Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (425 page)

First published in
New Worlds Quarterly 2
, September 1971

“But I once
did
succeed in stuffing it all back in Pandora’s box,” Richarson said, taking another hit. “You remember Pandora Deutchman, don’t you, Will? Everybody in the biochemistry department stuffed it all in Pandora’s box at one time or another, I seem to vaguely remember one party when you did it yourself.”

“Oh you’re a real comedian, Dave,” Goldberg said, stubbing out his roach and jamming a cork into the glass vial which he had been filling from the petcock; at the end of the apparatus’ run. “Any day now, I expect you to start slipping strychnine into the goods. That’d be pretty good for a yock, too.”

“You know, I never thought of that before. Maybe you got something there. Let a few people go out with a smile, satisfaction guaranteed. Christ, Will, we could tell them exactly what it was and still sell some of the stuff.”

“That’s not funny, man,” Goldberg said, handing the vial to Richarson, who carefully snugged it away with the others in the excelsior-packed box. “It’s not funny because it’s true.”

“Hey, you’re not getting an attack of morals, are you? Don’t move, I’ll be right back with some methalin—that oughta get your head straight.”

“My head is straight already. Canabinolic acid, our own invention.”

“Canabinolic acid?
Where did you get that, in a drugstore? We haven’t bothered with it for three years.”

Goldberg placed another empty vial in the rack under the petcock and opened the valve. “Bought it on the street for kicks,” he said. “Kids are brewing it in their bathtubs now.” He shook his head, almost a random gesture. “Remember what a bitch the original synthesis was?”

“Science marches on!”

“Too bad we couldn’t have patented the stuff,” Goldberg said as he contemplated the thin stream of clear green liquid entering the open mouth of the glass vial. “We could’ve retired off the royalties by now.”

“If we had the Mafia to collect for us.”

“That might be arranged.”

“Yeah, well maybe I should look into it,” Richarson said as Goldberg handed him another full vial. “We shouldn’t be pigs about it, though. Just about ten percent off the top at the manufacturing end. I don’t believe in stifling private enterprise.”

“No really, Dave,” Goldberg said, “maybe we made a mistake in not trying to patent the stuff. People
do
patent combo psychedelics, you know.”

“You don’t mean
people,
man, you mean outfits like American Marijuana and Psychedelics, Inc. They can afford the lawyers and grease. They can work the FDA’s head. We can’t.”

Goldberg opened the petcock valve. “Yeah, well at least it’ll be six months or so before the Dope Industry or anyone else figures out how to synthesize this new crap, and by that time I think I’ll have just about licked the decay problem in the cocanol extraction process. We should be one step ahead of the squares for at least another year.”

“You know what I think, Will?” Richarson said, patting the side of the half-filled box of vials. “I think we got a holy mission, is what. I think we’re servants of the evolutionary process. Every time we come up with a new psychedelic, we’re advancing the evolution of human consciousness. We develop the stuff and make our bread off it for a while, and then the Dope Industry comes up with our synthesis and mass produces it, and then we gotta come up with the next drug out so we can still set our tables in style. If it weren’t for the Dope Industry and the way the drug laws are set up, we could stand still and become bloated plutocrats just by putting out the same old dope year after year. This way, we’re doing some good in the world, we’re doing something to further human evolution.”

Goldberg handed him another full vial. “Screw human evolution,” he said. “What has human evolution ever done for us?”

* * * *

“As you know, Dr. Taller, we’re having some unforeseen side-effects with eucomorfamine,” General Carlyle said, stuffing his favorite Dunhill with rough-cut burley. Taller took out a pack of Golds, extracted a joint, and lit it with a lighter bearing an Air Force rather than a Psychedelics, Inc. ensignia. Perhaps this had been a deliberate gesture, perhaps not.

“With a psychedelic as new as eucomorfamine, General,” Taller said, “no side-effects can quite be called ‘unforeseen’. After all, even Project Groundhog itself is an experiment.”

