The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (64 page)

“
She’s entirely right about
the networks,” he said briskly. “They won’t touch anything like
this. First, they would have to get an opinion from their medical
experts. All allopaths, of course, illegal for anyone else to be an
expert. Which means CBS, NBC, and ABC would each get the same firm,
carefully considered, forget it, are you out of your
gourds?”

“
Hank—”

“
So if Dane can arrange for
this—this drama to be shown even once on national television, even
if only on cable, she can then do with it whatever she desires,
with my blessing. That is, with the copy we’ll make for her. If
that’s all right with you, Sheldon?”

“
Me? Why me?”

“
Well, you’re in it, aren’t
you? Quite prominently, I would say.”

“
Yeah, I guess... Well,
huh, it’s okay by me.” I ran some fingers through my hair, smoothed
my unsmoothable eyebrows, and smiled gently. “Do you think I—we, I
mean—might really be on national telev—”

“
Numerous other copies we
must make from the original will, I expect, be viewed primarily
during meetings of PUCUEH, and other life-affirming organizations
allied with us. Assuming, of course, the FDA does not seize all
copies, define them as detrimental to the nation’s health, and
destroy them. Also assuming we are still at large after it—and
we—are viewed by the police.”

“
Ah...police. Yes. I knew
there was something—”

“
We must phone them
immediately, and surrender.”

“
Surrender?”

“
Of course. Were you
planning to escape from the planet?”

That didn’t deserve an
answer. Besides, Hank continued, without waiting, “Even an hour
ago, Sheldon, I feared you and I—Dane, too—might soon be arrested,
tried, convicted, and sentenced to forever. But now, I do not fear
this so much. I believe we have won a great victory. Not the war,
no, but this battle, yes. If so, we may expect to proceed onward
vigorously and win more battles, more and more of the many that lie
before us.”

“
I hope you’re right,
Hank.”

“
Who doesn’t? So, Sheldon,
make haste now and inform officialdom, call the po—”

He stopped, head cocked on
one side, listening.

I heard it, too. Faintly.
Sirens. A lot of sirens.

Hank scowled, then sighed.
“Perhaps,” he said gently, “that will not be necessary.”

He was right again. Only
there was no “perhaps” about it.

CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE

The sounds of sirens
nearing the Omega Research Center was faint, but getting
louder.

Hank glanced around the
cluttered laboratory. “I think,” he said briskly, “we would make a
better first impression if we took Wintersong and Belking out of
their boxes.”

I agreed instantly. It
would not be helpful for those visitors to assume we’d trussed up
our prisoners and were fiendishly occupied in beating them with
whips, clubs, or tickling their feet; we were in enough trouble
already.

We had time, but just
barely. When the first two armed came inside the lab,
followed—after a curious but soon-understood delay—by uniformed
police and plainclothes officers, three newspaper reporters, one TV
anchor, and two politicians, Belking and Wintersong were seated on
the floor against a wall, erect but slumping and leaning against
each other.

Belking was totally out of
it, still unconscious; but Wintersong’s eyes were open, staring.
During the next hour, which is how long it was before all of us
left Omega together and headed downtown in separate cars, like a
parade, Wintersong didn’t speak once, didn’t say a single word. At
the time, I missed the significance of that fact, my attention
occupied by the many other things going on, some of which were
exceedingly peculiar.

The first being when the
nearer, and shorter, of the two uniformed deputies spotted us,
fixed his eyes, and gun, on me and yelled, “Hold it right there,
Mister!” exactly like a prime-time TV actor in a detective soap.
Well, no; not exactly. Because something very odd was going on
here.

He was staring at me
almost as bug-eyed as Wintersong, and his voice cracked on that
last word so it came out “Mis-terer!” Moreover, instead of
thundering toward me he was backing away. Backing away? So for that
matter, was the taller deputy, who’d thundered in right behind the
first guy. They’d come through the door in the wall of Wintersong’s
adjacent office, and around the end of that six-foot-high
honeycombed wall like gangbusters; but now they were acting as if I
was armed with two AK-47s and a bazooka. I didn’t get it. Not right
away.

