The Star-Spangled Future Read online

  Wintergreen had shelled out $100,000,000 for the computer. It was the best damn computer in ! the world. In two minutes and 7.894 seconds it had performed its task. In one succinct word it gave Wintergreen his answer:

  “Negative.”

  Spontaneous remission did not correlate with any external factor. It was still spontaneous; the cause was unknown.

  A lesser man would’ve been crushed. A more conventional man would’ve been dumbfounded. Harrison Wintergreen was elated.

  He had eliminated the entire external universe as a factor in spontaneous remission in one fell swoop. Therefore, in some mysterious way, the human body and/or psyche was capable of curing itself.

  Wintergreen set out to explore and conquer his own internal universe. He repaired to the pharmacy and prepared a formidable potation. Into his largest syringe he decanted the following: Novocaine; morphine; curare; vlut, a rare Central Asian poison which induced temporary blindness; olfactorcaine, a top-secret smell-deadener used by skunk farmers; tympanoline, a drug which temporarily deadened the auditory nerves (used primarily by filibustering Senators); a large dose of benzedrene; lysergic acid; psilocibin; mescaline; peyote extract; seven other highly experimental and most illegal hallucinogens; eye of newt and toe of dog.

  Wintergreen laid himself out on his most comfortable couch. He swabbed the vein in the pit of his left elbow with alcohol and injected himself with the witches’ brew.

  His heart pumped. His blood surged, carrying the arcane chemicals to every part of his body. The Novocaine blanked out every sensory nerve In his body. The morphine eliminated all sensations of pain. The vlut blacked out his vision. The oifactorcaine cut off all sense of smell. The tympanoline made him deaf as a traffic court judge. The curare paralyzed him.

  Wintergreen was alone in his own body. No external stimuli reached him. He was in a state of total sensory deprivation. The urge to lapse into blessed unconsciousness was irresistible. Wintergreen, strong-willed though he was, could not have remained conscious unaided. But the massive dose of benzedrene would not let him sleep.

  He was awake, aware, alone in the universe of hli own body with no external stimuli to occupy himself with.

  Then, one and two, and then in combinations like the fists of a good fast lightweight, the hallucinogens hit.

  Wintergreen’s sensory organs were blanked out, but the brain centers which received sensory data were still active. It was on these cerebral centers that the tremendous charge of assorts hallucinogens acted. He began to see phantom colors, shapes, things without name or form. He heard eldritch symphonies, ghost echoes, ms howling noises. A million impossible smells roiled through his brain. A thousand false pains and pressures tore at him, as if his whole body hit been amputated. The sensory centers of Wintergreen’s brain were like a mighty radio receiver tuned to an empty band—filled with meaningless visual, auditory, olfactory and sensual static.

  The drugs kept his senses blank. The benzedrene kept him conscious. Forty years of being Harrison Wintergreen kept him cold and sane.

  For an indeterminate period of time, he rolled with the punches, groping for the feel of th! strange new non-environment. Then gradually, hesitantly at first but with ever-growing confidence, Wintergreen reached for control. His mini constructed untrue but useful analogies for actions that were not actions, states of being that were not states of being, sensory data unlike an sensory data ever received by the human brain. The analogies, constructed in a kind of calculated madness by his subconscious for the brute task of making the incomprehensible palpable, also enabled him to deal with his non-environment as if it were an environment, translating mental change into analogs of action.

  He reached out an analogical hand and tuned figurative radio, inward, away from the blank waveband of the outside side universe and towards the as-yet-unused waveband of his own body, the internal universe that was his mind’s only possible escape from chaos.

  He tuned, adjusted, forced, struggled, felt his mind pressing against an atom-thin interface. He battered against the interface, an analogical translucent membrane between his mind and his internal universe, a membrane that stretched, flexed, bulged inward, thinned… and finally broke. Like Alice through the Looking Glass, his analogical body stepped through and stood on the Other side.

  Harrison Wintergreen was inside his own body.

