The New Accelerator

The New Accelerator

Certainly, if ever a man found a guinea when he was looking for a pin

it is my good friend Professor Gibberne. I have heard before of

investigators overshooting the mark, but never quite to the extent

that he has done. He has really, this time at any rate, without any

touch of exaggeration in the phrase, found something to revolutionise

human life. And that when he was simply seeking an all-round nervous

stimulant to bring languid people up to the stresses of these pushful

days. I have tasted the stuff now several times, and I cannot do

better than describe the effect the thing had on me. That there are

astonishing experiences in store for all in search of new sensations

will become apparent enough.

Professor Gibberne, as many people know, is my neighbour in Folkestone.

Unless my memory plays me a trick, his portrait at various ages

has already appeared in The Strand Magazine--I think late in 1899;

but I am unable to look it up because I have lent that volume to

some one who has never sent it back. The reader may, perhaps,

recall the high forehead and the singularly long black eyebrows

that give such a Mephistophelian touch to his face. He occupies one

of those pleasant little detached houses in the mixed style that

make the western end of the Upper Sandgate Road so interesting.

His is the one with the Flemish gables and the Moorish portico,

and it is in the little room with the mullioned bay window that

he works when he is down here, and in which of an evening we have

so often smoked and talked together. He is a mighty jester, but,

besides, he likes to talk to me about his work; he is one of those

men who find a help and stimulus in talking, and so I have been

able to follow the conception of the New Accelerator right up from

a very early stage. Of course, the greater portion of his experimental

work is not done in Folkestone, but in Gower Street, in the fine

new laboratory next to the hospital that he has been the first to use.

As every one knows, or at least as all intelligent people know,

the special department in which Gibberne has gained so great

and deserved a reputation among physiologists is the action of drugs

upon the nervous system. Upon soporifics, sedatives, and anaesthetics

he is, I am told, unequalled. He is also a chemist of considerable

eminence, and I suppose in the subtle and complex jungle of riddles

that centres about the ganglion cell and the axis fibre there are

little cleared places of his making, little glades of illumination,

that, until he sees fit to publish his results, are still inaccessible

to every other living man. And in the last few years he has been

particularly assiduous upon this question of nervous stimulants,

and already, before the discovery of the New Accelerator, very

successful with them. Medical science has to thank him for at least

three distinct and absolutely safe invigorators of unrivalled value

to practising men. In cases of exhaustion the preparation known

as Gibberne's B Syrup has, I suppose, saved more lives already

than any lifeboat round the coast.

"But none of these little things begin to satisfy me yet," he told

me nearly a year ago. "Either they increase the central energy

without affecting the nerves or they simply increase the available

energy by lowering the nervous conductivity; and all of them are

unequal and local in their operation. One wakes up the heart and

viscera and leaves the brain stupefied, one gets at the brain

champagne fashion and does nothing good for the solar plexus, and

what I want--and what, if it's an earthly possibility, I mean to have--

is a stimulant that stimulates all round, that wakes you up for

a time from the crown of your head to the tip of your great toe,

and makes you go two--or even three--to everybody else's one. Eh?

That's the thing I'm after."

"It would tire a man," I said.

"Not a doubt of it. And you'd eat double or treble--and all that.

But just think what the thing would mean. Imagine yourself with

a little phial like this"--he held up a little bottle of green glass

and marked his points with it--"and in this precious phial is

the power to think twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice

as much work in a given time as you could otherwise do."

"But is such a thing possible?"

"I believe so. If it isn't, I've wasted my time for a year. These

various preparations of the hypophosphites, for example, seem

to show that something of the sort . . . Even if it was only one

and a half times as fast it would do."

"It WOULD do," I said.

"If you were a statesman in a corner, for example, time rushing up

against you, something urgent to be done, eh?"

"He could dose his private secretary," I said.

"And gain--double time. And think if YOU, for example, wanted

to finish a book."

"Usually," I said, "I wish I'd never begun 'em."

"Or a doctor, driven to death, wants to sit down and think out

a case. Or a barrister--or a man cramming for an examination."

"Worth a guinea a drop," said I, "and more to men like that."

"And in a duel, again," said Gibberne, "where it all depends on

your quickness in pulling the trigger."

"Or in fencing," I echoed.

