9/1

Played: January 11, 2024.

Monday. April 15th, 1974. 10 AM. Jocasta, Archie, and Andrew are in Archie's new LA office. As Jo loiters in the bullpen, Andrew takes to last week's Variety with scissors.

"You think we can get in to see the big man? I got a hunch about something," Andrew asks Jo suddenly, as the clock ticks from 9:59 to 10:00 AM. 

"Sure, I don't see why not."

Andrew knocks on Archie's door. He has a clipping in his hand. "Boss, you got a minute?"

"Andrew—Andy! Come on in, sure…"  Archie is busy, everything chaotic, but he's happy to be interrupted.

Andrew very carefully shuts the door behind him, sits down in front of Archie's desk, takes the clipping from Variety.

"So you know how I used to get signals from your world—from SANDMAN—while I was writing Atlantis? You know, it just kind of happened…got, like, Visions… I don't know if this is a real movie. I looked at it with… I mean Arch obviously you can take a look at it…"

As Archie pores over the clipping, Andrew continues. "It just doesn't feel real to me. I don't want to let my imagination run away with me, I don't want to say this is like a coat tail being dragged or something like that…but just the description, right? It's kind of 'us-y,' you know?"

Archie looks up in alarm. 

"It's kind of like the stuff that y'all have done in the past, with the mind, the brainwashing…?"

"Yeah, it's a little spacey sounding," Archie agrees. "London's come up before in our work."

"Viv and I have talked about his science fiction and speculative stuff a ton over the years. Obviously his visions of the future didn't come true. But I've read the Star Rover. It's a bit discursive, but basically what they describe here: the guy gets tortured, he sends himself out of his body, inhabits himself in past lives. Basically a lot of literary critics just think it's a way for Jack London to have done a Western and a prehistoric fantasy.  A way for him to spread his wings a little bit, but there was politics involved too, obviously, because you know this was about prison reform. Back then, people being put into contraptions to make them confess…and death row itself, you know? That's the other thing: this is also a capital punishment parable."

As Andrew speculates, Archie checks for and doesn't see any overt memetics in the Variety article; there's nothing there encouraging people to see this eventual movie, it's just a typical blurb.   The description suggests an updating of the original story into modern terms and ideas. 

"As you get further and further into the novel it gets very weird. It gets capital-W Weird. It gets very spiritual so if… I don't know if you've seen any of Roeg's movies but they're all pretty out there. His style is…no real chronology, there's flipping around between different time frames and different frames of reference, and…" Andrew is uncertain. "I wouldn't have brought it to you if it didn't make me think that something was happening. I just can't explain it better than… it doesn't feel like it's a real movie. Maybe there's something more happening there? I don't know."

"No, that's good," Archie assures the uncertain Andrew. 

"I looked at this last week and it didn't set off anything… but this morning, it did. So make of that what you will."

Archie turns to Jocasta, who accompanied Andrew into his office but has been silent. "What do you think, Jo?"

"I don't know. I'm not familiar with the director or the writer, but if this is ringing some alarm bells maybe we can reach out to the producers?"

"Maybe we can get a hold of the script," muses Archie.

Jo nods. "We start with the person at Variety who wrote the article to see who their source was or whether they're just reprinting a press release. If that's the case we follow that lead and see who's behind it. As usual, this could be something we're doing and the left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing… or it could be something a little stickier."

MEANWHILE IN SAN FRANCISCO. At 10:30 AM, the Telex in the Mission suddenly springs to life. A bank robbery by the Symbionese Liberation Army in Sunset, at the Hiberia Bank. Some people have gotten shot, they made off with around $10,000, and Patty Hearst is one of the people involved in the library.

Back in February when Patty Hearst was kidnapped, Marshall asked some questions and confirmed that the SLA is a CIA operation, with the goal of discrediting the counterculture and political activism generally. Donald Defreeze was recruited in Vacaville by one of Jolly West's many programs, but it isn't an OZYMANDIAS operation, or even a SANDMAN operation, it's strictly CIA. Marshall assumes that the SLA has gone rogue to some degree, as otherwise they wouldn't have been allowed to abduct an heiress. Nothing he's heard about the SLA seems at all History-B related.

Fifteen minutes later a second item comes across the telex ticker: a fire at the Bohemian Club in Nob Hill. No explosion, but a sudden conflagration on one of the top floors of the large four-story building. Local law enforcement speculates immediately at a connection to the SLA robbery, but there's no immediate obvious evidence of this. The robbery and the fire happened almost simultaneously, at ten o'clock.

Marshall consults one of his staff esmologists, John Merrick, on the current state of San Francisco. The general vibe in the city is not great: a lot of tension, people are talking race war. 

