“Fake?” He gulped. “No; it was real gold.”
Beth shook her troubled head.
“Bill showed me,” she whispered. “It looks like gold on the outside. But, when you scratch it, it’s only lead.”
Mr. Peabody felt sick. He couldn’t keep tears of frustration from welling into his eyes.
“I tried,” he sobbed. “I don’t know why everything goes wrong.” He caught a determined breath, and sat up in bed. “But I can make gold—real gold. I’ll show you.”
“Dad!” Her voice was low and dry and breathless. “Dad, you are going insane.” Quivering hands covered her face.
“Mother and Bill were right,” she sobbed faintly. “But the police—oh, I can’t stand it!”
“Police?” Mr. Peabody leaped out of bed. “What about the police?”
The girl moved slowly back, watching him with dark, frightened eyes.
“Mother and Bill phoned them, before I came in. They think you’re insane, and mixed up in some horrid crime besides. They’re afraid of you.”
Twisting his hands together, Mr. Peabody padded fearfully to the window. He had an instinctive dread of the law, and his wide reading of detective stories had given him a horror of the third degree.
“They mustn’t catch me!” he whispered hoarsely. “They wouldn’t believe, about my gift. Nobody does. They’d grill me about the counterfeit and the gold brick and the bracelet. Grill me!” He shuddered convulsively. “Bee, I’ve got to get away.”
“Dad, you mustn’t.” She caught his arm, protestingly. “They’ll catch you, in the end. Running away will only make you seem guilty.”
He pushed away her hand.
“I’ve got to get away, I tell you. I don’t know where. If there were only someone who would understand—”
“Dad, listen!” Beth clapped her hands together, making a sound from which he started violently. “You must go to Rex. He can help you. Will you, Dad?”
After a moment, Mr. Peabody nodded.
“He’s a doctor. He might understand.”
“I’ll phone him to expect you. And you get dressed.”
He was tying his shoes, when she ran back into the room. “Two policemen, downstairs,” she whispered. “Rex said he would wait up for you. But now you can’t get out—”
Her voice dropped with amazement, as a coil of rope appeared magically upon the carpet. Mr. Peabody hastily knotted one end of it to the bedstead, and tossed the other out the window.
“Goodby, Bee,” he gasped. “Dr. Rex will let you know.”
She hastily thumb-bolted the door, as an authoritative hammering began on the other side. Mrs. Peabody’s remarkable voice came unimpeded through the panels:
“Jason! Open the door, this instant. Ja-a-a-a-son!”
Mr. Peabody was still several feet from the ground when the miraculous rope parted unexpectedly. He pulled himself out of a shattered trellis, glimpsed the black police sedan parked in front of the house, and started down the alley.
Trembling from the peril and exertion of his flight across the town, he found the door of Dr. Brant’s modest two-room apartment unlocked. He let himself in quietly. The young doctor laid aside a book and stood up, smiling, to greet him.
“I’m glad to see you, Mr. Peabody. Won’t you sit down and tell me about yourself?”
Breathless, Mr. Peabody leaned against the closed door. He thought that Brant was at once too warm and too watchful. It came to him that he must yet step very cautiously, to keep out of a worse predicament than he had just escaped.
“Beth probably phoned you to expect a lunatic,” he began. “But I’m not insane, doctor. Not yet. I have simply happened to acquire a unique gift. People won’t believe that it exists. They misunderstand me, suspect me.”
Despite his effort for a calm, convincing restraint, his voice shook with bitterness.
“Now my own family has set the police on me!”
“Yes, Mr. Peabody.” Dr. Brant’s voice was very soothing. “Now just sit down. Make yourself comfortable. And tell me all about it.”
After snapping the latch on the door, Mr. Peabody permitted himself to sink wearily into Brant’s easy chair. He met the probing gray eyes of the doctor.
“I didn’t mean to do wrong.” His voice was still protesting, ragged. “I’m not guilty of any deliberate crime. I was only trying to help the ones I loved.”
“I know,” the doctor soothed him.
