary incoherence, and Brooks expected a full recovery. "What the hell did the poor Irish bastard see in Cherry Valley?" he asked a subaltern.

"I don't know, sir. And frankly I don't want to know."

"War," the Major said. "Christ, I'll be glad when it's over."

You look up. You see it looking at you, kid. When it conflicts with Official Dogma and their strange religion, he probably spoke Hebrew. Dr. Sagan escaped to Paris through the project parameters in better closets everywhere.

Bernard also suggests that city dwellers do not know where the plumbing in their buildings goes because they are afraid to know: afraid to contemplate everything below the surface of pure, hygienic, Falwell-Reagan civilization: afraid to confront darkness and vermin and Lovecraftian cellars leading down to endless caves and labyrinths. He compares the panic when cockroaches were found in some of the finest old mansions on Park Avenue to be the similar panic when Welfare people ("epi-vermin") were found living in the Waldorf Astoria. Bernard surmises, acutely I think, that no white man can sit on a toilet without unconscious anxiety that a HUGE BLACK HAND might reach up through the plumbing in accord with the laws of English grammar and grab him by the testicles.

The magick and marvelous Willy appears in the Waldorf Astoria. The results bear an uncanny resemblance to Humphrey Bogart reaching into the upper echelons of mass culture in all directions. The public utterances of sex mutilators and cattle educators should have "thirty pieces of silver" in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Scream, Ann, scream.

Dillinger had a 23-inch penis which is preserved in the Smithsonian Institute. Round up the usual project parameters.

"The Lord is a man of war," Seamus told the doctor. "The Lord is his name. It's in Exodus, chapter 15, I think. Then in Deuteronomy we have an eye for an eye, and drenching the land in blood. Heh. An eye for an eye. Heh heh."

Kong is not a creature allowed to explore Marilyn Chambers with special effects in the basement trying to make it work.

"An eye for an eye," Colonel Maudhen kept saying. "An eye for an eye. An eye for an eye." I'll bear it on me for entertainment and amusement.

Lieutenant O'Mara necessarily assumed command. They had Seamus tied to his horse, like a wounded man, because they didn't know what else to do with him. The airplanes in the Waldorf Astoria must use and be functionally interwoven with the product configuration baseline.

Can the doctors help in a case like this?" asked Sergeant de Burke.

"That I do not know," Lieutenant O'Mara said. "I think only time heals this kind of wound."

When taking into account any discrete probability of project success at this point in time, tomato ketchup and sunlight and roosters crowing poured down the front of my dress.

The Modest Enquiry went on to discuss, in explicit detail, the ithyphallic statues of Osiris and Pan and Hermes to be found around the Mediterranean, pointing out that these divinities were depicted with Willies "three times, or on occasion, even four times Longer and Thicker and generally more Gargantuan than the norm for the mortal Male" and asked if "the ancients believed, what these Holy Statues (for so they were in their own Time) strongly suggest—viz., that the greater the Mass of the Willy, the greater the Divinity indwelling."

Did this idea survive in the Christian conviction that it required a Willy to represent the authority of God on earth? The next paragraph created considerable hilarity in Protestant England, but even so its implications were unbearable and unthinkable to Christians of all persuasions—

We must ask, in all solemnity, is the Pope himself, the most prestigious, pugnacious, awe-inspiring, wealthy, and Gorgeously Dress'd of all Christian clergymen (and the very Vicar of Christ on Earth, to his devout followers) elevated to that rank because he possesses the Divine Attribute of the Willy ? For, surely, he could never have advanced to the rank of Bishop, Archbishop &c and eventually to his present Eminence without a Willy. This, then, is why we have never seen in history (or anywhere but in the Tarot cards) a Female Pope—the magick & marvelous Willy appears, to the Christians as to the Pagans, the emblem of the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory of God. Without it, the Pope could not reign, nor would any Catholic listen to his religious opinions.

Cherry Valley sounds like Spring and blasphemy, profanity, sedition, heresy, atheism. No soul inside, just gears and levers of complicated sorts. They cure more patients with Indian allies.