"This may be crazy, but I feel like these two things are related," Merck says of the fire and robbery. "I don't know if the SLA is planting bombs at the Bohemian Club—I don't think they could get into the Bohemian Club in any capacity, they're pretty tight-knit when it comes to security, even with their menial workers. But I've just got this feeling like these two events might be related somehow, especially considering they happened around the same time. Maybe one is meant to get somebody looking the other way.

"As far as the 'general Vibe' is concerned: people in San Francisco aren't used to having to deal with terrorists, serial killings, political bank robberies and hijackings. There's been a lot of them over the past eighteen months. The Bohemian Club…while it may be very secretive, people in San Francisco know that's where the ruling class of this city go to relax. So if it is a political statement, it's a very very old one.

"This is part of the memetics of kidnapping Patty Hearst: to turn a daughter of the ruling class into a revolutionary is a very very powerful memetic image."

Marshall listens. "But to what end?" he asks rhetorically. "I don't want to start…if it's not related to what we're doing, I don't care. But if it's a CIA project and they want them to be doing this to discredit the Left it's just sort of an odd meme to unleash onto the populace. Unless there's a level of errance to it? Unless the SLA slipped the leash and something's gone wrong? 

"We keep watching. It's not something that we can involve ourselves with meaninglessly. Unless like the Hearst Family calls me or something.  I am a fake cult deprogrammer."

Dave suggests he go down to Sunset and gather some in-person intelligence, which Marshall heartily endorses. In the meantime Viv calls up Sophie to gather more background information on the SLA, the records from Jolly West's project at Vacaville, etc.

MEANWHILE ON MOUNT SHASTA. Over the last four months Mitch, Mary-Lynn, and a few other spiritual advisors have been putting together the Saint Germaine School, to provide education and guidance to a few members of the gifted youth. The first class is small, only 6-8 students. Among this initial class three of the kids came from Puharich's 'turkey farm' in New York, brought here by Jo. The students who had places to go after the 'turkey farm' was shut down went back to their homes and found places in other schools.

One of the former INDIGO children is Hilton, now eleven years old. He's lived within either INDIGO or Puharich's school his entire life. Much like Charley, he doesn't have a lot of experience with the outside world. He's older than Charlie, so he was at the INDIGO facility at Granite Peak a bit longer than she was. He doesn't remember his birth family at all, he's just trying to kind of go along to get along in this new school. He's very happy to be here; the 'turkey farm' was not a great situation for the kids there. It was basically INDIGO without the charm.

Hilton's "power set" is similar to Mitch's, in that he has some psychokinesis, the ability to remote view (not as highly attuned as Pat Price or even Mitch) but effective at short range: guessing cards that are inside envelopes, that kind of thing. 

What Mitch has been able to discover over the past six to eight weeks is that Hilton is, right now, Mitch's best bet for awakening Illumination within this initial class.  At around 9:59 AM, Mitch is in the middle of a class when he perceives, with his Illuminated extrasensory perception, something happening somewhere.  Hilton looks up very briefly to make eye contact with Mitch, and then looks back down at whatever he's doing on his desk.  

"May I be excused?" Hilton says.

"Okay, sure. Knock yourself out."

Hilton gets up and walks out of the classroom, clearly concerned about something. Looking out through a window Mitch can see Hilton standing outside, just staring at the slope of the mountain. Mitch breaks off his lecture (on the thematic relationship between Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie) and follows Hilton out, leaving Sherry to pick up the slack.

"So you felt it too, Mr. Hort?" Hilton asks him.

"Yeah. I mean, I feel a lot of things, a lot of the time, but the thing that you're talking about? I'm going to say 'yeah' because I remember you looking up at me and being like, 'oh I saw a thing.'  I saw that. So I'm going to say yes, to your question. My answer to your question is 'yes, I saw it too."

"I have to say I haven't really seen anything, but…I felt it. And I feel like I should get closer to it to find out what it is."

"What, you want to go up Shasta?"

"I think we have to go around to, like, the other side."

"You think it's on the other side? In America?"

"No, just around the mountain…"

(This would match up geographically with where people came out of the tunnels back in Mission Five.) 

"We wouldn't have to go a hundred degrees around the mountain, it would just be…it would be about a four-hour hike…"

"Wow, so you've been, like, reading up on how long it takes to hike places? That's a level of initiative that I wasn't expecting from you, Hilton. But that's great! I appreciate your enthusiasm! Really excited about this project, and you really want to go on this hike with me, so let's go ahead and do it! I'm hearing from you a lot of enthusiasm and I am 100% prepared to indulge it. Let's go!" Mitch starts walking across the field. Hilton runs to catch up. 

