by Earl
“Well, now, that serum I’ve locked away is for you, too, George—for you and your splendid parents, who believed in me when my own father didn’t. You’ve got a key; and you know how to use a hypodermic.”
“Thanks, Dick,” said George simply, tears in his eyes. George was just a young man. The terror of. the Green Plague striking their happy home had been bothering him no little. Now there was no such worry.
And the terror of the Green Plague striking at his home bothered Dick! The last three days had been busy enough to keep his mind from such thoughts. But each evening, the Crafts retailed for the two young men how many deaths had struck in the near-by city, the city in which lived Dick’s parents, friends—and Dorothy Nash. A sense of pride kept Dick from dashing to the telephone and communicating with his parents, but that third day, a particularly devastating one for the city, his pride broke down.
With a certain trepidation, he approached the steel gates of the Palmer mansion. It seemed untenanted. The butler came at his ringing, peering out fearfully as if expecting to see something horrible. The advent of the Green Plague had made people wary of each other, afraid to look at one another, for fear of seeing the dreadful green blotch beside the right ear. The butler’s face lit up with a guilty smile, and he ushered in the ousted son of his employer.
Dick sat in the massive parlor. As he gazed about, it seemed that somehow the regal splendor of the place had vanished. In the face of the awful tragedy of dying hundreds outside, the magnificence of this house seemed out of place, sacrilegious.
He looked up when he heard footsteps. There in the doorway stood his father. He was thinner than before and there was a haunted look in his face. Even his firm step was gone, and with it, arrogance. Wesley Palmer was frightened by the Green Plague; he knew that even his wealth could not buy him security from it.
He stared at his son coldly. “You here?”
A lump arose in Dick’s throat. He wanted to leap up and embrace this man, comfort him, tell him that he had a cure for the Plague. “Dad!” he whispered hoarsely. “I’ve come here—”
“By what right?” The voice was harsh and bitter.
It stabbed the young man to the heart. His father had not changed, even in the face of death. “Dad, can’t you forget our differences at a time like this? When the Green Plague—”
“Why do you come to this house from which you have been banished? There was never a black sheep in the Palmer family before. Do you come for money when the world is dying to continue your puttering with which you have disgraced our name?” Glassy hard eyes stared at Dick as though he were a criminal.
“Can I see Mother?” asked Dick suddenly sick at heart.
The stem figure stiffened and a finger pointed. “Get out!”
Dick sprang to his feet, his eyes ablaze with rage. “Dad, you are still unwilling to forget and forgive. I have never harbored malice toward you for your acts toward me, but I at least expected to find a man with some reasoning left. The world is a death-trap at present. Either of us may be stricken any moment. Yet you talk of your proud name!”
Dick choked and went on: “I haven’t come here for money, I came to see you and mother, to tell you——”
“Get out!” came in thunders from the—”
“All right. I’ll get out,” said Dick, suddenly quiet. “But you’ll listen to my last words for your own good. Some time ago a young man came to you for a loan. You refused him, thinking I had sent him. I didn’t. That money he asked for was to be used in my research on a serum to combat the Green Plague. We got the money elsewhere. That blessed serum that the government has been promising over the radio, when its production gets under way, is what I ‘puttered’ away at. If you had given me the money, I would have completed it sooner, and thereby saved many lives.”
Wesley Palmer leaned drunkenly against the wall, his face suddenly ashen white.
“You, dad—you murdered all those people by refusing to help me! Upon your head, with all its despicable family pride, rests their blood. Now I’ll get out.”
Dick turned at the door. “If you need the serum, you or mother, come to me and get it. But the only way you’ll get it, dad, is by crawling up to me on your hands and knees—by begging it from that worthless ‘putterer’ who disgraced your proud name!”
Dick, outside the Palmer mansion, stepped into George’s car, which he had borrowed to come to the city, and slumped into the seat. After several minutes of inaction, he raised his head. His face looked old and tired. The lines of hardship and sleeplessness streaked his young features. Starting the motor, he dropped in on the physician to whom he had entrusted the serum he had made. The serum was already used up.
