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

by David Henry Keller

  The third floor front held the mystery of the house. He was a man with a steady income, and no occupation. John Jones was his New York name. Every two weeks he received a letter with a check. He was clean, bald, and old. He spent a little of his income for food, more for clothes, and the rest in the cheap dance halls of New York. He danced one third of the dances and rested the other two thirds, and never gave a hostess more than one ticket. He hoped that some night he would find the woman he was looking for. Since he was hunting one with the intelligence of Minerva, the body of Venus, and the kindness of the Mother Mary, his quest was doomed to failure. So he danced, and twiddled his thumbs, and wished that his heart muscle and his moral code would allow him to spend ten dollars on one woman instead of ten cents each on many. He had danced with Valencia Moore, but did not know that she lived on the floor above him.

  Jones bought his newspapers from Harry Wild, and occasionally danced with Valencia Moore. Wild smiled on the other three, and dreamed of loving Sally. Valencia paid no attention to any one of them; they simply did not enter her plan of life. Sally kept things clean for all of them, and fantasied a life free from dirt and asthma.

  Singly they might have been interesting to the sociologist; as a quartette, they made a harmonic failure. From the animal viewpoint, they shared certain biological urges. They slept, ate, and moved, as necessity demanded. Spiritually, there was no contact. Even had Sally known of the letters the newsboy was writing to her, she would have reacted with a confused negativism. That any man should love her was a thought so impossible that it never entered her consciousness.

  These four were failures, and all of them through no fault of their own. Heredity, environment, disease, the inhibitions of a false standard of morality, had twisted and warped them mentally, spiritually, and physically, till they were caught in a web of fate from which there was no escape.

  The metropolis could have furnished a hundred thousand foursomes as badly assorted, unharmonic failures, as these. In fact, there was no reason why they should have been selected as the experimental basis for a scientific study that was destined to change in every way the life of the human race. There were thirty others living in that boarding house, any four of whom might have served equally well. But the scientist selected these four. His decision was not exactly a haphazard one. He wanted a beautiful woman who was bad; a good woman, sick and soulless; a gentleman whose body was shattered; and an old man who was trying to be young.

  The scientist found what he wanted in these four failures.

  THE INITIAL EXPERIMENT

  HARRY ACKERMAN had something, and he was not sure what to do with it. For five years, he had used a serum on the lower mammalia, had checked, rechecked, and double checked his results, and continued to doubt his own observation. No matter what animal he used for his experiment, the results were the same.

  His results were so uniform, the method so simple, the final analysis so weird and unusual, that he simply could not believe what he saw. It was impossible to confide in any of his brother scientists; they would have considered him insane. He refused either to be laughed at or to spend the rest of his life behind the walls of a hospital for psychotics. In addition to this, he wanted to have the sole credit for his discovery, and this selfishness made him become an antisocial hermit. It was not a question of selling his brainchild; he neither needed nor wanted money, but he did want recognition leading to fame.

  Now at the end of five years, he was ready to begin human experimentation. That, after all, was to be the crowning effort of his years of work. He felt that he knew what he could do with the body, but when it came to the mind, he was not so sure. It was difficult to properly imagine the results; it was more nearly impossible to determine the size or the number of the doses. It was one thing to feed the panacea to crickets or mice, and another to inject it into the veins of a man. Too little would be tantalizing, too much, dangerous. He could not keep his subjects in cages as he did the little monkeys.

  Yet he realized that, sooner or later, he had to face the issue. It would not take him more than one minute to inject five cubic centimeters into a human vein. Once that was done, all he would have to do was to wait for the results. If he failed— why, other men had failed before; if he succeeded, life would be changed; not just one life, but the life of the Genus Homo.

  For the present, the last thing he wanted was newspaper publicity. A cleverly worded advertisement would have given him experimental material by the hundred, but it would also have brought unpleasant notoriety. For the present, he had to work in secret. That is why he came to New York, where a man can be lost quicker and more completely than he can in the Sahara Desert.

  At times, he had contemplated giving himself an injection of the serum. That would have been the easiest way and the simplest. But he was not sure of the results, and he could not face the thoughts of an accident—not on his own account, but for the sake of his son. The last ten years of his life had been spent for the good of the boy. Otherwise he would not have had the courage or the vision to go on with the work. If he took the serum and died, as some of the animals had died in the early years of his study, there would be no one left to love the little fellow, and though he rarely saw him, he felt that love was very essential for the welfare of Harry Ackerman Jr.

  There was no special method in his selection of a boarding house when he came to New York. He simply picked out a cheap one in a poor neighborhood, paid a month's rent in advance, and started to become acquainted with his fellow boarders. From those he met he selected the four failures; and, much to their surprise, asked them to spend a Saturday evening with him. The hard part of the programme was persuading them to accept his invitation. Each required a different approach, and, with the exception of Harry Wild, none of them would have come had he known the others were to be there.

  Sally came because the landlady ordered her to be nice to a star boarder. John Jones came because it was the first time anyone had been kind to him in New York without charging him for it. Valencia saw a chance to do some fancy gold digging; and besides, a twisted ankle kept her from the dance hall. But Harry Wild had found a man who knew more about mice than he did, and that was enough for him.

