Masters of Atlantis

  “I think it was really more of a head attack,” he said. “I wasn’t exactly off my rocker, but my memory, feeble enough before, was now shattered altogether. They said I wasn’t getting enough oxygen to my brain. Just the odd bubble now and then, as I understand it. Well, not shattered altogether, because I knew my name and there were certain dim but familiar figures that kept appearing in my dreams—not least yours, sir, though I couldn’t place you nor understand the significance of your conical cap. But on the whole all was a merciful blank. They were very good to me there in that hospital, pauper that I was. The doctors got me back on my feet with blood-thinner pills. My blood was like tar and I thought I was down for the count. They told me to lay off the Crisco and stay away from salt. Did you ever try to eat mashed potatoes and gravy with no salt? A mule wouldn’t eat it. But those doctors got me on my feet, God bless them, and then the nurses put me on to a group of recovered alcoholics. More good people. They took me in and introduced me to their methods. The doctors grudgingly admit that those methods work, where their medico methods fail, but the spiritual aspect bothers them. They don’t like any system that doesn’t involve pills and injections. But credit where credit’s due. First the doctors saved my life and then those people saved it again. I haven’t had a drink in five years. They restored my selfesteem. In six months I was a new man, wearing a clean shirt and holding down a good job selling bonds over the telephone from a boiler room. I discovered I had a knack for selling things, a gift for hopeful statement combined with short-term tenacity of purpose. But I wouldn’t stay hitched. I had a comfortable life and yet something was lacking. I jumped around a good deal. I tried my hand at real estate, selling beachfront lots out of an A-frame office in a patch of weeds. I sold used cars. ‘Strong motor.’ ‘Cold air.’ ‘Good rubber.’ Those were some of the claims I made for my cars, or ‘units,’ as we call them in the business. I bought fifty-weight motor oil by the case. Then for a time there I had a costume shop downtown. It was seven feet wide and a hundred and twenty feet deep and poorly lighted. My stock was army surplus stuff and little bellboy suits and Santa Claus suits and animal heads and rubber ears and such. I had more uniforms than Hermann Göring and sometimes for a bit of fun I would wear one myself out on the sidewalk to attract attention. Go through a few drill steps. ‘Jackets, bells and Luftwaffe shells!’ I cried. ‘While they last!’ Then I saw another opportunity and sold out to an Assyrian. They like to be on Main Street. The lighting is not a big thing with them. He beat me down on the price but I left a few surprises for Hassan in the inventory. That’s when I set up Bigg Dipper, a little operation dealing in oil and gas leases. Small potatoes, you understand, but my own show. That’s when I bought my motor home, which is not a luxury but an important business tool. All this time things were coming back to me. No flood of light now, don’t get me wrong. I couldn’t arrange these events in a consecutive way, and still can’t, but I was getting back bits of my past. Little vignettes. Here’s an example. The worst block was the 1950s. I had lost that entire decade. Ten years of murk. President Eisenhower? You might as well ask me about John Quincy Adams. Then one morning there at sunrise in Corpus I had a vivid 1950s memory. It was another ocean sunrise in Miami. It was the summer of 1956 and I was in a car with another bum named Dorsey LaRue. Some bums have cars. We had nothing better to do and we were on our way to Detroit to see about getting an advance peek at the 1957 De Sotos but we never made it. We never got out of Miami. Dorsey took his eyes off the road to get a better station on the radio, or maybe to tune in the one he had more clearly, or even to shut it off altogether, I don’t know, but he lost control of the car and we smashed into a twenty-four-hour laundromat, scattering night workers and early risers. I remembered that brief motor trip and I remembered James Wing in San Francisco and how kind he was to me. What a gentleman! A hard worker too but he was never really able to get oriental Gnomonism off the ground. I remembered playing fan-tan with James Wing and Dan Soo and Ernie Zworkin. Ernie was the last man in the phone book