The Adding Machine Read Online Free PDF Page B

the menace and the final resolution when the menace is fully dissipated.
    The menace can be an epidemic, an enemy about to spray nerve gas on New York City or poison the water supply, or even a revived prehistoric monster. But here you have to be very careful; the general public won’t want to be really frightened or shaken up too much, just a little bit. The horror film formula involves a measure of extortion: you’re paying not to see something that’s really horrible, you are paying to see Willard’s nice rats and not to see rats eating the genitals off a screaming infant.
    So we combine these two formulas for a sure-fire hit.. .
    The set is a biological warfare center. What goes on behind these walls? See what I mean? We are taking the reader right past the MP’s at the gate, into Top Secret Classified areas. Bitter staff rivalries and intrigues — the lady virologist who loves Doktor Hester, who has eyes for the FBI lady who pretends to be a receptionist... Here is a staff meeting where Professor Steinplatz denounces as nonsense Doktor Hester’s Anthrax 38: ‘It is time we got so out from the barnyard.’ Doktor Hester has other projects; he bides his time.
    Now here’s the beginning: Louie the Light opens his beady black eyes and looks cautiously around the room. He stands up groggily and looks at a door in front of him. He shivers, remembering an occasion when with his sex centers inflamed by electrodes he had started through that door towards a stunning albino with pink eyes. Just as he touched the door an agonizing shock twisted his lean body as a blinding light shone straight into his pleasure-dilated pupils. After that he couldn’t see for five days during which he was given no food. It was Doktor Hester who named him Louie the Light from the number of lights to which he had been exposed.
    Footsteps. Key in the lock. Louie conceals himself behind a centrifuge. Voices... ‘So now Doktor we will see your so interesting Wilhelm Hester Virus 23, nein?’ No one notices a grey shadow as it streaks down the hall.
    Louie the Light can hardly walk by the time he reaches Highway 97. LIGHTS! He squeaks with terror. The next second a tire flattens him into a bloody blob, his fear-dilated eyes, long yellow teeth and curled tail looking up at the mud guard. Louie has seen the light. Ten minutes later, the driver (subsequently identified at St. Vincent’s Hospital as Walter Winch, travelling X-ray equipment salesman) is in a gas line at Broadway and 23rd Street.
    Meanwhile, in Doktor Hester’s laboratory, Professor Steinplatz points dramatically to an empty cage. ‘Where is this wondrous rat? This Louie the Lighted?’
    Doktor Hester turns pale. He realizes with appalling clarity that he has made one of the great goofs of history, besides which Verdun, the invasion of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler, the Dardanelles, are but grains of sand on a vast radioactive empty beach. Within days Virus B-23 rages through the cities of the world like a topping forest fire.
    Newscaster: ‘Virus B-23 is one of the most contagious diseases ever to appear on this planet and it shows such an ability to mutate that a physician can never be sure he is dealing with a case of B-23 until the hideous terminal symptoms supervene: an accelerated putrefaction accompanied by sexual frenzies, the victim rotting and performing obscene acts before the horrified eyes of his friends and family. In the end the victim disintegrates, giving off sepia puffs of noxious yellow vapours and deadly spores that infect anyone in the vicinity — and the people running from centers of infection spread the plague in concentric circles.’
    At this point we start selling the movie rights. It can be a twenty-million dollar spectacular or it can be a low-budget winner shot right in the germ center ... ‘I feel terrible about the whole thing,’ says Doktor Hester on TV. So finally the virus is brought under control, leaving bizarre mutations in its wake, some