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Title: The Eternal Man
Author: Sharp, D. D. [Drury Dubose] (1888-1960)
Date of first publication: August 1929
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Science Wonder Stories, August 1929 
   [New York: Stellar Publishing Corporation]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 3 November 2016
Date last updated: 3 November 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1372

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.
We have made one correction to the printed text, substituting
"on one side of him" for "one one side of him".






THE ETERNAL MAN

by D. D. Sharp




_The present story is perhaps the greatest short science fiction story
of the year.  If it had been written by H. G. Wells, or Edgar Allen
Poe, no one would question its greatness, but coming as it does from a
new author in science fiction, it must be hailed enthusiastically by
every true lover of this type of story.  The editors found themselves
reading and re-reading this little gem a number of times--it is so good._

_It is one of those stories that will cause a great deal of controversy
from our readers; but if the editor knows anything about their likes
and dislikes, we certainly predict one thing--and that is, the story
will be universally liked and discussed._




Old Zulerich grew no older.  And in the dead of night the rat, with its
eternal life, would come upon the table and stare at him with red
spiteful eyes; while Zulerich sat as stiffly as though sculptured in
stone.




THE ETERNAL MAN




The Recluse

Herbert Zulerich was a big, heavy-framed man with a tangled mop of
shaggy hair which lay back from his sloping forehead and clustered
about the collar of his dark coat.  His nose was big and prominent,
swelling like a huge peak upon his face, and his mouth was a deep-lined
canyon between the peak of his nose and the bulge of his chin.

Zulerich's habits were as strange as his face, and ponderous as his big
body.  How he lived no one knew, and no one knew either how he managed
to maintain the formidable array of test tubes, and retorts.  In his
laboratory was every conceivable kind of peculiar glass, holding
liquids of all colors.

Zulerich had, at one time, been a chemist of somewhat more than local
fame, but of late years he had become a recluse, staying alone most of
the time in his big stone house just back of the highway where the
constant stream of autos seemed to disturb him but little.

In truth they disturbed him a great deal.  Some days he would watch
them in their hurry as they drove furiously along the straight line of
paved roadway, and into his face would come gloom and melancholy.  And
into his large blue eyes would come a hurt look; a feeling of sympathy
for those who seemed so full of life, so gay, so thoughtless.

"Death!  Death!" the old man would whisper, "Man goes through long
years of preparation for the few days of accomplishment before the
conqueror destroys all."

"So much preparation," he would whisper as he shook his big head.  "So
many brilliant minds polished and blazing for an hour, like roses grown
and tended to be cut for an evening's bloom; hands so skillfully
trained, and so soon folded quietly at rest."

That he was in quest of some great secret, everyone who knew him had
long ago suspected.  But what that secret was, no one knew and few
could even guess.

The truth was that Zulerich's mind was obsessed by a single
thought--the appalling waste of death.  And since science and invention
were conquering the other enemies of man's existence, Zulerich set out
after the example of Ponce de Leon, to discover the elements which
might be combined to give eternal life.

Strange as it may seem, Zulerich was making some progress.  He had
found out some things which had astonished him.  Some of his
experiments had awed and stupefied him, and then he made a discovery
which gave him a decided fright.

He had been experimenting with unicellular organisms, and had found
that they did not behave as inorganic chemicals did.  He knew that the
reaction of those animalcules was distinctly physiological and not
merely physical, organic and not purely chemical.  They did not
resemble any known chemicals, for they reacted as individuals and not
as mere materials.  This discovery, he found, was confirmed by Jennings
in his book "Behavior of Unicellular Organisms."

Old Zulerich had studied the intricate processes of cellular division
and multiplication, hoping to penetrate the law of the organism and
discover something of the life it maintained.  He wanted to discover
what it was that, at the peak of growth, prevented further cleavage of
cells.  In short, he wanted to find the principle which confined the
limits of size and growth.  Find what it was that caused the cells of a
living body to increase and multiply until maturity and then cease
growing except when incited by a cut or other accident to the tissue.
Why should a cell become active to replace wounded flesh, yet balk at
rebuilding vital tissues, such as the lungs; or refuse to replace a
lost tooth more than once.

He experimented in numerous ways to provoke cell growth, trying to
divine whether they had individualities of their own or whether they
were bounded by the individuality of the whole.  He wanted to find
whether cells had an intelligence which caused them to do the
remarkable things necessary to their co-ordination in the body.

Zulerich found out many things; stupendous, mystifying things, which no
amount of scientific theory could possibly explain.  He perfected
chemicals which applied to a rabbit's head caused its hair to grow so
long as to make it necessary for him to gather it into a bag.  And even
then the weight of it grew so great the rabbit could no longer drag its
load and he killed the animal out of mercy.  But still its hair grew
and grew.  His high-walled back-yard soon held some monstrous freaks
from his chemicals; dogs with heads as big as water barrels and bodies
of normal size, and rats with bodies as big as cows and small
peanut-sized heads.  And one day he applied a chemical to a horse's
eyes and the eyes grew out of their sockets like long ropes of white
sinew with great knobs of gelatine-like iris--limp flabby canes which
dragged upon the ground.  The effect of this last experiment so cut the
kind soul of Zulerich that he killed the monstrosities and wished to
abandon his whole business.  Then he would look again from his window
over the wide world where death laid waste, and he would sigh and
tighten his lips to plunge ahead again.

