by Jerry
This was fortunate, for a short time before I had been appointed to accompany the Frazier Polar Expedition on the air-flight to the north the following April. We wanted to check Vegard’s and McLennan’s studies of the aurora, and to pick up whatever else we might see of interest in the region of the pole. I made preparations to turn over my crystal research to Dr. Marling, who also took my classes and my administrative duties. It was necessary for me to do a good deal of extra reading and some consultation with the people in the department of astronomy, and to correspond with other physicists, to be ready. But I found time to be present when Murtha went over the contemplated experiment with Vinton.
A Brilliant Student Afflicted With Blindness—Murtha Experiments With His Eyes
VINTON was blind—but he was a brilliant youngster, and led most of his classes in spite of his handicap. To watch him swing along the street you might think he could see as well as anyone. There was a curious mottled scar across his face, without which he would have been handsome; for there was none of the vacancy in his expression that generally marks the blind man. He looked clean and young and decent, and he was—the sort that makes me enjoy being a teacher.
Against the dark curtain he used to see pictures—for there were two books of verse to his credit, and he was paying his way through school by writing pirate stories. If he had been different there might have been something pitiful in the idea of a blind boy’s writing of adventure; but he never asked sympathy. He wanted desperately to see, however, for as soon as the rumor of our work reached him, he came and offered to help. He would run any risk, or endure any hardship.
When I was convinced there was very little of either involved, I took him around to Murtha. Before we went ahead Murtha asked him, “How did your lose your sight” and he replied, “When I was nine a chum of mine and I rigged a telegraph line between our homes and studied Morse. One day I pulled a wet battery down on my face. That is why I’m scarred in this way.” Murtha was satisfied—“I wanted to make sure that the optic nerves were sound, for I can’t get farther in,” he explained, and we put the boy on the operating table. Murtha made his incisions, connected his electrodes, and swung in the current.
For a time nothing happened; and then the most beautiful look came upon his face and he said very softly, “I can see a yellow light.” Murtha pulled the window blinds and brought his electric torch into action. He flashed it on the selenium, shut it off, flashed it on, darkened it again—and each time Vinton reported the waxing and waning of the radiance. Color screens were tried, but all except the blue screen dimmed the image or illumination or whatever it was that went to him through the selenium and the wires. In time perhaps Murtha would enable the blind to see again!
The boy agreed to give him as much time as he wanted, and we came away together. We walked in silence most of the way to his room—he was very evidently stirred—but as he left me he said in a tone of reverence, “He’s wonderful, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I replied, “I hope he can do this thing he’s started.”
“Won’t you come in and meet Mother?” he asked. “Ever since my accident she’s been eyes for me. She’s very much interested in all this work.”
“Thank you, I can’t this morning,” I said, “I’d like to later though. I wish I might be here to see it all through, but you know about the expedition.” We parted—but it was certain Murtha had at least one worshipper. Well—who can blame the boy? He had no idea of the hollowness behind that remarkable mind, and the reaction to a promise of sight is a thing which we who see as a matter of course can hardly understand. At any rate, there seemed no harm in it. At worst, he would only lose a few illusions.
An Expedition to the Arctic and the Return
AS the months went by and the time came nearer for sailing, I had to withdraw more and more from Murtha’s investigations. I knew, however, that he was going far to duplicate the whole efferent nervous system—the senses. Taste, he readily matched; nerves of heat and cold he constructed, but the other touch-sensations eluded him—as did the colors blue, red and green; and of course the most difficult of all would be the complex sense of smell. Before undertaking that, he tried to develop an efferent nerve—or at least one relay of the pathway by which orders go from the brain to the muscles. I did not learn how he would know when he had been successful in this last.
In the excitement of departure, I all but forgot him, and afterward he seldom troubled my memory. The journey was such a novel interruption of my quiet life—the voyage to Norway, the airplane flight, our forced landing, the struggle over the ice by sledge, the coming of winter that forced us to camp on Northeast Land; the polar darkness, the desolation, few chances for observation, but endless hours of playing cards; snow—wind—the returning sun—the grinding ice that piled up on our barren rock, threatening to sweep us into the sea; food running low—the coming of the ship—that glorious first sight of green trees, and the easy journey home, with somewhat of scientific value but without the glory or satisfaction of having been anywhere near the Pole. There was the usual newspaper excitement, and we learned that we had been a source of anxiety to the whole civilized world ever since our start. Frazier’s classic reply that we “had also been something of a source of anxiety to ourselves,” struck the desired note, and the public had a very good time with us.
A Shocking Change in Murtha
I WAS rather surprised to find Murtha at the pier when we steamed in, and still more surprised at the shocking change in the man. He was gaunt and pale, and looked at least ten years older. In place of his former alternations of shyness and disciplined composure, was a manner of slinking furtiveness. He greeted me without heartiness, but with urgent haste. He seemed to want to get me away from my newly-met family, for some mysterious private talk. Perhaps I was rather brusque in pointing out that my own preferences were against him; but certainly that was before I dreamed of the things he had to say!