"You see," said Gibberne, "if I get it as an all-round thing it will

really do you no harm at all--except perhaps to an infinitesimal

degree it brings you nearer old age. You will just have lived twice

to other people's once--"

"I suppose," I meditated, "in a duel--it would be fair?"

"That's a question for the seconds," said Gibberne.

I harked back further. "And you really think such a thing IS

possible?" I said.

"As possible," said Gibberne, and glanced at something that went

throbbing by the window, "as a motor-bus. As a matter of fact--"

He paused and smiled at me deeply, and tapped slowly on the edge

of his desk with the green phial. "I think I know the stuff. . . .

Already I've got something coming." The nervous smile upon his

face betrayed the gravity of his revelation. He rarely talked of

his actual experimental work unless things were very near the end.

"And it may be, it may be--I shouldn't be surprised--it may even

do the thing at a greater rate than twice."

"It will be rather a big thing," I hazarded.

"It will be, I think, rather a big thing."

But I don't think he quite knew what a big thing it was to be, for

all that.

I remember we had several talks about the stuff after that. "The New

Accelerator" he called it, and his tone about it grew more confident

on each occasion. Sometimes he talked nervously of unexpected

physiological results its use might have, and then he would get

a little unhappy; at others he was frankly mercenary, and we debated

long and anxiously how the preparation might be turned to commercial

account. "It's a good thing," said Gibberne, "a tremendous thing.

I know I'm giving the world something, and I think it only reasonable

we should expect the world to pay. The dignity of science is all

very well, but I think somehow I must have the monopoly of the stuff

for, say, ten years. I don't see why ALL the fun in life should go

to the dealers in ham."

My own interest in the coming drug certainly did not wane in the time.

I have always had a queer little twist towards metaphysics in my

mind. I have always been given to paradoxes about space and time,

and it seemed to me that Gibberne was really preparing no less

than the absolute acceleration of life. Suppose a man repeatedly

dosed with such a preparation: he would live an active and record

life indeed, but he would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at

twenty-five, and by thirty well on the road to senile decay. It seemed

to me that so far Gibberne was only going to do for any one who

took his drug exactly what Nature has done for the Jews and Orientals,

who are men in their teens and aged by fifty, and quicker in thought

and act than we are all the time. The marvel of drugs has always

been great to my mind; you can madden a man, calm a man, make him

incredibly strong and alert or a helpless log, quicken this passion

and allay that, all by means of drugs, and here was a new miracle

to be added to this strange armoury of phials the doctors use!

But Gibberne was far too eager upon his technical points to enter

very keenly into my aspect of the question.

It was the 7th or 8th of August when he told me the distillation

that would decide his failure or success for a time was going forward

as we talked, and it was on the 10th that he told me the thing was

done and the New Accelerator a tangible reality in the world. I met

him as I was going up the Sandgate Hill towards Folkestone--I think

I was going to get my hair cut, and he came hurrying down to meet

me--I suppose he was coming to my house to tell me at once of his

success. I remember that his eyes were unusually bright and his face

flushed, and I noted even then the swift alacrity of his step.

"It's done," he cried, and gripped my hand, speaking very fast;

"it's more than done. Come up to my house and see."

"Really?"

"Really!" he shouted. "Incredibly! Come up and see."

"And it does--twice?

"It does more, much more. It scares me. Come up and see the stuff.

Taste it! Try it! It's the most amazing stuff on earth." He gripped

my arm and, walking at such a pace that he forced me into a trot,

went shouting with me up the hill. A whole char-a-banc-ful of people

turned and stared at us in unison after the manner of people in

chars-a-banc. It was one of those hot, clear days that Folkestone

sees so much of, every colour incredibly bright and every outline

hard. There was a breeze, of course, but not so much breeze as

sufficed under these conditions to keep me cool and dry. I panted for

mercy.

"I'm not walking fast, am I?" cried Gibberne, and slackened his pace

to a quick march.

"You've been taking some of this stuff," I puffed.

"No," he said. "At the utmost a drop of water that stood in a beaker

from which I had washed out the last traces of the stuff. I took

some last night, you know. But that is ancient history, now."

"And it goes twice?" I said, nearing his doorway in a grateful

perspiration.

"It goes a thousand times, many thousand times!" cried Gibberne, with

a dramatic gesture, flinging open his Early English carved oak gate.

"Phew!" said I, and followed him to the door.

