Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS SHE'LL BE WEARING RED PAJAMAS WHEN SHE COMES

When Otto Waterhouse entered the tent, it was Miss Mao who was waiting for him. "I never fucked a Chinese broad," said Otto, stripping off his clothing. "I don't think Stella is going to like this."

"It will be okay with Stella," said Miss Mao. "We need to get all the energies moving to combat the Illuminati. And we need your help." She held out her arms.

"You don't have to ask twice," said Otto, crouching over her.

At 5:45 in Washington, D.C., the switchboard at the Pentagon was warned that bombs planted somewhere in the building would go off in ten minutes. "You killed hundreds of us today in the streets of Washington," said the woman's voice. "But we are still giving you a chance to evacuate the building. You do not have time to find the bombs. Leave the Pentagon now, and let history be the judge of which side truly fought for life and against death."

The highest-ranking personnel in the Pentagon (and, with revolution breaking out in the nation's capital, everybody was there) were immediately moved to underground bombproof shelters. The Secretary of Defense, after consulting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that there was a 95 percent probability that the threat was a hoax, intended to disrupt the job of coordinating the suppression of revolution across the nation. A search would be instituted, but meanwhile work would go on as usual. "Besides," the Secretary of Defense joked to the Chief of Staff, Army, "one of those little radical bombs would do as much damage to this building as a firecracker would to an elephant."

Somehow the fact that the caller had said bombs (plural) had not gotten through. And the actual explosions were far more powerful than the caller had implied. Since a proper investigation was never subsequently undertaken, no one knows precisely what type of explosive was used, how many bombs there were, how they were introduced into the Pentagon, Where they were placed, and how they were set off. Nor was the most interesting question of all ever satisfactorily answered: Who done it? In any case, at 5:55 P.M., Washington time, a series of explosions destroyed one-third of the river side of the Pentagon, ripping through all four rings from the innermost courtyard to the outermost wall.

There was great loss of life. Hundreds of people who had been working on that side of the building were killed. Although the explosion had not visibly touched their bombproof shelter, the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and numerous other high-ranking military persons were found dead; it was assumed that the concussion had killed them, and in the ensuing chaos nobody bothered to examine the bodies carefully. After the explosions the Pentagon was belatedly evacuated, in the expectation that there might be more of the same. There was no more, but the U.S. military establishment was temporarily without a head.

Another casualty was Mr. H. C. Winifred of the U.S. Department of Justice. A civil servant with a long and honorable career behind him, Winifred, apparently deranged by the terrible events of that day of infamy, took the wheel of a Justice Department limousine and drove wildly, running twenty-three red lights, to the Pentagon. He raced to the scene of the explosion brandishing a large piece of chalk, and was trying to draw a chalk line from one side of the gap in the Pentagon wall to the other when he collapsed and died, apparently of a heart attack.

At 11:45 Ingolstadt time the loudspeakers and the sign over the stage announced the American Medical Association. After a ten-minute ovation, the four strange-eyed, ash-blond young people began to play their most popular song, "Age of Bavaria." (In Los Angeles the Mercalli scale on the UCLA seismograph jumped abruptly to grade 1. "Gonna be a little disturbance," Dr. Vulcan Troll said calmly, noting the rise. Grade 1 wasn't serious.) "What made you think we'd find him down here?" Saul asked.

"Common sense and psychology," Dillinger said. "I know pimps. He'd shit purple before he'd get the guts to try to cross a border. They're strictly mama's boys. The first place I looked was his own cellar, because he might have a hidden room there."

Barney laughed. "That's the first place Saul looked, too."

"We seem to think alike, Mr. Dillinger," Saul said drily.

"There isn't much difference between a cop and a crook, psychologically speaking," Dillinger mused.

"One of my own observations," Hagbard agreed. "What conclusion do you draw from it?"

"Well," Dillinger said. "Pricefixer didn't just pick up that girl because he wanted a lay. She has to fit somehow."

"The musician doesn't know that," Hagbard commented. "Watch his hands. He's repressing a fight impulse; in a few minutes he'll start a quarrel. He and the lady were lovers once- see the way her pelvis tilts when she talks to him?- and he wants Whitey to go away. But Whitey won't go away. He has her linked with the case he's working on."

"I used to be a cop," Danny said with an engaging imitation of frankness. "But that was years ago, and the work really didn't appeal to me. I'm a salesman for Britannica now. Better hours, and people only slam doors in my face - they don't shoot at me through them."

"Listen," Doris said excitedly. "The AMA is playing 'Age of Bavaria.' " It was the song that, more than any other, both expressed and mocked the aspirations of youth around the world, and the accuracy with which it expressed their yearnings and the savagery with which it denied them had won them over.

It started almost the instant the music began. A mile below the surface of the lake, near the opposite shore, an army began to rise from the dead. The black-uniformed corpses broke loose from their moorings, rose to the surface, and began to drift toward shore. As more and more of the semblance of life returned, the drifting became swimming motions, then wading. They fell into ranks on the shore. Under the steel helmets their complexions were greenish, their eyes heavily lidded, their black lips drawn back in wide grimaces. The mouths of the officers and non-coms moved, forming words of command, though no sound came forth. No sound was needed, it seemed, for the orders were instantly obeyed. Once again the power that had been granted to Adolf Hitler by the Illuminated Lodge in 1923 ("Because you are so preposterous," they told him at the time)- the power that had manifested itself in steel-helmed armies that had won Hitler an empire stretching from Stalingrad to the Atlantic, from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert-once again that power was visible on the earth.

"They are coming. I can feel it," Werner whispered to his twin, Wilhelm, as Wolfgang thundered on the drums and Winifred belted out:

This is the dawning of the Age of Bavaria- Age of Bavaria- Bavaria-Bavaria!

The tanks and artillery were rolling into position. The caterpillar treads of the troop carriers were churning. Motorcycle couriers sped up and down the beach. A squadron of partially dismantled Stukas was lined up in the road. After the festivalgoers had been massacred and Ingolstadt had been overrun, the planes would be trucked to the nearby Ingolstadt Aerodrome, where they would be assembled and ready to fly by morning.

The dead men removed black rubber sheaths from rolled up red-white-and-black banners and unfurled them. Many of them were the familiar swastika flags and banners of the Third Reich, with one addition: a red eye-and-pyramid device superimposed on the center of each swastika. Other banners carried Gothic-lettered mottos such as DRANG NACH OESTEN and HEUTE DIE WELT, MORGENS DAS SONNENSYSTEM.

At last all was in readiness. The blue-black lips of General-of-the-SS Rudolf Hanfgeist, thirty years dead, shaped the command to march, which was relayed in similar fashion from the higher-ranking officers to the lower-ranking officers to the men. The lights and music on the opposite shore beckoned across the dark, bottomless waters. Moonlight glinting on the death's heads on their caps and runic SS insignia on their collars, the soldiers moved out, company by company. The only sound was the growl of the diesel engines of troop carriers and the clank of weapons.