The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery), page 22
“You mentioned Hank, and your becoming a doctor—because of him?”
“It’s true.” Paul smiled. “When I was still in High School, we moved from Glendale into the city, rented a house on Mulberry Street. Our next-door neighbors were Henry and Eleanora Hernandez—living then in the same house that’s his office now.”
“Paul, you’ve flabbergasted me again. You mean, when I was talking to Hank in his office this morning, I was next door to where you used to live?”
“Right. I was sixteen then, and by the time I graduated from high school I must have spent hundreds of hours talking with Henry. Or vice-versa. He always had a few minutes for me, often more, and usually told me some little thing that didn’t make sense. Didn’t seem to, anyway. Not at first. But little by little....”
Paul paused and then, apparently out of left field, asked me, “Are you familiar with Sturgeon’s Law, Shell?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Who, or what, is a Sturgeon?”
“As everyone except you illiterates knows, Theodore Sturgeon is a famous science-fiction writer, damned good one. Also a philosopher at least the equal of Murphy, for here in six memorable words is Sturgeon’s Law slightly sanitized: ‘Ninety percent of everything is crud.’ Obviously, if—”
I laughed, interrupting him.
“Don’t laugh!” he said, frowning exaggeratedly. “your knee-jerk reaction to the disturbing truth of Sturgeon’s Law is exactly like my youthful reaction to those crazy things Henry used to say to me. I thought they were crud at the time, but I finally understood he was gently introducing me to some of the ten percent that isn’t.”
Paul lifted his snifter, drained the brandy. “No question, Henry’s ten percent was tough for a teenager to handle. It wasn’t what my teachers—or even my parents—had been telling me, and it sure as hell wasn’t what the medical profession was telling everybody. And that was the hardest part for me to handle, because by then, certainly by the time I was ready to enter college, I knew I was going into pre-med, that I wanted to be a doctor. Which is what eventually happened, of course, but I would have become a completely different kind of doctor if Henry hadn’t told me so many things that didn’t make any sense at all. Not at first.”
“Things like what?”
“The crazy stuff? I remember hundreds of things. Maybe a thousand?”
“Sure. After today I may even recognize it, that’s why I asked.”
“It’ll cost you, oh, about five bucks worth of Armagnax.”
I told Paul that unless both his arms were broken he might consider pouring the dollop himself, which he was already doing anyway. After a series of small sips, eyes closed, he looked at me and said, “This particular craziness I remember well, because it was the very first time I’d heard anyone—anyone at all, anywhere—suggest that bacteria or viruses might not be the cause of infections or diseases but a result, like parasites or scavenger bugs that feast on already-sick plants in the garden and leave healthy stuff alone. I really thought that was dumb, then-gnarbly was the hot word in school that year, I thought it was really gnarbly.”
“Wait a sec, Paul. You thought it was dumb then? Meaning you don’t think so now?”
“Right. There was a big drive on then to get all the kids immunized against the flu epidemic that was supposed to start that year. Don’t remember what it was called, some virulent miasma floating in from Australia or New Zealand—or maybe Africa, wherever. In those days I never wondered how the experts figured out exactly where those little bugs would be coming from—I knew the bugs were so little they were invisible, nobody could see them, and I guess I assumed the experts just somehow knew where to go and capture them—or how those bug scientists tracked them through the atmosphere from there to here. Anyhow, I told Henry I’d be getting my flu shot the next day. And he asked me if I was sure that was a good idea, which I hadn’t really thought much about. I just knew everybody did it, so it must be a good idea. If it wasn’t, why would everybody do it? Well, I told Henry I guessed so, because the new influenza virus was coming and I didn’t want to catch it and come down with the flu.”
“Okay.”
