The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"I'm afraid it won't end the problem," another pommissar said funereally. "Our intelligence indicates that there are Chinese troops there. Unless Peking backs down, we're going to be caught in the middle when the bombs start flying and-" he quoted a proverb about the man in the intersection when two manure trucks collide.

"Damn," the Premier said. "What the blue blazes do the Chinese want with Fernando Poo?"

He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on schizophrenia; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of America and China.

And, banishing Thomas Edison and his light bulbs from mind, Saul Goodman looks back over the first eight memos briefly, using the conservative and logical side of his personality, rigidly holding back the intuitive functions. It was a habitual exercise with him, and he called it expansion-and-contraction: leaping in the dark for the connection that must exist between fact one and fact two, then going back slowly to check on himself.

The names and phrases flow past, in review: Fra Dol-cino-1508-Roshinaya-Hassan i Sabbah-1090-Weis-haupt-assassinations-John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King-Mayor Daley-Cecil Rhodes-1888 -George Washington…

Choices: (1) it is all true, exactly as the memos suggest; (2) it is partly true, and partly false; (3) it is all false, and there is no secret society that has endured from 1090 A.D. to the present.

Well, it isn't all true. Mayor Daley never said "Ewige Blumenkraft" to Senator Ribicoff. Saul had read, in the Washington Post, a lip-reader's translation of Daley's diatribe and there was no German in it, although there was obscenity and anti-Semitism. The Weishaupt-Washington impersonation theory also had some flaws-in those days, before plastic surgery, such an undetected assumption of the identity of a well-known figure was especially hard to credit, despite the circumstantial evidence quoted in the memos-two strong arguments against choice one. The memos are not all true.

How about choice three? The Illuminati might not be a straight unbroken line from the first recruit gathered by old Hassan i Sabbah to the person who bombed Confrontation-it might have died and lain dormant for a term, like the Ku Klux Klan between 1872 and 1915; and it might have gone through such breakups and resurrections more than once in eight centuries-but linkages of some sort, however tenuous, reached from the eleventh century to the twentieth, from the Near East to Europe and from Europe to America. Saul's dissatisfaction with official explanations of recent assassinations, the impossibility of making any rational sense out of current American foreign policy, and the fact that even historians who vehemently distrusted all "conspiracy theories" acknowledged the pivotal role of secret Masonic lodges in the French Revolution: all these added weight to the rejection of choice 3. Besides, the Masons were the first group, according to at least two of the memos, infiltrated by Weishaupt.

Choice 1 is definitely out, then, and choice 3 almost certainly equally invalid; choice 2, therefore, is most probably correct. The theory in the memos is partly true and partly false. But what, in essence, is the theory-and which part of it is true, which part false?

Saul lit his pipe, closed his eyes, and concentrated.