TCQ

In the Second Lustrum Hunky-Dory  created a sub-genre  of Rock 'n' Roll called  Ski  Music, and  unfortunately,  it would  not endure as such. But a few years later, Ski Music would boil up again  in  California  as  Surf Music  and  dominate  the  early Sixties. So again, Hunky-Dory preceded and defined an important pop music trend, but they received no credit for it.

Ski Music  was  anticipated  on  their  first  album  with  the instrumental track Stampede which was named for Stampede Pass in the Cascade Range where  members of the  WDF often  went skiing from November through April. Also the last song,  Gone Skiin', would have sat right at home on the new Skiin' USA platter.

Ski music called for way more aggressive  drumming from Hunky, with more creative fills, but the big change was  in the bottom end. Dory set  aside  her  acoustic  bass  (which  was  always difficult to  mic for  concerts anyway) and  picked up  a Fender Precision electric  bass,  or P-Bass. Dory's performance  was pushed way forward in the mix  and run through a  spring reverb box, which  allowed  Dory  to essentially  duet  with  her  own slapped-back notes.

The new bass took some getting used to. Instead of standing up on an end-pin, it lay horizontally across  her chest, supported with a shoulder strap. But it also allowed her to get out of her seat and  dance around  the  stage,  leading to  more  visually dynamic concerts.

Jill set  aside  her  saxophone and  picked  up  a  solid-body electric guitar, which Dory  taught her to  play after  she was satisfied with  her  own  electric bass  technique. Ski Music still used the  AABA arrangement  of Rock  'n' Roll  songs, but now Jill would  solo the  'B'  part on  electric guitar  rather than saxophone. She slit the  speaker cones  in her  amplifier with a  knife  to  create  a  ragged  distortion  that  sounded (counter-intuitively) very good.

Red Hot On White  Powder introduced the  new Ski  Music sound, with a twangy guitar riff that  would become de rigueur  in the British spy movies of the following decade. But there was also a Bavarian mountain flavor  to  the songs,  with  Robyn the  cute little madchen singing about gingerbread, pilsners, nutcrackers and other whiter-than-white things. The rhythm and blues were left far behind.

Alabama Alps was a countryfied  love ballad in 3:4  time, with Jill on steel slide  guitar and  a guest  session soloist  on a fiddle. The song was a  little bit of  a joke, since  it hardly ever snowed in Alabama, and the highest mountain  in that state would be called a hill by the folks of Washington State.

Break a Leg  and Sit  By My  Fire were  the obligatory  filler songs, at the required album  positions of track three  and six respectively, but they were still Ski Music songs and as in the first album,  these  songs  still  had  their  die  hard  fans, particularly Break a Leg, which ended up on a B side.

Snow Bunny was the big radio hit, and the clear implication of the lyrics  was that  the girl  in question  was a  Playboy Snow Bunny. The song was  two minutes  of non-stop  double entendres written by Robyn, each one too cleverly obscure to be stopped by the censors. But the kids heard through the  grapevine the song was naughty and the grownups  didn't like it at  all, therefore they desperately wanted to hear it.

The Chick's Gone Skiin' was also  a very popular song,  but at the  same  time  it  was somewhat  mysterious. Each verse  was accompanied by the ring of a bell, as Robyn sang two stanzas and then she seemed to fade away  (perhaps to go skiing)  while the band carried on, and the  listener wondered if  Robyn's singing had been real or a dream.

So the song was perhaps a half instrumental,  and after jamming for a while it moved seamlessly into the next track. This was a common practice in the concept albums of later decades, but this early on it was a revolutionary move, perhaps the  first use of the studio itself as an instrument.

Seven Humps was a fully instrumental boogie, and it evoked the image a rapid run down a ski slope with seven hillocks of snow, each one marked by a key  change and a resumption  of the basic groove. It also ran for  seven minutes, which was  also unheard of. But it never bored the listener.

Suicide Skiier, as the last track, had to anticipate the theme of their next  album five  years later,  and indeed  their 1960 album would be  about  suicide. This self-imposed restriction always created a firm structure that led in turn to the burst of creativity of the band's next Lustrum.

In the spring the album  was finished, titled Skiin'  USA, and Snow Bunny was released as a single on 45 RPM records, backed by Break a Leg. Everything sounded a lot  better than  the first outing. It was recorded in stereo on a  four-track tape system, in a real studio.

This time the footprint  of the band's  tour was  much larger, encompassing the entire western half of the United States. They even played  a gig  at  the  foot  of  the Matterhorn  ride  in Disneyland. But despite the  larger geographical  footprint, in terms of  total cities  played their  road show  was abbreviated compared to the 1950 tour because Joy had to tag along too, and her summer vacation ran for only about three months.

In the Third Lustrum, the  album Hunky-Dory created  was called Suicide Club, which would  have eerie  reverberations in  a few years when they operated a company called Cryoscan.

Their first album Pandemonium had  been recorded in  a garage. Their second   album  Skiin'  USA   had  been  recorded   in  a professional studio, but  they had to book time  there, and they would only have short slots, sometimes as brief as two hours, to lay down what they could. But for Suicide Club, Hunky-Dory built their own recording studio with an eight-track system, and they lived in it for six months while they created  the LP. And when they were finished, the studio  became a source of  income when other artists lined up to get time in it.

The sound was exotic, morbid, even Gothic. Robyn traded in her piano for an organ. Dory used a store-boughten fuzz box for her bass. Jill would pick up a sitar as often as she would pick up a guitar. Hunky slowed things down a bit from the  Ski Music days and developed a more stately, deliberate beat,  but there's was still a drum solo or two  hotter than anything anyone  else was doing at the time.

The big hit on the album was  Life and Death Are  the Same and this became the eternal war cry of the WDF (except for Lilith's own  personal  war cry,  which  was  "Follow me!")  During  this Lustrum, there was  no war  in  Israel, so  Lilith remained  in America close to Robyn.

