The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (62 page)

It took about half a
minute. Then, “Yes.”

“
I repeat, has your IFAI
vaccine produced even partial immunity to the virus in any
experimental animals?”

“
No.”

After that, the rest was
easy. Well, sort of.

If pulling a man’s guts
out tying granny knots in them, and then putting them in backwards
is easy, then the rest of it was easy. I like to think, when it’s
necessary, I can be as tough and mean as the next guy. Because
sometimes, if you’re too gentle, considerate, kind—not quite mean
enough—you can blow it, get yourself killed, or even get other
people killed, which is almost as bad. In which case kindness
becomes brutality. Which, it did not appear, was going to be a
problem for Hank Hernandez.

He said intensely, “I have
read all your papers, Wintersong. And all others concerning IFAI by
virologists, molecular biologists, immunologists. I have seen your
celebrated microphotographs of the IFAI virus. Nobody else has
taken such photographs, because nobody else has seen it. How does
it happen that only one man has ‘isolated’ the deadly IFAI virus?
If it exists, and can be isolated, should not dozens of our
brilliant virologists be able to produce pure cultures of
it?”

“
It exists, of course...of
course it exists. The techniques for isolation, for producing the
initial culture, are extremely complex, delicate, difficult...
laymen cannot possibly understand the scientific
protocol—”

“
I am a doctor, you idiota!
I am not laymen who pucker and kiss science asses, I am a
physician, a surgeon—remember? If your IFAI bug exists, show it to
me, give me some.”

“
That is
ridiculous...ridiculous. I isolated, yes, I alone isolated, the
virus. I took microphotographs of it—”

“
I told you, Wintersong, I
have seen your photographs. Not only reproductions in journals, but
the originals, glossy enlargements. Your virus looks like—what, The
Crab Nebula maybe on a foggy night? Or electron-cooked chewing gum.
Spit? Did you take pictures of some spit? What is it,
Wintersong?”

Wintersong’s eyes were
sort of jerking, moving rapidly left and right, pausing, then
moving again, as if there was a tremor in muscles controlling them.
He was blinking his eyes rapidly. “I don’t know what it is. Nobody
does, really. But it probably is the IFAI virus—”

“
Not if there is no IFAI
virus.”

“
That’s ridiculous.
Ridiculous. There is one. Billions of them. I took microphotos of
some. But it keeps...changing. That is, they keep
changing.”

“
Ah! Of course, changing,
altering form, as do all viruses and bacteria, as I have dozens of
times seen, as many others have seen, photographed, written—it is
normal pleomorphism, thus you yourself must have
observed—”

“
No. Ridiculous. There is
no such thing as pleomorphism. That’s quackery, existing only in
the...minds of quacks.”

“
If the IFAI virus
continually changed form, how could you make a vaccine from it?
From which form did you make it?”

“
I—that’s not...it was
difficult.”

“
It was impossible! Verdad?
Not even the great Dr. Wintersong could do the
impossible.”

“
No, I did it. I have
perfected the vaccine to prevent IFAI—the deadly epidemic,
IFAI—I...it perhaps, perhaps needs more testing, more... It is a
great, great achievement, worthy of the Nobel Prize in Medicine. I
will probably receive the No—”

“
Bullshit!” Hank stuck his
face about three inches from Wintersong’s head, roaring, “I know in
Omega you call the vaccine bugshit, but it is really bullshit,
verdad? It is a hoax, a fraud, allopathic bassackward
dumbness—bullshit! Admit it!”

“
No, it is the safe,
perfect Wintersong vaccine, I will deserve the Nobel—”

“
Sheldon!”

I jumped. I knew Hank
could get loud, but that was loud.

“
Yessir,” I said. “What?
What?”

“
Stop the air mixture, turn
it off. Pull out the wires from this—this—head. Pull out the tubes,
turn if off—”

“
No—no—no-no-no-no...”

That was the head, of
course.

Hank again, face about
three inches, maybe two inches, from Wintersong’s bugging eyes.
Almost snarling. “Say what is the IFAI vaccine, the
truth.”

