Life Everlasting and Other Tales of Science, Fantasy, and Horror

by David Henry Keller

  "Do you realize what it means to the women of America to face those childless years, those barren centuries of existence?"

  "Perhaps. As much as a lone man can realize a woman's feelings. But you women have everything else; health, happiness, ease, the love of your husbands, every possible comfort. You have a life that is incomparably easier than the old life ever could be. It looks as though you should be happy."

  "Is there anything you can do to us that will enable us to have families?"

  "Perhaps. There again I am not sure. But the principle of opposites is a very strong one in nature. We have light and darkness, strength and weakness, men and women, heat and cold. We used to have laughter and tears, happiness and sorrow, health and sickness, sweet and sour, pure living and sin. And we have serums and antiserums. After I discovered the Biddle Serum, I started to look for the antidote, or antiserum. I did not want to use it, but I wanted to see if there was such a thing."

  "Did you find it?"

  "I think so. At least, this is what I did. I found a mouse with cancer, and gave the serum. The cancer disappeared, and the mouse lived on; far past the usual length of life for a mouse. I became rather fond of her, and I guess she liked me a little. But she never had any babies. Two months ago, I gave her an injection of the antiserum. She produced a little family, raised them to independence, started to grow the cancer, and died. In that case, the antiserum did all that could be expected of it."

  "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.

  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 Wi
ld 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, Biddle 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 BONELESS HORROR

  THE Emperor of Gobi sat proudly on his marble throne. Below him, on the Steps of the First Magnitude, sat the Seven Wise Men, on whom the Emperor depended for the welfare of his realm, and the continued power of his dynasty.

  And, on the other Steps of Magnitudes Two down to Seven, stood the nobles of the realm, all of them selected because of some brilliant achievement adding to the splendor of Gobi.

  One after the other, the Seven Wise Men read from parchment scrolls, the record of their departments for the past month, and the Emperor praised them for all they had done. Especially did he give credit to the Royal Mathematician, the Royal Engineer, and the Royal Geographer; for these three men, separately and in unison, read of the plans they had prepared for the destruction of the Land of Mo, that great kingdom of the south, which dared to dispute with Gobi the supremacy of the world.

  For the Emperor of Gobi had issued orders that Mo not only must be conquered, but also actually destroyed; and for months the three Wise Men in charge of the Departments of Mathematics, Engineering, and Geography had studied over the problem, and now they had a plan. It was a good plan; and, at the end of it, Mo would be no more.

  There was one flaw in the beauty of the plan, and that was the long time needed to accomplish it. Tunnels had to be dug under the sea, and under the great gulfs of water separating Mo from Gobi; and even though all of the slaves and all the machinery and great skill of Gobi—though all of these were put to work—still years would pass before the desired end would be accomplished.

  So the face of the Emperor darkened, for he was now passing his fifty-ninth birthday; and he knew that ere thirty more years faded away, he and his Seven Wise Men and all who had helped him make Gobi great would be worm food and dust in their golden coffins, or else so old that their greatest worry would be the dragging of broken bodies through another day. He thought back over all the great men who had served the kingdom in past ages, and he saw that about them all only one fact remained certain; and that was that they lived a while and then died.

  And thinking thus, his face grew hard and sad; and he chewed the end of his mustache in such a way as to make the Royal Barber tremble. Finally, he cried:

  "All of your plans are folly and your thoughts foolish vain, for who of us will be here to see this ending of our enemy thirty years from now? And what comfort if a few of us live on, yet lack the mental power to glory in our triumph? Give us youth! Take away from us the weight of the years gone by, and there would be satisfaction in the perfecting of your plans. Give me youth! Take from my shoulders the weight of years, from my head the whitened hair, from my face the little wrinkles—fateful handwriting of Time, the Conqueror—and then you can destroy Mo. Which of you Seven Wise Men can make a man young?"

