THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 13, EPISODE 2

Exotic as their results proved, the foundations these Swedes built on were solid... the neurological postulates of Werniche and Broca and Lamarck... before them, Viennese dialectics between digitalist Franz Gall, a compartmentalizer of functions of the brain, and his rival, Pierre Florins, an early holist.

The Swedes had found rats' eyes a fruitful medium for grafting organs; not only brains, but little hearts with pumping function assumed by iris nerves, opening and contracting with the ebb and flow of light. Hearts racing, sometimes seizured, in absolution's darkness... slowed, even stopping beneath Sol Invictus. T. watches at the remotest corner of my new, improved eye while the cloacal fog of Watergate finally burns off.

"Guy looks like a bug," said Wally, pointing at Oppie, leaning forwards, hands clasped like a mantis. "But smart... 'science isn't everything. But science is very beautiful.' I happen to agree but this damn war's ruined American science for kids. This, however, I dig..."

Wally flips the page, I follow his finger down the text until it stops and taps twice. Said Oppenheimer: "There is no meaningful responsibility without power."

South of the border, Junior's made everything kosher with Hanna-Barbera... great billboards of Tom and Jerry and the Roadrunner sprouting pro-Zamora slogans now loom over the major boulevards of the capital. A few have been predictably detourned with blanquista or Communist graffiti: "Fuera gringas (gringas?) de Costazul!" but these only serve to heighten the puniness of sectarian revolt. How does one go about chopping down a regime under which education is dictated... not by Aristotle, but by Top Cat? Neon wisdom slurries out of the mouths of Muppets, anime from Japan, Asterix and Tin Tin, even the stiff-collared old man of the New Yorker, eyes popping at a mouthful of Onix - "la suprema aguardiente negra" with its fly Harlem zoot-suiters dancing 'cross the label.

The Marxist remnant hisses its own epithet for Juventud... "el polio".

Somewhere, in whichever pueblo of Heaven's reserved to those who cut electric wires, Fico must be looking down, either cursing Salamancan filth or praying it exhausts itself climbing Peter Beard's Temple towards the Gran Xutan!

Last night I even told Zamora that TeleNacional should sponsor a revival of "Veinte Preguntos!"... under OAS criteria, it might even qualify as educational, and thus be subsidizible by the International Monetary Fund for export to regimes like Colombia, probably Paraguay, too!

While Libby's been winning on the Coast, New York's deep in its Great Blackout... when phones got working again, T's secretary in those days (a certain Mrs. Roberti) said darkness had been an excuse for citywide revels... candles and champagne. The reprise a decade later, went over like Altamont after Woodstock... we've used up our spiritual capital and when Blackout next arrives, matches and shotguns will sing that song.

Libby had won the morning's show wire to wire, toying with Dennis DeFranco over the last five questions... establishing that the subject was female, recently deceased and a television personality she'd ask "Did the subject criticize Mrs. Khrushchev's clothes?" (Bing! $90)... "Was the subject fond of drinking in New York City?" (Bing! $95)... "Is the subject Dorothy Kilgallen? (Bing! Bing! Bing!)

The afternoon's taping, however, was canceled on account of Eisenhower's heart attack. Thursday, always the Devil's Day! "Relatives I haven't heard from in years are calling," she said, as we waited in the studio cafeteria. "Selma says I'm just lucky to have known about steady state or the Vietnik demonstrations... I'm as smart as she is, I coulda killed her!"

She'd won a trip to Florida... I told her to try and hold out until Disney's new park opened. If she had, she might have run into Brian Palin, who'd started out as an Imagineer... one of those little dwarves in Uncle's mine. "They were going to do walking, talking robots of all the Presidents and I get assigned Harding!" Brian remembers... "the managers walked round all day with slide rulers, and anybody whose hair exceeded standards would be sent off to be Orienteered. Never saw any of those people again... not in the shop, the streets, in town, not anywhere! Sometimes a friend or relative called, asking questions about Jim or Mary or Bob - what could I say? That was one spooky place!"

Brian finally quit Disney to work... his New Zealand visa giving him options Americans could not enjoy on Gorki Park's "Attraktsion '71", so he can swap a few words of Dos Vedanta with Tess in the mother tongue. He did go back to Florida when NASA crashed, recruiting laid-off engineers for seven bucks an hour, no benefits, all the New York winters they could eat. He'd gotten good people, for a few years... I mention rat sprouts, of course Palin knows people who do that, though to recruit them now... with the defense budget heating up... that would cost. Wire brain sprouts to dummies... simple! "Columbus? Hitler? I can program macros, make it pretend to eat a pound of chocolate and shit little tanks. Percentage sign, sender... digestion's covered by sending macro to self..."

The few times I've brought them together, Brian and Brother John Robinstett pretend not to recognize one another, General Johnny too... Tess doesn't bother, I've seen him chatting up the roboteer twice these past few days. "Even the word... robot... a Socialist origin," the Dogmaster tweaks, "fraternal Czechsy-Slovak comrade Capek. Kill by fascists!"

Dr. Ventura's remarks lead me to wonder how the Florins/Gall struggle resolved itself. Ralph and Alice came up vacant, so I had Manny find a printed biography and discovered that the matter had been settled through a deus ex machina... the Emperor Frederick II kicked Gall out of Vienna in 1801 for publishing his "doctrine about heads" lest people begin to "lose their heads over it".

"Freddy might have been influenced by what was already going on in France," Ventura acknowledged while we waited for Paul's MRI printouts. "Harry used to speak of the rising-ups all over the Continent, last century, deadly for science, medicine..."

"Who?" I ask.

"Religious types. You know!" smirked the tall Doctor with the glow, holding five fingers up. "Scared the bejesus out of Cromwell even further back... pious fellows, to hear them, but Ollie saw through that. Said 'they had tongues like angels, but had cloven feet'. Some things just wheel round, don't they?"