The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (38 page)

“
I wish you
hadn’t.”

He smiled. “They must be
quackery, because science is what is published in reputable medical
journals. This easily, Sheldon, is truth crucified and error made
king by acclamation. Because of this, in time a brand-new young
doctor sees some flies on a big huge pile of manure and being just
out of allopath school where everybody is crazy, naturally he says,
’How did they do that?’”

“
Yeah, yeah, I think I
already heard this one.”

“
No, this is a different
one. Patience. You are learning things, even if you don’t know it.
Later, when you think of orthodox research—like Jenner’s,
Pasteur’s, Wintersong’s—you will automatically be reminded of
manure piles. Our young new allopath is, we will charitably assume,
a sincere and honest fellow not yet totally corrupted, and thus
still eager to learn the truth. So, remembering what Yogi Berra is
supposed to have said, ‘You can observe a lot just by looking,’ he
observes the pile in order to look at it.”

“
Did Yogi really say
that?”

“
Probably not. Our fellow
considers the size of the mass, estimates its weight, counts the
flies. Finally he says, ‘Caramba, this is too much for me,’ and
begins seeking the truth. How does he do this, Sheldon?”

“
How? You’re asking me
how?”

“
Never mind. I already know
the answer. The answer is: He consults the scientific literature.
He looks into the Index Medicus, into all the places where
published scientific papers are listed explaining the truth about
everything. Our fellow has a dim memory, from before medical
school, of something or other about flyspecks. So he looks it up.
It isn’t there. Nothing has ever been published about flyspecks, or
any excremental deposits even remotely resembling them. Therefore,
they don’t exist. So he looks up ‘manure’ and there finds the
answer. He finds eleven small-print pages of answers. He finds.
‘Manure, Uncommon Production of by Common Housefly,’ and ‘Manure,
Muscidae and Their...’ he finds, ‘manure, ordure of Musca Domestica
of the family Muscidae: How They Do That.’”

“
Hum,” I said. “You sure
cover a lot of territory just to get back where—”

“
The end result...well, in
the end, our young doctor fellow is satisfied, convinced he now
possesses the truth because he has found it printed in reputable
medical journals and cited in the Index Medicus, et cetera, just
like all the other doctors who did the same thing, and still do.
Our hero is well on his way to becoming a true allopath, welcomed
into the miasmas of orthodoxy with all the other misasmers. And
forever after, if he sees or hears a Rife or Koch, Reich or Hoxey,
or even a Hernandez, running around quacking ‘Flies don’t do big
manure piles, they only do little bitty flyspecks, they really do
do,’ and that is what he believes truth is.”

“
I see.”

“
Do you? The truth before
their eyes has become invisible, as invisible to them as were
Magellan’s ships to the Fuegans.”

Hank marched to his desk,
sat down, leaned forward. He beamed at me, waiting
expectantly.

After apparently waiting
long enough, he said, “Sheldon, does this help you understand
better how unreal is much of authorized medical reality? And why in
the absence of medical freedom, it must be so?”

“
Well, maybe if I reach a
little. I think I followed most of that, until Magellan? And some
ships.”

“
Fuegans. This wonderfully
illuminating report drawn from the log books of Fernando Magellan,
the Portuguese navigator and ship captain whose ships sailed into
Tierra del Fuego, or the group of islands below the tip of South
America and south of what is now called the Straits of Magellan,
the native Fuegans were unable to see them. They were unable to see
the ships. The people who lived there had, for centuries, seen
nothing on the sea larger than their own canoes. A great ship,
thousands of times larger than a canoe, was beyond not only their
experience but their imaginations. So they could not see Magellan’s
ships, and did not.”

“
How do you know they
couldn’t see the ships? I don’t imagine they went around saying,
‘Hey, lookit that thing, I can’t see it, can you
either?’”

