The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"But not your mother and father? They were different from most people?"

And then it clicked: the spell was broken. Every detail from Saul's notebook, every physical characteristic Peter Jackson had described, was there. "You're not a doctor," he shouted. "I don't know what your game is but I sure as hell know who you are. You're Joseph Malik!"

George's stateroom was paneled in teak, the walls hung with small but exquisite paintings by Rivers, Shahn, De Kooning, and Tanguy. A glass cabinet built into one wall held several rows of books. The floor was carpeted in wine red with a blue stylized octopus in the center, its waving tentacles radiating out like a sunburst. The light fixture hanging from the ceiling was a lucite model of that formidable jellyfish, the Portuguese man-of-war.

The bed was full size, with a rosewood headboard carved with Venetian seashell motifs. Its legs didn't touch the floor; the whole thing was supported on a huge, rounded beam that allowed the bed to seesaw when the ship rolled, the sleeper remaining level. Beside the bed was a small desk. Going to it, George opened a drawer and found several different sizes of writing paper and half a dozen felt-tipped pens in various colors. He took out a legal-size pad and a green pen, climbed on the bed, curled up at the head and began writing.

April 24

Objectivity is presumably the opposite of schizophrenia. Which means that it is nothing but acceptance of everybody else's notion of reality. But nobody's perception of reality is the same as everybody's notion of it, which means that the most objective person is the real schizophrenic.

It is hard to get beyond the accepted beliefs of one's own age. The first man to think a new thought advances it very tentatively. New ideas have to be around a while before anyone will promote them hard. In their first form, they are like tiny, imperceptible mutations that may eventually lead to new species. That's why cultural cross-fertilization is so important. It increases the gene-pool of the imagination. The Arabs, say, have one part of the puzzle. The Franks another. So, when the Knights Templar meet the Hashishim, something new is born.

The human race has always lived more or less happily in the kingdom of the blind. But there is an elephant among us. A one-eyed elephant.

George put the pen down and read the green words with a frown. His thoughts still seemed to be coming from outside his own mind. What was that business about the Knights Templar? He had never felt the slightest interest in that, period since his freshman year in college, when old Morrison Glynn had given him a D

for that paper on the Crusades. It was supposed to be a simple research paper displaying one's grasp of proper footnote style, but George had chosen to denounce the Crusades as an early outbreak of Western racist imperialism. He'd even gone to the trouble of finding the text of a letter from Sinan, third leader of the Hashishim, in which he exonerates Richard Coeur de Lion of any complicity in the murder of Conrad of Montferret, King of Jerusalem. George felt the episode demonstrated the essential goodwill of the Arabs. How was he to know that Morrison Glynn was a staunch conservative Catholic? Glynn claimed, among other dyspeptic criticisms, that the letter from the castle called Messiac was well known as a forgery. Why were the Hashishim coming back to mind again? Did it have to do with the weird dream he'd had of the temple in the Mad Dog jail?

The sub's engine was vibrating pleasantly through the floor, the beam, the bed. The trip so far had reminded George of his first flight in a 747-a surge of power, followed by motion so smooth it was impossible to tell how fast or how far they were going.

There was a knock at the stateroom door, and at George's invitation Hagbard's receptionist came in. She was wearing a tight-fitting golden-yellow slack ensemble. She stared compellingly at George, her pupils huge obsidian pools, and smiled faintly.

"Will you eat me if I can't guess the riddle?" George said. "You remind me of a sphinx."

Her lips, the color of ripe grapes, parted in a grin. "I modeled for it. But no riddle, just an ordinary question. Hagbard wants to know if you need anything. Anything but me. I've got work to do now."

George shrugged. "You beat me to the question. I'd like to get together with Hagbard and find out more about him and the submarine and where we're going."

"We are going to Atlantis. He must have told you that." She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, rolling her hips. She had marvelously long legs. "Atlantis is, roughly speaking, about half way between Cuba and the west coast of Africa, at the bottom of the ocean."

"Yeah, well- That's where it's supposed to be, right?"