THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 7, EPISODE 5

"Harry always said he was only following Herzl's timetable," T. chuckled, "but he really was holding out for the Templar calendar to run down to zero on his birthday, October twenty third. His sixtieth. What ego he'd developed! Forrestal jumped out of that window believing Harry had sold out to the Jews... Harry never sold out to anyone! Fortunately perhaps...

"In April 1954," T. remembers, "Winston Churchill broke with Eisenhower over the March testing of Lady Dragon, a fourteen megaton super. Of course Brits have always been untrustworthy... that Fuchs incident, Philby... that bunch." And he'd held up a floppy wrist. "Turing for Oppenheimer, only a little tit for tat like... who were those fellows in 'The Godfather', hostages?... Boccacios?" After T. saw the movie he read the book and, finding it exemplary, assigned it to all Lentex new hires above the thirty fifth floor. A model by which the modern corporation should be run!

Now if Harry had been a literalist, he could have fudged the prophecies enough so that six years really meant six, not six thousand, tacked this time onto Israel's foundation and thereby justified release of flying monkeys. From what T. remembers, however, more than mere prophecy was at stake... the reason Ike considered pre-emptive war in the first place was because America would not be destroyed. China and, for that matter, Russia might be devastated but the world would not be split asunder - as might occur two years later when both sides possessed bigger arsenals!

So Harry's lodging with the pacifist faction was based on Berian cunning - realism alien to Power and LeMay, perhaps but, if not provable, at least undisprovable under the Devil's doctrine of uncertainty.

May, '54 then, after the French... remember, Egg, we went into Vietnam to clean up their mess... suffered a catastrophic rout at Dien Bien Phu. A cabal of Generals... some Templars, among others... pressured Eisenhower to use the Super on Vietnam, but he'd refused. "Caesar was assassinated for his raising the solar over lunar calendar," Duck reminds me, and von Neumann went on a nuke proliferation tour of Latin America.

On the last day of that month, Britain hastily drafted and passed legislation forbidding homosexuals, undesirables and other risks to the Crown to travel unrestrictedly. A week later, Alan Turing was found dead, allegedly a suicide by poisoned apple.

On the first day of June, T. presented me with a black plastic ball in which floated a polygonal wafer marked with Hebrew letters in a fluid medium... a toy he'd had flown in all the way from Tel Aviv. "This sign," he pointed, "is Aleph... the rising of Aleph means yes. The other sign is Taw... that means no." Of course it was only a primitive Israeli version of a prophetic toy soon to be found everywhere... the Franklin Goodwill's full of them (mostly with plastic cracked, fluid long ago leaked out). Oracles that float to surfaces and then erase themselves, like the Cheshire Cat smiles Asa and Goofballs imprinted into Ralph and Alice - trapdoors - subject of innumerable complaints by innumerable failed generations of Maxob. Like Engdahl, claiming God moved the reef round on him.

On the next day, the second, Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked by a vote of three to two. Much later, the scientist would recall that Kepler, seeking to justify the primacy of the sphere, is credited with discovering ellipses. Black wisps of smoke rise towards Gloria from the Malecon, where shirtless ones bake their tortillas over oil drums of broken vinyl albums.

More womb-kicks from an angry, embroyonic God in Herman Kahn's Doomsday-in-a-Hurry...

"The computer would be given all facilities it would need to be well informed about world affairs. We could then unilaterally legislate into existence a Soviet (or Chinese) Criminal Code. This would list in great detail all the acts which the Soviets were not allowed to commit. The Soviets would then be informed that, if the computer detects them in any violations, it will blow up the world."