The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (37 page)

“
It is more complicated
than a ton of vegetable soup, Sheldon, so you cannot digest the
whole thing in one meal. But before we finish, maybe you will be
one of those able to remember that what happens to a Rife or a
Koch, and so many others, is always the same happening, the same
ugliness over and over. I could name them all day and until
tomorrow. Each time it is the same story, over and over, again and
again. It is a great crime. A crime so monstrous the imagination
cannot wrap around it—but nobody pays. At least the guilty do not
pay, only the innocent.”

“
I see plenty of that in my
own business.”

“
Yes, it is not only in
medicine that the guilty go free. But where else except in medicine
are the victims unaware they are victims? Where else are the
assassins saluted, made rich, blessed as saviors, rewarded and
honored for their crimes?”

“
That’s pretty strong
stuff, Hank.”

“
Not strong enough. Perhaps
one day soon.” He looked past me, unmoving, his voice becoming
gentler. “You yourself, Sheldon, will be able to see in your mind
unending mountains of corpses, smell the stench of rotting dead,
maybe weep for children whose futures have been stolen.”

He blinked, his eyes
focused on my face again. “So, then, my little library I gave you
made you impressed with Rife and Koch, and what happened to them.
That is good, good for you to know. Was there anything else of
special importance to you?”

“
Yeah...” I sort of
mentally skipped back through that thick file again, remembering
things that had surprised me, or shocked the hell out of me, points
I’d noted and underlined. “The other big thing would have to be the
really incredible—to me—number of negative articles, quotes,
statistics, and damned convincing reports about immunizations,
vaccinations, their dangers and side effects. Some of it almost
made your crazy claims sound conservative.”

Hank smiled. “I am
conservative, you just don’t know it yet. So, then, you found the
arguments against immunization convincing? Intelligent
even?”

“
Made more sense to me than
what I’ve heard from the other side—the little there’s been. I
mean, all my life I’ve heard get your shots, get protected, but not
much about why. Just do it, never much in the way of logical
explanation.”

“
That is because there is
no logical explanation.”

“
Well, it’s still kind of
surprising. Maybe shocking. But, for one thing, entirely aside from
all your brainwashing yesterday—”

“
Un-brainwash.
Vice-versa.”

“—
I saw a side of my buddy,
Paul, last night that I didn’t know anything about. I mean, I
talked to Paul, Dr. Anson—”

“
I know.”

“
You know? How come you
know about that?”

I didn’t really expect an
answer. Didn’t get any. “What the hell is Paul doing?” I asked,
somewhat severely. “Is he reporting to you about my progress in
school? Or what?”

Same response. Except this
time Hank smiled, rubbing one sharp end of his gray mustache in
what struck me as a sinister way.

Finally I said, “Okay,
pull the dumb Sphinx bit on me. But tell me this, maybe I don’t
know a whole lot about Pasteur, but I always got the impression he
was some kind of medical god, brilliant scientist and
researcher—until Paul started dumping on him last night. And now
you. I remember way back, in school... well, didn’t Pasteur save
the French silkworm industry? By finding out what bugs were eating
them up or something? And didn’t he discover how to inoculate cows
or pigs or something with the vaccine he invented, and saved the
whole goddamn cattle industry? Or something?”

“
Something, yes. But not
what you think, not what you have been allowed to hear. Good for
Paul. Good for me. I will dump on Louis Pasteur every chance that
comes to me, he needs plenty of dumping. As does the other
criminal, Jenner. In your area of expertise, Sheldon, they were,
respectively, our Jack the Ripper and Al Capone of medical
superstition.”

“
That’s too damned much,
Hank. Maybe these guys didn’t have all the answers—back then—but
they must have contributed something to science, and
medicine.”

“
They contributed horror,
tragic error. Disease and death. Uncountable, unimaginable,
unnecessary death then, in their day, and also now, in
ours.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

Hank stopped speaking, and
for awhile I didn’t say anything either. I then looked across the
desk at Hank and said, “Don’t misunderstand me, my friend. Since
talking to you yesterday, and all that reading last night, I’m
pretty much on your side. Pretty much. I mean I don’t doubt the
facts you’ve laid on me, maybe not even your conclusions. But it’s
so damned one-sided, and extreme.”