"Mr. Hort, do you remember how I got here?"

Mitch is evasive. "I mean, roughly. Kind of.  To the extent that anybody remembers anything."

"I kind of feel the same way. I feel like it's a…I remember being with Dr. P in New York, and then something really crazy happened, and then that lady brought me here. And I can remember, but I can't. It's weird. What's going on right now, it's making me think of…that the last few months…I don't know…"

Mitch reflects on what he knows about Jocasta's retrieval of Hilton and the other INDIGO children from the 'turkey farm.' Back in late February or early March when all this was happening, Jo had said she had two targets on her list. Andrea Puharich and Uri Geller. Mitch suddenly recalls reading about Geller dying in a motorcycle accident a couple of weeks prior. They put out his album posthumously, but they can't move it. It's down to $2.98 at Tower Records already.

Hilton laughs suddenly. He stops and apologizes, but Mitch tells him he can laugh. "That's fine, yeah. Let it out."

"Well, I mean, I am laughing. Because I'm happy to be here. It is so much better than where I was before," Hilton says with real emotion in in his voice as he looks up at Mitch (perhaps the first person to treat him kindly in his entire life). "I want to clear up what's going on, on this mountain. Is that why you put the school here, Mr. Hort? Is it because this place has things happen around it?"

"Well, sure, in like a really…big-picture sense, yes. It all comes down to the idea that there's stuff that happens at Mount Shasta, yeah.  There's more to the story than that but if I try to clarify I'm probably just going to end up obfuscating more, so maybe you have a follow-up question that I can answer? Or maybe you don't, and we can just enjoy the… what is it, overcast? Probably it's overcast, yeah. It's spring, it's probably chilly, overcast, there's always clouds up here…"

Weather for Mount Shasta, April 15, 1974: clear and cool, little cloud cover, high 50s/low 60s

"But, um, I might have more questions if we get a little closer because I can't see things real good unless I'm a little closer, so…"

BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO NOW. Dave is going to the site of the bank robbery to scout it on foot, while Sophie watches the news and researches the SLA. 

Dave calls in from the Hibernia Bank. "Uh, there's two dead here. Two bystanders…two customers that were coming into the bank, and from what the cops and the FBI are telling me, it's Hurst who shot them. She's fully one of them now, is what they're saying. They said they hope 'Tania' has got a good lawyer.  They made their getaway in two cars, they're scanning the city right now trying to find them…that's all I've got so far, boss."

"The whole thing," Marshall muses aloud. He's at the downtown office, where there is a lot of space (empty offices, empty conference rooms) and almost no people. "This whole thing reeks of a psy op, we were doing this in Vietnam six years ago when I was over there.  Hmm. I can see the CIA's fingers all over it, but…it really does feel like things are getting a little out of control.  We're in an ontological…I feel like this is starting to sweep within our jurisdiction a little bit. This is getting a little weird…"

Viv mistakenly believes he was talking to her, rather than himself. "Do you think she could become a true believer in whatever mix of trust-fund Maoism is happening in the SLA? Marshall, do you think this young 20-year-old debutante could have been converted so quickly?"

Marshall is diffident. "It would depend on what methods they used. We could do it that quick,  but query: whether she has been so fully converted as to intentionally kill two people? Witnesses' memories can be tampered with. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe the gun went off and she didn't mean it. We don't yet know that she is fully a zealot. That level of compliance can be achieved with the right amount of psychological cause. We need more information for this, from people on the ground."

While Dave approaches some witnesses or some cops to determine whether she was screaming 'death to America!' when she gunned down those two people, Viv wants to bring up the Bohemian Club. She requests permission to go and check out what's happening down at the Bohemian Club.

"Oh, agreed," Marshall says quickly. "We don't—this is not a permission-seeking organization!  You pursue the things that you find interesting. Go! Do that! The thing that I'm weighing right now from an organizational perspective is, this all reeks of memetic psychological warfare but is it legitimate memetic psychological warfare? Is this a Ruskie op or something? Or is something that we need to be concerned about? Right now it's still unclear."

Dave radios in to report that traumatized witnesses report seeing two people get shot. The witnesses are definitely confused; a lot of them were on the floor of the bank as the two people who got shot were coming in. The door was covered by one of the SLA members (Dave reports witnesses told him), and the gunshot victims walked in. They told them to get out, they ran out, and then it was Patty Hurst who shot both of them down. The SLA had military carbines, witnesses assert, and at least one veteran on the scene whom Dave questioned said they looked like M1 army rifles. Hearst was shouting slogans, the getaway was done in two cars, they had people waiting outside for them. It was all over in about four minutes, they said. 

