Page 147 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Operation Belshazzar

Cyrus Lee was last on the list: if Al Magnus had me pegged as well
as he claimed, that made sense. I would receive the highest fee for
handling this case, and never be asked to do another. Thus the
distaste I endured in preparing to meet Lee was constantly sweetened
by the sugarplum vision of my bank account rising from the dead.
After a few months of watching a respectable balance slip through
my porous hands I was ambivalently looking forward to my final
assignment. Magnus had already engaged me to establish sufficient
rapport with eleven other crackpots to convince them to take money
from some superficially-credible but fictitious entity to prove or
actualize their theory—and then face the consequences. With each
subsidy delivered Magnus increased my compensation, following an
incremental schedule that would pay me a total of almost eight
million dollars if I stuck it out. That meant playing front man for him
when approaching a dozen potentially unstable men generally
considered beyond the pale, owing to their unwavering belief in ideas
completely rejected by everyone else. They were, accordingly, for the
most part loners, unable to find support from normal channels of
commercial investment and academic research—and often enough
ended up antisocial to the point of paranoia. That was why I was
being paid so highly: Magnus, through his own eccentric method of
selecting personnel for positions in his corporation, had decided I,
among an unknown number of applicants for a vaguely-described
job, had the best chance of successfully dealing with these cranks,
and he judged it prudent to offset any compounding revulsion I
might experience in the performance of my duties with an ever-
greater reward.
So I had stayed the course. Ultimately, I realized, it didn’t matter
what I felt about my work: unable to save any of the income, but
getting used to expanding possibilities of extravagance and profligacy,
I kept coming back for more out of necessity. Magnus had people,
unconnected with me, compiling information on prospective
recipients of his generosity; the dossier on Lee was filled with
clippings related to his contentious presentations of theology, church
history and Biblical prophecy. The ex-seminarian seemed to miss no
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