The Müller-Fokker Effect (14 page)

She preferred to go in the bedroom with Jerry and lock the door and lock him out. They were having secrets in there, terrible secrets. Jerry was one of the damned. Already his foot had gone to Hell, Billikins knew.

He’d tried to explain to her why he liked to watch Billy Koch on television. It wasn’t that silly little man waving his arms around and speaking about Gawd. There was something else, a real deep voice, so deep you couldn’t hear it unless you were one of the elect, so slow you couldn’t make out the words unless you were one of the elect. And, in a way, you didn’t
listen
to it at all. In a way, you looked at it--no, that wasn’t right either. You just knew it was there. Nurse had just laughed at that.

After breakfast he gave her one more chance.

‘Nurse, the
LORD
moves me,’ he said.

‘You have to go to the bathroom? You want to go potty?’ She leaped up and began tugging at his belt.

‘No, no, I mean the
LORD
moves me to carry on His work. I wanna work on the wall,.’

‘Oh,
that
.’ She unloaded herself in the creaky tube-frame chair again, and at the same time took up a slice of sticky coffee cake. Billikins rose to go.

Her mouth, poised over the cake, curved in a nasty smile. ‘All I can say is, if that wall is the
LOORD’S
work, then the
LOORD
oughta have his mouth washed out with soap.’

Nurse Harriet Saga took a hairpin out of her coffee cup.
What a crummy job
. She picked up the paper and leafed through it, tasting her thumb to hasten past meaningless headlines toward the horoscope page.

She felt cheated by the paper this morning. There were no sexational movie star drug raid shocking truth stories, nothing. Even her horoscope was vague.

The Big Cheat was this crummy job, looking after a feeb like that. She’d only taken on the job because her niece, Marilyn, who worked for the Crusade, had told her they needed a nurse for some secret project—and because Billy was so handsome. No one had told her his handsomeness was all show, all for the old ladies from Cedar Rapids…

True, the Crusade paid her a hundred a month over her salary, but that was to keep her quiet. The funny part was, they wouldn’t even let her talk to Marilyn about it. All the girl knew was that her aunt was taking care of some ‘old man’. Which was just as well, all around, because otherwise Marilyn would be over here every day—she had autographed pictures all over her little room—and there wouldn’t be those pleasant afternoons with Jerry.

‘Huh? That’s funny.’ She looked at the headline and even some of the small type under it.
‘BILLY TO PREACH AT FERTILIZER PALACE
’, it still said. Some big place in Kansas City. And how could he be out preaching when he was right here? And all those TV programs—maybe they weren’t taped re-runs. A twin brother? An actor 3 ringer? She’d have to ask Jerry. Something wrong, anyhow, and it was worth more than a hundred a month to keep quiet about It.

At noon, Nurse turned on the TV and sat with him, watching a cartoon. Billikins saw that the cartoon was really a message from Jehovah to His Person on Earth, showing forth through the simple parable of Bill the Cat, Mary the Canary and Mike Mouse the divine drama:

Beelzebub (Baal-Ze-bul, the shit god, or just plain Bill) wanted to catch and eat Mary, but he always ended up in trouble: running through a brick wall to leave a Bill-shaped doorway, receiving his own bomb in the mail (a Negrofying blockbuster) or flattened by a mallet. But—and this was the important part—Baal would also be restored to his full powers! There was no hint that Mike and his legions would ever, finally, triumph over the powers of dark-seeing Bill!

The cartoon finished with Bill holding his hotfoot and running off into the flat perspectives of distanceland (whence Lucifer shall return, bearing the same light), a fade…and Bette Cooke, looking wonderfully substantial, smiled right at him.

‘Something from the oven,’ she said, ‘for Baby and me.’

And it clarified everything. The three chillun of God melted together with love in the burning heart of Jesus, where Bill was Mary was Mike, where Bette Cooke was Billy Koch, being the light and bearing the light and bearing witness to the light. And the light was the sun of God, Baal.