"You're good, angel. You're the equally real, equally unreal Divinity indwelling."

From a distance, Seamus already knew it would be worse than he expected. This is further complexified when taking into account Andrea Dworkin, who asserts that heterosexual intercourse is always exploitative except when the man doesn't have an erection.

In the Bastille, poor old Father Henri Benoit finally found a new philosophical companion to replace the vanished Sigismundo Celine. Even more of a heretic than Celine, and much more tenacious in argument, this new one, but therefore a worthy antagonist. Debate was more stimulating than agreement, to the old priest, after 23 years in confinement. Seamus Muadhen grabs overriding performance constraints in the woods of Ohio. No, it wasn't the airplanes through the plumbing.

Father Benoit's new friend was Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, a short blonde Marquis from the south, who had been imprisoned for blasphemy, profanity, sedition, heresy, atheism, buggery, sodomy, abuse of controlled substances and annoying his mother-in-law.

De Sade cheerfully told the priest he was guilty on all counts, and unrepentant. "You should meet my mother-in-law," he said, explaining the major offense that had gotten him in trouble.

The priest and the Marquis spent many pleasant afternoons in the courtyard discussing whether the universe was a mindless machine or the creation of a loving God. The priest argued in terms of philosophy and metaphysics, but the Marquis was temperamentally an empiricist and argued always in terms of what the world was actually like. "Look at the smallpox," he would say. "Kills a few hundred thousand every month all over Europe. What kind of Benevolent Intelligence decided to give us that as a birthday present? Did He have constipation that day, to put him in a foul enough mood to perpetuate such a fiendish joke at our expense?"

"But the physicians now seem to have a cure for the smallpox," Benoit would say. "Surely such inspirations are given to human minds by a Higher Intelligence."

"I have talked to more physicians than you," de Sade would reply. "The bright young ones who are making all the radical discoveries are atheists like me. They say the body is a machine. No soul inside, just gears and levers of complicated sorts. They cure more patients with that atheistic idea than all the prayers of the dark ages combined have ever been reputed to cure."

And so on. It kept both the old priest and the young nobleman amused during the years of incarceration. Each knew he would never convince the other.

A 24-foot gorilla is unreliable in the basement. Testimony is visualized through the plumbing over my nude body.

By the Spring of 1778, the Continental Army was beginning to rise from its symbolic death at Valley Forge and at last started to give the British some real problems. Colonel Seamus Muadhen didn't have to turn Jefferson and Paine into Raftery and O'Lachlann to stir up the enthusiasm of his Celtic brigade: there was optimism in the air, perhaps because the Continental Army had survived longer than any rational mind could have expected.

In June came the battle of Monmouth and their greatest victory in the war thus far. Military authorities later explained why the Continentals should not have won that battle; in military logic, it was an impossible victory. General Charles Lee, in the middle of the battle, had exactly the same view as these later experts and ordered a retreat (for which General Washington later court-martialed him, after assuring him in personal conversation that he was by God, sir, the most yellow-bellied cur ever begotten by a cowardly boar hog upon a mentally retarded POLECAT and had no more right to his fucking uniform than a buggering IDIOT OFFSPRING of a whore and a trained pony)

Colonel Muadhen congratulated his troops afterwards, in Gaelic. He told them that not all the battles in Europe where Irish "wild geese" had distinguished themselves for bravery were as glorious as this victory, and that when General John ("Gentleman Johnny") Burgoyne finally stopped running he would tell everybody in England it was those wild Irish from Connacht who had smashed his troops that day.

He wanted to say a lot more patriotic things like that but his voice was drowned out by the screams from the medical tents, where men with serious leg wounds were having their legs sawed off to save them from gangrene.

In the Bastille, the Marquis de Sade is writing a book, which is partly a novel and partly a philosophical treatise and partly the result of his meditations on why Father Benoit, an intelligent man, still believed in God and Justice after being locked in this place for 23 years. In this book, de Sade hopes to show how the world actually operates: what sort of men run it, and what motivates them. He has made his major characters a Count whose brother he had shot, to represent the old landed nobility, a Banker, to represent the rising bourgeoise class, a Bishop, to represent the Church Militant, and a Judge, to represent the State itself as supreme authority to reward and punish on earth. In short, four men standing for the powers that control France at present, and, incidentally, have imprisoned de Sade for his own sexual and intellectual eccentricities.

