July 31, 2025 • 18 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Revenge by Arthur Porges. If the syndicate is half as
powerful as some people have claimed, they'll murder me any
day now. I object on principle to being killed by
evil men for a good deed, So maybe lynching by
stupid ones as preferable. I mean you, and you, the
(00:22):
suet heads who profited by my work but refused your help.
You've been yammering about narcotics for years, how drug addiction
was spreading, reaching down even to your unmannerly spoiled brats
who despise their parents and our venal society to the
same degree. The stuff comes in by the tun across
the Mexican border. They grow it for our benefit in
(00:43):
Red China and a few friendly Asian countries don't mind
exporting some now and then. Either. In spite of heroic
work by our small group of poorly financed narcotics agents,
the flow of drugs cannot be halted. Oh, you and
your elected representatives made a lie lot of panicky moves
to combat this threat. The Department of Health, Education, and
(01:04):
Welfare was given a new bureau, set up like the
FBI and headed by Myron P. Bishop, a man trained
by that distinguished expert on narcotics and slinger himself. But
as to sensible solutions such as legalizing the sale of
heroin to break the worldwide criminal control on the distribution
of drugs, that your vapid puritan morality wouldn't permit millions
(01:29):
of dollars for enforcement and to punish the sick, but
not one cent for prevention, and almost nothing to find
out why people bother to become atticts in the first
place and how to cure them. Oh, it wasn't entirely
your fault. You listened to the experts, usually career policemen,
who expect to cure any social evil with clubs and prisons.
(01:51):
I'm reminded of the simpleton found measuring two horses with
a tape in order to be able to distinguish the
black one from the white. Until I came along, nobody
had ever reached the core of the matter. You don't
kill a flourishing plant, in this case, a yupus tree
by lopping off a handful of leaves. You strike at
(02:12):
the roots. That's what I meant to do and did
for your benefit. Oh, I admit there were a few
dollars in it for me, but some what. The ox
that treads the wheat is not muzzled. When a man
saves a manufacturer of fifty thousand dollars a year by
some improved process, or even by using three bolts someplace
(02:34):
instead of four, they gladly pay him three percent of
the annual savings or something like that as a reward.
Most big outfits have such a policy, and it's a
good one. Well, if I cut millions off the government budget,
it allows one hundred thousand dollars. Too much to ask.
I just wanted to go on with my researches without
(02:55):
battling a horde of bill collectors every month. Fat chance
I didn't get him easily, dime, You, your elected and
appointed officials, and your kept press just gave me all
the time. Horse laugh well he who laughs. Last, you'll
remember the old saw. I'll see to that. I'm writing
(03:19):
this so you'll know how they treated me. You mustn't
think I'm a crank mad at the world for no reason.
My case is better than Dreyfus's and Sacho ven Zetti's combined.
Here I was prepared to remove the drug scourge forever,
and at a pidling cost. Did I get courteous handling,
or at least a fair hearing, not bloody likely. I
(03:42):
was an idiot to expect anything from the world's most
inflated bureaucracy, Dickens's circumlocution office brought up to date. Let
me start at the beginning. Then you'll see who's right.
I'm a biochemist by profession, damned good one, but too
individualistic to please the research centers. They liked docile teams
(04:05):
scientific perturons to pull the big red wagon. So I
taught at one Jerkwater college after another. Sooner or later.
My superiors, all dotterers who stopped thinking with sighs of
relief once they had their pH d Union cards, objected
to my attitude. If I published, they were jealous. It
made the other faculty members look bad. If I failed
(04:28):
to produce, then why was I wasting lab facilities and
neglecting my classes? The students wanted their turn papers back
within five days. The other teachers could manage it, why
not me. A difference between what my colleagues expected from
their pupils and what I did was the difference between
the lightning bug and the lightning Those students. They didn't
(04:51):
want biochemistry. They want a letter on a card A
sea would do. Damn. Few of em got it from me,
I'm happy to say, and those that did knew more
about the subject than most PhDs. Now I take as
my creed the fruitful dictum. Think in other categories. A
(05:13):
famous researcher once invented or discovered this maxim in a dream.
It is the secret of many great advances in science.
