Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (68 page)

“I hate those radioactive by-products…” Gordon says, contemplating a can of Cheez-Wiz as he tries to follow Lloyd’s monologue. Everyone else has given up. They’re more interested in the search for ideal snack foods.

“There must be close to a million tons of Helium-3 on the Moon,” Lloyd says, licking his dry lips, “enough to power the world for thousands of years. It would be worth about a billion dollars a ton in terms of its energy equivalent in oil. A single space shuttle load could theoretically supply all of America’s energy needs for an entire year.”

“Sounds great. So why don’t you guys go get some?”

Lloyd picks up a large bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos and eyes its expiration date. “Well, it was a risk-fraught venture, obviously…. If my company was going to become involved in it, we wanted to know why NASA had shut down the Moon program. That, of course, led to my association with Ingo Swann–and you know the rest of the story.”

“So do you think that’s what those naked guys were doing up there–mining for Helium-3?”

“That would be my best guess,” says Lloyd. “They could have fusion reactors inside the Moon’s hollow core, keeping everything warm and humming. Did you know we still don’t have a reasonable explanation for the Moon’s origins? Many of the rock samples we took from the Moon are one- to two-billion years older than any materials found on Earth–which makes it highly unlikely that the Earth and the Moon were created at the same time. But the Moon is too big to have been captured in passing by the Earth’s relatively weak gravitational pull. It might nab anything up to 30 miles in diameter, but the Moon is over 2000 miles in diameter. It’s also highly odd that the gravitational forces are asymmetric, which keeps one side of the Moon always hidden from us and results in a net transfer of energy from the Earth to the Moon.”

“Food for the Moon!” Gordon says, flying the orangey-yellow Cheez-Wiz can like a rocket past Lloyd’s pock-mark-cratered nose.

“I think you can see where I’m going with this…” Lloyd says, lowering his voice to a hushed, confidential tone. “I believe the Moon is an artificially-constructed satellite, deliberately placed into orbit around our Earth sometime before the dawn of Mankind. Upon the Moon–or perhaps inside it, similar to the Death Star in that
Star Wars
movie everyone seems to be so fond of–there exists an almost unthinkably powerful quantum holographic projection device that keeps Earthlings trapped in a false frequency-reality construct fueled by our own negative emotions.”

“Lloyd, could you do me a favor?” Gordon practically begs as he sets down the Cheez-Wiz can on the shelf’s dust-ringed surface. “Can you please be a pal and buy me a six-pack of beer?”

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

Back out on the open road, Lloyd gets the Bentley up to speed and then resumes his monologue right where he left off: “Strange activity on the Moon has been reported for hundreds of years…. There’s a fascinating document you should all take a look at–NASA Technical Report R-277. It’s a chronological catalog listing 579 unusual lunar sightings, generally considered reliable, from as far back as the year 1540. On March 5th, 1587, for example, a star was seen emanating from within the body of the crescent moon, ‘directly between the points of her horns’–just like the star and crescent moon symbol on the flags of so many Muslim countries. Could that ‘star’ have signified a lunar base? And do the flags of those predominantly Islamic nations signify their allegiance with the denizens of that Moon base? It’s food for thought.”

“It’s food for the Moon…” Gordon mopes. “I could’ve really used that beer.”

“We’re traveling in an open vehicle,” Lloyd points out. “I can’t have some unenlightened Highway Patrolman accusing me of contributing to the delinquency of minors.”

“Even though that’s what you do, with all your whacked-out talk,” Twinker says with a pout.

“Lloyd’s just tellin’ it like it is!” Jimmy says, jumping to his uncle’s defense.

“Yeah!” Skip shouts, backing him up with a militantly raised fist. “Nude Dudes on the Moon.
It’s the Truth!”

“Get real,” Twinker says.

Lloyd reaches into a brown paper grocery bag tucked under his seat and tosses the new June 1983 issue of
Penthouse
into Gordon’s lap. “Good pornography stimulates your kundalini and raises your endorphin levels, creating an analgesic effect. It can lead to addiction like anything else, but it’s better for you than beer…. Besides, you need to be sober for your meeting with Doctor Felix.”

“Doctor Felix…” Gordon mutters, thoroughly disgruntled. “What makes
him
so fucking special, anyway?” He starts thumbing through the magazine.

