It was not till after nine that the Wolf and the inventor were able to have an hour to themselves. Everybody was happy and excited. Mrs. Smith cried, but they all understood why. They all talked during dinner, all except Biddle. He just sat, and listened, and looked. He tried to remember the night he had invited these four to his bedroom, and explained to them what he wanted. Were these the same four? Jones did not look a day over thirty. Wild could have held his own as guard on a football team. Sally was lovely and Valencia charming, and they were both as fine young women as you could find anywhere. Sally always had been wonderful, but Valencia was now pure gold with all the dross burned out.
In the library, the Wolf turned and faced his guest.
“You have something,” he said. “What are you going to do with it?” he demanded.
Biddle threw out his hands in a hopeless gesture.
“I am not sure,” he replied.
“You know what this means?”
“Partly. I have just come from Ohio. You have heard of the Governor, Welfare Watkins? He was good to me. I have just finished the injection of seven hundred recidivists, a group of men who would be considered hopeless by every known method of analysis. Watkins is in personal charge of the experiment. I am simply waiting till I see the results.”
“Suppose the sick ones get well, and those who are bad become good? What are you going to do about it?”
“What is there to do? What will Watkins do? Seven hundred sick men, imprisoned for life, become well in every way. What is the answer?”
“My answer is this. If you can do it for seven hundred, you can do it for every criminal in the States. If you can do what you did for my boy, you can do it for every little child who needs it. If you can cure Sally, and Harry, and Valencia, and Jones, you can cure everyone who is sick. That is my answer. Can you? Are you going to? And how? What kind of machinery will you place in operation? You are going to change humanity. Before you do it, you must be sure of your control.”
Biddle walked silently up and down the book-lined room.
“I am going to wait,” he said at last, “till I have the monthly report from Farview Prison. If that is favorable, I am going to give a guarded statement to the Press.”
“What paper?”
“The Purple Flash.”
“You are true to your promise.”
“How do you know?”
“I ought to know. I am the owner of the paper. My reporter told me what you had promised her. We are just waiting for your word, and then we are going to have the greatest story any tabloid has ever sprung. By the way, do you know what those four patients of yours are doing? They are writing a book; trying to imagine what the world would be like if everyone were given a dose of your medicine. I am working on it with them at night. I give them ideas concerning business. Of course so far, it is only a dream.”
“Yes, just a dream.”
The two men sat in silence. Suddenly, the Wolf whispered:
“Have you given yourself a dose of the serum, Biddle?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You see, I have a boy. That is what I have had in mind all these years. I wanted to do something for him some day, and it did not seem fair to let him go last.”
“He—is sick? Like my boy?”
“Worse.”
“And you were willing to help my boy first?”
“Yes. You see, I had to be sure. I could fail with others and keep working—have hope—but if I gave it to the boy and failed, I would have to stop.”
“I understand. Well, you cannot stop. You have something that is so wonderful that it does not belong to you. Understand, I am not asking for anything for myself. I could sell that stuff for you at a million dollars a dose, serum you have been giving away to diseased convicts. But I am not doing that. I am not even asking for a dose for myself. You gave me a real son, and I am yours to command for the rest of my life. But you have something in that serum that is dynamite. If it goes off at the wrong time, it will devastate the world. And if it does not go off, it will rob the world of something the human race has a right to. Suppose you were killed?”
“Who is going to kill me?”
“The doctors and the lawyers ought to, but I suppose you are safe from them. They rank rather high. There are business men who are going to be wiped out, but I doubt if they would try to kill you. But how about the bootleggers and the underworld? Those who traffic in vice of every form? I have talked to Valencia. She knows all about that life; but now she is clean, clean as a hound’s tooth. She says she deserves no credit for her reformation. She just decided suddenly that she did not want to be bad any more. The criminal lawyers may smile when their living is taken away from them, but how about the criminals? And I am not sure of the politicians. They fatten on vice; it is a source of their power.”
“Let’s wait,” answered Biddle. “I want to be sure of myself, and then I will have a message for the American people.”
“Will they be ready for it?”
“That is a point well taken. Would it be best to take them into my confidence, or wait till the number of cures was so great that no one could doubt?”
“You cannot keep it a secret,” declared the Wolf with a twisted smile. “My reporters, who have been trying to cover the work in Ohio, tell me that there are two hundred reporters at the Farview prison. If the Governor had not quarantined the place and called out the National Guard, they would have broken into jail to find out what was going on. So far, they cannot say anything because they do not know anything, but when the governor of a state goes into a prison for one month with a large staff of specialists, that’s news, my son, that’s news, and those reporters are going to do everything possible to find out what is going on.”
“I guess we will let Welfare Watkins take care of that.”
Hiram Smith went to the phone and called up the night editor of The Purple Flash. After listening carefully, he said:
“Watkins has told the newspapers that he has nothing to say.”
