COSMIC HERETICS: Part 5 :

by Alfred de Grazia

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PRECURSORS OF QUANTAVOLUTION

"Life is like an endless procession, long since begun, which we join as it passes by." So comes down to us a saying of Pythagoras. V. didn't mind joining the procession but he wanted to be seen carrying the largest idol of science. This sentiment led him to understate the height of the people walking before him, as well of those walking alongside.

The recounting of one's precursors has in it an element of snobbery, like the genealogical research that discovers barons but not brigands, big shots rather than bums. V. was especially careful to admit no disgraceful ancestors and came near to the point of acknowledging no one; pari passu he would not recognize any contemporary descendants of non-existent ancestors. This led him into an awkward position where, on the one hand, he was extolling the observations of ancient catastrophists of religion and natural history but disdaining the multitude of their descendants who were equally impressed by ancient catastrophism; he lost sight of most of the world's people when accusing mankind of a collective amnesia of ancient catastrophes, focusing his mind upon the uniformitarian intelligentsia of modern times.

He was loath to draw sustenance from and give thanks to the long line of Christian defenders of the historical and catastrophic accuracy of the Bible, whose works on subjects such as evolution and geology were, for their times, as good as his own in Earth in Upheaval. He was unfriendly to religiously committed writers who pursued parallel paths and sought to ignore them. When Donald Patten, who had published an extensive and substantial scientific work on the Biblical Flood in 1966, was introduced to him at a home reception in Portland around 1972, V.'s first words were spoken angrily: "You are trying to destroy me, but you will fail in the end!" So relates Patten and there is no reason to doubt him, especially when he adds that a while later V. returned to him and apologized. Says Patten:

Patten was a geographer, hailing originally from Montana. In 1973, he published a second book, "The Long Day of Joshua and Six Other Catastrophes," all of which events Deg found acceptable in the history of the millennium after -1450 B. C. Deg purchased them in London in 1976 through a member of the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies. In them, he found stimulus and information. Before then, he had heard only a few derogatory remarks about the books.

Patten and his collaborators, of whom the most prominent were Ronald Hatch and Loren Steinhauer, were fully committed to astral catastrophism and built a complete succession of scenarios around orbital intersections of Mars and Earth, beginning with the deluge of Noah. (At first Mars was exculpated for the Deluge but now Patten would implicate it then and there as well.) Patten's admiration of V.'s work, which he expressed most strongly in an article of 1982, did not extend to accepting the participation of planet Venus. He presented the Deluge in an unusual structural form; generally his work has this geometrical structure of thought. Like Deg, he was prone to set up categories and lists. He developed also a short-term calendar of the ages.

His brief but friendly criticisms of V. were threefold: that V. was over --influenced by Freud and prone to accept too many evolutionary and uniformitarian doctrines, that he was unquantitative and unsystematic in his geology, and that V. was overconcerned with his critics. I cannot dispute Patten, because these same several views emerge from our own pages as well.

Patten's books, which he himself published, circulated widely and well over the years, and hundreds of thousands in due course watched a 60-minute filmstrip of his ideas presented in English and other languages. He could not be said, however, to have conformed to the ruling formula in Christian Evangelism, which was determined by Henry M. Morris and the leaders of the Creation Research Society, who held to an age of 10,000 years for the world, therefore constraining creationist science greatly. Deg was next in line of constraints, with his 14,000 years for a holocene period full of quantavolutions, including lunar fission, nor could he believe that the Judaeo-Christian God had laid down this constraint; it was miserably self-imposed with full blame unto himself. Still he was grateful for the works tendered him by the creationists and, unlike V., felt no need to disavow them.

V. cited with relish ancient predecessors, but when it came to citing modern scientific ones such as Georges Cuvier, Brasseur de Bourbourg, Donnelly, Hoerbiger, and Bellamy, his lines were niggardly, rather derogatory, and somewhat aside from the point of their predecession. When accused in a letter to the New York Times (May 7, 1950) of having taken wholesale from Hans Hoerbiger, an older contemporary, V. rightly answered with details of their divergences and Hoerbiger's failings. But here, as elsewhere, V. held to a narrow view of what constituted the procession of life and science, and precession.