A sharp alarm stiffened Mr. Peabody. He realized that Brant’s soothing professional manner was intended to calm a dangerous madman. Words would avail him nothing.
“Beth must have told you what they think,” he said desperately. “They won’t believe it, but I can create. Let me show you.”
Brant smiled at him, gently and without visible skepticism.
“Very well. Go on.”
“I shall make you a goldfish bowl.”
He looked at a little stand, that was cluttered with the doctor’s pipes and medical journals, and concentrated upon that peculiar, painful effort. The pain and the rushing passed, and the bowl was real. He looked inquiringly at Brant’s suave face.
“Very good, Mr. Peabody.” The doctor’s voice sounded hushed and slow. “Now can you put the fish in it?”
“No.” Mr. Peabody pressed his hands against his dully aching head. “It seems that I can’t make anything alive. That is one of the limitations that I have discovered.”
“Eh?”
Brant’s eyes widened a little. He walked slowly to the small glass bowl, touched it gingerly, and put a testing finger into the water it contained. His jaw slackened.
“Well.” He repeated the word, with increasing emphasis. “Well, well, well!”
His staring gray eyes came back to Mr. Peabody. “You are being honest with me? You’ll give me your word there’s no trickery? You materialized this object by mental effort alone?”
Mr. Peabody nodded.
It was Brant’s turn to be excited. While Mr. Peabody sat quietly recovering his breath, the lean young doctor paced up and down the room. He lit his pipe and let it go out, and asked a barrage of tense-voiced questions.
Wearily, Mr. Peabody tried to answer the questions. He made new demonstrations of his gift, materializing a nail, a match, a cube of sugar, and a cuff link that was meant to be silver. Commenting upon the leaden color of the latter, he recalled his misadventures with the gold brick.
“A minor difficulty, I should think—always assuming that this is a fact.”
Brant took off his rimless glasses, and polished them nervously. “Possibly due merely to a lack of familiarity with atomic structure… . But—my word!”
He began walking the floor again.
All but dead with fatigue, Mr. Peabody was mutely grateful at last to be permitted to crawl into the doctor’s bed. Despite that small dull throbbing in his brain, he slept soundly.
And up in the heavens a bright star winked, greenly.
Brant, if he slept at all, did so in the chair. The next morning, wrinkled, hollow-eyed, dark-chinned, he woke Mr. Peabody; refreshed his bewildered memory with a glimpse of a nail, a match, a cube of sugar, and a lead cuff link; and inquired frantically whether he still possessed the gift.
Mr. Peabody felt dull and heavy. The ache at the back of his head was worse, and he felt reluctant to attempt any miracles. He remained able, however, to provide himself with a cup of inexplicable coffee.
“Well!” exclaimed Brant. “Well, well, well! All through the night I kept doubting even my own senses. My word—it’s incredible. But what an opportunity for medical science!”
“Eh?” Mr. Peabody started apprehensively. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t alarm yourself,” Brant said soothingly. “Of course we must keep your case secret, at least until we have data enough to support an announcement. But, for your sake as well as for science, you must allow me to study your new power.”
Nervously, he was polishing his glasses.
“You are my uncle,” he declared abruptly. “Your name is Homer Brown. Your home is in Pottsville, upstate. You are staying with me for a few days, while you undergo an examination at the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
Mr. Peabody began a feeble protest. Ever since Beth was born, he had felt a horror of hospitals. Even the odor, he insisted, was enough to make him ill.
In the midst of his objections, however, he found himself bundled into a taxi.
Brant whisked him into the huge gray building, past muses and internes. There was an endless series of examinations; from remote alert politeness that surrounded him, he guessed that he was supposed to be insane. At last Brant called him into a tiny consultation room, and locked the door.
His manner was suddenly respectful—and oddly grave.
“Mr. Peabody, I must apologize for all my doubts,” he said. “The X-ray proves the incredible. Here, you may see it for yourself.”
He made Mr. Peabody sit before two mirrors, that each reflected a rather gruesome-looking skull. The two images merged into one. At the base of the skull, beyond the staring eye sockets, Brant pointed out a little ragged black object.
