Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,25

and its close relative abrin are powerful phytotoxins, respectively derived from castor and jequirity beans, whose attractive flowering plants can be purchased at most commercial nurseries and require just three months of cultivation to yield mature beans, which beans are lima-shaped and either scarlet or a lustrous brown and historically were, Schmidt had gotten that eerie Big Brothers/Big Sisters-like sensation again when he discovered during his careful researches, sometimes employed as rosary beads by medieval flagellants. Castor beans’ seed hulls must be removed by soaking 1-4 oz. of the beans in 12-36 oz. of distilled water with 4-6 tablespoons of NaOH or 6-8 ts. of commercial lye (the beans’ natural buoyancy requiring here that they be weighted down with marbles, sterilized gravel, or low-value coins combined and tied in an ordinary Trojan condom). After one hour of soaking, the beans can be taken out of solution and dried and the hulls carefully removed by anyone wearing quality surgical gloves. (NB: Ordinary rubber household gloves are too thick and unwieldy for removing castor hulls.) Schmidt had step-by-step instructions stored on both the hard drive and backup disks of his Apple home computer, which possessed a three-hour battery capacity and could itself be set up right there on the pine worktable in order to keep a very precise and time-indexed experimental log, which is one of the absolutely basic principles of proper lab procedure. A blender set on Purée is used to grind the hulled beans plus commercial acetone in a 1:4 ratio. Discard blender after use. Pour castor-and-acetone mixture into a covered sterile jar and let stand for 72-96 hours. Then attach a sturdy commercial coffee filter to an identical jar and pour mixture slowly and carefully through filter. You are not decanting; you’re after what is being filtered out. Wearing two pairs of surgical gloves and at least two standard commercial filtration masks, use manual pressure to squish as much acetone as possible out of the filter’s sediment. Bear down as hard as due caution permits. Weigh the remainder of the filter’s contents and place them in a third sterile jar along with × 4 their weight in fresh CH3COCH3. Repeat standing, filtering, and manual squishing process 3-5 times. The residue at the procedures’ terminus will be nearly pure ricin, of which 0.04 mg is lethal if injected directly (note that 9.5-12 times this dose is required for lethality through ingestion). Saline or distilled water can be used to load a 0.4 mg ricin solution in a standard fine-gauge hypodermic injector, available at better pharmacies everywhere under Diabetes Supplies. Ricin requires 24-36 hours to produce initial symptoms of severe nausea, vomiting, disorientation, and cyanosis. Terminal VF and circulatory collapse follow within twelve hours. Note that in situ concentrations under 1.5 mg are undetectable by standard forensic reagents.

More than a few among the crowds and police initially used the words sick, sickening, and/or nasty when the tank’s deltate nozzle was affixed to the protuberance at the center of the figure’s rear end’s white-and-navy bullseye design. All such expressions of distaste were silenced by the subsequent inflation. First the bottom and belly and thighs ballooned, forcing the figure out from the window and contorting him slightly to keep his forehead’s cup affixed. The airtight Lycra rounded and became shiny. The long-haired man on Dexedrine patted his bicycle’s slim rear tire and told the young lady he’d lent the field glasses to that he’d figured all along what they (presumably meaning the little protuberances) were. One shoulder’s valve inflated the left arm, the other the right arm, & c., until the figure’s entire costume had become large, bulbous, and doughily cartoonish. There was no coherent response from the crowd, however, until a nearly suicidal-looking series of nozzle-to-temple motions from the figure began to fill the head’s baggy mask, the crumpled white Mylar at first collapsing slightly to the left and then coming back up erect as it filled with gas, the face’s array of patternless lines rounding to resolve into something that produced from 400+ ground-level US adults loud cries of recognition and an almost childlike delight.

. . . And that the time, Schmidt told the Focus Group, had—probably not at all to their disappointment, he said with a tiny pained smile—that the time had now arrived for them to elect a foreman and for Schmidt himself to withdraw and allow the Focus Group’s constituents to take counsel together here in the darkening conference room, to compare their individual responses and opinions of