by Jerry
But old Thorndile had summoned him, pleadingly, and here he was.
They had nothing in common; in fact, he had found the scientist a rather irritating person. Nevertheless, despite his artistic sensitivenes, he was tolerant of human shortcomings. If he disliked Thorndile, if there was something queer, something slightly sinister in the professor’s personality, Mansfield was ready to excuse it on the grounds of scientific preoccupation.
He pressed the button again. A blue light flared in his face from the mirrorlike surface of the chromium steel door that guarded the scientist’s sanctum. He was, he knew, visible to Professor Thorndile in his radionic-vision reflector, even though his own eyes could not pierce the steel partition. He frowned; it seemed strange that a man who took such precautions against unwelcome visitors should wish to see him.
The heavy door rolled back silently into the wall. Mansfield blinked his eyes. The laboratory appeared to be dark; but as he stepped forward he made out numerous reddish glows—ruby lights.
“Ha, you have come, my friend! Splendid, splendid!”
Professor Thorndile touched a button and some electrically controlled mechanism rolled the huge door shut behind Mansfield. Again he felt like shuddering.
He glanced around. The place had the atmosphere of a hell, to his sensitive imagination; he didn’t enjoy the feeling of being locked in here. Everything had a reddish hue—the scientist’s bald, egg-shaped head and lean face, with its sunken cheeks and eyes that peered at him through thick-lensed spectacles; his shriveled old body; the walls and ceiling; the complex maze of benches, scales, test tubes and other paraphernalia—all tended to create a weird illusion, diabolically unreal.
“What is it you wish to tell me, Professor?” he asked, shaking the scientist’s bony hand with attempted cordiality.
“Tell you! My friend, I got you here to show you, not tell you! I am about to reveal—for the first time to anyone but myself—the greatest miracle of scientific achievement since the year 1968! Do you know what outstanding discovery marked that year, Mansfield?”
“No,” the young man confessed, “I’m afraid not. As you know, I’m an artist, not a scientist. I could tell you a number of advances that have been made in the field of art. For instance, in the ten years since 1968 the fourthdimensional element, which I am now working on, was introduced into the works of Van Devere and Molct to a degree that makes our old conceptions—”
Professor Thorndile checked him.
“Art!” he scoffed. “I know nothing of art—care nothing for it! I, Mansfield, am a scientist, the greatest scientific mind since Alterberg, the physicist, who gave the world his theory of eternitivity. I am even greater than Alterberg—as you shall be privileged to see for yourself!”
MANSFIELD avoided meeting the piercing gaze of those fanatical old eyes. As an artist, he had learned to be tolerant of the flaming ego-superiority of creative men. It was necessary, he supposed, for a man to have an exaggerated feeling of his own importance, at least privately, in order to put down all obstacles and accomplish the seemingly impossible. Even in this day of wonders, one who attempted radically new things had to contend with the incredulity of others. It was a race-instinct, apparently, to doubt whatever the imagination could not readily grasp. Yet Professor Thorndile’s cackling voice and over-confident manner made him stir uncomfortably.
“Why have you chosen me, a layman, to be the first one to see this thing, whatever it is?” he asked, a trifle irritably.
“Ha, we will come to that later, my young friend! To understand, you must first view the miracle to which I am about to introduce you. Mansfield, my boy, the efforts of my hands and brain, of twenty-seven years of exhaustive study and toil, are today in the final stage of fulfilment! But, come—follow me!”
He led the way to a tall object which loomed up like a shrouded piller in the semi-darkness. Then he jerked a cord, and the shroud arose, revealing what seemed to be a giant test tube.
“Look!” hissed the professor. “What do you see?”
Mansfield pressed forward, straining his eyes. Dimly he could make out a network of wires, tubes, valves; a complication of tanks and wheels and agitators; and attached to the outside of the great test tube were numerous dials, regulators, indicators and moving graphs. He shook his head apologetically.
“What is it, Professor?” he asked politely, not wanting to appear rude by revealing his lack of interest.