  Silently, the Seven looked at each other, fiddling their fingers and toying nervously with their dragon rings, emblems of the immortality they believed in but lacked. The Emperor, too, had a ring like theirs, only his was carved from a single garnet, while theirs were just made of gold. The dragon swallowing his tail—the never ending, ever beginning symbol of fadeless youth—made the rings sacred to the Seven and to their Emperor.

  From his throne, the ruler commanded that seven of his slaves be brought in. These he had his Chief Executioner kill in seven different ways—by the silken cord, and decapitation, and the bleeding from the wrists, the pouring of molten lead in the ear, the golden needle stuck slowly past the eyeball, the placing of a drop of poison on the tongue, and, finally, the frightful death by command, wherein the mighty Ruler need but command a man to die, and the man dies from fear of being disobedient.

  And the seven dead bodies of the slaves lay stretched out on the floor of the palace; and the Emperor rose and whispered:

  "I can give death, but I cannot make myself live on till I see the end of Mo. Hear me, you Seven Wise Men! Am I ruler, or am I not?"

  The Seven bowed before him and assured him that he was indeed their Lord and King.

  "Then attend to what I say. Meet me in three months, and at that time tell me how to prolong my life ten-fold so I can glory in the conquest of this country I hate so much. Do this, or I shall kill you Seven Wise Men, and other men will take your place and wear the dragon rings. The manner of your deaths will not be easy like the deaths of these seven slaves, but you shall be weeks in the ending of your lives. All that time you shall have due cause to reflect over your lack of intellect, in that you could not make me live on for long enough to glory in the fall of Mo. You are all wise men, and you have worked well for the Land of Gobi, but all of your wisdom will not suffice, unless you give this immortality to me."

  They bowed their heads and withdrew from his presence, stepping aside so their silken robes should not tou
ch the dead bodies of those who had died to teach them how they could go on living.

  Other slaves came and removed the carrion, and the Nobles left the great hall. At the last, only the Emperor sat there. He rang a gong. At that summons, came the High Priest, a man who knew all the wisdom of the God; and what he did not know, he would not admit. The Emperor permitted the Priest to sit near him.

  "Tell me again, Norazus," the Emperor asked, "about the dragon whose ring I wear."

  "This dragon lives far to the north of Gobi," the High Priest began. "He lives perpetually with his tail in his mouth, thus never reaching either an ending or a beginning, but going in a circle, which is thus an emblem of eternity, a symbol of immemorial, immortal life. Yet is he nothing like everlasting, for every seventh year he lays seven eggs in the sands of the desert; and, of these seven, he selects one which he swallows, hatching it out in the heat of his stomach. When it ripens, the new dragon eats the old one and emerges from his inner gut; but in his body is the soul of the old dragon, and in his head the wisdom of the ages. Thus is the life of the dragon renewed every seven years by means of a new body; but the skin of the old dragon lies dried and bloodless on the ever-shifting sands."

  "A pretty tale, Norazus; but is it true?"

  The two men looked at each other. Then the priest whispered:

  "What if I showed you eggs of the dragon, some of the six he discards and leaves to turn to stone in the sand?"

  "Eggs or stone, what boots it? How can you tell the dragon egg from the giant awk, or the dodo, or other birds my wise men prate of?"

  "Some things must be taken on faith."

  "What is that? A bubble for children. We are wise. I wear this dragon ring because it is the emblem of power. My father and his before him wore this ring, but we must seek elsewhere for life everlasting. The dragon may know how to renew himself, but we cannot use his power."

  "Have you benefited from the daily blood of a new-born child?"

  "Not much. In fact, I fear that it has harmed my appetite. The meals are not as good as they were before I took this tonic. Several times I have belched, making necessary the death of my cook. No, Norazus, let us wait till the Seven Wise Men report on their method of prolonging life. Whatever they advise, I will share it with you and with them. But we will never learn the secret of the Dragon or of the Salamander or of the Phoenix, who buildeth a fire for a new life through the burning of the old body. Not in such forms must we seek added years. Yet I must live to see the ending of Mo."