“That’s it.”
“You mean the meteor?”
“It is a foreign body. Naturally, we can’t determine its true nature, without recourse to brain surgery. But the X-ray shows the scars of its passage through brain tissue and frontal bone—miraculously healed. It is doubtless the object which struck you.”
Mr. Peabody had staggered to his feet, gasping voicelessly.
“Brain surgery!” he whispered hoarsely. “You aren’t—”
Very slowly, Brant shook his head.
“I wish we could,” he said gravely. “But the operation is impossible. It would involve a section of the cerebrum itself. No surgeon I know would dare attempt it.”
Gently, he took Mr. Peabody’s arm. His voice fell.
“It would be unfair to conceal from you the fact that your case is extremely serious.”
Mr. Peabody’s knees were shaking.
“Doctor, what do you mean?”
Brant pointed solemnly at the X-ray films.
“That foreign body is radioactive,” he said deliberately. “I noticed that the film tended to fog, and I find that an electroscope near your head is soon discharged.” The doctor’s face was tense and white.
“You understand that it can’t be removed,” he said. “And the destructive effect of its radiations upon the brain tissue will inevitably be fatal, within a few weeks.”
He shook his head, while Mr. Peabody stared uncomprehendingly.
Brant’s smile was tight, bitter.
“Your life, it seems, is the price you must pay for your gift.”
Mr. Peabody let Brant take him back to the little apartment. The throbbing in his head was an incessant reminder that the rays of the stone were destroying his brain. Despair numbed him, and he felt sick with pain.
“Now that I know I’m going to die,” he told the doctor, “there is just one thing I’ve got to do. I must use the gift to make money enough so that my family will be cared for.”
“You’ll be able to do that, I’m sure,” Brant agreed. Filling a pipe, he came to Mr. Peabody’s chair. “I don’t want to excite your hopes unduly,” he said slowly. “But I want to suggest one possibility.”
“Eh?” Mr. Peabody half rose. “You mean the stone might be removed?”
Brant was shaking his head.
“It can’t be, by any ordinary surgical technique,” he said. “But I was just thinking: your extraordinary power healed the wound it made in traversing the brain. If you can acquire control over the creation and manipulation of living matter, we might safely attempt the operation-depending on your gift to heal the section.”
“There’s no use to it.” Mr. Peabody sank wearily back into Brant’s easy chair. “I’ve tried, and I can’t make anything alive. The power was simply not granted me.”
“Nonsense,” Brant told him. “The difficulty, probably, is just that you don’t know enough biology. A little instruction in bio-chemistry, anatomy, and physiology ought to fix you up.”
“I’ll try,” Mr. Peabody agreed. “But first my family must be provided for.”
After the doctor had given him a lesson on the latest discoveries about atomic and molecular structure, he found himself able to create objects of the precious metals, with none of them turning out like the gold brick.
For two days he drove himself to exhaustion, making gold and platinum. He shaped the metal into watch cases, old-fashioned jewelry, dental work, and medals, so that it could be disposed of without arousing suspicion.
Brant took a handful of the trinkets to a dealer in old gold. He returned with five hundred dollars, and the assurance that the entire lot, gradually marketed, would net several thousand.
Mr. Peabody felt ill with the pain and fatigue of his creative efforts, and he was still distressed with a fear of the law. He learned from the newspapers that the police were watching his house, and he dared not even telephone his daughter Beth.
“They all think I’m insane, even Beth does,” he told Brant. “Probably I’ll never see any of them again. I want you to keep the money, and give it to them after I am gone.”
“Nonsense,” the young doctor said. “When you get a little more control over your gift, you will be able to fix everything up.”
But even Brant had to admit that Mr. Peabody’s increasing illness threatened to cut off the research before they had reached success.
Unkempt and hollow-eyed, muttering about “energy-conversion” and “entropy-reverse,” and “telurgic psi capacity,” Brant sat up night after night while Mr. Peabody slept, plowing through heavy tomes on relativity and atomic physics and parapsychology trying to discover a sane explanation of the gift.