Get off the main line, stop fooling with the leaves
of the tree, and turn to the roots. Invert the
problem if necessary. I was thinking about the narcotic scandal.
(05:34):
A teacher at my college had a lovely sixteen year
old daughter, carefully reared, who was badly hooked. Saw that
poor man's hair whiten in a few months. How would
you feel knowing that your daughter had been so degraded
by a drug as to sell herself to anybody with
enough money to buy her a fix an innocent, playful
(05:56):
sniff at a party. Some punk, probably an addict himself,
had trapped her in order to finance his own habit.
They talk about cures, but people on the inside know
that permanent escape from the trap is as rare as
portraits of Trotsky in Russia, or integrity among politicians in
this country. Well, I put my brains to work on
(06:19):
the problem. Seemed obvious that, as in the case of prohibition,
you couldn't possibly lick the drug traffic by cutting the
lines of supply. Not in a country as big as ours,
with a Mexican border and red China on the side
of the enemy. Not when a package the size of
a watch could be worth a fortune. Think in other categories.
(06:40):
I reminded myself, how can a biochemist rather than a
policeman stop the syndicate. Then it came to me, simple
and obvious. Hit the source, the weak link, the roots
of the poison tree. In short, papaver sounifum, the opium
(07:01):
poppy itself. Basic, isn't it destroy the plant and you
cut the heart out of the drug traffic? No cops,
no hopeless warfare against cunning smugglers, no battle with big money,
corruption of officials. And remember, no chemist alive can synthesize
opium or its derivatives. Sure, there are a few other
(07:23):
bad narcotic drugs from different plants, like marijuana, but they
play a relatively small part and can be controlled. Besides,
it was my intention to destroy their sources as well
when the time came. But first the biggest culprit, I
go to work re examining all the recent work on
(07:44):
tobacco virus and similar plant killers. New studies on the
key protein chain of the genes were the foundation stones
of my plan. The disease had to be highly specific
and deadly. I couldn't risk even the remotest possibility of
harming food plants in a hungry world. But as I've said,
with no false modesty, I'm no slouch in my field
(08:05):
of biochemistry. I took a harmless poppy rust from our
California flowers here and treated its genes with certain chemicals.
It was a matter of six months and well over
eighty tries, but finally I came up with a virus
that killed the opium poppy like smallpox wiped out the Soux.
No more than that, some Indians were or became immune
(08:29):
to the disease, just as insects build up resistance to
the most potent poisons. But with my virus, that's simply
not possible. I won't get technical here, but to become
immune to this stuff would be like man's developing antibodies
against his own tissues couldn't happen without killing the organism
faster than the virus does. Once this epidemic began, not
(08:54):
a poppy would survive. So far, everything was fine, except that,
as usual, I lost my job. I got fifty turned
papers behind. Didn't bother me because there wasn't a student
in my three classes who knew any more biochemistry than
a baboon. In the first paper I'd found this gem.
(09:15):
It is well known that a mammal reproduces by suckling
its young faced with more of the same. It was
a pleasure to be fired. Now, in any really civilized society,
they'd have my statue on top of the Capitol building
and with neon lights to boot. But in our bureaucratic
(09:38):
wilderness of Washington, with a thousand government hired cretans running
interference for each big appointed super cretan, my troubles had
just begun. I took some sample poppies to the HW offices.
They were in vacuum sealed plastic envelopes, because I knew
that once my virus spores got loose in the atmosphere,
(09:58):
they'd spread all over the world like radioactive dust. Or faster.
I hope to see the Commissioner of Narcotics, Myron P. Bishop,
but his magnificence was harder to reach than the whole
College of Cardinals. Was impossible to put my point across plants?
Was it that way to the Department of Agriculture, Oh, poppies,
(10:18):
Pamphlets on wildflowers could be had from documents. I wrote
countless letters, pulled what few wires were within my reach,
and haunted Washington like the ghost of Calhoun. And finally
I got ten minutes with El Pomposo himself. As I've said,
dumb students are nothing new to me. But even the
(10:39):
worst of them couldn't have been any more obtuse than Bishop.
