And in 1974 the four members of the American Medical Association gazed somberly down at Joe Malik from his office wall. It looked to be a long day, and there was nothing to anticipate as exciting as last night had been. There was a thick manuscript in a manila envelope in the IN box; he noticed that the stamps had been removed. That was doubtless Pat Walsh's work; her kid brother was a stamp collector. Joe smiled, remembering the diary he'd kept when he was a teen-ager. In case his parents found it, he always referred to masturbation as stamp collecting. "Collected five stamps today- a new record." "After five days of no stamps, collected a beauty in several colors. Enormous, but the negotiations were tiring." Doubtless today's kids, if they kept diaries (they probably used casette tape recorders), either talked openly about it or considered it too incidental to mention. Joe shook his head. The Catholic teen-ager he had been in 1946 was no more remote than the crumbling liberal he'd been in 1968. And yet, in spite of all he'd been through, much of the time he felt that all of the knowledge didn't make a difference. People like Pat and Peter still treated him as if he were the same man, and he still did the same job in the same way.
He took the heavy manuscript out and shook the envelope. Damn it, there was no return envelope. Well, working at a magazine like
Hail Eris and Hi, Joe,
Here is a brilliant, original interpretation of international finance called "Vampirism, the Heliocentric Theory and the Gold Standard." It's by Jorge Lobengula, a really far-out young Discordian thinker. JAMs don't go in much for writing, but Discordians, fortunately, do. If you find it worth printing, you may have it at your usual rates. Make the check payable to the Fernando Poo Secessionist Movement and sent it to Jorge at 15 Rue Hassan, Algiers 8.
Incidentally, Jorge will not be involved in the Fernando Poo coup. He is turning toward a synergistic economics, which will gradually lead him to see the folly of Fernando Poo going it alone. And the coup itself, of course, will not be any of our doing. But Jorge will be a key figure in Equatorial Guinea's subsequent economic recovery-assuming the world pulls through that particular mess. If you can't use this paper, burn it Jorge has plenty of copies.
Five tons of flax,
Mal
P.S. The Fernando Poo rebellion may still be one or two years in the future, so don't jump to the conclusion that the pot is coming to a boil already. Remember what I told you about the goose in the bottle.
M.
(Down the hall in the lady's room, bolting the door for privacy, Pat Walsh takes her transistorized transmitter from her pantyhose and broadcasts to the receiver at the Council on Foreign Relations headquarters half a block east "I'm still writing lots of Illuminati research papers, and they'll give him plenty of false leads. The big news today is an article on Erisian economics by a Fernando Poo national. It came with a covering letter signed 'Mal,' and from the context, I feel fairly certain it's the original- Malaclypse the Elder himself. If not, at last we've got a lead on that damned elusive Malaclypse the Younger. The envelope was postmarked Mad Dog, Texas…")
Joe put down Mal's letter, trying to remember the obscure references to Fernando Poo before the movie last night. Someone had said something was going to happen there. Maybe he should get a stringer on the island, or even send somebody over. A malicious grin crossed his face: It might be interesting to send Peter. First some AUM, then a trip to Fernando Poo. That might fix Peter up.
Joe flipped through the Loberigula manuscript quickly, scanning. There were no fnords. That was a relief. He had become painfully conscious of them since Hagbard had removed the aversion reflex, and each fnord had sent a pang through him that was a ghost of the low-grade emergency in which he had previously lived. He turned back to the first page and began to read in earnest:
VAMPIRISM, THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY AND THE GOLD STANDARD
by Jorge Lobengula
Joe stopped. That sentence had been used in the Black Mass in Chicago and further back, he knew, it was the code of the Abbey of Theleme in Rabelais; but there was something else about it that chewed at his consciousness, something that suggested a hidden meaning. This was not just a first axiom of anarchism-there was something else there, something more hermetic. He looked back at Mal's letter: "Remember what I told you about the goose in the bottle."