V. had come upon Donnelly's Ragnarok in 1940 at the New York Public Library and was depressed by the discovery, according to his own words. Thomas Ferte published in 1981 an account of the numerous fore-shadowings in Donnelly's widely known work of less than a century before. But then V. unsportingly downgraded Donnelly. I have earlier discussed the remarkable case of Beaumont, whose claims were so similar but whose method so differed from V. 's. I mentioned that V. noted to himself that Beaumont must have gotten his ideas from V. by telepathy (though the reverse should be more true, if any credence were to be given telepathy).

Discovery of V.'s belief in "telepathy" amused Deg. He was reminded of Hans Kloosterman, the catastrophist geologist leader, whom Deg had joshed for decrying V. as fanciful while himself espousing telepathy. V. might well have agreed with Kloosterman's explanation of the uses of telepathy to Deg, in a letter of May 5, 1976 from Rio de Janeiro:

When Greenberg published in 1981 a posthumous note of 1948 by V. on precursors, he reacted too strongly "to put the lie to the idiotic and petty criticism of certain people (e. g. James Oberg) who have accused Velikovsky of failing to mention 'his antecedents' -- particularly Whiston, Donnelly, Hoerbiger, and Bellamy -- as recently as the Fall issue of The Skeptical Inquirer, a trivial publication with debunking pretensions." Then Greenberg advanced three other works that V. might have mentioned, provided he had come upon them, Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis (1833-60), Comyns Beaumont The Mysterious Comet (1932), Harold T. Wilkins, Mysteries of Ancient South America (1945). Neither Greenberg nor V. mentioned Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, a most important predecessor, as I think V. would have granted. Deg carries this story in his journal:

Another precursor of V. (and of course Deg) was Howard Baker a geologist who first mentioned Venus as a possible intruder into Earth's space sheath, but had much to say concerning the Moon. Again I resort to Deg's Journal:

V. had found in legend brief evidence that the Moon was young in the sky. He published it in 1973, claiming that the Moon had been captured, a Hoerbiger idea, and showing no awareness of the large quantity of legendary and geophysical evidence that H. S. Bellamy had brought to bear on the capture theory in several books, especially in Moon, Myths, and Man (1936). The main reason why V. dismissed the fission-eruption hypothesis was saying that such a catastrophe would have been too destructive: "since human beings already peopled the Earth, it is improbable that the moon sprang from it; there must have existed a solid lithosphere, not a liquid earth. Thus it is more probable that the moon was captured by the earth."

On several occasions Deg would say to V. that he was pursuing affirmatively the theory that the moon was wrenched from the earth in the time of man. V. had no interest in discussing the question. He offered no objection. He would grunt some vague expression like "You are working much, I see..." when Deg would say "Just look at the Pacific Basin...." and then move on the another topic. That he didn't object seemed to Deg a kind of nihil obstat.

The mystery of the purloined book of Baker was unsolved. Deg wrote Walter Sullivan one time asking where he had obtained the reference to Baker's work, but received no reply. Deg made a last-minute change in his manuscript to credit Baker's work, not that he believed in credit per se but that he was happy to find like-minded company in the Pythagorean procession of life.

The idea of "precursors," believed Deg, was about as slippery, nonsensical, and morally disturbing as the idea of prior claims in science. In this I certainly agree with him. We know little about how a fruitful hypothesis is achieved and developed. Merely applying words will not help; what are the operations? And he goes on to explain:

So V. was accident-prone with precursors. It was quite unnecessary. The absurd attempt of critics to pretend that what he said was not only false and anyhow not new could be taken seriously only by fools. But as I have shown here time and time again he seemed to think that knowledge came in gobs, and he had produced some gobs, and had to defend them against theft by others.

Who were V.'s precursors, I asked Deg, the truth now, and nothing but the truth. Precursors were many, he replied.

And you, I asked, what did you take from him? Everything I could, Deg answered.

What I mean by "accepting," he continued, is taking for granted, and not reconstructing the same structure alongside his structure. "Accepting" is what, say, a paleontologist does who has a fossil ape and gets it dated at 12 million years by a laboratory on potassium-argon dating and accepts this as his date.

Well, I said, dubiously, how does it happen that your writing often races along breezily and confidently?

Onetime, V., in an unusually frank conversation with Wolfe, Milton, and Rose -- at the same set of meetings in fact that produced the euphoric letter that I described in the chapter on Holocaust and Amnesisa -- denounced the coining of words as the tactic of crackpots, and then confessed that he had coined a word; it was "introgenesis." It meant that "everything wishes to make everything else to its own fashion." Existence, whether animal, plant, or even celestial and inorganic bodies, operates by this imperative, to take whatever it encounters, digest it, and reconstitute it with oneself. Introgenesis was marked by him to become the key word in his philosophy. It would have become my philosophical system, he said, if I had not come upon Worlds in Collision. Everything wants to swallow up every other thing.

