HE WHO LIVED

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, jutting like a huge peak upon his face, and his mouth was a deep-lined canyon between that peak and the bulge of his chin.

Zulerich's habits were as strange as his face, ponderous as his big body. How he lived no one knew and no one knew either how he managed to maintain his formidable array of test tubes and retorts. In his laboratory was every conceivable kind of peculiar glass, holding liquids of all colors. Zulerich had been at one time a chemist of 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 tine of paved roadway and into his face would come gloom and melancholy. Into his large blue eyes would come a hurt look, and an odd feeling of sympathy for those who seemed so full of life, so gay, so thoughtless, would creep into his heart.

"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 the old man 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 hazard even a guess.

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

A fantastic quest, seemingly hopeless, yet Zulerich felt that he was making progress. He had discovered things which had astonished even 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 these animalcules was distinctly physiological, not merely physical, organic, 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 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 coordination in the body.

Zulerich found out many things—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 that 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 backyard soon held some monstrous freaks produced by his chemicals—dogs with heads as big as water barrels and bodies of normal size—rats with bodies as big as cows and heads no bigger than peanuts.

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 gelatin-like iris—limp flabby canes that dragged upon the ground.

The effect of this last experiment so cut the kind soul of Zulerich that he killed all the monstrosities and recoiled from the thought of making more. Then he looked again from his window over the wide world where death laid waste, sighed, tightened his lips and plunged into his work again. It was not growth that 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 wait and watch until the end of time to determine whether or not cells would eventually die. He knew that they would not die . A few drops of the pale green fluid in the graduating glass he held in his hand would permit any man to live eternally. For he had at last found the combination he sought—the chemical which continued life without the necessity of decay.

AFTER a year of experiment 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, 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 the fire of life in its pink eyes. It lived on, day after day, week after week, month after month, without the slightest loss of weight or sign of hunger or thirst. It lived with its tiny soul imprisoned inside it.

Yet even then Zulerich dared not himself drink the elixir, though his work was exhausting his strength and his heart was growing weak—its flutterings made him take fright at times. For there was a flaw in his experiment.

True, the animal lived without breath, food or water. But it was entirely unable to move! Looking at it one would take it for dead, except for the glow in its fierce little eyes and the entire absence of decay. Zulerich set out to mend the flaw. He worked feverishly, knowing his time was short. He did not want to die with success just within his reach. He did not want to come so near offering mankind the boon it craved most of all only to fail when in sight of his goal.

A year passed before Zulerich found the ingredient lacking in his pale greenish drops. The very simplicity of the thing had caused him to overlook it in the beginning and his discovery of it was almost ludicrously accidental.

One day he had a pail containing a solution of cleansing soda near the windows 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 casement. Its mouth was open in the same position it had held when Zulerich had forced it to receive the life preserving drops. It had stood there, a tiny paralyzed living statue, while the four seasons of the year had gone by.

Today Zulerich had thought to remove the animal from the windows before beginning to wash them. But as he had grown older he had grown more absent-minded, less able to use the care and forethought of former times. And this time his carelessness produced an amazing result. No sooner had the soda dropped into the rat's mouth than it squealed and scurried for cover. The very next instant it was out, nibbling a crust of cracker the parrot had dropped upon the floor. Overjoyed, Zulerich watched the rat regain the use of its muscles. But anxiety soon crept into his joy. The rat developed hunger. Hunger foreboded decay. Decay meant death.

Pondering them he trembled. He was old, he had not much time to watch and wait. Even now, as a result of his suspense and relief over the new discovery of the soda drops, his heart was fluttering alarmingly. And there was something new, frightening, in its flutterings. Had his time come at last, now, when his precious experiment was almost completed, perhaps perfected, but not yet given to the 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. Was it to be so with him? Was this the end?

He thought of his drops! Quickly he stepped over to the table. He snatched up the pale green vial, dusty from long idleness on the shelf. He measured off the drops. His hand trembled so that the vial itself dropped to the floor and spilt its precious fluid. But he drank the drops in the measuring glass. Then he reached for the soda water sitting just within reach of the touch of his hand.

HE COULD not move! He had forgotten, forgotten that he would be unable to bring the soda to his mouth. He had overlooked a very vital thing. What was to be done? Nothing. There was nothing he could do but sit and wait—a neighbor might pass. He sat immovable as though cut in stone. He could not move even an eyelid. He was frightened.