I had the dead plans saw brown and withered. There
were simple charts showing exactly in terms of time, how
the virus worked, killing the poppy within forty eight hours
and even destroying the viability of any seeds that might
be ripening. Did this jug head appointed by the President
(10:59):
to fight the terrible drug problem comprehend the miracle being
offered to him, the simple solution that would make him
the greatest, In fact, the only success in his post
that this country had ever known. Not he I had
to spell it out in nursery school terms. But I've
penetrated many numbskull in class by dint of persistent drilling,
(11:21):
and finally got through to the cold oatmeal under his
parietal bones. Did that clear the air? If you think so?
Guess again. He threw up his hands in horror. Turn
a plant disease loose on the world deliberately. It was
a violation of the Conventions against German warfare. It was
barred by international law. It was unthinkable that the United
(11:45):
States would indulge in such irresponsible behavior. All right, I said,
take it to the un Let them distribute the poppy killer.
He brightened a little of that. Since every bureaucrat loves
above to pass the buck, a clear cut decision is
fatal to the species. Then he gave me a note
(12:06):
to our delegate, Wilburg Kavanagh Junior. This character was a
bit sharper. He heard me out, looked at my deceased poppies,
and arranged a conference with a big wig from the
State Department. Then things got really messy when I pointed
out that in a few weeks, every damned opium plant
in Asia would be deader than the Ming dynasty. This
(12:28):
little creek from Foggy Bottom almost had kittens on the spot.
It seems that just now our relations with Red China
are highly delicate. If we turned the virus loose on them,
even if it did kill only poppies, and he had
his doubts about that. What if it who attacked Rice,
the Reds would scream murder, they'd yell German warfare and
(12:50):
have us cold. Well, they could ship us opium by
the long time. That didn't affect the delicate condition. Though.
It seemed to me, however, that there was some ambiguous
and wistful in the state man's attitude, and they thought
I understood. When a country sends a spy to do
some dirty job, they disown him officially if he's caught,
(13:12):
except for that U two fiasco some years ago, when
the US broke all the unwritten rules and made jackasses
of us before the world. Now, obviously, if I killed
all the poppies in the world, that would be a
fate accomplete. Washington could deny knowing anything about the cause
of death, especially since it would work indiscriminately even in
friendly parts of Asia. Just as long as I got
(13:34):
my one hundred thousand. I didn't mind skipping the official credit.
In fact, it would keep the syndicate off my back.
Suppose suppose I said, on my own responsibility, I released
the opium spores and ruined the opium trade. For good will,
you see that I get paid. He was horrified. In
(13:58):
the first place. Nothing would I ever could be done
until the virus had been checked out by government scientists.
If I would give him the virus and my notes,
he'd start the ball rolling. I know that Washington ball.
It's all angles and doesn't roll with a dam. I
went cold at the thought. Before you can get an
OK on anything big from a bureau there, your long
(14:20):
gray beard will be sweeping the floor for a moment.
I was tempted to take my plans to England, but
then remembered by that sane legislation legalizing the sale of
drugs under controlled conditions. They'd already licked the problem and
wouldn't be in the market for two cents. Though I'd
make China pay me the money to keep the virus buried.
(14:42):
For that matter, the syndicate would gladly kick in with
a million. But I'm an American first, and couldn't play
it that way, especially remembering Professor A's daughter. I thought
the thing through and decided that if I turned the
disease loose so that every good poppy is a day,
any decent government will quietly pay me off. They only
(15:04):
need to know that no other plants are affected. And
that's the way I played it. The next day, I
sprayed a few grams of concentrated virus into the humid
air of Washington and went home. If you read the papers,
you know the rest of that particular story. And eight months,
not even Sherlock Holmes could have found a live opium
(15:26):
poppy on the face of the earth. Once current stocks
are gone, there'll be no more narcotics deriving from that
particular plant. A government sensibly outbid all the attics and
operators in order to save what is left for medical use.
Should last for fifty years, all according to my plant. Fine,
(15:46):
But when I tried to collect they didn't know me
from the late Lucky Luciano. There was no proof whatever
They said that my virus did the job. After all,
their scientists had not been allowed to check my work.
