The subsequent history of the capsules is obscure. They turned up in the hands of one Harry Kamajian, an itinerant peddler of Olean, N. Y., who asked a druggist of that city whether they were good for headaches. Upon opening one of the capsules the druggist found it contained, not drugs, but a roll of thin paper, apparently cut from the India-paper edition of some book, and inscribed with minute characters.
The other two capsules were similar. The characters were finer than anything but the most minute engraving and were only deciphered with the aid of a microscope. The druggist, who refuses to allow his name to be used, declines to submit the originals for examination unless he is paid for the privilege. It will be noted that there is a gap in the manuscript, presumably representing a fourth capsule, which has not been discovered.
* * *
Into whatever hands this may fall, I pray to God that the finder will bring it to the police as soon as he can. I herewith lay a complaint that Dr. Adelbert Grimshaw is engaged in the drug traffic. I charge that he is a murderer. Dr. Voyna must be in it, too.
I fear that in spite of anything we can do, this will fall into Grimshaw’s own hands, in which it will only afford him a view of how he looks to other people—Sherman and Kraicki, Arthur Kaye and myself. Not that it will matter to you, Dr. Grimshaw. We who are about to die salute you! Behold your mirror. But if you who read this are not Dr. Grimshaw, will you do me one last favor? Please notify Miss Millicent Armbruster of 299 Wallace Avenue, Buffalo, that John Doherty is dead.
But notify the police above all. Here’s a clue; if they are skeptical, tell them to find out where Arthur Kaye is buried and to examine the coffin that is supposed to contain his remains. That ought to be convincing. They won’t find any.
What I have written here already sounds tense and hysterical, now that I read it, as though I were one of the psychiatric patients of this place, suffering from some sort of delusion of persecution. I am not—and it’s all true. Look, whoever you are that reads this, check up on me. It’s easy. My name is John Doherty. I am a graduate of Hamilton College, class of ’16, a member of Theta Alpha. I’m one of the fools who didn’t want to go into an ordinary business and so got a job with a private detective. His name is Morrison; he had an office in the Binghamton Bank for Savings building.
Look: this is how it happened. You can run a check on it. The Eye—that’s the Pinkertons—offered me a job and I took it. They put me on a job guarding a money shipment from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, where they thought maybe the messenger was crooked, but weren’t quite sure. I was locked in the express car with him and the money; it was a night trip. He was crooked, all right. During the night he waited till I looked a little bit dopey, then pulled his gun and tried to let me have it. I got him, but he hit me on the top of the head and after they pulled us both out of the car, I had to have an operation—trepanning, I think they call it.
I still know I was not nuts or anything, but after I got over the operation, I couldn’t seem to think straight all the time, so the Eye sent me down here to Grimshaw’s. Look: I’m going to give the whole story, because it’s all evidence, maybe not the kind you can bring into a court, but it can be checked up. When I got to this place, they gave me a long series of tests. I could recognize them all right as a modified Binet-Simon, and wondered why Grimshaw should bother putting a college man through that routine. That’s how much I didn’t know. I didn’t know the physical tests they gave me, either.
The routine at the sanitarium was easy. It was the first time I had a real rest since I could remember. We were kept in our rooms most of the time except in the afternoon, when all the patients went out for exercise in the park, with a garden and a small stream running through it. I got to know some of the other patients. You can check on them—Arthur Kaye, a big man with a high forehead, a broker, who was in here for dipsomania; Kraicki, who was Polish, and used to say he was a nobleman, but I think he was just weak in the head. Sherman was the interne in our wing. I got along fine with him, he liked the same sort of books I did. The four of us formed a little group and were together a good deal.
We started by trying to play bridge, but the game broke up early. Kraicki couldn’t keep his mind on it. He was amusing, you understand, but he just couldn’t learn to play bridge. You might as well have tried to teach a cow to roller-skate. So we just talked.
That’s the trouble, you see. We didn’t have anything to do but talk, and I got bored as hell. I used to be an athlete at college-football and lacrosse—and just sitting around or looking at a movie in the evening got me down. We weren’t getting treatments of any kind, just living at the place, apparently, and I didn’t have anything to do. So I began figuring out some way to get rid of the boredom, and the only way I could think of was to break a rule.
The most interesting rule to break seemed one connected with the wall. At the left side of the park it was; a high stone wall that kept our part of the sanitarium separate from that where the charity patients were. Sherman remarked one day that nobody but Grimshaw and Voyna were allowed in that part, and the building where the charity patients lived was only connected with the rest of the institution by a covered passage with an iron gate in it. I don’t like to run into things I can’t find out—that’s one of the reasons I went into this business—and besides, here was something for me to do. So I began figuring on how to get over that wall to find out what all this business of the charity patients was about.
This is the way I worked it. I arranged a dummy for my bed. Then, in the afternoon, when we were called for exercise right after lunch, I slipped around the door of the dining room into the big clothes closet there is there, and waited till the attendant bringing up the rear of the procession got past. After he had turned the corner I went back into the dining room, out the window quick, and into the other side of the park, not the charity patient side, but our own side, only not where the attendants were watching. I slipped down the side of the building to the edge of the stream where there are some rhododendron bushes; you can check on this. There I lay down and waited for dark. I knew that nobody would count us in, and the night attendant would only flash his light through the peephole in the door. The dummy would take care of him all right.