No neighbor passed who saw him. A week went by.

The rat played all over the room. 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. The rat had become bolder and Zulerich had used his enforced leisure to observe it. He knew his experiment had been a success. The rat only consumed food to replace its physical energy. It needed fuel only for movement, running about the room, which of course was a method of decay.

But the rat needed no food to support its life. Zulerich knew he had discovered the great secret. He had attained perpetual life, life which needed food only for its physical energies, for movement, not for life itself.

Then a neighbor peeped in. His first look of uneasiness gave way to one of pained sorrow. His face became melancholy as he saw old Zulerich sitting motionless upon his stool beside his chemicals. Such lack of motion could mean only one thing.

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. Finally he put all his appeal into the fierce cold fire of his living eyes. The man saw those eyes, bright and living. He slammed the door and fled the room. Zulerich became a world wonder. No one knew what had happened to him. They thought he was dead. They 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 the fluids in the bottles. Time passed —months, years—and still old Zulerich sat, a corpse but unburied, motionless but alive. Yet they did not think he was alive. They believed he had discovered some marvelous embalming fluid. His house became a kind of museum in which he was the only exhibit. Old Zulerich, growing no older at all, knew all this. He sat there, in a glass case now, hearing all they said and seeing before his eyes all that was done.

And in the dead of night the rat with its selfishness and eternal life and the unselfish chemist in his glass case would meet again. The rat would scamper 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 Zulerich always knew it by the peculiar scar upon its neck. The rat had what he lacked. For one long year the rat had been frozen as the man was now and the man had then given it movement as well as life. Could the rat do as much for the man? Would it if it could? It hated him. It never brought him the few drops of alkali he craved.

And one day they packed Zulerich carefully in a case and took him away from the place that had been his home. 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 other days he had loved to visit it, letting his fancies wander over 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 passing. 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 from their allotted rung.

Things changed, manners, customs, techniques, ways of life. But Zulerich grew no older, Zulerich did not change. And the rat—the rat to which Zulerich had given the gift of movement—it too, wherever it was, lived on also.

In all their years upon earth it was bound that these two, rat and man, should meet again, the rat with its selfish greed and the chemist with his unselfish dream. Had the rat 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? The night roundsman of the museum saw the rat, beat it with his broom, mangled it with his big heel, left it upon the floor until morning so that the cleaners might take it away. But before the cleaners came the next morning one of the scientists who was studying Zulerich saw the rat lying there upon the floor before the case, its body mangled, its eyes so bright and full of pain. He stooped, examined it. An exclamation broke from him. The rat's heart and lungs were quiet, it seemed quite dead, yet its eyes had the same living look of the man Zulerich in the glass case. Thus it came about that the rat too was placed under observation, set in a tiny case upon a perch just in front of the glass tomb in which old Zulerich sat looking out upon the great world through the big window.

The rat cut off part of the vision of the old man. His vision in frozen focus, he had perforce to gaze straight into the eyes of the creature to which he had given eternal life and to which, mangled now by broom and heel, had been given eternal pain as well.

Life streamed by under the old man's gaze, burning up with decay. Yet he held the secret all people so much desired. He held the connecting link between them and eternal life, a few drops of alkaline water. The wires of communication were down and none had the wisdom or the wit to raise them up. He had the secret, they had the power— if they only knew.

Eager and anxious, weary and bowed down, discouraged and broken, the people of the world tramped by in torrents of wasted motion. The undying man and the undying rat stared hatefully at each other. The undying man's mind kept on working, everlastingly seeking some means of breaking the paralysis of his body so that he might give eternal life to humanity.

Then he learned a great lesson from a small child.

The child, entering the museum with her father, saw the mangled rat, saw the pain and the desire for death in its eyes. And the child begged her father to kill the little rat as he had killed her little dog after the automobile had run over it. The father had smiled down on the child tenderly. That night Zulerich's eyes softened as he regarded the rat under the bright glow of the electric lights. In his heart was remorse and a newfound wisdom. He was glad now that he had been unable to give mankind his magic formula.

For he knew now, past all doubt and deep down in the living soul within his undying body, what the true answer was to all his dreams. He knew that one should improve life before trying to lengthen it.