CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

 

Hank peeled his lips back, jamming his teeth together as though trying to eat them. For an old geezer who could look quite handsome when in his normally pleasant mood, these occasional metamorphoses were disturbing.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“Los bastardos!” he went on, ignoring me. “Now we have them—you have them, trussed and bundled in your vehicle—but they have us! What can we do with them? What? What?”

“I’ve been asking myself those same three questions, Hank—”

“At any moment, I expect hordes of policemen, deputies, FDA Gestapos, CDC investigators, and the Surgeon General in full Halloween uniform bursting upon us. I expected it already, before now even. Should they do this and into custody take us, and from out of the automobile extract them, can you guess what will happen?”

“Yeah. Sure. I imagine—”

“No, you can imagine nothing horrible enough. They will give both Belking and Wintersong Nobel Prizes and free tickets to Disneyland while executing us instantly in my driveway.”

“Hank, it’s always darkest just before...?”

“Before Midnight, no matter what they say. Ai!” Hank flipped both hands into the air, turned, began pacing again.

I looked at Dane. She still wore an expression indicating a kind of bewilderment mixed with burgeoning apprehension. It was an expression that had been burgeoning for some time now.

We’d arrived at Hank’s combined home and office on Mulberry Street twenty minutes ago, and he’d greeted us with his normal volubility and enthusiasm. When he’d squinted with concern at my face, which was apparently still somewhat lumpy, and commented that I looked “seriously distorted,” I told him it was merely a temporary residue from my disagreement with Hobart Belking and he should see the other guy, then introduced him to Dane Smith.

It was of course, their first meeting, and Hank gazed upon her as a miser might contemplate his millions, saying, “Hermosissima! You are ravishing, Miss Smith. It is a great pleasure for my heart to meet one so most-beautiful.”

Then he bent forward and kissed her hand like one of those thin-mustached European fruitcakes, and I could tell she liked him already.

After moving to Hank’s inner office, we’d spent five minutes filling each other in with bits of info and fact not previously covered, then another five minutes discussing pros and cons of our immediate circumstances. Our immediate circumstances didn’t look too hot.

That’s when Hank had begun pacing. Pacing, and trailing streams of words behind him. Words, phrases, whole sentences and even paragraphs about allopathic myopia, about non-existent diseases that were terminal only when treated with orthodox futility and fatality, and also how great was the opportunity almost-now to cure the madness of medicine and restore virtue to the long-deceived people—those millions of senselessly sick, cruelly crippled, needlessly dying, the millions already bereaved and surviving in sorrow their beloved dead—by awakening them all from their medicated sleep and beginning the ending of their bassackward faith in gods of death and priests of perversion... but also how perilously endangered already-now, not tomorrow but today, tonight, now, was that great and splendid hope, how precariously balanced it was, how fragile this opportunity which might not come again.

It was Henry Hernandez, M.D., at his best and worst and somewhere-in-between emitting intelligent unintelligibilities at ricochet angles, and a lot of it went right by me, because I was by now used to this sort of verbal passion, Dane, however, was not. Just as Belking’s televised words about me—when she hadn’t been forewarned, or prepared for them—caused her considerable consternation, so did her unfamiliarity with Hank’s eruptions.

As Hank paced near her and started to turn, Dane said “Dr. Hernan—Hank.” It had become Hank and Dane about a half-minute after they met. “You’re getting me all confused. Talking about gods and priests and last-chance and...well, forgive me, it sounds crazy.”

“Is crazy.” He stopped, standing about two feet from Dane, eyes fixed on her face. “Not me, them. Their system of healing that cripples, their curing that kills. Most crazy, millions of people disasterized by this medical decay and corruption, still believe it is health care.”

“Hank, that’s—”

“I agreed already, crazy. I will explain.”

Hank stopped, was silent for several seconds, apparently deliberating, hesitating. Then, looking fiercely into Dane’s eyes as though trying to see the back of her head, he said slowly. “Yes, I will trust you. A woman of such radiant loveliness outside, if I cannot trust her inside then the word trust is useless, should be rubbed out from dictionaries.”

He turned took three or four paces away, came back and faced Dane again. “I will explain as best I can quickly, some of what I have said already to Sheldon. But I do not have two days with you. And you are involved with us now, you should understand what is at stake is not us, not a few little people, is much greater, is all of us, is all.”