"I don't know how many times it goes," he said, with his latch-key

in his hand.

"And you--"

"It throws all sorts of light on nervous physiology, it kicks the theory

of vision into a perfectly new shape! . . . Heaven knows how many

thousand times. We'll try all that after--The thing is to try the stuff

now."

"Try the stuff?" I said, as we went along the passage.

"Rather," said Gibberne, turning on me in his study. "There it is

in that little green phial there! Unless you happen to be afraid?"

I am a careful man by nature, and only theoretically adventurous.

I WAS afraid. But on the other hand there is pride.

"Well," I haggled. "You say you've tried it?"

"I've tried it," he said, "and I don't look hurt by it, do I?

I don't even look livery and I FEEL--"

I sat down. "Give me the potion," I said. "If the worst comes to

the worst it will save having my hair cut, and that I think is one

of the most hateful duties of a civilised man. How do you take the

mixture?"

"With water," said Gibberne, whacking down a carafe.

He stood up in front of his desk and regarded me in his easy chair;

his manner was suddenly affected by a touch of the Harley Street

specialist. "It's rum stuff, you know," he said.

I made a gesture with my hand.

"I must warn you in the first place as soon as you've got it down

to shut your eyes, and open them very cautiously in a minute or so's

time. One still sees. The sense of vision is a question of length

of vibration, and not of multitude of impacts; but there's a kind

of shock to the retina, a nasty giddy confusion just at the time,

if the eyes are open. Keep 'em shut."

"Shut," I said. "Good!"

"And the next thing is, keep still. Don't begin to whack about.

You may fetch something a nasty rap if you do. Remember you will

be going several thousand times faster than you ever did before,

heart, lungs, muscles, brain--everything--and you will hit hard

without knowing it. You won't know it, you know. You'll feel just

as you do now. Only everything in the world will seem to be going

ever so many thousand times slower than it ever went before. That's

what makes it so deuced queer."

"Lor'," I said. "And you mean--"

"You'll see," said he, and took up a little measure. He glanced

at the material on his desk. "Glasses," he said, "water. All here.

Mustn't take too much for the first attempt."

The little phial glucked out its precious contents.

"Don't forget what I told you," he said, turning the contents of

the measure into a glass in the manner of an Italian waiter measuring

whisky. "Sit with the eyes tightly shut and in absolute stillness

for two minutes," he said. "Then you will hear me speak."

He added an inch or so of water to the little dose in each glass.

"By-the-by," he said, "don't put your glass down. Keep it in your

hand and rest your hand on your knee. Yes--so. And now--"

He raised his glass.

"The New Accelerator," I said.

"The New Accelerator," he answered, and we touched glasses and

drank, and instantly I closed my eyes.

You know that blank non-existence into which one drops when one

has taken "gas." For an indefinite interval it was like that. Then

I heard Gibberne telling me to wake up, and I stirred and opened

my eyes. There he stood as he had been standing, glass still

in hand. It was empty, that was all the difference.

"Well?" said I.

"Nothing out of the way?"

"Nothing. A slight feeling of exhilaration, perhaps. Nothing more."

"Sounds?"

"Things are still," I said. "By Jove! yes! They ARE still. Except the

sort of faint pat, patter, like rain falling on different things.

What is it?"

"Analysed sounds," I think he said, but I am not sure. He glanced

at the window. "Have you ever seen a curtain before a window fixed

in that way before?"

I followed his eyes, and there was the end of the curtain, frozen,

as it were, corner high, in the act of flapping briskly in the breeze.

"No," said I; "that's odd."

"And here," he said, and opened the hand that held the glass. Naturally

I winced, expecting the glass to smash. But so far from smashing

it did not even seem to stir; it hung in mid-air--motionless.

"Roughly speaking," said Gibberne, "an object in these latitudes

falls 16 feet in the first second. This glass is falling 16 feet in

a second now. Only, you see, it hasn't been falling yet for the

hundredth part of a second. That gives you some idea of the pace

of my Accelerator." And he waved his hand round and round, over and

under the slowly sinking glass. Finally, he took it by the bottom,

pulled it down, and placed it very carefully on the table. "Eh?"

he said to me, and laughed.

"That seems all right," I said, and began very gingerly to raise

myself from my chair. I felt perfectly well, very light and

comfortable, and quite confident in my mind. I was going fast all

over. My heart, for example, was beating a thousand times a second,

but that caused me no discomfort at all. I looked out of the window.