Carlyle lit his pipe and sucked in a mouthful of smoke which was good and carcinogenic; the General believed that a good soldier should cultivate at least one foolhardy minor vice. “No word-games, please, Doctor,” he said. “Eucomorfamine is supposed to help our men in the Groundhog moonbase deal with the claustrophobic conditions; it is not supposed to promote faggotry in the ranks. The reports I’ve been getting indicate that the drug is doing both. The Air Force does not want it to do both. Therefore, by definition, eucomorfamine has an undesirable side-effect. Therefore, your contract is up for review.”

“General, General, psychedelics are not uniforms, after all. You can’t expect us to tailor them to order. You asked for a drug that would combat claustrophobia without impairing alertness or the sleep cycle or attention-span or initiative. You think this is easy? Eucomorfamine produces claustrophilia without any side-effect but a raising of the level of sexual energy. As such, I consider it one of the minor miracles of psychedelic science.”

“That’s all very well, Taller, but surely you can see that we simply cannot tolerate violent homosexual behavior among our men in the moonbase.”

Taller smiled, perhaps somewhat fatuously. “But you can’t very well tolerate a high rate of claustrophobic breakdown, either,” he said, “You have only four obvious alternatives, General Carlyle: continue to use eucomorfamine and accept a certain level of homosexual incidents, discontinue eucomorfamine and accept a very high level of claustrophobic breakdown, or cancel Project Groundhog.
Or…“

It dawned upon the General that he had been the object of a rather sophisticated sales pitch. “Or go to a drug that would cancel out the side-effect of eucomorfamine,” he said. “Your company just wouldn’t happen to have such a drug in the works, would it?”

Dr. Taller gave him a we’re-all-men-of-the-world grin. “Psychedelics, Inc.
has
been working on a sexual suppressant,” he admitted none too grudgingly. “Not an easy psychic spec to fill. The problem is that if you actually decrease sexual energy, you tend to get impaired performance in the higher cerebral centers, which is all very well in penal institutions, but hardly acceptable in Project Groundhog’s case. The trick is to channel the excess energy elsewhere. We decided that the only viable alternative was to siphon it off into mystical fugue-states. Once we worked it out, the biochemistry became merely a matter of detail. We’re about ready to bring the drug we’ve developed—trade name nadabrin—into the production stage.”

The general’s pipe had gone out. He did not bother to relight it. Instead, he took 5 mg. of lebemil, which seemed more to the point at the moment. “This nadabrin,” he said very deliberately, “it bleeds off the excess sexuality into what? Fugue-states? Trances? We certainly don’t need a drug that makes our men psychotic.”

“Of course not. About three hundred micrograms of nadabrin will give a man a mystical experience that lasts less than four hours. He won’t be much good to you during that time, to be sure, but his sexual energy level will be severely depressed for about a week. Three hundred micrograms to each man on eucomorfamine, say every five days, to be on the safe side.”

General Carlyle relit his pipe and ruminated. Things seemed to be looking up. “Sounds pretty good,” he finally admitted. “But what about the content of the mystical experiences? Nothing that would impair devotion to duty?”

Taller snubbed out his roach. “I’ve taken nadabrin myself,” he said. “No problems.”

“What was it like?”

Taller once again put on his fatuous smile. “That’s the best part of nadabrin,” he said. “I don’t remember what it was like. You don’t retain any memories of what happens to you under nadabrin. Genuine fugue-state. So you can be sure the mystical experiences don’t have any undesirable content, can’t you? Or at any rate, you can be sure that the experience can’t impair a man’s military performance.”

“What the men don’t remember can’t hurt them, eh?”

“What was that, General?”

“I said I’d recommend that we give it a try.”

* * * *

They sat together in a corner booth back in the smoke, sizing each other up while the crowd in the joint yammered and swirled around them in some other reality, like a Bavarian merrygoround.

“What are you on?” he said, noticing that her hair seemed black and seamless like a beetle’s carapace, a dark metal helmet framing her pale face in glory. Wow.