He paused, breathing slowly and deeply. Then, eyes burning into Dane’s, he placed one hand on each of her shoulders, spoke rapidly and without pause for at least two minutes, spoke with such rising and at last brrnnnggging intensity that it transfixed even my attention—and I’d heard most of it before. Dane stood unmoving, her eyes steady on his, lips parted, entranced as though hypnotized.

Into those two minutes Hank somehow compressed hours of argument he’d hurled at me, jumping from one point to the next and thundering on to another like a man driving spikes with a verbal sledge hammer, but he also added for Dane a few things I’d never heard before. Not from him, not from anyone else.

I heard him say or shout again: “The symptoms are not the disease... Nothing is incurable... allopathic insanity mandated by law makes truth a crime. Plus, new to me: Callous killing of millions for profit... murder for power and perhaps pleasure... drugging with fluoride and killing with chemotherapy.”

Then more quietly, Hank spoke of dozens of separate lawsuits already in preparation, many ready for filing. Each was aimed at a different point—weakness, dangerous delusion, legally-protected coercion—in the body of what Hank called the “allopathic monopoly that rules us the same way it attacks diseases: not through persuasion and truthful argument but by deception and terrible force.” In more than half of the lawsuits, plaintiffs were either POCUEH itself or members of that organization; the rest were a variety of groups and individuals supporting animal rights, patient rights, human rights.

At the end, Hank slowly dropped his hands from Dane’s shoulders and said, “If we succeed, if we win, we will win for all of America, medical freedom, not an imposition of more coercion for our own alleged good, but the removal of such coercion—for the first time since this land-of-free USA was born, true medical freedom, the right of each citizen to choose whatever health care he wishes and can pay for, and his equal right to reject any so-called medical protection or treatment chosen for him by others even if falsely called free medicare. Then the people may survive and grow strong, at least it will be possible, there will be hope. But if we are prevented, or lose this chance to win all, I fear there will not again be an opportunity like this. If we lose I fear there will not be hope any more. It will be already too late.”

Dane looked a little dazed. She blinked, moistened her lips, then said the first words she’d spoken for quite a while—the first words anyone except Hank had spoken for a while. “It...it can’t be that bad, Hank, can it?”

“Can be. Is. Is worse all the time, unless stopped will become much worse, tragically so, with unimaginable death. Already is planned mandatory-for-all immunization with poisonous miasmas....”

Hank let the words trail off, then walked behind his desk, leaned forward toward us with both hands flat on the desktop. He looked at Dane, then me, back to Dane again.

“I have been arguing to you that every belief and almost every practice of official medicine today is worse than useless—is harmful. If this is true—and it is true—how much harm can people suffer without losing joy in life, if not life itself? Look with me at a single piece of this worseness, because it is so important now, this minute: IFAI. All who listen only with ears to the many voices of official medicine, including those of great police powers in our own U.S. Government, will become hopelessly convinced this Invariably Fatal Acquired Illness, this brand new one is the most terrible threat to life now attacking the earth—but only because so many self-appointed experts, plus radios and televisions and newspapers say all-together the same thing. It is not something horrible that is, only something said, but said over and over and over again until it is like, Don’t-think-of-purple-elephants until you can’t think of anything but purple elephants.”

Hank hissed a bunch of air through his nose. “These same ear-thinkers will become convinced also their peril is increasingly desperate because it had been said eight million times the illness is fatal and there is not yet any cure—by which the medicine business does not really mean cure, but only, patentable drugs and drugs and more drugs, and poisonous vaccines, to be sold for billions of profits. Which should make transparent to you both how it will work out, how it always works out. Si?”

He gazed briefly at Dane, then me, as though expecting some kind of brilliant A-ha! He didn’t get any. So Hank sped on, “When all is lost almost, when hope is gone almost, or when everybody is terrified enough, there will be announced a ray of exciting hope in the hopelessness and ninety-nine times out of ninety-nine, the hope will be something patented by a drug company.”

“Outside—” Hank inclined his head toward the driveway, not moving his hands from the desk— “are Belking and Wintersong, two people of greatest importance in this danger from IFAI, its prevention, its cure. Wintersong has discovered a vaccine, will oversee testing, perfecting, lend to it his great prestige. Belking will manufacture—has manufactured tons of the Wintersong vaccine, will promote it and sell it and become enriched from it. Soon there will be other new drugs—”

“Hank, wait, has manufactured tons? Tons?” That was Dane, again. “The FDA hasn’t even given final approval for the vaccine yet. Only Phase Two clinical testing on human, not approval for mass immunization. And tons would mean...”

