7/1

Played: June 14, 2022.

Monday, August 6, 1973. It’s a hot one — sunny, high’s in the 80s, another perfect California day.

The team arrives in their own time at Livermore. They gather in the conference room for their weekly all-hands meeting and find Archie (and, of course, Charley) already there. Once everyone’s seated and the pleasantries are out of the way, Archie places a box of Tasty Acres children’s cereal on the table.

Archie: Tell me, what do you all make of this?

Mitch: Are we doing this now? Are we doing this now?! Are we doing this now?! Finally? Finally! We’re doing this now?! Ah! Wonderful!

Marshall: What are you talking about, Mitch?

People pass around the cereal box which — Archie warns them — contains a surprise on the back: a maze, the solution to which forms a subliminal glyph. The glyph sparks a desire to eat more of the cereal in whoever is attempting to solve it (either by following the “correct” path with their eyes or by drawing a line through the maze from entrance to exit). The glyph has no effect on anyone in the room, given their SANDMAN training, though Mitch feels the subtle tug of the Anunnaki source code.

Archie: And if that’s not bad enough, it’s sweetened with vegetables. The marshmallows are made of vegetables!

Roger: Doesn’t all sugar come from vegetables? I mean, I seem to remember lots of people harvesting sugarcane. You may not know these mysteries, but it’s an actual labor intensive and horribly deadly process. Which is why we had slaves do it.

Archie: Yes, well, yes … sugarcane is a vegetable, I suppose. I was picturing, you know, Brussels sprouts. Anyway, Melanie picked this up at the market last week. It’s from an outfit called Beale Farms — just a small California-based company. But look here!

Archie points out the advertisement on the front of the box: “FORTIFIED WITH MORE VITAMINS AND MINERALS. WITH A NEW SWEET TASTE YOU WON'T FORGET. Our patented process of extracting sweetness from vegetables means NO ADDED SUGAR! Watch this fall on CBS Saturday Mornings for our Tasty Acres commercials and the further adventures of Terry, Farmer Roy, and all your Tasty Acres pals!”

Archie: They’ve got ads coming on CBS. They’re advertising their own advertising.

Marshall: So we don’t know what this glyph does, right? Like, we don’t know what’s supposed to happen here, do we?

Archie: I think it just makes you hungry. Or, at least, that’s the only effect we’ve noticed.

Marshall: Well, if it’s printed on the box, presumably it must originate from someone at this company’s design department because they would have had to be running it off a sketch or something. So it seems straightforward enough to me: we’ll just send the ladies (he gestures at the field team) over there, see who the design team is, and we’ll just have a chat with them, right? I mean, that seems like common sense. Someone has a glyph, like someone is drawing a glyph, so this seems like a no-brainer. That person’s got be at the company, right? Or at the printing press?

Roger: Shouldn’t our first question be: is this us?

Marshall: Oh, god. We always have to think about that now, don’t we?

Roger: Sorry.

Marshall: I mean, is this us? Arch, do you think this is us?

Archie leans back in his chair and thinks aloud. Frank Stanton hasn’t been as active at CBS as he was when he was president of the company. These days he spends a lot of his time doing nebulous philanthropic work. That said, he has his finger on the pulse of TV programming and he typically keeps Archie in the loop about network programming decisions. Right now it's the middle of the summer, so what Archie knows from Stanton is that all the pilots have been shot and the animated series for Saturday mornings have been produced. This fall, the Saturday morning CBS lineup is just a bunch of cheap tie-in cartoons to already-existing TV series. Everything’s becoming a faded copy of a copy of a copy of something else, Archie grouses. There's virtually nothing original being created. It's all Scooby-Doo, Brady Bunch tie-in cartoons, etc. etc. The idea of this thing on the cereal box being an ad for an ad — that’s a really canny thing someone came up with, in Archie’s estimation. Why? Because they're trying to get the kids to watch. If they don't, the cereal box will tell them to watch. A blunt instrument, Archie muses, but clever all the same. Anyway, to have a tie-in like this with CBS, the cereal company must have some pull. Not necessarily with SANDMAN, but with the network. September is a very important time for television, so somebody at this Beale Farms — or whoever owns them — has some connections.

Jocasta raises a hand.