until Victor Zym hit town out of the blue and nudged him back a space. I remembered riding across the desert stretched out on that long seat at the back of a bus. That was before they put a toilet back there in the corner. There was a newspaper over my face with a headline—I can still see it—that said PREGNANT MOM WITH BAT SENDS 4 PUNKS PACKING. I remembered stealing a banana and getting mixed up with some left-wing women, and then later with a three-hundred-pound doctor named Symes who was trying to put a book together called Slimming Secrets of the Stars with a writer named Polton and two promoters named Constantine Anos, unfortunate name, though apt enough, and Dean Ray Stuart. Dean, I should say, was his given name, and he was never, to the best of my knowledge, the chief officer of a college or cathedral, and neither was he connected, as far as I know, to the royal house of Scotland. I doubt if Dean Ray got through the sixth grade. With that bony ridge over his eyes and his mouth ajar he looked like Java Man. He was a publisher but he confided to me once that the only book he had ever read through to the end was Polton’s Billy on the Farm, as a special favor to Dub, and even there he skipped around some. And his breath. How could I forget that? It would have killed a small bird, I give you my word of honor. You had to fall back a step or two when Dean Ray was confiding. The usual rotten air but with a fishlike tang I’ve never run into before. What a crew! And the Ivy twins, Floyd and Lloyd, with their matching outfits, always laughing, at the least little thing, and breaking into laughter at the same instant, a dead heat. They looked at each other when they laughed and they opened so wide you could see those little pink flappers at the back of their throats. They were inseparable, I’m telling you, Chang and Eng, and great laughers. Those simultaneous peals haunt my dreams. What a gang! The past, you see, was coming back to me. Now this brings us up to last September when the brain circuits really began to crackle. I was at my luncheon club in Corpus. We meet on Thursdays at the Barling Hotel. Before we sat down to eat I was introduced to the speaker for that day, a state legislator. It was Senator Morehead Moaler, Jr., or ‘Junior’ Moaler or ‘Big Boy’ Moaler. Some call him one thing and some the other. Buys all his clothes at the big man’s shop. Well, that name rang a bell, or no, it was more like a detonator went off in my head. Suddenly I remembered you, sir, and Maceo. I saw you here in the Red Room. Squanto was up there on the mantel listening to us in his customary attitude, one of perplexity. Bits of my Gnomon past came to me and I saw Gnomon words swarming visibly before my eyes like bees. I remembered that Morehead Moaler had led our strongest Pillar in Texas and I said to myself, Texas is a big state but how many Morehead Moalers can there be here? Well, at least two as it turned out, for Big Boy was the son of our own Morehead Moaler of La Coma, Texas. I was in contact again! I saw what was lacking in my life. I had been cut off all those years from Gnomonism and the Jimmerson Spiral. I sounded Big Boy out and found he didn’t know the first thing about the Gnomon Society, and had no wish to know. He was not a friendly man. When I told him I was in oil he said his first guess would have been grease. But he did arrange for me to meet with his father and I went down to La Coma to pay my respects. What a grand old man! Such pep! So full of fun! He was in his wheelchair and he was wearing his Gnomon sash when he received me there at his beautiful estate. It’s right next to the La Coma Country Club, just off the eighth green. Oh, he spoke highly of you, sir, and he was kind enough to remember my work for the Society in the 1930s, which was more than I could do. Do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘My life is an open book, Popper,’ which was more than I could say. So many chapters better left sealed. We recited the Gnomon Preamble together. I faltered badly but that wonderful old fellow was letter perfect. Do you know what Mr. Moaler thought, sir? He thought he was the last Gnomon. Can you believe it? He thought we were extinct fauna, you and I. His own Pillar had dwindled down to just himself and he feared that you had either passed on or become unhinged. He said he had heard nothing from the Temple in recent years. None of his letters had been answered
.”

