Metropolitan inventor Rothwang, King Attila, Mabuse der Spieler, Prof.-Dr. Laszlo Jamf, all their yearnings aimed the same way, toward a form of death that could be demonstrated to hold joy and defiance, nothing of bourgeois Goetzkian death, of self-deluding, mature acceptance, relatives in the parlor, knowing faces the children can always read… .

“You have the two choices,” Jamf cried, his last lecture of the year: outside were the flowery strokings of wind, girls in pale-colored dresses, oceans of beer, male choruses intensely, movingly lifted as they sang Semper sit in flores/ Semper sit in flo-ho-res… “stay behind with carbon and hydrogen, take your lunch-bucket in to the works every morning with the faceless droves who can’t wait to get in out of the sunlight—or move beyond. Silicon, boron, phosphorus—these can replace carbon, and can bond to nitrogen instead of hydrogen—” a few snickers here, not unanticipated by the playful old pedagogue, be he always in flower: his involvement in getting Weimar to subsidize the IG’s Stickstoff Syndikat was well known—“move beyond life, toward the inorganic. Here is no frailty, no mortality—here is Strength, and the Timeless.” Then his well-known finale, as he wiped away the scrawled C—H on his chalkboard and wrote, in enormous letters, Si—N.

The wave of the future. But Jamf himself, oddly, did not move on. He never synthesized those new inorganic rings or chains he had prophesied so dramatically. Had he only remained behind in the trough, academic generations swelling away just ahead, or had he known something Pökler and the others didn’t? Were his exhortations in the lecture hall some kind of eccentric joke? He stayed with C—H, and took his lunchbucket to America. Pökler lost touch with him after the Technische Hochschule—so did all his old pupils. He was now under the sinister influence of Lyle Bland, and if he was still seeking to escape the mortality of the covalent bond, Jamf was doing it in the least obvious way there was.

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If that Lyle Bland hadn’t joined the Masons, he’d still probably be up to those nefarious tricks of his. Just as there are, in the World, machineries committed to injustice as an enterprise, so too there seem to be provisions active for balancing things out once in a while. Not as an enterprise, exactly, but at least in the dance of things. The Masons, in the dance of things, turned out to be one of these where Bland was concerned.

Imagine the fellow’s plight—got so much money he don’t know what to do with it all. Don’t go screaming, “Give it to me!” either. He’s given it to you, though in roundabout ways you might need a good system of search to unsnarl. Oh, has he given it to you. By way of the Bland Institute and the Bland Foundation, the man has had his meathooks well into the American day-to-day since 1919. Who do you think sat on top of the patent for that 100-miles-per-gallon carburetor, eh? sure you’ve heard that story—maybe even snickered along with paid anthropologists who called it Automotive Age Myth or some shit—well, turns out the item was real, all right, and it was Lyle Bland who sprang for those academic hookers doing the snickering and the credentialed lying. Or how about the great Killer Weed advertising campaign of the thirties, who do you think worked hand-in-glove (or, as grosser individuals have put it, penis-in-mouth) with the FBI on that one? And remember all those guy-goes-to-the-doctor-can’t-get-a-hardon jokes? Planted by Bland, yup—half a dozen basic variations, after having done depth studies for the National Research Council that indicated an unacceptable 36% of the male work force weren’t paying enough attention to their cocks—not enough genital obsession there, and it was undermining the efficiency of the organs doing the real work.