“Could you give the antiserum to the nation, like you gave the serum?”
“Yes, if it became the right thing to do.”
“And it is your opinion that, if a woman received the antiserum, she would have children?”
“Yes. Of course, it would be necessary for her husband to have the antiserum also. Perhaps not. I am not sure, but I think so.”
“Would you excuse us, if we talked this thing over privately?”
“Certainly. I will walk over to the Madonna. You can find me there. It is only a few city blocks from here.”
One hour later, the women walked over to where Biddle was standing in the shadow of the Madonna.
“We have decided,” announced Mary Gregory. “The women of America ask you for the formula of the antiserum.”
“For general distribution?”
“No. But we feel that every man and wife who really want to have a family should be allowed to make the decision. Those who wish to remain childless can do so.”
“Are you sure you know what you are asking for?”
“We are.”
“It cannot be,” declared Biddle. “Never in the history of the human race have women been as free as they are now. They can come and go, free from the chains of a home and family. No longer slaves of the Moon, their love-life is liberated from anxiety. There is no longer sickness to fear, the death of loved ones to dread. You are happy, healthy, and able to compete in every way on equal terms with the male. Everything woman has striven for in the past you now have. Do you mean to say that you are going to give it up?—deliberately sacrifice all you have gained?”
“We want our babies!” cried the women.
“But in having them you lose your immortality. Having them, you no longer are eternal. You will become sick, diseased, crippled. Some of you will die in childbirth. Some of your children will die; others will live to become defectives, epileptics, cripples. Some of the ones who live to maturity will cause you shame; they will become insane, criminals, prostitutes. You will see children die in your arms. In the years to come, you will wish they had died while they were sweet babies. Sickness will come, suffering, sorrow. Your health will break, your husbands will leave you for fresher women. You will die with one hand on your breaking heart, and the other on the broken cross. That is what you are asking for. Do you mean to tell me that you, knowing what the old biological urge for offspring meant to womankind, want to change your glorious existence of today for that?”
“We must have our babies!” cried the women.
“You must remember what life was. A brief childhood of dolls, and then the chains that made you slaves to the Moon. A brief period as a pampered plaything to a man, and then a slow death, that you might bring a new life into the world. Sickness, invalidism, the breaking back that never lost its ache. Another child, and another, and with each child, a loss of beauty and strength. At last, freedom from the Moon, leaving you a sexless creature—miserable with flashes of heat and seconds of cold—to pass out at last, an old woman, nursed by children who dread you and grand-children who do not know that you play with them because you are in the second childhood of senility. Are you going to stand there and tell me that you want the old life back?
“I am going to give you one more chance. Here, in the shadow of the Madonna who knew what having a child meant to a woman, are you going to tell me that your sex will deliberately go back into that shadow when you can spend centuries in the sunlight of childless freedom?”
Mary Gregory stepped forward.
“Give us the formula, Sidney Biddle. We have decided. Nothing you can say will make us change our minds. You have not told us a thing we do not know. We know that we speak for our sisterhood. Give us the formula, Sidney Biddle. Give us back our babies.”
Trembling, the scientist took out a notebook, and wrote slowly on a blank page. At last, he tore this page out, and handed it to the rich woman.
“Here is what you are asking for. Any chemist can make it; any physician give it. Now may I ask you to leave me here? I want to be alone once more.”
They all left except Mary Gregory.
“Why do you stay here in the shadow?” she asked.
“Because that woman knows how I feel. She knows what it means to have a son die, and not be able to save him. Like her Son died, and mine.”
“Why did you not take the serum, Sidney Biddle?”
“Because I did not want to live forever,” he replied.
CHAPTER 20
Old Lives For New
Biddle lived alone for two more years, and then determined to go back to civilization. The first person he called on was Hiram Smith, the secret owner of the Rosy Dawn. The rich man was delighted to meet his friend again.
“You look a little older, a few more white hairs, but still very fit. I guess that arctic air agrees with you, Biddle.”
“I guess so. Clean living and hard work are fine medicines. How are you? Not quite as brown as when I saw you last. Anything happen?”