“Tons, yes. Nitrogen-frozen, all ready. Enough for everybody. You, me, Sheldon, and a quarter-billion customers besides us, just in the U.S.A. Do not repeat this, please, could get two people I love dearly in much trouble, meaning dead. There was recently a secret meeting—”

Hank stopped, and smiled. Then he relaxed, sat down in his padded swivel chair, and said less seriously than before, “Sounds so melodramatic, verdad? Like spy movies, Hitchcock plots. Well, sometimes life is melodramatic—and death, too, melodrama with unhappy ending. The secret meeting I mentioned was in Lausanne, Switzerland. During three days there, plans were made for acceleration of the IFAI machine from epidemic to pandemic, more cases diagnosed under new definitions, danger increasing like crazy, this together with much promotion of the IFAI vaccine—new releases, TV reports about how safe the vaccine is, like mother’s milk used to be, eighty-nine point nine percent protection, so on, so on. This to be followed by lobbying Congress, and other criminals in Washington, D.C., for passage of a law—already written by the lawyers—requiring universal immunization against IFAI, on mandatory vaccination of everybody, to protect everybody.”

With only a momenarty pause, Hank continued, “Even when I condemn stupid upside-downness of allopathic medicine, I am not condemning all allopathy, all upside-down doctors. Most are good men, good people, lousy doctors—because they all try to squash symptoms with poisonous drugs and pills, that’s what allopathy is; hit-it-till-it’s-dead. Their problem, and ours, is that they have been taught lies and believed them.

Hank stopped, frowned, then said slowly and deliberately, “It is easy to prevent an epidemic that does not exist. But if you are crippled or killed by a doctor’s sincere stupid treatment of your symptoms, does it matter to you that he is not evil but merely deluded? Does it make any difference to your injured or dying loved one, friend, child? Please, do not be yourself stupid or hear what I have not said. I have not said all in today’s medicine are evil, are liars, are some kind of monsters. I have said most are good people, maybe misguided people but possessed of virtue, intending healing while doing unintended harm, I have said most are. Most, not all.”

“Because some, a few, understand the truth as well as I, or you or anyone else, they know very well what they are doing—and, monstrously, continue doing it even knowing what they know. Those are the few who move the rest, who speak for all, who profit most from the drugs and pills and mass immunizations for disease-names they have invented. Over and over it is the same people—many times familiar names if you look for them—speaking new versions of old lies and announcing again and again new epidemics to replace used-up ones. If you watch, and remember, you will also recognize the same old Heaven-and-Hell scare-you-to-death alarms and warnings, and panic-button pushing in a hand-set for the Swine Flu or AIDS or IFAI bugshit along with just-patented approved poisons guaranteed to cure the so-called incurable disease. Those who orchestrate this, who plan and promote and profit most are not ignorant or deluded, they are evil. And it is those few who must be faced, who must be confronted and confounded, or all is lost.”

Hank stopped, this expression grave.

I was shocked. I hadn’t heard him sound so down and pessimistic before, and until now he’d never spoken of all being “lost.”

But his sour expression, and apparent depression, was momentary. After a few seconds he stood up again, stuck both hands in his back pockets of his trousers, and said briskly, “We have two of the worst outside, wrapped up by Sheldon like cocoons. Two of those who know well what they are doing, two of the worst. But they will never admit they know, will not confess their part in this monstrous deception. Even if they did, to us, they would later deny—successfully, for we are already discredited while they are gods of medicine and money—”

“Hank, deception?” That was Dane again. “And monstrous? I don’t think you meant what happened to the Vungers.”

“I didn’t.”

“And after what you just said, I’m not sure I believe any of it, but I certainly don’t believe you if you’re suggesting attempts to control the IFAI epidemic are some kind of deception. Because there’s no question it’s a terrible disease, a plague, people are dying—”

“Dane, my dear, people are dying all the time. And they die of whatever doctors put on death certificates, yes? People die of chemotherapy or massive uncontrollable infection after chemotherapy and their death certificates all say some kind of cancer. Old men and women in nursing homes die of over-drugging with psychotropic and sedatives and their death certificates report failure of heart, lungs, kidney, whatever—at death everything fails. So name any one of those failures and it’s true. Babies die within days of hypodermic injections to protect them against seven deadly dangers and their death certificates say ‘SIDS,’ or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which is acceptable medical tautology like dead due to dying. You say no?”

