"Wam-Pum! Yeehaaww!! Jesus traveling Christ, this stuff's good!" the Captain whooped, tucking the glass vials into his belt-case. "Keep it coming, Henry. And God bless Sandoz labs!"
"Al, before you leave we need to go over the new takers. These Stanford kids are tremendous... it's almost spooky."
"Any of 'em stand out?" the Captain winked. "You got one who might interest us, Henry?"
The chemist nodded, staring over his low-cut reading lenses at a lab folder marked: Perry Lane Classified. "A graduate student named Franklin Moore. He arrived a few months ago on a creative writing scholarship from the University of Oregon."
"Jesus," the Captain moaned. "Not another one of these sensitive, literary types."
Henry shook his head. "This kid made the national wrestling team four straight years. We sent him over to Czechoslovakia, and he tore their heavyweights new assholes."
The Captain stared at a school photo. Bull-necked, knotty copper curls, and that look in the eyes, then nodded. "OK, so you've got him into the IT-290. How's he held up?"
Henry smiled. "He could probably pin anyone in the United States, and never mind the weight."
"But that's all bullshit, Henry. What about his mind? I want a kid with a goddamn mind like Aldous Huxley," the Captain shouted. "Get him on the LSD-25, Henry, we know it's the future. Don't you know it, Henry? Don't you know it's the future? You can eat all that methamwhateverthefuckyouwanttocallit yourself, for all I care, just get the kid on the L-S-D! Do it now, Henry. Do it for me. Turn the whole fucking world on, Henry! Yeaaahooooo!"
The Captain walked out of Langley and stretched his arms in the early morning sun and let out another shout and offered a young agent "Some wampum, son? Make you a new man, boy!" Squaring his flat-top in the reflection of a blackened window near the entrance of the CIA's headquarters, Al Hubbard wondered when Sandoz was going to solve that dilation problem. "The eyes," he said to no one particular, "that's what gives it away. The President couldn't tell right now if it weren't for the eyes."
At 8:35 a.m., in a leather notebook, he jotted: Franklin Moore, kid genius wrestler, then jogged up a short stack of stairs at the East Wing, and knocked at the office door of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb.
A platinum-haired man, wearing a tan suit and a fixed, professional smile, answered the door. He motioned toward a chair, then took a seat behind his own desk, a blonde slab carved from a fallen bayou jacaranda. "General," the Doctor said to a tall, sallow man sitting at his right, "I'd like you to meet Captain Al Hubbard. He'll be in charge of the Perry Lane project, reporting to me. Sit down, Al."
The Captain palmed some sweat from his forehead, eyes glittering in the staid government den.
"Perry Lane. Tell us about it, Captain."
"Yeah," Hubbard coughed, "well. We've got what I call the Beatnik Problem. These art-literary types and their social consciousness-oriented, well, you know, have a lot of campuses stirred up. And we've got to put a lid on it. But these kids are very keen on martyrdom, a sort of Jesus complex, you might call it and what we don't need right now is a big showdown."
Gottlieb smiled. "So what would you have us do about this beatnik problem, Al?"
The Captain pulled out a thick Havana seed-roll, chomped the end off and put it back in his briefcase. Lighting up, he rose from the chair. "We take one of them," he puffed, "and train him and make him the spokesman of his generation, and then turn him in on his own people as a sort of Judas Goat which would be like sticking a screwdriver in that socket over there, Sidney," the Captain glimmered. "The lights go out. Total confusion. Then we go in, sweep away the dregs, and get back to business."
Dr. Gottlieb continued to smile.
"It's a long-range solution. We need to throw a switch in their circuitry," the Captain said, nodding, still staring at the socket in the wall. "These liberal types are bright. But their hearts are in the wrong place, you understand. They'll sell this beautiful country of ours downstream if they ever get into power."
The General focused grimly on Hubbard as the spy dragged slowly on the mahogany tube. "So," the Captain said, punching at an imaginary spot in the air, "we keep one of these Beatnik types in his natural habitat, Perry Lane at Stanford University, where they have set up sort of a West Coast base and prepare him for a leadership position, like I said before, and render him weak to the power of suggestion. Our chemist is working on it right now."