When this burst of philosophical confidences was conveyed to Deg, he wondered at it -- it seemed so meaningless -- and only years later, when he heard a full statement of it, did he appreciate that V., without realizing it, was simply coining a word (typically he credited words with substance) which referred to his own immense narcissism, the same narcissism that he urged all psychiatrists to fish up from their patients at the beginning of analysis.

The sole coinage of the realm was to be one's own. This wish seems to go hand in glove with the wish for unassailable proof of the purest assay of gold in the coin. V. as he grew old appeared to be ever more hopeful that some one critical test would occur, some grand fact, that would prove him right. The attitude became at times an obsession in that he would disregard problems or proof that lacked this capability. This explains why he became barely interested in myth while hanging upon every new discovery in space. A fully professional intellectual such as he should have known that there is a) no proof of right, b) no single right, c) little chance that right on a single test would erase wrongs on others, but, too, sociologically, d) one's opponents are not likely to define right in one's own terms, e) they are not inclined to come to grips at one's strongest point (even though ideally this would seem proper), f) they will seek to recognize someone else as the originator or predecessor of the chosen point (creating a new issue and argument of an undefined kind). V. was not alone in this regard; he had supporters who worked hard to establish him as champion predictor of the one right critical test results. Still it didn't work.

It seems that all three behaviors join together in an authoritarian character: the ultra-sensitivity to "priorities of claims" to which I referred before, the anxiety over precursors, and the hope for the single critical test. In all of them we discover the intolerance of ambiguity which is a strong trait of the well-researched "authoritarian character" in psychology, and Deg alludes to the research in several of his early writings. There is, too, in all of them, an aversion to the close proximity of others, to a trespass upon one's possessions, a need to define exclusive boundaries.

Dislike of ambiguity is not only "authoritarian" but also "scientific" by the way, for which the antidote is pragmatic operationism, a subject for another essay. Perhaps it is time to venture a clearer statement. How did Deg and V. diverge from their basic narcissism, so that V. fiercely defended his claims whereas Deg untypically and diffidently recollected his claims after dispensing them like the money of a drunken sailor?

Both men, encouraged by their early models, commanded unusually strong energies that they used to conquer their existential fears by creating an independent self, a self not dependent upon others, that would take in the world and refuse to let the world include them. But then V., to enhance his primary ego clutched, contained, and possessed his aberrant egos, his poly-ego, whereas Deg dispersed his ploy-ego hoping and expecting dividends to return.

The result was the formation in V.'s case of an authoritarian character, in Deg's case an anti-authoritarian character. (I trust that you will not be put off by the fact that V. had to attack the scientific establishment and that Deg sometimes liked authoritarian causes(" universal national service") and people (such as V.) The authoritarian character led to predispositions to monolatrous, monarchical, and presidential forms, on V.'s part, while the anti-authoritarian character led to polytheistic and republican forms on Deg's part. On V.'s side, the same character ran continuously the risk of enhanced paranoia; on Deg's part the risk was hypercritical reformism.

I shall not elaborate upon the distinctions farther here, but a rough example may suggest the effect. I selected six well-known historical figures (there is no use in comparing the two men with the cop on the beat, their local congressmen, or others whom you have not known): Noah, Moses, Stalin, Trotsky, Theodore Roosevelt, and Charles de Gaulle. I asked a couple of persons who knew both V. and Deg to assign each famous character to one or the other, on grounds of relative nearness. V. ended up with Moses, Stalin, and de Gaulle; Deg was assigned Noah, Trotsky, and "Teddy" Roosevelt. I had, of course, predicted those assignments. The test works out even better by using a scale of "nearness" from 1 to 10.

"Hypercritical" is relative to the standard of evaluation. Deg was uncomfortably aware that by normal practice he was hypercritical, but that by logical and rationally instrumental measures he may have been no more than properly critical. He was elated the first time he saw a sign in a printing shop saying "If things look confused around here, that's because they are." Not only were matters everywhere in worse shape than were admissible, but the only intelligent comment one could make all too often had to begin at least with a negative, and he felt, which I think was true, that he rarely failed to come up with a subsequent constructive resolution. Moreover, the line between critical analysis and hyper-criticalness was often too indefinite to bother with. Furthermore, was he not equally critical of himself whom he liked exceedingly well?

