The greatest adventure
of the imagination.
Left to himself the Doctor returned to the open window. Spring fever
was upon him. Work and all its paraphernalia appeared as an insult to
nature. Accordingly he yielded himself to the soft influences of the
warm breeze and the flashing blue and silver glory of the bay. Standing
there he let the memories of a busy lifetime stream through his mind
and out to the future with all its promise of great things to be.
Ever since his school days he had been bitten by the ambition to trace
life to its secret source and lay bare its mystery. To create life,
or at least to control and direct it when once created, that was the
great problem. Then, when he had begun to learn something of systematic
biology, he had seen the utter hopelessness of a direct attack.
Wasting no time he had turned his energies elsewhere, to humbler
things, in order that he might, if lucky, surprise the enemy unaware.
For he realized that a wholesale creation of a fully living organism
by artificial means was probably centuries beyond the capabilities
of science, and his was too high an intelligence to waste itself on
unsolvable riddles. If in laborious investigations of lesser problems
he might catch a glimpse of the goal he would be happy, provided only
that his search was not otherwise fruitless and bore abundant good to
humanity in the alleviation of pain and preventable misery. But he
would not waste his gifts on crass impossibilities.
His course at first had been hard and indirect. Forced by poverty to
work his way through school and college, he had come early to a wisdom
far beyond his years. With absolute clarity he had seen that freedom
from worry over money matters is the first essential for genuinely
creative scientific work. While constantly harassed by poverty he had
been powerless to concentrate his abilities on any problem worth the
solving. He therefore decided in his second college year to swerve
aside temporarily from his ambition and make money. To the regret of
his instructors he abruptly threw up the study of medicine and changed
over to geology.
The new science was congenial. At many points it touched the past story
of life if not the present. Putting every ounce of brain and energy
into the work, he mastered the geology of coal and oil formations and
graduated easily at the top of his class.
He was now twenty. The day after graduation he shipped as a coal passer
on a steamer bound for China. Arrived there, ignorant though he was of
the language, he disappeared into the interior.
His subsequent career is one of the classics of mining engineering. In
eighteen months he had located one of the richest anthracite fields
in the history of coal. Moreover he had obtained from the Chinese
government certain concessions which, if worked, would make him one of
the hundred richest white men in the world. All he had to do was to
stay on the ground and let his prize develop. Capital would come almost
unasked.
It was here that he showed the stuff he was made of. Instead of
degenerating into a money-making machine he placed all his rights in
the hands of an English company. Within six weeks he had sold out for
ten million dollars cash all of his interest which, if nursed with
ordinary business acumen, would have netted him a hundred million
before he died. But he had no time to squander in making money. The
most precious years of his life were slipping through his hands, and he
was still but half educated for the work he had set himself.
While idling about Shanghai waiting to close up his business he met
and married the English girl who for eight years made him a flawlessly
happy man.
Having invested his fortune in government bonds he forgot it and
proceeded with his wife to Vienna to finish his medical education. That
accomplished, he left his wife and infant daughter with his mother,
and took a year's holiday with half a dozen friends exploring the
southernmost extremity of Patagonia in a fossil hunting expedition.
The fossils aroused his purely biological interests. On returning
to civilization he again went with his wife to Europe. There he
specialized for two years in the great centres of pure biology. At
twenty-seven, on returning to America, he felt himself fitted to begin
useful work.
Resolutely putting from his mind the fantastic hope of discovering the
origin of life, he concentrated his powers on the difficult problems
of cell growth. Thus gradually and naturally was he led to the study
of cancer, on which he had now been engaged for about ten years,
publishing little but learning much, if only in a negative way. Always,
subconsciously, at the back of his mind loomed up the greater problem.
In his reading and in his experimental investigations he let slip no
chance of following out the slightest clue. These excursions into the
unpractical sometimes cost him weeks of precious time. Yet he never
regretted them, for the least profitable yielded two or three definite
facts worth the having.
With singular detachment he had kept his mind free from speculative
theories. He followed neither Driesch nor Loeb. To him vitalism and
mechanism, as judged by their positive achievements, were equally
impotent to describe life. One side philosophized without experiment,
while the other, experimenting blindly without reason, contented
itself with a vague reference to electricity as the probable source
of all living phenomena. Profound technicalities like the intriguing
"polarity" and "heliotropism" that seemed to the unthinking to
"explain" so much while in fact they explained nothing but their
authors' taste in names, left him cold. All this might be the first
step, but surely it was no more. With the rapidly changing fashions in
science and the influx of men of genius into biology, ten years might
see polarity displaced by some newer fetish equally noncommittal. In
the meantime he would remain neutral.
The door opened softly and Edith appeared.
"Oh," she said, "you're not working. I'll bring him up, then."
"Bring who up?"
But Edith had vanished. Presently she reappeared, ushering in a
gray-bearded stranger, evidently a seafarer. The new-comer carried a
tar-soaked box about four feet long and ten inches square.