Growth was not what Zulerich wanted.  He was quite content that man
should retain his present stature.  What he desired was to increase
man's years.

And then he discovered it.  He did not need to prove the experiment by
waiting and watching until the end of time to find out whether the
cells would eventually die.  He knew they would not die.  A few drops
of pale green fluid in the graduating glass in his hand would permit
any man to live eternally.  He knew this was possible for he had at
last found the combination he sought; the chemical which continued life
without the necessity of decay.




The Elixir Found

After a year of experiments upon his cells he tried a drop upon a rat.
He caught the rat in one hand and held his medicine dropper with its
pale green fluid in the other.  But, as the dropper released its
globule, the rat moved its head and the drop hit the side of its face
and trickled down and spread about its throat.  It left a scar upon the
hair, a peculiar scar like a question mark.  Zulerich tried again with
a second drop with better success.  The rat swallowed it.

Zulerich watched carefully.  The animal's heart seemed to cease
beating.  The lungs became motionless, and yet the rat lived, with a
fire in its pink eyes.  It lived on, day by day, week after week, month
on month, without the slightest loss of weight or sign of hunger or
thirst.  It lived with its tiny soul imprisoned in it.

Yet even then Zulerich dared not drink his elixir, though his work was
exhausting his strength and his heart was very weak and with its
flutterings gave him frights at times.  There was a flaw in his
experiment.  The animal lived without breath, food or water, but it was
entirely _unable to move_!  To see it one would presume it dead, except
for the fire in its fierce little eyes and its lack of decay.

So Zulerich set out to mend the flaw.  He worked feverishly now, for he
was a very old man and his heart threatened to fail.  He did not want
to die with success just within his reach.  He did not want to come so
near offering mankind the one boon it craved and then to fail.

Two years passed before Zulerich found the ingredient lacking in his
pale greenish drops.  The thing was so simple he had overlooked it
altogether.  He discovered it quite by accident.

One day he had a pail containing a solution of washing soda near the
window and was washing down the dusty glass so that he might see out
over the blighted world and gain strength from its curse to continue
his work.  He would allow no one else in his laboratory and washed the
windows himself.

A few spattering drops fell into the motionless, upturned mouth of the
rat where it stood upon the deep casement.  Its mouth was open in the
same position Zulerich had left it when he had forced it to receive the
life preserving drops.  It had stood a tiny, paralyzed, living statue
in that same attitude for two long years.  Zulerich had really thought
to remove the animal from the window before beginning to wash them.
But as he grew older he had grown more absent minded.  He was unable to
use the same care and forethought he once had; but this time his
carelessness resulted in a great discovery.

Immediately when the soda dropped into the rat's mouth it squealed and
scurried for cover.  But it soon came out to nibble a crust of cracker
the parrot had dropped upon the floor.

Zulerich had been overjoyed at the rat regaining the use of its
muscles, but now he became worried and anxious because it developed
hunger.  He thought that hunger might forebode decay which meant death.

Even as he pondered he trembled, for he knew he was very old and had
not much time to watch and wait.  And then as the result of his
suspense and relief over the new discovery of the soda drops, his heart
began fluttering alarmingly.  It acted as it had never done before.  He
thought his time had come to die, and his precious experiment was
almost completed, perhaps perfected, but not yet given to a life-hungry
world.

All the legends he had ever read of the discovery of elixirs of life
had had their fruits frosted just before the eating.  And so it seemed
it was to be with him.  This was the end.  Then he thought of his
drops!  He would drink them and there would be ample time to conclude
his experiment.

He stepped quickly over to the table and sat upon his high stool.  Then
picking up the vial of pale green, which had become dusty with its long
idleness upon its shelf, he measured his drops.  But his hand trembled
so that the vial dropped to the floor and spilt its precious fluid.  He
drank the drops in the measuring glass.  Then he reached for the soda
water sitting just at a touch of his hand.




The Living Corpse

He could not move!  He had forgotten he would be unable to hand the
soda to his mouth.  For the moment he was too upset and frightened to
think clearly.  He had overlooked a very vital thing.  There was
nothing to do but sit and wait for a neighbor to pass.  He was as
immovable as though cut in stone.  He could not move an eyelid.  He was
very frightened.

A week went by.

During that week the rat played all over the room.  One time it came
out mockingly upon the table before him.  Zulerich regarded it closely.
It was not breathing.

Another week passed before anyone came into the house.  During this
time the rat became bolder and Zulerich had much time to observe it.
He knew his experiment had been a success.  The rat only consumed food
to replace its physical energy.  It needed fuel for running about the
room, which of course was a method of decay.  The rat needed no food to
support its life.  Zulerich knew he had discovered a great secret.  He
had accomplished life perpetual which only needed food for its physical
energies.