One Friday night Hunky and Dory  drove to the top  of End Dome Hill to gaze at the lights and  the stars and make  love in the back seat of their huge Detroit-made car, aided,  of course, by the  trusty Purple  Cable. Pretty soon the  whole car  began to smell  like a  girl's gym  locker  room, and  they couldn't  see anything outside for the condensed sweat on  the windows. Hunky and Dory ran through every trick  in the lesbian sex  book, and then some.

Round about ten o'clock the  moon came  out, and a  Mexican AM radio station  they knew  about started broadcasting  at 250,000 watts, carrying an  unearthly  howl by  skip  all across  North America. The cross-country truckers and every kid at a drive-in hamburger joint or making  out at  Inspiration Point  knew that howl. It was the Wolfman, who spoke at a  machine-gun pace in a strange kind  of street jive designed  specifically to infuriate the grownups, and he played whatever the hell he wanted to. And the first song he wanted to  play that night was  Snow Bunny by Hunky-Dory.

The girls knew fame had arrived.

Visions 1961 Rebekah was  thirty-six the rest  of the  band was twenty-five

first All or Nothing

second Lonely One

third Come the Night

fourth Touch Up Your Memories

fifth cover You Talk Too Much

sixth ___________________

seventh Visions

eighth Shades below

The eighth and final song on Suicide Club was  One Way Trip and according to the rules of the band, the title  of the last song had to foreshadow the theme  of the  album which was  to follow five years later. The next album therefore was a half-hour freak out, a "trip" indeed. The band titled it Krautrock.

No one in the WDF actually used any drugs harder than marijuana. Robyn said LSD worked by creating a temporary psychosis, and if it was used  too many times, there was the  chance the psychosis could become permanent. Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac,  and Syd Barrett of Pink  Floyd  would prove  that  Robyn's warning  was correct.

Sharing minds directly through the Purple Cable was a far better mind-bender anyway, and there were immediate sexual benefits.

But the members of  Hunky-Dory were artists,  and art  could be interpreted in many  ways. Dory's song lyrics may have had drug overtones to appeal to the  record-buying market, but  this was not intractably so. When Robyn sang "Insane in the  brain from windowpane" this didn't necessarily refer to acid. Wink. Nudge.

Robyn used her Farfisa organ through an electronic phase shifter to create a droning backdrop so low and ominous that even Dory's growling bass lines were in a higher register. Hunky's drumming was as organic and improvisational as usual, but swooshed up and down in pitch as she hit the skins near the rim and moved to the center.

The big  change  in  the  band's   sound  was  the  use  of  an endlessly-repeating  loop  of blank  tape  to  create a  bizarre half-second echo while Jill  did things  like run  a microphone stand over the strings of her electric guitar. Each echoed note would repeat for at least a  dozen times before fading  into an undifferentiated  muddle of  sound,  and  the repetitions  would bounce between speakers. All of this made for some very strange music.

Another big change was in the structure of the album. There were still eight "songs" but these simply arbitrary names applied to regions of  the album that  were strung together with  no actual breaks of silence. The only real break was between the two sides of the record. It was truly a contemplative album for fans who enhanced the experience with their favorite chemical aids.

The one single that was released from the LP, Your Mind On Five Dollars A Day, was remixed to introduce a fade  in and fade out at the beginning and end of the song, and  at four minutes long it was twice the length of the typical Hunky-Dory track from the beginning of their career.

As with the preceding Lustrum,  their tour embraced  the entire United States,  but  for  the  first  time,  Hunky-Dory  toured overseas as  well,  a  little  splash  back  from  the  British Invasion, visiting both the United Kingdom and Germany.

Even the  Beatles  were  influenced by  this  album,  and  they encapsulated its sound the following year on  the bizarre final track of Revolver, titled Tomorrow Never Knows.

1966 Rebekah was 41 the rest of the band was twenty-six

first Days to Come

second Wanderin' Gal

third Kraut Rock

fourth Born To Go Wrong

fifth cover A Taste of Honey

sixth Far Country

seventh Rakehell

eighth Trance Am

TC001: For the '71 sessions  Robyn took delivery of  the second Vogue Songmaster ever  built, a  synthesizer she  wore like  an electric  guitar with  great  live  performance dynamics. Robyn played the keyboard with her right hand and bent the notes with her left along the neck strip. With the Songmaster she learned to do  a  passable  imitation of  the  hammer-on  and  pull-off technique of a guitar trill. Tabaet was sufficiently impressed to put her Gibson in storage and bounce back to playing sax.

TC002: Robyn laid  down the  vocal and  keyboard tracks  at the Crossroads and the rest of Hunky-Dory came into the studio after to record layer  after layer  within  a framework  of a  punchy thirty-six minutes of  music. They titled it  Impotent America Entranced.

In Dubbed Leftist By the Righteous, Dory started  with a gentle bass line accompanied by Robyn on electric piano before the song suddenly transformed into a rocker clocking in at four minutes. Dory's lyrics poked at Nixon's "Square America".

TC003: Dubbed Leftist  was a  backward-masking electric  boogie shuffle intended as a red flag for holy  rollers, subversive as hell, a call  to revolt for anyone who actually  listened to the lyrics, but audiences seemed to love instead the novelty of the very first synth pop song in history.

The driving beat and anthemic melody of  the instrumental first third of You Are Here was licensed for the opening credits of a short-lived (single season) television show about fashion models called Runway.

TC004: The second part of the song was the group trying its hand at a little twelve-bar blues with Robyn doing her impression of a  sultry 1940's  torch song  diva that  she had  done on  every Hunky-Dory platter going back to the 1940s.

Then Hunky started pounding her  drums at 132 beats  per minute while Robyn laid down a crystal electronic sheen  and made some rather sensuous sounds which weren't even words, exactly. A lot of horny teen-aged boys bought the record just for You Are Here part III.

