Introduction to
CARCINOMA ANGELS:
This is the last introduction to be written, though not the last in the book. Last, because I have put it off time after time. And not because there is a dearth of material to be written about Norman Spinrad, but because there is so much. A leading editor for a hardcover house contends Norman is the hottest young talent to emerge from the field of speculative fiction in years. Another editor, of a magazine, says Norman is an abominable writer (though he buys his work ... go figure that). I think he writes like a lunatic. When he is bad, he is unreadable, which is infrequently. When he is good, he tackles themes and styles only a nut would attempt (knowing in advance the task was impossible) and has the audacity to bring them off in spectacular fashion.
Take for instance his contribution here. It is a funny story about cancer. Now tell me that isn’t fresh ground, unbroken by Leacock, Benchley or Thurber.
Spinrad is a product of the Bronx. He’s a street kid, with the classic hunger for achievement, status and worldly goods that drives the have-nots to the top. He truly feels there is nothing he can’t do, nothing he can’t write. He isn’t writing this novel, or this story, he is writing a career, and it pulses out of him in volume after volume. At twenty-six he bids fair to being the first writer of the genre to break out into the big-time mainstream since Bradbury and Clarke. His drives are worn like a suit of clothes, and they manifest themselves in obvious ways. Let his bank balance sink below a thousand dollars, and he gets twitchy, actually changes disposition like a Jekyll-Hyde, becomes unbearable, driven. Let an idea of purest gold come to him and he paces back and forth, rolls his eyes, scratches his head, stands poised in the center of the room with legs twined around each other like some great redheaded bird ready to go up. He is a creature of emotion, stated in broadest terms. Love will send him driving across a continent. Friendship will plunge him into an emotional maelstrom rather than let someone down. Hate will push him to excesses of language and a killing urge to run other cars off the road. His inquisitiveness sends him where neither angels nor fools would tread. His critical faculties are so sharp I have seen him correctly postulate a theory for social behavior that was indicated by only the most casual occurrence. He is gullible. He is cynical. He knows where it’s at in terms of his times, and he hasn’t the faintest idea when he is being put on. He is truly a wise man, and he is the sheerest buffoon. People do not take him in, yet there have been times when I have seen Norman shucked thoroughly by inept practitioners of the art form. His first novel (The Solarians, 1966) is so bad it cannot be read. His third novel (The Men in the Jungle) is so brilliant it burns like the surface of the sun.
He was born in New York in 1940, graduating after the usual number of years from the Bronx High School of Science, a “highly overrated think-factory for the production of mad scientists, neurotic adolescent geniuses, bomb-hurling anarchists, and Stokeley Carmichael, who finished a year behind me.” He graduated from CGNY in 1961 with the only Bachelor of Science degree in Esoterica ever granted by that institution. (His major consisted of courses such as Japanese Civilization, Asian Literature, Short Story Writing and Geology.)
While in his final term at CGNY, Norman’s professor in short-story writing pleaded for stories that really pulled out all the stops, much like my request for this book. Norman handed the unsuspecting pedant a story so dirty it still hasn’t been published. However, the professor was impressed and suggested Norman submit it to Playboy. The Bunny-Lovers’ Gazette turned it down (though they have since rectified their shortsightedness in matters Spinradian; see “Death-watch,” Playboy, November 1965) but it only took once to get Spinrad into the habit of submitting things he had written to magazines. It seemed so much more advisable than shoving them into the cracks in the walls for insulation. (A simple jump of logic. If the magazine buys the stories, you take the money and jam it into the walls for insulation.)
After graduation he went to Mexico where he contracted various nameless diseases and aggravated an old one with a name. In some inexplicable manner this convinced him to become a writer. He returned to New York, wound up living and working in Greenwich Village and put in a stint in the hospital where he contracted something called toxic hepatitis, ran temperatures of 1060 for five days straight, hallucinating all the while, and held off interns with a bedpan while calling the Pentagon (collect, naturally, he wasn’t that nuts) and waking a general at 2 a.m., thus getting the idea for his story in this anthology—the interaction between external and internal mythical-subjective universes. Whatever the hell that means.
