THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 6, EPISODE 3

In the Zone, Tess would be a Spock: logical and dualistic as that other Johnny, von Neumann... our General J's a Kirk, a Wiener... unified, vague. "All complex mathematical systems contain incompleteness; that's the edge guerrillas hold over mercenary armies," General Johnny admits. "Sensible authorities desire law and order, but nobody wants to pay the price. Insurrection's like polio you catch in a public swimming pool. All the best think tanks, Gallup and MORI, ORC and TIO... even your bunch in the Santa Monica Mountains... INRI, International Research Intelligence..."

"Doug's group?" General Johnny blinks. Since Jeff set his rats onto Max, silvers have counterprogrammed. Funny, one way of sniffing silvers always has been to follow the stench of agitated rodents; it follows them from lab to home to office, even church. If they attend. Amidst a hesitancy of dogs, rats ascend; kings of fierce countenancing, off-duty, shop for ersatz Hawaiian shirts on the Malecon.

Monday, in the city, the temperature's crawled above freezing and it's easy to spot Republicans by their grins. Lou Baggott calls from D.C. - Weinberger and Stockman confirmed, Donovan and Sam Pierce still holding. One Aeon customer's lawyer, a Mr. Brickman's been leaving messages... I call and his office says he'll get back to me. Kuyper's issued a memo to reconfigure all form letters. Phil Diamond's taking tomorrow off to fly down to join Lou at the festivities... rumor has it that the President and his wife are deep into astrology. "Rat pack's back too!" he oozes, "Dean, Frank, Ethel Merman, almost all the Osmonds! Charlton Heston! And Charlie Pride... don't let anybody tell you Republicans are racist. I've met their Chairman... he digs the Temptations! Just like me!"

I don't know what the Daily News told Phil his horoscope was but the moon's full. Behold! what manner of opinions, fields seeded with far meaner toads punctuate Hollywood's outlaw progeny? Phil glides off whistling a medley: "Celebration" and, I believe, "The Tide is High"?... recently, however, Phil's theme's become "Another One Bites the Dust". Or ice... as it may be.

Our Quad consultant's hand-delivered a handful of chips this afternoon, sprinkling them out across a table like Pyrates' Bones, pointing to each, naming functions... I'd brought a few home for Paul and Bud to look at during "That's Incredible" and "Dynasty" before the Inaugural gala. "These," I'd told the boys, rattling half a dozen chips, "unload the system from your VDT and match it with cable protocols, the software can be backed up with cassette or mag card." Paul's intent, Bud's eye wanders... he prefers J.R.'s valence-jumping to scheming Carringtons... "We still get requests for paper tape. Even punchcards," I laugh, mirthlessly.

"Uh huh?" Bud thinks I'm trying to make him feel stupid. "What's wrong with the set we have... it's paid for! If I go up the roof, work on the antenna, I can get Poughkeepsie, or even the Hartford station when the Giants are blacked out."

"Well, Quad would be capable of expanding screenlining by a factor of almost ten," I say, "it'll also handle the new high definition sets they're trying out in Japan... also in Prague and Budapest."

"I suppose we could wait until the programming catches up to the medium," I comment... seeing as how nobody has to pay McLuhan royalties now, not in that place he's gone to. "It's sort of like using Stoli in Bloody Marys instead of the house brand."

"Well," hmphs an Engineer Bob's brought along, "I suppose you could look at it that way. But what about Picturephone? AT&T setting up meeting rooms now the concept's taken off?"

I don't feel up to telling him it's been off, orbiting the moon since 1964's World's Fair. I don't want anybody seeing me in the morning, before I've put on makeup, and I don't want to see anybody... Wally, the Japanese... Uli especially! in the morning either. How vain the psyche of unbounded Hows! "Alright," Bob tries, "how about airline reservations? These," and he'd tapped another pile of silicon dominoes, "come as near Bell and IBM specs as patent law allows. The client's minimalized into a microworld, his queries answered by nondirective psychology."

"So if he doesn't know where he wants to go, the terminal decides for him?" I'd guessed.

"Exactly. The chip operates like truth serum. Fiber optic gestalt potential doubles yearly; by the end of the century anyone with a home computer will be able to download the Library of Congress in four hours."

"Hmmm..." Parsonage ponders, "edit and reload the doctored version back in five more..." The Engineer blinks, deviation's occurred, blowing fog over the Strangeloves, in my estimation, as I'd tapped into Ralph and Alice...

Bob and I finally settled on a token order to keep the supplier from bolting to another end-product assembler; I'd told Paul and Bud, still clicking chips along to Donny and Marie. Popo was the star at Junior's Inaugural... "and just who is that horrid boy?" Doña Eusebia had asked in all innocence. By then she'd doubled her collection of dolls, all with the same sort of china white, bony faces out of the last century... replicas to replace those disappeared during the years of Don Jaime Arcilla, never a great believer in America's Third Amendment. Memo to Palin... dictators and their creatures are not comforted in the presence of anima. You can expunge the spirit sucker from the doll... the Catholics have had almost their full five centuries to tame Uay devils... but they still wait, stare and wait behind their wood and glass Panoptica.

As T. remembered: when Harry Stone used to call those Lentex men up to Rhode Island during the summer of '52 and '53, they'd all stand at attention in their dark suits and sober ties like devil dolls while he'd recite anecdotes of his old Providence clients. Apparently the author H. P. Lovecraft owned a Lentex typewriter (the 212, with its rounded, vaguely Turkish typeface) and used it to peck out "The Dunwich Horror". Or, T. worried... himself torn asunder like an atom drawn too close to Milky Eminences... "it might have been 'The Colour Out of Space'..."