TC005: When listeners  flipped the  vinyl over  they heard  the album's biggest hit, Thumper Bait, a  more-or-less conventional three minute rocker  about  fleshly temptation  that got  heavy rotation on radio stations  everywhere but  in the  Bible Belt. Thumper Bait didn't actually  name names, but  enough preachers saw a jackboot that fit and wore it. Sales lost by the lack of airplay were  more than  made up  for by  sales to  the faithful eager to burn the albums after church. Hunky-Dory couldn't lose.

TC006: On Responsibility  Boundaries  Robyn  brutally put  down bystanders who are willing to watch a rape in broad daylight but are unwilling to try to  stop it, as  though it were  all being done for their amusement. The song seemed to touch a nerve.

Chunk Tide was  an understated  instrumental raga,  the musical accompaniment for an  oil spill  oozing up  on the  shore of  a pristine beach. Some fans called it filler but it was  a moody sonic slab that balanced the intensity of the rest of the album.

TC007: Drug Century closed things out with a seeming paradox, a pro-legalization  tirade about  the misery  of drug  dependency, capping the band's breaking of as many  taboos, traditions, and policies as was possible in thirty-six minutes. Impotent America Entranced never sold less than  two or three hundred  units per week and provided a steady income from royalties no one sneezed at. This was the final  lustrum and the  band knew it,  so they extended the Entranced tour into the early months of '72.

TC008: Tabaet got  past the  halfhearted  pat down  at the  box office without being stopped, but she neglected to wrap the tape carefully around her ankle, and a bottle of brandy slid down the inside of her pants leg and shattered on the blacktop.

Robyn didn't break her stride  or even look back. "You brought that in here?" she gasped with mock indignation. That brought knowing chuckles  to   some  of  the  others   walking  on  the long, crowded,  landscaped path  leading  to  the Harvey  Downs Amphitheater.

TC009: Tabaet shrugged it off. "Do you think you can play okay knowing Tolson's gonna to crash the party?

"Sure," Robyn replied. "Seeing our old pal Clyde will just add an angry  edge to  our performance.  But we have  to get  to the stage the same way Hunky did." So they passed from the backstage area to  general  parking  by a  roundabout  way  that  avoided COINTELPRO and the local police presence that was already piling up. They packed tickets to their own show and  fell in with the throng of fans.

TC010: As they  picked  their  way to  their  seats the  rhythm section of the band was busy warming up, with Hunky beating out a long drum solo and Doriel fingering some live improvisation on bass. The gimmick of Hunky-Dory was an ironic bad-girl mystique, with the irony highlighted by white "halos" three  of the girls always wore.

But Tabaet had, instead,  two black devil  horns, which  made a kind of  sense. She broadcasted sex to both men and  women on a molecular level like a human radio station.

TC011: The band encouraged rumors  the lead singer  and drummer were wanted  by  the  authorities,  which  was  very  much  the actual case. Tabaet brought Robyn's attention to  the heavy law enforcement presence around the stage. They formed a gauntlet to intercept the  mystery  woman  before she  appeared. They had already let Hunky  slip  through  and that  was  why they  were crowding the stage now, hoping to snag her and Robyn in one fell swoop and also bag Dory  and Tabaet for associating  with known fugitives.

TC012: Robyn and Tabaet  were already running  a bit  late. The heavies lurking around the stage added to the crowd's feeling of anticipation. Suddenly, by some unspoken cue, part of the crowd rushed down to fill up scattered  empty seats in the  first few rows. Tabaet and Robyn dove over the newly vacated seats to join them. With a few bumps and bruises they pushed their way to the front row. After a nod from Dory to a group of bouncers her lead singer and sax player were hoisted up onto the stage.

TC013: Hunky improvised her  rhythms and  fills in,  around and under Dory's precisely metered bass lines. This inversion gave Hunky-Dory a very unusual but  organic sound. In a reversal of convention Dory kept  almost robotic time on  bass while Hunky's drumming added the human element of subtle randomness. Meanwhile Tabaet and Robyn ranged over the stage with their flashy legwork as the roar  and whistling  of the  crowd rose  to a  deafening level. The band was gearing up to open with Pandemonium.

TC014: Police  and  FBI  agents  swarmed  the  stage  from  its perimeter on a  prearranged  signal. Clyde Tolson moved  close enough that Tabaet could hear him shout orders over the noise.

Robyn decided to appeal to her fans. "Hey folks, it looks like the  cops don't  want us  to play  for you  tonight!" The crowd expressed their great displeasure by throwing their own smuggled bottles at the stage and pushing the security guys back. Some of them wedged between  the  bouncers and  clambered  up onto  the stage.

TC015: A riot was just  a hair's-breadth away and  Clyde Tolson knew it. He made  a chopping  motion with  his  hand. The men unhanded the  girls  and   returned  to  their  positions  just off-stage. They knew they  could  afford  to wait. The crowd grew happy again,  thrilled by  the full-participation  theater Hunky-Dory was putting on.

Tabaet wasn't sure  how long  they'd get  to play  before Clyde moved again but Robyn knew something. She told the band to play No Love Lost, the biggest hit from Suicide Club.

TC016:

"Date her, mate her, take good notes and rate her you hypocrite! But you don't know there's no love lost! Booze her, use her, try your best to lose her, cruise holy writ for a reason why there's no love lost! Your  goody-good book  Bible baptist  bitches are gonna know  this time! Eve  was framed  by Adam but  blaming the victim won't  fly this time! Jump  her, pump her, then  go ahead and  dump her,  tell yourself  it's  to save  her soul,  there's no..."

That was when the shots began to ring out.

TC017: A bullet struck  Dory's right leg. She marveled at the pain that was headed her way in about two seconds, so she cashed in one of  the benefits  of the  Change and  volunteered for  a temporary coma.

