Memoirs Found In a Bathtub Read Free

tapping 17 trillion erg-seconds from the time wells that orbit the Moon.
    According to the theory of chronotraction, movement back in time is practicable only at a considerable distance from objects of great mass, since their proximity consumes staggering amounts of energy. Consequently, sightings of the past had to be taken from probes placed high in the stratosphere. Their sudden appearance and disappearance in the sky must have mystified the people of the Neogene. Prodoctor Two Sturlprans maintains that the projection of a retrochronal probe would show up in the past as a bulging disc, not unlike two horizontal saucers floating rim-to-rim through space.
    Chronotraction yielded an abundance of data, including authentic photoshots of the First Pentagon soon after its construction. This building, indeed a pentagon, each side measuring 460 feens, was a veritable labyrinth of steel and concrete. Histognostor Ser Een estimates the corridors ran about seventeen to eighteen of their mylz. The entrances were guarded day and night by over two hundred priests of lower rank. Further time delving, prompted by the chronicles excavated in the ruins of Waa-Sheetn, led to the discovery of the Second Pentagon, a much less imposing structure than the First, as most of it lay beneath the ground. Certain passages from the chronicles pointed to the existence of yet another, a Third Pentagon. This was to have been a closed, completely independent unit, a state within a state, by virtue of sophisticated camouflaging and enormous reserves of food, water and compressed air. However, after systematic chronoaxial soundings were taken over the entire length and breadth of twentieth-century Ammer-Ka and revealed not a trace of any such structure, most historians accepted the thesis that the Waa-Sheetn chronicles spoke of the Third Pentagon in a figurative sense only, that the building was raised purely in the minds and hearts of the faithful, and that the propagation of the legend was designed to uplift the flagging spirits of those few remaining followers of Kap-Eh-Taahl.
    So stood the official version of our historiography when the young Prognostor Wid-Wiss began his archeological career.
    Wid-Wiss reexamined all the available materials and published a treatise in which he maintained that, as the power of the Prez-tendz began to wane and their dominions diminish, they resolved to build a new seat of government, one far from all populated areas, somewhere in the mountainous regions of Ammer-Ka and hidden deep beneath the rocks, that this last refuge of Kap-Eh-Taahl might be inaccessible to the uninitiated. Wid-Wiss held that the postulated Pentagon of the Last Dynasty was a kind of collective military brain whose task was twofold: first, to watch over and preserve the purity of the faith, and secondly, to convert those peoples of the world who had abandoned the true path.
    But Wid-Wiss’s treatise was pooh-poohed by the experts; it clearly ran counter to most of the known facts. Critics like Supergnostors Yoo Na Vaak, Quirlsto and Pisuovo of the Martian School of Comparative Paleography pointed out the many contradictions in Wid-Wiss’s chronology.
    For example, the Last Pentagon had been built, according to Wid-Wiss, only a few decades before the papyr catastrophe. But if this Third Pentagon had really existed, argued the critics, the Prez-tendz within would have surely taken advantage of the postpapyr anarchy and attempted to conquer the world in the very first days of the Chaotic. And even had such an attempt to overthrow the Federation been thwarted, some trace of it would have survived in the oral tradition. Yet our historiography notes nothing of the kind.
    Wid-Wiss defended his hypothesis, claiming that when the populace of Ammer-Ka went over to the side of the “heretics” and joined the Federation, the priests of the Last Pentagon ordered it to be completely sealed off from the outside world. So the underground Moloch isolated itself from