Hank paused, waiting for whatever comment Dane might wish to make. She didn’t make any, remained silent, and I thought she looked a little frightened. Whether it was because of Hank himself, or what he’d been saying, I didn’t know; but her expression was almost one of alarm.

Hank continued, “Add up all those diagnoses, misdiagnoses, guesses, and deceptions from all those death certificates and they turn into statistics. Medical statistics of morbidity, mortality, disease-name incidence also epidemics. In USA we have more different epidemics than anybody, we are lousy with them: epidemics of heart disease, other cardiovascular diseases, cancer diseases, practically everything is diseases. Consider the Swine Flu epidemic. We know now—there wasn’t any, not a single case, it didn’t happen, didn’t exist, it and the Swine Flu virus were made up by those ‘few,’ the death gods, I have mentioned. Since there was not anything resembling a Swine Flu virus anywhere in all of existence it was difficult to make a vaccine from it. But by sheer persistence they managed to do it anyhow. Then they shot barrels of whatever it was into millions of humans to protect them from it. Gave them millions or billions of the people’s money. Or consider the AIDS epidemic. Which, alas, is also neither a disease nor infection—”

“Stop it!” That wasn’t me this time; it was Dane. She continued somewhat heatedly, “That’s a terrible thing to imply when thousands of people are dying...” She let the words trail off, apparently recalling what Hank had said to her the last time she’d mentioned deaths attributed to IFAI.

Then, even more heatedly, almost angrily, she went on, “The entire scientific world can’t be wrong! What if you’re wrong? What if the IFAI epidemic is getting worse, and Dr. Wintersong really has developed a vaccine to prevent it? If you had your way, you’d make people afraid of being immunized, you’d allow them to refuse...” Dane stopped again, shaking her head, and finally said simply, “Damn you!”

“I know,” Hank said gently. “Is difficult. We are so used to letting experts do to us what they think should be done it has become almost habit to agree even when experts are lunatics. That is most dangerous in medicine, where truth can improve and prolong our lives, but lies—even simple error if inflicted upon all—can hasten all our deaths. You say maybe they are right, I am wrong. If so, so what? How many thousands, or millions, can my error sicken or kill? My error does nothing to people, it leaves them alone. But if I am right? What might results be of their error? And what if it is not error but deliberate design, part of a monstrous purpose kept secret from its victims?”

Hank stepped from behind his desk, began pacing slowly again, both hands still in his hip pockets. “Concerning Invariably Fatal Acquired Illness, this deadly IFAI, you also say the entire scientific world can’t be wrong. Of course it can be. Usually is. But where do you get this ‘entire’ anyway? How about Dr. Hernandez, me? I am part of the scientific world. So are several hundred physicians in POCUEH plus many biologists and virologists and engineers and housewives and husbands. Plus thousands more in USA and around the world. But their voices are like mine—only those I speak to within earshot, in person, like you and Sheldon, know I believe most IFAI promoters are dangerous ignoramuses or worse. Such unacceptable hearsay remains private, is not published, is not written in newspapers or verified on TV.”

Hank flashed a quick smile at me, then turned and began pacing again, saying, “I have unusual sources of information—some of it secret, or supposed to be many thousands in POCUEH, plus people in dozens of other organizations working with us, even a few in CDC, NIH, FDA, and elsewhere. So I can tell you about results from the first test of Wintersong’s IFAI vaccine. Of one thousand mice, in ten weeks, four hundred died. So they started over by cremating the four-hundred dead mice along with all records about them, saying the test was with only the remaining six-hundred mice.”

I heard Dane suck in her breath. Then she said, “That’s not possible. Hank, that’s deliberate fraud, outright deception. Scientists wouldn’t do that.”

Hank stopped pacing near us, smiled at Dane. “Among those six hundred mice, many developed malignant tumors, others staggering gait, a few developed a peculiar semi-paralysis with tremors, just lay in their cages and wiggled, trembled, jerked.”

Dane pulled her head to one side, eyes squeezed shut, but she didn’t say anything.