“Slightly. That boy of ours decided to fall in love. Mighty nice girl, and we were all in favor of their marriage. The first thing we knew, after the wedding, they went and took a dose of your antiserum, so they could have a child. That just spoiled it all for the wife and me. We had been making plans to live at least for a thousand years, but that would mean that we would see our children and our grandchild grow old and die while we were still in the vigorous golden maturity of the Biddle Serum. So, what did we do but go and get some of the antiserum ourselves. Now when the grandchildren come to visit us, they will have the old-fashioned kind of grandparents, just nice, old, white-haired people who can try to relive their youth in their children’s children.”
“So, you sacrificed everything, not for the love of a child, but for the love of a grandchild?”
“That’s it. You would think it was a sacrifice, if you had seen me with an attack of rheumatism this last winter.”
Biddle laughed, a friendly, sympathetic, tearful laugh.
“Just an old fool, you always were, Smith, just an old fool. By the way. Where are my old friends Harry Wild and Sally Fanning?”
“They are married. He is back at the old news stand, and they have a little apartment close to where they both lived before you met them.”
“Give me the address.”
“Sure; but I do not think I would go and see them. You remember how they were the time you saw them on the lawn in front of my home? Well, when you remember them, just think of the way they were then.”
“I will have to see them the way they are now,” replied Biddle. “I have to find out something.”
He called at the little apartment late at night. Harry Wild answered his knock on the door.
“It’s Ackerman! Sally, it’s Ackerman, our old friend, and more than welcome. Come right in and sit down. Let me have your hat, Sir. This is an honor, to have you come and see us.”
“It is, indeed,” echoed Sally.
“And how are all the mice?” asked Biddle.
“You should see them,” replied Sally. “Dozens of them, into everything, but I will say this: that the Baby is fond of them. Keeps quiet for an hour at a time when I am too busy to amuse her, just watching them play around the floor.”
“So there is a baby?”
“Finest girl you ever saw,” said the newsboy. “Looks just like her mother. Glad it was a girl. We would not have known what to do with a boy.”
“We are telling her that so she won’t think we were disappointed,” explained Sally. “We are saying it now, before she knows the meaning of words, so we will be sure to say it when she learns to talk. We want her to be sure we loved her.”
They insisted that he come and see the baby. They made him say that he had never seen a finer baby; and they fed him coffee and sandwiches, and made him promise he would come often to see them.
When he left, Harry went down to the front door with him.
As they stood in the doorway, Bi
ddle looked at the little man curiously.
“You are lame, Harry,” he said. “Have you hurt yourself?”
“No. But my old trouble came back. My bad leg is short again, and my back is slowly growing crooked.”
“Well, well! That is too bad. But you keep on smiling?”
“Sure. I have everything to live for now. Fine wife, sweet baby, good business. Why shouldn’t I be happy?”
“That is fine, Harry. Keep on smiling.”
“I will, Mr. Biddle. By the way, do you know of a good remedy for asthma? Sally has had some real bad spells since the baby came, and I do wish someone knew what to do for her.”
“I am sorry. I’ll send her some stramonium leaves. Burn them and inhale the smoke. That will help her. Asthma is a difficult thing to cure. Well, good night, Harry, my boy. I am glad about the baby.”
“Good night, Mr. Biddle, and thanks for looking us up. Send me your address. Next week, the old Purple Flash is going to come back on the stands, and I want to send you some of the first copies. I bet that the Wolf of Wall Street will make it a real tabloid. It ought to go big. The people are getting hungry for that kind of a paper.”
It was all too much for Biddle.
He took the first train for Quebec and the first boat for his mountain home. He walked slowly up the mountain path. It was a hard climb. He was not as young as he had been. He found the house open and a fire burning in the fireplace, but no one was there.
He put down his bag and walked across the crest of the mountain to the Madonna. Under the shadow, a woman sat. As he came near, she walked over to meet him.
“Mary Gregory!” he sighed, “what are you doing here?”
“I wanted to come,” she replied. “You need a woman. If you had a woman in the house with you, you might do something worth while, invent something that would be of real help to mankind.”
“But I am an old man, Mary,” he cried, “an old man growing older.”
“I have taken the antiserum,” she said. “Now I can grow old with you.”
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction Megapack, Volume 5 Page 37