THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 6, EPISODE 6

No Fortune transpires unseen by Mary Monahan. No Bacon for the wicked. Jolting back down vulture mountain with Red and Bob calls to mind Sicily, and Gunter's old pal Paolo, il Mafioso, shortly before death. "Did you know Gunter started as a forger?" this capo di criminale recalls. "S'verissima! During the war so much lovely art lost, disappeared... destroyed by Mussolini, by Hitler... or simply burned to roast potatoes over. Interested persons supplied il Signore with copies, photographs and Gunter returned, to a grieving world, masterpieces not even the expert could discriminate from original. It was a great loss when he began to paint for himself, a great loss..."

So we all become accommodated to virtuous crime. A tall man I didn't know, white, but with a light brown Afro, slithered into the FIT bierhalle booth where we waited and told Jeff to be in the parking lot by Quarley Hall, the physics building, eight that evening on the dot. "Eight?" I object and the guy shrugged, so we have the rest of an afternoon to kill at the Capitol Theatre watching "Che" and "If"... two words, two plaster saints, two wasted bucks.

We get to the parking lot at quarter to eight and Afro shows up on the dot, on the spot, with a key. "We don't expect company from the Star Trek boys... all gone home for the holidays. All we need you to do is to start up, get into ARPANET and wait for our remote to come on line. They're going to open a file at 10:45, but have only eighteen minutes to locate the password. Once that shows up on the screen, you copy the file to our remote, then erase the password... six letters deleted, back-keypunched. It's not even programming, it's typing."

"It's not only a felony," Jeff answered back, "it's probably treason."

"Nothing like that!" Afro promised. "Trust me! You'll have to shut the system down... that might take what, five minutes, ten? Once the machine's dead, just walk out and don't even bother closing the door behind you. We can't prevent their knowing they've been broken into, but what can they do? Issue a search warrant for Spock? Go back to Hugo's, I'll meet you at midnight. You got something to read until quarter to ten?"

"We'll manage," Jeff said. "Should we have brought gloves?"

"Gloves? There's millions of fingerprints all over that old room. This ain't no James Bond movie..."

Afro hurried away with a determination of body that belied his promise.

"Think that we're being set up?" Jeff asks, slipping through the door.

"Why?"

"Dunno, just what governments do. Like Reich - his enemies, the psychiatrists, cut a deal with Washington who jailed him, killed him... burned his books. He wasn't a Nazi or Communist... they persecuted him too... but he was too freaky for the fifties and nobody spoke up."

"Somebody would speak up now," I'd said.

"Maybe. If I were Nixon," Jeff dreams, "I'd pull every last soldier out of Vietnam. By boat, by plane, by waterskis if I had to. Once the war ends, Americans aren't just going back to sleep, they'll be ready for deep hibernation. Throw out-of-work soldiers into the job market, a few more assassinations, lies in the media that students and hippies somehow stabbed government in the back over Vietnam, get the right technology and you have all the ingredients for fascist takeover."

The Quarley computer was one of ours, a Lentex Petra III, spinning off the line Harry Stone introduced, two weeks before he flew off into birdland. Petra I was like Alice and Ralph, in that it owed a lot of its design and capacities to government research Harry cribbed from Los Alamos and spliced into Dendral's ventures in '55 and early '56. Petra II succeeded it, four years later, Petra III around the time of JFK's assassination. We'd have a Petra IV, eventually, but it came late; didn't hit the market until we were already in the Zone, and it survived only until Ralph and Alice could be hastily retooled for civilian use. As a thinking machine... all the Petras were still perfect Ralph and Alice conduits but, then, any mid-power engine could do that. We're compatible, if nothing else.

Petra III used transistors, not vacuum tubes, so it wasn't quite the tank a Petra I was... II tends to be forgotten for good reason, it wasn't very good, but made a lot of money for Lentex (mainly because users couldn't wait to replace it with IIIs). Still, it's a tank, this one in Quarley Hall looks half disassembled and I half expect it wouldn't even work.

"Afro's wrong," Jeff said, "or maybe just forgot to tell us, but countdown starts when this mother lights up. What time did you say it was?"

"Eight... sixteen now."

"Place'll be surrounded if we give two hours' notice. By my experience Petra activates in about eight minutes, we'll give it twice that. Bring anything to read?" I shook my head. "Too bad... let me know when it's half past ten."

"I don't feel very well..." I'd said.

"Well, stay away from there!" He pointed to the open tanks where coolant that probably hadn't been changed since DENDRAL was developed at Stanford five years back lay like a stagnant puddle, the creek next to the chemical plant that feeds the reservoir. "Ask T. about Petra cooling systems. Uses nasty stuff, from the folks who brought you napalm... it's vital medium, almost like blood... pH neutral, you can dip your hand in it, won't burn, but just insanely toxic, we shouldn't even be breathing in here. Usually it's all sealed up but when I start Miss Peter here it'll probably start churning like a tankful of piranhas. One more reason to lay low, go slow, get the hell out when we've done our duty."

Ten minutes later Jeff shakes his book. "The difference between good architecture and bad's that same as between white and black magic; the honest architect's a healer... he makes dissymmetries, but only under light where its rude power shines, accessible. Go downtown, on the other hand, walk streets where the sun almost never shines, and you will see that the bad architecture of New York's bad by design. Diabolic vision became instilled and, later, the hornet's despair. Through architecture... as through politics and culture, lately that of advertising, mankind approaches the precipice a sleepwalker... he comes to love his executioner, no doubt, the way lambs welcome the shepherd's knife."

In New York, for the hell of it a few weeks ago, I tossed an early file of Petra hacks into Franklin criminal code to Ralph and Alice for digestion and excretion:

  Near Gunter's final resting place are ruins which famous Brit and American occultists came to, praying and dancing on behalf of Pan between the wars. "They tried to revive the old feasts of our ancestors," said Paolo, il Mafioso, and not without some approval.

He was a criminal but not a bitter man like Gunter, absorbed as he was with the enormity of his own approaching death. Gunter forbade his wife, Pia, to let music lift the cloud of his last days, so she played for herself when he and I went to the village... no plinking of keys for him. Theirs was harsher ivory, like T's bloodstained bones. I missed the chance to have Brendan dedicate a song to Gunter... The Tide is High, perhaps... maybe that new hit about Bette Davis, her eyes? (The eyes of Alice Kramden blaze in another of Hal and Doug's quonset huts like coal Charles Hay Fort said absorbed bad vibes from disgruntled miners... "not only exploding but hopping out of grates and sauntering along floors...")

The clouds that sweep through New York City are secret pentagons of silver rain but thunderheads off of the coast of Xul bring tiers of dark riders. "And the bones scrape by..." from "Man Without A Face" of course, "...silk slips off twilight's thighs..."