The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (18 page)

“
Have I got this straight?
They caught IFAI while working at Omega, so then Omega simply told
them to get lost?”

“
Precisely, except I wish
you would not say they ‘caught’ anything. And except that the
person who discharged them—Dr. Wintersong himself—did not tell them
they had tested positive for the IFAI virus. This omission is
unforgivable, I think.”

“
If he didn’t tell them,
maybe he didn’t know. Isn’t that possible?”

I slowed down a little
before the end of my question, because Hank was giving me that look
of his, sort of grimacing as though experiencing considerable pain,
head tipped forward as he looked at me piercingly from under his
eyebrows.

But he said mildly, “You
may assume it is possible, if you wish. However, because at Omega
there is always much research work being done, with many presumably
homicidal viruses and bacteria, the blood of each Omega employee
must be tested every three months. Two days after their last blood
samples were drawn the Vungers’ employment was ended, abruptly, by
Dr. Wintersong. He told them in person their work was
unsatisfactory, they would receive two weeks severance pay, and the
severance was effective immediately. Nothing more. So it was only
later, when Guenther and Helga became ill, tired and weak, that
they began going from doctor to doctor. The first one ordered
several tests, then informed them they were afflicted with IFAI,
for which there was no cure. Which is the same inexcusable thing
other doctors said to them. Until they came to me, of course. As I
have recounted.”

“
Yeah. Well, I guess it’s
logical to assume—I mean, even I know Omega is probably number one
in the war on...uh, the battle against...in medicine’s effort to
find a cure for IFAI. Whatever that is.”

I wasn’t exactly pleased
with the way Hank was smiling at me, or for that matter with the
way he began responding to my comment.

“
You are maybe beginning to
think a little, Sheldon. I am encouraged: a little is better than
nothing. But, yes, it is true that the Omega Medical Research
Institute is the great allopathic hope for invention of a vaccine
that can be injected into millions of people so they maybe won’t
get IFAI but probably will get nineteen other disastrousness from
the poisonous injection itself, and also for production and
patenting of drugs to suppress the symptoms of IFAI in people who
actually get it, even if as usually happens they get it from the
vaccine intended to prevent it.”

“
Hank—”

“
And it is also true that
Doctor William Wintersong is known as the foremost medical
researcher into these life-and-death matters in the entire country.
Not surprisingly, his medical gloriousness has been directed
primarily toward the concoction of a ‘prevent-the-catching-of-IFAI’
vaccine, which can be squirted into everybody on earth so they
won’t catch it, and only secondarily toward concoction of a drug
for treating the comparatively few people who do catch
it.”

“
You just said ‘catch it’
yourself. Two or three times.”

“
With me it is a joke, I
know better. Do you follow my logicalness in saying it is
better—much more hugely profitable—to produce a concoction which
the Monopoly and its paid-for legislators can legally force upon
everybody for the good of all mankind, instead of a drug to treat
merely—”

“
I’m afraid I do. I’m also
afraid you’re either completely nuts, or the biggest negative
thinker since Adam. I’m also beginning to think, even if you’re
only three-fourths crazy, you still might be one of the most
dangerous men on the planet.”

“
No might-be about it,
Sheldon. I am a most-dangerous man, all right, but only to the
stupids and rabbit-blinders and pig-burners and bugshit makers.
That is why they will keep trying to put me in jail—”

“
Wait a minute. Did you
say...? Well, I thought you said bug—”

“
Shit, that is correct. But
this is not my word. It is what the many eminent scientists who are
now scientifically manufacturing the scientific vaccine, in
accordance with the wondrous Doctor Wintersong’s breakthrough
discoveries—”

“
Vaccine? There isn’t
any—”

“
Actually, this nauseating
term, bugshit, as a close-to-perfect description of the
vaccine-glop I am here mentioning. The purulent slime is in part
produced from the exudates or excretions from the virus suspected
of producing in people the symptom complex unmusically named IFAI.
These poisonous excretions—”

“
IFAI? Where the hell are
you going with this—?”

“—
plus billions of the dead
little bodies of the virus assuming it actually exists and has
little bodies to be dead since viruses are already dead or they
wouldn’t be viruses, is mixed together with a kind of...well, a
kind of pus, heated and treated with corrosive chemicals to kill
it, maybe, and formaldehyde to preserve it, maybe, whereupon it
miraculously becomes a ‘life-saving vaccine’ to be injected into
people for the prevention of IFAI, maybe. The geniuses who produce
this awfullness do not, however, among themselves, call it a
vaccine or a serum or a lifesaving anything, but simply bugshit. I
am informed of this on good authority. It is their little
scientific pleasantry, I suppose.”

I felt queasy.

Looking sharply at me,
Hank said, “Sheldon, have I offended your ears by referring to this
noxious substance as bugshit?”

“
Well, it’s just that you
make it tough—see, you stack all the cards in your favor. I’m no
fan of today’s medical excesses, but I can’t go along with the
kinds of things you claim happen. I just don’t believe doctors
would do anything like—”

“
Ha! Now you are being
another puppet for medical ventriloquists. These godlike beings,
our doctors, will do anything! There is nothing so horrible or
life-destroying that it will fail to excite doctors; frenzy to
attempt it. They will cut out your heart and throw it away, your
kidneys, your lungs, your liver, your penis—no, not the penis. The
women’s uterus, yes. Do you know that for many years the favorite
unnecessary operation in the United States, the surgery performed
more than any other, was the hysterectomy, a mutilation nearly
always done by men doctors to women? This by doctors who have never
cut off even one penis?” He smiled. “Does this not at least tickle
your curiousness about their godness?”

I didn’t think he expected
an answer. If he did, he was going to be disappointed.

