The Illuminatus! Trilogy полностью

Rebecca backed up and sat down on the bed. "It's too much, too fast, I'm scared. I can see you don't have any contempt for me, but, Lord, can I live knowing that somebody else knows every single repressed desire I have?"

"Yes," Saul said calmly. "And you're mistaken about Time. I can't know every secret, darling. I've only had a smattering of them. A handful. There are a dozen people right now who've been through my head the same way, and I can look any one of them in the eye. The things I know about them!" He laughed.

"It's still too fast," Rebecca said. "You disappear, and then you come back knowing thongs about me that I only half know myself, and you're not a cop anymore… What do you mean, you've joined 'the other side'? The Mafia? The Morituri groups?"

"No," Saul answered happily. "Much further out than that. Darling, I've been driven mad by the world's best brainwashers and put back together again by a computer that does psychotherapy, predicts the future and steers a submarine all at once. On the way, I learned things about humanity and the universe that it would take a year to tell you. And I don't have much time right now, because I've got to fly to Las Vegas. In two or three days, if everything works out, I'll be able to show you, not just tell you-"

"Are you reading my mind right now?" Rebecca asked, still awed and nervous.

Saul laughed again. "It isn't that simple. It takes years of training, and even then it's like an old radio would you like to hear a scientific lecture while you're being laid? That's a perversion we've never tried before." His hand moved down from her cheek to her neck and then began unbuttoning her blouse.

("There's a Morituri bomb factory in your building," Cassandra Acconci said flatly. "On the seventeenth floor. The name on the buzzer is the same as yours."

"My brother!" Milo O. Flanagan bellowed. "Right under my nose! That freaking faggot!")

"Oh, Saul. Oh, Saul, Saul," Rebecca closed her eyes as the mouth tightened on her nipple… and Dr. Horace Naismith crossed the lobby of the Sands, affixing the VSR badge to his lap'el, and passed the Midget again… "Well," the Attorney General told the President, "one solution, of course, is to nuke Las Vegas. But that wouldn't solve the problem of the possible carriers who could have hopped a plane already and might be anywhere in the country now, or anywhere in the world." While the President washes down three Librium, a Tofranil and an Elavil, the Vice President asks thoughtfully, "Suppose we just distribute the antidote to party workers and ride this thing out?" He is feeling more than usually misanthropic, having had an appalling evening in New York due to his impulsiveness in answering a personal ad which had touched his heart…

("Thank you Cassandra," Milo A. Flanagan said fervently. "I'm eternally grateful to you."

"One helping hand deserves another," Cassandra replied; she remembered how Milo and Smiling Jim Tre-pomena had helped her get the abortion the time she was knocked up by that Canvera character. Her father had wanted to send her to New York for a legal D amp; C, but Milo had pointed out that it would look kind of funny to some people for the daughter of a high KCUF spokesman to have an official abortion. "Besides," Smiling Jim had added, "you don't want to fool around with them New York Jew doctors. They might do dirty things to you. Just trust me, child; we've got the country's best-qualified criminal abortionists in Cincinnati." Actually, though, the real reason Cassandra was blowing the whistle on Padre Pederastia's bomb emporium was to annoy Simon Moon, whom she had been trying to get into her bed ever since she met him at the Friendly Stranger Coffee House six months before. Simon hadn't been interested, due to his obsession with black women, who represented the Holy Grail to him.)

"Wildeblood here," the cultured drawl came over the wire.

"Have you finished your review yet?" Peter Jackson asked, crushing another cigarette butt in his ashtray and worrying about lung cancer.

"Yes, and you'll love it. I really tear these two smart-asses apart." Wildeblood was enthusiastic. "Listen to this: 'a pair of nursery Nietzsches dreaming of a psychedelic Superman.' And this: 'a plot that is only a put-on, characters who are cardboard, and a pretense of scholarship that amounts to sheer bluff.' But this is the crusher; listen: 'a constant use of obscene language for shock effect until the reader begins to feel as depressed as an unwilling spectator at a quarrel between a fishwife and a lobster-pot pirate.' Don't you think that will get quoted at all the best cocktail parties this season?"

"I suppose so. The book's a real stinker, eh?"