Could have faked the whole thing. Attempting to take credit
for a mutant disease which began naturally, especially since dozens
(16:06):
of bacteriologists were now isolating the virus. When I pressed harder,
they dragged out an FBI file showing I was a
crank and a maverick, unable to hold a job, guilty
of signing a peace petition in nineteen forty nine. If
Bishop or Kavanaugh tried to help, I don't know about it.
I suppose I'm lucky that the syndicate has been equally skeptical. Otherwise,
(16:28):
being out many millions, they would have liquidated me by now.
But it's basically your fault, you, the people. I took
my case to you as a court of last resort.
A few papers gave me a fair enough shake to
present the evidence, but you paid no attention. Or I
tried to get your signatures to a petition to purge
(16:50):
the HW Department, or to start a congressional investigation, you
just laughed at me. Well, you enjoyed that headline crackpot
chemist claims he killed all those poppies? Was it self defense? Well,
my jovial friends, I'm going to teach you a lesson.
I could easily wipe out half of you by killing
(17:11):
some selected food plants. But I'm not a mass murderer
and would rather make a more subtle job of it.
I've two more viruses just about perfected after the first.
It's easier when I turn them loose. You'll have a
real grievance against me. This time, you're getting notice in advance,
so nobody can talk about natural disease. Besides, the appended
(17:34):
lab notes will easily convince a few key men in biochemistry,
and they'll confirm me. Now, let me point out the
two plants you'll miss badly. One is yeast, Yes, yeast.
When you read this, the one celled organisms responsible for wine,
beer and alcohol generally will be dying as a race
(17:55):
in a few months. Good liquor will be scarcer than
an electric blanket in hell. Sure, grain alcohol can be synthesized,
but bouquet isn't that simple, and you'll pay dearly for it.
How you'll pay. A decent lab made whiskey won't be
on the shelves tomorrow either. The other plant you'll miss
(18:16):
even more, I mean tobacco. No more cigarettes, no more
fat cigars, hallelujah, No more tobacco commercials on TV did
you know tobacco cannot be synthesized at all, at any price.
(18:37):
Get it you two pack a day Fietans End of
Revenge by Arthur Porges
Revenge by Arthur Porges. If the syndicate is half as
powerful as some people have claimed, they'll murder me any
day now. I object on principle to being killed by
evil men for a good deed, So maybe lynching by
stupid ones as preferable. I mean you, and you, the
(00:22):
suet heads who profited by my work but refused your help.
You've been yammering about narcotics for years, how drug addiction
was spreading, reaching down even to your unmannerly spoiled brats
who despise their parents and our venal society to the
same degree. The stuff comes in by the tun across
the Mexican border. They grow it for our benefit in
(00:43):
Red China and a few friendly Asian countries don't mind
exporting some now and then. Either. In spite of heroic
work by our small group of poorly financed narcotics agents,
the flow of drugs cannot be halted. Oh, you and
your elected representatives made a lie lot of panicky moves
to combat this threat. The Department of Health, Education, and
(01:04):
Welfare was given a new bureau, set up like the
FBI and headed by Myron P. Bishop, a man trained
by that distinguished expert on narcotics and slinger himself. But
as to sensible solutions such as legalizing the sale of
heroin to break the worldwide criminal control on the distribution
of drugs, that your vapid puritan morality wouldn't permit millions
(01:29):
of dollars for enforcement and to punish the sick, but
not one cent for prevention, and almost nothing to find
out why people bother to become atticts in the first
place and how to cure them. Oh, it wasn't entirely
your fault. You listened to the experts, usually career policemen,
who expect to cure any social evil with clubs and prisons.
(01:51):
I'm reminded of the simpleton found measuring two horses with
a tape in order to be able to distinguish the
black one from the white. Until I came along, nobody
had ever reached the core of the matter. You don't
kill a flourishing plant, in this case, a yupus tree
by lopping off a handful of leaves. You strike at
(02:12):
the roots. That's what I meant to do and did
for your benefit. Oh, I admit there were a few
dollars in it for me, but some what. The ox
that treads the wheat is not muzzled. When a man
saves a manufacturer of fifty thousand dollars a year by
some improved process, or even by using three bolts someplace
(02:34):
instead of four, they gladly pay him three percent of
the annual savings or something like that as a reward.