Then the noon news reports start. The Hearst/SLA story is clearly going to be national news.  

AND IN LOS ANGELES. Archie, Jocasta, and Andrew see the television news. Jocasta turns and calls up Marshall.

"Morning, Marshall."

"Good morning!"

"A lot happening today."

"I know! Really busy morning, right? We're all abuzz about it over here, too."

"Well, I don't want to put more on your plate, but when you have a moment…if you have an in with…" Jo checks her written notes. "If you have an in with Robert Redford or Nick… R O E G…"

Marshall is of course familiar with Nick Roeg. "I'm sure I can put you in touch with somebody. Why? Are you shopping something around? Did you finally—did you finally get the screenplay written, Jo? Did you finally write that screenplay?"

Jocasta chuckles mirthlessly. "You've been reading my wish book. No, no, just ringing a little alarm with the writer-in-residence."

"Oh," says Marshall, understanding immediately.

"We just want to see if there's anything to it."

Archie signals to Jo. "Are you talking to Marshall?" He's almost quiet enough for his voice to not carry through the phone line. "Ask him if everything's under control with this Patty Hearst thing. But don't make it seem like I'm asking," he quickly adds. "I don't want him to think that we don't think he's got it well in hand…but I'm seeing this seven-headed serpent on all the news channels, that can't be good."

"Well I won't keep you," Jocasta tells Marshal. "When you get around to it." She pauses. "Do you think you need a hand with…?"

"This Hearst thing? I don't think so," Marshall says coolly.

"I guess it's foolish of me to assume that you have a hand in it, but…"

"God, I wish!" Marshall's turn to laugh mirthlessly. "Viv and the esmologist boys are evaluating and I have Dave on the ground. We're trying to get a handle on it.  I still haven't seen an angle that would trigger my interest as opposed to the DOD or the CIA. I'm gonna call Jolly West, because this is apparently a project he worked on. My current thinking is that this is a Jolly West experiment that slipped their leash after OZYMANDIAS got terminated, and maybe we just need to bring it back into control."

"Give Jolly my love."

"Oh I will! I'll tell him you said hey."

Once the call is over Jo tells Archie "he seems to be on it. He'll let us know, but he's got his own esmology boys on it, we'll see what turns up."

WHILE IN SAN FRANCISCO. Marshall dials up Jolly West.

"Professor West's office?"

"Hi, this is Dr. Redgrave, can you put me through?"

"Absolutely, Doctor. I'll see if he's in."

15 seconds go by.

"West."

"Jolly! It's Marshall. How are you?"

"Uh." Jolly West does not seem eager to chit chat. "Watching the news."

"Yeah. We are, too.  You had to know this call was coming, because…isn't this—were you associated with this project?"

"I, uh…at a couple of degrees of remove, yes," Jolly admits. "I mean—this is—we've been doing this in prisons all over California for the past three or four years. Politicals, Black Panthers, anybody we can co-opt, you know? I mean, I—when they, when they, when they took the Hearst girl, my—my—was—play it out. See how it goes, obviously, there was a lot of other stuff going on back in January, you understand, that was taking up my attention, so I…this isn't…you've got to understand, this is not a SANDMAN op, this is an agency op, this is about discrediting the Left. This is, you know, obviously I can, you know, historically play both sides on discrediting the Left because Leftists often lead to the Kings, but you…this is basically, I'm…it's a job I'm doing for Langley, you know, we have a, we have a Black linguist who went into the prisons who worked with what he thought were good prospects…good unsubs for us to utilize…he hooked up with these Maoists in May or June, we let him out of prison to see what would happen…this is what happened. It's interesting how it's kind of turned into a cult…"

"I would say that's definitely one way of putting it."

"I would say that's pretty standard for these kind of leftist sects, you know, that have, you know, esmological, you know, uh quotients…"

"Where does this symbol come from? I'm not implying anything, I really am not, I'm just getting calls from other people who are who are like 'what's going on guys?'"

"Well, you, you have to understand, DeFreeze, we never taught him any—any!—techniques whatsoever. I mean we don't put that kind of—we don't put that kind of explosive in the hands of, you know, civilians, right? So either Hurst—and again, our analysts have been at this, you know she's been on a college campus the last two and a half years, so who knows what kind of memetics she's absorbed, you know, I mean, she could be a True Believer here. I don't know what they did to her in captivity that we… We had our stress guys listen to the recording that came into the news a couple weeks ago…you probably saw that all over the news…I mean she sounded broken. She sounded like she'd been, you know. like there had been some hacking happening, you know, not physical, you know, just psychological, so are they working with somebody else? I mean, my feeling is no, and our esmologists don't see any evidence—don't see any History-B in it at all."

