Mind Webs - Carcinoma Angels

A surreal sci-fi series exploring speculative concepts, dreams, and philosophical what-ifs. Each episode is a cerebral journey into the mind’s deepest questions.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Mind Welcome to.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
A half hour of mind Way stories from the worlds
of speculative section. Today's stories Norman Spinrad's Carcinoma Angels, which

(01:39):
appeared in Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison. At the
age of eight, Harrison winter Green first discovered that the
world was his oyster when he looked at its sideways.
And that was a year when baseball cards were in
The kid with the biggest collection of baseball cards was it?
Harry winter Green decided to become it. Harry saved up

(02:02):
a dollar and bought one hundred random baseball cards. He
was in luck. One of them was a very rare
Yogi bearret In three separate transactions, he traded his other
ninety nine cards for the only other three Yogi Bears
in the neighborhood. Harry had reduced his holdings to four cards,
but he had cornered the market in Yogi Beret. He

(02:22):
forced the price of Yogi Bera up to an exorbitant
eighty cards. With his lush fund thus accumulated, he successfully
cornered the market in Mickey Maddele, Willie Mays, and Peewee Reese,
and he became the JP Morgan of baseball cards. Harry
breathed through high school by the simple expedient of mastering
only one subject, the art of taking tests. By his

(02:44):
senior year, he could outthink any test writer with his
jip sheet tied behind his back, and won seven scholarships
with foolish ees. In college, Harry discovered girls being reasonably
good looking, reasonably fascile. He no doubt would have garnered
his fair share of conquests in the normal course of events,
but this was not the way the mind of Harrison
Wintergreen worked. Harry cultivated a stutter, which he could turn

(03:08):
on or off at will. Few girls could resist the
lure of a good looking, well adjusted guy with a
slick line, who nevertheless carried with him some inner secret
hurt that made him stutter. Many were the girls who
tried to delve Harry's secret while Harry delve. Then in
his sophomore year, Harry grew bored with college and reason

(03:29):
that the thing to do was become filthy rich, and
he assiduously studied sex novels for one month, wrote three
of them in the next two, which he immediately sold
at one thousand dollars to throw. Were the three thousand dollars.
Thus garnered, he bought a shiny new convertible. He drove
the new car to the Mexican border and the cross
into a notorious border town. He immediately contacted a disreputable

(03:52):
shoeshine boy and bought a pound of marijuana. The shoeshine boy,
of course, tipped off the border guards, and when Harry
attempted to walk across the bridge to the States, they
stripped him naked. They found nothing, and Harry crossed the border.
He smuggled nothing out of Mexico, and in fact had
thrown the marijuana away as soon as he bought it. However,
he had taken advantage of the Mexican embargo on American

(04:14):
cars and illegally sold the convertible in Mexico for fifteen
thousand dollars. Harry took his fifteen thousand to Las Vegas
and spent the next six weeks buying people drinks, lending
Brokee gamblers money, acting in general like a fuzzy cheek
centa claus, gaining the confidence of the right rons, and
blowing five thousand dollars. At the end of six weeks,

(04:35):
he had three hot market tips, which turned his remaining
ten thousand into forty thousand dollars. In the next two months,
Harry bought four hundred quted government surplus jeeps in four
hundred jeep lots at ten thousand dollars a lot, and
immediately sold them to a highly disreputable Central American government
for one hundred thousand dollars. He took the one hundred

(04:58):
thousand dollars and bought a tiny eye island in the Pacific,
so worthless that no government had ever bothered the claimant.
He set himself up as an independent government with no taxes,
and sold twenty one acre plots to twenty millionaires seeking
a tax haven at one hundred thousand dollars a plot.
He unloaded the last plot three weeks before the United States,
with the un backing, claimed the island and brought it

(05:20):
under the sway of the Internal Revenue Department. Harry invested
a small part of his two million dollars and rented
a large computer for twelve hours. The computer constructed a
betting scheme by which Harry parlayed his two million dollars
into twenty million dollars by taking various British soccer pools
to the tune of eighteen million dollars. For five million,

(05:43):
he bought a monstrous chunk of useless desert from an
impoverished Arabian sultanate. With another two million, he created a
huge rumor campaign to the effect that this patch of
desert was literally floating on oil. With another three million,
he set up a dummy corporation which made like a
big oil company and publicly offered to buy his desert
for seventy five million. After some spirited bargaining, a large

(06:07):
American oil company was allowed to outbid the dummy and
bought a thousand square miles of sand for one hundred
million dollars. Harrison Wintergreen was at the age of twenty five,
filthy rich by his own standards, he lost his interest
in money. He now decided that he wanted to do good.