After the lights in the main building went out, I moved along the wall until I found a tree growing close enough against it, climbed over with some trouble and dropped on the other side. There was no one in the grounds. I tried the door, more to assure myself of being unable to get in than with any hope of entering. To my surprise, it was unlocked. The lower hall was paved with stone, scrubbed clean, and had only a single unshaded bulb at the far end. There was no sound but a rather subdued moaning upstairs somewhere, which was not at all surprising since the loonies who were the bulk of Dr. Grimshaw’s patients were usually making a. noise of some kind, somewhere.
I was about to go upstairs and see what I could through the peep-holes when I heard steps and the grating of a key in the lock pf the passage door. The stairs were too far away, the door by which I had entered would cut me off, but there was another door to my immediate right, and it was fortunately unlocked. I grabbed at it, and found myself in a broom-closet, surrounded by mops, where I had hardly installed myself before steps came down the hall. There was a key-hole; through it I made out Grimshaw and Voyna, on either side of a boy of about twelve, who was dressed in what appeared to be a long one-piece suit of pajamas.
Abreast of my place of concealment, they turned on the light in another room and went in, leaving the door open behind them. I could only catch a glimpse or two of what was going on as the figures moved back and forth, truncated by my key-hole, but Grimshaw’s voice was perfectly clear:
“Now will you listen to us and take it? The tests show you need it, and you know you’ll feel better afterward.”
“No, I won’t,” said another voice. “I know what it is; it’s dope you’re giving me. I don’t care what you do. You can make a midget out of me and maybe I can’t help it, but I ain�
��t going to be no dope-fiend.”
It was the boy and he was not a boy, as I realized instantly, with a kind of cold horror; though the rest of it, I did not quite understand.
“Swine!” said Grimshaw. There was the sound of a blow. “Do as I say!”
“I won’t!” said the voice of the little man. “Go to hell!”
There was another blow, and something like a whimper, then Voyna’s voice:
“The injection—”
“Nah, have I not told you many times that this must be oral?” said Grimshaw.
“Aber, Herr Doktor,” began Voyna, and then both of them started jabbering in German, which is something I don’t understand. Then they shut the door.
I slipped out of the broom-closet and to the outer door, my taste for exploration cured for the evening. I already had a good deal to work out, and doubted whether anything I could find on the upper floors of the charity ward would throw more light. Besides, I didn’t want to be cut off up there, with Grimshaw and Voyna in the room below.
That night I slept out under the trees, not wanting to take the chance on prowling the corridors, for if something funny really were going on, it might be dangerous. At that point, I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. The midget could easily be plain bugs, but Grimshaw and Voyna hadn’t treated him the way you treat mental cases. Also, that reference to dope was a sticker. I’d done enough private eye work to know what a good cover for peddling the junk a sanitarium like Grimshaw’s could be. The part about making a midget out of somebody wasn’t good sense, but I’m no medic, so that didn’t figure by itself.
In the morning I got back to the dining room in time to join the rest at breakfast, but didn’t do anything till afternoon, when I decided to ask Sherman about it. The trouble was that I couldn’t seem to get rid of Kaye and Kraicki; they hung around until I had to tell them the story as well as Sherman. When I had finished, the interne said:
“Oh, I think you’re borrowing—” and then he stopped.
“I know, I know,” I said. “This is just suspicion. But you’d be surprised in my business how much you build up on suspicion and the tipoff. What I’m asking is whether you have anything that would confirm it, one way or another.”
“Only more suspicion, I’m afraid,” said Sherman. “There’s the fact that nobody but Grimshaw and Voyna go into the charity ward—that is, except one or two of the attendants, who are just strong-arm men. I know they have a private laboratory—none of us go there, either—and he could be making his own type of drugs. It’s just incredible that he could produce midgets, but—”
“But what?”
“But I have seen a car around here from the Great Neiderlinger Shows. Two or three times.”
It was like that, all indefinite and a little nutsy, so I figured the thing to do was really settle matters. I didn’t get the chance. Things broke loose that night. We four always ate at one table together, and it wasn’t a good meal at dinner, because Kraicki had been pretty much upset by what we were talking about during the afternoon and kept fidgeting. It finally became so noticeable that Grimshaw himself came over to the table and said he’d like to see Kraicki in his office after dessert.
It took just that. Kraicki leaped to his feet and in a voice you could hear clear across the dining-room, shouted:
“Ha, ha! So I will be a dopish or a midget like those others. I tell you, you will not do this to Count Kraicki. No never.” Grimshaw just stood and looked from one to the other of us. None of us said anything, but he must have realized what we knew and what we suspected from the looks on our faces. After a minute, he smiled a crooked smile, kind of, and said: “No, I will not do it to Count Kraicki.” Then he went back to his place as though nothing had happened.
I’ve seen plenty of guys look like that before, the business I’m in, and I know it always means trouble, but I didn’t know how much trouble it meant this time, or how quick on the trigger Grimshaw was. I didn’t think of warning Sherman, who was the only one of us that could have made a getaway.