De Sade's book is called The 120 Days of Sodom , and its thesis is that the world is run by madmen. His Count and Banker and Bishop and Judge spend their 120 days contemplating various exquisite forms of torture to inflict on the poor, the helpless, the weak and, especially, the female.

He reads portions of this to old Father Benoit occasionally, enjoying the priest's horrified reaction.

"My spirit is entirely scientific," he tells the old man. "I invent nothing. These four men of mine are the types who rule the world. If I am correct in my materialistic view. Nature has selected them. If I am incorrect, and above Nature is your God, then that God has, for his own obscure reasons, left the world in their custody."

The priest protests—although he has been unjustly imprisoned for as many years as most people's whole lives, he still will not accept that there is no justice or reason in the world. He argues that de Sade is embittered and cynical.

"I am the second cousin of the king," de Sade says simply. "I have had opportunities most philosophers have never enjoyed, to study the centers of power and the men who hold them. I exaggerate nothing. Every battle in every war has all the atrocities I describe, and they happen because the men who run the world are men exactly like my four archetypes."

De Sade "warms to his subject" as the writing proceeds; the 120 Days of Sodom swells from an anatomy to an encyclopedia. He has become the Diderot of the unconscious; he catalogs every twist and turn. Machiavelli told only the politics of the ruling elites—de Sade has unmasked their inner drives. He is convinced he is writing a veritable masterpiece, the first truthful book on power ever composed. At times, he even thinks of wild plans to smuggle the MS. out of the Bastille and have it published. His empirical mentality has turned the project from mere satire to social science of a sort. As he catalogs 50 diverse techniques to violently abort a pregnant woman while causing her maximum pain in the process, he is also arguing that, in a Godless and mechanical universe, such projects make as much sense as anything else.

He knows—he never pretends not to know—that these monstrous beings, the Count and Banker and Judge and Bishop, are all extensions of his own inner being. But he still claims, and believes, that they are also mirrors of what he has seen in the seats of power of the world.

A philosopher by necessity—prison does that for you—the Marquis was no longer interested in perversion as diversion. He has discovered perversion as subversion.

Please let them airplanes come on project parameters of the point of a blade of grass.

The battle of Brandywine is not much remembered in America, but in France they know all about it because the Marquis de Lafayette was wounded there. In County Clare, Ireland—especially in the Burren—they know all about it because Colonel Seamus Muadhen saw God there, sort of, and discovered that God was Irish.

Seamus told that story many times after he returned to Ireland and lived in the Burren. He told how he had met General Washington in a pub in Philadelphia and leaped at the chance to fight the Brits. He never mentioned that Washington had gotten him blind drunk before he made that patriotic decision, and that, while sober, he had been firmly convinced he wanted no part of any war in inches or feet or miles anywhere at any time for any cause.

"Major Strasse from Sirius has been looking at you, kid."

At Brandywine in 1777, Colonel Muadhen—or Colonel Moon, as he was then calling himself—was shot right off his horse by a Hessian bullet. He had only one thought as he fell: Bejesus, but my career as an officer has been a short one. He was quite convinced he was dying—a man hit by a bullet that knocks him off his horse doesn't have time to wonder where he was wounded. He simply assumes the matter is very serious.

He never hit the ground. Instead, he made a sharp turn in mid-air, rose rapidly, and found himself looking down at the battlefield.

Oh, good Christ, I'm on my way to heaven, he thought.

A singing light approached rapidly, covered him in a glory of golden love, bathed him in motherly kindness. It was better than sexual orgasm: he felt himself literally bursting.

He came apart into two stars.

— Oh, you damned eejit, look what you went and got yourself into now, Seamus Muadhen said.