(06:29):
He did good. He toppled seven unpleasant Latin American governments
and replaced them with six social democracies and a benevolent dictatorship.
He converted a tribe of borneo head hunters to Rosicrucianism.
He set up twelve rest homes for overage hores, and
organized a birth control program which sterilized twelve million Feecan
Indian women. He contrived to make another one hundred million

(06:51):
dollars on the above enterprises. At the age of thirty,
Harrison Wintergreen had had it with due gooding. He decided
to leave his footprints in the sands of time. He
left his footprints in the sands of time. He wrote
an internationally acclaimed novel about King Farouk. He invented the
winter Green filter, a membrane through which fresh water passed

(07:15):
freely but which barred salts. Once set up, a winter
Green desalianization plant could dissalinate an unlimited supply of water
at a per gallant cost that approached absolute zero. He
painted one painting and was instantly offered two hundred thousand
dollars for it. He donated it to the Museum of
Modern Art. He developed a mutated virus which destroyed syphilis.

(07:37):
Bacteria like syphilis, had spread by sexual contact. It was
a mild effrodisiac. Syphilis was wiped out in eighteen months.
He bought an island off the coast of California, a
five hundred foot crag jutting out of the Pacific. He
caused it to be carved into a five hundred foot
statue of Harrison Wintergreen at the age of thirty eight.

(08:00):
Harrison Wintergreen had left sufficient footprints in the sands of time.
He was bored. He looked around greedily for new worlds
to conquer. This then was the man with the age
of forty was informed that he had an advanced, well spread,
and incurable case of cancer, and that he had one

(08:22):
year to live. Winter Green spent the first month of

(09:03):
his last year searching for an existing cure for terminal cancer.
He visited laboratories, medical schools, hospitals, clinics, great doctors, quacks,
people who had miraculously recovered from cancer, faith healers, and
little old ladies and tennis shoes. There was no known
cure for terminal cancer, reputable or otherwise. It was as

(09:23):
he suspected. As he more or less even hoped he
would have to do it himself. He proceeded to spend
the next month setting things up to do it himself.
He caused to be erected in the middle of the
Arizona Desert an air conditioned, walled villain. The villa had
a completely automatic kitchen and enough food for a year.
It had a five million dollar biological and biochemical laboratory.

(09:46):
It had a three million dollar microfilm library which contained
every word ever written on the subject of cancer. It
had the pharmacy to end all pharmacies, a liberal supply
of quite literally every drug that existed, poisons, painkillers, hallucinogens, dandricides, antiseptics, antibiotics,
at ache remedy's, heroin, quinine, kerrari, snake oil. Everything. The

(10:09):
pharmacy cost twenty million dollars. The villa also contained a
one way radio telephone, a large stock of basic chemicals,
including radioactives, copies of the Quran, the Bible, the Torah,
the Book of the Dead, Science and health with Key
to the Scriptures, the Eaching, and the complete works of
Willin Reich, and all this Huxley. It also contained a
very large and ultra expensive computer. By the time the

(10:32):
villa was ready, winter Green's many cash fund was nearly exhausted.
With ten months to do that which the medical world
considered impossible, Harrison winter Green entered his citadel. During the
first two months, he devired the library, sleeping three hours
out of every twenty four, endosing himself regularly with benzedrine.

(10:53):
The library offered nothing but data. He digested the data
and went on to the pharmacy. During the next month,
he tried oreomycin, basta, trac stanis fluoride, hexel resource andol, cortizone, penicillin, hexachlorophine,
sharp liver extract, and seven three hundred and twelve assorted
other miracles of modern medical science, all to no avail.