Tabaet and Robyn dived into the crowd in front of the stage and slunk away in the gathering chaos.

Hunky had to extricate herself  from behind the drum  kit. That gave time for the police to hem her in. But everyone who merely touched her backed away screaming with a broken arm and a jammed pistol.

TC018: Hunky avoided the Hunky-Dory caravan,  now crawling with cops, and made for the Airstream that brought  Tabaet and Robyn to the venue. It would take an hour just to  get out of General Parking. Cops were  slowing  the vehicles  as  they  left  and checking inside with flashlights. When it was her  turn Tabaet plowed right through the checkpoint  and out onto  the highway. The plates were radioed ahead but they weren't the only vehicle of interest. That's how it was with drugs and parole violations.

TC019: "Nineteen forty-seven."

Those  were  the   first  words   Dory  heard   upon  regaining consciousness. Her sight focused on her once and present captor Clyde Tolson seated across the room where she lay. Her left leg was elevated. Her right ankle was cuffed to a rail  of her bed and her left wrist was cuffed to another rail.

Tolson continued. "Twenty-five years! That's how long  since I had my hands on one of you. Your brother had a bullet in his leg also, but I had nothing to do with that."

TC020: "You may not have shot hem, Clyde, but going by the last time you had  your clutches on me it's certain  you bored hem to death."

"But I learned something,  Doriel. I know  there's no  point in asking questions you don't want to answer. Gabriel's death I put down  to shock,  but watching  Ian  remove the  bullet from  you without anesthetic really drove the point home. I suppose it's a side effect of the changes. And you look so young!"

"Thanks! I suppose that's another side effect. I don't blame you for the bullet, Clyde, I know you wouldn't risk  losing me when you had me in your grasp after all these years. I guess that was one of  the DC cops.  And it  was very kind  of you to  have Doc Troch patch  me up. So, out  of gratitude, while I'm  stuck here I'll answer exactly one of your questions."

TC022: "How does the change pass from person to person?"

Dory held up a pinky. "Three ways. First is you're born with it. We call those the Begotten.  Gabriel and I were  Begotten." Her ring finger came up. "The second way is when the Begotten have sexual  relations  with  someone.  Male or  female,  it  doesn't matter. We  call those the  Made. You  once had Kim  and Sophia. They were Made. But if you  think you can just send some asshole in here  to rape me  and he'll be  Made, you'll be  wasting your time. Both parties have to be fully willing."

They bugged  the wrong  phone  during  the May  1972  Watergate break-in. It was  just  a secretary's  phone  mostly  used  by staffers  to order  in Chinese  food, not  the one  used by  the Democratic Party chairman clear on the other side of the office in a locked room.

The corresponding transcripts  were  useless  and the  Attorney General, loath to piss away  $89,000 in diverted  and laundered campaign funds, ordered a second break-in to square things away because the President  himself  insisted  they keep  collecting whatever information they could on his political enemies, around the clock.

Daddy got his Washington team back together. Spook told the same group of burglars he used  the first time  to fly back  up from Miami. It took two  days to  get everyone  into place  with the right equipment, mostly  off-the-shelf stuff  that couldn't  be traced, but there was no written plan and no rehearsal.

This astonished Shutterbug, a semi-retired CIA operative who had captained a boat for over  three hundred missions  to communist Cuba (some of which  were extraordinary  renditions of  men who might have been  his friends had he dared to  lift their hoods). But his friend  the  Realtor,  a fellow  Bay  of Pigs  veteran, practically worshiped the ground Spook walked on.

The Quiet Man walked nonchalantly through the front door of the Watergate office complex, signed in,  took the elevator  to the top floor, entered  the stairwell,  then used  masking tape  to cheat the  locks on every door  all the way down  to the parking garage levels.

A private security  guard  named Frank  Wills  found the  tape, because his first task was  always to check the  basement doors for tampering when  he came  on to  his shift  at midnight. He pulled the tape off and called his supervisor, who  told him to check the other doors and call back in fifteen minutes.

But what Frank did instead was go get some fast food across the street with a young lady intern who was pulling a late-nighter.

When the actual burglary commenced,  it lasted for  about seven minutes before they came  back to their  base of  operations in Room 419 of the Watergate Hotel  and told Daddy the duct tape on the B-2  garage level  door was missing. The Locksmith and The Goon offered to look for another  lock to pick but  the Realtor and the Spook got cold feet and told Daddy they wanted to abort the mission. The Photographer said he was ready  to do whatever Daddy decided to do. Daddy decided to cancel the evolution and try again two weeks later.

So the Quiet  Man  made  his rounds  again,  but  this time  he removing the  tape from all the  doors. By the time Frank Wills finished his hamburger and actually did what his supervisor told him to do (check the other doors), there was no tape. He figured it had just been some lazy workman who taped the B-2 level door open that one time to save a few seconds of hassle fumbling for keys while carrying something big. Wills forgot about the entire episode.

On July 1 the team  returned one more  time to the  sixth floor offices of the DNC at the Watergate complex, bugged the correct phone, photographed ten rolls  of film  of the  Realtor holding documents in his blue-gloved hands, and even made off with some blank stationary with  Democratic Party  letterhead. What they didn't find was evidence that Cuban President  Fidel Castro was giving money to the Democratic Party, which is  what they hoped to find. But that was okay, because President Nixon's master of dirty tricks,  Donald Segretti, simply used  the letterhead they stole and the photographs of various  signatures to manufacture such evidence.

Tactically, there was  little  profit in  any  of this  illegal activity, all it really  did was  turn what  would have  been a historic 49-state  victory in  November 1972  into an  even more historic 50-state victory. But having avoided a  messy second term scandal, Nixon was free to bring about what  he called the New American Revolution,  making  the  executive branch  nearly omnipotent with a cabinet whose  heads were supremely  loyal to him. Congress he largely ignored. But this notion of an imperial presidency was going to bite America in the ass in October 1973 when the Yom Kippur War spiraled out of  anyone's control, even the control of an Imperial President.

