"Yes. When are you going to fit arms and legs on him? He should be practicing with them at this stage of the game, I should think—I was."
"You should think—but, unfortunately, you don't, about anything except war," was the surgeon's dry rejoinder. "If you did, you would have paid more attention to what Phillips has been doing. He is making the final test today. Come along—your conference with Kinnison can wait half an hour."
In the research laboratory which had been assigned to Phillips they found von Hohendorff with the Posenian. Haynes was surprised to see the old commandant of cadets, but Lacy quite evidently had known that he was to be there.
"Phillips," the surgeon general began, "explain to Admiral Haynes, in nontechnical language, what you are doing."
"The original problem was to discover what hormone or other agent caused proliferation of neural tissue—"
"Wait a minute; I'd better do it," Lacy broke in. "Anyway, you wouldn't do yourself justice. The first thing that Phillips found out was that the problem of repairing damaged nervous tissue was inextricably involved with several other unknown things, such as the original growth of such tissue, its relationship to growth in general, the regeneration of lost members in lower forms, and so on. You see, Haynes, it is a known fact that nerves do grow, or else they could not exist; and in some lower forms of life they regenerate. Those facts were all he had, at first. In higher forms, even during the growth stage, regeneration does not occur spontaneously. Phillips set out to find out why.
"The thyroid controls growth, but does not initiate it, he learned. This fact seemed to indicate that there was an unknown hormone involved—that certain lower types possess an endocrine gland which is either atrophied or non-existent in higher types. If the latter, he was sunk. He reasoned, however, that, since higher types evolved from lower, the gland in question might very well exist in a vestigial stage. He studied animals, thousands of them, from the germ upward. He exhausted the patience of the Posenian authorities; and when they cut off his appropriation, on the ground that the thing was impossible, he came here. We gave him carte blanche.
"The man is a miracle of perseverence, a keen observer, a shrewd reasoner, and a mechanic par excellence—a born researcher. Therefore, in time he learned what it must be: to cut it short, the pineal body. Then he had to find the stimulant. Drugs, chemicals, and spectrum of radiation; singly and in combination. Years of plugging, with just enough progress to keep him at it. Visits to other planets peopled by races human to two places or more; learning everything that had been done along the line of his problem. When you fellows moved Medon over here he visited it as a matter of routine, and there he hit the jackpot. Wise himself is a surgeon, and the Medonians have for centuries been having warfare and grief enough, steadily and in heroic doses, to develop the medical and surgical arts no end.
"They knew how to stimulate the pineal—a combination of drugs and specific radiations—but their method was dangerous. With Phillips' fresh viewpoint, his wide, new knowledge, and his mechanical genius, they worked out a new and highly satisfactory technique. He was going to try it out on a pirate going into the lethal chamber, but von Hohendorff heard about it and insisted that it should be tried on him. Got up on his Unattached Lensman's high horse and won't come down. So here we are."
"Hm-m-m—interesting!" The admiral had listened attentively. "You're pretty sure that it will work, aren't you?"