"What kind of suggestion?" Dr. Gottlieb asked.
"We're working on an intersubjectivity drug, sir, based on a South American vine with purported telepathic properties. It's a ways off yet. The best we've got going now is a combination of verbal reinforcement and a hell of a dose of LSD-25. I wonder how some of these kids know tomorrow from yesterday with the dosage Sandoz cooks up," Hubbard chuckled. "This spokesman will respond to a mentor, a like-minded, liberal-thinking guru type whose orders will come from us."
"Are we thinking of the same man, Al?"
The Captain sank back in his seat. "He's been a hell of a service to us, Sidney. He's not in great health, but he's just the sort of elder statesman this project needs," Hubbard said, reflecting deeply, drawing in as thoughts the languorous blue vapors of the cigar now resting gently between his first two fingers. "Yes. Indeed. Vitally must have."
"Are you willing to share your supply, General?" Gottlieb wondered, placing his long, tanned fingers on his desk.
William Creasy, Chairman of the Army Chemical Corps, cocked his head and grinned. "Sounds so fucking crazy, it might work."
Dr. Gottlieb stood up. "As Director of Project MK-ULTRA, I will immediately request that special agent Aldous Huxley be assigned to the Perry Lane project."
"Thank you, sir... thank you," the Captain jumped to his feet, saluting, and gleamed his whole, shining, glittering, goddamned magnificent self out into the warmth of the sun, with a fresh new pellet under his tongue, say hallelujah.
Morning came to Perry Lane with the jaybirds, the smoke from a nearby stove, and a vigorous rapping on the front door of Cabin #12. Franklin tried to ignore it, but the sound was insistent. He pulled on a worn pair of Levis and shuffled bare-chested to the front of the cabin.
A bearded man stood on the porch with a peculiar, twisted grin on his face. "Good morning, oh yes, it is indeed a model morning, and since we are going to be virtual neighbors, I knew it would only be right to introduce myself. Carlo Marx," the man smiled. An appropriate surname, he admitted, in that his political convictions had recently evolved from the Zen order of something Franklin couldn't quite comprehend. "And, while our backgrounds may be different, I hold not the slightest doubt that we will solve , not merely remediate, the ills of this venal world...together, Franklin Moore, you and I."
Franklin stared at the bearded man with the gallon jug of burgundy in his grip. "You're too crazy to be dangerous," Franklin decided, inviting the man into his two-room cabin. He stoked the big-bellied stove to take some of the chill from the air, then grabbed two cups from the basin, realizing that he was about to get drunk with a sandle-wearing, Jewish-born, wine-toting bearded freak: the type he'd been warned about repeatedly in the pages of the Corvallis Daily Herald.
"I read about your arrival in the Town Crier," Carlo giggled. "You're a mixed bag, Franklin Moore. Who would have ever thought that a common-day jock would end up gobbling strange pharmaceuticals for the Central Intelligence Agency?"
Franklin lifted his purpled lips from the cup and stared at Carlo.
"I will write a poem about you some day, my dear. A great, epic tome. A grand, ironic thing: Big Brother Requests Your Services. Oh yes, I feel the flush of a hundred dichotomies. I must be off. Many pages to write," Carlo tittered. "Say, dear, you wouldn't happen to have carried off any benzedrine from the hospital, now would you? Well, of course not," he smiled, eyelids drooping. "I suppose that's the persistent junky spirit in me."
Franklin followed Carlo to a '54 Rambler loaded down so heavily with books and blankets and bric-a-brac that its tires resembled last summer's basketball on a forgotten shelf in the garage. "That car's not goin' ten feet," he insisted.
Carlo laughed, gazing at the jalopy, comparing it to the fullness of an idea whose time had come, leaving Franklin wondering, as Carlo drove off, where he had heard that quote before, or if, indeed, it was an original, emanating like breath from the mind of a true genius...or if the strange bearded man was, after all, just one of the gaggle of California freaks he'd read about just last week in the Corvallis Daily Herald.
