by Earl
“I’ll be needing these things, Mary.”
“Yes, Master George,” said Mary. Mary knew just what to do with it: put it in an envelope, address it to the firm he bought all his materials from, and mail it. Master George had an account with them. After a few flicks at the bottles at suspected areas of invisible dust, she tucked the duster under her arm and walked to the door.
“Oh, Mary,” called Master George, halting her as she was about to leave, “my notebook; how is it that it’s here on the table? I remember leaving it on the desk. Now, that’s the second time something like that has happened. Mary, I’ve warned you, haven’t I, never to touch . . . .”
“Why, Master George,” broke in Mary aggrieved, “by all the saints above—beggin’ your pardon for the oath—I’ve never touched it!”
Master George looked at her for a moment in silence and then said, “All right, Mary. Beg your pardon for being hasty, must be my imagination.”
Mary left the room without a word, somewhat hurt that Master George should have so little faith in her. Ever since he had caught her looking through the notebook three years before, and severely chided her in one of his rare moments of anger, she had shunned the black book like poison. The only explanation Mary had in her mind—she could never say it to his face—was that the intense work was affecting Master George a wee bit and making him suffer from memory relapse or distortion.
Meanwhile George Lockhart picked up the notebook, toyed with it a moment, trying to remember definitely whether he had left it on the desk or the table, and finally gave it up as he mumbled: “Don’t know. Thought I left it on the desk. Must be wrong. Nobody ever in here, except Mary, and I’m sure she wouldn’t . . . .”
He broke off as the problems of the day flooded into his mind. With the vigor of absorbing fascination in his work to inspire him, Lockhart began the day’s tasks. George Lockhart and his work were one, inseparable and indivisible. A bachelor all his life, he was married to his experimenting. He paused now and then to stand by the open window and breathe in large lungfulls of the fresh, spring air. These refreshed him greatly for the laboratory was generally filled with a variety of fumes, despite the steady activity of the swirling fan outlet above the window. In a short time he had the various units going, distilling here, crystallizing there, heating there, and boiling here. The big electric oven came in for its share of use. The vacuum pump was called to duty at times. The distillery usually delivered its stream of pure water all day long. He sat at the costly analytical balance at times, handling its delicate controls with practiced familiarity. And so the day went. The black notebook was periodically referred to and sometimes written in.
GEORGE LOCKHART was on the eve of a great discovery. Five years of painstaking work had finally brought him within sight of the long-awaited goal. This very day he expected results. Of course, several times before he had expected results, only to be bitterly disappointed; but today he felt closer than ever to the haven of success. Lockhart was one of those rare, very rare, human beings who experiment in virgin fields of research, with not a thought of gain, but only with the yearning for that which is new, unthought of. In other words, he was a true scientist. His special field was chemistry.
He had eaten his dinner with Mary, abstracted and half-heartedly. Mary, familiar with Master George and his habits, knew the value of silence at times like this, and withheld her usual small-talk with which she entertained him at mealtimes. But when suppertime came around, Master George was in a seventh heaven of discovery, and Mary placed the cold sandwiches on his bench and left, wondering what had gotten him so unusually excited. About 8:00 Lockhart stopped all operations except the big, quiet fan, and concentrated his faculties on the distilling apparatus on the table.
In a small distilling flask, clamped on a ringstand, and fitted with an allglass condenser, reposed a colorless liquid. With a small micro-burner Lockhart heated the material with infinite caution. Any accident would mean days of concentrated labor lost. The whole set-up was connected with a vacuum pump and manometer for distillation under reduced pressure. With his eyes constantly shifting from the thermomenter to the manometer, to the burner, he stood for an hour till the readings were correct.
Then the liquid began to distill. Periodically it would “bump” in the provoking way that liquids under reduced pressure do at times, and he would snap away the burner. But the Claissen neck of the flask trapped the splashing liquid so that it could not contaminate the distillate. In another hour he had distilled all of the liquid he could use, and carefully opened the air valve. Lockhart had become the acme of caution. It took several minutes to let in the air; he had been distilling at extremely low pressures. Finally he nervously twisted the flask holding the precious distillate off from its shellacked connection and held it up to the light. It was a clear, colorless fluid.
Lockhart stood there a moment in an attitude of prayer. He fervently prayed to a kind fate to grant that this liquid held the possibilities of the substance he was striving to produce. With a small pipette he measured off a small portion, added to it a standard amount of water and potassium permanganate as an oxidizing agent, and titrated the whole for an acid value.
“Still too dilute,” he spoke aloud. Transferring the original distillate to a crystallizing dish, he placed it in the oven, set the temperature at 102 degrees centrigrade and closed the door.
