Part 3, Tribute to Allan

But that's another overlong story that must wait. Yet, it is not so strange that a scientist as frustrated as he was had turned to astrology to impress the gals and to make sense of his own psyche. Art didn't help. Religion had no meaning. Even science itself was far too weak to ken the depths of his soul, if he had one, nor the enigmas of existence, if he even partook of it.

Long before the end, though, astrology turned out to be but a simple braided system of trite aphorisms in disguise that were about as enlightening as a tautology. About all that gave him any real solace were the mysteries of the Ancient Ones, the Old Men and Women of this land, the Fathers-Who-Create and the Mothers-Who-Give-Life.

These, our cousins, were the first Americans, the ones who built gargantuan ceremonial temple mounds and gigantic mountain medicine wheels. They were our equals, true builders of real cities and towns. Architectural and engineering creators, they effortlessly designed great pueblos and even those superhighways of commerce and industry. They built them of the crude stuff that Nature provides and so refined it to a technological standard Werner Von Braun would have loved.

We aver that the superhighways were merely a network of nonstop foot paths, that the cities and towns, sans the paleontological evidence of their ancillary tepees, lean-tos and mud huts, were but villages. But it is indisputable that trails like Chisholm and others linked the Pacific, Atlantic, Great Lakes, the Southwest deserts, Montezuma's palace and the Caribbean.

However, as citizens of a real New World, Allan did certainly know them well, far better than we. Too, they and he loved and lived by the same wide, darkly bright night sky.

But a privileged few they are now. And all of Them can listen to the music of the stars, as Al did often. Not by means of ceremonial drums or haunting flutelike melodies but by means of Mozart did he listen and mourn for himself and for us.

Allan George Frees, like our continent's aboriginals, knew that we Europeans, though wealthy in a narrow sense and with need of psychiatrists, social workers and policemen by the hundreds of thousands, are verily the Most Poor Ones. We are the destitute, desperate, Ignorant Plunderers, the Mad Debauchers. Possessed by a drive that we cannot fathom, like a mass demon, we Whites and our hangers-on all plunge crassly onward through time like an obscene avalanche. We leave nothing that is foreign intact.

No crowds of ancient Native American churchmen at convention nor aged armies of red policemen on parade could deny it. That the most idealistic worldwide civil changes of our day, spurred by Green movements, are nothing but systoles upon the great gut of the White Man's world of greed and speed and money. Great contractions these movements are. They must inevitably give the expected cathartic result, Al obviously could blindly see.

If only he might call Them his brothers and sisters. They could be his Saviors, if Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad or if Yahweh and even Jesus Himself would not.

But all his philosophizing and mountain climbing and star gazing and art loving and lady chasing and music listening took financial support. It was luck, pure luck, that led him to found his library literature research firm, a company that supplies medical documents to those who truly need them. Indeed, it is an establishment that freely supplies startling facts of life or death to those who could not otherwise get hold of them at all.

It was luck and libraries. Fortunately, he fell in love with libraries as an astronomy student at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the mid 60's. He fell in love there where the libraries are almost as numerous as the very stars themselves. There's Cudahey and Scholl, Galvin and Washington and at least two dozen others within a stone's throw of the famous city's elevated Loop. But it was the distinguished John Crerar that furnished the neatly hard-bound photocopies of the rare astronomy texts Al clasped to his chest once, so eagerly, as a young high school student from Lane Tech.

It was luck and libraries and ladies. One lady he chased and who he also did love very much, but not enough, took him to Seattle where his amour of libraries led him to the University of Washington. Here, within the enormous National Library of Medicine Regional Medical Library, he worked happily for a while, for a pittance.

He could not stand some professors back at UIC. Many bored him. A most important few ranked him as an amateur, applying the Quadruple Standard of judgment that only certain frighteningly arrogant Ph.D.s can master so artfully. He was but a teenager, yet already their professional equals. He even had experience as an expedition leader who organized a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine. As a high school junior he observed the scientific mysteries of the solar eclipse of 1963.