Now the same kind of self-justification was possible for V. Was it not true that most conventional scholars and scientists were out to get him? Were they not making of him a target for the release of all too many hostilities toward what he represented, an independent, unprotected proud figure of opposition? Didn't the humanists turn him over to the scientific crowd, and the scientific crowd kick him back among the humanist crowd, each proclaiming that he had no place among them? So he was then, a heretic, stimulated continually along the dimension of paranoia. And a goodly number of his supporters, several of whom were close to him but the majority of whom were out in the public, were also exercised in their paranoid dimension and felt better to be able to attach their paranoias like tentacles to such a strong defensible stone.

A great difference between Deg and V. was that whereas V. took the greatest pride in being unbending, determined and assured, Deg was continually seeking knowledge through self-examination and the admission of sins and weaknesses. Thus it came about that V. was a kind of Captain Dreyfuss, every inch of him the reflection of his assailants, whereas Deg was an Emile Zola, vehemently led by the inner necessity to espouse liberty, equality, fraternity and justice. And I have a feeling that V., had he been restored to his commission under the colors of science, would, like Dreyfuss and his family, have begged his supporters to retire from the scene.

When he was writing Homo Schizo, Deg came upon the essays of the psychologist Morton Prince, edited by Nathan G. Hale, Jr., where material on multiple personality is contained. What Deg marked in the margin of the Introduction as "terrible" are the following lines:

The sacrifice of principles for prestige and self is an everyday affair in science and academia and the victims of misconduct are legion, nor do they receive the glory of execution or the stake.

When on a snow-enveloped January morning in 1965, Deg's father died, V. projected from the depths of his own character and experience and advised Deg that he would enter now upon a highly creative period. The consoling remark was more revealing of V. 's paternal relationship than of Deg's. Not since he was twelve had Deg noticed his father weighing upon him. Aside from an oration for a junior High School convocation that he considered too important to let the boy write by himself, and letters that were merely informative and invariably encouraging, Deg's father committed little or nothing of his beliefs to paper. He read and worked upon reams of music as a scholar works upon books and papers. Perhaps only a character, not a philosophy, was needed in copying and orchestrating his musical scores -- now a soulful surge of Wagnerian triumph, then again a sweet and lively Mozart Overture, and another time he would prepare a Verdi chorus for brass instruments. The only expression Deg came upon when he disposed of the music archive to the New Jersey State Prison System was this: "A rebellion is terribly hard to repress when it is born in men's mind. How can intellectual resistance be killed?" It is not known what occasioned the remark, neatly written on a small note pad.

The heretics, or rebels if you will, carried on with the procession. Deg is now writing Brian Moore in Hartlepool, England:

Deg was both disturbed and amused when, in the last years of their lives, Stecchini and Velikovsky disputed the attitude of Plato towards catastrophe, the first stressing that Plato would have catastrophists put to death, the latter regarding Plato as the last direct heir of the catastrophist tradition. They did not communicate for some time before Stecchini's death. The issue is germane to political science because it reveals the conditions under which the elitist political philosopher such as Plato will choose raison d'etat over truth.

The argument was not resolved, although to Deg it seemed clear enough that Plato was wearing the two caps of scientist and political ruler. When he played wearing the one, he had to recognize the catastrophe of Atlantis and other disasters, and exhibited little confidence in the stability of the heavens. When he played the role of custodian of public morals, he recognized, as few did afterwards, that men behave in imitation of the sky gods. When the gods misbehave, so do men. Hence Plato would severely chastise those who rendered the gods a disorderly mob or perceived disorder as the rule of the heavens.

Then after several years of laboring over Immanuel's archive, his widow, Elisheva, died. Deg wrote a eulogy of her during her last hours.