Anyway, this is what happened. About one o’clock in the morning there was someone at the door. I’m a fight sleeper and I was on my feet by the time they came in, so I let the first one have it right on the button, and down he went. But Grimshaw had thought of that, too. The second one got my arm in a ju-jitsu grip and the third one was on my back and pretty soon they had me stretched out. Then they turned on the light, and Grimshaw was standing over me. I saw I had clipped him at least once in the rough-house and felt good about that.
“So!” he said. “You have serious delusions of persecution, my friend. You imagine things about this place where we are good to you, my friend the detective. Your injury is more serious than I have thought. We must place you in the disturbed ward for a little while, Mr. Doherty.”
I started to ask the attendants whether they were going to let the big crook get away with this, but before I could get anywhere, Grimshaw pulled out the old hypodermic and let me have it, and next thing I passed out.
The next thing I knew I was coming to in a different room. I couldn’t tell where it was, but I guessed somewhere in the charity ward, because the angle on what trees I could see through the window was different. They had me in a strait-jacket and kept doping me so that I lost count of time. Once I was operated on; I can remember coming to with my head and neck in a plaster cast and the feeling of nausea which is the after-effect of ether.
After this Voyna used to come in and feed me from a spoon, and then in the evening Grimshaw would give me another injection. I felt terribly ill and depressed all the time. In the morning I’d wake up with a blinding headache, and after that wore off, have a horrible sensation of weakness. I began to wonder if he wasn’t doing something to drive me insane, because the room seemed to grow in size, and the strait-jacket got looser and looser.
One day it was so loose that I actually wriggled out of it. I hadn’t figured my getaway much beyond that point, though, and when Grimshaw came in, I could think of nothing better than trying to jump him. It didn’t work; I was so weak he handled me like a punk, and when he got me into the bed again, I knew something was screwy, because he had not only handled me easily, but he seemed to be more than a head taller than I was, and I’m a six-footer. I suppose that should have been the tipoff—that and what the midget had said when I heard him. But you have to remember that I wasn’t feeling too good—really off my nut, I guess—and couldn’t make head or tail of what I did see. Once I was taken out on the balcony for air and I thought I saw Arthur Kaye lying on another deck chair near mine, all muffled up, but he didn’t speak, and I was feeling too sick. I used to have dreams about giants walking around the room with weapons in their hands.
The first really conscious day I had was I don’t know how many weeks later, when Grimshaw told us. about it. The night before he hadn’t given me the usual injection. In the morning I woke to look at a ceiling that seemed miles overhead and lower down the foot of the bed was a long distance away. The room was gigantic.
Grimshaw came in a little later, with a bundle in his arms. I couldn’t believe it at first; he looked over fifteen feet tall. The bundle he set down on the bed; it turned out to be Arthur Kaye, the big man, clad in a pajama-like garment like myself, only now we were midgets smaller than the one I’d seen in the charity ward.
“Look: what goes on?” I said to Kaye. He looked a little dazed but he said:
“I don’t understand,” and stood up on the bed beside me, and by that time Grimshaw was back with Voyna and two other bundles that were Sherman and Kraicki.
Voyna went out. Grimshaw looked down at all four of us standing on the bed together and began talking. His voice was so loud and so deep in pitch that I had a little trouble in getting what he was talking about, and so I won’t be able to put this down in his exact words, but I’ll try to come as near as I can, and for God’s sake, whoever finds this, make sure that somebody gets it. It’s the most important of all. This is what he said:
“Allow me to congratulate you, gentlemen. You have advanced the cause of general science immeasurably. You four are the participants in what will be known as the Grimshaw experiment, and I wish to thank you for placing me in the front rank of the world’s endocrinologists.
“Dr. Sherman, you at least will be able to understand the references. To the rest of you, I will offer a few words of explanation—Mr. Kaye, Count Kraicki, and our estimable detective friend, Mr. Doherty. There are certain glands in the body, gentlemen, which are called respectively, but not at all respectfully—oh, by no means, respectfully—the-thyroid, parathyroid, and pituitary glands. They are known as the ductless glands and they have no obvious function. It has been widely assumed that their true function is the discharge into the blood-stream of the various vitamins that maintain the human balance.
“Gentlemen, this is an error. You are the proof. It has been discovered that if the thyroid glands of a young animal, say a sheep or dog, were destroyed, it would become a dwarf of the species, and it has been presumed that this was solely due to lack of vitamins. Investigation has also shown that if a thyroid or pituitary gland were injured there resulted a giant—a seven-foot circus monster. These things are well known, gentlemen. Even in adults there are changes. Dr. Haussler has recorded how an abnormally developed pituitary gland caused a man’s fingers to become short, wide and stubby, long after he was fully grown.
“It is my discovery, gentlemen, that the interlock between the endocrine glands and dwarfism or giantism is not due to vitamins, but to an enzyme. Ach, it will revolutionize medicine! I call this enzyme ‘Theta.’ I have isolated it, and I am well on the road to synthesis. Here is the formula.”
My Best Science Fiction Story Page 37