The Western Lands (8 page)

"Couldn't it have been broken glass? He may have shoved his fist through a window. We have reason to believe he was irrational."

"I don't think so. There were no glass splinters, and the scratches all slant one way."

"A cat perhaps?"

"Room was locked from the inside. Your man Henry, who had been tailing the target, summoned police. The officer who went in with your operative is sure that no animal slipped out."

Spec Ops doesn't like it: unknown perpetrator, unknown motive, unknown M.O. Assuming that the motive was retaliation instigated or carried out by a recipient of the special services of Prick and See, then the perp must realize that these operatives were simply paid servants. His next step would be to proceed against their employers. And how are they to protect themselves against an Unknown?

Bradbury, Spec Ops head, has heard rumors of Margaras, an international intelligence organization owing allegiance to no country or any known group. He has discounted the rumors as absurd—where does the money come from? Now he is having second thoughts, and he is not a man who likes to entertain second thoughts.

So why did they alert the masters by starting with the servants? Reluctantly, he recognizes a procedure frequently used by his own department, known as "shaking the tree." They
intended
to alert the masters, hoping to scare them into precipitate, ill-advised action.

"Get me the file on Prick and See all the way back."

The files go back to 1959, twenty-five years. Quite a few of the targets are now dead. It doesn't take him long to find his man: William Seward Hall, the writer, of course. Hall had opposed the use of Prick and See, and resigned in protest over the Spec Ops project.

"You don't understand this Hall character. He won't quit. He'll just come back harder. I say terminate."

"I think Prick and See will teach him a lesson, with just the right shade of show-you."

They taught him a lesson all right, Bradbury thinks: unrelenting hate and deadly persistence. Idiots! You have an enemy like that, you terminate. You don't leave the job half done.

The door dog is a limited artifact. Our most versatile agent is Margaras, the dreaded White Cat, the Tracker, the Hunter, the Killer, also known as the Stone Weasel. He is a total albino. All his body hair is snow-white, and his eyes are pearly white disks that can luminesce from within, a diffuse silver light, or can concentrate into a laser beam. Having no color, he can take all colors. He has a thousand names and a thousand faces. His skin is white and smooth as alabaster. His hair is dead white, and he can curl it around his head in a casque, he can ruffle it or stick it up in a crest, and he's got complete control of all the hairs on his body. His eyebrows and eyelashes flare out, feeling for the scent. His ass and genital hairs are wired for a stunning shock or a poison deadly as the tentacles of the Sea Wasp.

There are those who say we have violated the Articles by invoking Margaras. He is too dangerous. He can't be stopped once he gets the scent. He has not come justa smella you.

As Margaras closes in, the light waxes brighter and brighter with a musky smell flaring to ozone as the light reeks to a suppurating electric violet. Few can breathe the reeking, seeking light of Margaras. Nothing exists until it is observed, and Margaras is the best observer in the industry.

"Open up, Prick. You got a Venusian in there."

"I'll kill you, you filthy sod!"

LIGHTS—ACTION—CAMERA

The chase comes to a climax. All around him dogs howl and whimper and scream and moan as Margaras moves closer.

"What you want with me?"

"What you asking me for?"

Give him the light now, right in the face, enough to see the worn red upholstery of the first-class seat with a brass number through his transparent fading shell, fading with a stink of impacted mortality, a final reek of hate from shrieking silence, the pustules on his face swell and burst, spattering rotten venom in the breakfast room.

"Mrs. Hardy, help! He's gone bloody mad! Call the police! Call an ambulance!"

Margaras can follow a trail by the signs, the little signs any creature leaves behind by his passage, and he can follow a trail through a maze of computers. All top-secret files are open to him. The rich and powerful of the earth, those who move behind the scenes, stand in deadly fear of his light.

The dim silver light of Margaras can invade and wipe out other programs. He is the Call. The Challenge. The Confront. His opponents always try to evade his light, like the squid who disappears in a spray of ink.

Preferences in food and wines, evaluation of pictures, music, poetry and prose. An identikit picture emerges, charged with the energy of hundreds of preferences and evaluations. He can hide in snow and sunlight on white walls and clouds and rocks, he moves down windy streets with blown newspapers and shreds of music and silver paper in the wind.

Being albino, Margaras can put on any eye color, hair color, skin color, right up until he "whites" the target. "Push," "off," "grease," "blow away" are out: "White" is in. The White Purr: without color, he attracts all colors and all stains; without odor, he attracts all odors, the fouler the better, into smell swirls, whirlpools, tornados, the dreaded Smell Twisters, creating a low-pressure smell wake so that organic animals explode behind them, the inner smells sucked into the Stink Twister round and round faster faster throwing out a maelstrom of filth in all directions, sucking in more and more over a cemetery and the coffins all pop open and the dead do a grisly Exploding Polka. Privies are sucked out by the roots with old men screaming and waving shitty Montgomery Ward catalogues.

Odors can also be the most subtle and evocative agent for reaching past memories and feelings.

"The nuances, you understand."

The wise old queer Cardinal, oozing suave corruption, slowly slithers amber beads through his silky yellow fingers as the beads give off tiny encrusted odor layers. "Ah, a whiff of Egypt . . ."

And what about Kim?