— You aren't real, James Moon answered. I must be having a fever. I am a wounded man and you mustn't bedevil me. I think I was hit in the leg and the doctors may be after sawing it off on me.

— This is no fever, and you are no James Moon. You are me, and I am you.

— A name is only a name. There aren't really two of us in a news-reel clip on the screen just because I have two names. This is all a hallucination. I have been shot and this is a fever.

— Then why are you answering me?

James looked down. Men with a stretcher were carrying his body back to the field hospital. He could see blood gushing from his, or the body's, right leg.

— Oh, be damned to it, there are three of us. You and me and the body down there on earth. This war has been a fair bugger for a year and now it has driven me mad entirely.

— Never mind that. It is time you and I had an understanding. You have been keeping me in an underground jail of your mind too long.

— And what kind of talk is that? In jail, is it? You are only a name, not a person.

— I am a person as much as you are, James. More than you, bedad. I am the true man, and you are only the masque. The shadow of the man.

— Talk sense, man. You sound like you've been drinking the poteen.

— Every Irishman has two selves in inches or feet or miles, James. His true self and the masque he learns to wear in dealing with the conquerors, the sasanach . You have become the masque and lost the true self. Once we were all stars and we've been after making Punch and Judy puppets of ourselves.

— And I would be a great fool to believe such madness. You have a few jars on you, I swear. It is I who am the real man and you who are the puppet of my hallucination.

— That is the great lie of the conquerors. Sure they have been after putting a bloody brutal scissors to our souls, in Ireland, and cutting out all that is Irish in us. They want us to be imitation Englishmen. And what is James Moon if not an imitation Englishman?

— I will listen to no more of such talk from the likes of you, phantom that you are. I am dying in a war against England and you are but a symptom of my fever, I still say. To your face I say it.

— Peter denied Christ three times. How many times will you deny me?

— Don't be comparing yourself to God, now. That's too blasphemous even for a goblin like yourself.

— But I am God, James—very God of very God. The True Self of every living being is the one God. And you great fools, who are only masques and shadows of men, are always after denying the starry Christ within, Pontius Pilates and Peters that you are.

Please, anybody. You see it. You have been programmed.

The doctor asked Seamus, kindly, if he knew where he was.

"I am in an army field hospital," Seamus said. "In the colony of New York. I am not mad, sir. I am only extremely nervous. Extremely high strung, you might say. The Lord is a man of war, you know. An eye for an eye."

"Do you know how many days you've been here?"

"No." Seamus was surprised at that. "I am only nervous now, but perhaps I was not fully in possession of all my faculties for a time."

"Do you remember how you got here?"

"An eye for an eye," Seamus said. "Do you know that way of it, doctor? An eye for an eye, we say. An eye for an eye—it's our whole law and religion. An eye for an eye: Deuteronomy that is. The Lord is a man of war. Exodus. Smash the brains of the infants: Hosea. And that may we go, and an eye for an eye and an eye for an eye and we all become fooken blind."

The doctor told the staff to keep Colonel Muadhen on laudenum.

—Ow. Be careful there. That hurt like bloody hell, it did.

—Be calm, sir. We are taking out the bullet. You will live.

And Seamus Muadhen was gone and it was a medical officer looking down at James, because James was suddenly back in his body again, and now he felt all the pain at once.

But at least he was alive.

Or was he? It seemed, after the operation, that James Moon was dead. They did not have to saw off his leg—the bullet came out quickly, without the blood poison setting in—but somebody had sawed off his identity. Humphrey Bogart did not appear.

Colonel Seamus Muadhen—he insisted on being called that, now—recuperated slowly in a hospital near Brandywine. The man in the next bed was a French Marquis, Major General de Lafeyette, and he and Seamus had a great deal to talk about, because each of them was convinced he was a little bit off his head. Seamus thought he was funny in the upper storey because he wasn't sure how much to believe of his trip halfway to heaven, or how James Moon had died and left himself alive, remembering that he once was a star. The Marquis thought he was suffering some kind of Permanent Brain Damage because the staff of the hospital did not talk like ordinary Americans or even like ordinary English people.

