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They sat peering into each other's eyes as Gospel Pam proceeded with her introduction. "In the words of the Bible and of our guest, Better to cast thy seed in the belly of a whore than by the wayside. Our guest's father was a minister of the Lord, a Serbian pastor tending a Croatian flock. Science now recognizes our guest as, perhaps, the first man ever to hear the lost chords of music sound in physics. As an example of how important he is to science, I offer a comparison with the great German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855). Recently, an international scientific body proclaimed one Tesla to be the equal of ten thousand Gausses."
Sebastiana clicked off the radio.
"Billy, as it was with Tesla and Thomas Spofford and Dr Bruhn, so it is with you. In applying for his first serious job, any young man
is offering a lifetime of loyalty for sale, and, almost always, quite unwarily s0."
"That's why I'm in medical school."
"You guessed Pam was about to interview the ghost or Nicola Tesla?"
"Sure did."
"And you guessed the rest of it, too?"
They whooped and slapped hands.
They embraced and hugged.
He laid a great wet kiss on the cheek of Gospel Pam.
He abruptly felt a fierce slashing headache and sat on a couch.
"Occupy the neurons," said Sebastiana Pam. "That's the motto of my ministry. In our time, the Time of the Great Extermination, we----you and me and all those out there in radio-internet land---- will be the immune system defending the neurons against chemical forms of CIAIDS and Bruhn's fever."
"As in vibrate the virus."
"You have no idea what Christianity did to me. It made me cold, wooden, ugly, and vindictive. Through my new post-Christian christian ministry, I'll cause it to kill itself. And I'll do that in part by preaching the religion of the groin area, uh . . . I mean, era." "What's Pamela's next program?"
"An interview with Aliens. But first, of course, in the interests of twice-as-holy twice-as-practical, comes the commercial. Tomorrow, an appeal for altar girls weaves into the woof of my money number. Dig this! To pledge your free-will offering, call 1-800-LOVE GOD." He felt a surge of warmth, a fever, and, smiling with feeling, reached up and took her hands in his.
"Aliens?"
"Yes, my friend, Aliens. Doubtless there's life out there, but clearly there's no reason space travelers on legitimate missions, or even adventures, would come to this wet pea of a planet. No. As with the ancestors of whites---- as preached by the honorable Mohammed Fard----earthbound Aliens are all outcasts, fugitives from unspeakable crimes, Hitlers on the run. Some people say Aliens represent nothing more than scientific quackery. Others say not only do they exist and visit us, and that they're often mentioned in the Bible, but that they will come and save us. These folks hope for salvation from outer space. My guests are going to be born-again Aliens, one from some far-off galaxy, the other from Chicago.
She squeezed his hands and laughed.
"Billy," she said, "Mosca told me she/he plans to get birds and insects together, enough of them so that their wing-beats, done in perfect unison and precisely modulated, will produce Tesla's world-smashing resonance."
Billy felt a chill, and not from the thought.
"Fantastic, but possibly possible," he said.
"Tesla began the resonance pulse a hundred years ago when his alarm-clock sized oscillator produced that earthquake in New York, and, if he hadn't turned it off, the resonance would have kept amplifying and extending until it produced some hideous calamity"
"You think Mosca'll try?"
"I don't know, Billy. I do know Mosca said if she can't wipe out the human race, if she fails in that, she'll begin where Tesla left off, and destroy the world."
"Sometimes, Sebastiana, I think of life as a weed flower, growing from a crack in the sidewalk."
"Yes. Life defies concrete. It flourishes in adversity, in defiance of the clod whom it knows will come along someday and stomp it."
Billy trembled and clutched her hands and bit his lip against ubiquitous pain as he felt himself tossed on a tremendous rush of fever. A sudden sweat wet his body. "I'm feeling ill, and it's not a hangover. I'm getting sick, but what the hell. It's like that old pal of Blaise's
said. 'Some things are too serious to take seriously and too funny to laugh at.'"
A cramp wracked him and he shrank into a fetal ball.
By inadvertently crushing Mosca while waiting for the sun, Billy had brought the Quing Virus curse down upon himself, but, perhaps, by doing so, had spared millions, or, even, Earth itself. We must now withdraw from these scenes and allow them to proceed unrecorded, unobserved, in anonymity, as one after another they move toward fulfillment of the as-yet unknown fates of Pedro the Penitent, of the Child, of the Soldier, of Cendrars and Richard; of the Saint, the Scientist, and the Student; and of that incarnation of a peculiarly American dilemma: The CIA.
As for Mosca hirself, victim of the ultimate swat, prototype of future governance, what should be hir epitaph?
Much of the material relating to CIA has been printed in various places, some has not yet appeared in the media, and some has been invented for this book. Which are which? Can you sort them out? Can anyone else?
R.M.
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