Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 4 (1924-12).djvu/157



ARTIN ZUCKER reversed the usual process. All heroes, it is well known, enjoy a kinetographic review of their entire past lives in that brief, fearful second when they stand on the threshold of the hereafter and bravely stare death out of countenance. Martin Zucker, on the contrary, watched the little movie of his past life as he came back into being, as he lingered in that anesthetized zone between coma and consciousness. But Martin Zucker was not a hero; perhaps that accounted for his reversion of the usual process.

This is what Zucker reviewed on his own little mental screen:

A youth, far distant, when he starved and suffered and played in the lumber settlement of Johnstown; a love episode with Hilda Juessing; three, four, five years of labor in the woods, felling trees, suffering with the cold, sweating and freezing at once, to earn money to marry Hilda; a single flash, the murder of Hilda and Lars Behr; then a numbness, mental and physical, which endured through months, years.

Gray days, monotonous days: they flickered by on the screen. Each was like the last; he began each day by dragging himself from his cell cot, dressing in the semi-darkness, marching step for step with the man ahead of him and the man behind, out past the tally-guard, into the chair factory. Then hours of wrapping soft paper pulp around frames to make "wicker" furniture, reaching for the paper strips, wrapping, wrapping, reaching again and wrapping again. A brief respite for lunch—beans, coffee and bread and butter—and then back to the prison factory and the everlasting wrapping of chairs. At night, back to the dining hall with eight hundred other gray-faced, lusterless men; a few moments to satisfy the animal desire of hunger; and then the black night in cell No. 656.

The nights were no more distinguishable than the days. Sometimes he had visions of Hilda, but he drove them away by pounding his fists against the steel bars until his knuckles were raw and bleeding and the ache of his hands occupied his mind.

To Martin Zucker there was no such thing as time. Day and night, night and day; work and eat, eat and sleep. That was all. From time to time the men who worked beside him told with elation of their approaching freedom. From time to time men left their benches and Zucker appreciated that they were going back to that dim figment, the world. He didn't envy them their freedom, for to him it meant nothing. Except food and sleep and work, nothing meant anything to Zucker. Least of all, time.

Then there was a sudden change. A doctor had talked to him, cross examined him, asked a question which Zucker scarcely understood. But as he labored mentally over the doctor's words in his cell that night he began to understand. The doctor had promised him—Youth!

ROM that moment of realization the mental pictures became clearer. There was, the next day, the prison hospital; a white clinic room; a dozen avid doctors, and in the center one who fingered instruments with a certain gloating delight. He treasured a tiny, gelatin-filled bottle but did not treasure his words, the subtitles of the drama.

"This transplanting of glands," the paunchy surgeon explained, "is no longer an experimental operation.