“
Sheldon, you must learn
that in contrast to the way god-doctors speak among themselves on
Olympus, for the peasants they create nice unintelligible words to
describe their crimes, thus making them resemble
virtuousness.”

“
Okay, bugshit, whatever.”
I told him. You were talking about Wintersong’s vaccine. Hell, I
didn’t even know there was an IFAI vaccine.”

“
There isn’t. There is only
this concoction, concocted by very high-powered biochemists and
bacteriologists and virologists and serologists and possibly
proctologists, some of whom are working at the Omega Medical
Research Institute under the supervision of Doctor Wintersong who
invested it. The rest of whom are busily producing the concoction
at Belking-Gray Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the Fortune-Five-Hundred
drug colossus right here in Los Angeles. Which I mentioned earlier,
speaking of Belking the lion and elephant shooter, who should
himself be skinned alive.”

“
They’re actually making
it? An IFAI vaccine?” I knew something or other about Belking or
Belking-Gray—something I didn’t like—and I might have remembered
what it was, except that Hank was still zipping on.

“
Well, they’re making,
nitrogen-freezing, stockpiling, a lot of bugshit. But if you wish
to call it a miracle vaccine to prevent people from catching an
Invariably Fatal Acquired Illness, I won’t stop you.”

“
I mean, everybody’s still
saying... Well, I never heard of an IFAI vaccine before now. I
thought maybe in a year or two—”

“
It is natural you would
hear nothing. All of this has been done in great secrecy, of
course—in the profession we sometimes learn of these things, and I
have certain people, doctors and others, who inform me of a little
this, a little that. But you and other laymen would not hear
anything—great secrecy is necessary so that no other drug company
may learn important details of this new vaccine and steal it, and
patent it, and make the hundred billion dollars or so which it
might be worth.”

“
The hundred billion? For
bugshit?”

“
Give or take a few
billions. Even much more would be a small price for saving the
human race, right? If it works, of course. Or, rather, if it comes
close enough to be disguised as something that works some of the
time, maybe, which is usually enough to satisfy the masses,
elsewhere referred to as the human race and/or all mankind. But
this cannot be known, nor can the Wintersong brand of bugshit truly
become an FDA-approved life-saving vaccine—that’s a joke,
Sheldon—until it is tried out on people.”

“
Tried out. Yeah.” I was
definitely a little queasy. And, my mind flipping back to other
things Hank had said, I was experiencing, along with the
queasiness, a noticeable nausea. I swallowed, finished, “But the
way you talk, Hank, you make it sound like a, well, a
crapshoot.”

“
Right. Good for you,
Sheldon, you have said it exactamente! It is truly a shooting of
crap, but it is called scientific test, or clinical testing. These
are terms our allopathic doctors and researchers use to impress
upon public awareness the misperception that they are practicing
life-saving science instead of a heads-we-win tails-you-lose
crapshoot when they are experimenting upon people, and sometimes
killing them. But how else can they find out if the new vaccine, or
heart drug, kidney drug, or beta-blocker, antidepressant,
cholesterol drug, or antibiotic bug-drug, actually squashes any
symptoms? First it must be force-fed or injected into thousands of
animals to find out how many of them it kills. This gives them a
risk-benefit ratio to lie about in advertisements. After this it
will be tried out on humans to find out how many of them it kills.
If too many of these clinically-tested humans become dead, or
merely comatose or impotent or blind or crippled, the dedicated
researchers may assume the experiment was not a patentable
success.”

I opened my mouth, but
didn’t say anything. Hank wouldn’t listen, he would just keep
barreling along. That’s what he did; he just kept barreling
along.

“
Then it’s back to the
toilet for that one, and new clinical testings of the next one. The
tragical comedy is that, as I have been explaining all day, none of
these crapshoot-tested drugs and vaccines ever cure anyone who is
sick, they cannot cure, for they merely attack or suppress symptoms
of disease without removing the underlying imbalance or disorder
that produced those symptoms. Thus instead of removing disorder
they cause more disorder, disease, and death. Is this upside-down,
or not?”

He stopped talking. But I
didn’t say anything for quite a while, several seconds at least.
Because I was trying to pick out segments of Hank’s various
dialogues that had stuck in my brain for one reason or another,
pull them from different places and line them up and—maybe make
sense of it all, or part of the all. But he’d said so many strange
things to me, some of them undoubtedly true but others probably
hangovers from the religion on his asteroid, that all I actually
got was: confused.

Hank noticed. “You look
confused,” he said.

“
Why would you think that?”
I asked him belligerently. “How could I get confused? I have
listened carefully to everything you’ve said in whatever foreign
language it is you’re using and it is all now as clear as pitch
darkness. I mean, everything I’ve heard has—”

“
Heard, yes!
Yes!”

“
No. No, don’t—”

“
That is the other part of
it, Sheldon. I have explained how people and things that work to
heal are gotten rid of. But that is only part, and you yourself
have just put a spot of light on another part.”

“
I did?”

“
Yes. Because you—and
everyone else—are supposed to become confused, it is a necessary
part of the well-planned cleverness. This doctor dictatorship I
have spoken of to you is a monopoly not only of medical practice,
but also and even more so of mind. It is a conspiracy not only to
yell out the fraudulent claims that don’t work but to shut up the
true claims that do work. People cannot even know this good and
true healing exists if it is never seen with their eyes or heard
with their ears. This conspiracy to keep silent and invisible any
who would use, or speak of, alternative therapies and cures is very
successful. It has worked all your lifetime and much longer. It is
working now.”

“
Conspiracy? Come on. I
haven’t heard a whole lot about any conspiracy.”

“
Not supposed to.
Conspirators always quote each other one after another saying there
isn’t any conspiracy, only crazy people believe in conspiracies, so
if you believe it this proves you are crazy and need mental
adjustments in a qualified institution, which they just happen to
have handy.”