Carnegie looked along the rest of the cages. The same pornographic scenes’ were being played out in each one. Mass rape, homosexual liaisons, fervent and ecstatic masturbation.
“It’s no wonder the doctors made a secret project of their discovery,” Johannson went on. “They were on to something that could have made them a fortune. An aphrodisiac that actually works.”
“An aphrodisiac?”
“Most are useless, of course. Rhinoceros horn, live eels in cream sauce: symbolic stuff. They’re designed to arouse by association.”
Carnegie remembered the hunger in Jerome’s eyes. It was echoed here in the monkeys’. Hunger, and the desperation that hunger brings.
“And the ointments too, all useless. Cantharis vesticatora-“What’s that?” “You know the stuff as Spanish fly, perhaps? It’s a paste
made from a beetle. Again, useless. At best these things are irritants. But this…” He picked up a vial of colorless fluid. “This is damn near genius.”
“They don’t look too happy with it to me.”
“Oh, it’s still crude,” Johannson said. “I think the researchers were greedy and moved into tests on living subjects a good two or three years before it was wise to do so. The stuff is almost lethal as it stands, no doubt of that. But it could be made to work, given time. You see, they’ve sidestepped the mechanical problems. This stuff operates directly on the sexual imagination, on the libido. If you arouse the mind, the body follows. That’s the trick of it.”
A rattling of the wire mesh close by drew Carnegie’s attention from Johannson’s pale features. One of the female monkeys, apparently not satisfied with the attentions of several males, was spread-eagled against her cage, her nimble fingers reaching for Carnegie. Her spouses, not to be left loveless, had taken to sodomy. “Blind Boy?” said Carnegie. “Is that Jerome?”
“It’s Cupid, isn’t it?” Johannson said:
“Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
It’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“The bard was never my strongest suit,” said Carnegie. He went back to staring at the female monkey “And Jerome?” he said.
“He has the agent in his system. A sizeable dose.”
“So he’s like this lot!”
“I would presume-his intellectual capacities being greater-that the agent may not be able to work in quite such an unfettered fashion. But, having said that, sex can make monkeys out of the best of us, can’t it?” Johannson allowed himself a half-smile at the notion. “All our so-called higher concerns become secondary to the pursuit. For a short time sex makes us obsessive. We can perform, or at least think we can perform, what with hindsight may seem extraordinary feats.”
“I don’t think there’s anything so extraordinary about rape, Carnegie commented, attempting to stem Johannson’s rhapsody But the other man would not be subdued.
“Sex without end, without compromise or apology,” he said. “Imagine it. The dream of Casanova.”
THE world had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages; an end, perhaps, to everything. For the fires that were being stoked now were fiercer than the innocent world suspected. They were terrible fires, fires without end, which would illuminate the world in one last, fierce light.
So Welles thought as he lay in his bed. He had been conscious for several hours, but had chosen not to signify such. Whenever a nurse came to his room be would clamp his eyes closed and slow the rhythm of his breath. He knew he could not keep the illusion up for long, but the hours gave him a while to think through his itinerary from here. His first move had to be back to the laboratories. There were papers there he had to shred, tapes to wipe clean. From now on he was determined that every scrap of information about Project Blind Boy exist solely in his head. That way he would have complete control over his masterwork, and nobody could claim it from him.
He had never had much interest in making money from the discovery, although he was well aware of how lucrative a workable aphrodisiac would be; he had never given a fig for material wealth. His initial motivation for the development of the drug-which they had chanced upon quite by accident while testing an agent to aid schizophrenics-had been investigative. But his motives had matured through their months of secret work. He had come to think of himself as the bringer of the millennium. He would not have anyone attempt to snatch that sacred role from him.