An immovable cyclist, head down and with a frozen puff of dust

behind his driving-wheel, scorched to overtake a galloping char-a-banc

that did not stir. I gaped in amazement at this incredible spectacle.

"Gibberne," I cried, "how long will this confounded stuff last?"

"Heaven knows!" he answered. "Last time I took it I went to bed

and slept it off. I tell you, I was frightened. It must have lasted

some minutes, I think--it seemed like hours. But after a bit it

slows down rather suddenly, I believe."

I was proud to observe that I did not feel frightened--I suppose

because there were two of us. "Why shouldn't we go out?" I asked.

"Why not?"

"They'll see us."

"Not they. Goodness, no! Why, we shall be going a thousand times

faster than the quickest conjuring trick that was ever done. Come

along! Which way shall we go? Window, or door?"

And out by the window we went.

Assuredly of all the strange experiences that I have ever had,

or imagined, or read of other people having or imagining, that little

raid I made with Gibberne on the Folkestone Leas, under the influence

of the New Accelerator, was the strangest and maddest of all.

We went out by his gate into the road, and there we made a minute

examination of the statuesque passing traffic. The tops of the wheels

and some of the legs of the horses of this char-a-banc, the end

of the whip-lash and the lower jaw of the conductor--who was just

beginning to yawn--were perceptibly in motion, but all the rest

of the lumbering conveyance seemed still. And quite noiseless except

for a faint rattling that came from one man's throat! And as parts

of this frozen edifice there were a driver, you know, and a conductor,

and eleven people! The effect as we walked about the thing began

by being madly queer, and ended by being disagreeable. There they

were, people like ourselves and yet not like ourselves, frozen

in careless attitudes, caught in mid-gesture. A girl and a man

smiled at one another, a leering smile that threatened to last

for evermore; a woman in a floppy capelline rested her arm on

the rail and stared at Gibberne's house with the unwinking stare

of eternity; a man stroked his moustache like a figure of wax,

and another stretched a tiresome stiff hand with extended fingers

towards his loosened hat. We stared at them, we laughed at them,

we made faces at them, and then a sort of disgust of them came upon

us, and we turned away and walked round in front of the cyclist

towards the Leas.

"Goodness!" cried Gibberne, suddenly; "look there!"

He pointed, and there at the tip of his finger and sliding down the

air with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally

languid snail--was a bee.

And so we came out upon the Leas. There the thing seemed madder

than ever. The band was playing in the upper stand, though all

the sound it made for us was a low-pitched, wheezy rattle, a sort of

prolonged last sigh that passed at times into a sound like the slow,

muffled ticking of some monstrous clock. Frozen people stood erect,

strange, silent, self-conscious-looking dummies hung unstably in

mid-stride, promenading upon the grass. I passed close to a little

poodle dog suspended in the act of leaping, and watched the slow

movement of his legs as he sank to earth. "Lord, look here!" cried

Gibberne, and we halted for a moment before a magnificent person

in white faint-striped flannels, white shoes, and a Panama hat,

who turned back to wink at two gaily dressed ladies he had passed.

A wink, studied with such leisurely deliberation as we could afford,

is an unattractive thing. It loses any quality of alert gaiety,

and one remarks that the winking eye does not completely close,

that under its drooping lid appears the lower edge of an eyeball

and a little line of white. "Heaven give me memory," said I,

"and I will never wink again."

"Or smile," said Gibberne, with his eye on the lady's answering teeth.

"It's infernally hot, somehow," said I. "Let's go slower."

"Oh, come along!" said Gibberne.

We picked our way among the bath-chairs in the path. Many of

the people sitting in the chairs seemed almost natural in their

passive poses, but the contorted scarlet of the bandsmen was not

a restful thing to see. A purple-faced little gentleman was frozen

in the midst of a violent struggle to refold his newspaper against

the wind; there were many evidences that all these people in their

sluggish way were exposed to a considerable breeze, a breeze that

had no existence so far as our sensations went. We came out and

walked a little way from the crowd, and turned and regarded it.

To see all that multitude changed, to a picture, smitten rigid,

as it were, into the semblance of realistic wax, was impossibly

wonderful. It was absurd, of course; but it filled me with an irrational,

an exultant sense of superior advantage. Consider the wonder of it!