  It was a world of wonder and loathsomeness, of the majestic and the ludicrous. Wintergreen’s point of view, which his mind analogized as a body within his true body, was inside a vast network of pulsing arteries, like some monstrous freeway system. The analogy crystallized. It was a freeway and Wintergreen was driving down it. Bloated sacs dumped things into the teeming traffic: hormones, wastes, nutrients. White blood cells careened by him like mad taxicabs. Red corpuscles drove steadily along like stolid burghers. The traffic ebbed and congested like a crosstown rush-hour. Wintergreen drove on, searching, searching.

  He made a left, cut across three lanes and made a right down toward a lymph node. And then he saw it—a pile of white cells like a twelve-car collision, and speeding towards him a leering motorcyclist.

  Black, the cycle. Black, the riding leathers. Black, dull black, the face of the rider save for two glowing blood-red eyes. And emblazoned across the front and back of the black motorcycle jacket in shining scarlet studs the legend: “Carcinoma Angels.”

  With a savage whoop, Wintergreen gunned his analogical car down the hypothetical freeway straight for the imaginary cyclist, the cancer cell.

  Splat! Pop! Cuush! Wintergreen’s car smashed the cycle and the rider exploded in a cloud of fine black dust.

  Up and down the freeways of his circulatory system Wintergreen ranged, barreling along arteries, careening down veins, inching through narrow capillaries, seeking the black-clad cyclists, the Carcinoma Angels, grinding them to dust beneath his wheels…

  And he found himself in the dark moist wood of his lungs, riding a snow-white analogical horse, an imaginary lance of pure light in his hand. Savage black dragons with blood-red eyes and flickering red tongues slithered from behind the gnarled boles of great airsac trees. St. Wintergreen spurred his horse, lowered his lance and impaled monster after hissing monster till at last the holy lung-wood was free of dragons…

  He was flying in some vast moist cavern, above him the vague bulks of gigantic organs, below a limitless expanse of shining slimy peritoneal plain.

  From behind the cover of his huge beating heart, a formation of black fighter planes, bearing the insignia of a scarlet “C” on their wings and fuselages, roared down at him.

  Wintergreen gunned his engine and rose to the fray, flying up and over the bandits, blasting them with his machine-guns, and one by one and then in bunches they crashed in flames to the peritoneum below…

  In a thousand shapes and guises, the black and red things attacked. Black, the color of oblivion, red, the color of blood. Dragons, cyclists, planes, sea-things, soldiers, tanks and tigers in blood vessels and lungs and spleen and thorax and bladder—Carcinoma Angels, all.

  And Wintergreen fought his analogical battles in an equal number of incarnations, as driver, knight, pilot, diver, soldier, mahout, with a grim and savage glee, littering the battlefields of his body with the black dust of the fallen Carcinoma Angels.

  Fought and fought and killed and killed and finally…

  Finally found himself knee-deep in the sea of his digestive juices lapping against the walls of the dank, moist cave that was his stomach. And scuttling towards him on chitinous legs, a monstrous black crab with blood-red eyes, gross, squat, primeval.

  Clicking, chittering, the crab scurried across his stomach towards him. Wintergreen paused, grinned wolfishly, and leapt high in the air, landing with both feet squarely on the hard black carapace.

  Like a sun-dried gourd, brittle, dry, hollow, the crab crunched beneath his weight and splintered Into a million dusty fragments.

  And Wintergreen was alone, at last alone and victorious, the first a
nd last of the Carcinoma Angels now banished and gone and finally defeated.

  Harrison Wintergreen, alone in his own body, victorious and once again looking for new worlds to conquer, waiting for the drugs to wear off, waiting to return to the world that always was his oyster.

  Waiting and waiting and waiting…

  Go to the finest sanitarium in the world, and there you will find Harrison Wintergreen, who made himself Filthy Rich, Harrison Wintergreen who Did Good, Harrison Wintergreen, who Left his Footprints in the Sands of Time, Harrison Wintergreen, catatonic vegetable.

  Harrison Wintergreen, who stepped inside his own body to do battle with Carcinoma’s Angels, and won.

  And can’t get out.