Rewind to early Saturday  morning, June 17,  1972. A half hour after midnight Robyn and Lilith  walked across the  street from the Howard  Johnsons  and  enter  the  parking  garage  of  the Watergate hotel/office complex. Robyn carried an empty US Postal Service mailbag that Ariel had "requisitioned" for her. She led Judith one level down, then the walked toward  the door leading into the  building. It was  locked,  because Frank  Wills  had removed the tape when he came on his shift.

"President Nixon sent some burglars here  tonight," Robyn said. "Well, not the President exactly, but men working  for him did. If the  burglars get caught, there's  not going to be  a nuclear war. He will be too preoccupied by the scandal."

"Why would such a small thing become a scandal?"

"Because Nixon will abuse his power and try to cover it up, and that by itself will be the scandal."

"So why don't we just call the police?"

"If we do, they'll get away. They've got a lookout posted in our hotel. In the room right next to ours, in  fact. But here's the oddest thing: if  I leave this mail bag right  here, they'll get caught."

And that's just what Robyn did. At first Lilith wanted her to explain why  it was  going to  help, but  the narrative  was too complicated and she just threw up her hands and  cut Robyn off. They went back across the street to their room and watched from the balcony.

At one AM the Quiet Man pushed open the door from the inside and noted that the piece  of tape  he had  placed there  before was missing. But he did not immediately assume a  guard had removed it, because he saw an empty US Postal Service  mail bag sitting just outside the door.

That made all the difference. The Quiet Man assumed a mailman had come and tried to use his key to unlock the door, but found the door was already accessible thanks to the strip of tape. The Quiet Man also assumed  the mailman had  removed the  tape, but that he would be too busy delivering mail to think of reporting it to anyone. So he replaced the missing tape with another strip to cheat the lock.

At about one thirty, the Watergate security  guard Frank Willis pushed the door open a second time and saw another strip of tape along the edge there after he had removed the  first. He pulled the tape again and went to the nearest phone to call the police.

At 1:52 AM, Robyn and Lilith watched a crappy car pull up across the street. Two informally dressed long-haired men got  out of the  vehicle and  entered the  hotel. Neither Robyn nor  Lilith realized they were plainclothes cops using an unmarked car, and neither did Alfred Baldwin suspect anything,  watching from the balcony right next door to them. Lilith scowled at Alfred, then went back inside the room, leaving Robyn standing out there.

Baldwin was more than a little nervous and he  felt like he had to say something  to explain  to Robyn  why he  was out  on his balcony watching the Watergate.

"Beautiful night," Alfred opined.

"You have no idea," replied Robyn.

It was getting late, but  Robyn and Lilith watched  the growing police presence at the Watergate complex from  their balcony in the Howard Johnsons across the  avenue. Their funny neighbor Mr. Baldwin had to check out quite suddenly.

"Did we do well, after all?" Lilith asked.

Robyn looked dreamy for a few seconds. Then she said, "Oh yes. This bust  right here isn't  enough to  do in the  President, at least until after  the election, but he's going to  try to cover it up, and he's going to  botch the cover-up, and that will nail him in the end. He will have no choice but to quit his job or be impeached.

"What about the war in the Middle-East next year?"

ROBYN: We still  get that,  and Israel  wins, barely,  and only after you  give Sharon  our  intel  again. But it doesn't  go nuclear. No one goes nuclear, in fact, until well into the next century.

"Not far enough out for Michael's purposes, I suppose."

"We get more breathing room, but the space program just sort of peters out. The  moon landings are never followed  up. Then when they do start lobbing nukes around it's too late.

LILITH: Okay, who starts lobbing nukes around?

ROBYN: About ten years from  now some Muslims in  Lebanon start using suicide bombers. One guy goes  out  and takes  hundreds of victims  with  him. They promise their  soldiers  lots  of post-mortem  sex. And it works! The US President  pulls  his Marines out, and  this is  seen by  the terrorists  as positive reinforcement for what they're doing. So when the new century comes in America pretty much goes into a  permanent war against them, and its a very strange war that mostly stays off the front pages. But you can't uninvent the bomb and sooner or later these suicidal assholes start getting some nukes, and  there's no way to stop them. Eventually the West resorts to  just sterilizing Islam from the entire planet but the West take  a lot of damage too, and after that  the world  is in  no shape  to do  much of anything in the way of space travel.

LILITH: So you're saying we  just traded  a dark future  for an even darker one.

ROBYN: Oh, it's not all dark. There's some good things that will happen too. Communism goes away. People get smarter about their health, there's some traction on the war on cancer. People will carry around telephones with no wires, and they will use them to watch any movie or television show they want, whenever they want to watch them. These telephones will double as  cameras. Movie cameras even. And all those pictures and movies and  music and things they write about what they're  doing will go up  on this big, connected. . . thing. . . so all their friends and anyone in the world can see them. And that's how everyone will get the news or read books in forty years, even in the smallest villages of the poorest countries.

"With all that  going  for them,  why do  they  kill the  space program?"

"It costs  too  much  and  there's no  more  rivalry  with  the communist world to  conquer space. Oh, they don't  kill it dead, they  just switch  to  sending  robots to  do  it instead,  take pictures of  all the planets,  so people  can see them  on their little telephones. That doesn't do us much good, does it?"

"Perhaps we should use reverse psychology. If they  run into us up  there, and  we  tell them  to wrap  up  their program  back, they'll do precisely the opposite."

MAA: At 5:26 PM EST on December 13, 1972, six days after leaving Earth and during their third  day on  the surface of  the Moon, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt  made the final  moonwalk of Apollo 17.

Gene Cernan had flown to the Moon before, on Apollo 10.

