THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 4, EPISODE 7

Because we were mightily stoned... except Jeff, who'd finally achieved time on the Berkeley computers, and so girded his loins in the sobriety of substrates, catalysts... and because it was not our loss after all... that San Francisco fire was a fun fire, something worth goggling at. The soaring flames, children wandering, bewildered, through lines of firehose and roiling clouds of hydrocarbons... knowing that the sneezing policemen might suspect me of intoxication but couldn't possibly convict! Look at the fire! Look at the grouse! Groovy!

(Another fading analog term - winding grooves of organic vinyl mercilessly displaced by digital bits as surely as bauxite overcomes the petrified wood of Giant bats. Next, they'll call in Neil and Bud for attitude adjustment... "It bytes!" already has acquired cachet, but it'll never replace groovy!)

Sensible Berkeley hominids having fled to the mountains or Chicago, Jeff had inherited a whole suite of their cubicles... cages of rats, and all the after-midnight computer time he can handle.

"I know where there's a snake," I tell him, one warm night (upon which a shrieking Senator accuses Mayor Daley of using Gestapo tactics), "come to eat all your smart rats!"

Jeff taps a drawer next to my pelvis, under shelves of chemicals in bottles, smiling: "I know where to find a mongoose... he'll eat your snake."

"But I know a Chinese restaurant whose cook's looking for mongeese to chop up for hot mongoose chop suey." One long last weekend of work, punctuated by Pasolini and Fellini films... Italian shadows in an old cracked-window theatre (but without the bats old theatres in Salamanca all possess). Jeff says no word of bread or power all Sunday... Monday night packing, radio off, whispering the silent horror of departing years.

"Who's going to clean this place up?" I say, when the old red truck is finally loaded.

"Mañana cleans up," Jeff said. "Always!"

Our escape, finally, was as refugees... Joad and Clampett films run backwards, west to east. Jeff brings his truck into the City to load my few belongings into boxes with pictures of lettuce and bananas and we're off... fleeing back across the Bay Bridge like Doctor and Mrs. Kimball. Dogs on our scent, detectives on our heels. "Damn!" I remember on the far side of Sacramento.

"What?" Jeff shouts. "Forget something?"

"I've been almost four years in California and still haven't been to Disneyland!"

So I miss Brian Palin's embryonic experience (Mike says the Kiwi's best stuff is in Florida anyway, most of it locked up so as not to frighten children); the red truck dies in Reno under the eyes of Johnny Cash so, after a smaller substitute's purchased from a busted gambler, triage occurs... most of Jeff's books... Duns Scotus, Boole, Poincare... go to the post office. Franz Gall and Herman Kahn we keep for reading through the big empty of Wyoming and Nebraska.

The agenda's Franklin... find an apartment and a better car, drop stuff off... marriage in Rhode Island, back to Franklin for educational processing. The bats, bastard sons of Henry Miller and cool old cars of Salamanca on hold for one more year. But New York City's only sixteen miles and a river away... corned beef and cheesecake, off-off-Off Broadway theater, another Fillmore! Attitude, engerny...

"When we get to Franklin," I promise, "we'll see half the Picassos in the world. You'll get a big old overcoat for winter, like Jimmy Stewart wore in that Christmas movie."

"Mister somebody in Washington?" Jeff's nuclear on the concept. "An Eisenhower coat?"

"A Khrushchev greatcoat, if it's cold enough," I promise. "And Russian hat. People in New York City still wear hats. Wait till they see you walking down Park Avenue in a People's Hat!"

Ralph and Alice are like having public libraries a fingerstouch away... not New York's, of course, but a reasonably potent small city establishment, with a bent towards the weird as a consequence of silver inputting in the Zone. Like Lovecraft's reading room in Providence, maybe, or Borges' library of sand, down Argentine way... or slummy old FIT itself with cracked brown stone and gargoyles falling off the roofs. SPIFFY holds all old Petra protocols, Harry Stone's whinings, chains of Chomsky... (which T. pulled under fidgy wangler pressure after Tet). Bit strings of nouns... singular (ns), plural (np) and serving as adjectives (na). Adverbs, verbs and modifiers to make menus that, in Utah, go by the shorthand "Hong Kong Gardens"...

Together, Ralph and Alice become so goddam literal!

And the terminal spits out:

Which, compiled, resulted in patterns of more complexity (though not necessarily more efficiency)...

Since Hermie's third happy assumption blew the K's margins, I had to have it renamed s>Economic Momentum Maintained>...

I tell the Kramdens to first compile the Variables, which results in the following that, given Hudson jargon, results much like the former with one significant exception...

"Failure to Deal With Ambiguities and Uncertainties" is too long for the packet and can't be shortened without harming the content (even though ambiguities and uncertainties are, to my shrunken mind, redundant). When, in the Zone, we were given long winded statements that couldn't be compressed, we threw them into a new category... pnp or plural plural nouns. Maybe it should have been designated ppn, but that was reserved for some entirely other category, used so infrequently I'd have to look it up. So instead of having to run out the string as ns m v m np m np, the first and final modifiers are swallowed, leaving...

...or, on occasion, terata, caused by "ambiguities and uncertainties" having violated the grid and balling up the whole program, as, for another example...

And, while I'm computing the new settings, and making the (easy) decision on what has to be substituted, Ralph and Alice keep chattering.

Zone chaff. Note, by the way, how Ralph and Alice humanize themselves by slightly varying routine instructions... "it", "the footnote", "this". Whole mid-70s slang vectors buried in the system that reek of old farts trying to pick up teenyboppers with lines from "Mod Squad" or "The Brady Bunch". Some codewriters are into graffiti... usually the disappointed and disgruntled in life. But since it's an old, therefore presumably fire-hardened code, I'm inclined to compromise...

Compilation, like the Dogmap, ranks findings by probability of success based on previous usage in the Kramdens. Winds are common, rubber cats rare. If I'd done this back at FIT or Berkeley, the punchcard chunkings would be driving me crazy.

Well, there you have it, Egg. Nuclear foo young? War's happy aftermath filtered through game show options and Honeymooners. Since Ralph and Alice run these programs many times in a second, you just take the alternatives... run them, run the results too for ten or a hundred iterations until you reach what fulfills your own criteria for intelligence. Game over. Except...

I hit the space bar and the Kramdens reveal...

And, thence, continuing...

Upon which time the Egg is ready to receive its Spirit... that is a matter of rigorous dispute. Dr. Vejar would dismiss this possibility altogether until the birth struggle begins, Yglesias would argue otherwise (although from the self-serving but understandable object of preparing Christian soldiers).

And the keepers of secret histories search for answers in the sweep of deep sciences, seeking sleek, elegant laws and finding rude contraptions, dangling wires and trapdoors as the motorcade of smiling David Eisenhowers and waving Julie Nixons glides past, driven by the old men of Ingolstadt. There is jazz... Uli affirmed to me, once, that certain Arabs pronounced the Yezidi saints "jazzatas", gone Gabriels blowing righteous horns. Marrow horses in Uli's surf lunge for the plums of wrecked pyrate ships under red and green Jovian moons.

I append my own footnote... three verses of Scipio... the Etruscan General who saved Rome from Hannibal (making him in the view of some... Mark Cobb and Omar Assim at FIT, in particular... the world's Bull Connor par excellence!). But for Scipio, Africa... not Europe... would have exercised dominion over the Western portion of the world with the crossroads X of voudon, and not the cross, raised on cathedrals from St. James to Notre Dame, to Archimedes Street in Salamanca and St. Patrick's in New York.