The Western Lands (5 page)

"Looking for some action, friend?"

"Well, uh, yes . . ."

The Murphy Man makes a phone call: it's all set up. He leads the mark to the apartment building entrance.

"Go up one flight, first door on your left, 1A. Prime grade, friend, and she's ready and waiting on you. You pay me now, so there won't be any arguments."

Only a black man can have the real Murphy Man voice— cool, insinuating, familiar—and the real Murphy Man face— sincere, unflappable, untrustworthy.

And practitioners of the Hype or the Bill, a short-change routine. You start by paying for a two-bit item with a twenty-dollar bill. You get the change on the counter, then you tell the clerk, "I must have been dreaming—I don't mean to take all your small change. Here, give me ten for this" and count the ones back, minus the five. Or something like that. It's hard to get a conviction on the Bill, because nobody can explain exactly what happened.

The basic principle can be found in a sketch by Edgar Allan Poe on nineteenth-century hustlers who were known as Diddlers. The diddler walks into a tobacco store and asks for a plug of tobacco. When the plug is on the counter, he changes his mind.

"Give me a cigar instead." He takes the cigar and starts to walk out.

"Wait a minute. You didn't pay for the cigar."

"Of course not. I traded it against the tobacco plug."

"Don't recall you paid me for that either."

"Paid you for it! Why, there it is! None of your tricks on traveling men."

Unobtrusive and insistent, practitioners of the Bill are often addicts.

I wonder if there are any hype men left? Like Yellow Kid Weil and the Big Store: he would set up a prop brokerage office or bookmaking parlor and fleece his customers for several days before vanishing one night with the boodle. Also noteworthy is the sordid yachting swindle, practiced at one time by a certain well-known cult leader who shall be nameless. They're going to buy a boat together, sail the South Seas . . . this swindle requires that mark and swindler live in the same trailer, get drunk together every night and lay the same whore. Yellow Kid Weil would have been scandalized. "Never drink with a savage," was one of his rules.

The old-time bank robbers, the burglars who bought jewelry-store insurance inventories and knew exactly what they were looking for, the pickpockets trained from early childhood—they say the best ones come from Colombia—where are they now? The Murphy Men, the hype artists, the Big Store? Gone, all gone.

Ordinary outlaws specialize; so do the Natural Outlaws. Joe the Dead specializes in evolutionary biology. He dedicates his dearly bought knowledge of pain and death to cracking two biologic laws:

Rule One: Hybrids are permitted only between closely related species and then grudgingly, the hybrids produced being always sterile. The Biologic Police bluntly warn: "To break down the lines that Mother Nature, in her ripe wisdom, has established between species is to invite biologic and social chaos."

Joe says, "What do you think I'm doing here? Let it come down."

Rule Two: An evolutionary step that involves biologic mutation is irretrievable and irreversible. Newts start life in the water, breathing with gills. At the ordained time the newt sheds his gills and crawls up onto the land, now equipped with air-breathing lungs. Then he returns to the water, where he lives out his days. So it might be convenient to reclaim his gills and breathe underwater again?

"No glot, clom Fliday," says the Cosmic Uncle. It's the law.

So, for starters, Joe pulls a baby mule out of the cosmic manger. There is Mary—Mother Mule—and Joseph—the father—and the impossible child with a glowing, pulsing halo.

A Kansas vet known as Joe Lazarus was the instrument of altered destiny. He had been kicked in the head by a mule and pronounced dead at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, but was returned to life. Like Saint Paul, knocked off his ass on the road to Damascus, after his miraculous recovery, Joe Laz knew what he had to do.

He set out to produce a fertile mule. He exposed horse and donkey sperm to orgone radiation in a magnetized pyramid, and inseminated the mare—didn't hack it. So Laz went further: he rigged a magnetized stall and bombarded the copulating animals with DOR—Deadly Orgone Radiation. He sewed himself into a goat skin and whipped his beasts to wild Pan music—any woman hit by the Goat God's whip will conceive—and finally he created a fertile mule.

Skeptics pronounced Joe Laz's mule the most colossal hoax since the Piltdown Man.

"I had it up my sleeve," Joe deadpanned.

