Page 5 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Prologue

others of his generation he originally believed that the development
of a doomsday weapon was both inevitable and necessary for
humanity to come to its senses and abolish war. That is a quaint idea
now, of course, but the first part of it has come to pass, leaving the
failed expectation of the second rather poignant. Be that as it may,
life goes on, leaving a wake of broken dreams and reinforced
nightmares. The explosive my father invented required an infusion of
capital in order to be fully tested. He was not given a hearing in the
halls of finance or of government. He was considered—and here I
use a word that I will not repeat and do not wish to be uttered in my
presence—a crackpot. He invested the family’s savings in filing a
patent and scaling down an experiment to prove his point. I was still
a child when he collapsed at his workbench.”
I tried to look sympathetic, or at least overlay my puzzlement with
an expression indicative of concern.
Magnus continued. “My early years were difficult. I studied
chemical engineering and revisited my father’s notes several times as
I became more conversant with the science behind his endeavor. By
that time the hydrogen bomb had dwarfed all other destructive
devices, and no weapon had served well as deterrence to violence. I
took a job at one of the new corporations converting petrochemicals
into food, placing my skills in the service of saturating fats and
coaxing exotic esters from light crude. And then I discovered that my
father had formulated not an explosive but a catalyst in an extremely
efficient process of rendering animal tissue. I formed my own
company and was able to build it into the Hog Wild Corporation.
Yes, Mr. Baker, I am CEO and major shareholder in the company
that produces Pigwigs, Ultra Oinkers, Snout Chips, Pig Dippers and
Curly Q’s. Every bag of them puts five cents in my pocket; you may
extrapolate that by whatever quantitative factor you fancy.”
Doing the math was unnecessary. The man was wealthy and
getting wealthier every day the Pavlovian public continued to salivate
for suicide by clogged arteries. At once he crossed the class divide
from crazy to eccentric in my mind.
“Now I am in a position to rectify—by proxy, at least—the
injustice suffered by my father. It is my intention to assist a dozen
men in the same situation. And that is why I need you—or someone
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