The Seven Madmen (18 page)

His voice was raspy. His eyes blazed so fiercely they seemed to have slipped out of focus. His great woolly head jerked right and left, as if extraordinary feelings were discharging in his brain, he put his hands behind his back and went back to his pacing, repeating:

"Ah! gold
...
gold
...
you know what the early Germans called gold? Red gold. See? Shut up. Satan. But just imagine, never before has a secret group tried to fuse together such an amalgam. Money will bind it all together, give the mixture enough weight and violence to pull people into it. We'll appeal most to the young, since they're dumber and more enthusiastic. We'll promise them anything. See? We'll give them fancy uniforms, spiffy tunics
...
helmets with rainbow plumes
...
sparkling gemstones
...
an exotically named set of ever-more-secret echelons, inner circles
...
. In the mountains we'll have a cardboard temple—used only as a movie set— No. After our triumph, we'll build a temple with six golden doors. It will have pink marble pillars and inlaid copper paths. And all around we'll have gardens
...
and mankind will flock there to worship the god we've invented."

"But the money
...
the money to do all that stuff
...
millions
...
"

While the Astrologer was speaking, Erdosain had been caught up in his enthusiasm. He had forgotten all about Barsut, even though he was standing right in front of him. He couldn't help imagining a great, fresh new world. Mankind would live in perpetual simple celebration, fireworks would spangle the night sky with showering red stars, an angel with pale green wings would skim the cloud crests, and under the leafy arches of the woods men and women would wander about in white tunics, their hearts free of all the vile slime that now coated his own. He closed his eyes, and Elsa's face went streaming by in his memory, but before it could strike a responsive chord the Astrologer's savage reply filled the stables:

"So you want to know where we'll get the money? No problem. We'll run brothels. The Melancholy Ruffian will be the Great Patriarch of Prostitution
...
every one of our group members will have a share in the deal
...
. We'll live off usury
...
off women, children, workers, the provinces, madmen. In the mountains—out in Campo Chileno—we'll set up gold processors, we'll extract ore with electricity. Erdosain has a five-hundred-horsepower turbine worked out. The nitric acid will come out of the nitrogen in the atmosphere, drawn out with a spinning voltaic arc, and we'll have iron, copper, and aluminum by electric processing. See? We'll lure the workers in with false promises and whip them to death if they won't work. Isn't that just what goes on now in the Gran Chaco, with the production system for tea, rubber, coffee, and tin? We'll fence our setup with electric wire and keep all the cops and bureaucrats in the South paid off. It's just a matter of getting started. The Gold Seeker's here already. He's been having a wild time, wandering around in the Campo Chileno with some prostitute they call The Mask. But we have to start somewhere. And to play god, we'll pick some adolescent
...
. Or better yet, handpick some especially beautiful child and raise him up to play the part of god. We'll let word get out
...
then it'll spread via the grapevine, only getting to be more and more mysterious till word-of-mouth blows him out of all proportion. Can you picture the reaction of those idiots in Buenos Aires once it gets around there's an inaccessible temple of gold and marble in the mountains of Chubut, with an adolescent god living there
...
a wondrous creature who works miracles?"

"
You know your ravings are sort of interesting?"

"Ravings, huh? Didn't they swallow that hoax about the plesiosaur that was found by some drunken Englishman, the only guy in Neuquén Province the cops wouldn't let use a revolver because he had such lousy aim?
...
Didn't people in Buenos Aires believe in the supernatural powers of the Brazilian quack who miraculously cured Orfilia Rico of paralysis? That was a shabby trick, also totally lacking in imagination, all those idiots blubbering away when that quack held up his patient's arm, and her as paralyzed as ever, which goes to show that for people today and always there's this urgent need to believe in something. Making use of some newspaper, believe me, we'll work wonders. There are several newspapers dying for some sensational stuff to cash in on. And we'll give them all this miraculous god to feed their craving for marvels, embellishing it a bit with stories we can get out of the Bible—I have it; we'll proclaim the boy the Messiah prophesied by the Jews
...
. That needs some working out
...
. We'll take pictures of the Jungle God. We can make a movie showing the cardboard temple in the depths of the forest and the god conversing with the Spirit of the Land."