One Man’s Fight
(against the Black Conspiracy), by Wes Davis, became a national best-seller that month, nudging down on the non-fiction list two cookbooks and a factual account of the way lions live. Many found in Wes’s simple phrases and clumsy constructions the honesty of the blunt backwoodsman who speaks his mind. That Wes had been born and brought up in New York, and lived less than a year in the Midwest, made no difference. So broadcast was the fear of a Negro conspiracy that the reviewers were merciful, the media congratulatory, and the public delighted.
At last, at long last
, they said,
someone is saying it out loud.

A Southern Congressman demanded to know why this man was in jail. A Northern preacher used sections of the book in his sermons (especially: ‘Why Jesus Chose White Disciples’, ‘Why Washington Kept Slaves’, and ‘The Black Beast: Human?’). An old lady who had been ‘receiving’ dark presences on the gold rims of her glasses began the Free Wes Davis Society. A schoolteacher, fired for carving the word
SIN
on the neck of a Negro child, formed the Organization for the Rights of Gentile Anglo-Saxon Man. The Klan revived, and the American Nazi Party gained new strength. Of all right-nut organizations, only the Jess Hurchists stood still.

From their tiny St Paul office, Amy and Grover carried on underground work on the largest scale they could afford. Amy spent her days writing anonymous letters to Congressmen, the President and the FBI. (‘We wondered if you had noticed how the little cent-sign ¢ on our government’s postage stamps looks a lot like a hammer and sickle…’) while Grover worked on his deciphering.

He was sure that almost anything, if you looked into it, could yield up a Communist plot. The number and arrangement of milk bottles on doorsteps in the neighborhood, for example. That had proved an ingenious code, and through breaking it Grover discovered that They were poisoning the money with radioactives. He wasn’t able to get an unrigged Geiger counter anywhere, but Grover had a special dowsing stick that did just as well. Whenever he saw a dollar bill (alas! not often enough) he would suspend the forked stick over it. If it dipped, the dollar was ‘hot’—riddled with radioactives.

One of his richest sources of ciphers was the morning paper, especially the daily ‘Crypto Cutie’ feature. Through this he had already found out that the ‘Red’ Cross was a front organization, that most accidents happened in the home because Communists had flooded the market with booby-trapped home items, ranging from fluoride toothpaste and can openers designed to give a ragged edge to the more insidious items like ‘fry-o-matic’ electric blankets and exploding furnaces.

‘Eureka, Amy!’

‘You have found it?’

‘You betcha I have! Another plot of the International Cummunisk Conspiracy. Just feast your eyes on this, yesterday’s Cutie.’

He was not, of course, calling her a name. Amy realized her mistake and read the clipping he was holding out:

CRYPTO CUTIE
DKGTQ DTZDXQ AEQ RGB ET ZAD UGEX.

‘What on earth can it mean?’ Amy tilted her glasses to reread the inscription, but it remained a mystery.

‘Well here’s the “official” solution from today’s paper,’ he said, handing her another clipping.

EVANS ENTERS HIS JAM IN THE FAIR.

‘And here’s the
real
solution.’ He held up a sheet of paper.

‘CIGAR CANCER YDR UGS DA NYC PGDE
,’ the top line read. The next was a re-grouping of the same letters:
‘CIGAR CANCERY DRUGS
DA
NYC
. (signed)
PGDE
.’ He read it aloud, adding that ‘da’ was Russky for ‘okay’.

‘This is serious, Amy. We’d better get off a wire to the FBI.’

‘Yes, Grover.’ She looked at him, into his eyes, beaming at him all the love and admiration that could penetrate her lenses and his.

Grover turned away. ‘Yes, and I want to look into the possibility that the Redskies are running the Supreme Court by radios planted in the heads of all the justices. So get me that book from the library, on the Great Pyramid.’