I've told of the three heretics, heroes of V., who were burned at the stake. Do cosmic heretics live long? Plato voluntarily denounced his own catastrophic views; he lived to 80. Whiston was black-balled from the Royal Academy of Science and fired from Cambridge, but lived to 85. Boulanger died in his thirties. Carli-Rubbi ended his career as an economist in good style, as far as my inadequate sources reveal. Vico died at 76, but his friends got to fighting over their relationship with him and left his coffin standing on the street. Bourbourg was ridiculed at the end of his life. Ameghino was dismissed finally and posthumously honored; he believed in Atlantis. Donnelly landed on his feet, a versatile populist-utopian, writer and lecturer, and died at 70. Beaumont's papers were destroyed by bomb and fire; he was still writing when he died in his eighties, and Stephanos was still peddling his manuscript when last heard of. Hans Bellamy passed away old and with him most interest in Hans Hoerbiger's catastrophism, which occurred from the Earth's capture of satellites. Claude Schaeffer died in his eighties full of public honors, but not from his great work on Stratigraphie Comparée. Frank Dachille died quietly aboard a PanAm airplane to Rome, on his way to a conference; he was beginning to move back strongly into the study of catastrophism.

Of the fate of certain others, I've spoken elsewhere among these pages. The remainder are too many to census. I don't mean to imply anything. No curse attends to the practice of heresy; most heretics seem to live to old ages. Their ideas have been accepted. but no one does so, or he is fooling himself if he thinks so. It is easier to found an empire -- and much more common -- than to found a new model of scientific philosophy, and empire of thought. Christ and his early Christians did so. The Galileo-Newton axis powers did so. John Dewey and his pragmatists did so.

I would compare the cosmic heretics with the story of Leonard Woolf's life. His biography reads like a brilliant, long, and useful career, on the margins of heresy, for he was always a reformer, beginning as a Cambridge student, follower of the delightful new philosophy which answered every question by another question: "What do you mean by that?"; proceeding to Ceylon as so efficient a civil servant that he logically arrived at the next step, which was to de-colonize the British Empire; then he became a novelist and a publicist, edited several magazines including especially the Political Quarterly, set up his own publishing company, the Hogarth Press, to put out his books and those of his wife, Virginia, and other friends; helped to organize and bring to ultimate triumph the Labour Party; pushed for international government through the League of Nations; supported pacifist causes and creative writers; and best of all kept Virginia Woolf reasonably happy and at work on her novels and also kept her from committing suicide over many years, until she managed in her sixties to end her career by walking to her death in the sea.

Still, when Leonard came to conclude the fifth volume of his autobiography a few years ago, he had decided that the process of life was more important than its imprint upon the world. For in their effects upon the world, most of what he had attempted had failed. Both Ceylon and England had grown more hideous. Peace efforts had failed. International government had failed. Justice had failed. The Labour Party had failed. The publishing industry was much worsened. He had studied hard for twelve years and then labored hard for sixty-four years. So he named his last work, "The Journey Not The Arrival Matters," the reason being that one never arrives.

Of course, if Woolf had believed this in the beginning of his life he would have undertaken few, if any, of his numerous enterprises. It is absolutely essential to society that the young be such fools. And that some of them remain fools forever.

At the end of the third and last volume of his autobiography, Bertrand Russell states what as a boy he wanted to achieve in life and what he discovered in the end. He "wanted, on the one hand, to find out whether anything can be known; and, on the other hand, to do whatever might be possible toward creating a happier world. From an early age I thought of myself as dedicated to great and arduous tasks." Deg had felt precisely the same. It is the narcissistic heroic vision of oneself.

In the end Russell could appreciate that both his works on knowledge and his books on social realities were partially achieved. But he confessed that he could not crown them with a synthesis. He had succeeded in that many people were affected by his works and these were acclaimed. So far, so good, but the failures rankled.

The external world had refused to cooperate with his efforts and was worse, more evil, if anything. The internal world had failed him, too. "I set out with a more or less religious belief in a Platonic eternal world, in which mathematics shone with a beauty like that of the last Cantos of the Paradiso. I came to the conclusion that the eternal world is trivial, and that mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words."

Yet Russell was a tough old optimist and "beneath all this load of failure I am still conscious of something that I feel to be victory." The victory consists of still believing, first that a "theoretical truth" must still exist and "that it deserves our allegiance." Second, "I may have thought that the road to a world of free and happy human beings shorter than it is proving to be, but I was not wrong in thinking that it is worth while to live with a view to bringing it nearer."

