Page 153 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Operation Belshazzar

My suggestion cured his vacillation. “Mr. Lee: have you had lunch
yet? I haven’t and I’d like to invite you to be my guest over there at
Wings ‘n’ Beans.”
Five minutes later we were both squinting at the graffiti-like menu
on a chalkboard over the mummified cake and pie vitrine at the
eatery. Evidently my guest had not patronized the establishment
often enough to memorize the handful of dishes semi-intelligibly on
offer. After an unsuitable interval the cook staggered out of the
kitchen and wiped the counter around our elbows.
“Getcha somethin’?”
“I’ll have the lunch special,” said I brightly, my choice combining
adventure into the unknown with admirable thrift.
“Same for me,” chimed in Cyrus Lee.
That bit of business concluded, I opened the discussion. “Mr.
Lee,” I intoned in all seriousness, “The MRS has been endowed by its
creator—who prefers to remain anonymous—with a fund from
which to make occasional but significant awards to Biblical
researchers. We have followed your career for quite a while, and are
aware of the ill treatment you suffer at the hands of some of your
colleagues. Therefore, if it is appropriate, we would be honored to
confer upon you one of those awards.”
He digested that, perhaps more easily than he would his lunch. I
was thinking, between verbal slathers of undeserved praise and
mimed gestures subliminally suggesting an ego massage, of how this
might be my last bad meal for quite a while. And his, too, if he didn’t
spend all of Magnus’s money on cockeyed tracts and the means of
delivering them to the unconvinced.
“Appropriate?” barked Lee, seizing my weasel-word by the scruff
of the neck. “What does that imply? Some hoop I have to jump
through? Or an inquisition into my doctrinal purity?”
“Neither, I assure you.” I was playing him like a fiddle at a
hoedown. It was easier to let the air out of his mistrust when it was
directed at the paper tiger of abstract argument than at the elephant
in the room of my bona fides. “We must obey the spirit and the letter
of our charter by assuring our benefactor that your theories are both
original and important.”

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