I went home. How good it was to relax into the old familiar ways and places—to see the people I had known, to enjoy warmth and cleanliness and safety and leisure once again, to find my friends and my books where they had always been, to see the soft green of the campus, and hear the voices of students in song through the quiet of the evening! But twice I was asked, “Have you seen Murtha?” and one man handed me a newspaper clipping which told of Vinton’s death “under rather unusual circumstances.” All this was of course before the recent newspaper furor.
These two inquiries coupled with Murtha’s curious actions at the pier, disturbed me; and accordingly, early in the evening I walked over to his room. He was away. I left a card with what was meant for a cheery message scribbled on it. I had hardly reached home when his voice came to me strained and tense over the telephone, “Couldn’t you come back, Harvey? For God’s sake come if you can—I can’t come to you, and it is very important.”
“I’ll be right there,” I said briefly.
It is queer now to remember the mood in which I set out. His looks and manner had been ominous—but I was so steeped in the peace and happiness of my homecoming that other people’s affairs seemed of small account. I was sorry for young Vinton, a splendid youngster cut off without his chance; but he was gone, beyond recall—and the wind was sweet. Murtha was a solemn, self-centered individual, seemingly in some distress—but I was glad of the young moon peering through the elms. If I seem unduly hard-hearted, I can only suggest that my critic spend seven months of exile on an arctic rock, before passing final judgment.
Murtha opened the door for me, and led me to his fireplace without a word. It was mild autumn, but again a fire burned in the grate. He stooped and warmed his hands; and looking away from me at the fire he began to speak. The words of his prepared speech tumbled over one another and got out of order in his eagerness to get them said.
A Dreadful Revelation
“HARVEY. I—I want to talk to you about Vinton. He is dead, as you’ve probably heard—or at least people think he is. As a mat
ter of fact he’s in the laboratory. He wanted me to do the! thing I’ve done—he urged me to—but I’m not sure—that is—Vinton—Oh Harvey, I’ve killed him—or rather I’ve kept him alive—he’ll be alive forever!” He broke off short, and gasped like a swimmer coming up from deep water. “I don’t know what I’m saying!” He sank back into the chair and covered his face with his hands.
“What do you mean, Murtha? Tell me just what happened.”
He looked over at me, caught my eye, and glanced hastily back at the fire. The astonishing confession was meaningless to me. Chiefly I think I was amazed at the evidence that there was really a human being, capable of feeling, inside that shell of mind and matter and handsome clothes which we had all called by his name. He was a new man—; able to suffer. But he began now to speak—and his story was beyond belief.
Some months after I sailed, Vinton had been the victim of a motor accident, going home late one night through the familiar streets. Night was like day to him—but alas, not to the driver of the car that crushed him!
He could speak when they picked him up, and he begged to be taken to Murtha’s room. Murtha, he knew, was a physician, and he did not want his mother alarmed unnecessarily. He had no idea how badly he was hurt; but a moment’s examination told Murtha he could do very little. He stopped the hemorrhages, and tried with local anaesthetics to make the poor broken body temporarily comfortable—but there was no cure ever again for Vinton. Life—yes; but helplessness, and probable pain as long as he might live; pain that would stand between him and his fancies, pain that in time would wear down his courage and break his self-control. He told it all to the boy, with his blunt, unfeeling tactlessness. I cannot believe he deliberately made the picture dark.
Details of the Awful Experiment
BUT while he was speaking the temptation came—the idea he had cherished as a wild impossible fancy. How he presented it I do not know. He could be very subtle when he chose. Perhaps he, promised Vinton immortality in this world—freedom from the body’s limitations, time without end for learning and thought and the creative activity the boy loved. Perhaps he only suggested the possibility of escape from pain, and a share in a daring venture. But I can imagine how it was—the confident, self-assured man, speaking as one with authority to the discouraged, tortured youth who was trying to make up his mind to face a future of helpless idleness. He who was to have been the support of that mother who was eyes to her son—who by the magic of his fancy was to have kept them in comfort—must be a burden to her as long as he lasted alive.
At this point Murtha threw his wealth into the scales. He would make her an allowance to keep her comfortable—he would represent it as insurance and furthermore make her his heir. Remember, he was the hero who was slowly giving him back his sight. Vinton knew the things Murtha had accomplished; he knew of the work of Loeb and Carrel. If a heart could be kept beating in a bottle for years at a time, why should not a brain be kept thinking in a bottle forever? There seemed nothing impossible in the plan. How could he communicate? That was simple—for he knew his Morse, and Murtha had solved the problem of efferent impulses. He must trust the man to carry out his promise about the money; but if he did not, there was the certainty of poverty for the woman struggling to support her invalid son. Insurance policies contain “suicide clauses,” I was well aware—men had been known to kill themselves to get money for someone as dear as this mother was to her boy. I was not surprised to hear that he had said “Yes.”