“So, Henry asked me, ‘So, Paul, you really believe little influenza bugs from New Zealand smell us in California, and come here to bite us and infect us with the disease of flu?’ Before I could answer he said, ‘Ha! Chihuahua, caramba! Everybody knows—what? Nothing, that’s what. Everybody know the great Louis Pasteur proved germs cause diseases, a different germ for every disease—a different mosquito to stagnate every puddle—true? Plus also, everybody knows great Edward Jenner transferred pus and pox and putrid abominations from cow bellies and swine sores into people and saved those people from sickness—by nauseating to death all germs that cause diseases and all mosquitoes that stagnate sick puddles, comprende? Therefore everybody also knows that these great ones, this Louis and that Edward, together made everybody healthy as angels by immunizing them against every deadly germ and thus eliminating all infectious diseases from the earth. What everybody does not know is the TRUTH,’ he bellowed. ‘The truth that Pasteur proved nothing except he was a plagiarist and thief, a fraud whose scientific imbecility corrupted even the brilliant ideas he stole from Pierre Antoine Bechamp and others, transforming their genius into nonsense, gold into brass, virtue into vice. The truth that Jenner before him was the same kind of ignorant and arrogant politician as Pasteur, a do-gooder assassin who polluted the blood of his own eighteen-month-old child with poisonous swine-pox vaccine that killed him, thus making his only infant son one of the first in Jenner’s graveyard of immunized corpses. And these charlatans, impostors, apostles of pustulent error—these are the gods of death our allopaths worship: Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur, sainted authors of the sickness of vaccination and superstition of immunization, holy fathers of more than a century of man-made disease and decay and death, their heirs the murderers of millions of innocents.’ Henry went on and on, and by the time he finished, I saw things in a different light.”
“Seems Hank has a way of doing that.”
There wasn’t any conversation for at least a minute, and when I glanced at Paul again he was watching me, smiling slightly.
“May I have some more of my seventy-five-year-old cognac? Please?”
“No.”
He poured himself a small splash, maybe half a jigger or about five bucks’ worth. “You’ve got to stop being so negative, Shell. It’s just No, No, No all the time.” He polished off the cognac, held it in his mouth while slowly shaking his head back and forth, then swallowed and said, “Ahh-hh. Well, gotta go. But first....”
He thumbed through the pile of papers next to him on the divan, pulled out three or four of them, then closed the manila cover placing his selections on top. “If I know you, which I do, you won’t read all of this stuff in the next fourteen months. So I have chosen for you a sampler of Henry’s most subversive dynamite with which you may quickly improve your mind, or blow it entirely apart. I’m off.” He rose to his feet, stretching.
I leaned forward and picked Paul’s sampler off the stack, but didn’t check it immediately to see what those selections were.
“Good night, Paul.”
“Good night, Shell old Scott.”
I got up and walked to the doorway as Paul strode toward his adjacent apartment, then stopped, turned and smiled.
I smiled, too.
Paul put a key into his lock, went on inside.
But I stood there, smiling, for a minute longer before going back into my own apartment, wondering.
What, I was wondering, am I smiling about?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Back in my living room, I just puttered around for a minute or two. There were a lot of strange ideas in my head, and I wasn’t sure I liked all of them.
So I did what I often do when I don’t feel like thinking about anything puzzling, just want to relax: I fed the fish, in their two top-lighted aquariums against the front living room wall, and watched what’s got to be swirling beauty in anyone’s book: bright-orange swordtails, velvety black molliensias, a pair of perky little gold-and-cream raspboraheteromorpha, three dainty and yet deadly looking gray-and-black panchax chaperii swimming like sharks, and—“segregated” at one end of my twenty-gallon tank—the purple-bluish ripple of my lone betta splendens’ fanlike dorsal and anal and caudal fins, hues ever changing, flowing from purple to violet to a reddish-blue that sometimes melded into almost-ultra-violet vibrations of unnamable spectrums.
Plus, of course, a separate ten-gallon tank filled with the kaleidoscopically-darting and gonopodium-flexing exhibitionism of my dozen or so always busy guppies. Technically, lebistes reticulatus, a horrible scientific cognomen; “guppies” is a much better name, I think, for a collection of hyperactive little life forms that look like exploding rainbows.
I fed them a few pinches of salmon meal, which my pets attacked with enthusiasm, little live fishes eating bits of dead fishes, and watched them all dart, bend, twist and glitter. And felt myself unwind, relaxing. It always happens, when I watch the fish. Maybe I should have a dog or two. Nothing wrong with cats, except they might eat my fishes.
