by Max Shulman
“Yes, my secretary explained.”
“Very efficient girl, your Miss Whittaker,” said Jefferson. “Takes 120 words a minute and got the hottest britches in Owens Mill.”
“I’ll bear it in mind.”
“She’ll slap your hand a couple of times at first, but that’s only for show. You just keep grabbing, hear?”
“I hear.”
“Well, I know you’re busy, so I’ll mosey on. Anything you want, call me.”
“Thank you.”
“On the black phone.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ll be going now.”
“Good-bye.”
“Oh, one more thing.” Jefferson removed a pamphlet from his pocket and laid it on Ira’s desk. “You might glance at this when you get time. It’s last month’s bulletin of the Food and Drug Administration.… Mind you, it ain’t nothing we wrote here at Acanthus. It’s FDA’s own official monthly report to the American people.”
“Thanks, I’ll read it later.”
“You do that. And be sure not to miss them items I checked with a red pencil. This one, for instance.” Jefferson pointed to a story on the first page of the bulletin. The headline said:
FDA CHIEF ASKS NEW RECRUITING DRIVE;
INSPECTORS SERIOUSLY UNDER STRENGTH
“See that, sonny?” said Jefferson, poking the item with his forefinger. “The man says they’re seriously short of food inspectors. Not me says it; him, the boss of FDA. There it is in black and white in the official authorized bulletin of FDA. See?”
“I see,” said Ira.
“Now take a look at this,” said Jefferson. He flipped the bulletin open and pointed at another story marked with a large red check. The headline said:
SUMMARY OF SEIZURE ACTIONS
Jefferson read aloud. “‘During October, FDA seizures of filthy and spoiled foods totaled 1,816,994 pounds—a figure somewhat below the normal monthly average. Largest seizures, as usual, were of wheat contaminated with rodent droppings—1,216,290 pounds last month.’”
“What?” exclaimed Ira.
“Read it yourself,” said Jefferson, pushing the bulletin in front of Ira. “There it is, plain as day, official and authorized, written, published, and distributed by the Food and Drug Administration of the Government of the United States.”
Ira looked, saw that the story was precisely as the old man had quoted it, shook his head with incredulity. “But this is terrible!” he said.
“It is a cataclysm,” said Jefferson. “It is a visitation and a curse. Think about it, sonny. The boss of FDA says his staff of inspectors is way under strength. But even so, last month, undermanned as they are, FDA still managed to grab over a million pounds of contaminated wheat. Now think hard, sonny. Think how many million pounds they didn’t grab. Think if they was up to full strength how many million more pounds of wheat they’d find that was shot full of mouse turds.”
“Pleasant thought,” winced Ira.
“Well, I’ll leave you to your work now,” said Jefferson. He paused at the door and smiled sweetly. “Just one last word of advice: stay away from raisin bread.”
With a benign wave he made his departure.
In the days that followed, Ira paid numerous visits to the school of nutrition and public health, asked hundreds of questions, made hundreds of notes, held frequent meetings with the script writers and the production people whom the network had sent down to Owens Mill, prepared a rough preliminary version of the television show, enjoyed felicitous excesses with Boo before the fire or outdoors on the beach when the weather was fine, made guilt-ridden phone calls to Polly in Bel Air, slept briefly but deeply each night, lost six pounds from his middle and gained a luster of eye, a briskness of step that he had not known in a decade.
To preserve his new-won euphoria Ira scrupulously avoided using the white telephone which connected him directly to Clendennon in New York. But one day necessity forced him to pick up the white phone.
“Ira chickie!” cried Clendennon. “How are you, doll buggy?”
“Oh, shut up,” said Ira. “I’ve got two questions for you. Number One: is there any chance of getting an air date a few days later than December 18th?”
“Baby, you know better than that,” replied Clendennon. “I don’t have to tell you how hard it is to clear sixty minutes of prime broadcast time.”
“So it’s December 18th for sure?”
“For sure,” said Clendennon firmly. “So when do you want to start taping the show? December 11th? Twelfth? Thirteenth? Fourteenth? Pick your date, baby.”