  Introduction to

  All the Sounds of The Rainbow

  Harlan Ellison had gotten me a story assignment on a TV show called The Sixth Sense where hit was one of three story editors. The format had this team of investigators dealing with supernatural or esp occurrences. Anthony Spinner, the creator of the show, and now associate producer, or maybe story consultant, or co-co-story-editor (the staff structure of this production was worthy of a Borgia), wanted a story done around a Russian study of synesthesia which he threw at me.

  Well, this material on synethesiacs was fascinating, but it wasn’t a story, so I got to make one up. Phony gurus, real gurus, and their followers have long been a subject of fascination to me. Now what if there was this scam-artist who really did have supernormal powers…?

  Well that idea was axed at about the time the show was expiring, and for the same reason. The network guidelines required that each week’s paranormal occurrence must be explained away by the end of the show. This made it very hard to get coherent scripts, which was why there were so many story editors, all twisting slowly in the wind.

  And I was left with this story, to do with what I would, all by myself with no formats and no network guidelines…

  All the Sounds of the Rainbow

  Harry Krell sprawled in a black vinyl beanbag chair near the railing of the rough-hewn porch. Five yards below, the sea crashed and rumbled against convoluted black rocks that looked like a fallen shower of meteors half-buried in the warm Pacific sand. He was naked from the waist up; a white sarong fell to his shins, and he wore custom-made horsehide sandals. He was well-muscled in a fortyish way, deeply tanned, and had the long, neat, straight yellow hair of a beach bum. His blue eyes almost went with the beach bum image: clear, empty, but shattered-looking like marbles that had been carefully cracked with a ball-peen hammer.

  As phony as a Southern California guru, Bill Marvin thought as he stepped out onto the sunlit porch. Which he is. Nevertheless, Marvin shuddered as those strange eyes swept across him like radar antennae, cold, expressionless instruments gathering their private spectrum of data. “Sit down,” Krell said. “You sound awful over there.”

  Marvin gingerly lowered the seat of his brown suede pants to the edge of an aluminum-and-plastic beach chair, and stared at Krell with cold gray eyes set in a smooth angular face perfectly framed by medium-length, razor-cut, artfully styled brown hair. He had no intention of wasting any more time on this oily con-man than was absolutely necessary. “I’ll come right to the point, Krell,” he said. “You detach yourself from Karen your way, or I’ll get it done my way.”

  “Karen’s her own chick,” Krell said. “She’s not even your wife anymore.” A jet from Vandenburg suddenly roared overhead; Krell winced and rubbed at his eyes.

  “But I’m still paying her a thousand a month in alimony, and I’ll play pretty dirty before I’ll stand by and watch half of that go into your pockets.”

  Krell smiled, and a piece of chalk seemed to scratch down a blackboard in Marvin’s mind, “You can’t do a thing about it,” he said.

  “I can stop paying.”

  “And get dragged into court.”

  “And tell the judge I’m putting the money in escrow pending the outcome of a sanity hearing, seeing as how I believe that Karen is now mentally incompetent.”

  “It won’t work. Karen’s at least as sane as you are.”

  “But I’ll drag you into court in the process, Krell. I’ll expose you for the phony yon are.”

  Harry Krell laughed a strange bitter laugh and multicolored diamonds of stained glass seemed to flash and shimmer in the sun. “Shall I show you what a phony I am, Marvin?” he said. “Shall I really show you?”

  Waves of thick velvet poured over Bill Marvin’s body. In Krell’s direction, he felt a radiant fire in a bitter cold night. He heard a chord that seemed to be composed of the chiming of a million microscopic bells. Far away, he saw a streak of hard blue metal against a field of loamy brown.

  All in an instant, and then it passed. He saw the sunlight, heard the breakers, then the sound of a high-performance engine accelerating up in the hills that loomed above the beach house. Krell was smiling and staring emptily off into space.

  A tremor went through Marvin’s body. I’ve been a little tense lately, he thought. Can this be the beginning of a breakdown? “What the hell was that?” he muttered.

  “What was what?” said Krell. “I’m a phony, so nothing could’ve happened, now could it, Marvin?” His voice seemed both bitter and smug.