Most big outfits have such a policy, and it's a
good one. Well, if I cut millions off the government budget,
it allows one hundred thousand dollars. Too much to ask.
I just wanted to go on with my researches without
(02:55):
battling a horde of bill collectors every month. Fat chance
I didn't get him easily, dime, You, your elected and
appointed officials, and your kept press just gave me all
the time. Horse laugh well he who laughs. Last, you'll
remember the old saw. I'll see to that. I'm writing
(03:19):
this so you'll know how they treated me. You mustn't
think I'm a crank mad at the world for no reason.
My case is better than Dreyfus's and Sacho ven Zetti's combined.
Here I was prepared to remove the drug scourge forever,
and at a pidling cost. Did I get courteous handling,
or at least a fair hearing, not bloody likely. I
(03:42):
was an idiot to expect anything from the world's most
inflated bureaucracy, Dickens's circumlocution office brought up to date. Let
me start at the beginning. Then you'll see who's right.
I'm a biochemist by profession, damned good one, but too
individualistic to please the research centers. They liked docile teams
(04:05):
scientific perturons to pull the big red wagon. So I
taught at one Jerkwater college after another. Sooner or later.
My superiors, all dotterers who stopped thinking with sighs of
relief once they had their pH d Union cards, objected
to my attitude. If I published, they were jealous. It
made the other faculty members look bad. If I failed
(04:28):
to produce, then why was I wasting lab facilities and
neglecting my classes? The students wanted their turn papers back
within five days. The other teachers could manage it, why
not me. A difference between what my colleagues expected from
their pupils and what I did was the difference between
the lightning bug and the lightning Those students. They didn't
(04:51):
want biochemistry. They want a letter on a card A
sea would do. Damn. Few of em got it from me,
I'm happy to say, and those that did knew more
about the subject than most PhDs. Now I take as
my creed the fruitful dictum. Think in other categories. A
(05:13):
famous researcher once invented or discovered this maxim in a dream.
It is the secret of many great advances in science.
Get off the main line, stop fooling with the leaves
of the tree, and turn to the roots. Invert the
problem if necessary. I was thinking about the narcotic scandal.
(05:34):
A teacher at my college had a lovely sixteen year
old daughter, carefully reared, who was badly hooked. Saw that
poor man's hair whiten in a few months. How would
you feel knowing that your daughter had been so degraded
by a drug as to sell herself to anybody with
enough money to buy her a fix an innocent, playful
(05:56):
sniff at a party. Some punk, probably an addict himself,
had trapped her in order to finance his own habit.
They talk about cures, but people on the inside know
that permanent escape from the trap is as rare as
portraits of Trotsky in Russia, or integrity among politicians in
this country. Well, I put my brains to work on
(06:19):
the problem. Seemed obvious that, as in the case of prohibition,
you couldn't possibly lick the drug traffic by cutting the
lines of supply. Not in a country as big as ours,
with a Mexican border and red China on the side
of the enemy. Not when a package the size of
a watch could be worth a fortune. Think in other categories.
(06:40):
I reminded myself, how can a biochemist rather than a
policeman stop the syndicate. Then it came to me, simple
and obvious. Hit the source, the weak link, the roots
of the poison tree. In short, papaver sounifum, the opium
(07:01):
poppy itself. Basic, isn't it destroy the plant and you
cut the heart out of the drug traffic? No cops,
no hopeless warfare against cunning smugglers, no battle with big money,
corruption of officials. And remember, no chemist alive can synthesize
opium or its derivatives. Sure, there are a few other
(07:23):
bad narcotic drugs from different plants, like marijuana, but they
play a relatively small part and can be controlled. Besides,
it was my intention to destroy their sources as well
when the time came. But first the biggest culprit, I
go to work re examining all the recent work on
(07:44):
tobacco virus and similar plant killers. New studies on the
key protein chain of the genes were the foundation stones
of my plan. The disease had to be highly specific
and deadly. I couldn't risk even the remotest possibility of
harming food plants in a hungry world. But as I've said,
with no false modesty, I'm no slouch in my field
(08:05):
of biochemistry. I took a harmless poppy rust from our
California flowers here and treated its genes with certain chemicals.
