The Illuminatus! Trilogy

GEORGE DORN. His maternal grandfather, old Charlie Bishop, was once a patient of the famous Doctor William Carlos Williams. The Bishops came to New Jersey in 1723, having left Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 under something of a cloud. Folks in the Nutley-Clifton-Passaic-Paterson area always have a good word for the Bishops, though. But the Dorns were all troublemakers, and George's paternal grandfather, Big Bill Dora, was so indiscreet as to get killed by cops during the Paterson silk-mill strike of 1922.

HERACLEITUS. He was apt to say odd things. Once he even wrote that "Religious ceremonies are unholy." A strange duck.

THE SQUIRREL. A set of receptor organs transmitting information through a central nervous system to a small brain programmed for only a few rudimentary decisions-but, in this, he was not far inferior to most of our characters.

REBECCA GOODMAN. Her maiden name was Murphy, and she was named after Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. You thought she was Jewish, didn't you?

THE DEAD EGYPTIAN MOUTH-BREEDERS. There were five of them, of course.

DANNY PRICEFIXER. Shot in the line of duty two years after the events of this story. Loved the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

ADAM WEISHAUPT. "He's a deep one," they used to say on the faculty of the University of Ingolstadt, "you never know what he's really thinking."

CARMEL. One of his girls once cajoled a Hollywood character actor into calling him on the phone and pretending to be a researcher for the Kinsey Institute, seeking an interview. Carmel couldn't see any money in it and was trying to end the conversation when the actor asked stuffily, "Well, all we want to know, actually, is do you have intercourse with your mother regularly, or does everybody in Las Vegas call you ' Carmel the Motherfucker' for some other reason?" For once Carmel was speechless. The girl spread the story, and everybody in town was laughing about it for weeks.

PETER JACKSON. His great-grandfather was a slave. His son became the first President of the Luna Federation after the rebellion of the moon colonists in 2025. Much further back, a more remote ancestor was a king of Atlantis; and way in the future, a descendant was a slave on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system. (Peter was one of the crew when Hagbard finally blasted off for the stars in 1999). that's the way the cookie crumbles; and Peter had an intuitive sense of this paradoxical fatality, which caused him to tell Eldridge Cleaver once, "People who say 'You're either part of the solution or part of the problem* are themselves part of the problem." (Cleaver replied, wittily, "Fuck you.")

THE LAB CHIEF WHO WAS DISINTERESTED IN ANTHRAX LEPROSY DELTA. He later cracked up and wrote letters to the newspapers attacking the entire chemobiological warfare program of the United States government. Spent the last seventeen years of his life receiving treatment in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., occupying the same quarters that once housed the ingenious poet Ezra Pound. His rantings were taken seriously in certain places, especially among some leftward-leaning fellow scientists, but the Vice-President described them to the press as "the despondent demagogy of a paranoid pedant." A sample of the man's delusions, from a letter to the three top television networks (never quoted on newscasts because it was too controversial): "The boast of the 19th century was its conquest of these accursed plagues that attack men, women, and helpless infants indifferently. What shall be said of the 20th century, which has recreated them, at great expense and through the efforts of thousands of brilliant but perverted scientific minds, and then stored them live in installations throughout the country, where it is virtually certain, statistically, that an accident will unleash them upon an unsuspecting public, sooner or later?" (Loonies often harbor morbid fears of that sort.) The poor man never responded favorably to any of the efforts of his psychiatrists, even though they gave him ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) so often that his brain was practically fried to the crispness of a Howard Johnson omelette by the time he finally died.

ANTHRAX LEPROSY DELTA. A life form that could exist only by destroying other life-forms; in this respect, it was like many of us. The first of the products of Charlie Mocenigo's fertile genius, it could boast only of being ten times as deadly as ordinary anthrax. Insofar as it had consciousness, in a vague and flickering way, it was like that inhabiting a subway train at 5 P.M., concerned only with getting where it was going and then eating. The other strains were much the same, up to Anthrax Leprosy Pi.