Jitterbug Perfume Part 18

"Death is the fly in everybody's ointment.

"Death has never been acceptable to humanity, and 'tis less so today.

"To the religious chap, I say, if G.o.d loves ye, he wouldn't sicken ye and then murder ye. To the rational fellow, and tp the hedonist, as well, L say, death makes a mockery of your logic and your pleasure, alike.

"Folks can never be truly happy, or truly free, or even truly sane as long as they got to be expectin' the vigor to decline and the swatter to fall.

"So, darlin', I pushed aside everything else, cleared me jail cell o' professional journals and scholarly books and, yes, girlie magazines, too, although Alobar was to teach me that was a mistake, and I vowed to dedicate me every erg o' energy to this modest pursuit: the eradication o' death."

Priscilla looked at him with respectful disbelief. "Well, frankly," she said, "I've got to cla.s.sify that under the label of beating the old head against the old brick wall."

"Indeed?"

"Why, yes, Wiggs. Of course. Everything that's alive was born, and everything that was born has got to die. There's no getting around it. It's the law of the universe."

Nude though he was, Dr. Dannyboy drew himself up like a bank president. He tapped his patch portentiously, like a master of ceremonies tapping a microphone. Then, in a surprisingly soft and even tone, he said: "The universe does not have laws.

"It has habits.

"And habits can be broken."

Above Seattle, the many-b.u.t.tocked sky continued to grind. It taxed the wipers, ragged and lame, that limped, complaining every step of the way, back and forth across Ricki's winds.h.i.+eld; first plangent, then lambent, then plangent again, it addressed the tarpaper roof of V'lu's motel, adding an extra dimension to her dreams; it stacked its liquid telegrams against the windowpanes of the Last Laugh Foundation.

Ricki pulled the VW into the driveway of her duplex, killed the engine (a mercy killing), and dashed for her door. She ran not to minimize rain-soak but in order to catch the ring of the telephone should Pris be on the line.

A horned man with the haunches of a goat forced his way into V'lu's dream. The dreamscape was lit by a yellow flame, and there was a suck suck sound as the creature, advancing on her, pulled his hooves in and out of soupy mud. V'lu was awakened by the pounding of her own heart. She was surprised and disturbed to find her p.u.s.s.y quite wet. Realizing that the man in the dream and the man on the bottle were the same, she wisely removed the bottle from under her pillow and buried it beneath the neatly folded clothes in her suitcase. In the darkness, tinted slightly by a seepage of NO VACANCY neon, she walked to the window. Although it was permanently sealed, through it she could smell the rain. Seattle rain smelled different from New Orleans rain, thought V'lu. She was right. New Orleans rain smelled of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder, and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smelled of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath.

Except to the extent that it enhanced the coziness of their fireside chat, Priscilla and Wiggs were oblivious to the rain. It was simply there in the background, like the feeble fire in the grate. In the foreground were hormones, questions, and wild ideas.

Priscilla was willing to accept Dr. Dannyboy's notion that mortality was the princ.i.p.al source of misery for the human race. She might, moreover, sympathize with his painful conclusion that his previous philosophy had been a sham because it had been friendly to death, accommodating it, making excuses for it, even celebrating our vulnerability to it. But his apparently sincere conviction that he could s.n.a.t.c.h the mouse hair and remove the scimitar struck her as the kind of high-pitched delusion that can shatter a man's mind like a cut-gla.s.s punching bag.

"Wiggs," she said, "all those strange drugs you took, jungle berries and Amazon sap and stuff, not to mention regular old LSD, do you think they might have, you know, physically, uh, barbecued your brain?"

"Oh, no, darlin', none o' that. Sure and they destroyed some cells, no doubt about it, but 'twas for the good. If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'."

At that, even the rain backed away.

Things were quiet for a while, what with the slack in the weather and a conversational pause. After a bit, Wiggs took her nipple in his lips, applying a rubbery, rolling pressure, like Captain Queeg worrying those steel peas in his fingers during the Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Boingl The little pink pea stiffened with pleasure, much as an aged veteran will sometimes stiffen with patriotism. Pris was beginning to experience a resurgence of powerful urges in her loins when all at once there was a thumping noise from the floor above them.

"What's that?" she asked.

Wiggs spat out the nipple. "Morgenstern. 1 hope he doesn't wake Huxley Anne '

"What's he doing up there?"

