The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (8 page)

If his voice had been a
wind, it might have been Hurricane Zeus. It was loud, sure, but
more, there was in it something that was almost a humming or
vibration of trembling, like those infrasounds, inaudible, below
the level of conscious awareness, that can annoy, then injure, and
sometimes kill. It impressed me.

“
Gotcha,” I
said.

“
No, you don’t gotcha,”
Hank went on hummingly. “I had expected better of you, Sheldon–I
still do expect better of you. Alas, like most others, you believe
what you are told–told!–by the impostors of medicine, this great
monopoly which bellows at you from every television and radio and
also speaks in every media of print while saner voices are shut up
so truth remains silenced. But must you believe the unbelievable
because you hear it? Why have a brain at all if the only thing you
use is ears?”

“
Hank, maybe I should tell
you that I’m not all sweetness and light, every minute of every
day. Sometimes I actually get pissed–”

“
Pissed? Pissed? What do I
care even if you get diarrhea in my chair here? I am trying to
replace garbage in your head with a glimmering of light you
mentioned, with a modicum of sanity. If I cannot get out that
garbage, you will remain unready to handle my purposes, remain
without armor against them—you will be mentally a sheep among gangs
of allopathic lions and tigers and hyenas who can eat you up
easy.”

“
I like to think I can take
care of myself–”

“
Take care physically I
agree, even I expect with gorillas and freight trains. But mentally
resisting, when ten-thousand unopposed voices say over and over the
same lies, and dumbness, and stupid. Listen. You do not have to
believe me. Or them, either. Take your pick–or, better, believe
yourself. Listen again: Nothing is incurable! Any physician–or
anybody else, who tells a patient he has a fatal disease, that he
is terminal, that he is suffering from an incurable illness, should
be taken to the center of town and horsewhipped within an inch of
his life. Maybe a half-inch–”

“
Yeah, well, even if
there’s some truth in what–”

Presumably, he did not
hear me. “Such a terrible statement,” he continued without pausing
one-tenth of a second, “which is made by most orthodox physicians
as casually as they would tell a patient he has a bunion, is
thundering announcement not only of their own abysmal ignorance but
also their lack of caring for fellow human beings. These imbeciles,
whenever anybody else but them cures a sick one, claim it must be a
delusion, or is because they treated the sick one first and he’s
just now getting better nine years later, or they become
clairvoyant and see that this apparent good result is only a
‘placebo effect’ as when people given sugar pills and told this
will make them well often in truth get well. But what of their own
poison-placebo effect? How many patients have these same orthodox
physicians killed with their mouths, with their inexcusable
pronouncings of doom and decay and death?”

Hank relaxed somewhat, or
a least leaned back in his chair. But those burning eyes were still
fixed on me as if purple rays were about to shoot out of them. I
had to admit that, even though most of my questions and doubts
remained, Hank had for a change made a point I could accept without
reservation. Certainly I agreed that any physician who told a man
he was inevitably going to die—of any disease or condition
whatever—and killed hope by insisting nothing could be done to
prevent the imminent croaking, should at least be forced to pay for
the funeral.

But I didn’t mention that
to Hank. Instead, I said, “Makes sense. If I ever get sick, what I
want is a doctor who’ll tell me I’m immortal. Well, I’ll see what I
can pick up about Rusty, and check the Vunger’s place later. As for
those two heavies... anything more you can remember about
them?”

He shook his head. “I
recall no more than what I have said, Sheldon. And I saw only that
one, he with the mustache hanging downward.”

“
Yeah. Well, if...when
those bums tried to waste you, it’s eight to five the idea wasn’t
their own. Probably hired hands, doing their thing for somebody. If
so, it’s that somebody who’s important, not them.”

“
Exactly so. I had thought
of it also, that those two were ruffians, hired hands as you say.
But this somebody? It is blankness.”