"Are you up to something or just plain crazy?"

Erdosain looked at Barsut angrily. How could he be so idiotic, so unable to see the beauty of everything the Astrologer had devised? And he thought, "That animal, he's just jealous of the man's magnificent madness, that's the truth. Nothing for it but to kill him."

"I'm up to something and crazy both, and we'll cook up something halfway between Krishnamurti and Rudolph Valentino
...
only more mystic, a child with a strange face symbolic of the world's suffering. Our movies will show him in slum neighborhoods, the real hellholes. Can you imagine what it's going to be like when the masses get a look at our pale god reviving the dead, an archangel like Gabriel supervising gold processing, and terrifically dolled-up prostitutes waiting to marry the first poor wretch who goes out there? We'll be flocked with people applying to go staff the city of the King of the World and enjoy the fruits of free love
...
. Out of those losers we'll take the least educated—then really beat the hell out of them, work them twenty hours a day panning gold."

"I thought you were pro-labor."

"When I talk to a laborer, I'm a socialist. Now I'll tell you something: my organization is based on one started up at the beginning of the ninth century by a Persian bandit named Abdala-Aben-Maimun. Naturally, without the industrial part I have in mind, the part that will make it work. Maimun attempted a coalition of freethinkers, aristocrats, and believers from two races as different as the Persians and the Arabs with a whole elaborate setup of secret initiate rites and mysteries. They lied to people right and left. They promised the Jews the Messiah's arrival, the Christians the Paraclete, the Moslems the Madhi
...
so a bunch of people with totally dissimilar opinions, social backgrounds, and beliefs were all working for this big scheme but very few knew what the point of it was. That was how Maimun was going to win total control over the Moslem world. I should tell you the movement's leaders were complete cynics, they didn't believe in anything. We'll follow their scheme. We'll be Bolsheviks, Catholics, Fascists, atheists, militarists, depending on where you are in the echelons."

"You're the most shameless huckster I've ever seen
...
. It'd be funny if you brought it off."

Barsut took special joy in insulting the Astrologer. It was mostly because he hated to admit he was outclassed. Besides there was something that really rankled, it sounds odd, but he was furious thinking Erdosain should get to be so close a friend of such a man. And he was fuming: "How come this idiot gets to be friends with a man like that?" And that was the reason he felt so sure that everything the Astrologer said could be proven wrong.

"We
will
bring it off, with gold as the lure. The proof our scheme is really working will be there in black ink on the bottom line. Those brothels will rake it in for us. Erdosain has come up with a device to standardize the number of men a woman gets per day. Then also there's input from donations and a new industry we're going to launch: the copper rose, Erdosain's invention. Now maybe you see why we kidnapped you."

"What good does that do me if I'm still your prisoner?"

Just then, Erdosain thought how odd it was that Barsut had never once threatened to get back at the Astrologer once he was free, which made him say to himself: "You really have to watch it around that rat, he might blow the whistle on us, not for money, just for spite."

The Astrologer went on:

"With your money we could start a brothel, get our little band together and buy the metal and telegraph hookup and other things to process gold with."

"Have you thought you could be wrong?"

"Sure
...
I've thought that, only I just keep on as if I were dead right. Anyway, a secret organization is like a boiler. It gets up enough steam to run a big crane—"

"And what do you want to run?"

"Get some life running in those inert bodies. We happy few want, really, need, the greatest powers on earth. So we're justified in using any means to keep the weak cringing and the strong going strong. And for that, we need to build up our strength, get people's minds turned around, sell them on barbarism. The thing that gives us this mysterious energy, enough to keep the whole thing in motion, is our organization. We'll bring back the Inquisition, burn people at the stake in the square if they won't believe in God. It's necessary, believe me, it's totally necessary for a great, awesome religion to rekindle mankind's heart. To have people falling to their knees as a saint goes by, for the most insignificant priest's prayer to ignite wonders in the evening sky. Ah, if you knew how I've got it thought out! And how I keep going is by seeing how out of whack civilization and the twentieth century have got people. All those crackpots with no place to fit into society are so much waste energy. Go to the tackiest corner café, pick out two numbskulls and a cynic, and I'll show you three geniuses. Those geniuses don't work, don't do anything—I admit that so far they're only geniuses on paper. But there, on paper, is the energy that could be tapped to power a new and dynamic movement. And that's the energy source I want to plug into."