CHAPTER 7
The Hunger Strike
Sidney Biddle decided to stay on as the guest of the Wolf of Wall Street. He wanted to think. Some of the questions Hiram Smith had asked were enough to make anyone think. Biddle was a scientist, not a sociologist; an inventor, not a financier. When he started his studies on a serum that would help mankind, he was thinking in terms of his son rather than in terms of the nation. His experiments up to this time had been done only to make sure of his discovery, rather than to help the human race in its toilsome staggerings towards the stars. The thought that it would revolutionize the life of the world was something new to him. He decided that he had to think it over.
His position in relation to his discovery was not unique. The first man to tame fire, Tubal-Cain hammering the first piece of iron, the discoverer of gunpowder, of movable type, of the telescope; Newton with his apple, Watts with his steam kettle, Morse with his telegraph, Wright with his gliding machine—none of these had a clear consciousness of what his discovery would do to the life of the world. But those who were benefited knew. The man, warmed and protected by fire and by the iron tipped rod, the man reading the first Bible, looking at the moon through a lens, riding on a train, sending messages first over wire and then without wire, the man chasing birds through the air; these men knew what the discovery meant. Sally Fanning breathing lustily, Harry Wild standing erect, Valencia Moore cleansed from the desire to sin, John Jones made young again, the crippled son of the Wolf chasing rabbits through the woods; these had a far clearer vision of what had to happen in the world through the use of the serum than the man who had spent years perfecting it. And Hiram Smith, sensitized through years on the Stock Exchange, knew perfectly well what stocks would boom and what stocks would break when Wall Street heard the news. Already he had sold all of his holdings in the United Drug Company, a ten million dollar concern he had helped organize.
Biddle wired his address to the Govern
or of Ohio, and spent the next week in long conversations with the guests of Hiram Smith. He was especially interested in talking to Mrs. Smith. She was a woman, college educated, club cultured, and devoted, through the illness of her son, to charities for children of underprivileged people. In her joy over the changed condition of her only child, she could not forget that there were other children who were warped, twisted, and bent. She could not forget them, and she could not let the inventor forget. He listened to her pleading; he looked at the pictures of the little lads and lassies in the homes for the incurables in which she was interested.
“You are a peculiar inventor!” she exclaimed. “Most of the breed I have met have made things out of metals or devised new uses for electricity. But you work with living things, and so far you have not uttered a word or mentioned in any way the financial side of your undertaking. What are you doing it for? What are you going to gain from the development of your secret serum?”
Biddle simply smiled.
“I have a son,” he replied. “I invented several processes and sold them. Now I am spending that money. What is money, anyway? What thing that is worth while can it buy for you? What good did your husband’s wealth do you? In the end, the thing you were willing to pay millions for was given to you like the sunshine—like the air you breathe.”
“Are you going to let the world enjoy it?”
“I do not know. Just now, I am interested only in my son.”
On the evening of the eighth day of his visit, he received a telegram from the Governor of Ohio urging him to return to Farview Prison as soon as possible. No explanation was given. He showed the wire to Hiram Smith, who simply asked him for permission to take him to the prison by airplane.
“Something big must be happening there, and I want to go along and see what it is,” he explained. “You know I am interested.”
“The Governor might have something to say about your entering the prison.”
“He might,” agreed the Wolf, “if he knew who I was, but you can simply introduce me as your secretary, or a fellow scientist, or even your valet.”
“Okay,” agreed Biddle. “Let’s start.”
Morning found them at the prison. It was closely guarded by several companies of the National Guard. The few hotels of the neighboring town overflowed with newspaper men who were rapidly going insane over their inability to find out what was going on behind the mammoth granite walls of the prison. Biddle, once he was identified, had no trouble in entering; and the Wolf went with him as his private secretary.
“What’s wrong?” the scientist asked Welfare Watkins, as they met in the Warden’s office. “Has the serum failed?”
The tired executive shook his head.
“On the contrary, it has succeeded too well. The change in the seven hundred who received the injection has been rapid and in every way satisfactory. Especially so to the men who were treated. Men who were almost dead from tuberculosis started to recover; syphilitics cleared mentally as well as physically. Every man developed a new viewpoint on life; they started to sing, whistle, laugh. The utterly vicious and hopelessly desperate changed almost overnight.”
“The representative of the National Committee of Mental Hygiene told me that he had never seen anything like the difference between the men before and after the serum. The specialists spent one half of their time saying that such changes could not happen to the human body and the other half finding new causes for astonishment.