MAB: That flight  was  with  his commander  from  the Gemini  9 mission, Tom Stafford. On Apollo 10 Gene flew a lunar module to within a  tantalyzing nine miles  of the Moon’s  surface, then returned to altitude, leaving the glory of the first landing to Neil and Buzz on Apollo 11.

MAC: He wasn’t exactly tight buds with  his partner, Harrison Schmitt, a geologist who had bumped Gene’s pal Joe Engle from the flight so NASA could say the program was  shifting from hot dog military test pilots trained to do  science to professional scientists trained to fly.

MAD: Like the two preceding moonwalks of the Apollo 17 mission, the third one was to last about seven hours. But it would differ from the  first two  EVAs  in  a  very important  respect,  not counting the trivial fact that it was about an hour late getting started.

MAE: Robyn had been following live television broadcasts of the mission from only  a few  miles away  at Taurus  Base. Now she followed the mission with  the television in  her truck  as she drove down the flanks of North Massif to reach the floor of the Taurus-Littrow valley.

MAF: So many stations on Earth were airing the moonwalk the only trick was to pick out one station with a selective receiver.

The landing site of Apollo 17  was on the southeastern  edge of Mare  Serenitatis where  an asteroid  hit the  Moon nearly  four billion years ago.

MAG: The unimaginable violence of the collision created a basin four hundred miles across. The rim of Serenitatis is a ring of mountains which have collapsed in some places. This results in a corona of long valleys  like Taurus-Littrow aligned  toward the center of the Mare.

MAH: The pyroclastic flows that filled the "Sea of Serenity" had been accompanied by lava fountains which covered  the area with tiny glass  beads bearing  bright  colors  such as  orange  and yellow.

The outer, southeastern end  of the valley  butts up  against a large mountain.

MAI: In the  run-up  to Apollo  17 NASA  took  to calling  this mountain the East  Massif, and  the name  stuck. In the south, there is a narrow canyon that leads to yet  another valley. The west side of this canyon is the sheer wall of South Massif.

MAJ: Crossing north to the other side of East Massif is another canyon leading to still another  valley. Beyond this canyon is the so-called Sculptured  Hills, and to the west  of those hills is North Massif. Between North and South Massif is  a narrower exit valley.

MAK: This valley is about four miles wide, partially blocked by Family Mountain and a sharp fault ridge three hundred feet high. The eastern foot of that sharp ridge forms a gentle ramp leading up and around the western slope of North Massif  to some rugged back country.

MAL: In that area, where it would be too  difficult for landing craft to safely touch down, Judith Gervasi chose to build Taurus Base from a deep "cut-and-cover" tunnel, with  macros doing the cutting. A layer of lunar  soil was carefully groomed  to cover and disguise the ceiling.

MAM: Robyn drove  her  truck  to the  current  position of  the astronauts. There was a large, dark, shattered boulder wedged in the foot of North Massif  where geologist Harrison  Schmitt was gathering samples. She was careful not to run over their fragile electric Rover parked nearby.

MAN: That   Boeing-made  Lunar   Rover  contained   a  built-in navigation system that kept track  of every turn of  the wheels and calculated the distance back to the Lunar Module. This was a safety feature. If the Rover became inoperative, the astronauts would have to walk to the LM.

MAO: This system used Intel's new  four-bit microprocessor, the 4004, which was essentially a computer on a single silicon chip. As the 1970s progressed, this innovation  would undergo further advances and  become  the  heart of  the  Micro,  sparking  the Information Revolution.

MAP: The boulder being examined  by Schmitt, which was  in five separate pieces, lay  beneath a  long furrow  of dents  showing it’s recent plunge down the  face of the mountain. Apollo 15 Command Module pilot Alfred Worden had photographed the area in 1971 from orbit.

MAR:  Using  a   large   panoramic   camera,  Worden   captured photographic evidence of what looked suspiciously like tracks of wheeled vehicles  and  bright  debris  that  did  not  resemble stones at all. But analysts, making inquiries of the Russians, concluded the anomalies were from natural processes.

MAS: They said the tracks  and other debris were  probably from boulders that had rolled  down the  face of  North Massif  in a "recent" (less than 20 million  years) moonquake. The truth was, Worden had found evidence of Taurus Base  construction, but the floor of the valley was pristine.

MAT: Not even Robyn, with  her gift, could sense  a significant divergence of the present  Beta timeline,  the one  Michael and Yeshua found so unsatisfactory. She pulled her truck to a stop, pumped the atmosphere down  to a near  vacuum, then  popped the door open to wait for the boys.

MAU: Cernan and Schmitt hadn’t heard Robyn roll in, of course. And they were so busy it was sixteen minutes before they looked up from their tasks  and noticed Robyn's  truck parked  next to them. Both of the astronauts  uttered sharp expletives  and the live feed was hurriedly cut.

MAV: CBS cut to  Walter Cronkite  for commentary. The blackout would last  for  nearly  an  hour  as  NASA  claimed  technical difficulties. Robyn used her talent  as a B'nei Eloah  to probe her own future. Time was "lazy" as she  well knew. You had to kick it in the pants to change it.

MAW: Without this  inertia,  this reluctance  built into  time, Robyn would be a boiling nexus of change. Everything she did, no matter how small, would make all of reality  bifurcate, even as her  own  personal  consciousness,  her single  point  of  view, persisted in just one track.

MAX: Robyn noted, to her dismay, that even  her interference in the final  Apollo mission  didn't change things  sufficiently to prevent it from being the final mission. She saw that NASA would simply swear the astronauts and flight control crew to silence, and cover it all up.

MAY: Robyn waved for them to  come inside. There was plenty of room for at  least one astronaut to be seated  next to her, even fully garbed as they were. The sun illuminated her face and they could see they were dealing with a young woman. Cernan described the situation to Houston.