"Are you guys gonna…I've been saying this all morning, are you gonna pull the leash now? The girl shot two people, Jolly. This is troubling. It's going to lead people back to the Company. What safeguards do we have in place for this? Can we just shut it down? Do we know where she is?"

"Well, I mean, the first thing you have to understand is that I'm currently being investigated by the university system, because of that article that appeared in that Lefty scientist rag, like, I—I'm—I'm—I may not be here much longer, Doctor. I mean, I think you have to understand, like…"

Marshall rolls his eyes heavily on the other end of the phone call. Oh my God, he thinks, this again.

"We don't know who leaked that," Jolly continues, "we don't know who got that information to those… SANDMAN doesn't care about this SLA thing. This is an Agency op so I'm gonna have to answer to Langley, too. It doesn't do anybody any good to see a scion of one of the most famous families in California killing two people…"

"Okay, okay," Marshall interrupts him. "But are you basically telling me you can't shut it down? They have gone rogue, and you can't get the girl? You guys don't know where she is? Is that what you're saying?"

"The Agency has no direct control over the SLA, no."

"Oh, wow. Okay." Marshall can tell he's telling the truth. "Well, thanks for the intel, and good luck with things. I'll be in touch." As he hangs up on Jolly West without waiting for a response, Marshall reflects that this is no doubt the beginning of the end for him on every level. Jocasta was the person who (probably) leaked that story to the science journal that started Jolly's troubles, too. Marshall did put his best person on it. In one sense this SLA thing is a bit of a godsend, as it will provide an excuse to kick Jolly West fully out.

Marshall calls Roger, not for the first time, and he doesn't pick up, not for the first time.

AND UP ON MOUNT SHASTA. As Hilton and Mitch approach the spot that they sense is the source of the whatever-it-is, Mitch sees (with his Aura Sight) Hilton activate his Clairvoyance. about we go back to Shasta where things are a little bit calmer.

"You can do that and walk at the same time? I can barely walk and chew gum at the same time."

Hilton chuckles at that. "You know, Mr. Hort, you're probably just about the strangest teacher I've ever had, and I've had a lot of strange teachers over the years."

"I figure, but they're probably all kind of strange in the same direction, while I'm strange in a different direction. Maybe I'm not that much further from the origin point than the teachers you're talking about, but they're all clustered along one axis, so it's deceptive."

"No, I mean, that's accurate. Is that—?"

"I'm glad you agree that it's accurate."

"Is that mountain actually there?"

"Well," Mitch says immediately, "what do you mean by actually?"

Hilton has to think for a second. "When I look towards where I can feel that thing that kind of made me go hmm, I can feel that the side of the mountain is there, but if I press a little bit, and concentrate, and try to go and and kind of zoom in on what's happening over there. It's almost like the mountain disappears from the side of my vision and isn't there… So when I'm looking at it, it's there. When I'm not looking at it—that doesn't make sense!" He's really angry at himself for saying something he perceives as stupid. "But do you see? What I'm trying to say is, it's  kind of like, I can't sense it out of the side of my eyes—not my real eyes, my—I'm not making any sense."

Mitch nods. "So imagine that you have a really nice botanical garden," he begins. "And in your really nice botanical garden, you have a water feature, which is a fountain."

"A fountain, okay."

"It's up at the top of a hill, okay. You used to have a big ugly reservoir there, the Pear Reservoir, and you didn't like the way that looked so you installed over it, call it the Eye of Water.

"And it's this gorgeous fountain. The water just flows out of it, in this, like, smooth curtain. It feeds this little irrigation ditch that goes down the side of your hill, and it goes down this little artificial waterfall that you have in there, and it gets to this nice reflecting pool that shows your clock tower.

"And maybe once upon a time you needed that water to feed your pump system, but a lot of renovations have happened so you don't need to worry so much about that, but every year you go out to the this water feature, you look at that waterfall, and you think that's really pretty but it's getting to be winter, so you turn the water off. Where does the waterfall go?"

Hilton doesn't get it. "Well, the water's turned off, so there's still a—"

"Where did the waterfall go?"

"Well, it's not there any more…"

"Where did it go?"

"It would have drained away…?"

"So did the waterfall drain away? If you went and looked in the reservoir, would you see the waterfall down there? I don't think you would. I think you'd see water. You wouldn't see a waterfall. So where does the waterfall go? I'm sorry," Mitch says suddenly, not to Hilton. "I can see I'm boring you."

Hilton assumes Mitch is addressing him. "It's not boring, Mr. Hort, it's making me think different."