I picked up the stack of Hank’s papers with Paul’s few selections on top, carried them into the bedroom and plopped them on the bed, hung up the gaudy Chinese robe, stretched, yawned, scratched the hair on my chest.
Then I looked down at the thick pile of material on my bed. Earlier I had guessed that, in addition to a handful of pamphlets and brochures, as many as two hundred printed and typed pages might be lurking in there. I sighed. Paul had undoubtedly been right, no way I’d read all this stuff in the foreseeable future even if each paper had a splendid centerfold in it. But Paul’s sampler of Hank’s “excitements” was much less formidable, probably only an hour of pre-sleep reading, maybe only half that if I skipped a little.
So I climbed into the sack, fluffed three pillows behind me, adjusted my bedside reading lamp, picked up the less-forbidding small stack of the stuff. It wouldn’t be true to say I was giddy with enthusiasm, but I was unquestionably curious to find out what Paul’s hot-dog and hot-damn selections had been from what he’d referred to as “a remarkable collection.” He’d also said, apparently in all seriousness, that if everybody in the country knew what was in that collection it would mean the end of orthodo—or the end of Hank’s “ninety-nine percent that’s useless,” no less.
I started skimming through Paul’s small package quickly, but then slowed down, reading with a growing sense of surprise, and occasional shock. It took me only forty-five minutes—the first time—to read it all; but it was nearly two hours before I finished because, after that first go-through, I went back to the beginning again and with a red pen marked names, lines, paragraphs, emphasizing and underlining, putting together in my head a piece from here and a bit from there. Finally I thumbed through those pages once more, reviewing the parts I’d marked, and wondering what the hell.
* * * * * *
It was four a.m. when I turned out the light, and in probably no more than a minute I was asleep. At least I was zonked out in bed, and possibly snoring, sleeping the sleep of the pooped and brain-fagged and eye-weary. But then I got up, still wearing my fatigues, put on my boots and walked out onto the veld where I saw Bill Wintersong and Hobie Belking sitting on opposite sides of a glowing campfire. Yeah, the day was done, the great African sun, like a brain-fagged bloodshot eye, resting on the horizon and sinking toward night.
Wintersong was congratulating Belking, and Belking was congratulating Wintersong, on the harvest. The wonderful, record harvest. No question, it was a record, nobody else would ever touch it, they were the champeen harvesters of all time. I could see lumps on the veld, thousands of shadows from thousands of lumps. The lumps were animals. The corpses of animals. Animals dead, still bleeding, oozing warm, dead hippos and lions and rhinos and tigers and cheetahs and leopards and monkeys and elephants and bears and rams and puppies and everything else. Thousands, thousands, millions of them.
Then I couldn’t see the lumps any longer, so I turned, walked toward a mountain, I think it was Kilimanjaro, but whatever it was I knew the Spartan Apartment Hotel was over there somewhere. Ah, there it was, apartment 212. At the door, I turned, turned for a last look.
And in the distance was William Wintersong, M.D. and Hobart Belking of Belking-Gray Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Two tiny figures, nodding little heads and moving little arms, chuckling, drinking, chortling and joking, laughing with the blood of animals on their hands.
The alarm was a series of gunshots ending in a bell-like sound, a kind of bang-bang-bing. I didn’t open my eyes. Though a sense of disorientation persisted briefly, I knew I was awakening, knew where I was, on the veld in my bedroom at the Kilimanjaro...no. In my bedroom, after dreaming of the dry earth, the bloody earth, and of Bill and Hobie.
Yeah, Hobie, Hobart. In the last still-stretched-out-of-shape moment before opening my eyes and glimming another day, I remembered I would be meeting Hobart Belking this morning, would see him for the first time in the flesh.
And I knew, somehow, that no matter how nice the man might turn out to be, I wasn’t going to like Hobart Belking at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I woke up feeling as if I’d had a solid three minutes of sleep, showered and shaved, then zombied into the kitchen where I cooked some mush and ate two lumps, burned the toast and threw it away. Maybe I wasn’t super-dynamic this a.m., but I was efficient.
