Little Sex Maniacs
Glen Nyborg
(2002)
I want to tell you something. I want to tell you that
the mystery of the underground laboratory goes like this; every Tuesday
night, around seven or eight, a series of horrible, blood curdling screams
are heard, followed by manaical laughter, like the horrendous cackling
of banshees. There is always a kablooee, too. Two of them actually. Two
kablooees. And then the screams. And then the laughter.
You got that? Okay, that’s the mystery.
Now, I want to tell you something else. I want
to tell you the mystery’s solution. Sit down and put on your most
comfortable socks. That’s important. I can vouch for the importance of
comfortable socks because I am writing this in my most comfortable socks.
I can tell you, it makes sitting in one place for more than 10 minutes
or so very enjoyable. Go ahead and get them on.
Here goes. Here’s the solution to the mystery.
Just for your information, the solution ends with the word, “howled”.
It begins with the word, “deep ”.
Deep underground, in the sub-sub-basement of the
University Hospital, there was a magnet. It was a big one, too. It was
bigger than any magnet that had ever been built. It was a full inch
and a half larger than the magnet in the Kodlos Supercollider Complex in
Russia. It was a good three quarters of an inch larger than the magnet
used in Project Paradox, the secret time travel research center five miles
from Lorraine, Ohio, and a thousand feet below Lake Erie.
The magnet was one hundred, thirteen feet and three
and three quarters inches in diameter. It was twelve feet, five and one
half inches long with a hollow core three feet wide running its length.
It weighed three hundred tons and had enough metal in it to put together
seven eighths of a battleship.
But the thing about this magnet, the thing of importance
that dwarfed whatever interest anyone had in its size, was its power.
It was powerful enough to attract the iron out of anything.
Really. Anything. No matter what.
The magnet was a superconductor, all its important
parts creating, due to lack of electrical resistance, a magnetic field
of unheard of proportions. Electrons flowing freely with no concern
for heat, natures brake for that busy particle, because of the wonderfully
frigid qualities of liquid hydrogen.
Liquid hydrogen is the coldest thing you’ve ever
seen. This can be said with some confidence because nothing is colder than
liquid hydrogen. Nothing except for hydrogen ice. Nobody on the planet
Earth has ever seen hydrogen ice.
Dr. Son Jin Quance was very proud of his magnet.
He was so proud that every morning he came into the lab, he stood in front
of the magnet and bowed from the waist, hands at his sides. He also smiled
a big smile that showed his missing tooth. The magnet was one of only two
things that ever saw him smile this big. To hear it from the lab staff,
the fellows and various research assistants, Dr. Son Jin Quance was a cranky
old geezer. It was an act, though. Dr. Quance wanted those who knew him,
his collegues and graduate assistants, to spread the word that he was cranky.
He was actually a very nice guy who didn’t smile a whole lot. But the “cranky
geezer” propaganda kept his audiences delightfully unprepared for his practical
jokes. He loved practical jokes. He advocated practical jokes.
He also advocated the wearing of comfortable socks
when there was concentration to be done.
The next thing Dr. Quance bowed before was the
robot. It was a very small thing suspended in a very large tank of water.
He was never quite sure he was bowing before the robot because it was microscopic.
That’s how small the robot was, nobody could see it without very powerful
equipment that made a drop of water look as big as a football field.
But Son Jin Quance bowed all the same, he had faith that the robot was
in his respect’s line of fire.
The robot was the other only thing that ever saw
Dr. Quance’s missing tooth smile.
The water in the tank was normal saline solution.
That is, it was sterile water with point zero nine percent sodium chloride.
It was the kind of water doctors and nurses can put into human veins without
blowing the little animals called blood cells to smithereens.
People have lots of little animals inside their
bodies. Lots and lots and lots. If you don’t keep them happy, if you do
things like give them too little to eat or too much to drink, pretty soon
your body is no longer a body. Its just a lot of little animals wondering
where their food is or why they are being given too much to drink. Cells
don’t know how to say “no”. They are kind of stupid that way. Plus they
don’t have mouths to express themselves.
