Gladiator (2 page)
Authors: Philip Wylie
In the early 1930s, frustrated by his experiences with Knopf and serious fiction, Wylie turned his energies to making a living off what he called “a bumper crop of crap.” Two of the books from that period would provide still more inspiration to the spinners of fantastical adventures:
The Savage Gentleman
from 1932 clearly inspired the
Doc Savage
pulps, which in turn worked some influence on Superman and other comic-book heroes, while
When Worlds Collide
, co-written with Edwin Balmer the following year, probably inspired
Flash Gordon
and perhaps also Superman's interplanetary origin story. Over the next several years, an entire industry of comic books, comic strips, movie serials, and licensed merchandise grew up around superheroes. Most of those were spun straight out of
Superman
and probably owed nothing directly to Wylie (although with some of them, like Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Captain America, a man transformed by an experimental serum into a very Danneresque super soldier, one has to wonder), but they all rested, to some degree, on the foundation of
Gladiator
.
By that time, however, Wylie himself had moved on. He tackled serious fiction again in
Finnley Wren
, then donned his own heroic garb in an assault on American sentimentality and mediocrity via his 1942 collection of essays called
Generation of Vipers.
For some years, he was a prominent presence in book stores and magazines, almost a household name. Then he faded, while Superman and his brethren only grew more numerous, more famous, more artistically complex, and more central to our popular culture. I'm glad we have this opportunity to look back at his contribution to the superheroesâbut I also suspect Wylie would appreciate it if we could leave that behind for a moment and read this first novel of his for what it was before Jerry Siegel discovered it: the self-conscious but
heartfelt
roar of a young man of wild ideas and wilder ambition, climbing onto a rock in the lightning storm of the first decade of the modern world.
G
ERARD
J
ONES
Gerard Jones is the author of several books, including
Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book
.
Contents
Chapter
I
O
NCE
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. Danner's placid dominion of her hearth was Professor Danner'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. After he had lectured vaguely to his classes on the structure of the
Paramecium caudatum
and the law discovered by Mendel, he would shut the door behind himself, and all the fury of the stalwart, black-haired woman could not drive him out until his own obscure ends were served.
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. She, bolt upright and overshadowing him, like a coffin in the pew, rigid lest her black silk rustle, thrilled in some corner of her mind at the picture of hell and salvation.
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 un enlightened 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 Gropper. He'll enjoy it.”
Danner, in some embarrassment, gulped a huge mouthful of meat. “Why not?” he said. “Look at the insectsâthe ants. Strength a hundred times our own. An ant can carry a large spiderâyet an ant is tissue and fiber, like a man. If a man could be given the same sinewsâhe could walk off with his own house.”
“Ha ha! There's a good one. Maybe you'll do it, Abednego.” “Possibly, possibly.”
“
And you would make a splendid piano-mover.”
“Pianos! Pooh! Consider the grasshoppers. Make a man as strong as a grasshopperâand 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 itâtransplant itâand you have the solution.”
Mirth overtook Professor Mudge in a series of paroxysms from which he emerged rubicund and witty. “Probably your grasshopper man will look like a grasshopperâmore insect than man. At least, Danner, you have imagination.”
“Few people have,” Danner said, and considered that he had acquitted himself.
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 mattersâespecially 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 parlour. She stirred angrily in her clothes and speared a morsel of food. “You'll be punished for it.”
Later in the day Mudge and Gropper laughed heartily at the expense of the former's erstwhile host. Danner read restively. He was forbidden to work on the Sabbath. It was his only compromise. Matilda Danner turned the leaves of the Bible and meditated in a partial vacuum of day-dreams.
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 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 reburgeoning 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?”
“
Noâyes.”
“WellâI won't have such goings on, and that's all there is to it.”
Danner collected the débris. 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 ateâbeefsteaks 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 rigours 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.
“It's hungry,” Mrs. Danner said. “If you must keep a cat, why don't you feed it?”
“
I do,” he answered. He refrained, for politic reasons, from mentioning what and how much he fed it. The kitten mewed again.
“Well,” she repeated, “it sounds hungry.”
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 here? No, I don't want it here. Take it a cover.”
“Itâit 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 husband's quivering face and then to the broken door. On his part, he made no move. The kitten was a scant six inches from his foot. Mrs. Danner rose. She went to the door and studied the orifice, prying at it with her fingers as if to measure the kitten's strength by her own. Then she turned the key and peered into the gloom. That required either consummate nerve or great curiosity. After her inspection she sat down again.
Ten minutes passed. Danner cleared his throat. Then she spoke. “So. You've done it?”
“Done what?” he asked innocently.
“You've made all this rubbish you've been talking about strengthâhappen to that kitten.”