"Right, okay. But my point is, you're asking questions that seem on the surface like they make sense, but the answers to them that are real answers aren't going to give you the information you're trying to get at, when you ask the questions."

"Okay."

"You're asking me, is the mountain really there? I'd say, it depends on what you mean by 'actually,' because… I know what you mean by 'actually,' right? It's not a word that's that complicated, in terms of what people mean when they say it. It's not like there's a lot of different possible definitions in everyday yse. So I know what you're saying, I think, but the answer that I can give is not meaningful, because the answer is just, 'it depends.' Does that answer your question?"

"I… it's getting there… but I think there is something where we're headed that is not supposed to be there, I and I'm sure that's true and the reason why I know that, is because it feels like the mountain was empty for a little while. Or there was nothing behind it, or there was something different behind it… again, it's just really hard for me to understand. But I know when we get to the end of this, I know we're going to find something, Mr. Hort."

"Okay."

"I'm not leading you on a wild goose chase. I know it's going to be there."

"All right. Okay. Well…this is not a particularly accurate model of the universe, I'm going to warn you right now. This is not very accurate, but if you imagine that there's a bunch of, like, parallel realities—alternate dimensions—all superimposed on one another. So there's fifty thousand different Californias that are all off on a vibrational frequency or some shit like that, a different point on the probability axis, whatever, that's nonsense, however you would however you would describe it. But if you imagine a multiverse and you look at where Shasta is, you're going to see different things in the different versions of the world. Shasta is…it's like a big spiral staircase. You can go up and down it and get from one world to another. You can throw paper airplanes and then they go down and then they land in a different world… What I just said is not true, it's not accurate at all. But it kind of, like, glances at the truth and the accuracy. And that's the best that I can do under the circumstances,  which I know is insufficient, but it's all I got."

Hilton tries to process this. "Should we be scared about what I'm sensing over there?"

"We could be, if you want," Mitch replies. "That might be rational. But there's a lot of stuff to be scared of. You read the newspaper? There's a lot of stuff."

"Mr Hort," Hilton says, now in full Brave Young Man mode, "I don't need to read the newspaper to know what to be scared of." Mitch can see his aura cloud over with trauma and memories.

Mitch had been trying to jolly him away from that (no pun intended), but it's bound to happen.

ELSEWHERE.

Sophie, up in San Francisco, has sent down to Los Angeles the intel that Marshall obtained about the SLA being an off-the-leash CIA operation, and received instructions to research Jack London and the Bohemians. 

Viv calls in to update about the fire in the Bohemian Club building: it was extinguished quickly but she's not clear on how that was done. The staff was evacuated and one ladder from a specific fire station, on Nob Hill, was allowed to deal with it, even though it was a three-alarm fire.  "It set off all my alarm bells, Marshall. Just social-dynamic-wise. They've got their own private fire department, which I know sounds completely paranoid and crazy but that's what I could sense from observing them from across the street. They don't want anybody to know. The police were here, they didn't even go up. I know enough about law enforcement to know you have to file a report, so…they're hiding something, Marshall. They're hiding something about…the secret club of plutocrats is hiding something from law enforcement and almost all the fire department.  So make of that what you will."

Marshall considers. "It's not surprising that this group would be this secretive. It is weird, but…"

"I know, we have bigger fish to fry."

"No, I'm not even saying that we shouldn't follow this more. Is it related to the Hearst thing? Is it all part of the same thing? These are important things to think about. I'm just trying to think of angles of approach on them…"

"William Randolph Hurst was a very prominent Bohemian," Viv declares. "I know that much. Maybe it doesn't mean anything, but…"

"My instinct is, we need to find Patty. If we find Patty, we find the organization. I think I need to get a hold of Roger."  Marshall tells Dave and Sophie to get on that, finding Roger.  Right now, everyone in the police and the FBI are searching for Patty Hearst.

"Let me tell you what I know from my dalliance with the political left," Viv says. "The kind of militants that you're looking for here, with the SLA, they obviously have sympathetic people helping them, right? They've got safe houses, they…I don't have all the information you have on how they got away, but I haven't heard anything about them getting caught yet, and I've seen police all over the place checking parking garages. It's been even down here in Nob Kill it's been crazy. My feeling is you need someone familiar with these political circles who can ask some tacit questions with absolute psychological efficiency and plausibility. So what I'm saying is, send me to Berkeley and let me ask around."

"Okay," Marshall says readily, though Viv framed this as if it was a big ask. "Okay. Go."

"It may not come to anything…"

"If you can put your finger to the web of the social network, and feel a vibration off in some direction where she might be… please go. Go do that. Everyone's looking for her right now."