"Oh, 'tis a dance that he does, a dance against dying."

"Wiggs, what is going on in this nuthouse? I mean, you don't have a laboratory on the whole blessed premises, but you've got a n.o.bel chemist dancing with himself at three in the morning-or is he dancing with a full-grown kangaroo? It sounds like it-and do you actually believe you're going to live forever? Tell me you don't believe it. Please."

"I don't believe it."

"You don't?" She sounded relieved.

"No, I don't believe that Wiggs Dannyboy will be livin'

forever, but future generations will, Huxley Anne quite likely will, and even so, I expect to outlast me detractors. I could see me hundred-and-twentieth birthday, I could easily."

"But how? And why? Is this some sort of grandiose and rococo midlife crisis? Are you that afraid of getting old? Aging is the most natural thing in the world."

He snorted. "Sure and there's where you're b.l.o.o.d.y mistaken, me darlin'. There's where you're as wrong as garters on a nun." He snorted again, and his knuckle began rapping at his eye patch like a mongoloid woodp.e.c.k.e.r drilling for worms in a poker chip. "Agin" is a disease. Maybe disease is natural, but health is natural, too, and a h.e.l.l of a heap more desirable. Rust is natural, wouldn't you say? But rust can be prevented. And if you don't be preventin' it, it will ruin your machinery. Tis the same with agin'. Your man ages because he lets his body rust."

"Rust? I don't-"

"I'm talkin' about the degeneration o' cells. I'm talkin' about the gumming up o' cells with superoxide free radicals and toxins, I'm talkin' about the gradual breakdown o' healthy cell reproduction due to progressive deterioration o' nucleic acids. 'Tis all a form o' rustin'."

"And it can be prevented?"

"It can."

"Why don't doctors know about it then?"

"You might as well ask why didn't mariners in the Middle Ages know the world was round?"

"A few did."

"Sure and a few doctors today know the truth of agin'." He paused, gazing into the fire. Eventually, he smiled and said, "Your man, Alobar, he knew the world was round way back then. And in his own fas.h.i.+on, he knows the truth about age."

"Ah, yes, Alobar: the janitor who never rusts."

"Well, until recently he didn't. I should be gettin' back to me story."

"That's for sure."

"A kiss first."

"Mmm."

At Concord, Dr. Dannyboy had cleared his cubicle of journals and papers relating to his erstwhile (and some said, alleged) profession, only to gradually replace them with material relating to gerontology, genetics, and life extension. From prison, he became privy to the latest longevity research at universities in North America, Europe, and j.a.pan, and at private inst.i.tutions such as the Bjorksten Research Foundation, Montesano Laboratories, the Menninger Clinic, and the Inst.i.tute of Experimental Morphology in Soviet Georgia. Allowed one telephone call per week, he found himself, guiltily, dialing a biologist at Cornell or a gerontologist at the University of Nebraska Medical School, rather than his wife and infant daughter in nearby Boston.

It was far from easy, keeping pace with the leading edge of some of the most esoteric science, but Dr. Dannyboy was resourceful and, despite his unfas.h.i.+onable address, charming. What he learned encouraged and delighted him. To be sure, it also frustrated him in the saddest way that there wasn't more effort and money behind rejuvenation research. With an immense national effort, such as the project that brought us the atomic bomb, we could add fifty years to the average life span in no time at all, he was convinced of that. Wiggs also was depressed by the fact that he was unable to benefit personally from the information that he was acc.u.mulating. Nutrition was one area, for example, where he might have done some immediately salubrious work, but, alas, there were few diets on Earth so perfect for rusting out the machinery as the starch-and-sugar blizzard, the fatty acid monsoon of prison fare.

Wiggs began to fall prey to wide swings in mood. One day, brightened by the latest report from the UCLA Medical Center or some such place, he would be as optimistic as a newborn fly in a Mexican restaurant (an insect that might have its own vision "the perfect taco"), but the next day, crushed by the realities of the slowness of underfunded research and the deadliness of prison life, he'd be aboard that nickel submarine that is anch.o.r.ed at the bottom of the Black Lagoon.

Then, late one evening, as Wiggs whispered coa.r.s.e curses at the Capital of Adjectives-the moon-there was an explosion across Middles.e.x County at MIT, at one of the very laboratories that Wiggs was monitoring; and about three months later, as if in slow motion or delayed reaction, that blast blew into Concord Prison a new inmate named Al Barr, who would soon have incandescent beet leaves curling out of the eye of Dannyboy's periscope.