Although having some miles still to go and a passel of things to do, Deg might be compared. He never believed in absolute Platonic truth from his first reading of Plato at 15, nor before, nor afterwards, and, being poor at mathematics, he decided early to project the blame upon mathematics, asserting that mathematics were a neat way of speaking and necessarily could not be speaking some basic new truth that sprang ex machina linguae; furthermore, there would have to be new mathematics for every important perspective upon the True, requiring therefore many mathematics, whereas mythical and ordinary language, could by its indefiniteness suggest all of these perspectives. In either case, language and mathematics were largely dependent functions of thought, though they might, interacting with thought, also determine it somewhat. It can be seen then, that Deg was a pragmatist, functionalist, and social psychologist. "The truth" remained for him just what it was to the child, a guiding myth which, by much rationalization, was later fashioned into a politics and then a philosophy. Truth functioned existentially, as a hypothesis that worked better that any alternative hypothesis.

Turning to the external world, the same philosophical instrumentalism led him to believe, not that the world would be ultimately better, although this would take longer to achieve, but rather that the world might become either better or worse (in its concurrent configurations with future times) and one should not expect more than that, while moving pragmatically and existentially through the process of life.

It begins to appear to me that Deg's moods were externally fairly even, with a frequent enthusiasm and hedonism balancing his hyper-criticality. Privately, as with many people, his moods were more grim and irascible. His journal is not a perfectly true barometer, since he seems to express his critical and negative feelings often and his happiness (a word he detested) less.

When Deg became anxious enough to draw up one of his lists, he unknowingly let us have a way of guessing the ratio of concerns to total time available. Here is his list of stresses, dated late in the quantavolutionary period; it reveals that the question of chronometry is still plaguing him as well it might, and that the production of his book and the maintenance of a heretical circle are pressing him too.

As a final favor to me who was much impressed by Woolf's life accounts, Deg prepared a list to end all lists, accounting of his time over the period covered by this book. He skimmed it across my table to me.

"I did what you asked," Deg said, "but I forgot the four hours it took me to do so. So the Q series took 29,904 hours instead of 29,900."

I scarcely believed the figures anyway. Here they are as he gave them to me:

Time Accounting Hours (Lapsed Time: 21 years, 1963-83, total hours: 183,960) 1) 53,655 a) Meals, visiting with family and friends (including telephoning), general correspondence, radio-TV-newspapers; b) Housework and shopping, paying bills and taxes, personal hygiene, car maintenance.

2) 57,487 Sleep 3) 29,900 Research, writing, production and promotion, Quantavolution Series. 4) 10,307 Other research and writing. 5) 8,936 Politicking, consulting, and business affairs. 6) 9,651 Teaching, Committee work, doctoral supervision, NYU, 12 years.

7) 2,400 National Endowment for the Arts (excepting book "1001 Questions.")

8) 4,000 New World University at Valais, Switzerland. 9) 500 Kalotic movement for World Government (plus in Switzerland).

10) 2,000 1 year at hard labor (Naxos). 11) 900 En route somewhere (less project time achieved en route).

12) 1,940 Spent with V. on "the Cause" a) personal: 1190 b) telephone: 750

13) 204 Spent with V. on the substance of Quantavolution (not in 3 above).

14) 400 Spent with V. on personal and general socio-political discussions.

15) 2,800 Spent with other heretics (except with Milton, included under 3 above and does not include group time with V., see 12 above) on the "Cause": 1550 b) on the substance of Q: 1250.

184,080 Total hours accounted for 183,960 Total hours to be accounted for 365 x 24 x 21 - 120 Discrepancy 120 Add 5 days for leap years 0 Total Discrepancy "Do you have any questions?" he said and I said yes, I do : "Why do you include 'personal hygiene' under '1b) ' instead of '1a) '?" His answer was not nice and I see no need to convey it.

He went on to explain other matters that he believed to be beyond my comprehension. He begged me to note that at $40 an hour (he certainly had a modest idea of his worth) he had spent $1,200,000.00 on the Quantavolution Series. On the heretical movement as such he had spent the equivalent of $192,000. How did you arrive at the hourly rate, I asked him. It's near to what the University was paying me and about the average for when I operated as a consultant. You see, he said, after you become a tenured professor you can retire on the job, and many do, letting research and writing go by the board. However, such equivalencies don't make sense. If I had gone into business I would have made a great deal more, or a great deal less, because I am a speculator; smooth flows of money do not amuse me.