“No,” said Ira.
“I beg your pardon?” said Clendennon, an edge of nervousness in his tone.
“The point is, I can’t tape this show. There’s not enough time. I’ll have to go on the air live.”
Clendennon’s nervousness increased. “Why, Ira? Do you need more writers? More crew? More anything?”
“No, Clendennon. It’s not me. I could be ready in plenty of time to tape. The trouble is, Dr. Silenko has a batch of experiments in progress that can’t possibly be finished before air date.”
“Couldn’t they be speeded up?”
“People you can speed up; hamsters, no.”
“I don’t like it, baby. Too many things can go wrong with live shows.”
“Relax, Clendennon. I was making live television when you were still selling mechanical dogs.… Now let’s get to my second question: have you found someone yet who will do the rebuttal for the food industry?”
“I have,” answered Clendennon, and there was no trace of unease in his voice now. He oozed confidence. “I have found an excellent man.”
“He better be excellent if he’s going to tangle with Dr. Silenko,” Ira warned. “He better be better than excellent, because if he’s not, forty million dollars’ worth of General Foods billings are down the drain and you are just another unemployed person in a black suit.”
“I am touched by your concern for my job, Ira ducks—truly, deeply touched.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So who did you find?”
“A simple man. A modest, kindly, New England, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant man. A man who looks like a Norman Rockwell painting even as he sits on the board of the Lahey Clinic, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Payne-Whitney Medical Center, the Surgeon General’s Panel on Smoking, the Space Medicine Advisory Committee, the Salk Institute. A man who seemed homespun even as he stood in white tie and tails receiving the Nobel Prize in Medicine.”
There was authentic awe in Ira’s voice. “Did you really get Andrew McAndrews?”
“I knew you’d be pleased.”
“Pleased, hell. I am ecstatic. When are you sending him down?”
Clendennon hesitated an instant before answering. “Well, the fact is, Ira baby, I’m not sending Dr. McAndrews. I am personally accompanying him. After all, a man of such eminence deserves every courtesy, don’t you think?”
“What I think is you’re scared stiff to let me do a live show, so you’ve just decided to come down here to keep your hand on the switch.”
“Now, Ira, that’s plain silly.”
“It really is,” agreed Ira. “Come to Owens Mill if you like, look over my shoulder, breathe down my neck, tap my phone, steam open my mail, but, Clendennon, be smart: leave your paws off my show. I’ve got all the pieces now—Silenko on one side, Andrew McAndrews on the other, a powder keg in the middle, and the air full of sparks. Put ’em all together, they spell Emmy.”
“Emmy?” said Clendennon, and Ira could see his beady eyes widen with cupidity. “You seriously think so?”
“Good-bye, pussycat,” said Ira and hung up the white telephone.
One afternoon, following a politely insistent invitation from Virgil Tatum, Ira agreed to accompany him on a visit to those departments of Acanthus not connected with food research—the arts, the humanities, the learned disciplines—and after the tour Virgil drove Ira home to the Stonewall Jackson Hotel.
“I hope
you weren’t bored,” said Virgil as he drove.
“Enjoyed it thoroughly,” replied Ira.
“Good. I’ve been thinking you ought to get out of the food labs and take a more rounded look at the campus. Could be helpful to your tv show.”
“Oh? How?”
“I know, of course, your subject is food poisons, but it seems to me—and I’m speaking strictly as a layman—that you might possibly add a little scope to the program if you covered the whole of Acanthus.”
“Uh-huh,” said Ira. “Also, you wouldn’t be entirely brokenhearted if the world found out you’ve turned Acanthus into the best university south of Harvard. Right, Virgil?”
“Right,” grinned Virgil. “And up yours.”
Ira grinned back. “All right, prexy. I’ll hand you a few posies. You’ve got ’em coming.”
“Thanks.”
“Forget it.”
“Hey, Ira, would you like to have dinner tonight with Boo and me?”
Ira jerked upright. This night, as it happened, he had a seaside rendezvous with Boo. “Gee, I’m sorry, Virgil,” he said, speaking carefully, “but I’m booked.”
