Half-Past Eternity

Chapter Two Elixir of Death

Tomlinson lived in a rambling farmhouse. The lawn was overgrown with weeds and the fences sagged.

Sam Banth paid the man who had brought him out from Kingston. He walked up the drive carrying a small suitcase. He climbed the sagging porch steps and used the door knocker. After a long wait, just as he was about to try again, the door was yanked open. Sam, in one searching glance before he smiled, took in the straight tallness of her, the wood-smoke eyes which had sooted the lashes heavily, the ripe tautness across the front of the blue work shirt, the lorelei curve of flank which blue jeans couldn’t hide, the softness and petulance and discontent in the wide mouth. She was a big girl. A big restless unhappy girl with annoyance at him and the world showing plainly.

“Brushes?” she said. “Or chicken feed? Or maybe children’s encyclopedias.” Her voice was pleasantly deep, husky-harsh.

“None of those,” he said. “Dreams. I sell dreams to visions who come to doors.”

“Sell me one, brother. Mine haven’t been too good lately.”

“I’ve got a nice little item you might like. Acapulco, surf in the moonlight, dancing on the terrace, and a square-cut emerald the size of a walnut.”

Her manner changed. “We’re through playing now. What are you selling?”

“Are you Miss Tomlinson?”

“I was. Now I’m Mrs. Knight. But I’m not working at it.”

“I came to see your father.”

“Say hello to him for me. He’s been in the barn ever since I can remember. You can go around the house.” She started to slam the door. He put his foot in it.

“I don’t like that little trick,” she blazed. “Now what?”

“What do you want most in the world, Miss Tomlinson?”

“That’s a stupid question. Money. Enough to smother me.”

“What would you say if I told you that because I came here you’re going to have exactly that?”

“I would say you’ve got nails in your head, friend.”

He removed his foot. “You may now slam the door.” She did. He walked around the house, grinning.

The barn was a solid structure and appeared to be in far better shape than the house. A door had been cut into the large original door. He knocked.

The door opened. “Well?” said Dr. Tomlinson. “What is it? You disturbed me at a bad time. Are you selling something?”

“No. Mind if I come in?”

“You can stand right there and state your business.”

“You owe the federal government roughly fifty thousand dollars on the bet you collected last night, Dr. Tomlinson.”

Tomlinson gave a jump of surprise. “Goodness! I never thought — I never realized that— Oh dear, now I’ll have to do it all over again.”

“What you did to Kid Goth?” Tomlinson, in spite of his fussy and pedantic air, had a pair of keen blue eyes. He narrowed them. “Exactly what do you mean, young man?”

Sam Banth pushed by him and into the brightly lighted interior of the barn.

“Here! Yon can’t come in.”

Sam looked at the banked cages of experimental animals, at the tables of chemical apparatus, at the binocular microscope, at the shelves of texts and notebooks.

“Nice layout, Dr. Tomlinson.”

“I shall complain to your superiors. You have no right to force your way in here.”

Sam sighed, put his suitcase next to the microscope, pulled the chair away and turned it around. He sat down, crossed his legs, tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail and smiled gently up into the flushed face of Dr. Tomlinson.

“Independent research takes a lot of money.”

“Of course it does. But I don’t see how that—”

“Please, doctor. Let me hazard a series of guesses. Your funds are running low. You are at a critical and interesting stage in your experimentation. You have learned to apply new principles, apparently. The usual ways of getting funds are too slow. Maybe you’re so far off the beaten path no institution will give you a grant. Maybe they would if you showed them what progress you’ve made, but you’re not ready to do that yet. You contact Goth, manage in some way to give him a set of reflexes faster than any man ought to have, and then you bet all your funds and collect a small fortune. Then you were impractical enough to think you could come right back here, shut the door, and keep on with your work as if nothing had happened.”

Tomlinson’s shoulders sagged. He walked woodenly over to another chair and sat down listlessly. “I thought nobody would find out,” he said in a dulled voice. “I was careful that nobody would see Goth. I trained him so that he wouldn’t be — unusual.”