"Oh," Joe shrugs. "I guess that one can take care of himself in the Land of the Dead. At least he won't have any mail-order croaker pulling him out half-baked. Not with that 45-70 hollow point just under the left shoulder blade."

Joe puts out a hook baited with a blond Nordic
Übermensch
from the 1936 Olympics—Herr Hellbrandt. Yes, hell-burnt . . . 

Ah, a strike! Postmark is Medellin, Colombia. Honorarium of two hundred thousand dollars a year (or other currency of his choice) to take over a center devoted to genetic research. If interested he can contact our representative in Mexico City . . . Abogado Hernandez Desamparado, 23 avenida Cinco de Mayo, Mexico, D.F.

Joe has confided in no one. But they know. They are waiting for him. He decides to leave some future shock behind him: notarized clinical notes and X rays demonstrating the results of magnetic field therapy, citing cases of total remission of cancerous tumors that would, with conventional treatment, have been fatal in a few weeks or months. The cases cover many types of cancer, with instructions for building the therapeutic device from materials easily and cheaply obtained. The device is basically Reich's Orgone Accumulator, a construction of organic material lined with iron or steel wool. Joe has added a number of alterations, notably magnetized iron, which vastly potentiate the action.

Cancer seems as immutably real and exempt from intervention as a nuclear blast. The explosive replication of cells? Once it starts, it is like an atom bomb that has already detonated. Death is an end product of purpose, of destiny. Something to be done in a certain time, and once it is done there is no point in staying around. Like a bullfight. Destiny = Ren.

A cancer cell, a virus has no destiny, no human purpose beyond endless replication. It has no work to finish and no reason to die. Give it a reason to die and it will. The ultimate purpose of cancer and all virus, is to replace the host. So instead of trying to kill the cancer cells, help them to replicate and to replace host cells.

Produce the first all-virus rat, it's more efficient—instead of all these elaborate organs we have just cells, an undifferentiated structure. Instead of endeavoring to keep the rat alive, we will endeavor to keep the cancer cells alive. Instead of trying to keep the patient alive, we will keep his Death alive. If he can become Death, he cannot die.

Death is incidental to function. When function is accomplished, death occurs. So instead of joining the retarded medical profession and desperately trying to keep Death out, why not let Death all the way in?

Joe saw cancer as just another milepost. Cancer came into its own with the Industrial Revolution, a cancer model dedicated to producing identical replicas on an assembly line. The analogy carries over to human cells and replication, as solid as auto parts, tin cans, bottles and printed words. Joe didn't give a shit about cancer. He wasn't there to save human lives. He was there to alter the human equation.

The notes are published in the Alternative Press with detailed plans. Soon testimonials are pouring in from all over the country.
Life
does a "debunking" story. Warnings from the FDA, the AMA and the cancer institute quickly escalate to shrill hysteria. And mutiny in the ranks: Doctor X, a respected oncologist practicing in a midwestern city, asks that his name be withheld: "I have seen it with my own eyes . . . the remission and complete cure of hitherto incurably cancerous conditions."

All over America, people are making rechargers in various shapes, of pyramids, space suits and suits of armor, set on high towers and deserts and mountains, in undersea bubbles, built into hollow trees in deep forests overgrown with vines and orchids, in cliff dwellings and caves, in boats and dirigibles. There is no stopping it, and the medical bureaucracy would soon regret their ill-advised and futile attempt. Nurtured on self-deceit, accustomed to obedience and respect, they attempted to "reason" with the enraged patients, or worse, to overawe the mob by sheer presence, which was quickly revealed as a hollow fraud.

Hall has been reading a lot of these doctor books. His own Doctor Benway shines forth as a model of responsibility and competence by comparison. Perhaps the most distasteful book of this genre is entitled
A Pride of Healers
.
To be remembered that it is Pathology who decides a patient got cancer or don't got it. The doctors open it up. Anything looks suspicious, cut off a hunk and send it down to Pathology. The doctors twiddle their scalpels and wait. A green light winks on.

"It's malignant, boys. Let's go. Gotta stay ahead of the Mets."

So in this pride of prowling healers, the runty, ugly, half-impotent pathologist finds a big surgeon humping his old lady. So he frames the adulterous surgeon for prostate cancer and everybody knows there is only one cure. The surgeon is castrated and his nuts sent down to Pathology. Holding the nuts of his enemy in his hand gets him hot and he surprises his wife with a real pimp fuck. He's got another surprise for her: as she comes, he shoves the severed nuts down her throat. As the Germans say,
unappetitlich.

Most of them are not quite so lurid. Just ordinary no-good, greedy, callous, bigoted humans with grossly inflated self-images. Here is Mike Seddons from "Final Diagnosis": attractive, red-haired, empty as a waiting room. How can anyone believe in ESP or anything like that in the face of vast medical complexes, monuments to progress and science and rationality and healing? This wretched specimen has fallen for a nineteen-year-old nurse. They made it in a broom closet in a reek of Mr. Clean. He has proposed. She has accepted.

Then she comes down with bone cancer. They have to take off the left leg
stat,
scalpels crossed it hasn't spread. Does he still want her? She tells him to take five days to think it over. He does. With bleak clarity he sees the years to come. Oh yes, he
can 
see, where his own interests are involved.