Murtha was his own anaesthetist. He wheeled the operating table under the lights, brought the head from his wax figure (with its brain-shaped cavity ready and waiting) and set it beside the table, coolly mixed and spread the cleansing, nourishing liquids in the wax interior, made his temperature coils and capillary tubes ready, completed his electrical connections, and applied the ether-cone. The skull was fractured, and he cut along the fracture; he severed the spinal cord with infinite skill, working feverishly. Probably in his excitement he forgot what manner of thing he was doing; but before the night was gone he had moved—Vinton—from the kind, familiar habitation of flesh and blood to that still, dead body of wax and steel which was never meant to hold a fragile living spirit. When he had finished, he collapsed. He slept out the night in the very chair where I was sitting.
His dreams were ghastly; but in the morning he took himself strongly in hand, and forced himself through the routine duties of a physician reporting a death. His certificate was accepted without question then, because of his connection with the University, although he was not yet known locally as a medical man but as a teacher. Then he telephoned the mother and broke the news, calling on her immediately after as her son’s friend and physician. He told his lie about the insurance, and faithfully carried out the promised deception. He left her with a check and a promise of more to come; and it is probable that she never noticed that it was a personal check on a local bank. Going back to his rooms he wrote out a clear, short, simple will in her favor, had it witnessed, locked it away, and faced the placid waxen features of his apparatus.
Dreadful Messages from the Transplanted Brain of a Dead Man
HE took the speaking tube in hand, and in a trembling voice—for by now he was feeling “strangely” about it all—he spoke some words. Instantly the telegraph key began to chatter—weak, wobbly, uncertain Morse, but clear enough to be unmistakable. Vinton was there, alive!
He could not tell what it meant. He did not know the code. He took down the dots and dashes with infinite care for a long time, and closing the key rushed out to buy a code-book. The rest of the day he spent working out the message.
And such things as it contained! Curses, prayers, pleading, long stretches of incoherent letter-groups, quotations from the boy’s verse and evidence of frequent delirium! It was dreadful—I am using Murtha’s word. His horror grew, and often he sprang up from the table, only to return and plunge again into the work. Very soon he had memorized the dots and dashes, and could read whole sentences—always bitter and terrible sentences. In time he could endure no more, and stole away to walk wildeyed through the streets fighting for sanity and composure. But always, drawn by a fascination, irresistible, he returned to his rooms.
He opened the door again, and the awful metallic voice seemed to condemn him in the rattling language which he could not yet translate by ear. This time he took it gradually, a few sentences at a time—and they were as before. He defended himself through the speaking tube, but it was useless. Again and again he tried. Alterations in the position and temperature of the head—soothing or even narcotic solutions gave no relief. In his intervals of sanity Vinton had complained that he was being tortured; had bewailed his helplessness. Days went by—weeks—months. Colleagues, accustomed to regard Murtha as a solitary, saw his strangeness and a few even offered sympathy or aid; but he put them off. He grew gaunt, could neither eat nor sleep, was equally tormented in his laboratory or away from it, and lived near to madness with his grisly guest. I think the placid waxen features must have been worst of all—with their staring, indifferent eyes behind which his victim and his judge spoke out in endless alternate prayer and invective—the face without feeling, hiding hell. One thought alone sustained him and stayed his hand from making an end—he would wait for my return. Somehow I would solve the problem.
Speaking to the Dead Vinton
HE rose and led me to the laboratory. The banked apparatus lined the wall. At one end was the figure, from which wires and capillary wicks and tubes led outward. He strode over and lifted the top of the head, so that I saw the gray mass soft within. I turned away. The wax lid, with its well-combed hair, closed down. I wiped my forehead, which was cold and wet.
Murtha put the speaking tube into my hand, and I asked hoarsely, “Vinton, are you in pain? What can I do for you?” The instrument chattered, and Murtha translated in a low voice, “Thank God you have come. He promised to release me now. This place is more terrible than you can know. Set me free. Kill me or let him kill
me. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now. Now.
Murtha’s notebook was out, and as he spoke he took down the words. Later I learned that he had there every word the telegraph key had uttered—the most cruel indictment any man ever wrote of himself. He was a scientist still, through all the strange workings which through habit he still regarded as his great experiment. No emotion could shake him utterly out of his old self.
The whole thing stunned me. I tried to imagine how it would seem to be a disembodied mind, apart from the obedient creature of bone and muscle that served me. I tried to understand the man whose passion for his work, whose curious callousness, whose inherent cruelty—which was it?—could let him use this boy so, and keep him so. It was too much.
“He asks me for thought!” the machine was saying. “How can I think?” He told me before he put me here that in my body I should suffer so that fancy would be impossible. I am suffering, I have suffered so I cannot think. He is a devil. Let him kill me.” The letters ran together into meaningless rattle.
Then I roused at last. “Finish what you started,” I said. “Kill him!” He raised his arms over his head as if to ward off my look. “I will—‘I will,” he cried, “But—that will be murder!”
It was ten times murder to keep him there.
Is It Murder?
HE stumbled across the room, grasped a laboratory bottle, raised the sleek cover of the head and poured the contents in. The telegraph key fell silent.
We looked at each other. He walked past me to the laboratory door, and then fell into the chair beside the fireplace. I followed slowly, and sat a long time looking at the flames. We were both relaxed. He seemed visibly to grow larger, stronger, now that the fearful load was gone; but when next he spoke it was in a whisper, and I answered him the same way.