Virgil sighed. “Yeah, Boo told me the same thing when I asked her. She’s got one of those damn committee things tonight. But I thought if I called her back and said you were coming, she might change her mind. She’s pretty impressed with you, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“It’s a fact. Truth is, I’m pretty impressed myself. You’re a pretty impressive fellow, Ira. You’d have to be to catch a great woman like Polly and keep her all these years.”
“Yeah,” said Ira tonelessly.
“I’m not sure exactly what you’ve got,” Virgil continued. “Something volatile, I expect. Something mercurial and unpredictable that’s pure catnip to women. No female can tolerate the sight of an undomesticated man, as I’m sure you know.”
“Really?”
“Maybe that’s why I’ve been striking out with Boo for twenty years. Too tame, too square. Sometimes I think I ought to buy a beret or something.”
“Forgive the question,” said Ira, “but after twenty years, have you ever considered giving up on Boo?”
“Daily.”
“But?”
“Love,” said Virgil solemnly, “is very mysterious.”
“Amen,” said Ira, also solemnly, as the car pulled up to the Stonewall Jackson Hotel.
As Virgil suggested, Ira thereafter spent more time poking about the whole of Acanthus, and he was properly impressed with what he saw. But his primary focus remained on the school of nutrition and public health. Daily he came, observed, and recorded. He never got entirely hardened to the sight of expiring rodents, but it was, as it happened, a cage full of healthy mice rather than a cage full of sick ones that brought Ira closest to the edge of trembling.
“Shapian,” said Dr. Silenko as he entered the lab one morning, “how would you like to see a genuine dilemma?”
“Why not?” said Ira.
“Look here,” said she, indicating two cages of mice on a lab table. In one cage the mice were pathetically moribund; in the other they were sleek and agile, their eyes bright with health.
“We have been dosing the mice in both cages with AB Yellow, which, you will recall, is a dye commonly used in butter,” continued Dr. Silenko. “One cage of mice has been getting very large doses; the other cage has been getting very small doses. Now, Shapian, which is which?”
“Okay, I’ll play straight for you. The sick mice have been getting the big doses—and I’m wrong, right?”
“You’re wrong, right,” nodded the doctor. “The sick mice—very sick, indeed; they are dying of cancer—have been getting the little doses, and the healthy mice the big ones.”
Ira looked mystified. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand, and neither, obviously, does the Food and Drug Administration. But the explanation is perfectly simple. Shapian, look at that shelf behind you. See the tall blue bottle? That’s a quart of ink. Now what do you think would happen if you gulped down that whole quart of ink?”
“I’d throw up,” said Ira, who was, in fact, feeling on the queasy side.
“Either that or you’d have violent diarrhea. One way or another, you’d expel the ink.… Now to the next question: what would happen if you drank only one drop of that ink?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, I suppose.”
“Exactly, and there is the simple answer to the dilemma. The body has natural defenses against large doses of poison. When, however, the dose is small enough, the body’s defenses are not aroused; the poison is allowed to enter.”
“You mean it just lays there forever?” asked Ira nervously.
“Of course not. Small doses of poison taken infrequently—there’s the key word, Shapian: infrequently—will be evacuated. But small doses of poison, taken day after day, year after year, doses which FDA, in its wisdom, chooses to call permissible, will in time overtax the liver and kidneys. The poison will not be evacuated, not entirely. A residue will accumulate in the fatty tissues until sooner or later—” she pointed at the cage of wretched, dying mice—“this kind of thing will inevitably happen. Let FDA talk about permissible doses. I say when it comes to poison—” her voice shook with indignation—“no dose whatsoever is permissible!”
“Bravo!” cried a small man with a large red beard who had just entered the lab.
“Hello, Levine,” she said sheepishly.
“Excuse me, Joan of Arc,” said Levine. “I hate to bother you when you’re making a speech, but I need another centrifuge.”
“I’ll send one over,” said Dr. Silenko. “Oh, Levine, this is Ira Shapian, the television man.”
“I know it’s Ira Shapian the television man and good-bye,” said Levine.