Jocasta: Archie, I have a couple of questions. First, I don't recognize the company, but do any of us know this company well enough to know that they've got the financial clout to be making a play like this? To put commercials in heavy rotation on the network? I mean, I guess where I'm going with this is, is this a company that has suddenly gotten a lot of market pull? And if not — if it's an established company, or if it's a new one that's just come up — one of the possibilities is that the management of the company has to be behind this as opposed to — as I think we've sort of hinted at — just one crank in their graphic design department putting this glyph on there. Then second, did you say that your … that the kids ate some of this? And if so, was there any change in their behavior? I mean it seems odd. People have been selling sugary cereals since the ‘50s, right? I mean it can't be just a matter of wanting to make kids eat more sugar. You could do that with normal advertising.

Archie thinks for a moment and then says that, no, he didn’t notice anything unusual about his son, Eddie, after he consumed the cereal. He was a bit hyper, but no more than a kid who just had a bunch of sugary cereal. And he didn’t seem especially attached to Tasty Acres itself. He just … wanted a second bowl of cereal. “Very subtle,” Archie says.

Mitch notes that there is some cereal still in the box and Roger volunteers to try it so that they can see if there are any immediate physical effects. He pops a handful in his mouth. Everyone watches in silence as he chews. It tastes like normal, off-brand, strawberry-flavored children’s cereal. It’s sweet, but “is it sweet enough for the loa?” No, not really. Neither Papa Legba nor Maître Kalfu stand up and take notice. A minute or two passes without incident. Roger does not go into seizures or start screaming Sumerian. He shrugs and says he’ll report back if he experiences any weird aftereffects over the next couple of days.

The team decides on courses of action. Archie says he is going to reach out to his contacts in the PR world, see if he can turn up any information on this Beale Farms or the firm that’s handling their advertising. Jocasta says she will do some legal research into Beale Farms itself, find out where it’s incorporated, if it’s owned by another company, if it’s involved in any recent lawsuits, etc. Roger volunteers to call a few grocery stores to ask about how Tasty Acres is selling, pretending to be a desk jockey doing “market research” for Beale Farms. Marshall asks Charley to take the cereal down to her lab and test its chemical composition. The meeting adjourns.

Marshall lights a cigarette and walks out toward Dave Rocco and his waiting car. As he reaches the lobby, though, a lightbulb pops on over his head. He turns on his heel and heads back to URIEL’s offices. Remembering that Beale Farms was listed on the cereal box as having a P.O. box in a town called Dixon, which happens to be relatively near the Mission, he flags down Mitch.

Marshall: So, on my way out it just occurred to me that this P.O. box is in Dixon, which is not too far from the Mission. Maybe we could take — maybe you want to hop in the Cadillac with me, Dave can drive us through Dixon, see if something happens, see if you see something, maybe the mail’s getting delivered that day or something. I don’t know. Just see what’s there and if it’s nothing, I’ll have Dave bring you back here and drop me off at the Mission.

Mitch: I don’t see a reason not to do that. It’s in keeping with the established M.O. of me kind of wandering towards wherever we think the problem is to try to suss it out.

Mitch grabs his things and the two of them take off toward Sonoma County in Marshall’s plushily appointed Cadillac.

Archie makes some calls and flips through a few trade magazines but, surprisingly, is unable to ascertain anything significant about Beale Farms or who may be handling the company’s marketing. A bit mysterious, Archie thinks. Meanwhile, Roger cold calls several area grocery stores in the guise of a bored market researcher. The managers he speaks with report that Tasty Acres is the first “health food” product they’ve had which has tried to break through in a big way to kids. The stores have got big cardboard standees of Farmer Roy and Terry the Pig ready to go up in September when the commercials air on CBS. As for sales, the cereal is doing reasonably well. Mostly moms in their 30s who have young kids and see something bright and shiny but which is also in the health food aisle.

Down in her laboratory, Charley attempts to run the Tasty Acres cereal through some of her equipment but something goes wrong. Horribly wrong! The mass spectrometer that she uses for chemical analysis breaks, rendering it inoperable. It’ll take her hours to repair it. What is going on with this cereal company? Charley sighs annoyedly and starts disassembling, reassembling, and recalibrating the device.

