Gladiator | Page 2

microscope he had designed. "Huh!" he said. An hour later, while
he stirred a solution in a beaker, he said: "Huh!" again. He repeated it
when his wife called him to dinner. The room was a maze of test tubes,
bottles, burners, retorts, instruments. During the meal he did not speak.
Afterwards he resumed work. At twelve he prepared six tadpole eggs
and put them to hatch. It would be his three hundred and sixty-first

separate tadpole hatching.
Then, one day in June, Danner crossed the campus with unusual haste.
Birds were singing, a gentle wind eddied over the town from the slopes
of the Rocky Mountains, flowers bloomed. The professor did not heed
the re-burgeoning of nature. A strange thing had happened to him that
morning. He had peeped into his workroom before leaving for the
college and had come suddenly upon a phenomenon.
One of the tadpoles had hatched in its aquarium. He observed it eagerly,
first because it embodied his new idea, and second because it swam
with a rare activity. As he looked, the tadpole rushed at the side of its
domicile. There was a tinkle and a splash. It had swum through the
plate glass! For an instant it lay on the floor. Then, with a flick of its
tail, it flew into the air and hit the ceiling of the room.
"Good Lord!" Danner said. Old years of work were at an end. New
years of excitement lay ahead. He snatched the creature and it wriggled
from his grasp. He caught it again. His fist was not sufficiently strong
to hold it. He left it, flopping in eight-foot leaps, and went to class with
considerable suppressed agitation and some reluctance. The
determinant was known. He had made a living creature abnormally
strong.
When he reached his house and unlocked the door of the laboratory, he
found that four tadpoles, in all, had hatched. Before they expired in the
unfamiliar element of air, they had demolished a quantity of apparatus.
Mrs. Danner knocked on the door. "What's been going on in there?"
"Nothing," her husband answered.
"Nothing! It sounded like nothing! What have you got there? A cat?'
"No--yes."
"Well--I won't have such goings on, and that's all there is to it."

Danner collected the debris. He buried the tadpoles. One was dissected
first. Then he wrote for a long time in his notebook. After that he went
out and, with some difficulty, secured a pregnant cat. A week later he
chloroformed the tabby and inoculated her. Then he waited. He had
been patient for a long time. It was difficult to be patient now.
When the kittens were born into this dark and dreary world, Mr.
Danner assisted as sole obstetrician. In their first hours nothing marked
them as unique. The professor selected one and drowned the remainder.
He remembered the tadpoles and made a simple calculation.
When the kitten was two weeks old and its eyes opened, it was dieting
on all its mother's milk and more besides. The Professor considered that
fact significant. Then one day it committed matricide.
Probably the playful blow of its front paw was intended in the best
spirit. Certainly the old tabby, receiving it, was not prepared for such
violence from its offspring. Danner gasped. The kitten had unseamed
its mother in a swift and horrid manner. He put the cat out of its misery
and tended the kitten with trepidation. It grew. It ate--beefsteaks and
chops, bone and all.
When it reached three weeks, it began to jump alarmingly. The
laboratory was not large enough. The professor brought it its food with
the expression of a man offering a wax sausage to a hungry panther.
On a peaceful Friday evening Danner built a fire to stave off the rigors
of a cold snap. He and Mrs. Danner sat beside the friendly blaze. Her
sewing was in her lap, and in his was a book to which he paid scant
attention. The kitten, behind its locked door, thumped and mewed.
Danner fidgeted. The laboratory was unheated and consequently chilly.
From its gloomy interior the kitten peered beneath the door and saw the
fire. It sensed warmth. The feline affinity for hearths drew it. One paw
scratched tentatively on the door.
"It's cold," Mrs. Danner said. "Why don't you bring it in here? No, I
don't want it here. Take it a cover."

"It--it has a cover." Danner did not wish to go into that dark room.
The kitten scratched again and then it became earnest. There was a
splitting, rending sound. The bottom panel of the door was torn away
and it emerged nonchalantly, crossing the room and curling up by the
fire.
For five minutes Mrs. Danner sat motionless. Her eyes at length moved
from the kitten to her