"This is Captain Anderson," she said. "He insisted on showing you what
he has brought himself."
"Pleased to meet you, Captain," said the Doctor, advancing to shake
hands with his visitor. "Won't you sit down?"
"After you have seen what's in here."
Captain Anderson produced a huge clasp knife and proceeded methodically
to pry off the lid of his long box. As he worked crystals of rock salt
spilled out over the table and floor. The mess seemed to trouble him
not at all. Evidently he had great faith in the soothing efficacy of
his pickled monster, whatever it might be.
At last the cover was off and the closely packed salt invitingly ready
to be scooped out by the handful. The Captain used both hands. Then,
reaching in, he got the deceased monstrosity by what had been its neck,
gave it a vigorous shake to free it from the last crystals of salt, and
asked complacently,
"Isn't he a little peach?"
Edith, case-hardened as she was to monstrosities, could not repress a
gasp and a shudder of repulsion. Lane looked paralyzed.
"Good Lord," he exclaimed, "what is it? Bird or reptile?"
2
CAPTAIN ANDERSON'S STORY
The Doctor and Edith stood dumb before Captain Anderson's dried
monster. Its elaborate hideousness, unlike that of any living thing,
held them with a perverse fascination. Neither bird, reptile nor fish,
it was an incredible mongrel of all three. The serpent-like, heavily
scaled belly contradicted the bat-like wings with their short, bristly
feathers; while the exaggerated beak, crammed full of cruel yellow
teeth, revealed by the hard backward snarl of the horny lips, refuted
the monstrosity's claims to be considered a bird. Flattened against its
withered flanks were two lizard hands armed with ugly claws, to one of
which still adhered the dried scales of the last fish the creature had
devoured.
A skeptic at first glance would have declared the creature an
impossible fraud perpetrated by some over-imaginative sailor in his
misused leisure. But Dr. Lane, also at the first glance, thought he
knew better.
"It's only a baby of its kind," he said. "The parents have been dead
millions of years. This is the one perfect specimen in existence." The
Doctor thought he knew what he was talking about.
"Then there are others like it?" Captain Anderson asked, somewhat
crestfallen.
"No, only their fossilized bones and impressions of a few feathers
in the rocks that were mud when these things flew. The most perfect
impression was found in a mine in Bulgaria about four years ago. But
it was only a mark on the stone--not a shadow to this beauty. Where on
earth did you get it?"
"In the South Polar seas."
"Frozen into the ice?" the Doctor hazarded. He recalled instantly the
reputed discoveries of long extinct mastodons in Alaska, Northern
Siberia and elsewhere, their meat as fresh as on the day the giants
were trapped on the ice floes hundreds of centuries ago.
"No," the Captain replied. "This thing was still warm when we picked it
up. It could not have been dead more than fifteen minutes."
"But how on earth--"
"First let me ask you one or two questions. What is it?"
"I don't know," the Doctor confessed doubtfully. "At first I thought
it might be the missing link between the reptiles and the birds--a
half-way creature something like a pterodactyl and not quite an
archaeopterix. The last is the ancestor of all the birds. We know only
its fossil remains. Then I thought--but, here see for yourself."
Dr. Lane strode over to the bookshelves and selected a large green
portfolio. "Put your beast on the table and compare it with this," he
said, exhibiting a photographic reproduction of the famous Bulgarian
fossil. "Now, isn't yours like this?"
"In the main, yes. But that snake-bird in the mud had no scales on its
belly," the Captain objected.
"So much the better for yours. Either this is a forefather of the known
reptilian ancestor of the birds or it is a distinctly new species."
"Now for my second question," the Captain continued. "What is this
thing worth?"
"That depends upon whom you ask to buy it. A fishmonger down the street
might give you ten cents for it as a curiosity. Then again the American
Museum of Natural History would offer you, I imagine, whatever it could
afford. For this specimen is priceless."
"Very well. I'm only an ex-mining engineer and an old whaler. I know
next to nothing about such things and must take your word for the value
of this. Now, my last question. How much will you give me for it?"
Dr. Lane hesitated, but only for a second.
"Nothing," he replied.
"Then that's settled," the Captain retorted, restoring his despised
monstrosity to its coffin.
"Hold on a minute, Captain. By itself your wonderful find is of little
or no value to me. I care only for diseased things. This is perfectly
sound. A museum is the proper place for it after the right men have
worked out its anatomy in detail. When I said that I would give you
nothing for it I meant what I said. But I will give you a considerable
sum if you take me to the exact spot where you found this thing, as
you said, still warm."
The Captain desisted in his efforts to scoop up all the salt spilled in
his first exuberant haste.
"When you say a considerable sum what do you mean?"
"Name what you think right and I'll see."
"Ten thousand dollars?"
"It is not too much. I would offer even more under certain conditions."
"For instance?"