Richard Jung, wearing Carl Jung's old sweater and smoking his pipe, said, "And next the solar system." The room was crowded with white rabbits, Playboy bunnies, Bugs Bunny, the Wolf Man, Ku Kluxers, Ma-fiosos, Lepke with accusing eyes, a dormouse, a mad hatter, the King of Hearts, the Prince of Wands, and Jung was shouting over the din. "Billions to reach the moon. Trillions to get to Mars. All pouring into our corporations. Better than the gladiatorial games." Linda Lovelace elbowed him aside. "Call me Ishmaelian," she said suggestively; but Jung handed Drake the skeleton of a Biafran baby. "For Petruchio's feast," he explained, producing a piece of ticker tape. "We now own," he began to read, "seventy-two percent of earth's resources, and fifty-one percent of all the armed troops in the world are under our direction. Here," he said, passing the body of an infant that had died in Appalachia, "see that this one gets an apple in its mouth."
A bunny passed Drake a 1923 Thompson machine gun, the model that had been called an automatic rifle because the Army had no funds to buy submachine guns that year. "What's this for?" Drake asked, confused. "We have to defend ourselves," the bunny said. "The mob is at the gates. The hungry mob. An astronaut named Spartacus is leading them." Drake handed the gun to Maldonado and crept upstairs to his private heliport. He passed through the lavatory to the laboratory (where Dr. Frankenstein was attaching electrodes to Linda Lovelace's jaws) and entered the golf course again, where the door opened to the airplane cabin.
He was escaping in his 747 jet, and below he could see Black Panthers, college kids, starving coal miners, Indians, Viet Cong, Brazilians, an enormous army pillaging his estate. "They must have seen the fnords," he said to the pilot. But the pilot was his mother and the sight of her threw him into a rage. "Leaving me alone!" he screamed. "Always leaving me alone to go to your damned parties with father. I never had a mother, just one nigger maid after another acting as mothers. Were the parties that fucking important?"
"Oh," she said reddening, "how can you use that word in front of your own mother?"
"To hell with that. All I remember is your perfume hanging in the air, and some strange black face coming when I called for you."
"You're such a baby," she said sadly. "All your life, you've always been a big baby." It was true: he was wearing diapers. A vice president of Morgan Guarantee Trust stared at him incredulously. "I say, Drake, do you really think that is appropriate garb for an important business meeting?" Beside him Linda Lovelace bent in ecstasy to kiss the secret ardor of Ishmael. "A whale of a good time," the vice president said, suddenly giggling inanely.
"Oh, fuck you all," Drake screamed. "I've got more money than any of you."
"The money is gone," Carl Jung said, wearing Freud's beard. "What totem will you use now to ward off insecurity and the things that go bump in the night?" He sneered. "What childish codes! M.A.F.I.A.-
"Well, if you're so damned smart, who are the inner Five right now?" Drake asked testily.
"Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and Gummo," Jung said, riding off on a tricycle. "The Illuminati is your mother's breast, sucker," added Albert Hoffman, peddling after Jung on a bicycle.
Drake awoke as the Eye closed. It was all clear in an instant, without the labor he had spent working over the Dutchman's words. Maldonado stood by the bedside, his face Karloff's, and said, "We deserve to be dead." Yes: that was what it was like when you discovered you were a robot, not a man, like Karloff in the last scene of
Drake awoke again and this time he was really awake. It was clear, crystal clear, and he had no regrets. Far away over Long Island Sound came the first distant rumble of thunder, and he knew this was no storm that any scientist less heretical than Jung or Wil-helm Reich would ever understand. "Our job," Huxley wrote before death, "is waking up."
Drake put on his robe quickly and stepped out into the dark Elizabethan hallway. Five hundred thousand dollars this house and grounds had cost, including the cottages, and it was only one of his eight estates. Money. What did it mean when Nyarlathotep appeared and "the wild beasts followed him and licked his hands" as that damned stupid-smart Lovecraft wrote? What did it matter when "the blind idiot God Chaos blew earth's dust away"?