  Marvin blotted out the whole thing by forcing his attention back to the matter at hand. “I don’t care what little tricks you can pull; I’m not going to let you suck up my money through Karen.”

  “You’ve got a one-track mind, Mr. Marvin, what we call a frozen sensorium here at Golden Groves. You’re super-uptight. You know, I could help you. I could open up your head and let in all the sounds of the rainbow.”

  “You’re not selling me any used car, Krell!”

  “Well, maybe Karen can,” Krell said. Marvin followed Krell’s line of sight, and there she was, walking through the glass doors in a paisley muumuu that the sea breeze pressed and fluttered against the soft firmness of her body.

  A ball of nausea instantly formed in Marvin’s gut, compounded of empty nights, cat-fights in court, soured love, dead hopes, and the treachery of his body which still sent ghosts of lust coursing to his loins at the sight of the dyed coppery hair that fell a foot past her shoulders, that elfin face with carbon-steel behind it, that perfect body which she pampered and honed like the weapon it was.

  “Hello, Bill,” she said in a neutral voice. “How’s the smut business?”

  “I haven’t had to do any porn for four months,” Marvin lied, “I’m into commercials.” And then hating himself for trying to justify his existence to her again, even now, when there was nothing to gain or lose.

  Karen walked slowly to the railing of the porch, turned, leaned her back against it, seemed to quiver in some kind of ecstasy. Her green eyes, always so bright with shrewdness, seemed vague and uncharacteristically soft, as if she were good and stoned.

  “Your voice feels so ugly when you’re trying not to whine,” she said.

  “Bill’s threatening to cut off your alimony unless you leave Golden Groves,” Krell said. “He wants to force a sanity hearing and prove that you’re a nut and I’m a crook.”

  “Go ahead and pull your greasy little legal stunts, Bill,” Karen said. “I’m sane and Harry is exactly what he claims to be, and we’d both be delighted to prove it in court, wouldn’t we, Harry?”

  “I don’t want to get involved in any legal hassles,” Krell said coldly. “It’s cot worth it, especially since you won’t have a dime to pay toward your residency fee with all your alimony in escrow.”

  “Harry!”

  Her eyes snapped back into hard focus like steel shutters, and the desperation turned her face Into the kind of ugly mask you see around swimming pools in Las Vegas. Marvin smiled, easily choking back his pity. “How do you like your little tin guru now?” he said.

  “Harry, you can’t do this to me, you can’t just turn me off like a lamp over a few hundred dollars!”

  Harry Krell climbed out of his beanbag chair. There was
no expression on his face at all; except for those strange, shattered-looking eyes, he could’ve been any aging beach bum telling the facts of life to an old divorcee whose money had run out. “I’m no saint,” he said. “I had an accident that scrambled my brains and gave me a power to give people something they want and fixed it so that’s the only way I can make a living—a good living.”

  He smiled, and broken glass seemed to jangle inside Bill Marvin’s skull. “I’m in it for the money,” said Harry Krell. “So you better clean up your own mess, Karen.”

  “You’re such a rotten swine!” Karen snarled, her face suddenly looking ten years older, every subtle wrinkle a prophet of disaster to come.

  “But I’m the real thing,” said Harry Krell, “I deliver.” Slowly and haltingly he began walking toward the doors that led to his living room, like someone moving underwater.

  “Bill—”

  It was all there in his name on her lips two octaves lower than her normal tone of voice, the slight hunch forward of her shoulders, the lost, scared look in her eyes. It was a trick, and it was where she really lived, both at the same time. He wanted to punch her in the guts and cradle her in his arms.

  “If you’re crazy enough to think you’re going to talk me—”

  “Just let me walk you to your car. Please.”

  Marvin got up, brushed off his pants, sighed, and, suddenly drained of anything like emotion, said tiredly, “If you think you need the exercise that bad, lady.”

  They walked silently through a slick California-rustic living room, where Krell sat on a green synthetic-fur-covered couch stroking a Siamese cat as if it were a musical instrument. On either side of him were a young male hippie in carefully cut shoulder-length hair and a well-tailored embroidered jeans suit, and a minor middle-aged television actor whose name Marvin could not recall.