Farnsworth lay down on his shirt and pants and fell into a wordless vacuum, feeling the sun on his back and the faint ache of the healing scratch. He saw Ali sitting naked above him, Ali's hands massaging his back, moving down to the buttocks. Something was surfacing in his body, drifting up from remote depths of memory, and he saw as if projected on a screen a strange incident from his adolescence. He was in the British Museum at the age of fourteen, standing in front of a glass case. He was alone in the room. In the case was the figure, about two feet long, of a reclining man. The man was naked, the right knee flexed, holding the body a few inches off the grond, the penis exposed. The hands were extended in front of the man palms down, and the face was reptile or animal, something between an alligator and a jaguar.
The boy was looking at the thighs and buttocks and genitals, breathing through his teeth. He was getting stiff and lubricating, his pants sticking out at the fly. He was squeezing into the figure, a dream tension gathering in his crotch, squeezing and stretching, a strange smell unlike anything he had ever smelled before but familiar as smell itself, a naked man lying by a wide clear river—the twisted figure. Silver spots boiled in front of his eyes and he ejaculated.
Ali's hands parted his buttocks, he spit on his rectum—his body opening and the figure entering him in a silent rush, flexing his right knee, stretching his jaw forward into a snout, his head flattening, his brain squeezing out the smell from inside ... a hoarse hissing sound was forced from his lips and light popped in his eyes as his body boiled and twisted out scalding spurts.
Stage with a jungle backdrop. Frogs croak and birds call from
recorder. Farnsworth as an adolescent is lying facedown on sand. Ali is
fucking him and he squirms with a slow wallowing movement showing
his teeth in a depraved smile. The lights dim for a few seconds. When
the lights come up Farnsworth is wearing an alligator suit that leaves
his ass bare and Ali is still fucking him. As Ali and Farnsworth slide
offstage Farnsworth lifts one webbed finger to the audience while a
Marine band plays "Semper Fi." Offstage splash.
We see Tibet with the binoculars of the people
The scouting party stopped a few hundred yards from the village on the bank of a stream. Yen Lee studied the village through his field glasses while his men sat down and lit cigarettes. The village was built into the side of a mountain. The stream ran through the town, and water had been diverted into pools on a series of cultivated terraces that led up to the monastery. There was no sign of life in the steep winding street or by the pools. The valley was littered with large boulders which would serve as cover if necessary, but he did not expect resistance on a military level. He lowered his glasses, signaling for the men to follow.
They crossed a stone bridge two at a time, covered by the men behind them. If any defenders were going to open fire, now would be the time and place to do it. Beyond the bridge the street twisted up the mountainside. On both sides there were stone huts, many of them fallen into ruin and obviously deserted. As they moved up the stone street, keeping to the sides and taking cover behind the ruined huts, Yen Lee became increasingly aware of a hideous unknown odor. He motioned the patrol to halt and stood there sniffing.
Unlike his counterparts in western countries, he had been carefully selected for a high level of intuitive adjustment, and trained accordingly to imagine and explore seemingly fantastic potentials in any situation, while at the same time giving equal consideration to prosaic and practical aspects. He had developed an attitude at once probing and impersonal, remote and alert. He did not know when the training had begun, since in Academy 23 it was carried out in a context of reality. He did not see his teachers, whose instructions were conveyed through a series of real situations.
He had been born in Hong Kong and had lived there until the age of twelve, so that English was a second language. Then his family had moved to Shanghai. In his early teens he had read the American Beat writers. The volumes had been brought through Hong Kong and sold under the counter in a bookshop that seemed to enjoy freedom from official interference, although the proprietor was also engaged in currency deals.
At the age of sixteen he was sent to a military academy, where he received intensive training in the use of weapons. After six months he was summoned to the Colonel's office and told that he would be leaving the military school and returning to Shanghai. Since he had applied himself to the training and made an excellent showing, he asked the Colonel if this was because his work had not been satisfactory. The Colonel was looking not at him but around him, as if drawing a figure in the air. He indicated obliquely that while a desire to please one's superiors was laudable, other considerations were in certain cases even more highly emphasized.
The smell hit him like an invisible wall. He stopped and leaned against a house. It was like rotten metal or metal excrement, he decided. The patrol was still in the ruined outskirts of the village. One man was vomiting violently, his face beaded with sweat. He straightened up and started towards the stream. Yen Lee stopped him: "Don't drink the water or splash it on your face. The stream runs through the town."
Yen Lee sat down and looked once again at the town through his field glasses. There were still no villagers in sight. He put his glasses down and conducted an out-of-body exploration of the village—what westerners call "astral travel." He was moving up the street now, his gun at the ready. The gun would shoot blasts of energy, and he could feel it tingle in his hands. He kicked open a door.
One glance told him that interrogation was useless. He would get no information on a verbal level. A man and a woman were in the terminal stages of some disease, their faces eaten to the bone by phosphorescent sores. An older woman was dead. The next hut contained five corpses, all elderly.
In another hut a youth lay on a pallet, the lower half of his body covered by a blanket. Bright red nipples of flesh about an inch in height, growing in clusters, covered his chest and stomach and sprouted from his face and neck. The growths looked like exotic plants. He noticed that they were oozing a pearly juice that ate into the flesh, leaving luminescent sores. Sensing Yen Lee's presence the youth turned towards him with a slow idiot smile, arching his body and caressing the flesh clusters with one hand while the other hand slid under the blanket and moved to his crotch. In another hut, Yen Lee glimpsed a scene that he quickly erased from memory.
Yen Lee advanced towards the monastery. Then he stopped. The gun went heavy and solid in his hands as energy left it. His training had not quite prepared him for the feeling of death that fell in a steady silent rain from the monastery above him. The monastery must contain a deadly force, probably some form of radioactivity, perhaps psychic fission. He surmised further that the illness afflicting the villagers was a radioactive virus strain. He knew that top-secret research in the West was moving in this direction: as early as World War II, England had developed a radioactive virus known as the Doomsday Bug.
Returning to his body Yen Lee weighed his observations and surmises. What had he glimpsed and hastily looked away from? Tiny creatures like translucent shrimp feeding at the flesh nipples ... and something else.... He did not push himself, knowing that a biologic protective reaction was shielding him from knowledge he was unable to assimilate and handle. The monastery probably contained a laboratory and the village had been used as a testing ground. How did the technicians protect themselves from the radiation? Could the laboratory be operated by remote control? Or had the technicians been immunized by gradient exposure? Did the laboratory contain a sophisticated DOR installation?