When he first learned about the bombing of the MIT lab, Wiggs was irate. A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus. While other experts in the field spoke of "the challenges presented by the mysterious and implacable process called aging," scientists in the MIT experiment talked about slowing down aging as if that feat were already possible, and they stated publicly that in the future, "society might be able to abolish death from natural causes entirely." Dannyboy admired people who could rescue themselves from modest objectives.

He had expected the "middle-aged" janitor convicted of destroying the lab to be a fundamentalist Christian fanatic, a s.e.xually repressed lout driven loony as an outhouse rat by charlatan evangelists and the ambiguous poetry of the Bible; a knife-nosed, tight-lipped, lost-eyed ignoramus on a self-appointed mission to punish scientists for playing G.o.d, like those peasants who b.u.m down the mad doctor's castle at the conclusion of countless monster movies.

When Wiggs thought of lodging with this yahoo under a common roof, the green Spanish worm of revenge began to turn in his heart.

Therefore he was not only surprised but a bit abashed when Al Barr proved to be the most dignified prisoner in Concord. Straight of spine and sapphirine of eye, Barr appeared poised, intelligent, and master of a certain smile. Whereas Wiggs, on his good days, had a smile that snipped the tense prison air like musical scissors, Barr's smile was on the order of those stone-cut enigmas that, wired to a heroic nerve, grace the faces of cla.s.sical statues. He wore an air of mystery and some very interesting scars.

Having decided that this chap was no ordinary janitor (although it was known that he had swabbed the tiles of Boston's Turkish Bath House for years), and having become increasingly curious about the motives for the vandalism at MIT, and, further, having had little luck in generating conversation with Barr in the exercise yard (where the new inmate was occupied with a strange kind of yoga), Wiggs pulled some strings (had Wiggs been Geppetto, Pinocchio never would have left home) and arranged for Barr to become his cellmate.

The arrangement was acceptable to Alobar, who intuited that the one-eyed Irish drug maniac would be better company than the blue-collar sister-raper with whom he had previously been bunking. Although Alobar never trusted Wiggs completely (Wiggs was open and eccentric in ways the more closed and conservative Alobar found unsettling), the pair slowly, gradually became such friends that Alobar told him his life story. All thousand years of it. Everything.

Well, not quite everything. He told Wiggs more" than he had told Albert Einstein. He told him of exploits in Asia, adventures in French Canada (when Pan, half-mad from the lingering effects of K23, was still close by), which even the reader of these pages has not been told. He told him, more than once, of the perfume that was so strangely significant in . his life. But he never told him how to make the perfume.

He told him almost how to make the perfume. He told him of the jasmine theme, the citric top note, and how he had finally discovered the great elusive and startling base note of beet. Ah, but Alobar, the fox, left something out. He said "beet" to his bunky, but he did not say "beet pollen." If he had, things would have gone differently for several people that we know.

What's more, Alobar forced Wiggs to swear upon his mother's grave, his wife's knickers, the Book of Kells, the fairy hills of County Dublin,- his one good eye, and everything else that he held holy, including whiskey, vision root, the true universe, Huxley Anne's future happiness, and the Salmon That Fed on the Nine Hazel Nuts of Poetic Art, that he would never ever mention to anyone that beet was the secret ingredient in an allegedly unique and wonderful perfume.

Therefore, Wiggs kept the word beet to himself, fine and private, despite his sensitivity to Priscilla's burning curiosity about the comet-tailed vegetable that had extended its crimson orbit into her atmosphere. He did, however, tell her the rest of Alobar's life story. Rather, he told her the highlights of Alobar's life story, for to tell the whole of it would have taken months. As it was, it took a full two hours, what with Pris getting up twice to pee, and Wiggs tiptoeing upstairs three times to check on Huxley Anne.

By the end of the story, Dr. Morgenstern had long since ceased his immortalist jitterbug, the fire was out, the win-dowpanes nearly dry-and Priscilla was practically faint from the knowledge that she was in possession of the ancient bottle that had held the Kudra-baiting, Pan-deodorizing K23.