He sold his first story, “The Last of the Romany,” in 1962 to Analog (thus inciting the rumor that he is a “Campbell writer,” which Spinrad denies vehemently everywhere save in the presence of John W. Campbell, editor of Analog, at which time all he does is grin fatuously and say, “Yes, John.” This is no slur. I know of no writer who is a Campbell writer, or even a writer who writes for Campbell [two different things, I assure you], who is not a Yes John. I have never been a Yes John. I have also never sold to Analog) and aside from a stint in a literary agency and a month as a welfare investigator (having stolen so much from them, he felt it behooved him to make amends by intimidating other poor boys and their tubercular children), he has been a full-time writer ever since. (There are those who say Norman is only a part-time writer, being a full-time noodje!)
He has had a second paperback novel published—aside from The Solarians, which was mentioned deprecatingly already—and The Men in the Jungle, both this year. The latter is a truly original experience, a Doubleday book that grew out of a projected short story for this collection and a deep concern with the morality and tactics of Vietnam-style so-called “Wars of National Liberation.”
In the works, at this writing, is a new novel titled Bug Jack Barron, which Spinrad calls “a synthesis-novel written to satisfying the differing—though not necessarily conflicting—demands of serious mainstream avant-garde yessir boy writing, and science fiction; a coherent ‘Nova Express’, in a way.” Spinrad gets carried away with his own talent. I have read parts of Bug Jack Barron. It is not a synthesis-novel about whachimacallit or avant garde or mainstream or none of that jazz. What Bug Jack Barron is, chiefly, is awful dirty. It will sell like crazy.
But until your minds can be properly tainted by the full effulgence of Spinrad’s foulness, I suggest you pervert yourselves only slightly with “Carcinoma Angels”, a funny story.
* * * *
CARCINOMA ANGELS
by Norman Spinrad
At the age of nine Harrison Wintergreen first discovered that the world was his oyster when he looked at it side-wise. That was the year when baseball cards were in. The kid with the biggest collection of baseball cards was it. Harry Wintergreen decided to become it.
Harry saved up a dollar and bought one hundred random baseball cards. He was in luck—one of them was the very rare Yogi Berra. In three separate transactions, he traded his other ninety-nine cards for the only other three Yogi Berras in the neighborhood. Harry had reduced his holdings to four cards, but he had cornered the market in Yogi Berra. He forced the price of Yogi Berra up to an exorbitant eighth-cards. With the slush fund thus accumulated, he successively cornered the market in Mickey Mantle, Willy Mays and Pee Wee Reese and became the J. P. Morgan of baseball cards.
Harry breezed through high school by the simple expedient of mastering only one subject—the art of taking tests. By his senior year, he could outthink any test writer with his gypsheet tied behind his back and won seven scholarships with foolish ease.
In college Harry discovered girls. Being reasonably good-looking and reasonably facile, he no doubt would’ve 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 carefully cultivated a stutter, which he could turn 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 secret inner hurt that made him stutter. Many were the girls who tried to delve Harry’s secret, while Harry delved them.
In his sophomore year Harry grew bored with college and reasoned that the thing to do was to become Filthy Rich. He assiduously studied sex novels for one month, wrote three of them in the next two which he immediately sold at $1,000 a throw.
With the $3,000 thus garnered, he bought a shiny new convertible. He drove the new car to the Mexican border and across into a notorious border town. He immediately contacted a disreputable 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 had 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 cars and illegally sold the convertible in Mexico for $15,000.
Harry took his $ 15,000 to Las Vegas and spent the next six weeks buying people drinks, lending broke gamblers money, acting in general like a fuzzy-cheeked Santa Claus, gaining the confidence of the right drunks and blowing $5,000.
At the end of six weeks he had three hot market tips which turned his remaining $10,000 into $40,000 in the next two months.
Harry bought four hundred crated government surplus jeeps in four hundred-jeep lots of $10,000 a lot and immediately sold them to a highly disreputable Central American government for $100,000.
He took the $100,000 and bought a tiny island in the Pacific, so worthless that no government had ever bothered to claim it. 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 $100,000 a plot. He unloaded the last plot three weeks before the United States, with U.N. backing, claimed the island and brought it under the sway of the Internal Revenue Department.