Breathing a sigh of relief that, so far, all had gone without a hitch, he sat at his desk and opened the black book. Rapidly he turned the pages toward the middle. Then he read over again the note entered five years before when he had first conceived the idea of his present research. In his careful, small script was recorded the following:
“I commit myself, being independent and having the means, to the project of research into that field of organic chemistry which has to do with light-sensitive bodies, with the possibility in mind of actually synthesizing and isolating them. These light-sensitive bodies, which exist in the eyes of all seeing creatures, must be very complicated in structure and unstable in character, because of the extreme range of the eye and its remarkable adaptability. For instance, although sunlight is one half million times stronger than moonlight, one can see nearly as well in either light. When a person enters a dark room from bright sunlight, at first he sees nothing. Then gradually his sight clears and soon the formerly pitch-black room seems to him much more brightly lighted. This can be explained only by the supposition of a series of closely related compounds existing in the retina of the eyeball, which are manufactured almost instantaneously from a parent compound by the eyes, depending on the conditions. Each of these related compounds must be very easily derivable from the parent substance, for the eye recovers very quickly from extreme conditions, and all of them must be easily disruptible, so that the retina can clear away the bodies instantly and replace them with the others necessary under the new conditions.
“There is some reason to believe that these bodies are related to the cyanines, coloring matter of the flowers. I hereby devote my time and effort to attempt the isolation of the light-sensitive bodies, which, without a doubt, will be possessed of remarkable and valuable properties.”
After reading this introduction to his work, Lockhart slowly turned the pages of the notebook. Leaf after leaf was covered with the formulae and data of the attempt to get at these elusive, almost mythical, light-sensitive compounds of the eye. Whole sections were sometimes marked “blind alley” indicating a particular tine of research that had led him nowhere. But gradually he had come upon small successes. He struck a series of compounds which were affected by light, but so slowly that he realized they were not what he wanted. The light-sensitive bodies of the eye would have to react instantaneously to light, as the eye does. Working with these slow-acting compounds he built them up in hundreds of different ways, confident that some one of them would be “trigger-touch” to light. Once he got a solution that almost instantly turned different colors in streaks and bands when he let direct
sunlight fall on it, but this also became only a stepping stone as he searched for the compounds affected by ALL light, no matter how faint.
And now Lockhart was full of hope. Just a few days before he had hydrolyzed a white crystalline substance, one of his complicated triplecyanines, and saw it flash into all the colors of the rainbow in the ordinary light of his laboratory. He had danced around in joy that day, and surprised Mary by his exuberance. But he realized there was the task of isolating the end-product from impurities.
TONIGHT, as he arose from the desk and stepped to the oven which held such golden hope, he expected to culminate his five years of ceaseless labor with victory. There was just one more step in the process.
He opened the oven after shutting off the current, took out the hot beaker with a clamp, and again titrated a small portion to see how dilute it was. Satisfied with the result, he placed the still-hot beaker on an asbestos pad. His eyes glistened as he stood for a moment rubbing his hands and envisioning the stir his announcement of the discovery would make among scientific circles; especially back in the government labs, where his old fellow-chemists still worked in the old routine he hated so much. Coming back to earth again, he went into the small stock room for a moment and returned with a light-projector.
He set it up pointing at a cleared space on the bench and switched it on. A faint violet beam bathed the beaker. With buoyant spirits he pulled down the shades and closed the shutters of the two windows. Beside the beaker he placed a flask half filled with a yellowish solution, a small pipette, a small graduate, and a rack of clean test tubes. Then he switched out the lights.
At first he could make out nothing except a faint violet glow. Then, as his eyes recovered, the area lighted by the violet lamp became fairly-well defined. Lockhart used the violet light for the final stages of the experiments, because it is the light to which the human eye is least sensitive. He reasoned that if he got the compound, the violet light in which he worked would act so slowly on it that he would have a chance to store it away in the dark before it was totally affected, whereas any other light would have affected his compounds as fast as they were formed.
In the eerie, wavering violet light, in which the eye played such fantastic tricks as making the beakers dance and the pipette ripple like an eel, he carefully measured out a portion of the distilled solution into a test tube, added a pipette-full of the yellow solution, and put the tube in another rack behind the lamp in total darkness. In the second test tube he put a greater proportion of the yellow solution than in the first. In the third went a still greater proportion of the yellow solution, etc., till six tubes were filled.
Lockhart was breathing hard now, his heart beat like a trip-hammer. With six tubes filled and placed in the dark, he swung the beam of the lamp around in a quarter circle till it rested on the form of a lantern-slide projector. He fitted a slide into the slot on which was a series of seven bands of seven colors, which looked black in the violet light. Then in the dark behind the lamp he dipped into each test tube a strip of filter paper and pinned each to the side of a cardboard box so that they hung free.
Now he had to wait till they dried before the final test which would tell him whether success was his or whether he would again mark in the notebook—“blind alley.” As he nervously drummed his fingers on the wall against which he leaned, his eyes encountered the door which was lighted by a few faint, beams of violet. Startled, he saw it was open just a little way. There was no light coming from the hallway, because that was always dark at this time of night. With a puzzled frown he closed it. On a sudden impulse he swung it open and peered down the dark hallway. His eyes, used to the darkness for so long, outlined clearly the other end where stairs led upstairs to his room, to Mary’s room, and to the new boarder’s room.