Hank, fortunately, did. He
raised one hand, palm out toward them, and said loudly, presumably
using language he thought, not necessarily correctly, they would
find familiar and friendly, “Not to worry. No sweating. There is no
problem, I am a doctor.”

That got the attention of
the first deputy’s eyes. His gun stayed aimed approximately at my
midsection, but he glanced at Hank, who was continuing, “Yes, I am
a medical doctor. And I have examined this man, indeed I have
psychically if not physically tested not only his blood, but his
urine, hair clippings, tongue scrapings, and the pupils of his
eyes, to determine if there is any hyperplopia of his meniscatosis
or protruberance of any randomized dipthongs, and there is none.
Not a trace. This man is not contagious, he is not even infected!
Praise Aesaulepius!”

Then I got it. I kept
forgetting I was supposed to have crunched a vial of super-IFAI
bugs and become the Shelldonic Plague preparing to sweep the earth,
or at least Southern California; and obviously these lawmen had
been afraid of catching the plague, me. Which, I thought
sympathetically, must have given them serious pause: How could they
catch me, if they were afraid of catching me?

But now, I could see both
men visibly relax. The short deputy asked, “Isn’t he Shell Scott,
the P.I. IFAI guy I—?”

“
Please, please,” Hank
interrupted smoothly. “I assure you, Sir,” followed by considerable
more gibberish, ending “I realize you laymen do not even begin to
understand all these technical medical terms, but let it suffice to
say my professional opinion is, even Mr. Scott’s colonic escherii
coli are benevolent and he therefore suffers from no infections,
diseases, or even micro-bacteria...whatever Quod erat
demonstrandum.”

“
Wow, hey, that’s a
relief,” the deputy said, looking confused, but pleased.

“
Hank,” I said nearly in a
whisper, “you really ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

He turned his head to look
at me, beaming hugely, white teeth flashing. “You would of course
prefer to be shot, or sprayed with something dubious,
verdad?”

I didn’t have an answer
for the old goat, so I didn’t answer him.

Following a whispered
conversation between both deputies, the taller one left, returning
in about a minute with a third uniformed deputy and two men in
business suits, one of whom I recognized as an LAPD police
undercover officer working out of the Central Homicide Division.
There were more to come, but it took almost ten minutes before the
whole gang was here.

By then, I understood the
tip to the law about us had come from a 911 call made by the male
half of a young “engaged” couple who’d been parking in the nearby
toolies, discussing what kind of cake to have at their wedding, and
had seen us drive up to the Omega entrance and “break in.” This
hadn’t interested them a whole lot; just enough that they glimpsed
me carrying the two “corpses” inside, so all of these crimes were
duly reported—later, having by then decided angel’s food cake would
be nice.

Anyway, about fifteen
minutes after that “Hold it right there, Mis-terer,” the small
laboratory was crowded with more than a dozen guests, including the
mentioned reporters and politicians. One of the politicos was the
Congressman from Belking’s district, known to be a close friend of
Hobart’s; the other was the junior Senator from California, Edward
Manners, a man I thought well of, judging by his actions and
pronouncements so far.

They were accompanied by
the L.A. County Sheriff himself, and those three were not only last
to arrive, but the last who were going to. Apparently the other
lawmen, once inside Omega, had headed in pairs for different areas,
not being sure where the criminals might be found.

Well, they’d found us. We
hadn’t even been handcuffed yet, but the Sheriff, a burly
heavy-shouldered man with a thick mustache and kind-looking eyes,
stepped toward us—and right then a voice cracked, “Your attention,
please!”

It was Hank, of course,
and he just kept on going. Yes, kept on going rippety-pop and made
one of his ringading speeches, wouldn’t you know? He spoke
rapid-fire for three or four minutes, and fell silent when he was
through, silent because he’d finished, not because anybody stopped
him. Nobody did.