(11:16):
He began to feel pain, which he immediately blotted out
and continued to blot out with morphine. Morphine addiction was
merely an annoyance. He tried chemicals, radioactives, Christian science, yoga, prayer, animis,
patent medicines, herb tea, witchcraft, and yogurt diets. This consumed
another month, during which winter Green continued to waste away,

(11:37):
sleeping less and less and taking more and more benzitrine
and morphine. Nothing worked. He had six months left. He
was on the verge of becoming desperate. He tried a
different tech. He sat in a comfortable chair and contemplated
his navel for forty eight consecutive hours. His meditations produced

(11:57):
a severe case of eyestrain in twos significant words, spontaneous remission.
In his two months of research, winter Green had come
upon numbers of cases where a terminal cancer abruptly reversed
itself and the patient for whom all hope had been
abandoned had been cured. No one ever knew how or why.

(12:21):
It could not be predicted, it could not be artificially produced,
but it happened. Nevertheless, for want of an explanation, they
called it spontaneous remission. Remission meaning cure, spontaneous, meaning no
one knew what caused it, which was not to say
that it did not have a cause. Winter Green was buoyed.
He was even abulliant. He knew that some terminal cancer

(12:43):
patients had been cured. Therefore terminal cancer could be cured.
Therefore the problem was removed from the realm of the impossible,
was now merely the domain of the highly improbable. And
doing the highly improbable was Winter Green. Specially with six
months of estimated life left. Winter Green set jubilantly to

(13:05):
work from his complete cancer library. He called every known
case of spontaneous remission. He coded every one of them
into the computer data and the medical histories of the
patients and the treatments employed on their ages, sexes, religions, races, creeds, colors,
national origins, temperaments, marital status done in Bradstreet ratings, neuroses, psychoses,
and favorite beers. Complete profiles of every human being ever

(13:30):
known to after vive terminal cancer were fed into Harrison
Wintergreen's computer. Winter Green program the computer to run a
complete series of correlations between ten thousand separate and distinct
factors and spontaneous remission. If even one factor, age, credit, rating,
favorite food, anything correlated with spontaneous remission, the spontaneity factor

(13:53):
would be removed. Winter Green had shelled out one hundred
million dollars for the computer, was the best stand computer
in the world. In two minutes, in seven point eight
nine four seconds, it had performed its task. In one
succinct word, it gave winter Green his answer negative. Spontaneous

(14:13):
remission did not correlate with any external factor. It was
still spontaneous. The cause was unknown. A lesser man would
have been crushed, a more conventional man would have been dumbfounded.
Harrison Wintergreen was elated. He had eliminated the entire external
universe as a factor in spontaneous remission in one fell swoop. Therefore,

(14:37):
in some mysterious way, the human body and or psyche
was capable of curing itself, winter Green set out to
explore and conquer his own internal universe. He repaired to
the pharmacy and prepared a formidable quotation. Into his largest syringe,

(14:57):
he decanted the following novacane, morphine, kirari vlute, a rare
Central Asian poison which induced temporary blindness, olfactor cane, a
TopSecret smell of deadener used by skunk farmers, tympaneline, a
drug which temporarily deadened the auditory nerves used primarily by
fulibustering senators, a large dose of benzidrine, lysergic acid, psilocybin,

(15:24):
masculine peote extract, seven other highly experimental and most ill
legal hallucinogens, Eye of Newt and toe of dog. Winter
Green 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 a witch's brew. His

(15:44):
heart pumped his blood serge, carrying the arcane chemicals to
every part of his body. The novacane blanked out every
sensory nerve in his body. The morphine eliminated all sensations
of pound. The vlute blacked out his vision. The olfactor
Kane cut off all sense of smell. The tin panelin
made him death as a traffic court judge. The Kerrari

(16:06):
paralyzed him all. Winter Green was alone in his own body.
No external stimuli reached him. He was in a state
of total sensory decoration. The urge to lapse into blessed
unconsciousness was irresistible. Winter Green's strong will, though he was,

(16:27):
could not have remained conscious unaided, but the massive dose
of benzadreen would not let him sleep. He was awake, aware,
alone in the universe of his own body, with no
external stimuli to occupy himself with, and then one and two,
and then in combinations like the fists of a good,
fast heavyweight the hallucinogen system. Winter Green's sensory organs were

(16:49):
blanked out, but the brain centers which received sensory data
were still active. It was a these cerebral centers that
the tremendous charge of assorted hallucinogens acted. He began to
see fatomed colors, shapes, things without name or form. He
heard Eldrich symphonies, ghost echoes, mad howling noises, a million