“I believe that roaring you say you hear,” he told Mr. Peabody, “is nothing less than a sense of the free radiant energy of cosmic space. The radioactive stone has somehow enabled your brain—perhaps by stimulation of the psychophysical faculty that is rudimentary in all of us—has enabled you to concentrate and convert that diffuse energy into material atoms.”
Mr. Peabody shook his fevered, throbbing head.
“What good is your theory to me?” Despair moved him to a bitter recital of his case.
“I can work miracles, but what good has the power done me? It has driven me from my family. It has made me a fugitive from justice. It has turned me into a sort of guinea pig, for your experiments. It is nothing but a headache—a real one, I mean. And it’s going to kill me, in the end.”
“Not,” Brant assured him, “if you can learn to create living matter.”
Not very hopefully, for the pain and weakness that accompanied his miraculous efforts were increasing day by day. Mr. Peabody followed Brant’s lectures in anatomy and physiology. He materialized blobs of protoplasm and simple cells and bits of tissue.
The doctor evidently had grandiose ideas of a miraculous human being. He set Mr. Peabody to studying and creating human limbs and organs. After a few days, the bathtub was filled with a strange lot of miraculous debris, swimming in a preservative solution.
Then Mr. Peabody rebelled.
“I’m getting too weak, doctor,” he insisted faintly. “My power is somehow—going. Sometimes it seems that things are going to flicker out again, instead of getting real. I know I can’t make anything as large as a human being.”
“Well, make something small,” Brant told him. “Remember, if you give up, you are giving up your life.”
And presently, with a manual of marine biology on his knees, Mr. Peabody was forming small miraculous goldfish in the bowl he had made on the night of his arrival. They were gleaming, perfect—except that they always floated to the top of the water, dead.
Brant had gone out. Mr. Peabody was alone, before the bowl, when Beth slipped silently into the apartment. She looked pale and distressed.
“Dad!” she cried
anxiously. “How are you?” She came to him, and took his trembling hands. “Rex warned me on the phone not to come: he was afraid the police would follow me. But I don’t think they saw me. And I had to come, Dad. I was so worried. But how are you?”
“I think I’ll be all right,” Mr. Peabody lied stoutly, and tried to conceal the tremor in his voice. “I’m glad to see you, dear. Tell me about your mother and Bill.”
“They’re all right. But Dad, you look so ill!”
“Here, I’ve something for you.” Mr. Peabody took the five hundred dollars out of his wallet, and put it in her hands. “There will be more, after—later.”
“But, Dad-”
“Don’t worry, dear, it isn’t counterfeit.”
“It isn’t that.” Her voice was distressed. “Rex has tried to tell me about these miracles. I don’t understand them, Dad; I don’t know what to believe. But I do know we don’t want the money you make with them. None of us.”
Mr. Peabody tried to cover his hurt.
“But my dear,” he asked, “how are you going to live?” “I’m going to work, next week,” she said. “I’m going to be a reception clerk for a dentist—until Rex has an office of his own. And Mom is going to take two boarders, in the spare room.”
“But,” said Mr. Peabody, “there is William.”
“Bill already has a job,” Beth informed him. “You know the fellow he ran into? Well, the man has a garage. He let Bill go to work for him. Bill gets fifteen a week, and pays back six for the accident. Bill’s doing all right.”
The way she looked when she said it made it clear to Mr. Peabody that there had been a guiding spirit in his family’s remarkable reformation—and that Beth had had a lot to do with it. Mr. Peabody smiled at her gratefully to show that he understood, but he said nothing.
She refused to watch him demonstrate his gift.
“No, Dad.” She moved back almost in horror from the little bowl with the lifeless goldfish floating in it. “I don’t like magic, and I don’t believe in something for nothing. There is always a catch to it.”
She came and took his hand again, earnestly.
“Dad,” she begged softly, “why don’t you give up this gift? Whatever it is. Why don’t you explain everything to the police and your boss, and try to get your old job back?”
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