The old man did not answer at once. He touched a switch, and soft rays of indirect light flooded the laboratory.
“Look again!” he urged.
Mansfield’s indifferent gaze fell on the interior of the great glassite tube. He recoiled, gasping.
“Great Caesar—a man!”
Professor Thorndile chuckled. “Yes, my friend, you are right! That fellow is a man, as much as yourself, but with a great difference. You, Mansfield, were born of a woman, in the normal, orthodox fashion. This fellow—” He waved a hand to indicate his laboratory, then straightened his dwarfish body proudly. “This fellow,” he said, “is the product of my brain!”
Mansfield drew a deep breath, still staring. The creature was half floating in some kind of liquid. Mansfield dimly recalled having read somewhere that the mother’s body provides her offspring only protection, water, food, oxygen; the embryo developing its own blood and tissue. This liquid, then, must be a blood-substitute containing oxygen and bacteria-destroying properties; the tube attached to the creature’s navel supplied food. The rest—the flexible wires joined by suction caps to certain muscles, the tubes running to nose and mouth and ears, Mansfield did not understand. What amazed him most was the size of the supposed infant; he was at least eight feet in height!
“Robot?” Mansfield asked hoarsely.
“Robot!” the scientist mocked scornfully, His voice sent a little chill down Mansfield’s spine. “Would a robot have flesh and blood? Would it kick—would its heart beat? You, my young friend, are seeing a full-grown specimen of homo sapiens, scientifically developed!”
The artist’s face showed his perplexed incredulity.
“Surely,” cried the scientist, “you can see for yourself! Even a layman today knows that science has long been experimenting with the test tube baby! You must be aware, Mansfield, that to to bring to birth rabbits and cats and dogs and cattle—even monkeys—outside the mother’s body has become commonplace in the last decade! Only the human being, the most complicated of all vetebrates, has continued to defy that inevitable accomplishment!”
MANSFIELD roused himself out of his amazed stupor.
“The test tube baby!” he muttered, catching at the familiar phrase to steady himself. “Yes, certainly. They’ve been talking about that for half a century. I’ve read how Colonel Lindbergh, away back in 1936, gave up aviation and began to experiment with the possibilities of developing an infant in a test tube. Yes, and everyone knows that Dr. Leicester recently succeeded in bringing the Morrell sextuplets into the world after seven months in an incubator of some sort. But this—” He wiped his brow. “This, Professor, is not a—baby!”
“Of course he’s not a baby! He has the physical development of a thirty-year-old adult. See those radionic vibrators? They have produced in three years muscles that no human ever possessed before! And his brain! He has the intellect of a man of fifty, yet his mind has the plasticity, the teachableness of a young child! He will be known as the wonder of the age—of all time! Mansfield, you are looking at the long-awaited super-man of this planet!”
Mansfield gasped.
“Did I not tell you that I am greater than even Alterberg?” cackled the scientist. “What do you think now, heh?”
“I—I can scarcely credit my own eyes with the truth!” whispered Mansfield. “I’ve learned to believe anything is possible to man’s ingenuity, and yet—”
“And yet your eyes do not lie!” the old man chortled. “When you learn the potentialities of my super-man, you will be still more amazed, my young friend. Do y
ou know how old that fellow is? Four years old! I developed him from a mass of protoplasm to his present perfection in four years and eighteen days. Do you believe me?” Mansfield tore his gaze from the quietly pulsating figure to look at the scientist. He felt a little faint, his brain reeled, his mind was staggered at what he was witnessing.
“Tell me,” he demanded hoarsely, “how you did it! Is he—is he human?”
“Yes and no!” chuckled the old man, delighted at his guest’s stupefaction. “He is a controlled variation, just as the race of mankind is a nature-evolved variation from the ancient Pithencanthropus erectus, the once so-called missing link from the ape man to homo sapiens. If you were a scientist, Mansfield, I could readily make you understand a great deal. Do you know anything about embryology, histology, anatomy, morphology, physiology or psychology?”
