The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (59 page)

It was Henry Hernandez,
M.D., at his best and worst and somewhere-in-between emitting
intelligent unintelligibilities at ricochet angles, and a lot of it
went right by me, because I was by now used to this sort of verbal
passion, Dane, however, was not. Just as Belking’s televised words
about me—when she hadn’t been forewarned, or prepared for
them—caused her considerable consternation, so did her
unfamiliarity with Hank’s eruptions.

As Hank paced near her and
started to turn, Dane said “Dr. Hernan—Hank.” It had become Hank
and Dane about a half-minute after they met. “You’re getting me all
confused. Talking about gods and priests and last-chance
and...well, forgive me, it sounds crazy.”

“
Is crazy.” He stopped,
standing about two feet from Dane, eyes fixed on her face. “Not me,
them. Their system of healing that cripples, their curing that
kills. Most crazy, millions of people disasterized by this medical
decay and corruption, still believe it is health care.”

“
Hank, that’s—”

“
I agreed already, crazy. I
will explain.”

Hank stopped, was silent
for several seconds, apparently deliberating, hesitating. Then,
looking fiercely into Dane’s eyes as though trying to see the back
of her head, he said slowly. “Yes, I will trust you. A woman of
such radiant loveliness outside, if I cannot trust her inside then
the word trust is useless, should be rubbed out from
dictionaries.”

He turned took three or
four paces away, came back and faced Dane again. “I will explain as
best I can quickly, some of what I have said already to Sheldon.
But I do not have two days with you. And you are involved with us
now, you should understand what is at stake is not us, not a few
little people, is much greater, is all of us, is all.”

He paused, breathing
slowly and deeply. Then, eyes burning into Dane’s, he placed one
hand on each of her shoulders, spoke rapidly and without pause for
at least two minutes, spoke with such rising and at last
brrnnnggging intensity that it transfixed even my attention—and I’d
heard most of it before. Dane stood unmoving, her eyes steady on
his, lips parted, entranced as though hypnotized.

Into those two minutes
Hank somehow compressed hours of argument he’d hurled at me,
jumping from one point to the next and thundering on to another
like a man driving spikes with a verbal sledge hammer, but he also
added for Dane a few things I’d never heard before. Not from him,
not from anyone else.

I heard him say or shout
again: “The symptoms are not the disease... Nothing is incurable...
allopathic insanity mandated by law makes truth a crime. Plus, new
to me: Callous killing of millions for profit... murder for power
and perhaps pleasure... drugging with fluoride and killing with
chemotherapy.”

Then more quietly, Hank
spoke of dozens of separate lawsuits already in preparation, many
ready for filing. Each was aimed at a different point—weakness,
dangerous delusion, legally-protected coercion—in the body of what
Hank called the “allopathic monopoly that rules us the same way it
attacks diseases: not through persuasion and truthful argument but
by deception and terrible force.” In more than half of the
lawsuits, plaintiffs were either POCUEH itself or members of that
organization; the rest were a variety of groups and individuals
supporting animal rights, patient rights, human rights.

At the end, Hank slowly
dropped his hands from Dane’s shoulders and said, “If we succeed,
if we win, we will win for all of America, medical freedom, not an
imposition of more coercion for our own alleged good, but the
removal of such coercion—for the first time since this land-of-free
USA was born, true medical freedom, the right of each citizen to
choose whatever health care he wishes and can pay for, and his
equal right to reject any so-called medical protection or treatment
chosen for him by others even if falsely called free medicare. Then
the people may survive and grow strong, at least it will be
possible, there will be hope. But if we are prevented, or lose this
chance to win all, I fear there will not again be an opportunity
like this. If we lose I fear there will not be hope any more. It
will be already too late.”

Dane looked a little
dazed. She blinked, moistened her lips, then said the first words
she’d spoken for quite a while—the first words anyone except Hank
had spoken for a while. “It...it can’t be that bad, Hank, can
it?”

“
Can be. Is. Is worse all
the time, unless stopped will become much worse, tragically so,
with unimaginable death. Already is planned mandatory-for-all
immunization with poisonous miasmas....”