I stopped, started over.
“Put it this way, Hank. If everything you’ve said is true, the
absolute gospel, how come I never heard any of it before? Not any
of it. The same thing occurred to me last night when I was reading.
How come I never heard any of those arguments before, but only the
other side? Like what a blessing immunizations are, how important
it is for everybody to get their protective shots. Why was all of
that new to me, and if it’s so bloody important, as important as
you say it is, how come everybody doesn’t know about it
already?”

Hank didn’t answer my
question directly, at least not right away. Or maybe he did, but I
didn’t exactly know he was doing it until he’d done it.

“
We switch,” he said. “I
think it is not good to give you too many facts, true stories,
statistics. I think if I explain for you by interesting analogy, it
is better.”

“
Better for
what?”

“
Like making up a story
that is basically true but doesn’t seem like it. I think this will
bore into your head deeper, and stay there longer.” Hank paused
only momentarily. “I admit my one-sidedness absolutely. This is
because all your life you trust almost everyone else, have heard
only the other side. There are reasons for this. But we will
explain it more like playing a game, with more fun. So Sheldon, let
us begin. Invent a religion for me. Just quick, any
kind.”

“
Invent? Did you just fall
over the edge?”

“
Not yet. Sheldon, I have
already informed you—yesterday morning—that orthodox medicine is a
monopoly, an allopathic monopoly, the one percent that is allowed.
And this is true not only of medical practice but reporting about
medicine. So that whenever a medical expert is consulted for truth
to put or take out of a newspaper story or magazine article or
book, it is always an allopathic expert, of the one percent who is
consulted, every physician who writes a daily newspaper column
about health, or appears on the TV news health segments or in
movies, or speaks for our government agencies, all over and
everywhere—is without exception an allopathic physician, an
orthodox pill-prescribing drug-pushing vaccine-squirting
kill-the-disease doctor. I have told you this already.”

“
Yeah.”

He went right on. “So that
part is all done. But you still need to grasp more firmly, not only
that this controlling one percent is much like a powerful
priesthood with absolute authority to exercise demons and punish
heretics and forgive sinners, but that these priests of medicine
control the writing of all the law and commandments and rules for
what may be done and said, plus penalties—like stoning with
boulders or burning at the stake—for breaking them.”

Hank paused, brushing half
of his mustache with an index finger, looking at me. “Sheldon, let
us together make up this religion of ours.” He spoke softly, and
very slowly for a change. “We will say it is some place in the
infinite universe, maybe this tiny earth, maybe a place like this,
whatever we wish. There the priests have proclaimed a holy
commandment that from sunset to sunrise it is forbidden for anyone
to look upward, at the home of gods radiant in splendor, lest the
people parish, and, therefore, a further commandment that all
people must at sundown enter their houses and come out again only
after sunrise. The priests said this is for the people’s good, for
their protection. So, naturally, the people thank the priests and
give them their fatted brains, and some calves. But one night a
man, brave or bored or curious or even crazy, goes outside his
House, thus breaking the second commandment...he looks up without
being blinded, thus breaking the holy first commandment... and sees
stars.”

Hank looked sharply at me
again. “What happens to him?”

I’d been about half
hypnotized by Hank’s unusually soft and slow delivery, but I had
also been visualizing with unusual clarity the pictures suggested
by his words. I had imagined a gray-green land, the shuffling
people, richly-robed and stern-visaged priests. And then for a few
seconds I was that lone and lonely man, stepping outside into
night, looking up, filled with fear and trembling—and then with
wonder.

So I had to come back a
long way. “What happens to him?”

“
Yes. Finish my story. Make
me believe it is true.” He was smiling, arm bent, with elbow
resting on his desk top.

