The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (31 page)

“
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.