The illuminatus! trilogy Read Online Free PDF

his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of Russia and China.
    In Central Park, the squirrel woke again as a car honked loudly in passing. Muttering angrily, he leaped to another tree and immediately went back to sleep.
At the all night Bickford’s restaurant on Seventy-second Street, a young man named August Personage left a phone booth after making an obscene call to a woman in Brooklyn; he left behind one of his
this phone booth reserved for clark Kent
stickers
. In Chicago, one hour earlier on the clock but the same instant, the phone booth closed, a rock group called Clark Kent and His Supermen began a revival of “Rock Around the Clock”: their leader, a tall black man with a master’s degree in anthropology, had been known as El Hajj Starkerlee Mohammed during a militant phase a few years earlier, and his birth certificate said Robert Pearson on it. He was observing his audience and noted that that bearded young white cat, Simon, was with a black woman as usual—a fetish Pearson-Mohammed-Kent could understand by reverse psychology, since he preferred white chicks himself. Simon, for once, was not entranced by the music; instead, he was deep in conversation with the girl and drawing a diagram of a pyramid on the table to explain what he meant. “Crown Point,” Pearson heard him say over the music.
And listening to “Rock Around the Clock” ten years earlier, George Dorn had decided to let his hair grow long, smoke dope and become a musician. He had succeeded in two of those ambitions
. The statue of Tlaloc in the Museum of Anthropology, Mexico, D.F., stared inscrutably upward, toward the stars …
and the same stars glittered above the Carribean where the porpoise named Howard sported in the waves
.
    The motorcade passes the Texas School Book Depository and moves slowly toward the Triple Underpass. At the sixth-floor window, Lee Harvey Oswald sights carefullythrough the Carcano-Mannlicher: his mouth is dry, desert dry. But his heartbeat is normal; and no sweat stands out on his forehead. This is the moment, he is thinking, the one moment transcending time and hazard, heredity and environment, the final test and proof of free will and of my right to call myself a man. In this moment, now, as I tighten the trigger, the Tyrant dies, and with him all the lies of a cruel, mendacious epoch. It is a supreme exalation, this moment and this knowledge: and yet his mouth is dry, dust-dry, dry as death, as if his salivary glands alone rebelled against the murder which his intellect pronounced necessary and just.
Now:
He recalls the military formula BASS: Breathe, Aim, Slack, Squeeze. He breathes, he aims, he slacks, he starts to squeeze, as a dog barks suddenly—
    And his mouth falls open in astonishment as three shots ring out, obviously from the direction of the Grassy Knoll and Triple Underpass.
    “Son-of-a-bitch,” he said, softly as a prayer. And he began to grin, a rictus not of omnipotence such as he had expected but of something different and unexpected and therefore better—omniscience. That smirk appeared in all the photos during the next day and a half, before his own death, a sneering smile that said so clearly that none dared to read it:
I know something you don’t know
. That grimace only faded Sunday morning when Jack Ruby pumped two bullets into Lee’s frail fanatic body, and its secret went with him to the grave. But another part of the secret had already left Dallas on Friday afternoon’s TWA Whisperjet to Los Angeles, traveling behind the business suit, gray hair, and only moderately sardonic eyes of a little old man who was listed on the flight manifest as “Frank Sullivan.”
    This is serious, Peter Jackson was thinking; Joe Malik wasn’t on a paranoid trip at all. The noncommital expressions of Muldoon and Goodman did not deceive him at all—he had long ago learned the black art of surviving in a white world, which is the art of