Page 113 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Arbor Vitae Cortex

related to the mating status of others in the vicinity. Not only had
Oliver Betzaroff, naturalist without portfolio, detected the presence
of this tiny aperture in the roof of the mouth, but Oliver Betzaroff,
alchemist to and from the stars, would be able to offer to the public,
for a limited time only, an array of artificial odors dispensed in an
unobtrusive atomizer (batteries not included), designed to attract
members of the opposite sex. Yes, love potions.
This hit the popular imagination like a thunderbolt. Orders rolled
in, and Arrowmatic, Cupid’s Messenger, rolled out from a post office
box somewhere in the Great Sonoran Desert. “Pheromones—”
shrieked the ads, “—and she will, too!” Alas, this cure for the
declining birthrate was also doomed to failure. Before long it was
discovered that quadrupeds alone were responding to the amatory
signals liberally dispensed around the boudoirs and bachelor pads of
the country. The ensuing free-for-alls proved anything but seductive
for the bipeds in the room. The popular imagination hit back:
Betzaroff was giving no-names a bad name. For years he was
unwelcome in person or in print anywhere in the realm of
suckerdom. At that point I would have learned my lesson and found
some other means of extracting cash from the unwary: fool’s gold
was doing a brisk trade in the less physical sorts of transaction in
those days—stocks, real estate trusts, currency markets.
But everything else must have seemed just too pedestrian to
Oliver, and in his late forties he would have had trouble adjusting to
some other flavor of pie in the sky. So here he was again, on my radar
as a target for extravagant charity. After reading his file, I could not
understand why. Perhaps it was his sheer doggedness that appealed
to my boss: it couldn’t have been his brainstorms. And how was
anyone to distinguish between con artists and “genuine” crackpots
inevitably motivated by financial gain to some degree? As far as I
could tell, Betzaroff’s latest gimmick was no more likely to be based
on reality than any of the earlier ones. Yet Al Magnus had seen fit to
send me on this errand, and I was glad to get the payment offered in
return for my services. My motivation could not have been less
ambiguous.
When I finally located booth D-143, the beachhead of Tunnelight
Therapies, I felt a twinge of remorse for my dismissive attitude
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