Ira caught Levine’s elbow before he could make an exit. “Excuse me, sir. I’ve been meaning to pay you a visit. You, I understand, are the one who thinks water is so dangerous.”
“For washing, no,” said Levine. “For drinking, you got to be crazy.”
“Could you be more specific, sir?”
“I could be specific for six, eight months if you got the time,” answered Levine. “But even if you got the time, I ain’t. So what do you want to know, mister? Pollution? Chlorination? Purification? Storage? Fluoridation? What?”
“Well, let’s start with fluoridation.”
“All right, come to my lab,” said Levine. “Silenko, the centrifuge you’ll remember?”
“I’ll remember,” she said. “Good-bye, Shapian.”
“Good-bye, Dr. Silenko,” called Ira and raced to overtake Levine, who was already speeding down the corridor.
“What do you have against fluoridation?” asked Ira, catching Levine as he entered his own laboratory.
“You got a notebook?”
“Yes, sir,” said Ira, taking out pad and pencil.
“Write fast. I’m a busy man,” said Levine. “Objection No. 1: dental. Objection No. 2: hydraulic. Objection No. 3: legal. Objection No. 4: medical. Objection No. 5: economic … Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Okay. No. 1: dental. About cavities I wouldn’t even argue. You tell me fluorine prevents cavities, I’ll say fine, fluorine prevents cavities.”
“Well then?”
“Look at this.” Levine reached in a drawer, took out several eight-by-ten color photographs, and spread them for Ira to examine. “In the South Atlantic there’s an island called Tristan da Cunha. The water on this island is not artificially fluoridated. It contains, in its natural state, two ppm—that means parts per million—of fluorine. Now here you’ll see some photographs of the happy, smiling natives of Tristan de Cunha. Nice-looking fellas, yeah?”
“My God!” gasped Ira. “What’s wrong with their teeth?”
“Mottled,” said Levine. “Here’s one with brown and white stripes, here’s one with polka dots, and how do you like this fashionable herringbone?”
“Okay, Doctor, I admit it’s scary, but on the other hand, there aren’t too many of us living in Tristan de Cunha.”
“Don’t be a wise guy. You’ll find teeth exactly like this in parts of Texas, in parts of England, in parts of Pennsylvania, in any place in the world where there’s too much fluorine in the water.”
“But how much is too much?” asked Ira. “As I understand it, the American Dental Association has set a strict limit.”
“The American Dental Association should be locked up, the whole bunch,” replied Levine. “Sure, they put a limit: one ppm. And maybe one ppm wouldn’t hurt you. But how can you be sure you’re only getting one ppm? Let’s take my Objection No. 2: hydraulic.” Levine dipped into another drawer and ripped out a sheaf of papers. “I got here reports of water commissioners from New York City, from Pittsburgh, from the State of Wisconsin, from Morristown, New Jersey, from twenty other places. All of them say the same thing: incrustation. You keep pouring fluorine into a water supply, the valves develop such a crust that nobody knows from day to day how much fluorine is getting in or staying out.”
“And no way to control incrustation?”
“Sure. Pour more chemicals in the water to dissolve the fluorine. What’s the difference if they dissolve your guts in the bargain?”
Ira’s pencil was flying over his pad. “All right. Now Objection No. 3: legal.”
“Listen,” said Levine. “If there should happen, God forbid, a plague in this country, then the government got a right to go in and vaccinate everybody. No argument. But cavities is not a plague, and the government positively got no right to invade your body with fluorine. Anybody wants fluorine, let ’em buy it in the drugstore. The rest of us stand on the Fourteenth Amendment.”
“Good point,” allowed Ira.
“And here’s another—Objection No. 4: medical. Now, I’m not one of them nuts who says fluorine causes everything from cancer to clap. Just the same, we know fluorine is a poison; four and a half grams will kill you, no question. Also, we know fluorine got a definite action on the skeletal structure. If it works on the teeth, it works on the bones, that’s for sure. How it works, we’re still trying to find out. Probably bad, but, like I say, we’re still trying to find out. So, mister, answer me this: until we find out, what kind of craziness to go dumping fluorine in the water?”