  Mr. Jimmerson said, “Well, I don’t know what to say to that, Austin. Maceo tells me that the boys sometimes steal mail from our box. But I can’t say. I may have his letters back there somewhere. Maurice is helping me catch up on my correspondence. I always wanted to meet Morehead. If only we had had a hundred Morehead Moalers.”

  “You can and will meet him, sir. Wait till you spring the Lag on him. I want to be ringside for that. Let me tell you about him. So gracious! His gentle humor! His keen glance! We had lunch on the patio, just the two of us, outside the big house. There’s a big house and then all around in back there are guest houses. We ate our shrimp salad and strawberry shortcake and listened to sweet little voices raised in song. There were small children out on the grounds having a picnic and when they saw Mr. Moaler they came to their feet and sang to him. After lunch I rolled him around over the estate. It’s like a resort, with palm trees and tropical flowers. Did I tell you he made his fortune in sand and gravel? We fed his ducks. I’ve never seen happier fowls. We had a long talk. We began to confide in one another. He asked me if his son, Senator Junior Moaler, had not struck me as a swaggering moron. Well, what was I to say? After some hesitation I agreed that he had struck me so. A test, you see. Mr. Moaler was testing my honesty. My answer pleased him and he chuckled there in his delicate way beneath the rustling fronds. It was a light note, but not, to my way of thinking, out of place. You see what terms we were on.”

  Mr. Jimmerson said, “Yes, but you say you don’t remember anything about Meg and the registered dogs?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then tell me this, Austin. Here’s something I’m curious about. In all your travels did you never run across Sydney? Did you ever hear anything from him?”

  “Who?”

  “Sydney Hen.”

  “Hear from him! I haven’t thought of him in ten years! Sir Sydney! Don’t tell me he’s still creeping around somewhere!”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Still clucking, you say?”

  “Well, I’m not sure.”

  “The little prince? Still at large? You’re not serious!”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure.”

  “But say, we can catch up on Hen later. Plenty of time for that. Make a note, will you, Babcock? Just jot down ‘Catch up on Hen’ so we don’t forget. We were talking about Mr. Moaler. More Moalers and fewer Hens. Let that be our new goal. Right now, sir, I want you to get the picture at La Coma. What we have there is a soft climate, a beautiful estate and a generous patron. We have a rich man who shares our interest in reviving the Society. Listen to this. I sounded Mr. Moaler out about the idea of establishing a Gnomon retreat there and he went me one better. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘Why not a new Temple, Popper, right here in the Moaler latitudes?’ Now what do you think of that? But wait.”

  Popper took a small memorandum book from a coat pocket and flipped through the pages in search of something, suggesting that the next point to be made would require precise language. Mr. Jimmerson and Babcock waited in silence and speculated, each in his own way, on what was to come. An important date? Certain dimensions? An extended quotation from Mr. Moaler? A list of names? A poem?

  Popper found the page he wanted and jabbed at it with a finger. “There. ‘The Great Moaler Hall of Gnomons.’ That’s the name he would like to give to the new Temple. For some reason I keep wanting to call it the Great Moaler Dome of Gnomons. I don’t know why. That’s what comes of not getting enough air to your brain, or the wrong kind of air. A new Temple in Texas, you see, with a library, a laboratory, an observatory, a computer room with humming machines, a carillon, a reflecting pool, a curving palisade of flagpoles to indicate our international character and some shady walkways on which our Adepts can stroll in pairs with their hands clasped behind them, while chatting of philosophical matters and kicking idly at coconut husks. Those are just a few of the things we came up with. The computer room was Mr. Moaler’s idea. I would never have thought of it and yet what is Gnomonism if not harmony of numbers? It’s amazing what those machines can do. They can reduce everything you know, sir, to a dot. But let’s hear what you think of all this, this Great Moaler Dome, or rather Hall. Here I am rattling on and nobody else gets a chance to say anything.”

  “Well, Austin, it’s interesting that you should mention the shifting of the Telluric Currents.”

