THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 9, EPISODE 6

  

ECHEC!

 

Three days after Aeon's purge and not a word of English drifting up from the burned out basement except for little wispy chitterings at the center of the chaos where Peter keeps on the horn. Earning his daily keep. And Lo! out of the depths flow wheelbarrows of blackened, stinky crud and charred wood; in go more barrows bearing gleaming new wires and two by fours, smelling of fresh New England and Canadian forests. Sheaves of plywood, pallets of tiles and grout unloaded past midnight, jostling the prostitutes of blood-soaked Park Avenue... secreting funeral orations for Peter's undocumented to sweep up next morning.

Radio stations broadcast football scores from Santo Domingo, music from Panama, Jalisco, news from Costazul... furor over the American President's mistaking the Caribbean for Mediterranean. I think Junior was offended when I married Carlo, but was also too proud to show it; for a little while we were invited to the same old Colorado functions and Senior's party bosses found Carlo a job driving through the slums, telling people to vote for the Cristero candidate through a loudspeaker. That was one of those oddities you find in Salamanca, also an object lesson... it was not a Presidential year (and the Senator from this barrio had shown too many signs of independence), so old Zamora had decided to make an example of him, replacing the maverick by an enemy, but one upon whom he could count when the last dominoes were set down.

When he wasn't driving or going to Cinema where the Yankee movies with subtitles improved his English, Carlo flew kites off of our roof like a boy overgrown. The wedding gifts from Rhode Island had finally caught up, a jumble of crystal, lace and plastic, and we were still miles and months from Vietnam.

Peter Bach interrupts to tell me how he's doing on the job... two mentions in Suzy, half a column on the reconstruction in the trade papers. The work's gone fine... "Mr. Escalante's sort of a thug, if you know what I mean, but nobody crosses him so I guess it'll turn out right in the end. Oh and someone came by with this... thin, dirty fellow, wouldn't leave his name, said you'd know what he meant..."

My fingers close upon a rolled up copy of Hard Times with the little red rubber band around the center. "Thanks, Peter."

Fortunately the cover is all Ronald Reagan and the gang down in DC, most articles too... seasoned with liberal whinings of the you'll-be-sorry-now-that-we're-gone sort... but there's that one exception that causes me to inform Cynthia to hold my calls...

 

NAZI COMPUTER CORPORATION LOBBIES HAIG FOR SURVEILLANCE CONTRACTS!

 

By Mack Wagner

"Mack Wagner" is a known Flagler alias. I buzz Cynthia to have someone round up tabloids... the Enquirer, Sun, even the little grimy ones in black and white, go all the way to Woolworth's on 58th if they must... I know how Flagler operates.

I start to read...

"At the close of World War II, millionaire computer scientist Harry Stone, whom a former Attorney General once referred to as a "madman", excavated the smoking rubble of bombed out Nazi Germany to loot the intellectual and human capital of Hitler's Third Reich ahead of the Soviets... and to build upon the foundations of Dachau and Auschwitz an American Empire; a veritable Fourth Reich of electronic commerce and surveillance."

Well, so far, vintage Flagler... nothing we haven't heard before, though I do wonder who he's fronting for (and if there's anything libelous Evan can pin him down on). "Mack Wagner" even makes Harry seem rather attractive in that sort of Ian Fleming way Manhattan liberals despise but most good Amurkans rather envy...

"The object of Harry Stone's research was the Nazi sequence of calculating engines developed by Konrad Zuse of Heidelberg... primitive computers used in developing orbital mathematics for the V-series of missiles, for Werner Heisenberg's atomic bomb (never produced due to Allied destruction of German heavy water facilities in Norway) and for keeping records in Himmler's concentration camps. The Zuse 4 was destroyed during an Allied bombing raid in 1944, an alleged successor... Zuse 5... possessed capacities that we, today, would call artificial intelligence.

"The Pentagon says only that, if Zuse 5 did exist, it would have been carried off by Soviet occupation forces. But sources in Moscow reply persons under the command of Zuse gave or sold the supercomputer to an unidentified American as a part of the debriefing process of Heisenberg, and others, conducted by British and American intelligence at Farm Hall, Godmanchester, UK.

"Konrad Zuse, himself, claims to be rehabilitated... he is a now a prosperous West German industrialist with interests in electronics firms... he adamantly states that Nazi computing went down in flames with Zuse 4. But sources close to the inventor admit that his plans remained in circulation... under Hitler's order... and that, in the last year of the war, he lost contact with key subordinates who never resurfaced and, so, are presumed to have died, to have been taken away by Soviet revisionists, or to have escaped to neutral South Africa or South America... probably with American or British help."

Since Prague, Hard Times follows (followed, now) a pro-Mao, anti-Moscow line of march... Flagler lets his pseudonymous works be edited to fit any political slant, so long as there are excerpts he can pull and quote under his real name in The Storm. A third of the way down, "Mack" placed recent history aside, beginning to wax historical and (literally) Poe-etical...

"Modern computing was developed by Alan Turing, an Englishman, persecuted and hounded to his death for his sexual proclivities. Demonization of human sexuality was and remains common to Hitler, to the Stalinist perversion of Marxism, and so-called democratic nations. Patriarchal societies are constructed to reduce women to bondage and generate foot soldiers for imperialist wars waged against "alien races" upon whom demons of unrepressed sensuality are projected.