“And I could use ten times that amount,” finished the doctor. “This region is being struck heavily. Pray God the government supply comes out soon! I didn’t announce that I had some of the serum, because I knew the people would raid the place here and probably fight for possession of the serum. I passed it out to those I thought worthy of life. It’s a hard task, Dick! The news is beginning to leak out that you have more of the serum. I’ve been bothered all day with people coming and clamoring for antitoxin, till I told the butler to lock the door and keep everybody out. I would advise you to see that your laboratory is protected from raid. You know how a mob is in times of panic.”
That made Dick thoughtful. Perhaps he would need police protection for his farm laboratory. He knew that the government would picket soldiers at but a word. But he dismissed these thoughts for the time being as he headed for the Nash home. He had fought against it, but love had conquered. He must see Dorothy and assure himself of her safety.
He staggered for a moment in the house when a hysterical mother and nervous father informed him that Dorothy had been stricken but an hour before. They had, at her suggestion, called the Craft home to find out where Dick was. The boy George had answered and then suddenly the phone went dead.
His head whirling, Dick rushed to the girl’s bedside.
“Dick!” she screamed. “Oh, Dick! I thought you’d never come!”
“I’m here, darling, and I’ll never leave you.”
“Dick, I’ve got it. . . . look!”
As she made as if to push the hair away from her right ear, Dick stayed her hand. “Never mind. I can save you. I’ve got some serum at my lab on the farm. You’re coming with me.”
Without delay, he swept her into his arms, blankets and all. Even as the car left the city, she lapsed into the coma that precedes the death by the Plague some two or three hours. He drove furiously, yet carefully. It disturbed him to notice many other cars on the road, some returning, some going, some smashed and broken by the roadside. From all of them peered white, frantic faces. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of a horrid green blotch.
A Dramatic Climax
l Dick knew what it meant. As the doctor with whom he had spoken but an hour before had predicted, the news had leaked out about the farm laboratory, and frenzied, plague-maddened people had raided his place. Only one thing drummed through Dick’s head: “Faster, faster! Maybe I can yet save that precious serum in the cabinet!”
His heart sank as he came into view of the barn and house. A sizable crowd was there, milling aimlessly about the grounds, trampling without regard for the Craft property. Then he saw the barn with its doors open and many people within, fighting. And the noise was frightful: screams and shouts and mad bellows of insane anger. All were there but for one purpose, the serum that they had heard could save their lives.
Dick sobbed. Was he too late? Had the mob broken into the cabinet and taken the serum? Where was George? What should he do? Must this girl, the girl he loved more than life, die?
Something caught his eye. A colored cloth waved in one of the upper windows of the house. It must be George. Good faithful George; he must have been watching for his return. He watched the window as the car circled about the garden. George’s head and arm came out. He shouted, then realizing Dick could not hear in th
e tumult of the crowd, pointed vigorously to the back door. Dick waved a hand and headed the car for the rear of the house, honking the horn continuously to make his way through the people who seemed to be everywhere, standing around waiting for they themselves knew not what.
George met him at the door. He had been in a fight. His clothes were ripped and tom, blood had trickled from his nose, congealing on his chin.
“For God’s sake, hurry!” he gasped. He had a revolver in his hand, and kept an eye on the crowd as Dick ran in with the unconscious girl. Immediately, the crowd, divining that something was up, dashed at the door with wild shouts.
“Quick, upstairs!” screamed George. He swung the lower door shut, bolted it, and followed Dick with his precious burden. Upstairs, Dick also found Mr. and Mrs. Craft, pale and frightened.
“It’s been terrible!” said George as soon as he had closed and locked the door from downstairs and barricaded it, as it had been previously, with heavy trunks and tables. “They came in droves, raided the lab, tore things down, and—”
“But the serum, man, did you save that?” burst in Dick after laying the girl on the bed.