“Our friend Doctor Felix was the founding director of the National Institute of Mental Health from 1949 to 1964. He was involved in some ethically sketchy dealings with MKULTRA and its predecessors, but he’s since repented of all that. He’s also a 33rd degree Mason–no surprise there, I suppose…. He’s now a director of the Scottish Rite’s psychiatric research team. If anyone knows about mind control, it’s him.”

“Great…” Gordon says, and then with more enthusiasm: “Hey, look!” pointing to the magazine, “
Penthouse
has an interview with your buddy, L. Ron Hubbard.”

“Notice the
Junior
appellation,” Lloyd observes. “That’s L. Ron Hubbard’s son.”

“Still, it should be interesting….”

“I can’t believe you, man!” Skip says in disgust. “You’re actually reading the goddam articles?”

Gordon is too busy scanning the article to reply. “I don’t think L. Ron Hubbard Jr. likes his dad very much,” he says after a few minutes. “He claims he was born premature because his dad botched an abortion attempt on his mother. And listen to this–he’s talking about how he grew up watching his father screw people over with Scientology:
‘…What a lot of people don’t realize,’
he says,
‘is that Scientology is black magic that’s just spread out over a long period of time. To perform black magic generally takes a few hours or, at most, a few weeks. But in Scientology it’s stretched out over a lifetime, and so you don’t see it. Black magic is the inner core of Scientology–and it’s probably the only part of Scientology that really works. Also, you’ve got to realize that my father didn’t worship Satan. He thought he
was
Satan…. The Antichrist. Aleister Crowley thought of himself as such. And when Crowley died in 1947, my father then decided that he should wear the cloak of the beast and become the most powerful being in the universe.’
”

“I guess that stuff he did with Jack Parsons was just a warm-up,” D.H. says.

“Jack Parsons was so much cooler,” Jimmy comments.

“There’s more,” says Gordon, reading:
“‘…Hitler was involved in the same black magic and the same occult practices that my father was. The identical ones. Which, as I’ve said, stem clear back to before Egyptian times. It’s a very secret thing. Very powerful and very workable and very dangerous. Brainwashing is nothing compared to it. The proper term would be “soul cracking.” It’s like cracking open the soul, which then opens various doors to the power that exists, the satanic and demonic powers. Simply put, it’s like a tunnel or an avenue or a doorway. Pulling that power into yourself through another person–and using women, especially–is incredibly insidious. It makes Doctor Fu Manchu look like a kindergarten student. It is the ultimate vampirism, the ultimate mind-fuck. Instead of going for blood, you’re going for their soul. And you take drugs in order to reach that state where you can, quite literally, like a psychic hammer, break their soul, and pull the power through. He designed his Scientology Operating Thetan techniques to do the same thing. But, of course, it takes a couple of hundred hours of auditing and megathousands of dollars for the privilege of having your head turned into a glass Humpty Dumpty–shattered into a million pieces. It may sound like incredible gibberish, but it made my father a fortune.
’”

“
Soul cracking
. Now there’s a term you don’t hear every day…” says Lloyd. “But I think he’s got it exactly right. And it’s not just going on in the cults, like Scientology. It’s happening within all the major world religions. Catholic priests are sodomizing little boys–”

“No way!” says Skip.

“– Islamic clerics are condemning headstrong women to be stoned to death at public executions –”

“Those bastards!” says Twinker.

“– and have you noticed how every monotheistic religion ends up persecuting and murdering other people who don’t accept that religion’s version of the One and Only God? As Arthur C. Clarke put it: ‘Isn’t killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?’”

“That’s why I’m an atheist,” D.H. proclaims.

Lloyd isn’t quite finished: “For every war–for every woman raped and every man maimed or slaughtered, for all the savagery and destruction–there’s an underlying reason…”

“…it’s all food for the Moon,” Gordon finishes for him, half-hoping he’s wrong.

“Exactly. It feeds the Lam and the original gods of Mesopotamia–” Lloyd leans over and conspiratorially whispers into Gordon’s ear–“the
Anunnaki
.”

“Oh boy…” says Gordon.

“
You’ve got to feed the alien…
” Jimmy sings tunelessly. He hears the opening chords of Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” on the stereo and he shouts, “Hey, Lloyd, turn it up!”

