Page:Stirring Science Stories, February 1941.djvu/31

 chemical compound would irritate the cells just so And then?

"Do you know what I did then, Mr. Lawyer? I decided to try it out on myself! Crazed by my convictions and by my nearness to fulfillment after so many months, I decided to finish it alone. Without anyone's help—actually to make an incision into my own brain!

"After a sleepless night intensely rechecking my calculations, the great moment came."

Slowly the narrator raised himself from his chair and placed his hands upon the desk. He bent toward the startled lawyer and deliberately continued his story.

"I stood before the mirror of my dresser. Before me lay the surgical instruments which I was to use. Carefully, with painful patience, I shaved the front of my head. A steady hand, which taxed my will power to its utmost, moved the razor up, down, back, across my moist forehead. My skull appeared with a dead-white color."

His voice sank to a whisper, those gleaming eyes of his boring into the widened ones of the listener. The blood in the lawyer's cheeks, like the fading of a delicate color in the sun, began to drain away at each word as the voice made the scene seem to happen again.

"I took the tiny silver drill and pressed it just above the left frontal lobe of the cerebrum." As he spoke, he appeared to forget where he was. In him steadily grew the vivid recollection of that fatal night. He was reliving it, as he had done many times before.

"The drill sank slowly into the bone; my nerves were tense from the strain of watching lest it go farther than I had marked. Line by Une, it went down, until the minute red marking was flush with the skin. Then, with trembling hands, I eased it up. It came free, and quickly I slipped a disinfectant cotton pad over the tiny hole. The moment had arrived!

"In front of me on its clean white wrapping cloth lay the slender steel hypodermic. Rays from the unshielded electric light sparkled from its polished sides. Almost on their own volition my ice-cold fingers curved around it. With my other hand I reached for the thick glass bottle. The bottle that held all my dreams, all my fears.

"After working out the stopper with my teeth, I dropped the frail, needle-like point into it and gently drew the plunger back. Silently, that yellow golden liquid was sucked into the barrel. Mysterious and alien, that hellish stuff swirled as though angered by its capture, almost resentful of me, its creator."

The words flew more rapidly.

"Swiftly removing the protecting cloth, I inserted the point of the in-strument into the microscopic hole, adjusting it to the best position. Gradually, I squeezed down the plunger. I could imagine that thick, golden fluid piercing down between the layers of tissue above the brain, instantly dissolving into the 'dura mater' and going on to thoroughly permeate the 'arachnoid' and 'pia mater'—into the brain serum itself—irritating.

"And thus it was done."

IS breath was coming in shorter gasps and his face had become more strained. He wearily sank back into the wooden chair.

The lawyer sufficiently aroused himself to croak hoarsely, "And the results? What were the results?" He had begun to fear the peculiar