Whether any of those here
believed everything he said or not, I couldn’t tell; but they all
listened. For maybe the first minute there was a little movement,
and eyes shifting—usually toward me, with dark suspicion as though
I might be about to lay a deadly sneeze upon them—but after that
all eyes were upon Henry Hernandez, M.D., along with every iota of
everyone’s attention. There really was something Rasputin-like
about this guy when he got going, and he got going pretty
good.

Indeed, it was Hank
Hernandez at his most arresting and hypnotic, his most dramatic and
outrageous—and, I fervently hoped, most convincing. For he summed
up events of the last few hours concisely, and most effectively
than I could have in a week, and his only sins, if any, were of
selective omission. Midway in what was becoming a familiar-to-me
crackling-electrically humming-brrnnngging harangue, he flatly
accused William M. Wintersong, M.D. and all his kind, of crimes so
monstrous as to be almost beyond evil, and included Hobart
Belking—still unconscious, but with the beginning of involuntary
movements and perceptible facial tics—as not only accomplice but
author of most of them.

On one level, the
rapid-fire speech was a factual recital; on another, all those
facts were intertwined with Hank’s philosophy of health and
wholeness, his belief in the necessity of not fighting but
encouraging the life force, élan vital, inner virtue, divine wisdom
in everyman that it might restore harmony and wholeness—versus the
Belking-Wintersong-allopathic conviction that “sickness” must be
violently attacked, by licensed medical doctors.

Hank, at the end of those
few minutes, it was at least unmistakably clear that the difference
between Henry Hernandez and Belking-Wintersong was the difference
between those who believe man a universe of wonder, a
spirit-mind-body creation almost if not in truth godlike, a triune
being complete, whole, indivisible, one—and those who look upon man
as a collection of isolated individual flesh-and-bone pieces, a
mechanical gathering-together of liver, heart, skin, brain,
bowels...a perception leading inevitably to the separate, and
separated, parts of Guenther and Helga Vunger, and
Rusty.

After mention of those
names Hank ripped on with his voice like a musical buzzsaw and
finished “...as some of you saw them here in this very room
yesterday, saw them I pray with shuddering shame, Guenther and
Helga, my beloved friends, cured of their flesh-and-bone bodies,
requiring only life-saving transplants to make them well
again.”

For at least ten seconds
after Hank’s last words there was silence. Then the silence was
broken by a shockingly noisome “ppppp...” which, it immediately
became evident, was not any kind of opinion, or criticism, but air
bubbling past Hobart Belking’s lax lips. He was coming around, and
quickly, Belking opened his eyes, blinked them rapidly, ran his
tongue out and back in, then grunted gutturally. No words yet; but
that was definitely discontented grunting. And in about another
minute, when he’d come to most of the way and lost at least some of
the grogginess, Belking made a kind of a speech himself.

It was as if he’d never
been unconscious at all, and was merely launching into a tirade
he’d been planning for some time. At least, he accused the
notorious quack and the homicidal maniac of practically everything
except putting cayenne pepper on his monogrammed toilet paper. His
major charge was that Hernandez and Scott were dangerous fanatics
who in their mania along with other nuts like them—threatened
important medical experiments that could lead to improved health
and increased life spans for everyone everywhere, lifesaving
research whose finest moments were within medicine’s grasp right
now if not destroyed or delayed by the inexcusable actions of
quacks like Hernandez and criminals like Scott.

By then Belking was on his
feet, waving his thick arms, but that’s where he ran down. Perhaps
because he was wondering at last how he’d got here, and where all
these people had come from. But undoubtedly in part because he was
receiving dubious looks from several of those here assembled,
since, having entirely missed Hank’s just-concluded harangue,
Belking couldn’t know his mention of medicine’s “finest moments”
was not the most felicitous phrase he might have chosen under the
circumstances.