"In the infancy of the Fourth Reich, however, contradictions surfaced where Fascists were briefly "fascinated" with militant, Platonic homosexuality. According to Wilhelm Reich, himself persecuted by Hitler and Stalin and finally murdered by agents of McCarthyism in America, the Nazi propagandist Rosenberg idealized "a male state organized on homosexual bases". Rohm, leader of the Brownshirts, put this persuasion into practice. But Hitler, whose own sexual psychology must have been called into question by his closeness to Rohm, came to see expediency in proclaiming "family values" to ensure a continuing supply of cannon fodder... once Himmler's blackshirts were established as a credible police and military alternative, the Brownshirts were cruelly liquidated, just as Churchill would order the "suicide" of Turing (after prolonged chemical torture in a State facility) once the danger posed by Naziism passed.

"Turing was a critic of imperialism who expressed weak, Fabian sentiments of scientific Socialism directed by machines... a common and pernicious delusion promulgated jointly by America, England and Russia through their agents in the United Nations. He thought to make himself a useful creature to British spymaster Patrick M. S. Blackett, to Harry Stone and other buzzards of imperialism circling Farm Hall.

"Their inspirations were Charles Babbage, the Victorian-era designer of automata (much respected by Jeremy Bentham, father of the Utilitarian police-state) and... incredibly... the fabulist Edgar Allen Poe, who communicated enthusiasm for the future of "Androides" such as those fashioned by Maillardet, Vaucanson, and Camus... not the colonial philosopher of existentialism but one of those tinkers who designed mechanical toys to amuse the decadent court of Louis XIV and his doomed successors.

"Poe, on behalf of Vaucansonism, exposed one Johann Maelzel, who exhibited a mechanical chess player (presumably designed by one Baron Kempelin in 1768) as fraudulent. This automaton, painted and garbed as a Turk, loomed over a tiny cabinet whose hand moved pieces across the board and when victory neared... which occurred in most instances (but not all) the automaton would roll its eyes and pronounce "Echec!" Poe's charge against the "intelligence" of this machine was its irregularity of movement and occasional defeats... the author proceeded physically to the cabinet beneath the chessboard and withdrew, from it, a squirming Polish amputee. Maelzel's opening of the cabinet to show that there was no human agent inside was but a ruse... the presence of the Pole cleverly disguised by placement of mirrors.

"Thus... having learned from Poe the art of deception by mirrors and, from Turing, the importance of discretion... Harry Stone went to Farm Hall to strike a devil's bargain with old Nazis who had saved Zuse 5 from Allied devastation. 'In 1948, the long awaited imperative of Balfour's 1917 Declaration was realized... the dream of Herzl, generations of Rockefellers, of J. P. Morgan and other British, Jewish, American and French imperialists conspiring with Russian revisionism to establish a Zionist dagger at the throat of the emerging former colonies of Islam...' was the conclusion of..."

Enough! Quatsch! as Hitler would have said himself... I have scanned, though not processed, readouts from the Protocols of Zion Elders, numerous references to Palestine and, at the bottom of the page... "Lentex, the spider at the center of the military-surveillance web, is now directed by Harry Stone's granddaughter, her husband and the suits and spooks in their orbit..."

Codes and cultists in orbit, Doctors from Vienna to the moon.

If Bud got hold of this, he'd be insufferable!

Hard Times has gone to the grave one issue too late for its reputation. I hope Julian Kahn won't see it... he'd bust a gut. The only novelty concerns Poe... last night Brian Palin crawled under the roulette table after a string of losses, looking for tricky, dicky circuitry. Slow down, I tell myself, cool off... think cool thoughts, Rockefeller Center. Decisions to make... shall ice be natural or artificial? Hot discos all over Midtown ever since the fire; qualities of combustion have penetrated language... hot spots, hot tickets, hot vile vocalists in the image of Oil itself. Since Aeon blown temperature's last trump, maybe the time's come round for cool.

Bud comes round Friday afternoon so we can watch the hostage ticker-tape parade, he'd said Jack Doll was flying to Miami to spear some sun; his stately pleasure dome on West Eleventh, a few doors down from the Weather Bombing memorial lot would be free all week. "Can you think of an excuse to use it?" I could... Eileen had a source for "Annie" tickets.

I'd also heard rumors that Baggott was dickering with the board; wondering out loud if, with the uncertainties arising out of T's sisters' hints of selling their voting stock, I'd thought of pre-emptively unloading. "I haven't been voted down yet," I tell Lou and he goes all apologetic... "I was just asking, you know", right... all ice beneath the curtain of slush.

Jack's overlooks a lot down which I see Banco Bunco waste transactions blowing in the wind... down to MacDougal Street... and Lot's wife looks back on Haig's Vanni Fuccis of the National Security Industrial Association. Redundant Roman vassals of procurement, the stuff of fables, with their laurel and snakes. Roving packs of Romulans to whom one throws bones, like meat Almond threw from her Jeep to Zone eagles when sun melted their wings. Laced with strychnine... or wack!

 

  

TOMORROW:

FABLES of CAPITALISM

Read the collected essays of Poe or biography of Konrad Zuse... some meditations on the psychic properties of computer coolant waste are displayed in George Johnson's "Fire In The Mind"...

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