Mansfield shook his head regretfully.
“Right now I wish I did,” he said. “Of course my artistic training included elementary anatomy and physiology, and nowadays every layman knows a little psychology. But maybe I can grasp a little of what you say. How on earth did you—”
“I will explain, then, such scientific details as you can understand, but not yet. First, my friend, let us examine another wonder which my brain has created. To you, an artist, this one will be of extreme interest, no doubt, because—”
He checked himself, obviously unwilling to reveal his secret beforehand. They passed into another part of the laboratory, where Mansfield beheld another curtained test tube. Thorndile raised the shroud.
“Darkness has been essential to embryonic development,” he remarked, “but now it does not matter. In a short time—” He glanced at his watch. “In exactly fourteen minutes they will be ready to be born.”
“They.” Mansfield gaped at the test tube. “Is this another?”
The professor moved a switch and again hidden lights flooded upon them. Mansfield caught his breath sharply, staring.
“A—a woman!” he cried. “A beautiful maiden! Why, great Caesar.” His stare widened, incredulously. “It’s—it’s the golden goddess!
CHAPTER II
The Second Miracle
GRAEME MANSFIELD knew that he was looking at the most beautiful female his eyes had ever beheld. Her mass of golden hair bore a striking resemblance to the hair he had tried to produce on his canvas; but a second glance disclosed that his conception had been far short of the matchless vision he was now staring at.
She was a young girl, apparently about eighteen or nineteen, according to normal standards. Mansfield in all his life had never seen such glorious physical perfection in any creature. The most ideal models who had ever posed for him were crude and ill-shaped in comparison with this maiden. From the top of her golden head to the bottom of her shapely pink toes, which no shoe had ever marred, she was the acme of perfect womanhood.
Yet Mansfield realized sickeningly that she must be abnormal, like the giant super-man he had just seen. She had the same tubes at navel, nostrils, mouth and ears, though the muscle developers were missing from her shapely figure.
“She’s not—not human—not normal, I mean, is she?” he asked, feeling a sudden unreasoning hatred of the professor.
“Yes, she is,” Thorndile said. “I have not experimented with her beyond the most elementary matters of embryonic culture. She is a fully developed girl, Mansfield, the equivalent of a twenty-year-old woman, but her great beauty makes her look younger. To me, she is of secondary importance. I have not cared to over-develop her, as she will serve my purpose in her normal state, with all its normal functions.”
“Your purpose?” echoed Mansfield. “What purpose?”
“I was referring to the part she will play in life, as the wife of my superman. The union of a super-male with a highly gifted normal female is sure to result in—”
Mansfield caught his bony arm.
“You’re not going to do that!” he cried. “This girl—that monster! You’re going to mate them—like cattle?”
The scientist stared at him, surprised.
“What is wrong with that?” he squeaked. “That has been my great dream—my lifelong ambition, which the world has laughed at! You, Mansfield, have never laughed at me. I like you. You alone, even though you are not a scientist, have been tolerant, understanding. That is why I have brought you here, why I have shown you the astounding secret which I have hidden from the world. Mansfield, I am going to create a new race of beings—a super-race of mankind! Mansfield, the race of normal humans is doomed—the world is doomed—the world which has laughed at me and scorned me as a fool! You, Mansfield, shall not be destroyed. I have brought you here to show you, to instruct you. I am sparing your life, Mansfield!”
The artist stared at the grotesque face before him. The man was mad, he felt sure, now. His eyes blazed with hate, his wizened features were distorted with a lusting for revenge. He seemed more inhuman than the giant he had brought to life in the test tube. Mansfield felt his flesh crawling with horror; but apparently the scientist did not observe his reaction.
“The World is ruled by dictators,” Thorndile went on passionately. “Luccini, the master of United Europe—Sin Tao, the master-mind of the Oriental League—Channing, the President of Federated North and South Americas. Super-men, the silly masses call them. Super-men, Mansfield! Ha, I’ll show them! They shall all be destroyed. There will be one world dictator, one super-man. You have seen him. In a few moments you will talk with him. He will rule all beings on this planet, my friend, and from his loins will spring a new race, a super-race which shall hold such humans as are permitted to live in subjection, as slaves!”