Hank smiled. “Good
question, Sheldon. I’m glad you asked. Seamen of other later
expeditions who went ashore and communicated with those people,
were informed by the Fuegans that they had indeed been unable to
see the ships. But, also, their shaman told them the visiting
seamen had been transported in some kind of great and strange
vessel, and I would guess he must have described it at as something
like an unbelievably monstrous canoe. Moreover, and this is why I
am pleased you asked the question, he told them also that this
great thing could actually be seen if one looked
carefully.”

Those ships, and the
“blind” Fuegans, really did fascinate me, and I briefly let the
thoughts sparked by that story sort of roll around in my head for a
moment. “So is this the Megallen ship thing—they don’t see it,
don’t want to?”

“
Partly, but mainly because
they almost always see dead bugs. Dead bugs don’t change to
something else, they just stay dead.”

“
I remember...the Rife
Microscope, that didn’t kill the bugs, right?”

“
That is correct and that
is of supreme importance, Sheldon. The allopathic microbiologists,
virologists, bacteriologists, when they stain specimens, that stain
itself kills the specimens. When they put them into an electron
microscope, the electron beam kills them. So they see only dead
ones. Start with some cocci, round bugs, call the Bug A. They
change to another form, B, then to C and D and E and finally the
rod–shaped bacilli, F. So when they look at them dead, they think
each one is a different bug. But A-B-C-D-E-F isn’t six different
bugs, but one bug changing form. Do you see what this, all of this
I have said, means?”

“
Well, I’m sort of getting
the idea.”

Hank placed both hands on
the top of his desk, leaned toward me, and his voice again began to
take on that almost metallic humming or vibration I’d mentioned to
Paul.

“
It means every
prevent-the-bug vaccine ever cooked up by Jenner or Pasteur or
Wintersong and every imbecile in between them is a
worse-than-useless putrescence of pleomorphic mutating bugshits
that cause epidemics of sickness and death instead of preventing
them.” He took a deep breath and continued, “It also, almost
incidentally, means every poisonous kill-the-bug drug either does
nothing good, or else kills only some symptoms of disease and
leaves the true disorder the same as before, or usually worse. They
cannot allow the people to even begin believing this truth is true.
They must keep truth upside down.”

Hank paused, took a deep
breath. “You must now see why this must be so, do you not,
Sheldon?”

“
Sure.” I nodded slowly.
“If I buy your version—and I think I do now—if people realized
what’s been dumped on them, and what they’re literally being stuck
with, I guess they’d put the dumpers pretty much out of
business.”

“
Out of business is the
number one thing, the big money thing. Multi-billion dollar thing.
Public awareness and understanding of what we “quacks” have been
saying would mean, first, that the public would get one-thousand
percent healthier, but companies, and chemical companies, and
hospital companies, and allopathic prescription writing—plus all
the insanity of mass vaccinations and mandatory immunization
programs to protect the public from specific diseases caused by
specific unchanging bugs—would be down the toilet, where it
belongs.”

“
Where, as I imagine you’d
say, most of it came from in the first place.”

“
That is good, very good.
Have I told you that modern medicine is upside-down and
bassackward?”

I laughed. “You sure
have.” I stood up, stretched my arms and checked my
watch.

“
You are going?” Hank
said.

“
Yep, on my way. But don’t
think it hasn’t been fun.”

“
Beside hilarious fun,”
Hank said, not quite concealing his smile, “you have learned
something about bugs.”

“
More than I ever hoped and
dreamed, believe it or not.” I walked to the door, put my hand on
the knob.

Hank, still seated behind
his desk, said cheerfully, “Well, for sure, now you know where
deadly epidemics come from, plus how they are prevented and the
people saved from terrible disasters. You will be glad of this next
time it happens.”

“
I do? I will?”

“
Of course. Maybe you fail
to realize it fully, but you are now well-protected by a little
knowledge—doesn’t take much—against the fear-shouting of our
protectors. When again they start yelling all-together how they
must protect everybody from the next epidemic everybody didn’t know
they needed protecting from, you will recognize the symptoms of
this immunizing-everybody disease.”