“
Okay,” I said, a bit
hesitantly. “Well, this guy has all by himself discovered there’s a
whole something-else out there, he’s like Marco Polo landing in
Cathay, or Christopher Columbus discovering Amer... whatever it was
he sailed to, the Gray Azores or....”

I paused, thinking.
“Yeah.” I was getting with it now. “Okay, he’s got this incredible
revelation, this marvelous new knowledge, so he tells the
people—hey, what he does, he gets a whole gang of them together,
like in a Coliseum, and he makes this great mind-blowing speech
telling them to hell with priests and commandments, they’ve all got
to go outside tonight and look up and they’ll see a glory! He’s
named it stars! They flip out, go crazy, elect him President and
give him a hundred concubines and a lifetime pension of a million
dollars a year. Or whatever they use there, maybe they give him a
gazillion something or others. And he rules with a strong wise
hand, and he and the people live happily ever....”

Hank’s mouth was pulled
down, ends of that mustache like little gray daggers, and he
appeared to be growling hugely. It was unquestionably a sour look.
But he didn’t say anything. Just kept on looking as if his entire
face was fermenting.

I began getting
uncomfortable. “Look, that’s how it happened, okay? You see, Hank,
all our boy has to do is talk to the people, and tell them the good
news about what’s what, and that for all these years the priests
have been bullshitting.”

I stopped. He’d done it to
me, just let me stumble along until I arrived at his
conclusion.

It ticked me off a little,
but I ground my teeth together and said through them, “Got it. They
cooked him in a pot, didn’t they?”

“
Worse. They named him
anathema, accused him of blasphemy, found him guilty of heresy,
after which they tried him, and tied his limbs to four posts and
shot them off in opposite directions. Then they cooked his pieces
in a pot.”

“
Of course,” I
said.

“
And his pieces were Royal
Rife, William Koch, Wilhelm Reich, and a thousand more. And maybe,
if we’re not very careful, Henry Hernandez and even Sheldon
Scott.”

I felt a little tightness
between my shoulder blades, but I said, “Don’t include me, Hank.
I’m a layman, remember?”

“
You think they don’t cook
pieces of laymen in pots? Happens all the time,
Sheldon.”

But then he stood up,
stretched, arching his back, stepped out from behind his desk and
stopped near where I sat in my chair.

Looking down at me said,
with considerable animation again, “In answering your questioning
why only the dumb one percent is known to anybody, the other part
is showing you how truth is buried with ‘LIES’ carved on its
headstone.”

“
Hank, I’ve got to split
pretty quick, twenty minutes. I have to pick up Dane.” I smiled,
thinking thoughts unmedical. Also, unreportable. And maybe
unlikely.

“
Plenty of time,” Hank
said. “I think I can inform you some more about the curious
allopathic mentality. I think we can do it with
flyspecks.”

“
Flyspecks,
huh?”

“
We will consider the
so-called scientific research of the allopathic fraternity, the
orthodox physicians of authorized futility. There are some of them
researching now.”

Hank turned, hands clasped
behind his back. For a few seconds he gazed down at the floor,
silently, then raised his head to look directly at me, eyes
burning, and began speaking rapidly, like a professor beginning an
address to his students a minute before the bell.

“
Allopaths!” he barked.
“Allopaths see a swarm of little flies on a big pile of manure and
ask themselves, ‘How did they do that?’ After deep thought and
considerable time, they publish scientific analysis in medical
journals probing that, though nobody has ever actually seen it
happen, it is obvious flies must have eleven thousand little bowel
movements a day, which add up. Then the unorthodox Kochs or Rifes
or Reichs, or even Hernandezes, people who comprehend the existence
and nature of those little round specks flies leave behind, they
send papers to those same medical journals saying, ‘Flies don’t do
manure piles, they do flyspecks—but none of those papers is ever
published, none, zilch—the authors’ reports are anecdotal, there
have been no double-blind tests. So all these papers telling the
truth are denied publication. This truth is rejected as quackery
flying in the face of science. I said ‘flying’ there on
purpose.”