With an effort, Mansfield got a grip on himself. He decided to humor the old professor. The thing he was talking about was absurd. Destroy the nations of the earth, except for a handful of slaves; create a new race! Why, the idea was preposterous—lunacy!
AND yet—He glanced back at the test tube containing the lovely young woman. Thorndile had done this. Using his great knowledge of the very latest developments in many branches of ultra-modern science, he had accomplished a seeming miracle. If he could do the thing which other scientists had deemed impossible—if he had created a new scientific Adam and Eve—why not the rest?
“How, Professor, will you proceed to set up this super-man as world dictator?” he asked, trying to make his voice sound natural. “What of the armies, the forces on land and sea and in the air? It seems to me an impossible undertaking!”
The scientist tapped Mansfield’s chest with a bony finger.
“You are talking nonsense!” he scoffed. “Armies, navies, airplanes! Of what use will they be against my super-man? Bullets will not harm him; poison gas will not kill him, any more than it can kill certain bacteria with which he is inoculated. The fellow is invulnerable, and I estimate his lifespan at two hundred years!”
Two hundred years!”
“Certainly! Now, listen to me, Mansfield. You have observed grasshoppers, have you not?”
“Grasshoppers? Certainly!”
“You have seen them leap great distances. A man who could catapult himself a corresponding distance for his size would be killed by the fall, would he not? Furthermore, a normal man would jerk his own legs off if he could spring from the ground with enough force to equal the grasshopper’s feat, for his size. Or think of an enormous house fly, the size of a man. Think what a monster he would be, Mansfield—his strength, his relative invulnerability! Think of any insect, the ant, for instance. How does it compare with man, considering the differences in size between them?”
Mansfield wore a puzzled frown. “What are you getting at, Thorndile?” he asked.
“Just this! Years ago I discovered how the flesh and blood and bones of a human infant could be treated in the embryonic stages as to develop the best characteristics of insect life, yet leaving the brain all its highest functions of thought, will power and imagination. In fact, in the case of my super-man, I have been able, by the means of gland
secretions, to give him a gigantic brain and a mind that transcends even my own ability to realize its powers!”
“Mansfield shook his head slowly.
“All this sounds incredible,” he said, “yet I am forced to believe you know what you are talking about. If I hadn’t seen with my own eyes—” He paused, glancing at the sleeping beauty. “What of her?” he asked, with a slight choke in his voice. She seemed so sweetly innocent that it pained the young artist to regard her as being in any way connected with all this scientific madness. “Is she, too, invulnerable to ordinary death-dealing instruments?”
Thorndile jerked his egg-like head decisively. “No,” he sneered, “I have little interest in her, Mansfield. As soon as she has served my purpose she will be destroyed.”
“Destroyed!” Mansfield drew back. The scientist crackled with amusement. “Ha, your artistic sense is shocked at the idea of destroying such beauty!” he laughed. “But it will be quite necessary to kill her, Mansfield. You see, my super-man must not be allowed to form any silly affection for her. It would seriously interfere with the future which I have so carefully mapped out for him. No, she is only a woman. I need her only that a new creature may be created, in my test tube. It will be, in a way, her child; but it will be a super-human, like its father. I shall make it a woman. As you know, science has discovered the origin of sex, though I am the first scientist to achieve a method of positive control. You see, the oocytes from which ova develop, and the spermatogonia which becomes sperms—”
A tremendous crash drowned out his shrill voice. Mansfield jumped. He heard the sound of falling glass, then an inhuman roar.
“What was that?” he cried.
The scientist’s gaunt face had turned ashen; his eyes bulged.
“The glassite—the test tube!” he shrieked. “He has broken out through a wall of solid glassite! Quick, Mansfield—the super-man has been born!”