Jocasta spends the morning digging into Beale Farm’s legal affairs but legal research is notoriously boring and her mind wanders in strange directions. OK, she thinks: you’ve got Farmer Roy and Terry the Pig. Symbolically speaking, they are the protagonist and deuteragonist of this dyad. The classic dramatical dyad, in fact. Their setting is a cartoonish kid-friendly farm, all vegetables and sunshine and none of the harsh realities associated with actual farming. Indeed, the only animal on the farm is Terry the Pig, who Farmer Roy would never kill. What else? Well, “Roy” is from the French roi, naturally, meaning “king,” and he is wearing red overalls. Red King? No, that’s too obvious. Or is it? Is there a deeper meaning? Is this some kind of hidden message that the Red Kings are coming to gently pat us on the head, like domesticated animals? Only one member of URIEL has had that sort of interaction with an irruptor — Mitch — but it is well known to SANDMAN that the Anunnaki consider humanity to be little more than livestock. Now, if Jocasta was going to get paranoid, she’d think: are they … fattening us up? But if so, why? To what end? The solution may lie with this commercial Beale Farms intends to air on CBS.

In his office, Archie calls Jack Ogilvy, one of his friends from his ad man days down in Los Angeles. They exchange pleasantries, catch up on the wife and kids, and banter for a few minutes. Archie then gets into the reason for his call.

Archie: You know, Jack, I have a shop talk question I want to ask you. Do you know this outfit, uh, Beale Farms? They’ve got a cereal … what’s it called? Tasty Acres?

Jack: So you saw the ad for the ad as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah — I have heard of them. They’re buying a lot of time in the CBS morning lineup. I don't know where they're getting their money from. They're just a little mom and pop operation out of — out of your neck of the woods.

Archie: Yeah, it seems like a big swing. I mean, the kids love the cereal — Eddie can’t get enough of it — but I was just curious, do you know who’s doing their spots?

Jack: Well, yeah, I can tell you because they’ve bought not just a lot of ad time but a lot of time over at … it’s that outfit in Tarzana. Venture Toons?

This rings a bell with Archie. He knows all the big animation houses down in LA, of course. Disney, Hannah-Barbara. The standard-bearers for the industry. But then there are a bunch of cheap filmation outfits that have been popping up since the mid-‘60s. Almost all of them started off as commercial animators making, well, commercials makers for toys and the like. Over the past few years, though, a few have moved into doing actual half-hour kid shows. Some have even outsourced their animation operations to Japan in order to get things out faster and cheaper. Anyway, Venture Toons was founded in about ‘68, if Archie is remembering his dates correctly. They’re nothing special: a ramshackle operation that churns out cheap, knocked-together commercials and half-assed cartoons. It doesn’t surprise Archie to hear that they’re involved in this sort of a project. But he’d need to do more market research to learn more about their product base and client portfolio.

Archie: Cartoons made in Japan! What is the world coming to.

Jack: (chuckling) I don't know what to tell you. It's — everybody's looking for quicker and cheaper ways to to put this stuff together. There's just too much demand out there for it all. And again, where this little organic farms outfit is getting their money from, I couldn't begin to tell you. But I'm guessing they have some backers who think this is going to be a big thing coming up. I mean, my market research tells me — do Americans want healthy food? Well, no. But you know, as the folks who came from home from the war — I mean, Arch, you've been to the cardiologist the last couple of years, right?

Archie can tell Jack is projecting onto him his own insecurities about their former red-meat-and-whiskey lifestyle and how it’s affected their middle years.

Jack: We ate at the Source Family Restaurant for God's sake! (chuckling again) You see what's going on out there. People want to eat healthier, or at least maybe somebody wants to tell them to eat healthier. They think it's going to be an explosive sector in the next five to ten years. I don't know. My feeling is this cereal — I haven't been privy to any focus groups — but my feeling is if it's an organic company putting it out, it's going to be pretty pretty sawdusty. Not at all palatable for the average American kid out there.

Archie: I can see — I understand the play. You want to try to thread that needle, get something that mom's gonna like and the kids are gonna like. But I just think that kids are too smart for that. They see the word vegetable on the box and it's just not gonna fly.

Jack: No, no. It could go down as one of the big disasters in marketing history. I don’t know. But if you need an introduction down here — if you're curious to find out how this whole cross marketing with ads being advertised before they go on — I could definitely arrange an introduction for you, if you wanted to come down and shake some hands. I mean, I don't know if it's anything to get too interested in. If you're thinking it's a trend that could be capitalized on, I'd be interested to see exactly what you get out of it.

Archie: Yeah. I’m interested. What I’d really like is just to talk to somebody involved in this outfit — whether it’s someone from the company or from the ad agency or Venture Toons. So, you know, if you’ve got any names for me, let me know. Otherwise I’ll make some calls.