“So that experiment was entirely abandoned,” Hank went on pleasantly. “Meaning it never happened. Wintersong perfected his vaccine some more, maybe diluted it with Coca Cola made with fluoridated water, nobody has informed me of this so I am guessing. The next experiment was five hundred guinea pigs injected with reduced doses of the bugshit—the vaccine. Only two percent died completely. I have heard the most recent animal tests, which were fully reported to the Food and Drug Administration, achieved a zero percent mortality, complete protection against IFAI, and minimal side effects.”

Dane still looked as if she’d swallowed something sour. So I said, “How much of that was exaggeration, Hank? Or pure invention?”

“Only the Coca Cola.”

“But haven’t there been human tests since then, trying the vaccine out on people?”

“Of course, is the only way to make some kind of record for FDA to approve. Even devout vivisectionists know what happens to mice and guinea pigs and elephants is a little different from what happens with people. So three thousand people got to volunteer for experimental protection against IFAI. No fatalities. I think six died from profound immune-system depression resulting in antibiotic-resistant pneumonia. But those deaths were not attributable to the vaccine, since all six people obviously died of pneumonia, which was acceptable.”

Hank took a deep breath, looked from me to Dane and said intensely, “I do not exaggerate, we are truly in peril. Because when medical opinions become laws enforced by the State, any bassackward ‘authorized-and-approved’ whim can become law of the land and then rational argument is ended—illegal, forbidden!”

After thirty seconds I was really getting twitchy. Five seconds more and I said, “Well, ah...”

Hank said soberly, “I do not know how to stop the forces of our own government, of medicine, mega-business, and secret unnamed assassins from achieving their determination to immunize and drug everybody to death. I can not be sure now what will happen to our hundred lawsuits. I do not know how to prevent our imminent arrest, torture, and execution. It is almost incidental, but I do not even know what to do with—” he waved a hand toward his driveway.

Yeah, his driveway where sat Dr. Wintersong’s black Cadillac. In which Cadillac was Wintersong, plotting; and Belking, grunting and wiggling murderously. Assuming they hadn’t suffocated.

We all sat in lengthening silence. It stretched, thickened. And my mind was blank. At first. But then pictures began moving unbidden behind my eyes, slowly swirling among fragments of thought.

I recalled the first time I’d seen Hank...the flip book of Jock-Jock with his head snapping forward, lips spreading, the pale brown eyes and velvety skin of Lucinda, and the sound of precious Precious squeaking “Maaa!” I remembered beautiful Rusty, dying, dead, his brown eyes glazing into orbs of glass, and ugliness of the Vunger’s severed heads, Helga’s still, empty eyes, Guenther’s wild eyes rolling, Grinner’s body jerking as my bullets hit him, thick redness spilling from his mouth, flames licking at palm leaves and turning freeze-dried animals into ashes reaching for rows of mounted heads bolted against the walls.

My mind stopped, froze briefly, then moved again. One thought, one picture, stayed with me, melted, changed, and I felt a slow surge of warmth rise up in me and flush my face. I didn’t remember getting to my feet, but I was out of my chair, standing, then stepping to the edge of Hank’s desk.

I leaned forward, resting my hands on the desktop, and said rapidly, “Maybe there’s a way. What do you think of this?”

And for a full minute I laid it on him, starting with the picture that had melted in my mind and then building it up, getting excited as my own words began to help me visualize the scene more clearly, watching it work.

When I finished, Hank frowned, thinking, looking fierce.

Behind me, Dane said almost shrilly, “Shell, you can’t, you can’t do that!”

I glanced at her, smiling slightly. “Sure I can.”

“But that’s... too awful, too cruel—he might die!”

“Yeah,” I said, “I suppose he might. With any luck.”

Then Hank began nodding briskly, knifelike nose slicing the air. “It is possible, I think. At least, since I am a doctor, the medical parts can be consummated perhaps...probably. The rest, that will be up to you mostly.”

“Will be? Does that mean you think it could work.”

“Si. At least, is possible. If successful, most of our problems might be solved, partly, maybe, mostly.”

“Then you’ll give it a shot?”

Hank stopped frowning fiercely. His face smoothed, the bright blue eyes became brighter, almost glowing. At last, he smiled.

“Si!”

And I said, grinning, “Bueno!”

The game was afoot.

Some of it excited me, some worried me, and some of it plain scared the hell out of me.

But I knew how we were really going to do it. God help us.