Hank let the words trail
off, then walked behind his desk, leaned forward toward us with
both hands flat on the desktop. He looked at Dane, then me, back to
Dane again.

“
I have been arguing to you
that every belief and almost every practice of official medicine
today is worse than useless—is harmful. If this is true—and it is
true—how much harm can people suffer without losing joy in life, if
not life itself? Look with me at a single piece of this worseness,
because it is so important now, this minute: IFAI. All who listen
only with ears to the many voices of official medicine, including
those of great police powers in our own U.S. Government, will
become hopelessly convinced this Invariably Fatal Acquired Illness,
this brand new one is the most terrible threat to life now
attacking the earth—but only because so many self-appointed
experts, plus radios and televisions and newspapers say
all-together the same thing. It is not something horrible that is,
only something said, but said over and over and over again until it
is like, Don’t-think-of-purple-elephants until you can’t think of
anything but purple elephants.”

Hank hissed a bunch of air
through his nose. “These same ear-thinkers will become convinced
also their peril is increasingly desperate because it had been said
eight million times the illness is fatal and there is not yet any
cure—by which the medicine business does not really mean cure, but
only, patentable drugs and drugs and more drugs, and poisonous
vaccines, to be sold for billions of profits. Which should make
transparent to you both how it will work out, how it always works
out. Si?”

He gazed briefly at Dane,
then me, as though expecting some kind of brilliant A-ha! He didn’t
get any. So Hank sped on, “When all is lost almost, when hope is
gone almost, or when everybody is terrified enough, there will be
announced a ray of exciting hope in the hopelessness and
ninety-nine times out of ninety-nine, the hope will be something
patented by a drug company.”

“
Outside—” Hank inclined
his head toward the driveway, not moving his hands from the desk—
“are Belking and Wintersong, two people of greatest importance in
this danger from IFAI, its prevention, its cure. Wintersong has
discovered a vaccine, will oversee testing, perfecting, lend to it
his great prestige. Belking will manufacture—has manufactured tons
of the Wintersong vaccine, will promote it and sell it and become
enriched from it. Soon there will be other new drugs—”

“
Hank, wait, has
manufactured tons? Tons?” That was Dane, again. “The FDA hasn’t
even given final approval for the vaccine yet. Only Phase Two
clinical testing on human, not approval for mass immunization. And
tons would mean...”

“
Tons, yes.
Nitrogen-frozen, all ready. Enough for everybody. You, me, Sheldon,
and a quarter-billion customers besides us, just in the U.S.A. Do
not repeat this, please, could get two people I love dearly in much
trouble, meaning dead. There was recently a secret
meeting—”

Hank stopped, and smiled.
Then he relaxed, sat down in his padded swivel chair, and said less
seriously than before, “Sounds so melodramatic, verdad? Like spy
movies, Hitchcock plots. Well, sometimes life is melodramatic—and
death, too, melodrama with unhappy ending. The secret meeting I
mentioned was in Lausanne, Switzerland. During three days there,
plans were made for acceleration of the IFAI machine from epidemic
to pandemic, more cases diagnosed under new definitions, danger
increasing like crazy, this together with much promotion of the
IFAI vaccine—new releases, TV reports about how safe the vaccine
is, like mother’s milk used to be, eighty-nine point nine percent
protection, so on, so on. This to be followed by lobbying Congress,
and other criminals in Washington, D.C., for passage of a
law—already written by the lawyers—requiring universal immunization
against IFAI, on mandatory vaccination of everybody, to protect
everybody.”

With only a momenarty
pause, Hank continued, “Even when I condemn stupid upside-downness
of allopathic medicine, I am not condemning all allopathy, all
upside-down doctors. Most are good men, good people, lousy
doctors—because they all try to squash symptoms with poisonous
drugs and pills, that’s what allopathy is; hit-it-till-it’s-dead.
Their problem, and ours, is that they have been taught lies and
believed them.