Jack: Alright, I’ll do a little calling around and get back to you as soon as I can. But my feeling is that the folks at Beale Farms went directly to these guys down here in LA. So they’re just contracting out, basically, all of their promotional work. They’re too small — they don’t have their own sort of robust internal promotions department. They’re gonna subcontract that labor out to Venture.

After a round of goodbyes, they sign off.

In the Livermore cafeteria, Roger wraps up lunch then returns to the URIEL offices to visit Charley. So far, he’s seemingly experienced no side effects relating to the Tasty Acres cereal he consumed. Arriving in Charley’s lab, Roger finds the young girl surrounded by tools and pieces of equipment. She seems to be building something. He clears his throat.

Roger: Hey Charley. I know we probably have some new assignments coming up but … uh, I was hoping you could give me a little time on a project. I remember you helping me when we tried to bring up Joshua and we tried to bring up the same kind of like … that weird sound and music stuff that they were playing us over the headphones at GRAIL TABLE? I've recently had some experiences and I'm hoping that you can help me find some kind of groove that'll help me open myself up to other types of persons.

Charley: Huh. Well, um, sure. I — yeah. That's interesting. Um, I can certainly look into that.

Roger: I mean, you know what we've been working on. Like, what is your type of music, your rhythm that gets you going and I though maybe like, you could help doing the same.

Charley: Sure. So are you talking about like just some really relaxing music or are you talking about something else? Because I mean, you're making … (whispering conspiratorially) actually I had this idea when we were on the Mountain and I was, um, able to talk to — well, sort of talk to Uriel through Elizabeth and she was channeling her and I, to me, like, it specifically seemed like a particular frequency. So it was a particular sound that was kind of radiating or …

Roger: From her? Or from Uriel?

Charley: From Uriel. I mean, it's hard to describe but, yeah. I've been kind of thinking if I could recreate that sound, what would happen? You know, would I be able to reach the angel? And that's not exactly what you're talking about but that's interesting in terms of channeling. I mean, we've already kind of come across that but, um, yeah. I don't know. Yeah

Roger: That groove at, like, GRAIL TABLE? That helped us open up and make connections. That's what I'm trying to do. It's not like, I’m trying to get a particular frequency like turning it on the radio, which I think is what you're talking about.

Charley: No, yeah. Right. But if you can combine it … I mean, because sound can help focus the mind, right?

Roger: I already got experience with drumming and with using other types of music and chant and things like that to focus. That's usually though focusing on connecting to like … one known god. I mean, there particular rhythms for the specific loa, right? But this is more about me trying to be able to open myself up to feel different spirits.

Charley: (excitedly) Oh, I didn’t know that! There are? There are specific rhythms for specific loa?

Roger: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You may have noticed that when we were talking to Maman Brigitte, I was like talking in a particular cadence. They like certain rhythms.

Charley: Wow. OK. Alright. Alright!

Roger: If you want, I can play some of them and you can capture them.

Charley: Yeah! Yes! OK. Yeah, yeah.

Roger: How do you plan to record this? I mean, I’m absolutely willing to pull the drums out but …

Charley: Oh, this well — yeah. Um, I've been playing … well, I'm not really like … so I don't know if you've heard of the Moog? But it's a synthesizer and it's pretty experimental but —

Roger: Like one of those keyboard things?

Charley: Yeah! Yeah yeah yeah. Yes!

Roger: So like, a Hammond organ?

Charley: Yes! And I feel like it's maybe the … (whispering conspiratorially again) music of the future.

Roger: … OK.

Charley: So, yeah. I am not very good at it right now but I do have one. So, anyway. Yeah. I think that should be a part of it. I need more time to think and put it all together but I've got a lot of ideas.

Roger: I would love to come down and do some jam sessions with you and figure out some things because I — there's some … there's a groove I want to get into and I think I'll know it when we get there. I just need your help to play back stuff or try different things so you know whatever you got.

Charley: OK! I'm so excited!

Roger: Have you done jazz? I mean, this might take some of that.

Charley: No, but we can try that!

Roger thanks Charley for her time and Charley resumes repairing her mass spectrometer. But any old inorganic chemistry major could repair a mass spectrometer, and Charley starts daydreaming as she works about the weird magic music room she intends to build. A place where she can dictate the rhythms and the tone, like a composer, while Roger plays the actual music. She’ll need a whole sound board, of course, like a real recording studio — like those recording studios she saw at the Dominoe Records building! And speaking of records, she’ll need LPs. Lots of them. Maybe she can dispatch Roger to get those, just gather up whatever he can find at the Bay Area’s countless record stores.

