Warren Murphy: Feeding Frenzy

And then came the Great Schism.

One day, Brother Karl came out into the clearing to address the faithful.

"You will remember that I was the first to eat the Miracle Food. And I ate it raw. And now, it seems that many of you are under the misapprehension that the sacred bug must be cooked first. This is heresy. From this moment on, the dietary rules are set by me. And not anyone else."

Brother Theodore entered the clearing an hour later to address the same faithful.

"My people," he said, meaning his imaginary Chinchilla forebears and not the Latvian steelworkers, "have been eating the thunderbug for centuries. It must be cooked. We let it die on the vine and then cook it. It is the only correct way."

Brother Karl was back a few minutes later. "The Miracle Food is better eaten fresh. Cooked dead food is no better than beef stew."

In the morning, the hundred earliest disciples had split into two camps.

Brother Theodore called his people The Harvesters. They waited until the insects had died on the weed of overeating and they cooked them in a clear broth like chick-peas.

Brother Karl said that hereafter there would be only one approved way to eat Ingraticus Avalonicus. "Pick up the bug, snap off its head, and pop it into your mouth. Fresh and good. The way She wants it."

Brother Theodore dismissed Sagacious's followers as heretics, calling them "Snappers."

Sagacious gleefully picked up on the name. He had T-shirts made for his Snappers, in six designer colors and silkscreened with a legend rendered in what he claimed was genuine Phoenician calligraphy:

SNAP OFF THEY HEADS AND EAT THEM RAW

He proclaimed Brother Theodore and his Harvesters to be hopelessly New World and therefore counterprogressive.

Theodore told his followers that the Snappers were practicing the kind of cruelty to living things that all thinking people must protest. He had his own T-shirts made up for the Harvesters. They read:

ALL IN GOD'S GOOD TIME

The calligraphy, he claimed, was fourteenth-century Mohican. They sold like hotcakes at $29.99.

The next day, Brother Karl's followers moved out of the communal clearing into the next clearing. Both groups continued to share the slit trench latrine, and one evening Brother Karl and Brother Theodore met there, quite by accident, when both came to squat.

"Karl, you're screwing things up," Brother Theodore said.

"I am following the way that She set out for me."

"Forget her," Theodore snapped, "whoever the hell she is. We've got a good thing going here and if we start fighting about it, we won't have anything left."

"I'm not interested in 'a good thing,' " Karl said. "I am interested in truth."

"All right, all right. You want truth. Try this: How is it that somehow it's wrong to kill a freaking chicken, but you can snap the heads off the thunderbug and swallow it down warm?"

"Because that is what She told me to do."

"That's your answer? She told you to do it? What kind of an answer is that?"

"A truthful answer," replied Brother Karl Sagacious.

"You know what's wrong with you?" Theodore snapped. "You're a nut. You never should have left the campus. They like nuts at UCLA. That's why it's called macadamia."

"The word is academia," said Karl, "and yours are the remarks of a desperate man."

"Look. Can't we get together on this and stop bickering? Let everybody eat the way they want. No skin off anybody's ass."

"You're a charlatan, Theodore."

Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles growled, pulled up his pants, and left, wondering what he was going to do about Brother Karl Sagacious.

He did not intend to let this one get away from him. He had been on the wire all his life, scratching to make a wrinkled dollar. Con games had put him in jail. Anointing himself as a Chinchilla Indian had gotten him room and board and a little good press for a few years, until his thick black hair began thinning and falling out. Male pattern baldness, a specialist had told him.

"Well, fix it," he had insisted. "I can't be no freaking Chinchilla Indian without hair. You ever see a bald spot on a Mohawk? Or a Dakota Sioux with a receding hairline? Everybody knows the noble Red Man had the follicles of a grizzly bear. That's why my Chinchilla ancestors were so heavy into scalping. Hair was their totem. They ate hair, thus insuring abundant buffalo and no unsightly dandruff on their noble Chinchilla shoulders."

"Sorry, friend. Your hair's going."

Shortly after that, the Indian movement went up in smoke signals when most of its members went to jail for murder, and Brother Theodore drifted West where he lived on the fringes of assorted loony movements until one night, in a restaurant booth, he heard another man-who turned out to be Karl Sagacious-talking about the wonderful bug food he had discovered.

"Tastes just like lobster," the man kept repeating.

Theodore decided that there might be some way to turn a buck from it, and after the people had left, he went into the north California hills the man had been speaking of and, trying hard not to vomit, ate a couple of dozen bugs until he found one that tasted like lobster.

He went immediately to the press, concocting his story about the ancient Chinchilla thunderbug-eating tradition as he talked, and created PAPA right on the spot. A few weeks later, Sagacious-who never quite understood that the discovery had been stolen from him-showed up, and the two men agreed on a partnership to lead the new organization, People Against Protein Assassins.

And it had worked well enough until now . . . until this damn stubborn display by Sagacious.

Something was going to have to be done about him, Brother Theodore thought as he was falling asleep that night.

By morning, something had been done.

"Wake up, wake up, Brother Theodore," a young woman called, rushing into his tepee.

"What's the matter? What is it?"

"He's dead."

"Who's dead?"

"Brother Karl is dead."

"Oh, no. How sad. Oh, what a loss is ours," Theodore moaned and turned and buried his face in his pillow so the woman could not see him smile.

"And that's not all."

"What's not all?"

"Others are dying too," she said. "They're dropping like flies."

"Oh, what a pity," Brother Theodore said. And this time he meant it.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and his favorite movie was still Gunga Din.

He thought about it as he was sitting in the Harvard University auditorium, waiting for the start of the film tribute to Hardy Bricker, Hollywood's newest wonderchild.

He had liked Sam Jaffe in Gunga Din. But Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks and Victor McLaglen were good too. What other movies did he like?

He saw Fantasia once and really liked the dancing hippopotamuses. And Casablanca was okay except he never liked that fat guy who was in it. But Citizen Kane was about a sled, for crying out loud, and he had seen three minutes of Batman once, but the picture was so dark it looked like it had been filmed in a cave. He hadn't seen much else, not even in the various apartments he had lived in all his life, because while he had a VCR, it was always being used by Chiun, his trainer, to watch old soap operas.

It wasn't as if he hated movies. He didn't hate them. He didn't care enough about them to hate them. He just didn't think about them at all.

But he was willing to make an exception for Hardy Bricker.

Hardy Bricker had made five films and was now being called the hottest director in Hollywood history. "The thinking man's director," some critic said on television and Remo thought that might be true if the thinking man involved never thought about anything but bullshit.

Bricker's first film had been called Frag. It showed how American soldiers committed atrocities in Vietnam, pushed to perform them by an evil military-industrial complex intent upon enslaving the world. Remo had been in Vietnam for a while and he knew that the soldiers there were no better or no worse than any America had sent anywhere else. They just wanted to stay alive.