MAZ: A phone call  was made  to a contact  in the  Soviet Union asking if they  were operating  in the  same area  and didn’t bother to tell anybody. The Russian thought the  American joke was in particularly  bad taste. "Is not enough  you win  Luna race?" he said. "Now you rub it on?"

MBA: Cernan and Schmitt, who were watching their oxygen steadily spend down, gently prodded Houston they were  still waiting for instructions. At length C. Gordon Fullerton, the CAPCOM for that phase of the mission, said Cernan could approach the truck, and perhaps even enter it.

MBB: But he ordered Schmitt to wait outside and  be prepared to hustle back  in the Rover  to the  Lunar Module, which  was then about four miles away. So Cernan walked over to the  truck and performed a complete circuit around it. There was only the one woman seated inside.

MBC: This woman was wearing a vacuum suit, and she was waving at him, motioning for him  to come  inside. So Gene, now  free to oblige, did so. She gestured for him to close the door and when he did, she began to  re-pressurize the  cab of the  truck with pure oxygen, to just 3 psi.

MBD: When the dial read the appropriate  pressure Robyn removed her helmet  and  invited  Cernan  to do  the  same. The sharp spent-gunpowder smell of the lunar regolith assaulted her nose. She wrinkled it and said, "Do people ever imagine what the moon smells like? Oh, no."

MBE: But Robyn was used to it, and after two  lunar EVAs so was Cernan. When he removed his own  helmet his first words  to her were, "You sound like an  American." Robyn looked him over and saw Gene was rather gaunt, and thought it was a  shame a man in his thirties was going gray.

MBF: She said, "I was born on the high plains, Commander Cernan. Smack dab in the middle of the country, or close enough as never mind. My name is Robyn, with a 'Y'. Just Robyn, no last name."

Cernan's ice seemed  to melt  a little. He said, "Then forget 'Commander'. I'm Gene."

MBD: "It's an honor to meet you, Gene," she said. "I represent a privately held corporation  named  Astrodynamics. Sometimes  we just call  it Astrodyne. It's  nothing mega. We're based  out of Seattle,  but we  have  a  few offices  around  the world,  and, believe it or not, even up here.

MBE: "We've been watching you fellows drop by over last the few years, but  this is  the first time  you've come  within driving distance. I  couldn't resist  dashing over  for a  chit-chat, as brief as it must be."

"So tell me Robyn, what does your Astrodynamics Corporation do?"

MBF: "We're not focused on the bottom line, Gene,  at least not to the mindless level you would expect. We're actually about the business of philanthropy. Thirty years  ago we were a church. We see  human history  as  a work  of  art, and  we  are making  an endeavor to perfect it.

MBG: Now humanity leaving the Earth and spreading  out into the universe is much closer to perfection than staying home with all our eggs in one basket, to use the cliche,  especially when you consider the  powerful  weapons  we now  have,  and  the  sheer insanity behind making them."

MBH: Robyn showed him  a binder  containing many  documents and photographs. "The names and faces in this dossier will probably mean nothing to you, but they  will mean a great deal to certain people in the government. Please  accept this package and run it up your chain of command."

MBH: Cernan took  the documents,  and  as he  did, he  searched Robyn’s face. He really wanted  to  like her. "Why are you giving this to me?" he asked.

She said, "Think of it as a list of  serious grievances we have with  the United  States  going  back for  more  than a  hundred years."

MBI: "I feel  like  I've  stepped into  the  middle  of an  old argument,"  Cernan said  as  he flipped  through  the binder  to briefly sample the information. Old argument indeed. Some of the documents, just as Robyn said, were on age-yellowed paper dating back to the Reconstruction period.

MBJ: Robyn said, "If you have the time during your flight home, Gene, please take a deeper look at that material. I think you'll see why we didn't find it a good idea to get permission from the government of the United States  before coming up here and doing what we have done."

MBK: "And aside from whatever you've done up  here, Robyn, what else have you done?"

"Stuff. You know that Watergate  thicket the President  has got himself in?  That was  us. Unlucky for  him, lucky  for everyone else. It  prevents something much  worse than the  Cuban Missile Crisis."

MBL: Within the binder were also five sets of color photographs that drew  Commander  Cernan's  interest,  with  the  negatives clipped to them. He pulled them out and asked what they were.

"Images of each one of the previous Apollo landing sites, taken very soon after departure.

MBM: Note the missing  ascent stage in  each photo. We thought NASA might want a photographic record."

Cernan became quiet and put the photos back  inside the binder. He seemed to grow a little melancholy. Competing with the Soviet Union now seemed like a farting in a hurricane.

MBN: Robyn sensed this  and tried to  brighten him  up. "It’s twelve days before Christmas. I’ve got a hundred and fifty of your Earth  pounds of presents  for Mr. Harrison  Schmitt. Rocks from right here  at the North Massif, taken at  depths up to six hundred feet below the surface.

MBO: There's also sulfur from  a channel we call  Yellow Rille. Documentation provided with the samples have  original location and depth. We don't boast  any trained  geologists but  Judith Gervasi has experience with archaeology in the Middle-East. Some of the same principles apply.

MBP: Hopefully all this will compensate for the precious minutes you’re losing talking to me."

"And why are you  talking to  me, Robyn? Is  this just  a fancy sales pitch? Am I to be your go-between?"

She smiled and shook her head. "Basically, it all boils down to this, Gene:

MBQ: You may be impressed that Astrodyne got to the moon before Apollo 11, but the way we get here takes a strange shortcut. We specialize in some things but not in others. Your lunar lander out there, even  your  mothership orbiting  overhead, we  don't anything like those.

MBR: So we were willing  to forget  all the dirty  laundry when America was on the fast  track to  coming up here  and possibly teaming up with us. We could have built something together. But in the end the whole Apollo program was just so you could stick it in the eye of the USSR.

MBS: The interest of the American people started  to wane right after Apollo 11. The space race was just a big  Cold War stunt and after you 'won' it started  to look like spending  a lot of money  for  nothing. Now to  be  fair,  the Soviet  Union  lost interest as well, after you 'won'."