Finding herself stunned and upended by that knowledge, like a myopic houseguest who has walked into a patio door, Pris groped for st.u.r.dy furniture with which to right herself. "But-" she said, "but if they really truly did live all that time, all those centuries ... I mean, how? It's medically impossible, isn't it? How could they have done it?" She was stalling. She wasn't prepared to talk about the bottle just yet.

"Medically impossible 'tis not. Humanly impossible 'tis not. Can it be done? ye ask. Does koala-bear p.o.o.p smell like cough drops?"

Wiggs then went on, applying an occasional rat-a-tat to the shamrock, to explain Alobar and Kudra's program and how it was based upon the Four Elements. He took each element in turn and did a little number with it.

AIR.

"We relate to air through the breath. Most of us don't breathe properly, which is to say, we take in too little or too much and fail to consume it efficiently. Alobar and Kudra developed a method o' breathin' whereby the inhale and exhale were connected in an uninterrupted rhythm, a continuous, circular, flywheel pattern like a serpent swallowin' its own tail. Their breathin' was deep and smooth and regular. When they brought air into their bodies, they visualized suckin' in as much energy and vitality as possible; when they expelled air, they visualized blowin' out all the staleness and flatness inside o' them.

"Simple, 'tis true, but hardly simplistic when we understand that much o' the cellular damage that leads to tissue breakdown-agin', in other words-is caused by the acc.u.mulation in our bodies o' the toxic by-products o' metabolizin' oxygen. Superoxide free radicals, which is what these garbage molecules are called, combine with fatty acids to produce lipofuscin, which is an unstable, repulsive gunk that clogs up a cell like grease clogs a drain. The more goop ye have gummin' up your cells, the greater the strain on your metabolism, and the more taxed the metabolism the easier 'tis for still more poisons to acc.u.mulate.

"Biological studies have proven that the animals with the longest life spans are those with the lowest rates per body weight of oxygen consumption, apparently because they dump fewer superoxide free radicals in their cells. Since we're stuck with havin' to breathe oxygen until somethin' better comes along-laughin' gas is me own nomination, but so far Nature's not seen fit to make the improvement-we need to learn to consume less of it and to burn it more" efficiently. Sure and that is precisely what your couple, oblivious though they were to the putrid perils o' lipofuscin, succeeded in doin'.

"Proper breathin', in addition, reduces stress, and stress is a major contributor to agin', disease, and death. Alobar had been introduced to the virtues o' slow, relaxed breathin' at Samye lamasery. 'The lungs are not plow yaks," the lamas said, 'so do not drive them. Neither are they potting sheds, so keep them free of cobwebs." What the Bandaloop 'told' him, on the other hand, is impossible to translate, but 'tis obvious, 'tisn't it, darlin', that if a serpent of air is to swallow its tail-thereby perpetuatin' the circle o' life-it must be flexible, not tense."

WATER.

"Water, too, is helpful in alleviatin' stress. How many bloomin' times have ye heard, 'Why don't ye get into a nice hot bath and relax?' Sure, but relaxation may not o' been the primary result of Alobar and Kudra's bathin' rituals, nor was the psychological benefit o' ceremonial purification the main thing, although neither should be underestimated for their effect in promotin' salubrious longevity. O' greater benefit may have been the ability'o' the bathin' ceremony to lower blood temperature.

"Research at Purdue University, the UCLA Medical Center, and other lovely places has demonstrated that agin' can be forced into the slow lane, if not off the road altogether, by decreasin' the body's temperature. Hypothermia not only slows down the metabolic pump, allowin' it to coast a bit and refresh itself, it puts a lid on the autoimmune reactions that, contribute to an organism's deterioration. You see, darlin', our immune systems tend to be trigger-happy, especially at high or 'normal' temperatures, frequently attacking the very cells they hired on to defend-not unlike your police department or your FBI. When body temperature is depressed, the immunological cops remain in the station house playin' checkers, respondin' with their pistols, tear gas, and billy clubs only to genuinely threatenin' situations. The wear and tear this saves on the body is the difference between a cherry and a beater.

"Now, being European, Alobar was less than an enthusiastic partic.i.p.ant when Kudra discovered a thermal spring in one o' the caves, but gradually he came to appreciate the contribution o' the bath to their program. Their procedure was to soak for a half-hour or so, then withdraw to shade for a quarter-hour, repeatin' the process four or five times. The hot water caused their blood to rise to the skin surface, where, once they left the tub, it was in a position to be rapidly cooled. Ye understand? Over a period of centuries, this regular cooling down o' the blood may well have reset their internal thermostats-their hypothalamuses-so that they registered permanently two or three degrees below borin' -and debilitatin'-old ninety-eight point six. In Concord, alas, I never got a chance to take your man's temperature.