Earlier were mentioned gross disparities in compensation and resources between the conventional established scholars and the heretics. Here another of Deg's computations presents a shocking state of affairs. The typical prominent professor, at a university of the first or second grade of excellence, may be said to receive the following emoluments:

As for the time Deg had given over to the movement, it was little as you can see, no more than, say, a chairman of the board of a closely-held company would spend on its affairs, much more than, say, V. spent with Einstein, which V. turned into a book (yet unpublished), infinitely more than a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, according to James Joyce, which contained all of the wandering years of Ulysses, ten years in coming home from the Trojan Wars.

Then he said something worth repeating, that the time he spent with other heretics on the cause, and with V., the whole 'schmeer' he called it with fine vulgarity, was essential to the Q project. They would all have run around lost, if they hadn't been held by their crazy quilt network. The network was essential for morale and V. was the primary reference point; the game worked so that one had to touch base with him in some way, or utter the password, make some symbolic gesture.

Furthermore, working with others on V.'s cause was not like work with a political party or an evangelical sect, where you know what you want and have to believe in it, and there are few surprises, and the question is simply how to achieve them; for V.'s cause excited continually new issues of substantive science -- the argon concentration discovered on Mars, the moonquakes, a radiocarbon date, the examination of King Tut's skull, the excavation of Ebla, the finding of ash levels below the sea bottom, and in these and scores of other cases, the heretics had to figure out their possible significance. As it developed, certain people gave themselves over to agitation and publicity, like Robert Stephanos, who accepted answers for a long time, while others like Mullen and Schorr were best at evaluating truth and significance, and then there were others, like Lewis Greenberg of Kronos, who operated both as agitator and evaluator.

Take the discovery of ash levels below the sea bottoms, a set of discoveries beginning with the oceanographer Worzel, which V., Kloosterman, and Deg, among others, were quick to seize upon for their catastrophic significance. What was their extent, their composition, and their age? Did any pertinent facts remain concealed or unsought because of the conventional attitude of the oceanographers? V.'s cause, or let us say, since Kloosterman disavowed V., the quantavolutionary cause was to discover and prove a catastrophe, possibly exoterrestrial. Until they understood the studies, the heretics could not use them. Until they rewrote and extended the logic of the studies, they could not achieve the full use of them.

When the Quantavolution Series was completed, Deg could be asked what portions of this systematic and complete model of cosmogony might he confidently expect to be useful to science, and what might come apart soonest. I give here his answers:

That the basic principles of quantavolution would hold, he was fairly sure: the world has changed largely by sudden, large-scale, intensely forceful events.

Also, that the solar system is a broken-down binary and functioned once within a huge sac and plenum of dense gases.

Also, that the solar system was born electrically, changed and changes electrically, and only emulates a "gravitational" system when there is too little change to take note of or build a model upon.

Also, that the Earth exploded the Moon one time, and then it was that the continents began their rafting about the globe.

That the morphology of the Earth is almost entirely due to exoterrestrial interventions, including aftermath effects extending for long periods of time.

That biosphere evolution (and extinction) has occurred in generalized quantum leaps.

That the human is genetically and experientially poly-ego and schizoid, and rationality is a pragmatic form of schizoid behavior.

That liturgy, language, history, and literature, are schizotypical compensations and sublimations for fear.

That quantavolution as a heuristic model of natural and human history is useful for many scientific and human needs involving past time, and environmental and self-controls.

That historical religion had a crude reality base. Also that Moses behaved as he is described in God's Fire.

Deg was not sure of other parts of the model: That his radical compression of time can stand against the fully array of opposing chronometries.

That his microchronic calendar manages to name and divide properly the actual ages of natural and human history. That gods must exist and that as some point in time they must come to affect the world. (But he insisted upon the axiom that what they are like and when they will operate must stand as open questions.)

That the planets were as fully responsible for quantavolutionary events as he has made them be.

Also he was confident that on many points of detail he would be proven to be in error.

Nor did Deg feel at all certain that the quantavolutionary movement would succeed now, although, if human civilization survived, some model much like it would occur again. Furthermore, he thought it unlikely that quantavolution, if it succeeded in the next century in winning over science, would recognize or acknowledge the heretics of today, but would probably, unless otherwise decreed by a political revolution and for then largely irrelevant reasons, be adopted as a great many bits that would form statistical trends that would quantitatively change the existing gradualist and incremental model until it would appear that the scientific revolution was accomplished by a great many people working independently and empirically until driven together by the facts.

"How would you feel about that?" I asked him. "It's OK with me," he said, "I'd be so surprised at being right, that I wouldn't think of asking more. Even though it cost me a million dollars."