“
I...don’t know. Not
exactly. But it won’t hurt anybody.”

“
Caramba! It won’t prevent
IFAI, either, verdad, bastardo?”

“
No...well, if people
believe it will, it will probably prevent many cases. There is the
well known placebo effect, which can cure many people,
millions.”

Hank had straightened up,
rolling his eyes toward the ceiling, clenching his teeth. “Ai,” he
cried. “Your IFAI vaccine will kill people. Cripple them. Like the
Swine Flu vaccine, like smallpox vaccine in Africa. Like all your
goddamn worse-than-useless vaccines. It will kill, cripple,
diminish destroy—”

“
No, it is safe. Only more
animal tests.”

“
Bastardo! Idiota! I am out
of patience with you, totalmente! You persist in lying, lying, from
years of habit, yes.”

Hank stuck his face inches
from Wintersong’s again, and his voice took on that humming vibrato
or quivering ululation I’d heard many times before but never been
able to really describe. It couldn’t be described accurately
anyway; it had to be felt, zonking eardrums and plucking dendrites,
or synapses, whatever, those nerve things are.

“
I am glad Maillander and I
cut your goddamn head off. Next I will cut your nose
off—”

“
No.”

“
Then your ears, whatever
is left, I am going to whittle you away—”

“
No—”

“
Yes. One more lie, one
more of anything less than the whole truth, and...Look at
you!”

Hank stepped aside, his
body no longer concealing the mirror. Pointing to it, but staring
fiercely at Wintersong, he went on, “Look at yourself, what is
left. You are a pigmy, maybe eight inches high, a nothing! Now you
see yourself, for the first time, as you really are. Observe:
William Wintersong, M.D. this nothing!”

Wintersong observed.
Minutes earlier, when he’d seen his reflected image for the first
time, he had screamed horrendously, an ugly blood-chilling sound.
But, then, there had been sudden shock, rising horror, undoubtedly
uncomprehending disbelief. Now he was fully alert, he’d been
speaking at least temporarily distracted from his condition. Now,
he again observed, gazed upon himself, looked long upon William
Wintersong, M.D., and began to die.

Certainly that was the
impression I got. Because it was as the livingness, or force, a
silent humming of invisible energies within him—what Hank had once
spoken of to me as the power within that formed each of us from
sperm and ovum, made of us women and men, still animals all, blood
and bone and heart and brain—diminished in him, faded, began
leaking out of Wintersong.

It worried me. But not
Hank. Or, if it did, his worry wasn’t evident, and it sure didn’t
temper his attitude, an attitude almost of savagery. He just
waited, watching hawk-like, as Wintersong seemed to shrink, to
become somehow less, diminished, dwindling; then, when he was
ready, Hank bored on in.

“
Wintersong, listen
closely, with your life listen to me. I say the epidemic of your
Invariably Fatal Acquired Illness is the disease not of
civilization but of allopathic civilization—your pharmaceutical
poisons, your immune-suppressing drugs and vampiric vaccines, your
mistakes in attacking myriad symptoms, preventing rational
treatment of any causes of those disorders on this earth and its
people...that, and the pollution of land and sea and sky by
multiplied and mingled wastes and toxins, each year a hundred
thousand tons of airborne death unpunished, and food crops grown
with chemicals made not by God but greedy men, weakened crops grown
in pesticide-poisoned earth, in the interest not of human value but
of more dollars for the bastardos who turn food into waste before
it is eaten. It is these things, and more unending, that derange
nature, poison earth, weaken immune defenses, sicken bodies, and
produce departures from wholeness that assbackward allopaths call
Latin-name diseases...and there is no IFAI virus involved in this
at all. Or—Wintersong—will you say I am wrong?” Hank spat out those
last words like an oath, and waited, glaring.

“
...No.”

Hank sighed. “But you did
produce a vaccine.”

“
I had to. Hobie
insisted.”