Sometimes cells become sex maniacs. They have sex
until they can’t do anything else. These are the little animals that Dr.
Son Jin Quance is interested in, the sex maniac cells. When cells become
sex maniacs they don’t really have sex with each other, they just become
more of themselves, they divide. They divide like crazy. They divide so
much, take up so much room, that pretty soon the normally adjusted, sexually
responsible cells get nudged out of their jobs. Cells that work in the
liver get nudged out, cells that work in the lungs get nudged out, pancreas
cells get nudged out, even tongue cells get nudged out.
Dr. Son Jin Quance calls sex maniac cells “cancer”
cells. That’s what everybody you know probably calls them too.
A little baby boy was brought down to the sub-sub
basement, through the vault door, down the long hallway and into the big
glass laboratory with the superconducting magnet in the center surrounded
by its big air-tight, radio wave-tight cage.
“Hello, Baby Boy, “ said Son Jin Quance. This is
also how he addressed his own children, Baby Boy or Baby Girl. He did this
until they started school, then he would address them as Papa Son and Mama
Son until they found a name they liked for themselves.
Son Jin Quance’s real name was Sanford James Quance
and his family came to the US from England in 1854. He didn’t like the
name his parents gave him so he chose another one. He thought it would
be a good idea for his children do the same. He let them pick what tradition
to be brought up in as well. Son Jin Quance had chosen the Japanese tradition
for himself.
His daughter, Mosha Macaw Quance, had chosen Czech.
His son, Amfortas Pejorative Quance, had not chosen yet but was leaning
towards Eskimo or else something that included intense martial arts training.
Clear jelly was rubbed on Baby Boy to enhance
the magnet’s effectiveness. He looked like a glazed donut, he looked like
he was melting.
Son Jin Quance, in keeping with his chosen
Japanese traditions had affected a Japanese accent. Unfortunately, his
adopted grammar which he thought made him sound authentic, like he’d just
gotten off the boat from Yokohama, was criticized for being too Charlie
Chan-like. Many found it insulting.
Dr. Quance took Baby Boy and put a little breath
mask on its face. The mask was attached to a machine that made a
bellows go up and down just this much, just enough to fill up the baby’s
lungs and then pull back, deflating them.
In with the good air, out with the bad.
That’s what life guards say when they are saving
a drowned person. I always thought they said this to keep straight
just what you do with bad air and what you do with good air. You
don’t want to confuse things in the heat of the moment.
Surrounded by his assistants and fresh observers,
he liked the fresh observers most, they screamed the loudest, Dr. Quance
dropped Baby Boy into the big tank of water, the tank containing the robot.
Baby Boy created a cloud of detaching jelly behind him. He was a greasy
little water comet. The tank was then slid into the magnet and the magnet
was activated.
Three months prior, Baby Boy had come out of a
body that was exactly the same temperature as the tank he had just been
dropped into. He remembered the feeling and that the last time he’d
been in a situation like this, he’d slept a lot. So he went to sleep.
The magnet’s field found the robot and got smaller
and smaller and more intense thanks to all the colder-than-the-coldest-cold-you-could-ever-feel
wiring. The magnet then guided the robot into the baby’s eye, around the
side to all the stuff the eye is really made up of but that you never see.
Then back along a cord called the optic nerve and into the brain.
The magnet’s ultra powerful force took the robot by the hand to the sex
maniac cells. The sex maniac cells had nudged brain cells until they now
had a territory one inch wide and one inch and a half long right in the
middle of Baby Boy’s head, plenty big for a lot of sex maniac little animals
not even big enough to see.
They would make very boring attractions in a zoo.
Surgeons who see sex maniac little animals on a regular basis will tell
you so. They’ve told me.
When Dr. Son Jin Quance first presented the idea
of a magnet guided robot inside the human body, everybody at the conference
got very excited because they were all thinking of “Fantastic Voyage”,
a 1950’s movie where scientists shrink down passed the size of cells so
they can operate on a brain tumor.
Dr. Quance told them he would not be shrinking
anybody and that shrinking someone to that size, any size, would be impossible.