“
For now, anyway. I sure
wish you could narrow down your list of enemies to something a
little more manageable for me than half a million
doctors.”

He smiled. “Again I must
speak of medicine, because most who dislike what I and people like
me stand for–notice I say dislike, not fill up with murderous
frenzy–are in some way associated with medicine, pharmaceutical
products, drugs and machineries.”

I could tell, he was
getting revved up again, his voice slowly rising. “So it is true,”
he went on, “most of these enemies are physicians, allopaths who
fear even a Hernandez. But many enemies are not those, but others
allied with them.

“
Allied?”

“
Allied, in league, in
cohorts–or is it cahoots?–with the allopathic symptom-squashers.
Foremost among those others would be the tunnel-visioned ones with
cruel hearts and savage minds, those so-called scientific
researchers who do unspeakable things to animals in order that new
cosmetics or mouthwashes or deodorants–and most especially
profitable new drugs and vaccines, and still more vaccines and
drugs–may be developed. Developed, patented by the pharmaceutical
Gargantuas, and sold for gazillions. Some of those have made
sincere threats against me.”

“
Animals? Animal research?
Where did that come from? You hadn’t mentioned animals.”

“
I cannot mention
everything. The world is filled to flowing over with
stupids–”

“
Doctor–Hank, you’re not
shortening the list of your enemies, soon it will equal the
population. Haven’t you–we–got enough trouble with people without
bringing in animals?”

“
Okay, I am President of
the California state chapter of Physicians Opposed to Cruel and
Useless Experimentation on Animals, a now-national organization
which, six years ago, I founded. In all of California there are
only thirty-six of us, thirty-six true physicians willing to speak
out against these crimes and risk being persecuted, ostracized,
prosecuted, imprisoned, and maybe rolled in tars and feathers. But
we have saved many animals. We have also ended, or maybe ruined,
several so-called research projects. Naturally, those misnamed
scientists and medical researchers who received
multi-million-dollar grants for those ended or ruined
animal-killing exercises now resent us colossally. Especially
me.”

“
What did you call this
thing you founded?”

“
This thing...It is
Physicians Opposed to Cruel and Useless Experimentation on Animals.
Or, for short, pee-oh-see-you-ee-ay.”

“
For short?
Pee-oh-see-you-ee-ay? I thought that’s what I heard. POCUEA, huh?
Exactly what does this bunch do, you and the thirty-six others you
mentioned.”

“
Thirty-five others,
thirty-six me included. We are all unalterably opposed to current
medical experiments performed, usually in secret, upon animals.
Opposed to them upon moral grounds, but also for good medical
reasons, since nearly all results of such often-sadistic
experimentation are of no value to people, produce no improvement
of human health but instead more often produce harm, and are in a
word USELESS.”

“
Hank, if doctors and other
scientists didn’t carry out some controlled research with animals,
they’d have to experiment on people. Even you must
admit–”

“
They experiment on people
anyway. All the time. How do you think they test their thousands of
systemic poisons called drugs and vaccines? But at least people
have a small choice, animals have none, they merely suffer and
die.”

“
Okay,” I said. “I think
you’re pretty good at making mountains out of molehills, but you
did mention that you and your group have ruined some
multi-million-dollar research projects, right? Well, if I were a
scientist, halfway through a very important, maybe years-long,
experiment and you totally screwed it up, I might feel like killing
you myself.”

“
I see where you are going,
Sheldon. But these people, most of them, are not that kind of
killer. To run me over with a vehicle, shoot me, make a homicide of
me, no. This is not the way it is done. My enemies, they plan for
us–me, all those like me–a different kind of death. End me as a
physician, turn me into an ex-M.D. on welfare, end my healing of
their failures. This they would do with enthusiasm. As they did me
before. Believe it, this has happened to many others, not once but
hundreds of times, evidence of which is available to anyone who
will open his eyes and mind and look for it. But these are not
killers. At least, not with guns and bullets.”