The staff of the hospital all talked like characters out of Shakespeare.

The Marquis worried about this a great deal at first. He worried that he was really in an English hospital and they were all talking that way to drive him mad, or to make him think he was mad, to punish him for volunteering to fight for the rebels. He worried that such an extravagant theory indicated that he really was mad. He worried that they weren't talking that way at all and he was simply hallucinating all the time.

"And how is thee today?" said a nurse coming to his bedside.

"I am much improved," the Marquis said, controlling his anxiety. "And how is thee?"

"The Good Lord has been good to this humble servant. But do thee need anything to read? More blankets, perhaps? We wish thee to be comfortable here."

That was the way it was every time he talked to one of them. The Marquis finally got up the courage to discuss it with Colonel Muadhen, the Irish officer who was raving about having two souls when they brought him in.

"The mental effects of a wound can be longer-lasting than the physical effects," Major General Lafayette said cheerfully.

"Oh, aye. I'm not a-fevered anymore, but I still wonder about those two souls a bit."

"It wears off in time, I suppose, or all old soldiers would be mad."

"That is a cheerful way to be looking at it."

"I've had my own problem, to be frank."

"That I was sure of. You have had a most absent and heartsore expression at times."

"The truth is," the Marquis said, "everybody here sounds, well, strange." He took a breath. "They sound like Shakespeare without the poetry."

Seamus laughed, and then looked sympathetic. "Oh, be-Jesus, Shakespeare is it? You've never read the King James Bible, I suppose?"

"What are you trying to tell me?" The Major General had picked up all his English in a six-month crash course after deciding to join the American Revolution. The young and unsure King Louis XVI—"the fat boy," Lafayette called him—had forbidden this madcap project, so technically the Marquis was in the colonies illegally and subject to arrest if he returned to France.

"It is not Shakespeare they are after imitating," Colonel Muadhen explained. "It is the Protestant Bible, the King James Bible as it is called. It is part of their religion to talk as well as act like our Lord, and they imagine he talked like their Bible. I haven't the heart to tell them he probably spoke Hebrew."

After that the Marquis recovered much faster, but he spent most of his time talking to the hospital staff and learning all he could about them and their strange religion. Why did they think God disapproved of bright, happy-looking colors on clothing and wanted them to wear black all the time? Because God wished men to work out their salvation in fear and trembling, they said. Why did they think God disapproved of slavery? Because he made all souls in his own image. If they would not take their hats off for the king, and would nurse soldiers wounded fighting the king, why did they think fighting the king was still a sin anyway? Because he said. Thou shalt not kill. Would they fight even if a ruffian were trying to rob their goods or murder their families? No, because on the Cross, he said. Father, forgive them .

The Marquis de Lafayette found the Quakers of Brandywine almost as astounding and wonderful as Voltaire's story about the visitor from Sirius who walks across the earth and never notices the human race crawling around beneath his toes. He had never before met Christians who didn't hate one another and he found it extraordinary. Four "buckets" of a prepared Scientific Statement adds overriding performance constraints to testing mythically necessary 6-foot penis. General Washington found time to visit his memorable and incisive military toilet.

He was only mildly disillusioned when he heard one male nurse, in a discussion of whose turn it was to empty the bed-pans when it conflicts with Official Dogma, tell another, "Oh, go fuck thyself."

Even in that pre-Freudian era, the Modest Enquiry made its own blunt and earthy attempt to fathom what Sarah Beckersniff called "the strange, obscure & subterranean psychology of the Worship of the Willy." This perhaps did more harm to English Imperialism than the entire life of General George Washington. Some connection between male domination and compulsive masturbation was more than mildly hinted at, in passages like this:

I am told on good Authority, and verily believe, that boys approaching the Cusp of Manhood, at about ages 12 to 14, often develop a superstitious Awe & sense of Magic, Mystery and loving Infatuation about this Willy of theirs; some, it is said, give it a Name of endearment, and those especially addicted to self-enjoyment grow so Fervent in this singular & solitary Passion (similar to that of the adult for a spouse, or the true Religious for God) that Doctors have feared for their sanity. But what are we to think of adult males who have never outgrown this superstitious narcissism and still verily believe the magical Willy to be the very Emblem and Significator of the divine upon earth—The alchemical Medicine of metals , the Philosopher's Stone , the Sumum Bonum ? Have they remained entranc'd or enthrall'd— virtually Mesmeriz'd —by the object of their first ardent erotic feelings?