"Director of Madman Energy—"

"But that's it exactly. I want to harness the madman power, those numberless crackpot geniuses, the unsettled types who get thrown out of séances and communist party cells
...
. Those idiots—and I have firsthand experience to talk from—if carefully bamboozled and hyped-up, can carry out schemes that would stand your hair on end. Drugstore poets. Neighborhood inventors, the local prophet, street-corner politicians, and the philosopher down the street, those will be the cannon fodder for our setup."

Erdosain smiled. Then, not looking at the man in chains, he said:

"You don't know how when you get to the fringes of genius you find the most boundless insolence—"

"Right, not unless you understand those fringes, eh, Barsut?"

"I don't care about any of that rot."

"Well, you should, since you'll be in this with us. This is how I feel about it. If you tell somebody on that outer fringe that he's no genius, you have all that insolence and raw energy turned against you for not appreciating the guy. But if you carefully praise one of those incredibly conceited weirdos, then this same guy who might have killed you for the smallest put-down is at your beck and call. The secret is in knowing just how many lies to feed them. If there's enough, you can have an inventor or poet for your slave."

"And you think you're a genius, too?" Barsut burst out angrily.

"Yeah, I think I'm a genius
...
. Of course I think so—only for five minutes each day and that's it—after that I don't much care if I'm one or not. Those labels don't mean much if you're the guy who can make people's dreams come true. It's just out on the fringes of genius that empty words are so important. I've been working it out, and not because I'm worried whether I'm a genius or not. Can man be made happy? And so I start by going to those losers, giving them something to focus in on, a lie to make them happy by shoring up their egos
...
and those pathetic weirdos, who by themselves would never have gotten anyone to appreciate them, will blossom into valuable resources, will be our power source
...
our steam power."

"You do go on. I asked you one specific question, what you yourself want to get out of setting the whole scheme up."

"Well, that's a pretty stupid question. What did Einstein go and invent his theory for? The world could get by without Einstein's theory. Do I happen to know if I'm a tool of higher forces, in which I don't even believe? Don't ask me. The world is a mysterious place. Maybe I'm only the servant, the hireling who's setting up a beautiful house where the Saint, the Chosen One, will come to die."

Barsut smiled imperceptibly. There the man was, talking rot about the Chosen One, with his cauliflower ear, mad shock of hair, and carpenter's smock, and the total impression was one of irony and something un-graspable. How much of it was that weasel faking? And what was funny was that he couldn't be mad at him, something about the guy had taken hold of him, even though he had nothing new to say and just seemed to keep saying the same things and in the same tone of voice he had heard before, sometime long ago, somewhere off in the gray landscape of a dream.

The Astrologer's tone grew less commanding.

"Believe me, that's the way it is in times when people feel restless and uprooted. A few people get a feeling like something big is coming. Those who have their nose in the wind, and I'm one of those waiters and watchers, think it's up to them to start stirring society up
...
to do something even if it turns out to be nonsense. So, as it turns out, my something is the secret conspiracy. I mean, God! Does any man know in advance how what he does will turn out? When I think how I'm setting a world of puppets in motion
...
and how there'll be more and more puppets, I shudder to think, I even wonder if maybe the whole thing is as totally out of my control as some electrician who suddenly runs amok in a factory is to the plant owner. And even so, I have a compulsion to set the works in motion, to harness all that waste energy dissipating away inside a hundred heads, to get it all coordinated together by buttering up people's vanity, ego, longings, dreams, with lies for my basis and gold for reality
...
red gold—"