" Tis not the whole of it, though. Our bodies, splendid though they be, are as gullible as your widow in love or your form boy on Broadway. The body will fell for the same line from the same slick-talking placebo over and over again. Fortunately, it is usually as much to our advantage to be conned by a placebo as to be blarnied by an Irishman, and that was the case when the hot tub fooled the DNA of Alobar and Kudra into reactin' as if its hosts were back in the womb again. The temperature o' womb fluid is a fairly constant one hundred degrees. That happened to be the temperature o' the cavern spring where your couple bathed in India, and they duplicated it as precisely as possible whenever they heated baths in Constantinople or Europe. Floatin' suspended in one-hundred-degree water as often as they did may have conned their DNA into believin' they were neoembyronic, thus supplyin' them with the strongest and freshest hormones and enzymes, because 'tis the nature of DNA to lavish life-enhancin' goodies upon the fetal and the young, while deprivin' us that is over twenty.

"In the centuries when they traveled the fair circuit, they carted a barrel about with 'em, going to the trouble to fill it nightly with bathwater heated in Kudra's silver teapot. Their patience and persistence paid off. Every time the teapot whistled, your Pale Figure would lay down his scythe and mop his bony brow with a black bandanna: quittin' time on the corpse plantation, the most productive farm on Earth. Sure and Alobar stuck to his bathin' throughout his years in America."

EARTH.

"Trees and houses and diamond mines may attach themselves like lice to this element, but ye know that soil itself is fastened to the belly. Dirt is the mother o lunch.

"There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition, but 'tis obvious that diet must've played an important role in Alobar and Kudra's long-run performance.

"By now, even congenital idiots shut up in cellars in Saskatchewan grain towns are aware that excess body fet promotes infirmity and shortens life expectancy, but are ye familiar with the experiments at Cornell, Montesano Laboratories, the University of California, and the Nebraska Medical School? Severely reduced calorie intake and restricted ingestion o certain amino acids by laboratory animals drastically altered the process of agin'. There was an unfortunate side effect: your animals who were deprived of amino acids suffered from weakened immune systems. However, ye might recall that Alobar and his woman were, in perfect bloomin' counterbalance, strengthenin' their immunological effectiveness by coolin' their blood.

"Your man and his wife ate simply, but apparently they ate with gusto. They consumed small amounts o' food at a time, and let me impress somethin' upon ye, darlin', 'tis the best kept secret o' nutrition that 'tis healthier to eat small amounts o' 'bad' food than large amounts o' 'good.'

"Alobar told me that they fasted for five days each month. Now there's nothin' like periodic fastin' for cleanin' out your pipes, and remember 'tis the acc.u.mulated death o' cells- their failure to reproduce-that ages and kills a body, and 'tis the acc.u.mulation o' toxins that kills a cell. How does your sweet little cell get polluted with toxins? From improper breathin' and improper diet.

"One other thing about your couple's menu. Ye'll be remem-berin', o' course, that they were eaters o' beets. They were your original beetniks, ha ha. Well, 'twas only a few years past that Dr. Benjamin S. Frank discovered that beets build up the blood, stimulate the liver (which is our main organ o' purification), and supply a body with nucleic acid, nuclek acid being absolutely essential to the efficient reproduction o' youthful cell structure. Ta-da!"

(Dr. Dannyboy felt a wee bit guilty about bringing up beets in the context of nutrition while saying nothing about their application in perfumery, a subject that, for the present, at least, was a h.e.l.l of a lot more interesting to Priscilla. In the near darkness, he watched something flicker in her tired violet eyes at his mention of beets. Surely the poor girl didn't think that a good Samaritan was sending her beets in order to improve her diet?) FIRE.

"With the element o' fire, s.e.x enters the picture."

A little too obviously, he squeezed the cheeks of her a.s.s. Not to be outdone, she squeezed the cheeks of his a.s.s. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine s.e.x entering the picture. Would s.e.x enter the picture in a silk robe, or would it be as nude as a platter of cold cuts? Would s.e.x enter the picture from the left or the right? Would it ring first, or would it just slide in slyly, too quick and slippery to be denied; or, would s.e.x barge in forcibly, red-faced and green-bereted, pus.h.i.+ng all other things aside? She was very tired . . .

