Page 111 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Arbor Vitae Cortex

distributorships on the lookout for attractive investments. I aspired
to something far greater—an avatar of the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus
and the Easter Bunny rolled into one, the unexpected messiah of
moola for one lucky guy. You guessed it: Oliver Betzaroff.
It was my latest undercover operation in a series of reverse stings
engineered by Al Magnus, philanthropist extraordinaire. He had
selected me to be a walking, talking delivery system for some very
precisely targeted individuals needing a large infusion of cash in order
to pursue obsessively-held beliefs rejected by both their peers and the
general public. I had difficulty maintaining sympathy for these
crackpots, but that was my problem and I kept it to myself. Magnus
had warned me not to speak ill of them—not even to use that term in
his presence. He was paying me handsomely to deal with a bunch of
cranks most solid citizens would avoid like the plague. For his own
reasons he was determined to give them a chance to make good, to
push their theories to a logical conclusion and final implementation.
His position in the world of affairs precluded his direct participation
in that facilitation; he needed a proxy, and chose me out of a field of
applicants answering a vaguely-worded job offer.
I was not completely alone in this endeavor, luckily. He had a
contracted research organization assembling dossiers on his dozen
designated recipients of undreamt-of largesse. I received those files
one at a time, upon request and within six months of completing the
prior assignment. Magnus had created a schedule of remuneration for
my services that increased arithmetically with each completed task.
That was a smart move, because with each assignment I became less
enchanted with what I was doing and more cognizant of the dangers
to which I was subjecting myself and the object of my pursuit. I don’t
know if Magnus had suggested it himself during our one and only
meeting, but I retained the nagging suspicion that somehow he knew
me better than I knew myself, and that I would stick it out to the end.
I wonder if he also was aware of my inability to save much of my
earnings, a rather strong motivation to come back for the next
mission into the murky depths of muddied psyches.
My present case was, at least on paper, one of the more distasteful.
Betzaroff clearly had no scruples; he had already invented, or stolen,
or conjured out of thin air a series of schemes, gadgets and chemical
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