"That stuff about the million monkeys is true," I point out. "I read that myself in a science magazine. I got a hunch there's more to his idea than he figures. If my laboratory was set up I'd try it myself. Maybe I better had, anyways."
"Buck!" wheezes old Jode, "You'll be the death of me!"
He near strangles, laughin'. I get mad. "Okay," I say, "but I tell you right now you better let me do it if you sure-enough want that elixir. Icelandic spar ain't what he said. He's got good dope, but he's a phoney!"
Old Jode thinks that's so funny I go out and take a walk to cool off. But the more I think about it, the better the Prof's stuff looks. Next day I go to the public library and hunt up alchemy. I get a bunch of books out in the reading-room. Trismigestus. Bacon. Theophrastus. Paracelsus. Count Graby. I read them, fast, taking notes when necessary. I get fascinated; the stuff sounds plenty convincing. I get excited. It's as good as some science fiction. I fill my head up with the stuff, and a notebook with memos.
I go to a drug-store and buy some test-tubes. I get a alcohol-burner and some denatured; I go to a paint store and buy some more stuff. I have to hunt high and low before I can find a hobby-shop with geological specimens. I get some stuff there. Fluor-spar. The clerk sells it to me indifferent. Plenty of guys my age mess around with experiments; I get everything I need, except some egg-skin.
I go back to the hotel, lock the door and put the stuff together. I have not got pure chemicals. A hunk of native sulphur. I catch some soot from safety matches that I burn one after another under a metal ash-tray. I've got a hunk of sal-ammoniac—lump stuff, not what they sell at a drug-store. Nobody will sell me oil of vitriol, but I get some at a garage where they have it for storage batteries. I got some iron pyrites. I mix the stuff up careful. It makes an awful stink. I have to open the windows. I go through all the routine that a guy named Dr. Dee says would make a universal solvent. Nothing happens. Nothing at all.
I am pretty much disgusted. The Prof's stuff sounded good. If I'd read it in a science magazine I would've believed it and remembered it. But nothing happens. Next morning I am having breakfast when I remember about the skin of a egg. That is crazy. It ain't scientific; not modern scientific, anyhow. But I go upstairs with a egg-shell from breakfast. I get out that thin skin from inside and put it in the test-tube. Nothing happens.
I get disgusted all over again. I sit down with a science magazine, and I am reading it morbid, when I smell something funny. The test-tube is empty. There is a little white vapor around the bottom. There is a hole in the test-tube; there is a hole in the sink; there is a hole in the floor underneath. It stinks something awful. I don't know how far down the hole goes, but I know I got to get a laboratory and work this business out!
I tell old Jode about it. I show him the hole in the floor and the sink. He turns funny colors. "You mighta made poison gas, Buck!" he says. "You coulda killed yourself! It coulda been poison!"