A quiet, enigmatic former herpetologist residing in Florida challenges Rule Two. His name is Joe Sanford. Bitten by a king cobra, he recovered and devoted himself to the study of newts and salamanders. Sanford claims to have reinstituted gills in mature, air-breathing newts by injections of a lamb-placenta concentrate.

(The same preparation, in fact, was used by Doctor Kniehaus of Geneva, Switzerland, to turn back the clock for his wealthy patients. To name a few: W. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Pope Pius XII, President Eisenhower. I recall seeing Eisenhower waving a tiny American flag from his hospital bed, with a big stupid grin on his face, and wondering if he would ever die. Winston Churchill couldn't qualify, because he couldn't lay off the sauce for six weeks, a prerequisite for the Kniehaus treatment, and no exceptions.)

Rule Two carries the implicit assumption that time is irreversible. Sanford makes a hole in time, and Joe sloshes through the hybrids.

It is not necessary to prove anything, simply to state. This is a biologic revolution, fought with new species and new ways of thinking and feeling, a war where the bullet may take millennia to hit. Like the old joke about the executioner makes a swipe with the samurai sword . . . well, missed me that time. But just try and shake your head three hundred years from now.

Let it come down . . . the ancient barrier between grass eaters and meat eaters. The old dichotomy of carnivore and herbivore has dissolved in primal hunger to spawn creatures who eat flesh or grass at will. Lions graze on the veldt. A herd of carnivorous man-eating wildebeests stalks the villages, creatures who are warm-blooded or cold-blooded according to altered surroundings. At the end of the human line everything is permitted.

All is in the not done, the diffidence that faltered.

Let others quaver out: "I dare do all that may become a man, 

who dares do more is none."

Not so, says Joe.

He who dares at all, must dare all.

When mules foal

Anything goes.

When mules glow

Anything foals.

Hybrids Unlimited . . . HU HU HU.

Doctor Whitehorn studied the man sitting opposite him. The man's skull looked as though it were made of a thin metal that had been shattered on the left side and rewelded together, a thin line of red-purple scar tissue tracing the joint.

As the doctor surmised, Joe's blind left eye was not blind. Joe had devised an artificial eye, wired into the optic center, that presented his mind with pictures, often quite at variance with the reports of the right eye. This was especially noticeable when he looked at human and animal subjects, and he came to realize to what extent that which we see is conditioned by what we expect to see—that is, by a habitual scanning pattern, whereas the artificial eye had no scanning pattern. The lens was fixed and Joe had to direct it by movements of his head. On the other hand, the lens could be adjusted to a wide angle, which greatly extended the range of his peripheral vision. He found that he could read motives and expressions with great precision by comparing the data of the good eye, which was picking up what someone wants to project, and the data of the synthetic eye. Sometimes the difference in expression was so grotesque that he was surprised it was not immediately apparent to anyone.

He knew now that Doctor Whitehorn, who was looking through his references with an amused smile, doubted their authenticity.

Doctor Whitehorn had come to research via psychiatry. Many doctors are drawn to this profession because they have an innate deficiency of insight into the motives, feelings and thoughts of others, a deficiency they hope to remedy by ingesting masses of data. Doctor Whitehorn was driven to abandon psychiatry because of his insight, which rendered contact with hopelessly damaged creatures extremely painful, and even more painful the brutish and insensitive treatment such patients often receive, because they are "insane" and therefore no one will believe their complaints.

It was not that Dr. Whitehorn was overly compassionate. He simply could not help feeling someone else's pain. And the man sitting opposite him radiated pain. Of course . . . the physical injuries . . . the prosthetic limb, the artificial eye, phantom limb pain and phantom eye pain. The doctor became aware of a strange odor, not coming from the man, but something he brought in with him. A reek of rotten citrus and burning plastic, like a burning amusement park.

"Well, Professor Hellbrandt. You have impressive credentials."

"I know my subject."

"Quite a few subjects, I'd say."

"My code name was Big Picture. You can spend your life fitting one piece in."

"Most people do less than that."

"Most people do nothing."

"Certainly there is work here for a man of your . . . uh . . . capabilities and qualifications, though I suspect some of these references to be forgeries."

Joe shrugged with his right shoulder, the human shoulder, and smiled with the right side of his face. The result was disconcerting.