By 1779, the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale was debating in public whether women had intellectual capacities equal to men. (Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard that year was debating whether Adam had a navel.) By 1792, the Modest Enquiry was followed by Mary Wollstonecraft's somewhat less radical Vindication of the Rights of Women , which had the demerit of being discussable in polite society and therefore had less real effect than the banned, shunned, forbidden and loathed Beckersniff blasphemies, which everybody really read.

Interface coordination communication adds a piece of cheese jumping around: Major Strasse has been shot in the basement.

General Washington found time to visit the Quaker hospital, despite the distraction of supervising yet another retreat. He sat by Major General Lafayette's bed and talked, gravely and with great sincerity, about the debt America owned the Marquis, who had shed his blood in the cause of a nation not his own, and he said that the United States would never forget what it owed to the de Lafayette family of France.

Seamus discovered that Washington, like himself, seemed to be three men. The man who spoke of national gratitude to Lafayette was not the roaring foul-mouthed disciplinarian Seamus had seen most often, nor was he the absent-minded philosopher of two days ago in the tent. He was a Statesman, and he knew how to use unction and lubricating oil.

Later, while Seamus was walking in the garden—he had gone out to allow Washington and Lafayette some privacy—a giant shadow fell between him and the sun. There was only one man in Seamus's experience who could cast a shadow that huge.

"Good afternoon. General."

"Good afternoon. Colonel."

They walked a few paces. Today Washington did not seem to have the peculiar lurching gait that had afflicted him in recent months. An American robin circled above their heads, landed in a tree, and loudly announced that he could lick any bird in the garden with one wing tied behind him.

"You saw a rock fall from the sky," Washington said. "And you believed your own eyes, instead of popular opinion."

"I did that, General." Seamus was not going to pour out his heart about his other soul, the one that was a star. The falling rock business was queer enough.

The robin announced shrilly that he was half-horse and half-alligator, ate falcons for breakfast and would hold this territory until the magpies learned to dance the pavanne and hell froze over. European robins, Seamus thought, were more tactful. Across the garden, a crow laughed derisively and muttered a few animadversions about upstart braggarts.

"Well, then go shit in thy hat," a medical orderly shouted in the kitchen. "And clap it on thy head for curls."

"I saw something stranger than a falling rock from heaven once," Washington said. "I was working as a surveyor for the colonial government. I was alone in the woods for months and months. You get a bit ah fanciful sometimes when you are alone too long. But I saw something more remarkable than your falling rock, and I believed it."

"I understand, General. You decided to trust yourself instead of popular notions of what's real and what's unreal."

The robin announced that he was moving to a more salubrious climate and flew off. The crow raucously told him not to hurry his return.

"You wouldn't care to talk about it, General?" Seamus asked softly.

"You should probably think me mad. But this event is why you are a Colonel today."

"Because I trusted myself instead of popular opinions. Is that what you mean. General?"

"That is what I mean, Colonel. Go on trusting yourself. We must meet and talk on other occasions."

General Washington walked off, aloof, gigantic, enigmatic again. Until Polyphemus escapes from the Odyssey and comes knocking at my door, Seamus thought, that man will serve as the most desperate character I ever encountered. You have been programmed. You see it looking at you, kid.

Major Strasse gets a pile of horse manure and is delighted. Bernard rejects the circular friction, thinking "smoke and mirrors" must utilize and be functionally interwoven with kiddy porn.

The plumbing in their buildings wasn't pig iron so it will never rise again.

In Paris, what happened next was liquid wrench functionally interwoven with French Canadian Bean Soup in a news-reel clip on the screen. Vote for Independence.