It was a matter of six months and well over
eighty tries, but finally I came up with a virus
that killed the opium poppy like smallpox wiped out the Soux.
No more than that, some Indians were or became immune
(08:29):
to the disease, just as insects build up resistance to
the most potent poisons. But with my virus, that's simply
not possible. I won't get technical here, but to become
immune to this stuff would be like man's developing antibodies
against his own tissues couldn't happen without killing the organism
faster than the virus does. Once this epidemic began, not
(08:54):
a poppy would survive. So far, everything was fine, except that,
as usual, I lost my job. I got fifty turned
papers behind. Didn't bother me because there wasn't a student
in my three classes who knew any more biochemistry than
a baboon. In the first paper I'd found this gem.
(09:15):
It is well known that a mammal reproduces by suckling
its young faced with more of the same. It was
a pleasure to be fired. Now, in any really civilized society,
they'd have my statue on top of the Capitol building
and with neon lights to boot. But in our bureaucratic
(09:38):
wilderness of Washington, with a thousand government hired cretans running
interference for each big appointed super cretan, my troubles had
just begun. I took some sample poppies to the HW offices.
They were in vacuum sealed plastic envelopes, because I knew
that once my virus spores got loose in the atmosphere,
(09:58):
they'd spread all over the world like radioactive dust. Or faster.
I hope to see the Commissioner of Narcotics, Myron P. Bishop,
but his magnificence was harder to reach than the whole
College of Cardinals. Was impossible to put my point across plants?
Was it that way to the Department of Agriculture, Oh, poppies,
(10:18):
Pamphlets on wildflowers could be had from documents. I wrote
countless letters, pulled what few wires were within my reach,
and haunted Washington like the ghost of Calhoun. And finally
I got ten minutes with El Pomposo himself. As I've said,
dumb students are nothing new to me. But even the
(10:39):
worst of them couldn't have been any more obtuse than Bishop.
I had the dead plans saw brown and withered. There
were simple charts showing exactly in terms of time, how
the virus worked, killing the poppy within forty eight hours
and even destroying the viability of any seeds that might
be ripening. Did this jug head appointed by the President
(10:59):
to fight the terrible drug problem comprehend the miracle being
offered to him, the simple solution that would make him
the greatest, In fact, the only success in his post
that this country had ever known. Not he I had
to spell it out in nursery school terms. But I've
penetrated many numbskull in class by dint of persistent drilling,
(11:21):
and finally got through to the cold oatmeal under his
parietal bones. Did that clear the air? If you think so?
Guess again. He threw up his hands in horror. Turn
a plant disease loose on the world deliberately. It was
a violation of the Conventions against German warfare. It was
barred by international law. It was unthinkable that the United
(11:45):
States would indulge in such irresponsible behavior. All right, I said,
take it to the un Let them distribute the poppy killer.
He brightened a little of that. Since every bureaucrat loves
above to pass the buck, a clear cut decision is
fatal to the species. Then he gave me a note
(12:06):
to our delegate, Wilburg Kavanagh Junior. This character was a
bit sharper. He heard me out, looked at my deceased poppies,
and arranged a conference with a big wig from the
State Department. Then things got really messy when I pointed
out that in a few weeks, every damned opium plant
in Asia would be deader than the Ming dynasty. This
(12:28):
little creek from Foggy Bottom almost had kittens on the spot.
It seems that just now our relations with Red China
are highly delicate. If we turned the virus loose on them,
even if it did kill only poppies, and he had
his doubts about that. What if it who attacked Rice,
the Reds would scream murder, they'd yell German warfare and
(12:50):
have us cold. Well, they could ship us opium by
the long time. That didn't affect the delicate condition. Though.
It seemed to me, however, that there was some ambiguous
and wistful in the state man's attitude, and they thought
I understood. When a country sends a spy to do
some dirty job, they disown him officially if he's caught,
(13:12):
except for that U two fiasco some years ago, when
the US broke all the unwritten rules and made jackasses
of us before the world. Now, obviously, if I killed
all the poppies in the world, that would be a
fate accomplete. Washington could deny knowing anything about the cause
of death, especially since it would work indiscriminately even in
friendly parts of Asia. Just as long as I got
(13:34):
my one hundred thousand. I didn't mind skipping the official credit.