  Of the five at the party, only the scientist was at his ease. Sally was breathing hard, and wondering how soon she would become a dope-fiend. Adrenalin did not help her much nowadays, but morphine made the hell of breathless life a heaven of comfort in fifteen minutes. Wild kept thinking of those love letters never sent, and wondering if Sally was looking at the "Roger's Group" or at his twisted spine. The dancing temptation could not understand why the guy had asked the rest of the crowd, when she could have given him seventy minutes of pleasure for every hour he was willing to pay for. The old man could not keep his eyes off her curves, but he knew that his myocardium could not stand the strain. Besides, her English was impossible.

  Ackerman turned on the radio, passed the candy, cake, and cigarettes, and tried to be the perfect host. Socially he was a failure. The party was nothing more nor less than five incompatibles meeting in a test tube. He shut off the radio just as the "Quarrelsome Quartet" gave place to the "Malted Brew" advertising.

  "I want to talk to you people," he began, "and I am going to try to be as brief and as plain as I can. There is a serum I have been working on for some time, a medicine, you understand. In some ways I am a physician, and I have tried to discover something that would help people get well. It is something new, and I am not sure how much good it will do, but I am sure that it will not hurt the people I give it to. I am not in regular practice and so I cannot give it to my patients. That is why I have asked you here tonight. I believe that it will help Miss Sally Fanning's asthma, improve Mr. Jones' heart trouble, and make a different man out of my friend Harry Wild."

  "What do I get it for, Old Nut?" asked Valencia Moore.

  "You get it for anaemia of your pocketbook. In other words, it means just one hundred dollars to you to take one dose."

&nbs
p; "Attaboy," she laughed. "Now you are talking my language. For a hundred bucks I would take a dose of any poison. Give it to me quick."

  Sally Fanning, breathing harder than usual, looked at the dancing fool and then at the stranger, and then she gasped:

  "I do not understand you, Mr. Ackerman. Do you really mean that you believe that you can cure my asthma? And if you can, will the same medicine help Mr, Jones? Perhaps it will, but what has that to do with Miss. Moore? Or Mr. Wild? They are not sick."

  "It is hard to explain to you, Miss Fanning," answered the scientist, and there was a tone of patient kindness in his voice. "This serum I am going to use is a most peculiar one. . It has, or at least I think it has, many different kinds of actions. There are different kinds of sicknesses, you know, and I hope that all of you will be benefited by the injection. I am not promising anything definite, but I honestly feel that it will help everyone of you, and I am sure it will not hurt you. When I told Miss Moore I would give her a hundred dollars, I really should have said that I am going to give each of you that amount, because you are all helping me in a study that is very important to my future. If you are ready, I will begin, perhaps first on Mr. Wild. He knows me better and trusts me more than the rest of you. Will you take off your coat and roll up your sleeve on the right side, Mr. Wild? There, that will do very well. Now you can all watch me. First the tourniquet, then the needle goes into the vein, and I slowly inject the serum. It really does not hurt at all. Who will be the next one?"

  "I will," announced Valencia, "but first give me my hundred."

  THE FIRST RESULTS

  GOOD MORNING, Miss Fanning. How is the asthma?" Sally, the scrub, looked up from the brown stone steps she was cleaning. Ackerman was smiling down at her.

  "Your medicine helped me," she answered simply. "All my life I have taken Green Mountain Asthma Cure, and lately adrenalin, and even morphine, and everything else that anyone advised. They all helped for a while and then I was as bad off as ever. Of course, having to work for a living made it hard for me. Perhaps your medicine is the same as the rest, good today and no good tomorrow; but it certainly helped me to sleep, and this morning I feel strong and rested. If I felt this way all the time, I might amount to something, have courage to try to do something different; might even go to night school and get an education. I read in the paper once, that even if a woman was ugly, it helped if she knew something."

  "But you are not ugly."

  She laughed bitterly.

  "You must be blind. Look at my neck! And my hands, my hair. Dead, every bit of me. Work all day to earn an honest meal and a decent bed, and then work all night for the right to keep alive, every breath a battle. How could a woman be anything but ugly?"

  "But you are going to be better. Suppose I told you that in a little while you would be well—that your body would grow beautiful, your hair radiant? How would you like to sing as you work—to have people tell you your voice was lovely, your soul a thing of charm? What would you do then, Sally Fanning?"

  "I would cry, Mr. Ackerman. I would be so happy—I, who have never been happy—that I would cry for the joy of it. I would brush my hair till it came alive, and wash myself, and put on clean clothes, and go and sit in the park, in the sunshine, and just breathe deep. It is a terrible thing to fight for every breath, as I have all my life. I used to dream of being a bird, flying high in the sky, and yet having enough air left in me to sing; but always would come the waking and the asthma."

  "Perhaps the dream will come true," replied the scientist. "Have you seen my friend, Harry Wild, this morning?"

