[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I
Once upon a time in Colorado lived a man named Abednego Danner and his
wife, Matilda. Abednego Danner was a professor of biology in a small
college in the town of Indian Creek. He was a spindling wisp of a man,
with a nature drawn well into itself by the assaults of the world and
particularly of the grim Mrs. Danner, who understood nothing and
undertook all. Nevertheless these two lived modestly in a frame house on
the hem of Indian Creek and they appeared to be a settled and peaceful
couple.
The chief obstacle to Mrs. Danner's placid dominion of her hearth was
Professor Danner's laboratory, which occupied a room on the first floor
of the house. It was the one impregnable redoubt in her domestic
stronghold. Neither threat nor entreaty would drive him and what she
termed his "stinking, unchristian, unhealthy dinguses" from that room.
After he had lectured vaguely to his classes on the structure of the
_Paramecium caudatum_ and the law discovered by Mendel, he would shut
the door behind himself, and all the fury of the stalwart, black-haired
woman could not drive him out until his own obscure ends were served.
It never occurred to Professor Danner that he was a great man or a
genius. His alarm at such a notion would have been pathetic. He was so
fascinated by the trend of his thoughts and experiments, in fact, that
he scarcely realized by what degrees he had outstripped a world that
wore picture hats, hobble skirts, and straps beneath its trouser legs.
However, as the century turned and the fashions changed, he was carried
further from them, which was just as well.
On a certain Sunday he sat beside his wife in church, singing snatches
of the hymns in a doleful and untrue voice and meditating, during the
long sermon, on the structure of chromosomes. She, bolt upright and
overshadowing him, like a coffin in the pew, rigid lest her black silk
rustle, thrilled in some corner of her mind at the picture of hell and
salvation.
Mr. Danner's thoughts turned to Professor Mudge, whose barren pate
showed above the congregation a few rows ahead of him. There, he said to
himself, sat a stubborn and unenlightened man. And so, when the weekly
tyranny of church was ended, he asked Mudge to dinner. That he
accomplished by an argument with his wife, audible the length of the
aisle.
They walked to the Danner residence. Mrs. Danner changed her clothes
hurriedly, basted the roast, made milk sauce for the string beans, and
set three places. They went into the dining-room. Danner carved, the
home-made mint jelly was passed, the bread, the butter, the gravy; and
Mrs. Danner dropped out of the conversation, after guying her husband on
his lack of skill at his task of carving.
Mudge opened with the usual comment. "Well, Abednego, how are the
blood-stream radicals progressing?"
His host chuckled. "Excellently, thanks. Some day I'll be ready to jolt
you hidebound biologists into your senses."
Mudge's left eyebrow lifted. "So? Still the same thing, I take it? Still
believe that chemistry controls human destiny?"
"Almost ready to demonstrate it," Danner replied.
"Along what lines?"
"Muscular strength and the nervous discharge of energy."
Mudge slapped his thigh. "Ho ho! Nervous discharge of energy. You assume
the human body to be a voltaic pile, eh? That's good. I'll have to tell
Gropper. He'll enjoy it."
Danner, in some embarrassment, gulped a huge mouthful of meat. "Why
not?" he said. "Look at the insects--the ants. Strength a hundred times
our own. An ant can carry a large spider--yet an ant is tissue and
fiber, like a man. If a man could be given the same sinews--he could
walk off with his own house."
"Ha ha! There's a good one. Maybe you'll do it, Abednego."
"Possibly, possibly."
"And you would make a splendid piano-mover."
"Pianos! Pooh! Consider the grasshoppers. Make a man as strong as a
grasshopper--and he'll be able to leap over a church. I tell you, there
is something that determines the quality of every muscle and nerve. Find
it--transplant it--and you have the solution."
Mirth overtook Professor Mudge in a series of paroxysms from which he
emerged rubicund and witty. "Probably your grasshopper man will look
like a grasshopper--more insect than man. At least, Danner, you have
imagination."
"Few people have," Danner said, and considered that he had acquitted
himself.
His wife interrupted at that point. "I think this nonsense has gone far
enough. It is wicked to tamper with God's creatures. It is wicked to
discuss such matters--especially on the Sabbath. Abednego, I wish you
would give up your work in the laboratory."
Danner's cranium was overlarge and his neck small; but he stiffened it
to hold himself in a posture of dignity. "Never."
His wife gazed from the defiant pose to the locked door visible through
the parlour. She stirred angrily in her clothes and speared a morsel of
food. "You'll be punished for it."
Later in the day Mudge and Gropper laughed heartily at the expense of
the former's erstwhile host. Danner read restively. He was forbidden to
work on the Sabbath. It was his only compromise. Matilda Danner turned
the leaves of the Bible and meditated in a partial vacuum of day-dreams.
On Monday Danner hastened home from his classes. During the night he had
had a new idea. And a new idea was a rare thing after fourteen years of
groping investigation. "Alkaline radicals," he murmured as he crossed
his lawn. He considered a group of ultra-microscopic bodies. He had no
name for them. They were the "determinants" of which he had talked. He
locked the laboratory door behind himself and bent over the microscope
he had designed. "Huh!" he said. An hour later, while he stirred a
solution in a beaker, he said: "Huh!" again. He repeated it when his
wife called him to dinner. The room was a maze of test tubes, bottles,
burners, retorts, instruments. During the meal he did not speak.
Afterwards he resumed work. At twelve he prepared six tadpole eggs and
put them to hatch. It would be his three hundred and sixty-first
separate tadpole hatching.
Then, one day in June, Danner crossed the campus with unusual haste.
Birds were singing, a gentle wind eddied over the town from the slopes
of the Rocky Mountains, flowers bloomed. The professor did not heed the
reburgeoning of nature. A strange thing had happened to him that
morning. He had peeped into his workroom before leaving for the college
and had come suddenly upon a phenomenon.
One of the tadpoles had hatched in its aquarium. He observed it eagerly,
first because it embodied his new idea, and second because it swam with
a rare activity. As he looked, the tadpole rushed at the side of its
domicile. There was a tinkle and a splash. It had swum through the plate
glass! For an instant it lay on the floor. Then, with a flick of its
tail, it flew into the air and hit the ceiling of the room.
"Good Lord!" Danner said. Old years of work were at an end. New years of
excitement lay ahead. He snatched the creature and it wriggled from his
grasp. He caught it again. His fist was not sufficiently strong to hold
it. He left it, flopping in eight-foot leaps, and went to class with
considerable suppressed agitation and some reluctance. The determinant
was known. He had made a living creature abnormally strong.
When he reached his house and unlocked the door of the laboratory, he
found that four tadpoles, in all, had hatched. Before they expired in
the unfamiliar element of air, they had demolished a quantity of
apparatus.