Suddenly Lockhart caught his breath . . . . the new boarder! He had forgotten all about him, when he chided Mary in the morning about the notebook being out of place. It could just as well have been the new boarder rather than honest, good-hearted Mary! Either some sneaky urge of curiosity or of evil intent might conceivably prompt a man to steal into the laboratory in the dead of the night and look through the notebook; and maybe, Lockhart thought, the opened door could be attributed to him also. He could easily escape observation in the dark hallway.
The chemist went back to his work strangely troubled. The strips of paper weren’t quite dry and he leaned against the wall, filled with conflicting thoughts. He hadn’t seen the new boarder yet. Mary had explained that she had taken him, not because she needed the money or wanted the extra work, but because he was so courteous and said her reputation as a good cook had drawn him to her place. Now was that just a blind for some scheme, some plot? . . . if the man were anything of a chemist, a thorough reading of the latter half of the black book would reveal the vast importance of the formulae in there. And he, Lockhart, like a fool had left his laboratory unlocked, had left his notebook with priceless data on the beneh without a thought, so confident that he was safe from observation. As he again touched the papers and found them dry, he made the mental reservation to lock the desk and the door from now on.
He placed the first strip of paper from test tube number one in a wire holder fifteen inches from the end of the projector and put over the whole thing the metal cover with felt flanges that completely trapped the light. Only the strip of paper would be lighted by the infinitesimal flash from the globe back of the seven-colored slide.
With his hand on the mercury switch, he paused a moment to draw a deep breath. This was the crucial test, the possibility of a discovery of vast importance, or another disappointment. He twisted the tube; the mercury, sliding from one end to the other, connected the circuit for a fleeting instant while it ran past the bare ends of two wires, and reposed at the other end of the tube.
With trembling hands Lockhart lifted away the cover, snatched the piece of paper from the holder and held it in the full glow of the violet lamp.
“It works! Good Lord . . . . it works!” he cried in uncontrollable ecstasy.
A strip of black crossed the paper showing the presence of one of the colors from the projector, which one Lockhart didn’t know.
Rapidly he subjected the other five strips to the same process. Each came out with a strip of black in a different position. He placed all the six strips in a tray of dilute acid to remove the remaining compound, like using the “fixing” bath in photography. No developer would be necessary for these remarkable compounds; they were sufficiently sensitive to go to the end of the process at once without stimulation. After carefully putting the remaining part of the unhydrolyzed solution in the oven to keep it away from light, he switched on the electric lights.
Partially blinded, he waited for his eyes to adjust themselves, wondering how long it would take to explain all the mysteries of eyesight with his discovery, and then looked at the strips of paper. Each in turn had a band of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and faint purple, the latter hardly distinguishable. Feverishly he fingered them again and again, mumbling to himself in joy and satisfaction. It was the greatest moment in George Lockhart’s life, a life devoted to the search for truth. Perhaps nothing else in the world can be sweeter or bring more true happiness than the accomplishment of something no one else has done before. And George Lockhart walked on clouds, up and down the room, for an hour, his mind a mirror of sublime happiness.
With a mighty, unshakable calm, such as comes at moments like this, he seated himself at the desk and entered in the black book the final results of his research of five years’ duration. Naturally there was much yet to be done, formulae to check, refinement of processes, tabulation of results, recording of variations, etc., but that would all be just an enlargement of this night’s paramount result.
Finished with the notebook, he looked at the time. It was 4:00 in the morning. He must get to bed and awaken refreshed for the important work of classifying the many different variations of the parent substance to find out how each reacted to w
hite light. He placed the notebook in the drawer and left the laboratory, forgetting both to lock the desk and lock the door, as he had resolved to do. The reaction to the excitement of the night came as he was undressing. His trembling hands could hardly pull his shoes off. When he crawled into bed, he shook as if with the ague. But . . . . he was the happiest man on earth!
CHAPTER II
DISASTER
MARY FLETCHER read the note that had been pushed between the sill and the bottom of the door.
“Stayed up till 4:30 and wants to sleep till noon . . . . poor dear . . . . he’ll be a-killin’ himself with his work, whatever he be a-tryin’ to do,” commented Mary to herself. This was nothing new to her; he had done that before, and she always made a tastier lunch for him at such times. Why he did such unreasonable things Mary could never understand. He had all the time in the world to do that messing around in the daytime; why he should stay up nights . . . . Mary shook her head. It was something she could never fathom.
And then the new boarder, he was another queer man. He insisted on having breakfast at 9:00, dinner at 2:00, and supper at 8:00, although she would much rather have had the two men eating together and save her some extra work. The new man was just as close-lipped, in fact more so, than Master George. She couldn’t find out, contrive as she might, where he came from or how he earned a living. Really, Mary felt she had had enough of mysterious men, and would refuse taking another unless he came right out and told her those things she felt she ought to know . . . . yes, sir . . . . they would have to tell how they earned their money and what relatives they had and so on. When she had mentioned the subject of Master George and his laboratory, the new man had seemed to cough and then changed the subject abruptly. He evaded her attempt to suggest a formal introduction between them, and mumbled something about not intending to stay long, so it wouldn’t be necessary.