MBT: Robyn noticed  a feeling  of well-being  that bordered  on giddiness and looked at the cabin  pressure. It had crept past 4 psi of pure oxygen. Cernan's spacesuit was still  running, and pushing fresh air through his collar ring into  the interior of the truck. She bled it down.

MBU:  "Then  Nixon   canceled   Apollo  20   and  ordered   the reconfiguration  of  the third  stage  as  Skylab," Robyn  said, resuming where she had paused. "After that Nixon even canceled Apollo 19 to shift funding to  the Shuttle. It seemed to us that America wasn't looking outward anymore.

MBV: Then we visited the Soviets and told them there was a hard currency waiting for what they had to offer, or potentially had to offer. So the moon race is  a variation of the  story of the tortoise and the hare, with the  hare putting one toe  over the finish line and turning back.

MBW: But the tortoise is  closing in  now, and he's  bringing a nuclear  third stage. What did you do  with your  third stage, Gene?"

"We let it crash onto the moon."

"That's right, and one more reason we're glad things are winding up with NASA. We live and work here, you know."

MBX: "We  didn't know  that,  Robyn.  And  it was  for  seismic research."

"Okay, Gene, but dig this: The Soviet third stage is fired three times, once for Earth orbit, once for translunar injection, and once more for the return. Their vehicle is just that third stage and a lander."

MBY: They're coming down with a crew of four and the whole crew gets to land. So they're doing it after you, but they're doing it better. Now if the only reason you're going to the moon these days is for rocks, I'm sure the Soviets can  sell them directly to you for much cheaper."

MBZ: At that  Robyn  drew a  sudden breath  of  air and  paused briefly. What she had just said  to Gene Cernan were  the magic words. It took another Sputnik moment to get  America to react, but react America did, or rather, she shortly would. The purpose of Robyn's visit was fulfilled.

MCA: Nothing, absolutely nothing drove technological innovation faster than war, even  the faux war-by-proxy  of the  Cold One. Robyn had rekindled it. Reality had diverged and the Moon Race was back on. "Welcome to the  Gamma track,"  she muttered  to herself softly.

MCB: "I can imagine all of this must come as a terrible shock to you, Gene,  because  your  entire remarkable  career  has  been building up to this mission, but that’s the raw truth so there you go. The bottom line is that  NASA does not need to follow up your flight with Apollo 18."

MCC: "Then, Robyn, I would say  you are in luck.  Apollo 18 has indeed been canceled.  Dr. Schmitt out there was  supposed to be on that flight, but he bumped one  of my buddies to be the Lunar Module pilot on this one,  to my great displeasure. This mission truly is the last one."

MCD: "I'm sorry about  your friend, Gene.  I didn't  know that. We've been disconnected from things Earthside, just a bit." "How did you get up here anyway?" "It's a way nobody else has thought of doing yet, but even so, as I said, it's a shortcut. Easy ways always make you weak."

MCE: "I'm not sure I follow."

"Okay, suppose you're Captain Kirk at Starfleet Command, and you need to go to the moon. Do you ride  the starship Enterprise to get out there?"

"No, you just beam up."

"Bingo, Gene. That's about as close as I can get to telling you what's going on."

MCF: "Okay, but what I don't understand is how  you are willing to work with the Soviets. You told me you were born in America."

"Why would that be a problem, Gene?"

"Because they're...communists!"

"Actually,Gene, they're  just   socialists.  Communism  is  the theoretical end state.

MCG: "People can espouse utopianism, and claim  to be utopians, all while still living in  a crapsack country. We're negotiating with  the  Union of  Soviet  Socialist  Republics. And  frankly, competing theories  of economics bores  the hell out of  me. Yet wars are fought over them.

MCH: Besides, who owns your moon buggy?"

"The American people do."

"You see? Socialism. That dog-eat-dog every-man-for-himself and the devil-take-the-hindmost  stuff doesn't really work  all that well up  here, any more than  it works on the  aircraft carriers you served on.

MCI: The  American  model  even makes  it  worse,  because  the taxpayer's money gets shoveled out to the lowest bidder, or even to an incompetent contractor  who happens to  be in  a district where somebody needs  votes. That's how the  Space Shuttle  is going to bite NASA's ass someday.

MCJ: But, time marches on,  Gene, and your backpack,  which you have kept running  by the  way, won’t  run forever. That was pretty much all I wanted to say. Thanks for taking this time out of your tait schedule  to meet  with me. I think we  will meet again on Earth in the near future."

MCI: "I would  like that  very much,  Robyn" he  said. "In the meantime, I would  ask a favor from you." "Anything, Gene. Just name it." "My beautiful ten year old  little girl’s  name is Tracy," Cernan told her. "I wrote her initials with my finger in the ground near the Challenger.

MCJ: "I did it  far enough  away that the  blast of  our ascent won’t erase  it, but now that  I know you're here  I'm worried that new footprints might erase her initials."

"I can tell you  love your  daughter very  much," she  said. "I promise no one will ever come near the Challenger.

MCK: We'll  make  it  off-limits  to  the  Russians  too. Your Tracy’s initials  won’t last  forever,  of  course, due  to micrometeorites,  but close  enough. A million years? That’s much better than anything you could do for  her Earthside. Take care, Gene, and have a safe journey home."

MCL: They put their helmets on  once more and made  sure of the seals before Robyn pumped the air out and motioned  for Gene to leave. When the men returned to the LM Harrison Schmitt snapped a photo of Cernan. He looked haggard, exhausted,  and perhaps just a little bit haunted.

MCM: To his mind the young lady he met out there with her sheaf of papers and  bundle  of rocks  and all  the  things she  said spelled slow but certain doom for NASA’s  entire manned space program, not just the moon shots. But true to her words it was not the last time they would meet.