Hank stopped, frowned,
then said slowly and deliberately, “It is easy to prevent an
epidemic that does not exist. But if you are crippled or killed by
a doctor’s sincere stupid treatment of your symptoms, does it
matter to you that he is not evil but merely deluded? Does it make
any difference to your injured or dying loved one, friend, child?
Please, do not be yourself stupid or hear what I have not said. I
have not said all in today’s medicine are evil, are liars, are some
kind of monsters. I have said most are good people, maybe misguided
people but possessed of virtue, intending healing while doing
unintended harm, I have said most are. Most, not all.”

“
Because some, a few,
understand the truth as well as I, or you or anyone else, they know
very well what they are doing—and, monstrously, continue doing it
even knowing what they know. Those are the few who move the rest,
who speak for all, who profit most from the drugs and pills and
mass immunizations for disease-names they have invented. Over and
over it is the same people—many times familiar names if you look
for them—speaking new versions of old lies and announcing again and
again new epidemics to replace used-up ones. If you watch, and
remember, you will also recognize the same old Heaven-and-Hell
scare-you-to-death alarms and warnings, and panic-button pushing in
a hand-set for the Swine Flu or AIDS or IFAI bugshit along with
just-patented approved poisons guaranteed to cure the so-called
incurable disease. Those who orchestrate this, who plan and promote
and profit most are not ignorant or deluded, they are evil. And it
is those few who must be faced, who must be confronted and
confounded, or all is lost.”

Hank stopped, this
expression grave.

I was shocked. I hadn’t
heard him sound so down and pessimistic before, and until now he’d
never spoken of all being “lost.”

But his sour expression,
and apparent depression, was momentary. After a few seconds he
stood up again, stuck both hands in his back pockets of his
trousers, and said briskly, “We have two of the worst outside,
wrapped up by Sheldon like cocoons. Two of those who know well what
they are doing, two of the worst. But they will never admit they
know, will not confess their part in this monstrous deception. Even
if they did, to us, they would later deny—successfully, for we are
already discredited while they are gods of medicine and
money—”

“
Hank, deception?” That was
Dane again. “And monstrous? I don’t think you meant what happened
to the Vungers.”

“
I didn’t.”

“
And after what you just
said, I’m not sure I believe any of it, but I certainly don’t
believe you if you’re suggesting attempts to control the IFAI
epidemic are some kind of deception. Because there’s no question
it’s a terrible disease, a plague, people are dying—”

“
Dane, my dear, people are
dying all the time. And they die of whatever doctors put on death
certificates, yes? People die of chemotherapy or massive
uncontrollable infection after chemotherapy and their death
certificates all say some kind of cancer. Old men and women in
nursing homes die of over-drugging with psychotropic and sedatives
and their death certificates report failure of heart, lungs,
kidney, whatever—at death everything fails. So name any one of
those failures and it’s true. Babies die within days of hypodermic
injections to protect them against seven deadly dangers and their
death certificates say ‘SIDS,’ or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,
which is acceptable medical tautology like dead due to dying. You
say no?”

Hank paused, waiting for
whatever comment Dane might wish to make. She didn’t make any,
remained silent, and I thought she looked a little frightened.
Whether it was because of Hank himself, or what he’d been saying, I
didn’t know; but her expression was almost one of alarm.

Hank continued, “Add up
all those diagnoses, misdiagnoses, guesses, and deceptions from all
those death certificates and they turn into statistics. Medical
statistics of morbidity, mortality, disease-name incidence also
epidemics. In USA we have more different epidemics than anybody, we
are lousy with them: epidemics of heart disease, other
cardiovascular diseases, cancer diseases, practically everything is
diseases. Consider the Swine Flu epidemic. We know now—there wasn’t
any, not a single case, it didn’t happen, didn’t exist, it and the
Swine Flu virus were made up by those ‘few,’ the death gods, I have
mentioned. Since there was not anything resembling a Swine Flu
virus anywhere in all of existence it was difficult to make a
vaccine from it. But by sheer persistence they managed to do it
anyhow. Then they shot barrels of whatever it was into millions of
humans to protect them from it. Gave them millions or billions of
the people’s money. Or consider the AIDS epidemic. Which, alas, is
also neither a disease nor infection—”