I sighed, shook my head.
“Hank, I told you I’d take your case and I will–I have. So I’ll do
my damndest to find out what’s going on, who’s got it in for you.
But to be completely honest, I’d feel better about this job if you
didn’t exaggerate so damned much, didn’t make everything sound ten
times worse than it really is....”

I stopped because Hank had
leaned way forward, his head almost over the middle of his desk,
and was staring at me with his dark eyes wide, burning.
“Exaggerate?” he said in a loud voice. “Exaggerate? Where? I am
careful to make things less worse than they are. I mean, I make the
horribleness less horrible, so you will not puke in my clean
office. Exaggerate? Where? When? Speak!”

“
Don’t get so... Where?
Well, oh, for example, those damned animals. There has got to be a
lot of physicians and scientists doing good work with animals, to
find things that will help the sick, improve life for the
living–sure, maybe they test new drugs or vaccines on a few
animals, but that’s in order to help–”

“
Some wonderful help,” Hank
interrupted me. “To torture and kill millions of animals to get FDA
approval of some medication that is soon known to have terrible
side effects, including deaths.”

Hank paused briefly,
snorting dragon-fire through pinched nostrils. Paused very briefly.
Then, “Sheldon, all pharmaceutical drugs are poisonous to the human
system but were approved by the Food and Drug Administration, a
federal bureaucracy apparently determined to eliminate health in
the U.S.A. This approval means the pharmaceutical Gargantuas and
their well-funded scientists first had to test them on animals, had
to torture and cripple and blind and maim and kill millions of
animals, to prove they could make people well. These FDA-approved
toxins help the sick, these poisons improve life for the
still-living? Do I have to say to you that animals have life, that
they are among the living? Sheldon, in your ignorance you say I
exaggerate.”

Then he sighed, got up and
walked to one of the three gray filing cabinets against the wall to
his left, opened the top drawer and took something out, held it in
his right hand as he walked back and stopped before me. “I will
tell you of only one experiment, this with chimpanzees. I have here
some pictures, of one chimp only, but they are in a
series.”

I interrupted him. “Hank,
it isn’t that I’m not interested in this stuff, maybe even
concerned, but what I need are specifics about people who might do
you harm, the who and why. Specifics about people, not
animals.”

“
I have my reasons,
Sheldon. I have my reasons.”

He spoke very softly, but
I became even more aware of that kind of humming power in his
voice, the unusual vibrancy I’d noted when I first came into this
office. Still seated, I looked up at him and his eyes fixed on
mine. This close to him, I was again struck by the almost-glowing
luminousness of those dark eyes, but in his steady gaze was
something else, I thought. Something—sorrow, fear–psychosis? How
would I know?

“
Here. You may keep this,
Sheldon. But I would like for you to glance at it now.”

He handed me what looked
like a paperback book, maybe 4” by 6” and a half-inch or so thick,
with a color photograph of a handsome chimpanzee on the cover, its
mouth open and lips pushed forward and curling as if the little ape
was saying “Whoo!” At least, that’s the impression I
got.

In black letters at the
cover’s top, letters that appeared to have been typewritten rather
than professionally printed, was “JOCK-JOCK,” and in similar
letters at the bottom was the name, “Physicians Opposed to Cruel
and Useless Experimentation on Animals.”

I opened the cover, looked
at the first page. The “page” was actually a color photo printed on
thin paper, showing an alert bright-eyed chimpanzee–apparently the
same chimp as the one on the cover–seated in some kind of funny
little chair. He was restrained by leather straps pressing tightly
against his chest and stomach, and the long hairy arms were
similarly bound to the arms of that little chair. A foot behind the
chimp’s head was some kind of round metal thing about four inches
in diameter and six inches long, like a piston removed from a car’s
cylinder. Beneath the cylindrical thing, holding it up in the air,
was a kind of Rube Goldberg collection of metal rods and
bars.