“You forgot that he might go and get himself drunk.”

Tomlinson looked up sharply. He compressed his lips. “I forgot to warn him about that!”

“You made a nice sum of money.”

“I’ll give you the tax, in cash. You figure it out for me, please.”

For a moment Sam was tempted. But that would be like burning down the house to cook the dinner.

“I’m not a tax man.”

“Then who are you?”

“Your new partner, doctor.”

“There’s no way you can force yourself on me, young man.”

“My name is Banth. Samuel Banth. We will now consider my possible courses of action. I could arrange for a detailed medical examination of Goth. I could get so much newspaper coverage that you’d never have a moment’s peace from now on. But I imagine that the way to make you unhappy the quickest would be to tell your daughter how much you made last night and how you made it.”

With each stated alternative Tomlinson’s gray head had sunk lower.

Sam laughed. “Come on, now. Cheer up.”

“How can I?” Tomlinson said angrily. “You’re intruding yourself on a most important work. I sense that you want to profit out of my — methods. My object, sir, is research, not profit.”

“You’re going about it in a funny way.”

“Are you competent to judge that?”

“How much land have you got here?”

“Twenty acres. Why?”

“You’ve been puttering around with these mice for so long that your plans are mouse size. I want to help you, not hinder you. First, can you do for any athlete what you did for Goth?”

“Yes, but—”

“All right. Listen. We’ll form two corporations. One will be called the Tomlinson Research Laboratories, Incorporated. That, for tax purposes, will be classed as a charitable educational institution. You will be the operating head of it. We’ll build some dream labs for you and we’ll staff them with bright young men from the best schools to handle the details of research. You’ll make as much progress that way in a week as you do now in six months. The other corporation will be called Champions, Incorporated. Half this property will become a training area. I’ll hold fifty percent of the stock in it. You and your daughter will hold the other fifty. No, I’ll hold forty-nine percent in both corporations. That gives you and your daughter control, you see.”

“But I don’t—”

“Simple. We contact a professional athlete. We guarantee, for the maximum percentage of his future gross that we can wangle, to make him the best in the world. We maintain a floating fund and bet heavily on him. If you can do for others what you did for Goth, we can make at the minimum ten million bucks.”

“The... the whole idea makes me dizzy, Banth. I don’t see how—”

“Let me handle all tax matters, business angles and so on. You just take care of the research angle. Our first job is to pay off Uncle Sam on what you made last night, incorporate, and put the rest of it into the new corporations. We’ll set ourselves a minimal salary to begin with and boost it as the money begins to come in.” Tomlinson was silent for a long time. He studied his folded hands.

“I must know that nothing will interfere with my work. It is important.”

“Maybe you could tell me in layman’s terms what the work is, Dr. Tomlinson. Then I could appreciate its importance.”

Eagerness crept into Tomlinson’s tone. “I began this line of research six years ago. As a pathologist the phenomenon of age has always fascinated me. I had done research in geriatrics, the study of old people, the study of how to help them physically. Take glandular secretions for example. We know that the flow of secretions from many organs diminishes in both quantity and quality as time passes. Once a duplicate of the flow from a young and healthy gland is injected into the aged patient there is often an almost miraculous increase in vitality. The endocrinologists have done a lot in that field. But basically it is superficial, as it does not get at the root cause of the slow degeneration of the glands and tissues and organs. It is a stopgap, the same way a salt-free diet is a stop-gap in treating — say — congestive heart failure. The books talk about the ravages of time, yet a single cell, according to all growth and regeneration theories, should be almost eternal. Say that there is a time stream. Must all of us be carried immutably along that stream? Do you know what entropy is?”

Banth shrugged. “The standard example. The gas in a divided container, and then remove the division and though each molecule moves independently, they will never regain, even for a fraction of a second, their original positions all at once on each side of the non-existent division.”

