Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 1 (1923-12).djvu/31

30 made in spare moments, lay spread on a bed of cotton batting beside me, glistening, flexible, attenuated bits of glass thread drawn from a matrix of coarse glass tubing. In this fashion, too, had some master hand moulded that girl with whom I had been talking during visiting hours—held her in the fires of experience to the point of dissolution, then twisted her sharply to a sensitive, fine-spun, fragile point, a vessel for poison or elixir as chance might provide. She had had no visitors. A tribute to the innate tenacity of the human organism it was, that the blow of the man she called her husband had not killed her. Spun glass with the strength of steel.

The far-off rattle of dishes from the kitchen preparatory to the serving of a midnight meal to the night staff emphasized my isolation. I decided to dispense with this midnight exchange of pleasantries. Peace and the comfort of undisturbed pursuits filtered through my tired brain. A glorious night of work if I chose to take it! I could wedge in a few minutes of sleep the next day. Even the garrulous morgue keeper, whose tongue more than compensated for the many dumb ones in his domain and who could be expected two or three times of an evening to warm up, had gone—to visit a married daughter, he said. I remember wondering whether he jounced his grandchildren on his knee, taught them tricks and told them stories as other grandfathers do. Why not? There are men who make a living on hanging!

I pulled down the blue blind with ill-concealed irritation. A white light had suddenly spread over the courtyard and, blending with my microscope lamp, had paralyzed the effects of its rays. In the room where the light appeared lay a large Swede, too big for the ordinary hospital cot. He had been carried in that morning, still talkative. By sundown his jaws wore the grin of death, his limbs were rigid, his eyes glazed. Two days previous, an ordinary carpet tack had pierced his thumb. I felt in my pocket for the morgue key which the keeper had left with me. They might be coming for it any minute now.

Slide after slide, about a hundred in all, passed in review under the eye of my microscope. Gradually, Swede and girl, morgue keeper, ambulance, hospital, everything dwindled to the relative size of the minute creatures whose habits had absorbed me completely. The organisms themselves—to the naked eye mere films upon a glass slide—usurped, in my world, that night, the place these other people had assumed.

Caught in the attitudes of life by the mordant I had applied, whole colonies of micrococci, villages, towns, and nations, a veritable Pompeii of them bared intricacies of structure heretofore unreported in any journal of bacteriology. Not that I could claim, as yet, to have made a vital discovery. Only the presence of tiny specks on the surface of the micrococci, specks in each cell, consistently arranged in a characteristic formation stimulated my imagination to the point of unreality. Further investigation would be necessary before I could interpret their function. Further investigation—a whole day must intervene, a day of petty routine labors, of hospital rounds, of—

Might they not be the figures of some primitive karyokenetic process? The forces of some undeveloped sex instinct? The anlage, as it were?

The blood rushed to my head so that I could no longer see clearly. Door after door of Science swung open at the magic news of my discovery. Rocks moved! Fish talked! A hundred stained slides of micrococcus haematodes had conquered the world!

The whir of a bus engine close to my window, beyond the window, around the corner of the laboratory building to the morgue! The human mind at times is capable of a peculiar dual activity. While the focus of my consciousness centered on the illimitable possibilities of what I suspected was a sexual phase in the development of these lowest of plant forms, in the periphery of my consciousness, I concluded that a new driver must be handling the bus. Simultaneously, the two channels of thought continued their parallel course. What if these ultra-microscopic specks were the very entrails of life in its formative stage.

The old chauffeurs knew that the procedure was to turn to the right before the laboratory was reached and draw up at the emergency door, where a porter, summoned by the cacophonies of the bus bell would be waiting with a wheeled stretcher. If I asked to be released of a portion of my routine duties, perhaps there would be time to complete my investigations and obtain a hearing at the National Bacteriologists' before the end of the year. Credit would always redound to the hospital.

But the bell hadn't sounded! The bus had remained at the morgue door! There was the one conclusion.

"Damn that woman!" I heard Gleason say as I came up behind him.

The driver and a policeman who had apparently accompanied them had already tilted the stretcher from the rear of the bus. Without commenting on Gleason's remark, I bent over the dead woman. Under a dirty nightgown (probably they had found her so) that clung tenaciously to her body as if it had not been removed for days, the woman's configuration was clearly discernible—swollen legs, distended stomach, bulbous breasts. Soggy skin hung from her arms and cheeks, Her lips, slightly parted in the relaxation of death, showed a marked outline of blue, the purplish-blue consequent to the inhalation of illuminating gas.

I turned on Gleason.

"Damn that woman!" he swore again, more viciously, continuing to brush the dust from his glossy white uniform. "Gas company was there when I arrived—pulmotor brought her around. Damn fool turned up her toes just as the bus got started."

HE policeman, making entries in a small black notebook, grinned his assent. Like the mercury in a thermometer, I felt my temper arising to burst its bounds. Gleason was a music lover, or claimed to be. Once a week, he and his fiancée permitted themselves the luxury of a concert. But an intern's salary is hardly elastic enough to include both the fine imposed upon him for bringing in a dead patient, and the price of a pair of tickets.

His reasoning was as ingenuous as a child's. Because one Mary Malloy's burdens had proved unbearable, he and his fiancée would be forced to endure each other's company at home, or in some neighborhood moving-picture house. Damn that woman!

To avoid argument with Gleason, I swung on my heel and followed the stretcher into the morgue. Our feet scraped jarringly on the cement floor. None of the external reverence and awe which custom, or perhaps fear, accord to the dead marked the temporary disposal of Mary Malloy.

"There she goes, boy! Shove 'er in! Watch out for the pigtail—"

"Mary Malloy—age thirty-six!"

The policeman, kind enough to relieve me of the duty, wrote her name on the tag with a flourish, rubbed his hands energetically as if washing them of the whole affair and bade us a cheerful good-night. The chauffeur lifted the heavy zine cover, rattled it into place, once more tucked in Mary Malloy's recalcitrant braid of thick black hair, then thumped soundly on the cover to insure its stability.

Night, doctor. Guess she's safe!"

"Good-night!"

The discordant clatter of zinc, mingling with our voices reverberated down the corridor, bounded away from the closed metal doors of the locker room