Certainly, if ever a man found a guinea when he was looking for a
pin, it is my good friend Professor Gibberne. I have heard before of
investigators overshooting the mark, but never quite to the extent
that he has done. He has really, this time at any rate, without any
touch of exaggeration in the phrase, found something to revolutionise
human life. And that when he was simply seeking an all-round nervous
stimulant to bring languid people up to the stresses of these pushful
days. I have tasted the stuff now several times, and I cannot do
better than describe the effect the thing had on me. That there are
astonishing experiences in store for all in search of new sensations
will become apparent enough.
Professor Gibberne, as many people know, is my neighbour in Folkestone.
Unless my memory plays me a trick, his portrait at various ages has
already appeared in _The Strand Magazine_--I think late in 1899; but
I am unable to look it up because I have lent that volume to some
one who has never sent it back. The reader may, perhaps, recall the
high forehead and the singularly long black eyebrows that give such a
Mephistophelian touch to his face. He occupies one of those pleasant
little detached houses in the mixed style that make the western end
of the Upper Sandgate Road so interesting. His is the one with the
Flemish gables and the Moorish portico, and it is in the little room
with the mullioned bay window that he works when he is down here, and
in which of an evening we have so often smoked and talked together.
He is a mighty jester, but, besides, he likes to talk to me about his
work; he is one of those men who find a help and stimulus in talking,
and so I have been able to follow the conception of the New Accelerator
right up from a very early stage. Of course, the greater portion of his
experimental work is not done in Folkestone, but in Gower Street, in
the fine new laboratory next to the hospital that he has been the first
to use.
As every one knows, or at least as all intelligent people know, the
special department in which Gibberne has gained so great and deserved a
reputation among physiologists is the action of drugs upon the nervous
system. Upon soporifics, sedatives, and anæsthetics he is, I am told,
unequalled. He is also a chemist of considerable eminence, and I
suppose in the subtle and complex jungle of riddles that centres about
the ganglion cell and the axis fibre there are little cleared places of
his making, little glades of illumination, that, until he sees fit to
publish his results, are still inaccessible to every other living man.
And in the last few years he has been particularly assiduous upon this
question of nervous stimulants, and already, before the discovery of
the New Accelerator, very successful with them. Medical science has to
thank him for at least three distinct and absolutely safe invigorators
of unrivalled value to practising men. In cases of exhaustion the
preparation known as Gibberne’s B Syrup has, I suppose, saved more
lives already than any lifeboat round the coast.
‘But none of these little things begin to satisfy me yet,’ he told me
nearly a year ago. ‘Either they increase the central energy without
affecting the nerves, or they simply increase the available energy by
lowering the nervous conductivity; and all of them are unequal and
local in their operation. One wakes up the heart and viscera and leaves
the brain stupefied, one gets at the brain champagne fashion, and does
nothing good for the solar plexus, and what I want--and what, if it’s
an earthly possibility, I mean to have--is a stimulant that stimulates
all round, that wakes you up for a time from the crown of your head
to the tip of your great toe, and makes you go two--or even three--to
everybody else’s one. Eh? That’s the thing I’m after.’
‘It would tire a man,’ I said.
‘Not a doubt of it. And you’d eat double or treble--and all that. But
just think what the thing would mean. Imagine yourself with a little
phial like this’--he held up a little bottle of green glass and marked
his points with it--‘and in this precious phial is the power to think
twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice as much work in a given
time as you could otherwise do.’
‘But is such a thing possible?’
‘I believe so. If it isn’t, I’ve wasted my time for a year. These
various preparations of the hypophosphites, for example, seem to show
that something of the sort.... Even if it was only one and a half times
as fast it would do.’
‘It _would_ do,’ I said.
‘If you were a statesman in a corner, for example, time rushing up
against you, something urgent to be done, eh?’
‘He could dose his private secretary,’ I said.
‘And gain--double time. And think if _you_, for example, wanted to
finish a book.’
‘Usually,’ I said, ‘I wish I’d never begun ’em.’
‘Or a doctor, driven to death, wants to sit down and think out a case.
Or a barrister--or a man cramming for an examination.’
‘Worth a guinea a drop,’ said I, ‘and more--to men like that.’
‘And in a duel, again,’ said Gibberne, ‘where it all depends on your
quickness in pulling the trigger.’
‘Or in fencing,’ I echoed.
‘You see,’ said Gibberne, ‘if I get it as an all-round thing, it will
really do you no harm at all--except perhaps to an infinitesimal degree
it brings you nearer old age. You will just have lived twice to other
people’s once----’
‘I suppose,’ I meditated, ‘in a duel--it would be fair?’
‘That’s a question for the seconds,’ said Gibberne.
I harked back further. ‘And you really think such a thing _is_
possible?’ I said.
‘As possible,’ said Gibberne, and glanced at something that went
throbbing by the window, ‘as a motor-bus. As a matter of fact----’
He paused and smiled at me deeply, and tapped slowly on the edge of his
desk with the green phial. ‘I think I know the stuff.... Already I’ve
got something coming.’ The nervous smile upon his face betrayed the
gravity of his revelation. He rarely talked of his actual experimental
work unless things were very near the end. ‘And it may be, it may be--I
shouldn’t be surprised--it may even do the thing at a greater rate than
twice.’