“Peyotadrene,” she said, her lips moving like incredibly jeweled and articulated metal flower-petals. “Been up for about three hours. What’s your trip?”

“Canabinolic acid,” he said, the distortion of his mouth’s movement casting his face into an ideogramic pattern which was barely decipherable to her perception as a foreshadowing of energy release. Maybe they would make it.

“I haven’t tried any of that stuff for months,” she said. “I hardly remember what that reality feels like.” Her skin luminesced from within, a translucent white china mask over a yellow candle-flame. She was a magnificent artifact, a creation of jaded and sophisticated gods.

“It feels good,” he said, his eyebrows forming a set of curves which, when considered as part of a pattern containing the movement of his lips against his teeth, indicated a clear desire to donate energy to the filling of her void. They
would
make it. “Call me old-fashioned maybe, but I still think canabinolic acid is groovy stuff.”

“Do you think you could go on a sex-trip behind it?” she asked. The folds and wrinkles of her ears had been carved with microprecision out of pink ivory.

“Well, I suppose so, in a peculiar kind of way,” he said, hunching his shoulders forward in a clear gesture of offering, an alignment with the pattern of her movement through space-time that she could clearly perceive as intersecting her trajectory. “I mean, if you want me to ball you, I think I can make it.”

The tiny gold hairs on her face were a microscopic field of wheat shimmering in a shifting summer breeze as she said: “That’s the most meaningful thing anyone has said to me in hours.”

The convergence of every energy configuration in the entire universe toward complete identity with the standing wave pattern of its maximum ideal structure was brightly mirrored for the world to see in the angle between the curves of his lips as he spoke.

* * * *

Cardinal McGavin took a peyotadrene-mescamil combo and 5 mg. of metadrene an hour and a half before his meeting with Cardinal Rillo; he had decided to try to deal with Rome on a mystical rather than a political level, and that particular prescription made him feel most deeply Christian. And the Good Lord knew that it could become very difficult to feel deeply Christian when dealing with a representative of the Pope.

Cardinal Rillo arrived punctually at three, just as Cardinal McGavin was approaching his mystical peak; the man’s punctuality was legend. Cardinal McGavin felt pathos in that: the sadness of a Prince of the Church whose major impact on the souls of his fellows lay in his slavery to the hands of a clock. Because the ascetic-looking old man, with his colorless eyes and pencil-thin lips, was so thoroughly unloveable, Cardinal McGavin found himself cherishing the man for his very existential hopelessness. He sent forth a silent prayer that he, or if not he then at least someone, might be chosen as an instrument through which this poor cold creature might be granted a measure of Divine Grace.

Cardinal Rillo accepted the amenities with cold formality, and in the same spirit agreed to share some claret. Cardinal McGavin knew better than to offer a joint; Cardinal Rillo had been in the forefront of the opposition which had caused the Pope to delay his inevitable encyclical on marijuana for long ludicrous years. That the Pope had chosen such an emissary in this matter was not a good sign.

Cardinal Rillo sipped at his wine in sour silence for long moments while Cardinal McGavin was nearly overcome with sorrow at the thought of the loneliness of the soul of this man, who could not even break the solemnity of his persona to share some Vatican gossip over a little wine with a fellow Cardinal. Finally, the Papal emissary cleared his throat—a dry, archaic gesture—and got right to the point.

“The Pontiff has instructed me to convey his concern at the addition of psychedelics to the composition of the communion host in the Archdiocese of New York,” he said, the tone of his voice making it perfectly clear that he wished the Holy Father had given him a much less cautious warning to deliver. But if the Pope had learned anything at all from the realities of this schismatic era, it was caution. Especially when dealing with the American hierarchy, whose allegiance to Rome was based on nothing firmer than nostalgia and symbolic convenience. The Pope had been the last to be convinced of his own fallibility, but in the last few years events seemed to have finally brought the new refinement of Divine Truth home.