  “Wait, I forgot something. I haven’t explained the conditions. Let’s get that out of the way first, sir, if you don’t mind. Plenty of time later for the Telluric Currents. The last thing I want to do is misrepresent Mr. Moaler’s position. He is well known for his good works and he is also known for the conditions he lays down. Here’s one example. The small children of La Coma are welcome to frolic on his grounds, but whenever they see him they must stop in their tracks and sing to him or dance for him until he gives a ‘Cease singing’ signal, which is a sharp clap of those cymbals he has welded to his wheelchair. That’s his policy. A little song or some little improvised dance. Quid pro quo. It’s the same with the Temple. Mr. Moaler thought at one time of bequeathing his estate to his son, Big Boy, and then later to the Sholto Business College of San Antonio, of which he is a graduate. Then still later he thought he might divide it between the two of them. But where did his real interests lie? More important, where did his duty lie? Men of great wealth have great responsibilities. Had Big Boy or the Sholto people been as attentive to him as they might have been, seeing what was at stake? We went into those questions and others that came up along the way, and I pointed out to him that there were any number of business colleges in this country, probably two or three in San Antonio alone, and all doing a wonderful job too, but that this Great Hall would be a unique institution that would bear his name down through the ages. Mr. Moaler is just as quick as a cat. He saw the cogency of the argument and he is nothing if not decisive. You can’t be a quibbler and make that kind of money. He decided right there on the spot to cut Big Boy off and to endow Sholto with a bookkeeping chair, and let it go at that, and to dedicate the remainder of his sand and gravel fortune to this Great Moaler Hall plan—if—certain conditions were met. Now we come to his terms and I think you’ll agree they’re very generous. Here they are in a nutshell. The Master of Gnomons, Mr. Lamar Jimmerson, must go to La Coma and make his home there in the Great Hall, or in one of the guest bungalows, just as he pleases, and he must bring with him the Codex Pappus for final repository in the Great Hall, and he must award Mr. Moaler the following degrees—” Here again Popper consulted his notebook. “First Gnomon Knower, Far-Seeing Arbiter, Most High Steward, Grand Almoner, Intimate Counselor, Guardian of the Stone, Judge of the East and Companion of Pythagoras, which is to say, F.G.K., F.S.A., M.H.S., G.A., I.C., G.S., J.E. and C.P., the C.P. entitling him to wear the Poma. These few things, in exchange for which we live on Mr. Moaler’s bounty, free from care, like those ducks, while we restore the Gnomon Society to its former eminence. What could be fairer than that? Call me a dreamer if you want to but I believe this is the beginning of a new cycle.”

  Mr. Jimmerson said, “Am I wearing my Poma now?”

  “No, sir, you’re not. Your head is as bare as I’ve ever seen it. Please listen to me. In La Coma you’ll be able to work in comfortable surroundings for a change. Once more you’ll hold an honored position in the community. Do you realize the police in this town don’t even know who you are? They make it their business to know things and they don’t even know your name.”

  “That explains it, then.”

  “But the Moaler Plan, you see, was no good without you. Were you alive? Able to travel? I was frantic. I tried to call. No phone. There were no replies to my letters and telegrams. I called the Burnette Police Department. The desk sergeant thought the Temple was abandoned, having been condemned by the Health Department or the Fire Department, or both, but he sent a patrolman out to investigate. The patrolman called me back collect and said he found an old man living here downstairs with tw
o or three other people, and a pack of tramps upstairs. He said the place was a mess, he had seen nothing like it in his nineteen years on the force. I said, ‘Cluttered but not nasty?’ and he said, ‘Nasty too. Filthy beyond description.’ So here was a cop near retirement, never promoted, been out on the street the whole time, and he had never seen anything like it in all his years on the force. It was a strange report. I told Esteban to gas up the motor home and prepare for a journey north. We came blazing up the Interstate. Esteban has no sense of road courtesy at any time and when he learned that our mission was urgent he blew little foreign cars to one side and cut in ahead of emergency vehicles. Between noon and one he got up to ninety and ninety-five. He says all cops are off the road at that time. They insist on having their lunch at noon on the dot and taking a full hour. I didn’t really worry too much about that because I have a deputy coroner’s badge and I can usually count on professional courtesy from my fellow officers. All the way up I was wondering what I might find, and here I am and this is what I find. I find the Master here in the Red Room with the walls peeling and the floor carpeted with moldy newspapers and the trucks out there beating his brains to jelly. Over my head I hear the thumps of hoboes turning over in their fitful sleep.”

  Mr. Jimmerson said, “Then that explains the draft on my head. I put my Poma on and take it off three times a day. I don’t wear it all the time because hot vapors rise from my head and collect in it. Usually I have it on at this time of night but I’ve been feeling a draft up there and it made me wonder. Now I realize that I must have forgotten to put it on that last time, at around six o’clock.”

  “Unless you put it on and took it off again.”

  “What?”

  “Unless you did put it on again at six and took it off a fourth time.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. A whim. Another steam buildup. I admit it sounds unlikely.”