“That part of it is all right. The serum has started to act in exactly the way you said it would. Not a single failure. But the news spread to the other half of the prison population. How? Don’t ask me. In a few days the other seven hundred knew that something great and wonderful was happening to their mates and not happening to them, and they did not like it; and, in a way, I do not blame them. Suppose you were in the hospital of the prison rotting to death and in the next bed was a man sick as you were and from the same disease. Suppose you saw that man recover, almost over night, and you just kept on dying? What if you remained hopeless and your cell mate hopeful? The men who received the serum gained the idea, I do not know how, that they were going to get well in every way, and when they did I was going to pardon them. They were filled with hope.
“Naturally, the rest of the men wanted the same thing to happen to them. They were not sure what it was, but they knew it was something, and they wanted it. So they have gone on a hunger strike, seven hundred of them, and they swear they will not eat a bite till they get what they call fair play. So far there has been no violence, but Hell is likely to break out at any moment. And the men who are getting well are sympathetic. They are saying that the medicine ought to be given to all of the prisoners.”
“If you are willing to do so. Governor,” replied Biddle, “we will do that. It will not take long for me to get enough serum from my laboratories, and, with the physicians we have here, the work can be completed in a very few days. That ought to satisfy them.”
“It will, and I think you had better send for the medicine. But I am afraid it will not satisfy others. We have five prisons in the State. And then there are the reporters. I am actually afraid to leave the prison. They feel that there is something big happening, and they want the details. What can I say to them; and if I say it, will they believe me? You have started something big, but how is it going to end? And what shall I do with these men after they have turned this prison into a paradise? Are they still guilty?”
“What does the Warden say, Governor?” asked Biddle.
“Of course, he is a penologist. He has looked on this type of human behavior as hopeless. Even now, he says that they are suffering from some type of group hysteria, that in reality they are just as wicked and just as sick as they ever were.”
“What do the physicians say?”
“They are talking their heads off, and working twenty hours a day studying their pets. Each man has seen some impossible condition change for the better. One man was almost dead from cancer of the throat. From hour to hour they expected the disease to rot into a large blood vessel and the man to bleed to death. Now they say the man is going to recover. Of course they say that occasionally a cancer will do that, but they feel that too many things like that are going on at the same time. First they talked of coincidence, and now some of them are talking of omnipotence. They swear they are going to do something to you, torture you, if necessary, to make you tell them what it is you injected into the veins of these seven hundred degenerates. Something has to be done.”
“We will do it. You announce to the prisoners that I am sending for some more medicine; and that, as soon as it comes, every man will receive a dose, and the medicine and the dosage will be the same as was given to the other prisoners.
“You can tell the doctors and specialists that at the proper time I will make an announcement to representatives of the ethical medical societies of the United States; and when I do that, I will give the secret free to the nation. In the meantime, explain to them that they have had a wonderful opportunity to see the drug tested on over fourteen hundred cases and that it would be a good idea if they would prepare a report to the American Medical Association so that, when the time comes, that body of physicians will not think that I am some kind of a charlatan.
“As far as the reporters are concerned, tell them that in twenty-four hours you will have a statement to make giving them the bald facts of what has been going on in Farview Prison. I will help you prepare that statement. Now I guess that ought to please everybody.”
“But you said that it would take thirty days before the full effects of the drug could be observed.”
“That is true. And we will not make any extravagant claims at this time.”
“And you will send for the seven hundred doses at once?”
“Yes. My private secretary is here in his airplane. I will ask him to go to my laboratories, and have the drug rushed here. I will start him at once.”
The Wolf of Wall Street had overhear
d all of the conversation. Biddle took him to one side, and gave him a Philadelphia address.
“You will have to take a letter there for me. They will give you the package, and you can send it back by special messenger.”
“But how about me? I heard you promise to release the news to the papers in twenty-four hours.”
“Well, what of it? I did not forget my promise. You have your plane. When you leave here get to the nearest big city. Take over a private line, and burn the news over to your city editor. Tell him anything you want. Right at this minute you have, or at least I think you have, over twenty thousand words typed and ready for the press. In a few hours, you can bring that news up to date, and have the special edition of The Purple Flash on the streets. You ought to have at least twenty hours lead on every other paper in the States. More than that, you have a rather clear idea of what it means. You can use all of your information except one thing, and that is my name. Now I will write the letter, and you can start. Better not let those boys outside the walls learn who you are. If they do, you will not get far.”
“This is wonderful, Biddle,” whispered the secret owner of The Purple Flash. “It will put my paper at the head of all of them, and increase the circulation by five million. Could I speak to a few of these doctors, and sign them up for some future articles?”
“No. The last thing in the world I want is for them to find out who you are. All I want is for you to keep quiet for a little while.”
Once Hiram Smith was safely up in the air, Biddle returned to the Governor. He said:
“Suppose we start writing that statement for the papers?”
“I think that would be a good idea,” assented the Executive. “What do you think we had better say?”
“Not too much and not too little. Something like this:
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction Megapack, Volume 5 Page 30