In fact, it would keep the syndicate off my back.
Suppose suppose I said, on my own responsibility, I released
the opium spores and ruined the opium trade. For good will,
you see that I get paid. He was horrified. In
(13:58):
the first place. Nothing would I ever could be done
until the virus had been checked out by government scientists.
If I would give him the virus and my notes,
he'd start the ball rolling. I know that Washington ball.
It's all angles and doesn't roll with a dam. I
went cold at the thought. Before you can get an
OK on anything big from a bureau there, your long
(14:20):
gray beard will be sweeping the floor for a moment.
I was tempted to take my plans to England, but
then remembered by that sane legislation legalizing the sale of
drugs under controlled conditions. They'd already licked the problem and
wouldn't be in the market for two cents. Though I'd
make China pay me the money to keep the virus buried.
(14:42):
For that matter, the syndicate would gladly kick in with
a million. But I'm an American first, and couldn't play
it that way, especially remembering Professor A's daughter. I thought
the thing through and decided that if I turned the
disease loose so that every good poppy is a day,
any decent government will quietly pay me off. They only
(15:04):
need to know that no other plants are affected. And
that's the way I played it. The next day, I
sprayed a few grams of concentrated virus into the humid
air of Washington and went home. If you read the papers,
you know the rest of that particular story. And eight months,
not even Sherlock Holmes could have found a live opium
(15:26):
poppy on the face of the earth. Once current stocks
are gone, there'll be no more narcotics deriving from that
particular plant. A government sensibly outbid all the attics and
operators in order to save what is left for medical use.
Should last for fifty years, all according to my plant. Fine,
(15:46):
But when I tried to collect they didn't know me
from the late Lucky Luciano. There was no proof whatever
They said that my virus did the job. After all,
their scientists had not been allowed to check my work.
Could have faked the whole thing. Attempting to take credit
for a mutant disease which began naturally, especially since dozens
(16:06):
of bacteriologists were now isolating the virus. When I pressed harder,
they dragged out an FBI file showing I was a
crank and a maverick, unable to hold a job, guilty
of signing a peace petition in nineteen forty nine. If
Bishop or Kavanaugh tried to help, I don't know about it.
I suppose I'm lucky that the syndicate has been equally skeptical. Otherwise,
(16:28):
being out many millions, they would have liquidated me by now.
But it's basically your fault, you, the people. I took
my case to you as a court of last resort.
A few papers gave me a fair enough shake to
present the evidence, but you paid no attention. Or I
tried to get your signatures to a petition to purge
(16:50):
the HW Department, or to start a congressional investigation, you
just laughed at me. Well, you enjoyed that headline crackpot
chemist claims he killed all those poppies? Was it self defense? Well,
my jovial friends, I'm going to teach you a lesson.
I could easily wipe out half of you by killing
(17:11):
some selected food plants. But I'm not a mass murderer
and would rather make a more subtle job of it.
I've two more viruses just about perfected after the first.
It's easier when I turn them loose. You'll have a
real grievance against me. This time, you're getting notice in advance,
so nobody can talk about natural disease. Besides, the appended
(17:34):
lab notes will easily convince a few key men in biochemistry,
and they'll confirm me. Now, let me point out the
two plants you'll miss badly. One is yeast, Yes, yeast.
When you read this, the one celled organisms responsible for wine,
beer and alcohol generally will be dying as a race
(17:55):
in a few months. Good liquor will be scarcer than
an electric blanket in hell. Sure, grain alcohol can be synthesized,
but bouquet isn't that simple, and you'll pay dearly for it.
How you'll pay. A decent lab made whiskey won't be
on the shelves tomorrow either. The other plant you'll miss
(18:16):
even more, I mean tobacco. No more cigarettes, no more
fat cigars, hallelujah, No more tobacco commercials on TV did
you know tobacco cannot be synthesized at all, at any price.
(18:37):
Get it you two pack a day Fietans End of
Revenge by Arthur Porges
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