George held up one ampule.
Dick gasped and paled. “Where’s the—the rest?”
“Broken in the fight! It was all I could do to save this one! Thought I’d never reach the house alive.”
Dick steadied himself. “Fools! Blind, selfish pigs! Look at them down below, snooping around, snarling like a bunch of hungry rats. They’d murder to save their own selfish lives! I almost wish I hadn’t discovered.
“Good God! Dick. Don’t stand there talking. Dorothy is dying! Inject that serum.”
Dick sprang into action. It was over in a minute. A careful jab in the neck, a gentle push on the plunger, and the Green Germ toxin flowed into the girl’s bloodstream. In a few minutes, the green blotch on her right temple dulled. In a half hour it was obviously vanishing, although it would take ten hours for the antitoxin to do a thorough job. Then and then only would the deathly coma leave her.
Silence reigned in the room. George watched the crowd below. The Crafts went to bed, too unnerved to remain on their feet.
Two hours later, George spoke to the silent figure seated at the edge of the bed, watching the girl’s face. “Crowd is thinning down. Most of them leaving. Must have given up hope.”
He turned to Dick, saw that he was oblivious of the world, and quietly called to him to come below. For he had seen a car coming—a car that he had seen once before, Wesley Palmer’s car. He was waiting at the door when he stepped out.
“Dick!”
The young biologist started, turned his head slowly, then remained as if petrified. Dimly he saw his father, a tall worn figure. But the full concentration of his eyes rested on his right temple—on a horrible green blotch that seemed to writhe like a snake.
“Dad!” cried Dick and it was a moan, not a voice.
“Dick! You told me to come if . . . if I needed the serum. Dick, forgive me!” He came forward on hands and knees. “I’ve been a fool! A million dollars for the serum—anything, my whole fortune.”
When Dick spoke, his soul was ashes. His voice was steady, but his brain was afire. The man before him—his father, broken, sobbing, without pride—doomed.
“Dad, all the money in the world can’t buy you life now.”
“Dick!” One agonized scream.
“There is no more,” finished Dick calmly.
But when he caught his swooning father, he was sobbing. He laid his limp form on the davenport gently, reverently. A proud, austere, misguided man, but after all, his father.
Then he sat down beside Dorothy’s bed, to ease his aching brain for a moment. Then he would bring dad back to Mother.
l He looked up at George standing in the doorway, then sprang to him as he collapsed. Plainly now Dick could see the green blotch. And he hadn’t said a word! Dick suddenly remembered how queer George had been since they met here at the house. His eyes fluttered open.
“George!” moaned Dick, cuddling him in his arms like a baby. “Why didn’t you tell me? You must have had it when I brought Dorothy. You deserve it more than she. After all, she was faithless, while you—”
“No, no, Dick!” came faintly from the boy. “She was faithful, too. That five thousand, Dick—she gave it to me! Told me to keep it a secret—because you would think she was trying to buy back your love! She was faithful, Dick. She deserves to be saved—”
“And you!” moaned Dick. “You—oh, I’d give my dad’s whole fortune now for more serum.”
“Good-by, Dick!” came from the stricken boy. “I go—but we conquered the Green Plague—didn’t we, Dick ?”
“Yes, we did! You as well as I. You, George, your name will live forever.” And George sank into the coma which precedes the Green Death with a happy smile on his boyish lips.
THE END
ENSLAVED BRAINS
l Our author, who is fast becoming one of your favorites, presents here one of the most vivid, logical, living novels of the future that we have ever seen.
We are shown the effects that the civilization of 1973 would have on a man lost in the jungles and isolated from the world for forty years. Wonders surround him on every hand.
But Unitaria, the world of the future, is not all Utopia. The government scientists have instituted several terrible things—things that stagger the imagination.
How the conditions of 1973 affect Williams makes this a thrilling, active, breath-taking story from the first page to the last.
