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I ll come with you, Mouamet finished for him. Sandals sculling in the dust,
they walked together out of the monastery and set out on the long road to
Constantinople.
Instability
RUDY RUCKER AND PAUL DI FILIPPO
Jack and Neal, loose and blasted, sitting on the steps of the ramshackle porch
of Bill
Burroughs s Texas shack. Burroughs is out in the yard, catatonic in his orgone
box, a copy of the
Mayan codices in his lap. He s already fixed M twice today. Neal is cleaning
the seeds out of a shoebox full of Mary Jane. Time is thick and slow as honey.
In the distance the rendering company s noon whistle blows long, shrill and
insistent. The rendering company is a factory where they cut up the cow s
that re too diseased to ship to Chicago. Shoot and cut and cook to tallow and
canned cancer consommé.
Burroughs rises to his feet like a figure in a well-greased Swiss clock.
There is scrabbling,
goes Bill. There is scrabbling behind the dimensions. Bastards made a hole
somewhere. You ever read Lovecraft s Colour Out of Space, Jack?
I read it in jail, says Neal, secretly proud. Dig, Bill, your mention of
that document ties in so exactly with my most recent thought mode that old
Jung would hop a hard-on.
Mhwee-heee-heee, says Jack. The Shadow knows.
I m talking about this bomb foolishness, harrumphs Burroughs, stalking
stiff-legged over to stand on the steps. The paper on the floor in the
roadhouse John last night said there s a giant atom-bomb test taking place
tomorrow at White Sands. They re testing out the fucking trigger bomb to use
on that god-awful new hydrogen bomb Edward Teller wants against the Rooshians.
Pandora s box, boys, and we re not talking cooze. That bomb s going off in New
Mexico tomorrow, and right here and now the shithead meat-flayers noon
whistle is getting us all ready for World War Three, and if we re all ready
for that, then we re by Gawd ready to be a great civilian army, yes, soldiers
for Joe McCarthy and Harry J. Anslinger, poised to stomp out the
Reds n queers n dope fiends. Science brings us this. I wipe my queer
junkie ass with science, boys. The Mayans had it aaall figured out a loooong
time ago. Now take this von Neumann fella.
...
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You mean Django Reinhardt? goes Jack, stoned and rude. Man, this is your
life, their life, my life, a dog s life, God s life, the life of Riley. The
army s genius von Neumann of the desert, Bill, it was in the Sunday paper Neal
and I were rolling sticks on in Tuscaloosa, I just got an eidetic memory flash
of it, you gone wigged cat, it was right before Neal nailed that cute Dairy
Queen waitress with the Joan Crawford nose.
Neal goes: Joan Crawford, Joan Crawfish, Joan Fishhook, Joan Rawshanks in the
fog.
McVoutie! He s taking a hydrant roach, and his jay-wrapping fingers are
laying rapid cable.
Half the damn box is already twisted up.
Jack warps a brutal moodswing. There s no wine. Ti Jack could use a widdly sup
pour bon peek, like please, you ill cats, get me off this Earth. ... Is he
saying this aloud, in front of Neal and Burroughs?
And fuck the chicken giblets, chortles Neal obscurely, joyously, in there,
and then suggests, by actions as much as by words, Is he really talking, Jack?
That we get back to what s really important, such as rolling up this here,
ahem, um, urp, Mexican see-gar, yes!
Jack crab-cakes slideways on fingertips and heels to Neal s elbow, and they
begin to lovingly craft and fashion and croon upon and even it would not be
too much to say give birth to a beautiful McDeVoutieful hair-seeded twat of a
reefer, the roach of which will be larger than any two normal sticks.
They get off good.
Meanwhile, Bill Burroughs is slacked back in his rocker, refixed and not quite
on the nod because he s persistently irritated, both by the thought of the
hydrogen bomb and, more acutely, by the fly-buzz derry Times Square jive of
the jabbering teaheads. Time passes, so very slowly for Sal and Dean, so very
fast for William Lee.
So Doctor Miracle and Little Richard are barreling along the Arizona highway,
heading east on Route 40 out of Vegas, their pockets full of silver cartwheels
from the grinds they ve thimblerigged, and also wallets bulging with the
in-denom bills they demanded when cashing in their chips after beating the
bank at the roulette wheels of six different casinos with their unpatented
probabilistic scams that are based on the vectors of neutrons through six
inches of lead as transferred by spacetime Feynman diagrams to the workings of
those rickety-clickety simple-ass macroscopic systems of balls and slots.
Doctor Miracle speaks. He attempts precision, to compensate for the Hungarian
accent and for the alcohol-induced spread in bandwidth.
Ve must remember to zend Stan Ulam a postcard from Los Alamos, reporting za
zuccess of his Monte Carlo modeling method.
It woulda worked even better over in Europe, goes Little Richard. They got
no double-zero slots on their wheels.
Doctor Miracle nods sagely. He s a plump guy in his fifties: thinning hair,
cozy chin, faraway eyes. He s dressed in a double-breasted suit, with a bright
hula-girl necktie that s wide as a pound of bacon.
Little Richard is younger, skinnier, and more Jewish, and he has a thick
pompadour. He s wearing baggy khakis and a white T-shirt with a pack of Luckys
rolled up in the left sleeve.
It is not immediately apparent that these two men are
ATOMIC WIZARDS, QUANTUM SHAMANS, PLUTONIUM PROPHETS, and BE-
BOPPIN A-BOMB PEE AITCH DEES!
Doctor Miracle, meet Richard Lernmore. Little Richard, say hello to Johnny von
Neumann!
There is a case of champagne sitting on the rear seat in between them. Each of
the A-scientists has an open bottle from which he swigs, while their car, a
brand-new 1950 big-finned land-boat of a two-toned populuxe pink- n -green
Caddy, speeds along the highway.
There is no one driving. The front seat is empty.
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Von Neumann, First Annointed Master of Automata, has rigged up the world s
premier autopilot, you dig. He never could drive very well, and now he doesn t
have to. Fact is, no one has to! The Caddy has front- and side-mounted radar
that feeds into a monster contraption in the trunk, baby cousin to Weiner and
Ulams s Los Alamos MANIAC machine, a thing all vacuum tubes and cams, all cogs
and Hollerith sorting rods, a mechanical brain that transmits cybernetic
impulses directly to the steering, gas, and brake mechanisms.
The Trilateral Commission has rules that the brain in the Cad s trunk is too
cool for Joe Blow, much too cool, and a self-driving car isn t going to make
it to the assembly line ever. The country needs only a few of those supercars,
and this one has been set aside for the use and utmost ease of the two
genius-type riders who wish to discuss high quantum-physical,
metamathematical, and cybernetic topics without the burden of paying attention
to the road.
Johnny and Dickie s periodic Alamos-to-Vegas jaunts soak up a lot of the extra
nervous tension these important bomb builders suffer from.
So whadda ya think of my new method for scoring showgirls? asks Lemmore.
Dickie, although za initial trials vere encouraging, ve must have more points
on the graph before ve can extrapolate, replies von Neumann. He looks sad.
You may haff scored, you zelfish little prick, but I I did not achieve
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