Over black coffee I thought about what I’d read, and pondered—and possibly carried into fragments of dimly-remembered dreams—last night and in the early hours of this morning. Then I got my morning L.A. Times from outside the apartment door. The lead story, top-right on the front page, finished waking me up. Its bold black heading leaped at me: NEW HOPE IN WAR AGAINST IFAI. And below that, only slightly less bold: FDA Approves Clinical Testing of Miracle Vaccine to Prevent Spread of Deadly Disease.
“I’ll be damned,” I mumbled. For a moment I stood there, squinting down the empty hallway, thinking: IFAI? Clinical trials? What happened to the usual years of delay before the FDA approved anything?
Back in my living room, sprawled on the couch and with fresh coffee handy, I got my answer or at least part of it by quickly reading that lead story, plus a filled-with-hope-and-praise Editorial, and two supporting articles by the Times’ “team of medical experts,” namely a Myron Slotnick and a Dr. Manfred Boofremmel, who for authoritative in-depth enlightenment with you-know-who, don’t you?
What happened was the men of my dreams—how about that? I had practically predicted this excitement while unconscious—or Dr. William Wintersong and Hobart Belking, or in a larger sense the Omega Research Institute supported by Belking-Gray Pharmaceuticals, Inc., had perfected a vaccine already, scientifically proven to be effective against the deadly virus known to cause IFAI.
Working with great secrecy—to avoid raising false hope among victims of this deadly disease—scores of experts at Omega had months ago succeeded in perfecting the vaccine which had since then been successfully mass-marketed in ready-to-inject sterile glass, and nitrogen-frozen ampules, by scores of other experts toiling at Belking-Gray. Even after reading the explanation by the Times medical expert, I don’t have the faintest idea how all those other experts had done what they did, but probably nobody else did, either.
Well, almost nobody. Those Omega scientists, who almost certainly knew what they’d done, included virologists, bacteriologists, biologists, serologists, vampires, and an impressive array of other ologists and icians, many of which I couldn’t even pronounce, much less spell without looking them up. All of whom, it was several times noted, were under the brilliant supervision of the “eminent” Dr. Wintersong. Who, in other paragraphs was described as “scientific genius,” former outstandingly successful neurosurgeon turned top ranking researcher, award winner, and assuming the Wintersong-IFAI vaccine fulfilled what was referred to as its almost-certain promise, an “odds on favorite for the Nobel Prize in Medicine this year.”
Indeed, Wintersong was mentioned at least nineteen times, and Belking or Belking-Gray only about half as often. But there was a separate story, an illustrated lead article in the newspaper’s second section, about the pharmaceutical tycoon and the imminent day-after-tomorrow grand free-to-everybody-and-with-toys-for-the-children opening Hobart Belking’s Wild Animal Museum. Wherein, come Monday morning, animal lovers could view more than two hundred objects of their affection--mounted, stuffed, but mostly freeze-dried “in amazingly lifelike poses”—in mountain, desert, and jungle settings that were “faithful replicas of their natural environments.”
I got a little shiver when I read that, an involuntary goosebumpy rippling among my lumbar and cervical vertebrae, or whatever those wiggly bones are: and, remembering folks in black suits standing around the casket, whispering, “Doesn’t Henry look natural?” decided to read more about Belking’s amazingly-lifelike exhibits later. There were other creatures of more interest and importance anyhow. Lots of them.
Because it was revealed that “thousands” of animal experiments—the FDA mandated test to ensure safety and efficacy of any vaccine or drug or other poison prior to its licensure and injection into or ingestion by real living beings—had already been concluded. Concluded successfully, and properly reported to the Food and Drug Administration. Which after careful, but speedy, study had taken the bold but necessary step of approving “final clinical trials” of the vaccine without the usual lengthy delay, a delay during which “uncountable additional victims of IFAI might otherwise die unnecessarily” due to unavailability of the Wintersong vaccine. So, to prevent those uncountable demises, the FDA had cut the usual time for approval down, from eight or ten years to a couple of months.