He had found the dimensions of the Great Pyramid invaluable in learning things about the Supreme Court. The lengths of its secret passages in feet gave him numerical indices: one representing fidelity; two, deception; three, conspiracy; four, a quarrel and so on. The turns of the passages to left or right were self-evident, while upward or downward turns meant improvement or decline.

Likewise many other codes had tipped him off: The names of towns on the bottoms of coke bottles were used to dispatch agents of the conspiracy to their new locations; car license plates (along with the position and number of cars parked on certain streets each morning) delivered the ‘orders of the day’; supermarket shoppers’ elaborate code of purchases revealed a plan to bombard the television waves with subliminal messages
(‘QUIT WORK TODAY, CIVIL SERVANTS’ and ‘KIDS, DON’T DRINK MILKP).

If Amy had had the courage to write
‘GROVER, AMY LOVES YOU’
into an elaborate cipher and run it in the personal column of the Minneapolis
Sun
, she might have got through to him. Anything more direct was useless.

MacCormick Hines put down
One Man’s Fight
and rubbed his eyes.

‘Maybe I’m getting old. I always thought the real fight was individuality and private enterprise against atheistic communism. Now this fella says the Negroes are…No, I just can’t believe that. I used to watch Amos-n’-Andy. Why, those people are
happy’.

‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that, sir,’ said one of his bright young men. ‘The
natural
state of the Negroes may be one of simple ignorance and happiness—but they’ve been stirred up by left-wing bastards of all kinds.’

Mac sighed. ‘You may be right. You may be right, there. In my day, a man could earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, tuck away a little next egg, bring home the bacon, plan for his family’s future. And the next thing he knew, he was…’

‘The owner of National Arsenamid, sir? Speaking of which, I have the figures…’

‘Don’t interrupt!’ Mr Hines reached out and tweaked the young man’s nose. ‘I don’t want to hear anything more about the National Whatever it is! Get out of here!’

Holding his injured nose, the young man retreated. Mac was not to be left alone, however. Almost at once another b.y.m. strode in, bearing a thick file like a fasces.

‘Hail Wes Davis!’ he said.

Mac shook a fist at him. ‘None of that! I’ve just been reading Wes Davis’s book, and he doesn’t have a speck of sound business sense. I doubt if the fellow knows the value of a dollar! If you want to hail someone, hail
me
. On second thought, why don’t you hail a cab and leave me alone? Put it on the expense account. Put a letter of resignation on the expense account while you’re at it. What’s that file supposed to be?’

‘Sir, you requested the complete dossier on the Muller-Fokker tapes.’

MacCormick Hines took the file, turned over pages for a few seconds, then closed it. ‘Tell me what it says.’

The young man stood at parade rest, hands locked together behind his back, feet apart. ‘There seem to be only four reels of the tape in existence, sir,’ he said, or rather shouted. ‘Dr Müller-Fokker himself manufactured them, and the process is lost—gone with him to Black Power Russia.’

Which
Russia?’

‘If they aren’t, why was one of their writers, Pushkin, a nigra? And how about the Black Sea? Why did all the White Russians flee the revolution?’

‘The tape, the tape.’

‘Yes sir. The Russians deny that Müller-Fokker has defected, so far, sir. Anyway, the tapes were used for some of Dr Müller-Fokker’s private research. Then they went to the Mud Flats Biomedical Research Project.’

‘I know what happened there. Go on.’

‘The four reels were put up for sale in a surplus store here in town, sir. Two of them were sold to the Billy Koch Crusade, but we’ve only been able to find one of them there. That one is being used to run a robot replica of Billy Koch, and the key man to see is a Mr Jerry Zurkenhall. If you wish to interview him, sir, we can arrange that. The replica is due to speak in town soon.’

‘Where are the other three? You can’t make a heart out of a right auricle.’

‘Another surplus store bought one of them, sir. The fourth went to the government, oddly enough. To the Pentagon Logistics Office.’

‘Hmmm. That’ll take a fine bribe. Well, let’s get the one that went to another store.’