Joe had a number of devices that he could fit into a socket just below the elbow of his severed arm. One was a shock unit, with two long, needle-sharp electrodes that could be jabbed into an opponent to deliver the shock inside. He had a cyanide syringe, for instant death, and an air-powered tranquilizer dart gun. He regarded these artifacts as toys, for which he would have less and less use as he pursued his research projects. Joe never allowed the real purpose of a project to be revealed or even suspected until he was in a position to use it. By then it would be too late for his enemies to profit from his work.

Having discovered the key to the money of others through research grants and scholarships and foundations, Joe was able to juggle a number of projects at once, all contributing to his overall objective of totally subverting the present natural order. He formed an ecological foundation called the Spreaders, ostensibly to study various useful species of plants and animals and introduce them into areas where they are at present unknown, taking into account the appropriate climatic conditions, disturbance of existing ecological systems, and potential usefulness as food source, control of pests, etc.

Actually he intended to carry out experiments in punctua-tional evolution by transporting small numbers of fish, animals and reptiles to unfamiliar environments and, also, by bringing into contact species that had never been in contact before, to open potentials for hybridization. It is interesting to note that one of the few existing hybrids is the "tiglon," a cross between the lion and the tiger—creatures who live in different habitats and do not come into contact in nature, except by Man's interventions.

Joe could come on buddy buddy good old boy with the other researchers and they accepted it. They had to accept it, because they were all afraid of Joe. His white eyes, his dead pale skin, his faint voice that nonetheless carried across the lab and into their heads . . . and his disquieting smile. When he wanted something done, they did it. He never saw any of them outside the lab.

No one but Joe and his team knew that a basic aim of his research was to sabotage the proposed highway through the Amazon basin. Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Hiltons waiting offstage. He knows that if the highway goes through, it will mean the destruction of the last great rain forest left on the planet. Joe is a dedicated ecologist. It hurts him to see a tree cut down.

"They shall not pass," he decides.

He can see it already. The jungle Hiltons . . . "When Orchids Bloom in the Moonlight" on the Muzak . . . the bar, with orchids and a tank against one wall full of piranha fish. The management throws in live goldfish and pieces of raw meat.

The motels and souvenir shops and hamburger joints, drunken Indians, polluted rivers, the gritty bite of diesel fumes. In front of the Manaos Opera House, tourists pose with a boa constrictor.

Terrible scandal: a big pop star, in a jealous rage fueled by cocaine, grabbed his girlfriend's Yorkshire terrier and threw it into the piranha tank. As the piranhas attacked the floundering dog, the hysterical starlet threw a heavy bronze ashtray which shattered the tank, spilling snapping fish and bloody water across the patrons as the disemboweled, screaming dog dragged its intestines across the floor. Quite a scene it was, and of course there were plenty of cameras to freeze-dry this edifying spectacle for posterity and export. It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed.

They had passed through the town of Esperanza and stopped for a beer . . . three Policia Nacionale, jackets unbuttoned, a pock-marked, rat-faced local youth, probably the professional brother-in-law of a cop, their lives and outlook as cramped and limited as the valley was vast and open.

Joe had seen the Rocky Mountains, the Alps, the Himalayas, but this was another dimension, a peephole through which he glimpsed a larger planet, much larger than the Saturn of his dreams. And the silence was proportionately heavier as he looked out across the vastness of that valley, very clearly seeing, as if through a telescope, the little town of crumbling stucco, the river and stone bridge, poplar trees, fields, grazing sheep and cattle, tiny patches in the wide canvas.

The Hiltons unbuilt, the highway choked with brush and vines as Joe pulls out the time rug, spilling motels and gas stations, Mr. Steaks and McDonald's, jukeboxes and pizza parlors back to jungle and howler monkeys and bird calls. A malignant strain of yellow fever unaffected by standard inoculation, horrible skin diseases, an accelerated leprosy that kills in months, the clock turning back to the Panama Canal, every foot of highway paved with skulls. Pull back. Pull out. And they can't get workers. The Indians lurk in remote areas, waiting like the jungle to reclaim Invaded territory.

Joe eases over into transplant surgery. He soon excels, after an apprenticeship with Doctor Steincross, best 'plant man in the business. Joe is able to hide his potentials and act like any idiot surgeon, addicted to his operations and the adulation of patients, nurses and colleagues.