"I don't want to come off like a cop, either, but they're already not going to trust me as much because I'm older…"

"Do you want to take Dave with you as backup, because you might be running into some people who…?"

Viv considers, shakes her head. "I could probably talk my way of things if I need to. I feel like I can handle that."

"Okay. Well, you know they tell you this in SANDMAN training. There comes a day in every operative's life where they're told 'Viv, go find Patty Hearst.'"

"I'm on it!"

Meanwhile, various analysts are analyzing and giving their opinions. Robert Redford is a well-known Hollywood liberal and the Variety piece is clearly making a political statement, but not anything Annunaki-influenced or deliberately memetically encoded. The novel the Star Rover Jack London wrote to be a political tract, about all the same topics (capital punishment, government psychological experimentation, etc) sixty years ago.

"What you have here," Sophie says on a conference call to Marshall, Archie and Jocasta, "is a kind of repeating pattern in culture, a repeating pattern in politics, in art. Something is being dug up again, which leads me to the other thing that got my feelers tingling: this fire at the Bohemian Club.

"Jack London was a Bohemian (for a while, anyway) and the fire happened on the upper floors, where the guest rooms are. Many esteemed and famous people have been guests of the Bohemian Club over the last sixty-odd years, Jack London among them. There was also a very prominent death at the Bohemian Club, in 1926, the poet George Sterling. He was a sort of poet laureate of San Francisco during the 1890s through the 1920s. He killed himself with cyanide in the room that was set ablaze this morning…"

Marshall interrupts her with a sputter of disbelief.

Sophie misunderstands him. "I know it sounds crazy, but this is what I—"

"No, no, it's very impressive!" Marshall doesn't doubt that this is all legitimate, and relevant, he's just surprised at how quickly Sophie pulled it together.

"This is what I used to do, before THROWAWAY… I feel like there might be a connection between all these things that are happening."

"Well, when you put it like that, how could there not be?!"

Sophie continues uncertainly. "I know that our new remit involves spirits, and the dead, and I just feel like we have to get Mitch down there to Bohemian Club… I mean he could probably get in, right?"

"Oh, but he's so scary now," Marshall protests. "It's like—"

"He's a school teacher, Marshall, what are you talking about? He's probably teaching the kids about metaphysics or sitcoms or something like that right now—"

"I mean, do you want to call God, and be like 'hey man I know you're having a great time teaching these wide-eyed dewy youth about psychic whatever up in Paradise, but can you come back down to the Bay Area and investigate a pedophilic brotherhood, elite institutional club, that caught on fire?' Well, do you want to make that call to him?"

Sophie and Marshall turn to Archie. 

"Well," Archie says carefully, "Mitch might be ready to take a break from the mountain. Maybe spending all his time with eleven-year-olds might grow tired after a while."

"Do you want to call him?" Marshall demands. He's sincerely worked up about this.

Archie's not afraid to call Mitch. "Watch, he'll probably show up right before I make the call."

Mitch does not materialize.

"Well that's the thing," Marshall says after a pause. "I don't know the last time I had to call him. He's always just kind of been where he needs to be, and he's not here right now. I'm overthinking it again. I need to just—just call…"

"He's still just a regular person," Jocasta interjects. 

Archie chooses his words carefully because he doesn't want Marshall to feel like Archie is pulling rank and telling him what to do, but he's definitely concerned about Patty Hearst and the memetics of that situation.  When Archie hears backstory about the SLA being a Jolly West operation to discredit the left, he nods. "You've already figured this out. They're off the leash. The memetics here are not good.  You know what's going to happen: DeFreeze discredits the left, but this blonde girl is going to be a hero. We've got to get her back, and we've got to get her back alive."

Marshall agrees completely, and not just because in the revised SANDMAN org chart Archie is his direct supervisor.  "I have Viv out in Berkeley, she thinks that she can tap the weave and maybe get a lead on it.  There might be the Bohemian link…I really wish we could get a hold of Roger, because this is totally his avenue…I have Sophie trying to get a hold of him… I already talked to Jolly West. This is just another huge OZYMANDIAS fuck-up that we're cleaning up."

This isn't entirely true but it might as well be.

"One last thing," Archie says as the call winds down. "Do you want Jo to come up there? If you're short-handed without Roger?"

"If you think that's uh a good use of her at this time, then absolutely, yeah. I would be happy to see her again."

"What do you think, Jo?"

Jo has been listening quietly. "I think Roger needs to be doing what Roger's doing right now. I don't think you need muscle up there—you got Dave—but if you think there's anything I can add… Everything else I have right now is, well, there's nothing I can't get back to."