Then a neighbor peeped in.  His look of uneasiness gave way to one of
pained sorrow.  The neighbor's face became melancholy as he saw old
Zulerich sitting stiffly upon his stool beside his chemicals.  Zulerich
tried to cry out, but his voice like his limbs was paralyzed.  He tried
to croak, even to whisper, but there was no noise at all.  He put his
appeal into the fierce, cold fire of his living eyes which were turned
straight toward the door.  The man saw the eyes, bright and living.  He
slammed the door and fled the room.

Zulerich created quite a sensation after that.  No one knew what had
happened to him.  They thought he was dead, and surmised that he had
spilled some mysterious compound over him which had embalmed him with
the look of life still in his eyes.

Undertakers came from long distances to study him as he sat in his
laboratory.  They pried and tested among the fluids in the bottles, and
years passed, and still old Zulerich was not buried because they
believed he had found some marvelous embalming fluid and he was kept
for observation.

Old Zulerich, growing no older at all, knew all this, for he sat there,
in a glass case now, and heard all they said and saw before his eyes
all that was done.

And in the dead of night the rat with its selfishness and its eternal
life, and the unselfish chemist in his glass case, would meet again.
The rat would scamper lively across the top of the glass case in which
Zulerich sat as stiffly as though sculptured in stone.  It would sit
upon the table before him and stare at him with red spiteful eyes, and
then scamper away.  And Zulerich always knew it by the peculiar scar
upon its neck.  The rat knew what he lacked.  For two long years it had
been frozen, as he was now, before he had given it movement as well as
life.  But it was too mean to do so great a deed to a man.  It hated
him.  It never brought him the few drops of alkali he craved.

One day they packed Zulerich carefully in a case and moved him, and
when the case was opened he found himself in a lofty building with the
mummy of a Pharaoh on one side of him and musty relics of other ages
all around him.  He recognized the old building, for in the other days
he had loved to potter around there and let his fancies wander and his
thoughts seek something tangible in these fragments of a vanished age.

As he sat there upon his stool, protected within his glass case, the
unalterable line of his vision vaulted the narrow aisles below him and
gazed through the great glass of a tall window in the opposite wall.

Out there he watched the throngs that passed.  People of a day.  Men
who yesterday were babes in mothers' arms, today fighting up the long
and difficult ladder for their fragment of success, to leap tomorrow
into oblivion at their allotted rung.

Customs changed, women scrambled with the male, and there became even
less time or inclination to enjoy the fruits of preparation.  The years
of training lengthened.

In all the years upon the earth it was bound that the two should meet
again.  The rat with its selfish greediness and the chemist with his
unselfish dream.  The rat had been seeking him so that it might gloat
over him as it used to do.  So that it might scamper upon his case and
deride him with its motion.  But the keeper of the museum saw the rat
and beat it with his broom and mangled it with his big leather-shod
heel.  This happened in the night and he left the rat upon the floor
until morning so that the cleaners might take it away.

Before the cleaners came the next morning one of the scientists who
were studying Zulerich saw the rat lying there upon the floor before
the case with its mangled body and its eyes were so bright and full of
pain.  He stooped to examine it, and his interest became intense, for
its heart and lungs were quiet and it seemed quite dead, and yet its
eyes had the same living look of the man Zulerich in the glass case.

So the rat, too, was placed under observation and set in a tiny case
upon a perch just before the case in which sat old Zulerich looking out
upon the great world through the big window.  The rat in its case cut
off part of the vision of the chemist so that in seeing the world
beyond the window he must look straight into the eyes of the creature
to whom he had given eternal life, and which had been mangled until it
was given eternal pain.

The years passed on, long years, all the longer that there should be no
end of them.  It was all the sadder that, instead of viewing the misery
and waste of eighty years, he must watch it for eight hundred years,
and even then be not done.

Life streamed by under his gaze, burning up with decay.  Yet he held
the secret they so much desired.  Between them and eternal life was a
connecting link, a few drops of alkaline water.  The wires of
communication were down and none had the wisdom nor the wit to raise
them up.  He had the secret, they had the power, if they only knew.

Eager, anxious, weary, discouraged and broken, the people of the world
tramped by; torrents of wasted motion.  For long years he envied them,
of all that waste, the power to say one small word for their freedom.
For long years the undying man and the undying rat stared hatefully at
each other.  For long years he studied and contrived within his mind
some means for breaking the paralysis of his body so that he might
given eternal life to humanity.  Then he learned a great lesson from a
small child.

The child had discovered the mangled rat and had seen the pain and
desire of death in its eyes.  She begged her father to kill the little
rat as he had killed her little dog after a car had wounded it.

That night Zulerich's eyes softened as he regarded the rat under the
bright glow of the electric lights, and in his heart felt remorse.  For
the first time he was glad that he had not been able to give man his
magic formula.  He discovered that he should need to improve life
before trying to lengthen it.




THE END






[End of The Eternal Man, by D. D. Sharp]