D.H. leans forward and taps Lloyd on the shoulder, shouting above the wind’s turbulence: “Hey Lloyd, does it freak you the fuck out to know that Jimmy Page, the lead guitarist for this band, bought Aleister Crowley’s old house in England?”

“Nothing ‘freaks me the fuck out’ since my discovery of the ‘Nude Dudes on the Moon,’” Lloyd answers, still clearly in command of his emotions. “And the house you’re thinking of is the Boleskine House, on the south-eastern shore of Scotland’s Loch Ness. Some people even blame the more recent Loch Ness Monster sightings, beginning in 1933, on an aborted magick ritual that Crowley conducted there.”

“Makes sense to me,” Gordon says. “I already thought it was a tulpa.”

“Or a really big sturgeon,” Jimmy reminds him.

“Didn’t Jimmy Page make some girl have sex with a fish while they were giving a concert in Seattle?” Skip asks D.H. while he grinds his pelvis under Twinker’s butt to the music’s rhythm. “I wonder if he ever got abducted.”

Lloyd drowns out the rest of their conversation as he turns up the stereo speakers in the backseat. He continues talking quietly to Gordon, so no one else can hear: “As I was saying… in certain cases you might do well to think of
God
as a low-orbiting entity, as near as our Moon, that eats our emotions and starves without them–
God
, in those cases, being synonymous with the Anunnaki. So all those fervid exhortations to pray, to go to war, to serve
God
and country, to bear the noble burden of suffering–they’re only ploys used by spiritually-corrupt men and women to get you to feed that
God
of theirs. If they’re successful, they might be rewarded. But that only makes them higher caste slaves in an enslaved society. True spirituality, or
Gnosis
, is the only safe passage through this world. Institutional religion will eat you alive. When someone surrenders themselves, body and soul, to church dogma–or worse, to a televangelist–their soul is consumed, bit by bit. But by
starving God
–by reigning in our negative emotions, our moronic passions and infantile greed–well… in that way lies salvation.”

“So Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart… all those guys are working for the Anunnaki?”

“You better believe it,” says Lloyd. “They’re Four Gibbering Horsemen of a Trumped-up Apocalypse–experts at soul cracking, each and every one.”

“No wonder the Christian Broadcasting Network always gave me the creeps.”

“Understand, I’m not saying a perfect, loving God doesn’t exist,” Lloyd cautions. “I’m only saying that the
God
of Jerry Falwell and his brethren is not the True God they’d have you think. It’s tyranny masquerading as belief–an ideological virus that infects human psyches and turns people into spiritual zombies.”

“
Tricky…
” says Gordon. “I’ll bet the Republicans are in on it, too.”

“Along with high-ranking Democrats, Presidents, dictators, CEOs, United Nations diplomats, and Supreme Court Justices,” says Lloyd, barely pausing to catch his breath. “For more than seven thousand years, the Dark Brotherhood–to use your grandmother’s phrase–has been forging a vast network of politically powerful secret societies and religions capable of organizing people into competing factions. They maintain top-down control from the highest echelons of those organizations… even within the Freemasons, I’m sad to say… and they use their positions to secretly instigate wars between human beings. And as you already know, they were
also
the unseen planners behind most of the famous assassinations of the past few decades–which quite spectacularly furthered the emotional turmoil upon which their masters feed.”

“How did those assassinations work again?” Gordon asks. If Lloyd told him during their previous conversation, his memory of it must be occluded.
Blame it on the absinthe….

“It’s all mind control and sleight of hand,” Lloyd says. “A simple chess analogy can be used to illustrate: pawn checks king, but checkmate comes from the overlooked knight.”

“Oh…
right
…” says Gordon, hoping Lloyd will continue to illuminate.

“It all dates back to the original techniques developed by Hasan bin Sabbah with his Assassins in the fortress at Alamut. Modern assassinations are just variations on the same theme, grown increasingly sophisticated over time. Instead of getting potential recruits stoned on hashish, now memory-loss and hallucinations are produced using synthetic drugs like scopolamine, dipropyltryptamine, and LSD. You can thank Josef Mengele and the CIA for that infernal medical leap. They’ve also perfected the art of instilling men with the suicidal desire to commit acts of terrorism–which used to be accomplished with no more than a blissful, faked-up version of Mohammed’s Paradise. Now it’s all done with post-hypnotic suggestion and triggering mechanisms.”