"It's a very quick flight," Marshall reminds her. "We have private planes and things. And you are the woman of a thousand disguises."

Andrew approaches Archie, to indicate that Redford and Roeg are looking for a writer, and even absent the SANDMAN situation, Andrew would be interested. Archie agrees it would be a natural fit. Andrew suggests Marshall come down at talk to Redford, since they know each other slightly and he can arrange an introduction. Marshall is amenable but it isn't happening today (Bob Redford is off skiing somewhere).

A little later, Archie calls the St. Germain School.  "Mary Lynn? It's Archie Ransom."

"Archie! Oh my gosh, Archie! How are you?"

"We're doing okay. How are—"

"I haven't heard from you in ages. It's been too long, I'm sorry. Really hectic around here."

"I understand. Are you looking for the headmaster?"

"I was going to ask how the Old Man of the Mountain was…"

"He went off on a ramble with one of his prize students a little while back… He didn't say boo to me. He goes off on these walks, sometimes, with students. Tries to get them to unblock their minds, you know, think a little differently? I can't tell when it's going to happen but I can have them give you a call when they get back. They'll probably be back… they have been out there without any… I mean, they've been gone for hours now! I don't know where they are!" Mary Lynn laughs nervously.

"I wouldn't expect anything less. You're not concerned about it, though? This is standard operating procedure?"

"Archie, come on. You remember the last time we were on this mountain? All of us together?"

"I do," Archie admits. "That doesn't really fill me with confidence."

"But do you recall what happened at the end of all that? Dr Redgrave came with donuts, and we all had donuts in the parking lot.  We're fine, he'll be fine, he'll be back when he's supposed to be back." Mary Lynn is half used to all this stuff, and half still kind of freaked out by it all, wavering back and forth. Ever since she became the school's secretary and administrator, she's had to deal with a lot of stuff like this.

Archie just says "yeah. When he does come back down to Earth, if you could just have him check in with Marshall or myself…"

"I absolutely will, Archie. You take care of yourself. You sound stressed. Are you all right?"

"Oh, you know," Archie says with a rueful chuckle. "No rest for the wicked."

Mary Lynn hums. "I think you should have probably retired, after all this. We're up here on this mountain, just teaching these kids, and you're in LA? You just don't seem like an LA kind of guy to me.

"Well, we're doing important work, I like to think." Archie is mildly taken aback. "There's going to be lots of great things. Projects, wheels in motion…"

"Do you want to know the real problem with living up at Mount Shasta, Archie? It's the TV. Reception is horrible."

"Oh! I tell you, cable! It's the future. We'll get you wired up. The most amazing thing you've ever seen, seventeen channels, clear as a bell."

AND FINALLY SHASTA AGAIN

Mitch and Hilton make it to the spot where the mountain opened up during the special szygygy. Now Hilton is close enough to sense what's happening. "I can't feel it anymore," he says. "Can you try and look with… I mean, you can see like I can, right? You can see things that are hidden? I've never really gotten a good sense of what it is that that you can do, Mr Hort.  I can't do it right now. I can't seem to…" He's getting upset. Guilt in his aura flares up as he's plainly worried he just led Mitch on a wild goose chase for three and a half hours up the mountain, and now there's like nothing to be seen here.

"It's okay, calm down, everything's fine," Mitch reassures him. He takes a breath. "You were thinking we needed to come over here, and you thought you were going to see something, and now you're not seeing it?"

At the site, the place where Mitch and the others have seen the mountain open up, there's a bare wall of rocky cliffside where explosives have collapsed any tunnel that might have ever been here. Mitch takes a poke around a little bit, but he doesn't see anything in the underbrush or in the bushes. The mountain wall seems solid to his vision and he doesn't hear anything unusual. Hilton tries again with his Clairvoyance, but without luck.

Mitch slips into a meditative state and communes with Mount Shasta. The quarry is very close by, it's just very hard to see. Not visible by the naked eye, but Mitch feels that if his instinct is correct, that something actually has come out of the mountain off schedule… he needs to probe for Annunaki influence.

When Mitch activates his Detect, he immediately picks up on a History-B object nearby. Not a source of History-B energy but rather something or someone that has been exposed to history energy recently.  About 200 feet off, buried under some dead leaves.

It's a man, thin, white guy with white hair, seventy-something years old, coated in some kind of white dust and covered with radiation burns and riddled with cancers. He's not dead, yet. His teeth aren't bad. 

"Always the elderly," Mitch mutters.

Mitch beckons Hilton and they approach the man, who stirs as they come near and looks up at them. 

He says in a creaking ancient voice, "good stranger, I am ill and lost. Direct me, I beseech you, to Carcosa."