Harry invested a small part of his $2,000,000 and rented a large computer for twelve hours. The computer constructed a betting scheme by which Harry parlayed his $2,000,000 into $20,000,000 by taking various British soccer pools to the tune of $18,000,000.
For $5,000,000 he bought a monstrous chunk of useless desert from an impoverished Arabian sultanate. With another $2,000,000 he created a huge rumor campaign to the effect that this patch of desert was literally floating on oil. With another $3,000,000 he set up a dummy corporation which made like a big oil company and publicly offered to buy his desert for $75,000,000. After some spirited bargaining, a large American oil company was allowed to outbid the dummy and bought a thousand square miles of sand for $100,000,000.
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. 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 headhunters to Roscrucianism. He set up twelve rest homes for overage whores and organized a birth control program which sterilized twelve million fecund Indian women. He contrived to make another $100,000,000 on the above enterprises.
At the age of thirty Harrison Wintergreen had had it with Do-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 Wintergreen Filter, a membrane through which fresh water passed freely, but which barred salts. Once set up, a Wintergreen Desalinization Plant could desalinate an unlimited supply of water at a per-gallon cost approaching absolute zero. He painted one painting and was distantly offered $200,000 for it. He donated it to the Museum of Modern Art, gratis. He developed a mutated virus which destroyed syphilis bacteria. Like syphilis, it spread by sexual contact. It was a mild aphrodisiac. 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 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 who, at the age of forty, was informed that he had an advanced, well-spread and incurable case of cancer and that he had one year to live.
* * * *
Wintergreen spent the first month of 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 in Tennis Shoes. There was no known cure for terminal cancer, reputable or otherwise. It was as 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 villa. The villa had a completely automatic kitchen and enough food for a year. It had a $5,000,000 biological and biochemical laboratory. It had a $3,000,000 microfilmed library which contained every word ever written on the subject of cancer. It had the pharmacy to end all pharmacies: a literal supply of quite literally every drug that existed—poisons, painkillers, hallucinogens, dandricides, antiseptics, antibiotics, viricides, headache remedies, heroin, quinine, curare, snake oil—everything. The pharmacy cost $20,000,000.
The villa also contained a one-way radiotelephone, a large stock of basic chemicals, including radioactives, copies of the Koran, the Bible, the Torah, the Book of the Dead, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the I Ching and the complete works of Wilhelm Reich and Aldous Huxley. It also contained a very large and ultra-expensive computer. By the time the villa was ready, Wintergreen’s petty cash fund was nearly exhausted.
With ten months to do that which the medical world considered impossible, Harrison Wintergreen entered his citadel.
During the first two months he devoured the library, sleeping three hours out of each twenty-four and dosing himself regularly with Benzedrine. The library offered nothing but data. He digested the data and went on to the pharmacy.
During the next month he tried aureomycin, bacitracin, stannous fluoride, hexylresorcinol, cortisone, penicillin, hexa-chlorophene, shark-liver extract and 7312 assorted other miracles of modern medical science, all to no avail. 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, viricides, Christian Science, yoga, prayer, enemas, patent medicines, herb tea, witchcraft and yogurt diets. This consumed another month, during which Wintergreen continued to waste away, sleeping less and less and taking more and more Benzedrine and morphine. Nothing worked. He had six months left.
He was on the verge of becoming desperate. He tried a different tack. He sat in a comfortable chair and contemplated his navel for forty-eight consecutive hours.
His meditations produced a severe case of eyestrain and two significant words: “spontaneous remission”.
In his two months of research, Wintergreen 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. 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.
Wintergreen was buoyed; he was even ebullient. He knew that some terminal cancer patients had been cured. Therefore terminal cancer could be cured. Therefore the problem as removed from the realm of the impossible and was now merely the domain of the highly improbable.
And doing the highly improbable was Wintergreen’s specialty.
With six months of estimated life left, Wintergreen set jubilantly to work. From his complete cancer library he culled every known case of spontaneous remission. He coded every one of them into the computer—data on the medical histories of the patients, on the treatments employed, on their ages, sexes, religions, races, creeds, colors, national origins, temperaments, marital status, Dun and Bradstreet ratings, neuroses, psychoses and favorite beers. Complete profiles of every human being ever known to have survived terminal cancer were fed into Harrison Wintergreen’s computer.
Wintergreen programed 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 would be removed.