‘It will be rather a big thing,’ I hazarded.
‘It will be, I think, rather a big thing.’
But I don’t think he quite knew what a big thing it was to be, for all
that.
I remember we had several talks about the stuff after that. ‘The New
Accelerator’ he called it, and his tone about it grew more confident
on each occasion. Sometimes he talked nervously of unexpected
physiological results its use might have, and then he would get a
little unhappy; at others he was frankly mercenary, and we debated
long and anxiously how the preparation might be turned to commercial
account. ‘It’s a good thing,’ said Gibberne, ‘a tremendous thing. I
know I’m giving the world something, and I think it only reasonable
we should expect the world to pay. The dignity of science is all very
well, but I think somehow I must have the monopoly of the stuff for,
say, ten years. I don’t see why _all_ the fun in life should go to the
dealers in ham.’
My own interest in the coming drug certainly did not wane in the time.
I have always had a queer little twist towards metaphysics in my
mind. I have always been given to paradoxes about space and time, and
it seemed to me that Gibberne was really preparing no less than the
absolute acceleration of life. Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such
a preparation: he would live an active and record life indeed, but he
would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at twenty-five, and by thirty
well on the road to senile decay. It seemed to me that so far Gibberne
was only going to do for any one who took his drug exactly what Nature
has done for the Jews and Orientals, who are men in their teens and
aged by fifty, and quicker in thought and act than we are all the time.
The marvel of drugs has always been great to my mind; you can madden
a man, calm a man, make him incredibly strong and alert or a helpless
log, quicken this passion and allay that, all by means of drugs, and
here was a new miracle to be added to this strange armoury of phials
the doctors use! But Gibberne was far too eager upon his technical
points to enter very keenly into my aspect of the question.
It was the 7th or 8th of August when he told me the distillation that
would decide his failure or success for a time was going forward as we
talked, and it was on the 10th that he told me the thing was done and
the New Accelerator a tangible reality in the world. I met him as I was
going up the Sandgate Hill towards Folkestone--I think I was going to
get my hair cut, and he came hurrying down to meet me--I suppose he was
coming to my house to tell me at once of his success. I remember that
his eyes were unusually bright and his face flushed, and I noted even
then the swift alacrity of his step.
‘It’s done,’ he cried, and gripped my hand, speaking very fast; ‘it’s
more than done. Come up to my house and see.’
‘Really?’
‘Really!’ he shouted. ‘Incredibly! Come up and see.’
‘And it does--twice?’
‘It does more, much more. It scares me. Come up and see the stuff.
Taste it! Try it! It’s the most amazing stuff on earth.’ He gripped
my arm and, walking at such a pace that he forced me into a trot,
went shouting with me up the hill. A whole _char-à-banc_-full of
people turned and stared at us in unison after the manner of people in
_chars-à-banc_. It was one of those hot, clear days that Folkestone
sees so much of, every colour incredibly bright and every outline hard.
There was a breeze, of course, but not so much breeze as sufficed under
these conditions to keep me cool and dry. I panted for mercy.
‘I’m not walking fast, am I?’ cried Gibberne, and slackened his pace to
a quick march.
‘You’ve been taking some of this stuff,’ I puffed.
‘No,’ he said. ‘At the utmost a drop of water that stood in a beaker
from which I had washed out the last traces of the stuff. I took some
last night, you know. But that is ancient history now.’
‘And it goes twice?’ I said, nearing his doorway in a grateful
perspiration.
‘It goes a thousand times, many thousand times!’ cried Gibberne, with a
dramatic gesture, flinging open his Early English carved oak gate.
‘Phew!’ said I, and followed him to the door.
‘I don’t know how many times it goes,’ he said, with his latch-key in
his hand.
‘And you----’
‘It throws all sorts of light on nervous physiology, it kicks the
theory of vision into a perfectly new shape.... Heaven knows how many
thousand times. We’ll try all that after---- The thing is to try the
stuff now.’
‘Try the stuff?’ I said, as we went along the passage.
‘Rather,’ said Gibberne, turning on me in his study. ‘There it is in
that little green phial there! Unless you happen to be afraid?’
I am a careful man by nature, and only theoretically adventurous. I
_was_ afraid. But on the other hand, there is pride.
‘Well,’ I haggled. ‘You say you’ve tried it?’
‘I’ve tried it,’ he said, ‘and I don’t look hurt by it, do I? I don’t
even look livery, and I _feel_----’
I sat down. ‘Give me the potion,’ I said. ‘If the worst comes to the
worst it will save having my hair cut, and that, I think, is one of the
most hateful duties of a civilised man. How do you take the mixture?’
‘With water,’ said Gibberne, whacking down a carafe.
He stood up in front of his desk and regarded me in his easy-chair;
his manner was suddenly affected by a touch of the Harley Street
specialist. ‘It’s rum stuff, you know,’ he said.