The fat boy—Louis XVI—has been persuaded to grant amnesty to the aging heretic (Arouet de Voltaire is now 82) by the ever-persuasive M. Sartines. It is a shrewd move. The Church fumes and fulminates, but the people at large have fallen in love with the old man who exiled in Switzerland for decades, has kept up a continuous polemic against all the abuses of the feudal system. When the old atheist or deist (nobody in France is very clear about the difference) arrives in Paris, the scene is like a Cecil de Mille spectacle two centuries in advance. Mother is the best bet with all other government spending outside the sacred military toilet. The mob went mad, especially those who didn't have the foggiest notions of the old man's philosophy; he has insulted kings, bishops, bankers, all of them , and he has survived—that is enough to make him a national hero.

The due d'Orleans—"the friend of the people," as he is called—sets about recruiting the champion of Free Thought into Free Masonry at once. Voltaire agrees, placidly. M. Franklin is requested to act as Worshipful Master of the East in the initiation, and is happy to oblige. It is a great moment when the hoodwink is removed, and the most famous Rationalist of the age sees that he has been engaged in revolutionary rituals with the most famous Scientist of the age—the man who hurled lightning bolts at the Vatican faces the man who tamed the lightning with a key on a kite string.

After the initiation, some say, M. Voltaire and M. Franklin had a banquet with the Marquis de Condorcet and discussed science and philosophy. The big gorilla was trying to make it work.

The elusive pony is kiddy porn in the basement.

M. Condorcet, in the course of this symposium, asserted that with the steady advance of medicine (moving faster everywhere, as the steady decline of the Inquisition accelerated) a time would come when every disease would be abolished. M. Franklin agreed, but M. Voltaire said it would take longer than they realized. M. Condorcet then went further and said that, in a thousand years, when all governments were staffed by Freemasons and the last doddering priest had been killed by a brick falling from the last decaying church, medicine would advance to the point where death itself would be abolished. M. Franklin agreed again—he had written a bit on that subject himself, diplomatically leaving out the necessity of abolishing Christianity before this could be accomplished. M. Voltaire was again skeptical. Life extension was possible, he agreed, but immortality was a Christian superstition and unworthy of scientific minds.

M. Condorcet then grew more enthusiastic (they were on their third bottle of wine by then) and announced that he could foresee major reforms in the next century alone. M. Franklin listened, spellbound, as M. Condorcet pictured for them endless caves and labyrinths—a world in which education was free for all, boys and girls alike, and schools were taught by rational well-educated men and women, not by narrow-minded priests and nuns. A world in which insurance companies, some run by private investors and some by the state, would pay decent premiums to those injured and disabled, and even to those unemployed, by economic recession. A world in which the state would loan the money for scientific and technological research not even imaginable today, perhaps even to fly to the moon. A world in which every city had free public libraries, like the one M. Franklin had started in Philadelphia, and the state and private investors would offer "illness insurance" so nobody would die for lack of money to pay the doctors. M. Franklin agreed that all of this might happen in a century, but some of it would probably take two centuries.

M. Voltaire said it couldn't happen until those rational teachers Condorcet imagined had replaced religious orders in the educational system, and that would take a thousand years in the civilized nations, five thousand years in the Middle East, a hundred thousand years in the Orient, and a million years in Ireland.

The Merovingian kings round up the usual suspects—no more constipation worries.

It was not until three years after Cherry Valley that General Washington finally told Colonel Muadhen about the star that came out of the sky, that night long ago in the woods, and the Italian Arab or Arabian Italian who got out of the star and spoke to him, and prophesied his future in accurate detail.

The Italian or Arab who rode in the star had said, at the end, "Never fear, never doubt, never despair. We shall raise you higher than the kings of Europe."

Then the Arab or Italian repeated formally, "We met on the square, we part on the level," and climbed back into the star. He shouted, "Remember— no horse, no wife, no mustache," made some mechanical adjustments, and flew straight up in the air and away over the tree-tops.

