Gladiator

Gladiator
by Philip Wylie
1930
(copyright unrenewed)
"I see thee in the hemisphere advanced and made a constellation there!"
From Ben Jonson's "Mr. William Shakespeare"
Chapter I
ONCE upon a time in Colorado lived a man named Abednego Danner
and his wife, Matilda. Abednego Danner was a professor of biology in
a small college in the town of Indian Creek. He was a spindling wisp of
a man, with a nature drawn well into itself by the assaults of the world
and particularly of the grim Mrs. Danner, who understood nothing and
undertook all. Nevertheless these two lived modestly in a frame house
on the hem of Indian Creek and they appeared to be a settled and
peaceful couple.
The chief obstacle to Mrs. Banner's placid dominion of her hearth was
Professor Banner's laboratory, which occupied a room on the first floor
of the house. It was the one impregnable redoubt in her domestic
stronghold. Neither threat nor entreaty would drive him and what she
termed his "stinking, unchristian, unhealthy dinguses" from that room.
It never occurred to Professor Danner that he was a great man or a
genius. His alarm at such a notion would have been pathetic. He was so
fascinated by the trend of his thoughts and experiments, in fact, that he
scarcely realized by what degrees he had outstripped a world that wore
picture hats, hobble skirts, and straps beneath its trouser legs. However,
as the century turned and the fashions changed, he was carried further

from them, which was just as well.
On a certain Sunday he sat beside his wife in church, singing snatches
of the hymns in a doleful and untrue voice and meditating, during the
long sermon, on the structure of chromosomes.
Mr. Danner's thoughts turned to Professor Mudge, whose barren pate
showed above the congregation a few rows ahead of him. There, he
said to himself, sat a stubborn and unenlightened man. And so, when
the weekly tyranny of church was ended, he asked Mudge to dinner.
That he accomplished by an argument with his wife, audible the length
of the aisle.
They walked to the Danner residence. Mrs. Danner changed her clothes
hurriedly, basted the roast, made milk sauce for the string beans, and
set three places. They went into the dining-room. Danner carved, the
home-made mint jelly was passed, the bread, the butter, the gravy; and
Mrs. Danner dropped out of the conversation, after guying her husband
on his lack of skill at his task of carving.
Mudge opened with the usual comment. "Well, Abednego, how are the
blood-stream radicals progressing?"
His host chuckled. "Excellently, thanks. Some day I'll be ready to jolt
you hidebound biologists into your senses."
Mudge's left eyebrow lifted. "So? Still the same thing, I take it? Still
believe that chemistry controls human destiny?"
"Almost ready to demonstrate it," Danner replied.
"Along what lines?"
"Muscular strength and the nervous discharge of energy."
Mudge slapped his thigh. "Ho ho! Nervous discharge of energy. You
assume the human body to be a voltaic pile, eh? That's good. I'll have
to tell Cropper. He'll enjoy it."

Danner, in some embarrassment, gulped a huge mouthful of meat.
"Why not?" he said. "Look at the insects--the ants. Strength a hundred
times our own. An ant can carry a large spider--yet an ant is tissue and
fiber, like a man. If a man could be given the same sinews--he could
walk off with his own house."
"Ha ha! There's a good one. And you would make a splendid
piano-mover, Abednego.
"Pianos! Pooh! Consider the grasshoppers. Make a man as strong as a
grasshopper--and he'll be able to leap over a church. I tell you, there is
something that determines the quality of every muscle and nerve. Find
it--transplant it--and you have the solution."
His wife interrupted at that point. "I think this nonsense has gone far
enough. It is wicked to tamper with God's creatures. It is wicked to
discuss such matters--especially on the Sabbath. Abednego, I wish you
would give up your work in the laboratory."
Danner's cranium was overlarge and his neck small; but he stiffened it
to hold himself in a posture of dignity. "Never."
His wife gazed from the defiant pose to the locked door visible through
the parlor. She stirred angrily in her clothes and speared a morsel of
food. "You'll be punished for it."
On Monday Danner hastened home from his classes. During the night
he had had a new idea. And a new idea was a rare thing after fourteen
years of groping investigation. "Alkaline radicals," he murmured as he
crossed his lawn. He considered a group of ultra-microscopic bodies.
He had no name for them. They were the "determinants" of which he
had talked. He locked the laboratory door behind himself and bent over
the