“But — little! I thought it was a critter about as big as a rabbit.”
“The only standard of comparison is the majority of the species. That’s the yardstick.
Compared to the average height of humans, Grandpa is little. A little brown animal.”
“So it’s Grandpa, is it?” Gallegher said, returning to the workbench. “And he’s simply speeded up. Accelerated metabolism. Adrenalin. Hm-m-m. Now I know what to look for, maybe—”
He fell to. But it was sundown before Gallegher emptied a small vial into a glass, siphoned whisky into it, and watched the mixture disappear.
A flickering began. Something flashed from corner to corner of the room. Gradually it became visible as a streaking brownness that resolved itself, finally, into Grandpa. He stood before Gallegher, jittering like mad as the last traces of the accelerative formula wore off.
“Hello, Grandpa,” Gallegher said placatingly.
Grandpa’s nutcracker face wore an expression of malevolent fury. For the first time in his life, the old gentleman was drunk. Gallegher stared in utter amazement.
“I’m going back to Maine,” Grandpa cried, and fell over backward.
Never seen such a lot of slow pokes in my life,” Grandpa said, devouring a steak. “My, I’m hungry. Next time I let you stick a needle in me I’ll know better. How many months have I been like this?”
“Two days,” Gallegher said, carefully mixing up a formula. “It was a metabolic accelerator, Grandpa. You just lived faster, that’s all.”
“Ah! Bah. Couldn’t eat nothing. Food was solid as a rock. Only thing I could get down my gullet was liquor.”
“Oh?”
“Hard chewing. Even with my store teeth. Whisky tasted red hot. As for a steak like this, I couldn’t of managed it.”
“You were living faster,” Gallegher glanced at the robot, who was still quietly skrenning in a corner. “Let me see. The antithesis of an accelerator is a decelerator — Grandpa, where’s Jonas Harding?”
“In there,” Grandpa said, pointing to the blue-eyed dynamo and thus confirming Gallegher’s suspicions.
“Vitaplasm. So that was it. That’s why I had a lot of Vitaplasm sent over a couple of nights ago. Hm-m-m.” Gallegher examined the sleek, impermeable surface of the apparent dynamo. After a while he tried a hypodermic syringe. He couldn’t penetrate the hard shell.
Instead, using a new mixture he had concocted from the bottles on his workbench, he dripped a drop of the liquid on the substance. Presently it softened. At that spot Gallegher made an injection, and was delighted to see a color change spread out from the locus till the entire mass was pallid and plastic.
“Vitaplasm,” he exulted. “Ordinary artificial protoplasm cells, that’s all. No wonder it looked hard. I’d given it a decelerative treatment. An approach to molecular stasis. Anything metabolizing that slowly would seem hard as iron.” He wadded up great bunches of the surrogate and dumped it into a convenient vat. Something began to form around the blue eyes — the shape of a cranium, broad shoulders, a torso—
Freed from the disguising mass of Vitaplasm, Jonas Harding was revealed crouching on the floor, silent as a statue.
His heart wasn’t beating. He didn’t breathe. The decelerator held him in an unbreakable grip of passivity.
Not quite unbreakable. Gallegher, about to apply the hypodermic, paused and looked from Joe to Grandpa. “Now why did I do that?” he demanded.
Then he answered his own question.
“The time limit. Harding gave me an hour to solve his problem. Time’s relative — especially when your metabolism is slowed down. I must have given Harding a shot of the decelerator so he wouldn’t realize how much time had passed. Let’s see.” Gallegher applied a drop to Harding’s impermeable skin and watched the spot soften and change hue. “Uh-huh. With Harding frozen like that, I could take weeks to work on the problem, and when he woke up, he’d figure only a short time had passed. But why did I use the Vitaplasm on him?”
Grandpa downed a beer. “When you’re drunk, you’re apt to do anything,” he contended, reaching for another steak.
“True, true. But Gallegher Plus is logical. A strange, eerie kind of logic, but logic, nevertheless. Let me see. I shot the decelerator into Harding, and then — there he was. Rigid and stiff. I couldn’t leave him kicking around the lab, could I? If anybody came in, they’d think I had a corpse on my hands!”
“You mean he ain’t dead?” Grandpa demanded.
“Of course not. Merely decelerated. I know! I camouflaged Harding’s body. I sent out for Vitaplasm, molded the stuff around his body, and then applied the decelerator to the Vitaplasm. It works on living cellular substance — slows it down. And slowed down to that extent, it’s impermeable and immovable!”
“You’re crazy,” Grandpa said.
“I’m short-sighted,” Gallegher admitted. “At least, Gallegher Plus is. Imagine leaving Harding’s eyes visible, so I’d be reminded the guy was under that pile when I woke up from my binge! What did I construct that recorder for, anyhow? The logic Gallegher Plus uses is far more fantastic than Joe’s.”
“Don’t bother me,” Joe said. “I’m still skrenning.”
Gallegher put the hypodermic needle into the soft spot on Harding’s arm. He injected the accelerator, and within a moment or two Jonas Harding stirred, blinked his blue eyes, and got up from the floor. “Ouch!” he said, rubbing his arm. “Did you stick me with something?”
“An accident,” Gallegher said, watching the man warily. “Uh…this problem of yours—”
Harding found a chair and sat down, yawning. “Solved it?”
“You gave me an hour.”
“Oh. Yes, of course,” Harding looked at his watch. “It’s stopped. Well, what about it?”
“Just how long a time do you think has elapsed since you came into this laboratory?”
“Half an hour?” Harding hazarded.
“Two months,” Grandpa snapped. “You’re both right,” Gallegher said. “I’d have another answer, but I’d be right, too.” Harding obviously thought that Gallegher was still drunk. He stayed doggedly on the subject.
“What about that specialized animal we need? You still have half an hour—”
“I don’t need it,” Gallegher said, a great white light dawning in his mind. “I’ve got your answer for you. But it isn’t quite what you think it is.” He relaxed on the couch and considered the liquor organ. Now he could drink again, he found he preferred to prolong the anticipation.
“I came upon no wine so wonderful as thirst,” he remarked.
“Claptrap,” Grandpa said.
Gallegher said, “The clients of Adrenals, Incorporated, want to hunt animals. They want a thrill, so they need dangerous animals. They have to be safe, so they can’t have dangerous animals. It seems paradoxical, but it isn’t. The answer doesn’t lie in the animal. It’s in the hunger.”
Harding blinked. “Come again?”
“Tigers. Ferocious man-eating tigers. Lions. Jaguars. Water buffalo. The most vicious, carnivorous animals you can get. That’s part of the answer.”
“Listen—” Harding said. “Maybe you’ve got the wrong idea. The tigers aren’t our customers. We don’t supply clients to the animals, it’s the other way round.”
“I must make a few more tests,” Gallegher said, “but the basic principle’s right here in my hand. An accelerator. A latent metabolic accelerator with a strong concentration of adrenalin as the catalyst. Like this—”
He sketched a vivid verbal picture. Armed with a rifle, the client wandered through the artificial jungle, seeking quarry. He had already paid his fee to Adrenals, Incorporated, and got his intravenous shot of the latent accelerator. That substance permeated his blood stream, doing nothing as yet, waiting for the catalyst.