Marshall and Mitch arrive in Dixon, California, with Dave at the wheel. It’s a quiet farming community with a population of about 4,000. Three stoplights, an old set of train tracks, a Main Street lined with small unpretentious stores. Marshall has Dave park across the street from the post office and turn off the engine. They wait to see what happens.

What happens is that Mitch senses a faint — incredibly faint — trace element of a subduction zone about two miles to the east of his current location. From the drive into town, he knows that area is all agricultural fields and direct access roads. After a beat, Mitch asks Marshall to back him up and exits the car. Marshall and Dave follow. The three men walk through the little downtown to where the paved road ends, and then clamber across a drainage ditch, and then down a one-lane dirt path through expansive fields that stretch off into the horizon. A few locals eyeball the three of them; they don’t get many hippie types in Dixon.

As they go, Mitch’s sense of History B energy grows stronger and he is able to hone in on the location with more precision. Finally, after about a half-hour of walking, the three spot what looks like an abandoned complex of dilapidated wooden buildings. One of them is decidedly a barn, though the roof is caved in. Most of the structures look like they were built in the early twentieth century, except for the main farmhouse, which could be from the late 1800s. There seems to be no activity on site: no movement, no vehicles, no animals. “Real L. Frank Baum vibe,” Mitch remarks. “I’m getting more an Edward Hopper energy, to be honest,” Marshall responds. As they draw closer, Marshall gets the distinct impression that the site feels like an old spa or sanitarium — at least, some place that played host to guests, judging from the number of cottage-like outbuildings. Surrounding the property are the remnants of an old field wall made from cut granite.

After observing the place with a pair of binoculars for a couple of minutes and spotting nothing obviously treacherous, the three make their way onto the campus. The closer they get, the more Mitch is able to discern. Something ontological did, indeed, happen here — something fueled by belief. A lot of belief by a lot of people, which caused a subduction event and changed history. The flavor of this event is decidedly bloody; Mitch can smell the iron and the air is thick and humid. He can’t be 100 percent sure, but he’d guess that some sort of blood sacrifice took place here at one point. “Cult, man. What did I tell ya? Cult,” Mitch says. Marshall doesn’t remember Mitch mentioning anything about a cult but at this point, he takes all of Mitch’s odd remarks in stride.

Mitch, Marshall, and Dave inspect the property on foot. Nothing special jumps out at them: the place has clearly been abandoned for generations, nothing of value remains. No papers, no trinkets, no equipment. The barn — which was sizeable enough to hold 50 or 60 head of cattle back in the day — is in extremely poor condition. Mitch refuses to go inside, pointing at the partially collapsed roof. What they are able to discern is that the whole place was intended to house a sizable number of people. Working from their emerging cult-spa theory, it seems to Mitch and Marshall that the property was designed as a farmstead but with accommodations for visiting guests. If the place was ever a working farm, though, those days are long gone. All the remains are dead apple orchards and fallow land.

At Livermore, Jocasta returns from lunch and resumes her research into Beale Farms. She finds that the company was registered in 1969 but was acquired in 1971 by a company called Agrigenics. In the 1960s, Agrigenics was involved in putting together fertile crossbreeds of rice and wheat that were shipped to the Third World on behalf of the United States. “Agricultural diplomacy,” it was called. After that, they brought their services home and by 1973, they had a bunch of little bespoke organic, high yield farms peppering the West Coast. Their headquarters, it seems, is in a town called Vacaville.

With that mystery at least partially solved, Jocasta starts reading through various trade magazines connected with the cereal industry. Since the ‘50s, breakfast cereals have used cheap little toys to lure in kids. Whistles, decoder rings, plastic Army men, etc. etc. More recently, however, the cereal companies have shifted tactics. The things they include in and on their boxes are no longer just standalone toys, but “tie-ins” with other, well, stuff. “Collect 50 box tops, send them in, and we’ll send you a die-cast car!” They’re creating a synergy, Jocasta finds, between food consumption and reward-incentives. You don’t eat cereal just because you’re hungry, no. You eat cereal because eating cereal is a way to get something else. Her paranoia mounting, Jocasta’s eyes fall on a pair of red 3D glasses that came with one of the cereal boxes she was examining and she thinks to herself, suddenly: doesn’t General Mills have a division that works exclusively with the Defense Department? Her paranoia kicks into high gear — from the merely symbolic to the implications of the military-industrial-science complex. “They used to put glasses on chickens — red glasses — to keep them from pecking at each other,” she remembers an uncle telling her one summer when she was young. My God, she thinks. Is that what they’re doing? Are they literally putting farm equipment on kids?

