The Illuminatus! Trilogy

He walked through the do or-and then he did the thing the bank tellers remembered after and told the police. He reached up and adjusted his straw hat to the most dapper and debonair angle- and he grinned.

"All right, this is a stick-up," he said clearly, taking out his pistol. "Everybody lie down on the floor and keep calm. None of you will get hurt."

"Oh, God," a female teller gasped, "don't shoot. Please don't shoot."

"Don't worry, honey," John Dillinger said easily, "I don't want to hurt anybody. Just open the vault."

LIKE A TREE THAT'S PLANTED BV THE WATER

"That afternoon," the old man said, "I met Calvin Coolidge in the woods near my father's farm at Mooresville. I gave him the haul -twenty thousand dollars- and it went into the JAM treasury. He gave me twenty tons of hempscript."

"Calvin Coolidge?" Joe Malik exclaimed.

"Well, of course, I knew it wasn't really Calvin Coolidge. But that was the form he chose to appear in. Who or what he really is, I haven't learned yet."

"You met him in Chicago," Simon added gleefully. "He appeared as Billy Graham that time."

"You mean the Dev-"

"Satan," Simon said simply "is just another of the innumerable masks he wears. Behind the mask is a man and behind the man is another mask. It's all a matter of merging multiverses, remember? Don't look for an Ultimate Reality. There isn't any."

"Then this person- this being-" Joe protested, "really is supernatural-"

"Supernatural, schmupernatural," Simon grimaced. "You're still like the people in that mathematical parable about Flatland. You can only think in categories of right and left, and I'm talking about up and down, so you say 'supernatural.' There is no 'supernatural'; there are just more dimensions than you are accustomed to, that's all. If you were living in Flatland and I stepped out of your plane into a plane at a different angle, it would look to you as if I vanished 'into thin air.' Somebody looking down from our three-dimensional viewpoint would see me going off at a tangent from you, and would wonder why you were acting so distressed and surprised about it."

"But the flash of light-"

"It's an energy transformation," Simon explained patiently. "Look, the reason you can only think three-dimensionally is because there are only three directions in cubical space. That's why the Illuminati- and some of the kids they've allowed to become partially illuminized lately- refer to ordinary science as 'square.' The basic energy-vector coordinates of Universe are five-dimensional -of course- and can best be visualized in terms of the five sides of the Illuminati Pyramid of Egypt."

"Five sides?" Joe objected. "It only has four."

"You're ignoring the bottom."

"Oh. Go on."

"Energy is always triangular, not cubical. Bucky Fuller has a line on this, by the way: he's the first one outside the Illuminati to discover it independently. The basic energy transformation we're concerned with is the one Fuller hasn't discovered yet, although he's said he's looking for it- the one that ties Mind into the matter-energy continuum. The pyramid is the key. You take a man in the lotus position and draw lines from his pineal gland- the Third Eye, as the Buddhists call it- to his two knees, and from each knee to the other, and this is what you get…" Simon sketched rapidly in his notepad and passed it over to Joe:

"When the Pineal Eye opens -after fear is conquered; that is, after your first Bad Trip- you can control the energy field entirely," Simon went on. "An Irish Illuminatus of the ninth century, Scotus Ergina, put it very simply- in five words, of course -when he said Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt: 'All things that are, are lights.' Einstein also put it into five symbols when he wrote e = mc²?. The actual transformation doesn't require atomic reactors and all that jazz, once you learn how to control the mind vectors, but it always lets off one hell of a flash of light, as John can tell you."