Franklin walked through the doors of the Menlo Park Veterans hospital that afternoon, as he had a dozen times before, each time wondering which bullet would be spun into the chamber. "Whatcha got for me today, Doc?" Franklin wondered, laying himself on a sanitized cot. "Some of that speedy stuff, maybe?"
Mixing viscous spirits, suffused through gleaming needle. Slide shaft insert red poke vessel.
Franklin nestled into the bed, taking in the four white walls and the glistening, metallic instruments arranged on an even shinier tray. "Good talking to you, too, Doc." Within seconds, his fingers and toes began to tingle, hands and feet flushed, running up the arms, legs, chest cavity tightening, reflux peristalsis, retching up the wine in his gullet.
"Nurse, clean this boy up," the Doctor said coolly.
Franklin coughed up another ounce or two of Burgundy and bile as the nurse waited for him to finish vomiting. "Whyntcha tell the Doc that if... schpptt...he wants me back here...he should give that Ditran to some other poor, dumb sonumbitch," Franklin spat and choked as nurse Lorraine Devlin wiped cold beads of sweat from his forehead.
"Sweet boy," she said, dabbing his face with a moist cloth.
Franklin's eyes grew huge as he stared down at a nest of thorns growing, growling out of a blanket down on his waist that he would have otherwise liked to pull up and over his head to stave off a sudden, venous cold. He tried to laugh, but the sound came as the cackling of chickens in his ears. "Hell, Ditran's only once a month," he said feebly. "The rest is usually good kicks; and I sure can use the 25 smackeroos. What's your name? I've seen you here before...ahhh, look at me," he said, wiping a crust from the corners of his mouth as he tried to ignore the army of tumbleweed thistles marching in divisions toward his head.
"I've been looking," she flushed. "I'll see you Wednesday."
Franklin warmed through the chill of the Ditran, watching as nurse Devlin ministered to the mostly college-aged volunteers. Her long, auburn hair, and the way she wore it pulled back in a ponytail, reminded him of his mom in old pictures. In the corner of his eye, Franklin saw a stout man in a khaki suit exit the service elevator outside the Behavioral Research ward. The man burst through the double doors and the two were joined intuitively.
"Boy, have I got good news for you," the Captain roared, taking in the same four breathing, pulsating white walls. "Stagnant place, terrible scene," Hubbard growled. "No wonder so many Americans are unbalanced."
The treating physician rounded a corner, pointing fervidly to a red and white plastic sign. "This ward is for Authorized Personnel Only. Can't you read!?"
Captain Hubbard chuckled, lifting away a flap from his jacket, feeling the coolness of a .357 in its holster. "I can read a set of orders sending you off to a leper hospital in the Andes."
"I'm calling security."
The Captain extracted his Colt. "I'm the only security you need. I run this project, name's Al Hubbard," he said, watching the doctor lose color. Pressing forcefully on the ulnar nerve, he led the physician to the bed of Franklin Moore. "Looks from here like you've got a chill from whatever the Doc's got running through your veins, boy." The Captain motioned nurse Devlin to remove Franklin's I.V., then walked the Doctor into an empty office. "Ever try Ditran, Doc?"
"I've ..."
"Course not," the Captain muttered. "You'd never jab it into that fine boy's arm if you had. Terrible stuff, Doc. Evil. Gives a man a powerful dislike for the world around him." Hubbard unlocked the leather satchel on his belt and withdrew a vial of Delysid, fresh from Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. "Here. Put Franklin Moore on 400 micrograms of this and let him see the truth. And don't let us down, Doc," the Captain grinned. "Someone of your professional standing might have a hard time adjusting to the hills of Peru. It stays awful wet and cold all year. Your skin just rots off."
Al Hubbard winked at the doctor, and then strolled through the ward and left as he had entered -- a beacon of light, and a wonder.
...
Copyright Circuit Traces Communications 1995