Jocasta gathers her findings and barges into Archie’s office as he’s preparing to leave. She slaps down a huge pile of printed materials about the cereal companies, Agrigenics, and the pair of 3D red glasses. “Do you know how they put glasses on chickens?” she asks Archie in a menacing tone. It takes Archie a minute to make the connection, but eventually puts it together. He also remembers Agrigenics by name from the flyer the hippie protestor handed him at the farmers’ market. “The farmers’ market where you got attacked?” Jocasta asks, somewhat incredulous. Archie says yes. Jane got in the middle of an argument between … what was it? The teamsters and these sort of Cesar Chavez farm workers? It wasn’t one of the farm workers — it was just some hippie that gave it to him. They were doing some canvassing or leafleting or something. Protesting against the work Agrigenics was doing. He didn’t make much of it at the time, plus he was distracted. Jocasta gives Archie (and, at this point, Charley and Roger, who have joined them) a brief overview of her findings regarding Agrigenics, its prior work in food sciences, and its work shipping grain and the like overseas.

Back in Dixon, Marshall and Mitch compare notes and decide that their best course of action would be to return to town and see if anyone knows anything about the abandoned farmstead-sanitarium. After marching back through the fields, they find themselves on Main Street again. Marshall asks a passerby if there’s any sort of historical society in town, and the woman helpfully points him to an address at the end of the block, right near city hall. Inside, they are enthusiastically greeted by a tweedy older man in his late 50s. He gladly walks them through some of their little exhibits — mostly stuff about Dixon’s agricultural past, his founding in the mid-nineteenth century, and a couple things relating to the railroad. Once he’s done with the tour, Marshall asks if there was ever a health spa in Dixon. The man chuckles.

“Well, we don't have an exhibit about it because it's not the kind of thing a lot of people in this town are proud of,” he says jovially, “but back in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, there was a sect called the Pruists — p-r-u-i-s-t-s — a free love cult that basically made themselves nuisances to everybody around here. Stealing farmers daughters. Seducing some of the finest people up in Dixon and even in Sacramento with their all fruit diet commandments. Their leader, Beale Downer, was … I guess you'd call him a divine, right? He had gotten messages from God or the Book of Revelation or something — that in order to bring Christ's kingdom on Earth everybody had to have a vegetarian diet and rut in the fields all the time. So as you can see, the the town's not too proud of that. But they also had a legitimate business! Like you say, the health spa.

The historian also volunteers that the word “pruist” comes from the Hebrew root from Genesis for “be fruitful and multiply.” Marshall smirks. He asks if the Pruists were from around here and the historian says no, the Downers were from out East. With that, he snaps his fingers like he’s remembered something. He heads into a back office and returns a moment later with a thin little booklet, which he hands to Marshall. It’s a self-published thing, really well worn, hardcover and only about 80 pages. “This was written by one of their followers,” the historian says, “so keep in mind it’s a bit biased. But it should tell you the whole story.”

Marshall hands the booklet to Mitch who flips through it. At a glance, he catches a few bits and pieces: that the Pruists’ founder, Beale, was from Connecticut, and that his father had traveled to California in 1849, the same year Beale was born. After 10 years, he sent for his son who joined him at the farm he’d established in Dixon. The farm life didn’t take with Beale, who returned to New England to attend Yale once he was old enough. But somewhere along the way, Beale came back to California, possessed by the idea of building a utopian, polygamist, communal society of vegetarians. The group flourished for a time and supported themselves with their farm and the sanitarium they built. It was not to last, though: all that polygamy, they had too many kids to support. The whole endeavor collapsed in the early years of the twentieth century, and Beale Downer died alone, unloved, broke, in his empty house, ranting to himself. Marshall concludes by asking the historian who owns the land now; the historian demurs. He doesn’t know. Marshall smiles, thanks him for his time, and then stuns him with neurolinguistic programming, wiping his mind of the entire conversation and Mitch and Marshall’s presence. Standard operating procedure. They leave, and make their way down the street to the post office.