Wintergreen had shelled out $100,000,000 for the computer. It was the best damn computer in the world. In two minutes and 7.894 seconds it had performed its task. In one succinct word it gave Wintergreen his answer:
“Negative.”
Spontaneous remission did not correlate with any externa2 factor. It was still spontaneous; the cause was unknown.
A lesser man would’ve been crushed. A more conventional man would’ve been dumbfounded. Harrison Wintergreen was elated.
He had eliminated the entire external universe as a factor in spontaneous remission in one fell swoop. Therefore, in some mysterious way, the human body and/or psyche was capable of curing itself.
Wintergreen set out to explore and conquer his own internal universe. He repaired to the pharmacy and prepared a formidable potation. Into his largest syringe he decanted the following: Novocain; morphine; curare; vlut, a rare Central Asian poison which induced temporary blindness; olfactorcain, a top-secret smell-deadener used by skunk farmers; tympanoline, a drug which temporarily deadened the auditory nerves (used primarily by filibustering senators); a large dose of Benzedrine; lysergic acid; psilocybin; mescaline; peyote extract; seven other highly experimental and most illegal hallucinogens; eye of newt and toe of dog.
Wintergreen laid himself out on his most comfortable couch. He swabbed the vein in the pit of his left elbow with alcohol and injected himself with the witch’s brew.
His heart pumped. His blood surged, carrying the arcane chemicals to every part of his body. The Novocain blanked out every sensory nerve in his body. The morphine eliminated all sensations of pain. The vlut blacked out his vision. The olfactorcain cut off all sense of smell. The tympanoline made him deaf as a traffic court judge. The curare paralyzed him.
Wintergreen was alone in his own body. No external stimuli reached him. He was in a state of total sensory deprivation. The urge to lapse into blessed unconsciousness was irresistible. Wintergreen, strong-willed though he was, could not have remained conscious unaided. But the massive dose of Benzedrine 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.
Then, one and two, and then in combinations like the fists of a good fast heavyweight, the hallucinogens hit.
Wintergreen’s sensory organs were blanked out, but the brain centers which received sensory data were still active. It was on these cerebral centers that the tremendous charge of assorted hallucinogens acted. He began to see phantom colors, shapes, things without name or form. He heard eldritch symphonies, ghost echoes, mad howling noises. A million 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 drugs kept his sense blank. The Benzedrine kept him conscious. Forty years of being Harrison Wintergreen kept aim cold and sane.
For an indeterminate period of time he rolled with the punches, groping for the feel of this strange new non-environment. Then gradually, hesitantly at first but with ever growing confidence, Wintergreen 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 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 blank wave band of the outside side 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 turned, adjusted, forced, struggled, felt his mind pressing against an atom-thin interface. He battered against the interface, an analogical translucent membrane between his mind and his internal universe, a membrane that stretched, flexed, bulged inward, thinned...and finally broke. Like Alice through the Looking Glass, his analogical body stepped through and stood on the other side.
Harrison Wintergreen was inside his own body.
It was a world of wonder and loathsomeness, of the majestic and the ludicrous. Wintergreen’s point of view, which his mind analogized as a body within his true body, was inside a vast network of pulsing arteries, like some monstrous freeway system. The analogy crystallized. It was a freeway, and Wintergreen was driving down it. Bloated sacs dumped things into the teeming traffic: hormones, wastes, nutrients. White blood cells careened by him like mad taxicabs. Red corpuscles drove steadily along like stolid burghers. The traffic ebbed and congested like a crosstown rush hour. Wintergreen drove on, searching, searching.
He made a left, cut across three lanes and made a right down towards a lymph node. And then he saw it—a pile of white cells like a twelve-car collision, and speeding towards him a leering motorcyclist.
Black the cycle. Black the riding leathers. Black, dull pure light in his hand. Savage black dragons with blood-red eyes. And emblazoned across the front and back of the black motorcycle jacket in shining scarlet studs the legend: “Carcinoma Angels”.
With a savage whoop, Wintergreen gunned his analogical car down the hypothetical freeway straight for the imaginary cyclist, the cancer cell.
Splat! Pop! Cuush! Wintergreen’s car smashed the cycle and the rider exploded in a cloud of fine black dust.