(17:13):
impossible smells roiled through his brain. A thousand false pains
and pressures tore at him as if his whole body
had 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

(17:36):
drugs kept his sense black. The benzadream kept him conscious
forty years of being Harrison winter Green kept him cold
and sane for an interterminate period of time. He rolled
with the punches, groping for the field of the strange
new non environment, then gradually hesitantly at first, but with

(17:58):
ever growing confidence went the Green reached for control. His
mind constructed untrue but useful analogies for actions that were
not actions, states of being that were not states of
being sensory data unlike any sensory data received by the
human brain. The analogies, constructed in a kind of calculated

(18:19):
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
changes into analogs of action. He reached out an analogical
hand and tuned a figurative radio inward, away from the

(18:40):
blank wave band of the outside universe and towards the
as yet unused wave band 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 thing interface. He battered against the interface, an

(19:03):
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

(19:29):
inside his own body. It was a world of wonder
and loathsomeness, of the majestic and the ludicrous. Winter Green's
point of view, which his mind analogized as a body
within his true body, was inside a vast network of

(19:49):
pulsing arteries, like some monstrous freeway system. The analogy crystallized.
It was a freeway, and winter Green was driving down it.
Bloated sacks, dumped things into the teeming traffic, hormones, wastes, nutrients,
white blood cells creamed by him like mad taxi cabs,

(20:10):
red corpuscles drove steadily along like stolid burgers. The traffic
ebbed and congested, like a crosstown rush out. Winter Green
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

(20:32):
leering motorcyclist black, the cycle black, the riding leathers black,
dull black. The face of the rider's safe were two
glowing blood red eyes, and emblazoned across the front and
the back of the black motorcycle jacket and shining scarlet studs.
The legend car's Sonoma angels with a savage whoop, winter

(20:56):
Green gunned his analogical car down the hypothetical free straight
for the imaginary cyclist. The cancer cell splat top crush.
The winter Green's car smashed the cycle, and the rider
exploded in a cloud of fine black dust. Up and
down the freeways of a circulatory system, winter Green ranged

(21:19):
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 lights in

(21:44):
his hand. Savage black dragons with blood red eyes and
flickering red tongue slithered from behind the narrowed walls of
great air sack trees. Saint winter Greens spurred his horse,
lowered his lance, and killed monster after hissing monster, till
at last the holy longwood was free of dragons. He

(22:08):
was flying in some vast moist cavern. Above him, the
vague bulks of gigantic organs. Below, a limitless expanse of shining,
slimy Peratonial plane. From behind the cover of his huge
beating heart, a formation of black fighter planes bearing the
insignia of a scarlet sea on their wings and fuselages,

(22:31):
roared down at him. Winter Green gun dis 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
Peratonian below, in a thousand shapes and guises. The black
and red things attact, black the color of oblivion, red

(22:54):
the color of blood. Dragons, cyclists, planes, sea things, so lgers,
tanks and tigers in blood, vessels and lungs and spleen
and thorax and bladder, cars and noma angels all and
winter Green fought his analogical battles in an equal number
of incarnations. His driver, knight, pilot, diver, soldier, and with

(23:18):
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

(23:40):
was his stomach, and scuttling towards him on chitten's legs,
a monstrous black crab with blood red eyes, gross squat primeval,
clicking and glittering. The crabs scurried across his stomach towards him.
Winter Green paused, grinned wolfishly, and leaped high in the air,

(24:02):
landing with both feet squarely on the hard black carapace
like the sun, dried gord brittle, dry hollow. The crab
crunched beneath his weight and splintered into a million dusty fragments.
And winter Green was alone, at last, alone and victorious,

(24:24):
the first and 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

(24:45):
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 winter Green,

(25:08):
who made himself filthy rich, Harrison winter Green, who did good,
Harrison winter Green, who left his footprints in the sands
of time. Harrison winter Green, catatonic, vegetable, Harrison winter Green,
who stepped inside his own body to do battle with

(25:32):
Carcinomas Angels and won and can't get out. You've heard

(26:19):
Carcinoma Angels. Written by Norman Spinrag. The story first appeared
in the book Dangerous of Visions, which was edited by
Harlan Ellison. This is Michael Hanson speaking. Our engineer was
Steve Gordon. Mind Webbs is a production of WHA Radio
and Madison Service of the University of Wisconsin Extension name