Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 1 (1923-12).djvu/30



HERE is an artificial quiet about the wards of a hospital more oppressive than the muteness of the dead. But the silence of a laboratory speaks! The centrifuge whirls in frenzy at your touch, a dancing dervish yielding to the breath of his god. The glassware tinkles like the joyous laugh of a child at its mother's approach. Incubator doors open wide, saying, "Here are treasurers. Dig and find!"

I worked late that night, later than usual. Free at length from the interruptions of a feverish day, I felt reasonably certain of my security. True, for the night I was riding fourth 'bus, as we term an assignment to the fourth ambulance, but only in an extremity would I be called out. One day an excursion boat disgorged its passengers half a mile out in the bay. Every ambulance in the city took its turn, then, even the obsolete one-horse contraptions of the last generation. Only a month before, a ten-story, widely advertised bakery in the neighborhood—

Days after, the emergency wards reeked with the odor of burnt blood.

Selfishly, I admit, I hoped that the night would pass without a community misfortune. Enough of individual calamity had already crowded my day to capacity. My fellow internes accuse me of keener interest in the human angle of a hospital than in the medical. I accept their banter with amusement. I have never confided to any of them the problem that calls me to the laboratory every night.



I picked up another length of glass tubing, held it in the flame to the point of fluidity, then, with a quick movement, spun it out to the desirable length. A neat pile of these capillary pipettes,