  "I always see him in the morning. We always see each other early at dawn. We are the first up and out, he to sell his papers, and I to do my cleaning."

  "How did he feel?"

  "He was smiling."

  "But he always smiles."

  "Yes, that he does. But this morning he said he felt better. You know he has trouble with his back— never speaks much about it, but the pain is there, where the hump is. This morning he said it was gone. Of course, he meant the pain. There is nothing can untwist the body of him. I guess he smiles to help forget his legs and his back."

  "I like him," said Ackerman, quietly. "He is kind to the mice."

  "They come to him," explained Sally. "Where-ever he is, the mice gather. They used to be all over the house, and now they all live in his room. Of course, he feeds them, but there is something more than that."

  "Do you suppose they know he loves them?" asked Ackerman.

  The girl frowned:

  "If I don't get to work on these steps, they will never be cleaned. But I will say this about Mr. Wild. He is a nice young man, as nice a young man as I ever cleaned after, and there would be more than mice loving him if his back was straight and his legs even. But he was born that way and cannot help it, any more than I can my having asthma."

  "But suppose that would all be corrected? I mean, suppose he would get well and be like other men?"

  "Suppose you go and ask him? His stand is just around the corner. Suppose you stop talking to me about the moon, and heaven, and singing birds that never waken? You know, and I know, that just as he is now, so he will be till they place pennies on his eyes."

  "I am not so sure of that," retorted the scientist. "At least I will go and buy a morning paper from the lad."

  Harry Wild was singing as he handed the lurid sheets to his regular customers.

  "Happy?" asked Ackerman.

  "You said it! No pain. Slept all night and woke as fine as could be. Turned on the radio and took my exercises. One—two—three—four! Great stuff. Old twenty-three used to be hard to do, but this morning everything was easy."

  He lowered his voice:

  "Did you see Sally this morning?"

  "I did, and she was breathing with the ease of an opera singer. She is a nice girl, Harry, only she lets herself be discouraged."

  "It would be fine if things were different, Mr. Ackerman. Just suppose that she didn't have asthma, and suppose I was like other men—big and strong, and easy walking. Just suppose that! Say, that would be great stuff, wouldn't it?"

  "You are going to be, Harry. First the pain will leave you, and then your short leg will get longer, and your back straight, and even the mice won't know you any more."

  "Quit your kidding. Still, it sounds nice. Think there is a chance that the girl will get over her asthma?"

  Ackerman took a deep breath:

  "You are going to get well," he whispered. "All four of you. Strong, and well, and sane, and good. You are going to be the first of a new race. It is too soon for me to be sure, and too wonderful for me to see clearly; but if that medicine works, Harry, you will soon be able to love something else than just mice."

  "Quit your kidding," blushed the boy. "But it would be nice, Mr. Ackerman, it would be nice."

  In the next twenty-four hours, the inventor saw and talked to the other two of his experiments. He visited John Jones in his room, and found a puzzled man who did not wait to be questioned.

  "Two years ago," he began, "the doctors told me I might die at any moment, so I came to New York. They said that I would die on my feet, and I made up my mind that I would learn to dance, and die with a pretty girl in my arms. After you gave me the serum, I went to sleep. It was the first night I missed going to a jitney dance hall. This morning things look different. I know now that I am not going to die that way. In fact, I feel so well that I am not sure I am ever going to die."

  "That is an interesting statement," said Ackerman. "Suppose you kept on living, and growing stronger and younger? What would you do? How would you pass your time?"

  "I would write. All my life I have wanted to write. There is nothing as fine as putting a piece of white paper in a machine and pounding out your thoughts on it. But for years I was too busy; had to make a living; lots of people depended on me for the necessities of life. I had lots of things to write about, but never any time, and when I did have the time, the strength was lacking.
Then my heart went bad after influenza. The doctors tried to be kind and lied to me at first. They called it post-influenza asthenia. Later they told me the truth."

  "So you tried to kill yourself dancing?"

  "No. I tried to die while dancing. But it was not the dancing I was after. I wanted love. And no one is going to love an old broken man. So I took the best substitute. But not one of them gave me rest. Did you ever hear the girls talk in a dance hall, Mr. Ackerman? It is just too bad. I think everyone of them is feebleminded. And all they are after is a man's money. If a skeleton was worth a million, they would pretend to get hot, rubbing the wire that held his bones together. Just one night was enough for me to find that out. I told my first partner that I was enough of a healthy Vulgarian to enjoy holding a pretty woman in my arms. For ten minutes they fought with each other for the next dance. I finally asked one of them what they were excited about, and she said that the first girl had spread the news that I was a wealthy Bulgarian. Of course they had never heard of the Vulgate Bible."

  "What do you think of Miss Moore?"

  "She is as pretty as can be, and as soiled as man can make her. If she were disinfected and educated, and had the evil burned out of her, and I were young, I think I could love her and be happy."

  "Have you seen her this morning?"

  "Yes."

  "How is she feeling?"

  "Said her ankle was ok. She must be worried; she forgot to paint her face. She does not know it, but she is prettier without her makeup."