Word: scorpio
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...Scorpio had been brooding about his much abused deviated septum when a copy of Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon arrived. It was a confrontation that would measure the dimensions of his dread. To begin with, Mailer, born Jan. 31, 1923, called himself Aquarius throughout the book. But there were other things to cause one to worry. Although Scorpio shared Aquarius' tendencies toward water displacement, there were incompatibilities. Aquarians were eccentric and extremely difficult to judge. Uranus had bestowed on them the gift of radical vision and strong impulses to alter the status...
...Scorpio would yield to no man in his respect for Aquarius. Insight-for-insight, metaphor-for-metaphor, few writers could touch him. His ability to perceive, absorb and organize details and abstractions into platoons of charging prose were proof of his exceptional intelligence. As a social critic, he had an extraordinarily keen nose for the hydrants of power...
...Besides, Scorpio had been an Aquarius rooter from the start. Although he had the same affectionately ambiguous feelings toward him that he once held for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he followed Aquarius' erratic career with a kid brother's awe and expectation. To go directly from The Bobbsey Twins to The Naked and the Dead was not an experience one overcame easily...
...Scorpio had often found himself troubled about Aquarius' novels, however. What visions of damnation, for instance, smoked in Aquarius' head when in The Deer Park he had Marion the pimp say, "No one ever loved anyone except for the rare bird, and the rare bird loved an idea or an idiot child." Could it be that Aquarius, the nice Jewish boy from Long Branch, N.J., and Brooklyn, N.Y., the kid who loved model airplanes and went to Harvard to study aeronautical engineering-could it be that the youth committed to the ideals of democratic socialism and the young...
These and other questions were to bubble up through the book as savory tautologies. But deep down, Aquarius and Scorpio knew they would never turn to gold. In the end, there would he only the ancient gray moon rocks talking their number language to spectroscopes and computers-the machines Aquarius saw as "some species of higher tapeworm was quietly ingesting the vitals...