Up and down the freeways of his circulatory system Wintergreen ranged, barreling along arteries, careening down veins, inching through narrow capillaries, seeking the blackclad cyclists, the Carcinoma Angels, grinding them to dust beneath his wheels. ...
And he found himself in the dark moist wood of his lungs, riding a snow-white analogical horse, an imaginary lance of pure light in his hand. Savage black dragons with blood-red eves and flickering red tongues slithered from behind the gnarled bolls of great air-sac trees. St. Wintergreen spurred his horse, lowered his lance and impaled monster after hissing monster till at last the holy lungwood was free of dragons. ...
He was flying in some vast moist cavern, above him the vague bulks of gigantic organs, below a limitless expanse of shining slimy peritoneal plain.
From behind the cover of his huge beating heart a formation of black fighter planes, bearing the insignia of a scarlet C on their wings and fusilages, roared down at him.
Wintergreen gunned his engine and rose to the fray, flying up and over the bandits, blasting them with his machine guns, and one by one and then in bunches they crashed in flames to the peritoneum below....
In a thousand shapes and guises, the black and red things attacked. Black, the color of oblivion, red, the color of blood. Dragons, cyclists, planes, sea things, soldiers, tanks and tigers in blood vessels and lungs and spleen and thorax and bladder—Carcinoma Angels, all.
And Wintergreen fought his analogical battles in an equal number of incarnations, as driver, knight, pilot, diver, soldier, mahout, with a grim and savage glee, littering the battlefields of his body with the black dust of the fallen Carcinoma Angels.
Fought and fought and killed and killed and finally...
Finally found himself knee-deep in the sea of his digestive juices lapping against the walls of the dank, moist cave that was his stomach. And scuttling towards him on chitinous legs, a monstrous black crab with blood-red eyes, gross, squat, primeval.
Clicking, chittering, the crab scurried across his stomach towards him. Wintergreen paused, grinned wolfishly, and leaped high in the air, landing with both feet squarely on the hard black carapace.
Like a sun-dried gourd, brittle, dry, hollow, the crab crunched beneath his weight and splintered into a million dusty fragments.
And Wintergreen was alone, at last alone and victorious, the first 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 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 yen will find Harrison Wintergreen, who made himself Filthy Rich, Harrison Wintergreen, who Did Good, Harrison Wintergreen, who Left His Footprints in the Sands of Time, Harrison Wintergreen, catatonic vegetable.
Harrison Wintergreen, who stepped inside his own body to do battle with Carcinoma’s Angels, and won.
And can’t get out.
* * * *
Afterword:
Cancer. Cancer has become a whisper-word, a myth word, a magic word, a dirty word; cancer, you should pardon the expression, is the 20th Century Pox. Prominent Public Personalities, alone, escape from its ravages, as any newspaper obituary column will tell you: “dying after a long, lingering illness”, or “passing away from natural causes”. Cancer the Crab has even lost his billing in some of the more sensitive Astrological Columns, his piece of the zodiacal pie being preempted by “Moon Children”—the powers that be having decided that reminding one-twelfth of the readership that they were born under the sign of cellular madness is bad for the circulation, not to mention the alimentary canal.
So what’s with cancer anyway? (You have now read the word “cancer” six times. Found any suspicious-looking moles yet?) The Gallup Poll shows that seven out of ten Americans prefer tertiary syphilis to cancer. Such unpopularity must be deserved, but why? Just because cancer is your own body devouring itself like a wounded hyena? Simply because cancer is psychosis on a cellular level? Merely because cancer is inexplicable and incurable on the level of objective reality?
Ah, but what about on the level of mythical reality? How else do you expect to fight a myth anyway? Gotta fight Black Magic with White Magic. Couldn’t cancer be psycho-somatic (a magic word if ever there was one), the physical manifestation of some psychic vampirism? Cancer, after all, is the Ultimate Cannibalism—your body eating itself, cell by cell.
Wouldn’t you rather forget about this morbid, unpleasant subject and think about something nicer, like gas ovens or thalidomide or Limited Pre-Emptive Thermonuclear War?
After all, as Henry Miller says in his preface to The Subterraneans, “Cancer! Schmanser! What’s the difference, so long as you’re healthy!”
* * * *