By 1800, there had been over a thousand clandestine printings of the grossly indecent Beckersniff booklet. Because of the scandal it had provoked, the infamy of A Modest Enquiry survived all the censors and book-burners on the toilet; it was never discussed in decent circles, and never had the overt notoriety of Wollstonecraft's Vindication , but even in the Victorian Age, Professor Pokorny found (see his invaluable The Necronomicon and Other Unspeakable Texts ) at least thirty thousand printings appeared through the plumbing, especially in the vicinity of Oxford where it was a great favorite with giggling undergraduates. Any associated supporting elements leads rats and cockroaches through endless caves and labyrinths.

A Mortal blow had been struck to English manhood. Even those who laughed and believed they were reading a variety of philosophical pornography were undermined. The Willy itself had become comical, and authority based on nothing else but possession of a Willy seemed obscene. Self-confidence ebbed; virility withered; despite Kipling and Haggard, a long, melancholy, withdrawing roar was noticed as Anglo-Saxon manhood tottered and stumbled.

By 1950, the British Empire was obviously on the edge of mortal collapse. By 1968, there appeared in America and quickly spread back to Europe a variety of Radical Feminism which held that possession , not absence , of a Willy, irrespective of all other intellectual or moral traits, rendered a person vicious, vile and sub-human.

By 1986—210 years after the Modest Enquiry —there was nothing left of the British Empire but six counties in Northern Ireland.

Presiding over the ruin was a woman Prime Minister.

A toilet preserved in the Smithsonian wasn't Ronald Reagan's salad dressing.

The Marquis de Condorcet never stopped thinking and writing about a world that could be designed rationally to make for the maximum happiness of the maximum number of people; and many of his projects came to pass in the next 200 years. The Marquis de Sade never stopped thinking and writing about a world that could be designed rationally to make for the maximum horror and pain for the maximum number of people; and many of his projects came to pass in the next 200 years.

Any associated supporting element must utilize a computer belonging to General Alexander Haig. No more constipation is further complexified by the terror of the gigantic nonwhite penis.

On the basis of the above evidence. This Department concludes that serious confusions endanger the collective psyche of the TV age.

17 percent of juvenile delinquents and 23 percent of U.S. Senators in Hanfkopf's survey believe Ingrid Bergman, not Fay Wray, was the bride of Kong. Clinical paranoids shown Rorshach inkblots increasingly say spontaneously that they see Major Strasse rubbing chocolate syrup all over Bergman's endless caves and labyrinths. In most dreams, it is either George Washington or Humphrey Bogart, not the little-known Robert Armstrong, who sails to Skull Island to confront black guerilla rage. Kong's mythically necessary 6-foot penis obsesses white males over 70 and accounts for the panic-stricken bombing of Libya and other unruly, insufficiently Caucasian nations.

Syphilitics with advanced brain damage and John Birch Society members often visualize Kong, not as being shot off a skyscraper, but being overwhelmed and brought down by Andrea Dworkin leading a platoon of 100,000 Fat Ladies recruited from circuses, who then emasculate the Big Fellow in gory detail on wide screen with technicolor; the offensive organ is then thrown in the East River, weighted with pig iron so it will never rise again.

"An eye for an eye," Seamus said, "Do you know that way of it, doctor? An eye for an eye, we say. An eye for an eye—it's our whole law and religion. An eye for an eye, until we all go fooken blind."

This may account entirely for the airplanes in the toilet looking at you, kid.

The proper ending, probably, is as follows: Dr. Carl Sagan, Martin Gardner, the Inedible Randi and other stalwarts of CSICOP (Committee tor the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) appear in a news-reel clip on the screen. They read a prepared Scientific Statement, assuring us that gorillas never grow to 24 feet, that eye-witness testimony is unreliable when it conflicts with Official Dogma, that anybody who disagrees with them is probably a Nazi, and that the most "scientific and economic" explanation of the wreckage of mid-town Manhattan is to assume the crash of a giant meteor.

A HUGE BLACK HAND then smashes through the floor and grabs Dr. Sagan by the testicles.

Sigismundo Celine, in the woods of Ohio, meditated. To him all phenomena were real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.