“In its broader sense it refers to the continual, supposedly unalterable progress from order to disorder. Thus we can call it an attribute of time, as we know it. Or a by-product of time. Thus my thinking began to be along the line of attempting to slow up that entropic progress in living tissue. I had no success. When you come up against a blank wall it is often good theory to try the exact opposite direction. Could entropy be speeded? I attacked that problem by an attempt to stimulate every gland and organ in a living organism to the same exact degree. I was clumsy at first. The interrelations are delicate. My laboratory animals died. Finally there was one experiment where there was quite a deviation from the control group. After the injection, what I term the master injection, the life span of the animals, which had the same hereditary and environmental factors, was decreased by one tenth. I performed the same experiment many times, keeping a frequency distribution on the life spans. The next step was pure accident. I was working with cats and by accident a tom from the injected group got into the control group cages. He killed two of the control group with apparent ease. I then began to test reaction time. Do you begin to see?”

Banth rubbed his heavy jaw with his fingertips. “Maybe I see. By increasing the rate of entropy, or by stimulating the organism or whatever you want to call it, you’ve shortened the life span, but telescoped all normal reactions into the reduced time period.”

“Exactly. Take the case of Goth. I selected him rather carefully. A boxer on the down-grade without any other skill or talent by which he could make a living. Inevitably a charity or institution case before long. I speeded him up at first in the ratio of a one tenth decrease in life span. The effect was to make him live sixty-six seconds in every sixty, thus speeding his reaction time by one tenth of a second. I rigged up a reaction time test and found that he was a shade below the norm. Thus the first tenth didn’t seem enough. I made it a fifth giving him two tenths of a second advantage. That brought him considerably above the norm and even above extreme cases that have been reported. The most amazing thing to me was the new impression of mental alertness that he gave after treatment, even though I knew that the myriad pinpoint concussions he had suffered had made him — ah—”

“Punchy.”

“Yes, that’s the word.”

“Suppose he was going to live eighty years before old age got him, doctor.”

“Now he’ll live to be seventy, and show, at seventy, an apparent age of eighty. Goth seemed to feel that it was a very good trade. He had not intended to die of old age anyway. He merely uses up six months of his life every five months.”

“How about his habits?”

“Habits? Oh, I see what you mean. He’ll get six hours’ sleep in five hours. There’ll be physiological phenomena— accelerated heartbeat, respiration and so on. And, unless there is a training period, the change will be too noticeable to intimates. I had to keep Goth here and coach him in how to walk, talk, eat and so on. I had to continually urge him to slow down, to make each gesture with a conscious slowness.”

“Doc, are we in business?”

“You can honestly do what you said for my research program?”

“Yes. You need more funds and more help.”

“Well — then it’s a bargain. Come in the house. I believe there is a bottle of fair sherry about somewhere.”

They went into the kitchen. The girt turned from the sink. Tomlinson said, “Ah, there you are, Linda. My dear, this is Mr. Banth. He is my new... uh... partner.”

“Him?” she said. “Sticking needles in mice?”

“Mr. Banth has ideas which are somewhat more expansive.”

“I should imagine,” Linda said dryly. She straightened up, drying her hands on the thighs of the jeans. She stared at Sam for a long, long second. “Keep a close watch on the gold in your teeth, Pop,” she said, still staring full into Sam’s eyes.

“He seems quite — straightforward, Linda,” Tomlinson said. “You know, he might resent such a—”

Linda smiled and nodded. “You win. Pop. He is straightforward. Like the way a snake strikes. Welcome to our happy rustic little group, Mr. Banth.”

“You’d better call me Sam, Linda.”

“Sraightforward Sam, the Confidence Man.”

“Do you young people dislike each other on sight?” Tomlinson complained.

Sam finally forced her to drop her eyes. “Not at all, doctor. We just talk like this because we each recognize a kindred spirit.”

“That I could resent.” Linda said.

“The truth is ever bitter.”