THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "AEON" :: CHAPTER 7, EPISODE 1

Wednesday morning... Imperium, Day One... is a Maenad of uniforms; Al Haig's confirmed, Ted and Joan Kennedy divorcing, even the Mayor of New York calling for authority to decree municipal death penalties. Blood on the wind, but Alexander Graham Bell, busted in the lobby of AT&T's Murray Hill labs still counseling: "Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. You will be certain to find something that you have never seen before."

I slit Lou Baggott's gray package with T's opal-encrusted switchblade, shake his report out, glance at pertinent sections. Not bad, not bad. A little also bug flops out and I wonder where Louis has been hiding documents. Before the Nazi occupation, Polish physicists who gathered at the Scottish Cafe in Lvov buried their reflections... subsequently known as the Scottish Book... beneath a soccer field in Wroclaw for the Communists to dig up, after the war.

When the Templars complained that Herman Kahn's so-called "Doomsday machine" would be too slow taking effect after Russia tested a 57-megaton nuke in 1961, RAND, half-facetiously, drafted a "Doomsday-in-a-Hurry" proposal to warm Harry's old bones under the Bering because, being computerized, orders to war couldn't be rescinded by Pentagony wimps. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, the size (if not quantity) of flying monkeys began getting smaller; Kahn, anticipating anti-Doomsday criticism, acknowledged that the United States and USSR were both "status quo powers." How much of the technology that made the 57-megger possible spent years in a Polish grave with only bugs and worms as companions... that's highly open to interpretation.

Lou's package, containing Three Mile Island specs... on the other hand... is out-and-out zemi, so to speak, dripping with as much ketchupy ytz as any 57 Scottish Books.

"Hold my calls," I buzz Cynthia, warming up the Kramdens. >HARDYHAR I enter, then at the prompt >ENTALICE so as to access only the cold vapors swirling round the black stone of California that contains the so-called "intuitive", or left, or "female" memory. There's no purr, no Petrasian katchunketing... the delay is significant only in machine time... a twentieth of a second to ride the express bus and back, two thirds light speed on better days.

When the Zone was finally shut down, Lentex pounced, as Will Leonard and T. (and their fathers) had prepared for all along... government's infrastructure shoveled out from under the debris of Watergate at six, I think, no more than eight tenths of a cent on the dollar. The aging IBMs were decapitated; Alice carried to the West Coast for installation, Ralph... whose memory I'd brought back from Costazul at such cost... mounted atop his altar on the grounds of Dog School.

Alice promptly wires back a reply. Her ID of distinction's a margin of little diamonds as opposed to Ralph's Spanglish exclamation points (meant to simulate bowling pins, see?) or the partnership's colons... purportedly the diamonds were lifted off one of Ralph's golf sweaters, like one of Adam's ribs. (The Zone used to be full of frat-boy humor... before weirder weirdness metastasized!)

After barely enough time to contract a cold (among the Dogteam, one of the euphemisms for Armageddon is "catching a cold") Alice replies:

This is not good. I'm suddenly pissed off, not only at Alice's display of obscurantism, but by her demand and display of subject and reference passwords... there's a way of deleting these, but I'd interrupt her train of thought... and that's as likely to break down as Amtrak on any freezing January morning.

Damn!

T. brought me up the plateaus through COLONADE, but died before supplying the eighth plateau password... let alone the ninth. I suspect Harry never even provided him with that, as Wilson Leonard, Senior, also withheld that password from his sons. Which would mean there is no human being alive capable of reaching the ninth plateau... just Alice and Ralph, and perhaps one or other of the experimental Maxob. I have T's personal touch verification fetishes but, without the password to complement them...

And OUT before Alice can fire back one of her damn incompleteness protocols or other conniving wiles... masks and aliases!... really! I am going to break through to the ninth plateau! And when I do it's to the Moon with you, with both of you, Alice and Ralph...

The Moon!