“
Hobart Belking, of
Belking-Gray Pharmaceuticals, insisted you produce a vaccine—even
if it was impossible? Even if there does not exist an IFAI virus
from which to make a vaccine?”

“
Yes.”

“
Why? The obvious answer, I
of course know. But the whole truth, Wintersong. While there is
time for you...and for us. The truth.”

“
Money. Incredible amounts
of money. Even I was astonished. Hobie explained for me the many
avenues, many ways.”

A curious thing was
happening. Since looking long at himself, at his head with tubes
and wires descending to his naked scalp, Wintersong had not only
appeared to shrink somehow, to become less alive, but he was now
responding, speaking much like an automaton. His voice was
virtually without inflection, mechanical, almost unreal. His
expression, too, was much less animated, less mobile.

Now the flat voice issued
from his moving mouth in a face like a waxen mask. Neither in voice
or features was there any evidence of emotion at all, as if
Wintersong no longer cared what might be heard from him by others,
or thought of him by others.

If so, that probably meant
he would speak to us truly—at least, speak the truth as he knew it,
whatever it was he really believed.

Wintersong was continuing,
in those dull, almost unwavering tones, “Hobie assumed there would
be passage of legislation for mass immunization requiring everyone
to be immunized. He expected it within a month or two after my IFAI
vaccine received final approval. Which we knew it would, soon.
Figures were more than six billion dollars into the general
economy—through the medical community—of which two billion would
accrue to Belking-Gray Pharmaceuticals. Or to Hobie, practically
speaking. Two billion gross, but it’s nearly all net profit, the
vaccine costs only pennies. The assumption was a wholesale price of
eight dollars per c.c. of Belking-Gray/Wintersong vaccine, with
pediatricians, hospitals, general practioners charging
approximately twenty-five dollars for each injection of the
antigen. Much would depend upon amount approved for protection of
the citizenry by the government programs, Medicare-Medicaid, but
Hobie expected the federal position would be a reasonable
one.”

I got a small shiver
somewhere between my ears. Not because of the corruption testified
to by Wintersong’s words, delivered in that flat and unmusical
monotone, but at his mention of government programs—whether “the
public” desired it or not, unquestionably each citizen of the
citizenry might not only get it but be required to pay for the
dubious privilege.

I dimly recalled a
Hernandez tirade about multi-billion-dollar payments for approved
medical treatments and only for such “accepted-and-approved”
treatments, thus ensuring payment of tax dollars only for “the
one-percent that doesn’t work” but inevitably nothing for the other
ninety-nine percent. This resulting in further enrichment, and
entrenchment, of “the goddamn bassackward allopathic
monopoly.”

Wintersong had stopped
speaking of dollars and protection and profit, right after another
comment about Hobart Belking’s assumed “scenario.” He had been
silent for several seconds, long seconds, his eyes straining far to
his left and just as his mouth began opening while his eyes grew
very wide I realized what it was Wintersong was peering at,
straining to see.

Belking. I’d actually
forgotten about Hobart Belking for the last few minutes. Hank and I
had carefully placed the big cabinet well to Wintersong’s left,
Belking’s “severed” head clearly reflected in the middle of its
heavy glass-face, should Wintersong look that way. He just hadn’t
tried to look that far left—until now.

His eyes were about as
wide as they could get, and at last from his open mouth came
“Hobie? HOBIE?”

It took a while to get his
attention again. He was going on about “Hobie!” and “Him, too?” and
“You killed him, he’s dead, dead!”

And about then I had an
idea. Didn’t know if it was a good idea, just an idea, but it
seemed suddenly clear to me that the doctor’s greatest financial
and moral support had for many years come from billionaire Belking,
a man with enough influence to protect Wintersong from almost
anything coming down the pike. Without that powerful friend,
without that protection, Wintersong would really be in the
soup.

So as Hank started saying,
“No, no, he’s all—”

I interrupted “Woops! Yes,
all caught up, washed up, kaput—too bad, Wintersong.” Hank seemed
puzzled for a moment by my rapidly wiggling eyebrows, then
smiled.