THE DESTROYER #48: PROFIT MOTIVE

Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

For Les Wolf. A gentleman and glorious ... and for the awesome House of Sinanju, P.O. Box 1454, Secaucus, NJ 07094

Chapter One

He gave up eating veal because they kept the little calves in small dark pens until slaughter. Then he gave up eating all meats. Any killing was wrong.

He would not buy products from companies that also made war material. He joined peace marches and sang songs of brotherhood.

He avoided crushing ants under his shoes, and on the day he created the most remorselessly destructive enemy ever to threaten the human race, Norbert Peasewell refused to slap a mosquito drinking on his right forearm.

"You know, I always used to automatically slap them because they made such a welt after drinking your blood. It was the automatic response of a human chauvinist," said Peasewell. "But you know, they have as much right to life as I have."

"Norbert," said his wife, "we are the only family in Silicon Valley that's living on food stamps. You could go to work for any computer company in the valley and make at least sixty thousand dollars a year."

Norbert watched the mosquito drink off his forearm. He noticed the precise design of the body, how the legs, like artist's sticks, formed a delicate and precise platform for the small winged body, which plunged its drinking instrument into Norbert's giving arm.

Perhaps, thought Norbert, he was really put on earth to supply mosquitoes with food. How did anyone know otherwise? Why did personkind always assume any-

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thing not servicing it directly was valueless? Why did personkind assume that it alone was the sole purpose of all creation?

The only reason, concluded Norbert, was that bugs, lizards, and snakes lacked political power. If someone could organize mosquitoes to demand their inalienable creature rights, then no white American male would out of hand murder them so freely.