All that I had said, and thought, and done since the stuff had begun

to work in my veins had happened, so far as those people, so far

as the world in general went, in the twinkling of an eye. "The

New Accelerator--" I began, but Gibberne interrupted me.

"There's that infernal old woman!" he said.

"What old woman?"

"Lives next door to me," said Gibberne. "Has a lapdog that yaps.

Gods! The temptation is strong!"

There is something very boyish and impulsive about Gibberne at times.

Before I could expostulate with him he had dashed forward, snatched

the unfortunate animal out of visible existence, and was running

violently with it towards the cliff of the Leas. It was most

extraordinary. The little brute, you know, didn't bark or wriggle or

make the slightest sign of vitality. It kept quite stiffly in an

attitude of somnolent repose, and Gibberne held it by the neck. It

was like running about with a dog of wood. "Gibberne," I cried, "put

it down!" Then I said something else. "If you run like that,

Gibberne," I cried, "you'll set your clothes on fire. Your linen

trousers are going brown as it is!"

He clapped his hand on his thigh and stood hesitating on the verge.

"Gibberne," I cried, coming up, "put it down. This heat is too much!

It's our running so! Two or three miles a second! Friction of the air!"

"What?" he said, glancing at the dog.

"Friction of the air," I shouted. "Friction of the air. Going too

fast. Like meteorites and things. Too hot. And, Gibberne! Gibberne!

I'm all over pricking and a sort of perspiration. You can see people

stirring slightly. I believe the stuff's working off! Put that dog

down."

"Eh?" he said.

"It's working off," I repeated. "We're too hot and the stuff's

working off! I'm wet through."

He stared at me. Then at the band, the wheezy rattle of whose

performance was certainly going faster. Then with a tremendous sweep

of the arm he hurled the dog away from him and it went spinning

upward, still inanimate, and hung at last over the grouped parasols

of a knot of chattering people. Gibberne was gripping my elbow.

"By Jove!" he cried. "I believe--it is! A sort of hot pricking

and--yes. That man's moving his pocket-handkerchief! Perceptibly.

We must get out of this sharp."

But we could not get out of it sharply enough. Luckily, perhaps!

For we might have run, and if we had run we should, I believe,

have burst into flames. Almost certainly we should have burst into

flames! You know we had neither of us thought of that. . . . But

before we could even begin to run the action of the drug had ceased.

It was the business of a minute fraction of a second. The effect of

the New Accelerator passed like the drawing of a curtain, vanished in

the movement of a hand. I heard Gibberne's voice in infinite alarm.

"Sit down," he said, and flop, down upon the turf at the edge of the

Leas I sat--scorching as I sat. There is a patch of burnt grass

there still where I sat down. The whole stagnation seemed to wake

up as I did so, the disarticulated vibration of the band rushed

together into a blast of music, the promenaders put their feet down

and walked their ways, the papers and flags began flapping, smiles

passed into words, the winker finished his wink and went on his

way complacently, and all the seated people moved and spoke.

The whole world had come alive again, was going as fast as we were,

or rather we were going no faster than the rest of the world. It was

like slowing down as one comes into a railway station. Everything

seemed to spin round for a second or two, I had the most transient

feeling of nausea, and that was all. And the little dog which had

seemed to hang for a moment when the force of Gibberne's arm was

expended fell with a swift acceleration clean through a lady's parasol!

That was the saving of us. Unless it was for one corpulent old

gentleman in a bath-chair, who certainly did start at the sight of

us and afterwards regarded us at intervals with a darkly suspicious

eye, and, finally, I believe, said something to his nurse about us,

I doubt if a solitary person remarked our sudden appearance among

them. Plop! We must have appeared abruptly. We ceased to smoulder

almost at once, though the turf beneath me was uncomfortably hot. The

attention of every one--including even the Amusements' Association

band, which on this occasion, for the only time in its history,

got out of tune--was arrested by the amazing fact, and the still

more amazing yapping and uproar caused by the fact that a respectable,

over-fed lap-dog sleeping quietly to the east of the bandstand

should suddenly fall through the parasol of a lady on the west--in

a slightly singed condition due to the extreme velocity of its

movements through the air. In these absurd days, too, when we are

all trying to be as psychic, and silly, and superstitious as possible!

