not exactly the kind of lunch hobbes would have laid on you, rog, but it's all i got, and.  . all i got i share with you. go ahead. take all you want.
i'm still a vd man under the skin, rog. you know me. i'm a down-to-earth kinda guy, right?
so who changes?
that was my father's idea.  private practice. he wanted to set me up -- i couldn't say no. but he's dead now. and me, i'm still a snoop, i gotta do research. look at that beautiful stuff.  . lookit it!
this is the 'satyr's tongue'!
the note includes a warning against swallowing the tongue whole, but we don't see the rest of this caution. 'satyr's tongue' was hobbes's code name for our project. what we were trying to do was to find an alternative to organ transplants.
i know. you're bored already. transplants are yesterday's kishkas, right?
look. you got men, you got parasites that live in, on, and around men. now. why not breed a parasite that does something useful? eh? why not breed a parasite capable of taking over the function of any one of a bunch of human organs? why not, for example, a parasite living in the human abdominal cavity that plugs into the circulatory system and filters the blood like a kidney? if it takes a little blood for itself, so what? be generous! you can afford it.
you put the bug into the body of a man with a diseased kidney, the bug attacks the bad kidney, dissolves it, it's assimilated by the body, and now you got a perfectly good parasite where you used to have a rotten kidney. i know what you're gonna say. you're gonna say it's crazy.
right. it's crazy. but here's the beauty part. ready? who cares?
you know and i know that hobbes was a lousy teacher, eh? lousy. dry, academic, afraid of women, lousy. but he was always a genius at one thing -- getting grants. could he get grants for crazy projects?
you know who pays the rent here? eh? the northern hemisphere organ transplant society. and that's for something that's supposed to put them outta business. and they're not the only ones. we got grant money coming out of our ears.
see? there? you take a little of this.  that's a very rare venereal disease you get in the nomadic crinua people, northeast asia and japan. oo. that one's got it bad. they call it batinh. that means 'kiss' or 'caress.' when you get it it makes your lips itchy, ya wanta kiss everything. i even had it once. i always get everything at least once so i know what the patient's talking about. and there.  you take a little of that.  that's beautiful, isn't it? that's flexipes, the world's only cephalopod parasite. that's him right there. not a very good specimen. related to squids and octopuses. see? he lives in the guts of whales and big dolphins. ya like 'em big 'n hot 'n wet, don't ya? yeah.
we don't do it all here, we send out to have tricky stuff done.  the cell fusion, enucleation, chromosomal fission, all that fancy close work.
funny in the head. high suicide rate in the medical profession. too much body, alla time bodies, bodies.
rog, i gotta talk serious to you. really. listen. ya listening? ok. i want you to come into this with me. to tell the honest-to-god truth, i'm lonely. all hobbes ever did was run around getting money and phone me in the middle of the night. he wanted you in anyway. that's why we were gonna get together, the three of us. we would have enough to keep us going for at least five years, even with inflation.
you want to help sick people for the rest of your life? god forbid i should talk you out of it.
it was women did it to hobbes. couldn't handle them. that girl, that annabelle -- talk about crazy projects.
aw, he met her when he was lecturing at some private girls' school. they caught him examining her little tits for breast cancer in the faculty lounge. she was twelve. don't ask. it was craziness, believe me. they used to come here sometimes. don't ask.
i'll never really understand how he could do what he did to her.
yeah, sure.
but you'll think about what i said about working together, huh?
that you, rog?
it's me, rollo linsky. remember me?
yeah, well, i'm flattered, but you won't find any real meat in them.
listen, rog. i knew hobbes was funny, you know? i told you that. but i didn't really know just how funny he was. see.  when he kicked off, they sent all the personal secret stuff they found to his mother -- she's still alive but just barely -- and she sent everything she thought was medical to me here at the lab. i'm hobbes's partner, right? anyway, i've been going through his papers, and what they add up to is this: hobbes was shafting us all, me, the university, the foundations and the councils, the private labs, everybody. we never really knew what it was we were working on. hobbes gave us each a few crumbs, but he was the only one who knew what the whole loaf would look like.
it looks like -- and i quote -- 'a disease to save man from his mind.'
lemme clarify for you.
hobbes thought that man is an animal that thinks too much, an animal that has lost touch with his instinct, his 'primal self'.  in other words, too much brain and not enough guts. and what he came up with to help our guts along was a human parasite that is.  lemme find it here.  'a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease, a modern version of the satyr's tongue.'
but the important thing for you is this: hobbes used annabelle as a guinea pig. he implanted her with the thing. i figure that once the parasites took, annabelle went berserk. i dunno what she did, but hobbes wasn't ready for it. he had to kill her. and he wasn't trying to burn her, he was burning them, all of them.
huh?
i'd kinda like to come over there and have a look at one of these guys.
yeah. ah, i don't want to panic you or anything, but, i mean, the way hobbes designed them, they're supposed to get out of hand real quick, so you don't have much time to think about what's happening to you. once they decide to start pumping all those dynamite juices into the old blood stream.  i dunno. but if you see some people doing kind of compulsive, maybe even bizarre sexual things.
i dunno. try tranquilizers. once you can get at them, there's a lotta stuff you can use. i'll bring a bagful. it's just the standard tropical kit. but the trick is to get at them.
ok, rog. see you at ten.
hello, good evening, is anybody here? dr. st. luc? it's dr. linsky here to see you for consultation.
it's dr. linsky. anybody home?
is that mr. nicholas tudor? it's dr. linsky. i'm meeting dr. st. luc here. he must be a little bit late.
is anyone here? nicholas tudor? is that you? tudor? mind if i have a look at you?
just a peek, ok? a little peek won't hurt.