PART ONE
l “There’s my ship,” said Earl Hackworth, pointing down into a long barren valley which they viewed from the top of a tumbled rock ridge. “Isn’t it a wonderful sight in this primeval country? like a jewel in a setting of lead.”
The man spoken to bent blue eyes on the object which indeed glinted like a fiery gem in the strong sunlight, but made no answer. Then he turned his eyes to all the countryside. Far to the back was the green of jungle, spreading eagerly to right and left without end—the cruel, hot jungle which it had taken them three agonizing weeks to traverse. It seemed to crouch like a savage beast, relentless, waiting. It hurled defiance to man, but man had won. From its edge to where the two men stood was a sickly stretch of scrubland, accursed by nature, avoided by even the lowly snake. It had been hot like the inside of a furnace and deceptively long. It had seemed to mock their dragging limbs and vanishing water supply. Even the jungle was better.
But that was all over now, the man with the blue eyes reflected. Jungle and waste had been crossed and conquered. Danger and suffering had buffeted them and left them weaker in body but stronger in spirit. Before them was but a short trip to the bottom of the valley of naked sand. Then a man-made thing, an incredible marvel in aboriginal Africa, would take them up and away, away from feverish lowland jungle, from heartless scrub wastes. It would pick them off the ground and drop everything below into a memory.
“I say, Williams,” spoke Hackworth again. “How do you like my ship?”
The man Williams looked again, parted his lips and twitched a slow tongue that seemed undecided what answer to make. “Your ship!” he said, his eyes unfocusing with inward concentration.
“Yes, the ship I told you about,” Hackworth said. “The ship that will take us to the coast, and will take you from a ghastly exile. Now that ship down there is what is called a ‘Sansrun,’ or helicopter airplane. It can rise vertically, not like your 1933 airplanes, Williams, that had to run along the ground for a few hundred yards. Do you understand, old boy, or do I still talk too fast?”
“I can. . . . understand,” Williams said. The words came slow and precise.
“Good,” Hackworth said. “In another few weeks you won’t have any trouble with the language at all. Forty years is a long time. . . .
“But rather than talk aimlessly up here, let’s get the boys together and finish our trek. We’ve all had a good drink of water. Two hours and we’ll be th
ere. You call ’em, Williams. You speak their garbled Bantu better than I ever hope to. Just two more hours and then—‘farewell to Africa, jungle, and sand.’ ”
But the man Williams made no immediate move to call the “boys,” or native safari men. Instead, some strong emotion flooded his face. Even his superb tan, that had darkened his white skin to a coffee color, could not hide an odd expression of dismay, almost of fear.
“What’s the matter, Williams?” Hackworth asked sharply, laying a hand on his shoulder.
His blue eyes glazed for a moment in strong feeling; Williams evasively muttered to himself in native dialect.
“Listen here!” cried Hackworth fiercely, tightening his fingers on the other’s shoulder. “Out with it. Somethings bothering you.”
Williams ceased his muttering then and turned an agonized face to his companion. When he spoke, his voice was high and jerky. His throat muscles worked spasmodically.
“I can’t do it!. . . . Africa, Olgor. . . . it belongs to me. . . . I belong to it! Musri et kraal. . . . How can I leave my home?”
For a moment, Hackworth was thunderstruck, speechless. He stared at the brawny Williams and saw handsome features tightened with inner pain, with mental distortions. Was this the Williams of his boyhood? Could this man have once been his eager, joyous cousin? Or was this all a mad dream—a spell of magic Africa?
Hackworth swept his brow clear of perspiration and his mind of feverish obsession. He stretched forth both his hands to the other, grasping him by the shoulders.
“Good Lord! You don’t belong here,” he said firmly. “Think, Williams; you are a white man, as I am. You are my cousin; you were born far from this continent of mystery and misery. You are a virtual exile here. The civilization of the white man, your natural heritage, calls you—”
“I’m afraid!” cried Williams suddenly. “Forty years of this. . . . I’m afraid to go back!”