People got up and trod on other people, chairs were overturned,

the Leas policeman ran. How the matter settled itself I do not

know--we were much too anxious to disentangle ourselves from

the affair and get out of range of the eye of the old gentleman

in the bath-chair to make minute inquiries. As soon as we were

sufficiently cool and sufficiently recovered from our giddiness

and nausea and confusion of mind to do so we stood up and, skirting

the crowd, directed our steps back along the road below the Metropole

towards Gibberne's house. But amidst the din I heard very distinctly

the gentleman who had been sitting beside the lady of the ruptured

sunshade using quite unjustifiable threats and language to one of

those chair-attendants who have "Inspector" written on their caps.

"If you didn't throw the dog," he said, "who DID?"

The sudden return of movement and familiar noises, and our natural

anxiety about ourselves (our clothe's were still dreadfully hot,

and the fronts of the thighs of Gibberne's white trousers were

scorched a drabbish brown), prevented the minute observations

I should have liked to make on all these things. Indeed, I really

made no observations of any scientific value on that return. The bee,

of course, had gone. I looked for that cyclist, but he was already

out of sight as we came into the Upper Sandgate Road or hidden

from us by traffic; the char-a-banc, however, with its people now

all alive and stirring, was clattering along at a spanking pace

almost abreast of the nearer church.

We noted, however, that the window-sill on which we had stepped

in getting out of the house was slightly singed, and that the

impressions of our feet on the gravel of the path were unusually deep.

So it was I had my first experience of the New Accelerator. Practically

we had been running about and saying and doing all sorts of things

in the space of a second or so of time. We had lived half an hour

while the band had played, perhaps, two bars. But the effect it

had upon us was that the whole world had stopped for our convenient

inspection. Considering all things, and particularly considering our

rashness in venturing out of the house, the experience might certainly

have been much more disagreeable than it was. It showed, no doubt,

that Gibberne has still much to learn before his preparation is

a manageable convenience, but its practicability it certainly

demonstrated beyond all cavil.

Since that adventure he has been steadily bringing its use under

control, and I have several times, and without the slightest bad

result, taken measured doses under his direction; though I must

confess I have not yet ventured abroad again while under its influence.

I may mention, for example, that this story has been written at one

sitting and without interruption, except for the nibbling of some

chocolate, by its means. I began at 6.25, and my watch is now very

nearly at the minute past the half-hour. The convenience of securing

a long, uninterrupted spell of work in the midst of a day full

of engagements cannot be exaggerated. Gibberne is now working

at the quantitative handling of his preparation, with especial reference

to its distinctive effects upon different types of constitution.

He then hopes to find a Retarder with which to dilute its present

rather excessive potency. The Retarder will, of course, have the

reverse effect to the Accelerator; used alone it should enable

the patient to spread a few seconds over many hours of ordinary

time,--and so to maintain an apathetic inaction, a glacier-like

absence of alacrity, amidst the most animated or irritating

surroundings. The two things together must necessarily work an entire

revolution in civilised existence. It is the beginning of our escape

from that Time Garment of which Carlyle speaks. While this Accelerator

will enable us to concentrate ourselves with tremendous impact

upon any moment or occasion that demands our utmost sense and vigour,

the Retarder will enable us to pass in passive tranquillity through

infinite hardship and tedium. Perhaps I am a little optimistic

about the Retarder, which has indeed still to be discovered, but

about the Accelerator there is no possible sort of doubt whatever.

Its appearance upon the market in a convenient, controllable,

and assimilable form is a matter of the next few months. It will be

obtainable of all chemists and druggists, in small green bottles,

at a high but, considering its extraordinary qualities, by no means

excessive price. Gibberne's Nervous Accelerator it will be called,

and he hopes to be able to supply it in three strengths: one in 200,

one in 900, and one in 2000, distinguished by yellow, pink, and

white labels respectively.

No doubt its use renders a great number of very extraordinary things

possible; for, of course, the most remarkable and, possibly, even

criminal proceedings may be effected with impunity by thus dodging,

as it were, into the interstices of time. Like all potent preparations

it will be liable to abuse. We have, however, discussed this aspect

of the question very thoroughly, and we have decided that this

is purely a matter of medical jurisprudence and altogether outside

our province. We shall manufacture and sell the Accelerator, and,

as for the consequences--we shall see.

-THE END-
H. G. Wells' short story: The New Accelerator

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