"Now we know that s.e.x can ease stress, and we know that stress wears out the rubber on the wheel o' life. But s.e.xual fire, like the breath of air and the bath o' water, makes other contributions to the immortalist program.

"The human organism is designed by DNA to maintain an optimum of strength and health to s.e.xual maturity--and just a few years beyond. Once it has presumedly done its procre-ative duty, (and the perpetuation o' the species may be the * only thing DNA really cares about) 'tis kissed off, abandoned to steadily deteriorate. What Alobar and Kudra did was to keep their s.e.xual fires so hotly stoked that DNA was fooled into believin' that they were just entering into s.e.xual maturity. The fact that, despite their adolescently high hormone levels, they never actually produced a pregnancy, only contributed to the ruse. What with their womb soaks and s.e.x spurts, their DNA couldn't get a clear fix on their age. Twas only aware that they had somethin' going, and to be safe, it had better support them. "You're yawnin."

Priscilla stretched. "You know what time it is?"

"I hope I've not been borin' ye-"

"Oh, no ..."

"-with me gab. But ye wanted to know if 'twas medically possible for your man to live a thousand years, and I had to make me case. Next you'll be wantin' to know how 'tis medically possible for a tongue to wag incessantly without comin' unhinged. Me ex-wife said, 'Wiggs, you talk so much that when you die they'll have to beat your tongue to death with a stick.' I resent that remark. She should've said, 'if you die."

Pris made two small fists and rubbed her eyes. "Oh, Wiggs," she said.

"Hey, 'tis true! Your man programs himself to die. Almost with our first breath, we're taught to expect our last. The power o' suggestion will pack you up if nothin' else does. Check the statistics sometime on how many people die at the same age that their parents died, the parent whom they most identified with. Your man Elvis Presley not only packed it up at the same age as his mum, but the very same day o' the year. The body is the servant o' the mind, and if we keep tellin' our bodies that they're probably goin' to croak, age seventy-two, then come seventy-two, croak they will. Maybe the main reason your Alobar lived on was because he believed he could. It doesn't matter how ye take care o' yourself, beets and baths and breaths and whatever, if ye think that your death is inevitable, it will be. Att.i.tude, att.i.tude. Tis the death wish that nails 'em, every bleedin' time."

Wiggs actually paused for a moment, but before Pris could take advantage of the situation, he coughed up a couple of chuckles. "Funny thing," he said, "but that's where Alobar went wrong."

"Where? Did he go wrong?" Her voice was limp and webby, as if it were being filtered through mummy wrapping. "I was under the impression that he did everything right."

"Sure and 'twasn't right puttin' the torch to that laboratory. Landed him in Concord, where he's in a b.l.o.o.d.y fix. And 'twas completely unnecessary."

"He gave his promise."

"No matter. Twas in vain. Ye see, even if MIT, or any other inst.i.tution, should come up with a purple elixir, some formula for indefinitely extendin' life, it wouldn't help those old boys in the White House and the Pentagon. Not a whit. The death wish is so ingrained in 'em, in every polluted cell o' their shriveled old brains, that nothin' could make a difference. They can change their diets, change their chemistry, but they can't change their fundamental att.i.tudes. If ye could peek at their personal TV listings, ye'd find they've got a fiery finish scheduled on every channel. What's more, they're lookin' forward to it."

"But why?" she asked weakly.

" Tis their religion. To a man, your leaders believe that life on this ball o' clay is merely a test. An entrance exam for eternity. Tis the next life they're interested in, a life spent swappin' tales o' power with G.o.d, sittin' around the lobby o' the Paradise Hotel. That's why they're so dangerous, those righteous old farts. If they pushed the b.u.t.ton and furnaced the Earth, they'd say the Earth had it comin'. Sin and immorality and all. Most o' them are secretly wis.h.i.+n" for it. Fry those of us who are at ease with Nature and enjoyin' ourselves, then harpsichord off to their reward. No wonder people are scared silly. Most o' them won't let it show, but they're scared. Look at the line outside this house. It grows longer week by week."

"What do they want?"

"Those people in line? They want somebody to tell 'em they have a chance at the i-n-g of life and not just the e-d."