“
I will, huh?” I hadn’t
made it out yet, but I turned the knob and pulled the door halfway
open.

“
You bet. It’s like finding
hidden words in puzzles or riding a bicycle.” Hank walked to his
desk, sat down behind it looking satisfied.

I turned to leave but then
turned back momentarily and said, “Hey, IFAI, that reminds me. When
we spoke on the phone you said you wanted to talk to me about
that—about Wintersong’s practically-approved IFAI vaccine. I’m
afraid it will have to wait.”

“
Wait?” He asked softly,
smiling benignly. “Sheldon, what do you think we’ve been
doing?”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

Dane laughed and said,
“Turned into a door? That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever
heard.”

I scowled through the
Cad’s windshield at the narrow black-asphalt road ahead and decided
to change the subject. The present subject wasn’t
working.

I had hoped that by
casually mentioning our goodnight kiss of the previous p.m. Dane
would confess she’d made a foolish mistake in vanishing so
abruptly. Or that we’d have to try it again and perfect it, perfect
whatever it was we’d been doing, or that she’d suddenly gotten a
terrible cramp in her lips. Practically anything. But
dumb?

We were only about two
miles from the top of the rise ahead, from which point we would be
able to look down at those windowless bleached-bone buildings of
the Omega Medical Research Center. It was twelve-ten p.m. so there
were twenty minutes left before Dane’s appointment with William
Wintersong, M.D., plenty of time.

I hadn’t been late
arriving at the Halcyon, but I wasn’t even ten seconds early,
either, because when I’d pulled to a stop before the
lavishly-landscaped hotel, Dane was just coming out through the
lobby doors.

She had looked—and still
did—as fresh and pretty as wildflowers, wearing a silky-smooth
white dress splashed with shimmering bright colors, like pieces of
aurora borealis floating in milk, and around her neck was a scarf
the shade of melting emeralds, the color of her eyes. And, until
just now, it had been a most enjoyable trip.

In the beginning, after
Hello and You Look Great, and I Like A Man Who’s On Time, we yacked
easily for a while on our way out of the city. Yacked about Los
Angeles, her New York apartment from which she could see
approximately a millionth of an acre of Central Park, odds and
ends. Dane mentioned her writing, time-consuming but fascinating
research of Dr. Wintersong. And, because I was still full of stuff
Henry Hernandez had so recently been pounding into me, I mentioned
a couple of the ideas I’d gotten from him.

When she spoke of Dr.
Wintersong’s generosity in allowing her to interview him again
today, only hours after the “wonderful news” about his IFAI vaccine
had been released, she glanced over at me, smiling slightly, and
said, “But maybe you don’t think it’s all that wonderful, Shell. At
least you didn’t seem to last night.”

“
Still don’t. Apparently,
according to what I got from this morning’s story in the Times, all
that’s left before final approval of Wintersong’s bugsh—his
vaccine, or the FDA go-ahead for nationwide distribution and maybe
mass immunization, is testing it on a few more people.”

“
Not exactly a few, six
thousand subjects from all the most vulnerable population
groups—for the usual clinical testing in selected hospitals, some
doctors’ offices, clinics. That’s a statistically-significant
sample, and the protocol seems very sensible to me.”

“
Well, look, I’ve been
mentally kidnapped by a mad scientist—actually, a superior kind of
physician, I think—and he’s been throwing some provocative stuff at
me. Let me toss a couple of his curves at you and see what you
think, okay?”

“
Splendid.
Toss.”

I did the best I could to
sum up from what I’d read, or heard from Hank, the double-barreled
criticism of medicine’s so-called germ theory of disease that had
most impressed me, had in fact convinced me. Many of Hank’s
comments had been thrown at me so recently, some of them almost
riveted into my brain by that brnnggnng muted-buzz-saw voice he
employed occasionally, that most of it just fell into place without
much effort on my part.