The audience let out a collective “suh” of disappointment
and Dr. Quance came this close to telling them they were idiots.
When the robot got to the big party, the party
where all the sex maniac cells got down and did the wild solo thing, the
robot let out a little piece of thread, like spider’s silk. This was the
robot’s only purpose, to be a tiny thread factory. It couldn’t move, it
couldn’t see, it couldn’t do anything except make thread. The thread was
made of a special molecule that would stop any sex maniac cells from getting
passed it. It also acted as the magnet’s bullseye, it’s target, its home
plate, its finish line in the Olympic Stadium, its green on the neurological
18th hole.
The robot wound its web ball around the tumor and
when it was done, the magnet guided the robot out from whence it came.
By the way, the magnet could take pictures of Baby Boy’s brain just like
an MRI does. That’s how it could show the tiny robot where the sex maniacs
were.
The magnet zoomed in on the web ball and found
all the iron inside of it. This was mostly the iron in red blood cells
feeding the sex maniac cells, enabling them to go on doing their solitaire
nasty. Being a sex maniac is hungry work. If a cancer cell could talk that’s
one of the first things it would say.
The magnet latched onto the iron molecules of the
red blood cells inside the web ball. Dr. Quance made the magnetic
field jump back and forth, so slight a movement, almost not even a movement.
But a movement it was. In fact, to the red blood cells and to the sex maniacs
feasting on them, it was a whole lot of movement. The magnet played “Crack
The Whip” with them. They cracked the whip right through the cell walls,
the red blood cell walls, the sex maniac cell walls, every wall of every
cell in the robot’s web ball.
The cells, being stupid, did nothing about all
this carnage. They didn’t run away, they didn’t shout, they didn’t call
the cops. They just stood there like buffoons, wondering why there were
suddenly all these holes in them, wondering why their insides, all their
little cell organs and structures, had gone kablooee.
This word was a favorite of Son Jin Quance’s. He
said it whenever he cured a patient. He said it now and it was the one
bit of true joy he ever let his colleagues see come out of his body.
“KABLOOEE!” he shouted.
“KABLOOEE!” shouted the regular assistants.
It should be known that suppressing a smile is
a valuable asset in Dr. Quance’s research and procedures. Staff members
have been dismissed for the inability to do just that.
The new people, fellows, residents and medical
students watching the procedure for the first time didn’t quite know what
to make of the kablooee. Then they noticed the eyes of the others on them.
The lab staff, the old timers, all wore blank expressions, dead expressions,
like sharks.
The tank was pulled out, the water now murky from
gel off of the baby’s body.
Son Jin Quance reached into the tank and pretended
to pull out Baby Boy. What he actually did was take his famous Decoy Baby,
albeit famous only among those sworn to secrecy, from beneath his lab coat.
This famous Decoy Baby was made of special plastic that looked exactly
like human skin, skin that was, in this case, very bloody. Decoy Baby
also had one arm missing, one leg missing, half a head and a torso that
was fairly ripped to shreds.
It was the most disgusting thing anybody had ever
seen.
Son Jin Quance pretended to pull it out of the
tank, he’d had a lot of practice at this particular slight of hand. It
fooled everybody. It even fooled the old timers of the staff who’d seen
it done a hundred times.
The Good Doctor held it in the air over his head
and said simply, “Oh no. Well, sometime robot get carried away”.
The first timers took a moment to register the
blood and guts and dismemberment and then, once the picture had established
itself in their brains, they did what every new group on Surgery Tuesday
did, they screamed bloody murder.
It was mayhem and the old timers all looked at
their watches. They had another twenty seconds until they could laugh.
This was the deal, twenty seconds. Sometimes the twenty seconds were unbearable,
sometimes you would bet entire ball games could be played inside these
kinds of twenty seconds.
The screaming continued as Quance chucked the baby
on the lab floor, the tank slid out it’s full length, and the real baby,
pink, unharmed, asleep, tumorless, was pulled out and dried off.
“Sometime it just fine,” said Son Jin Quance with
a dead pan face, completely expressionless, like a shark’s.
5...4...3...2...1
The old timers howled.
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Last modified: April 1, 2002