Carcinoma Angels

"Carcinoma Angels" is a short story by Norman Spinrad first published in Harlan Ellison's science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions. It is a humorous story about cancer.

Story

Harrison Wintergreen is a man who has lived his life with the world as his oyster; he is as Larger Than Life as they get.

At age nine, he decides he will become Filthy Rich, and proceeds to save, swap, and earn his way upwards. He becomes Filthy Rich by his standards by the age of twenty-five, then loses his interest in money.

He turns to Doing Good—toppling unpleasant Latin American governments, converting a tribe of Borneo headhunters to Rosicrucianism, setting up homes for overage whores, and sterilizing fecund Indian women. He tires of Doing Good at thirty, and moves on.

He decides to Leave His Footprints in the Sands of Time, and does so extravagantly until age thirty-eight.

At age forty, he is told that he has an advanced, well-spread, and incurable case of cancer, and is given an expected year to live.

He proceeds to do everything probable to cure it, and when that fails, he turns to his specialty: the improbable. He goes to every source, then starts in on the unsourced.

He sets out to explore and conquer his own internal universe. He prepares a potent potion to be inserted by syringe, containing: Novocain; morphine, curare; vlut, a rare Central Asian poison which induced temporary blindness; olfactorcain, a top-secret smell-deadener used by skunk farmers; tympanoline, a drug which temporarily deadened the auditory nerves (used primarily by filibustering senators); a large dose of Benzedrine; lysergic acid; psilocybin; mescaline; peyote extract; seven other highly experimental and most illegal hallucinogens; eye of newt and toe of dog. All of these drugs are meant to induce hallucinations, increase his brainpower, make him go to sleep, and keep him awake at the same time.

He falls into a coma and enters his body as some sort of spirit and cures himself of the cancer, which is personified as a biker gang: the Carcinoma Angels. But his treatment was too effective and now he can't get out.

External links

• Carcinoma Angels title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database