The judge suffered a stroke and died and the trial was postponed, postponed forever in Breen’s opinion; he doubted that this particular blue law would ever again be enforced
Or the laws about indecent exposure, for that matter. The attempt to limit the Gypsy-Rose syndrome by ignoring it had taken the starch out of enforcement; now here was a report about the All Souls Community Church of Spring field: the pastor had reinstituted ceremonial nudity. Probably the first time this thousand years, Breen thought, aside from some screwball cults in Los Angeles. The reverend gentleman claimed that the ceremony was identical with the “dance of the high priestess” in the ancient temple of Kamak
Could be, but Breen had private information that the “priestess” had been working the burlesque & nightclub circuit before her present engagement. In any case the holy leader was packing them in and had not been arrested
Two weeks later a hundred and nine churches in thirty three states offered equivalent attractions. Breen entered them on his curves
This queasy oddity seemed to him to have no relation to the startling rise in the dissident evangelical cults through out the country. These churches were sincere, earnest and poor but growing, ever since the War. Now they were multiplying like yeast. It seemed a statistical cinch that the United States was about to become god struck again. He correlated it with Transcendentalism and the trek of the Latter Day Saints, hmm…yes, it fitted. And the curve was pushing toward a crest
Billions in war bonds were now falling due; wartime marriages were reflected in the swollen peak of the Los Angeles school population. The Colorado River was at a record low and the towers in Lake Mead stood high out of the water
But the Angelenos committed slow suicide by watering lawns as usual. The Metropolitan Water District commissioners tried to stop it, it fell between the stools of the police powers of fifty “sovereign” cities. The taps remained open, trickling away the life blood of the desert paradise
The four regular party conventions Dixiecrats, Regular Republicans, the other Regular Republicans, and the Democrats attracted scant attention, as the Know-Nothings had not yet met. The fact that the “American Rally,” as the Know-Nothings preferred to be called, claimed not to be a party but an educational society did not detract from their strength. But what was their strength? Their beginnings had been so obscure that Breen had had to go back and dig into the December 1951 files but he had been approached twice this very week to join them, right inside his own office once by his boss, once by the janitor
He hadn’t been able to chart the Know-Nothings. They gave him chills in his spine. He kept column-inches on them, found that their publicity was shrinking while their numbers were obviously zooming
Krakatau blew up on July i8th. It provided the first important transpacific TV-cast; its effect on sunsets, on solar constant, on mean temperature, and on rainfall would not be felt until later in the year. The San Andreas fault, its stresses unrelieved since the Long Beach disaster of 19331 continued to build up imbalance an unhealed wound running the full length of the West Coast. PelBe and Etna erupted; Mauna Loa was still quiet
Flying saucers seemed to be landing daily in every state
No one had exhibited one on the ground or had the Department of Defense sat on them? Breen was unsatisfied with the off-the-record reports he had been able to get; the alcoholic content of some of them had been high. But the sea serpent on Ventura Beach was real; he had seen it. The troglodyte in Tennessee he was not in a position to verify
Thirty-one domestic air crashes the last week in July …
was it sabotage? Or was it a sagging curve on a chart? And that neo-polio epidemic that skipped from Seattle to New York? Time for a big epidemic? Breen’s chart said it was
But how about B.W.P Could a chart know that a Slav bio chemist would perfect an efficient virus-and-vector at the right time? Nonsense! But the curves, if they meant anything at all, included “free will”; they averaged in all the individual “wills” of a statistical universe and came out as a smooth function, Ever y morning three million “free wills” flowed toward the center of the New York megapolis; every evening they flowed out again all by “free will,” and on a smooth and predictable curve