10-Story Detective Magazine Cover — page 107: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

his assistant’s. But Volner had be- come unreasonable and claimed all the eredit. If he acknowledged this, Dr. Klausman would be left with only a crumb of fame which meant defeat to his desires. To deny the claim would mean a shadow cast upon his laurels. There was only one way to answer Isaac Volner. He must go, his whinings smothered in death, Lolling back in his luxurious easy chair, the doctor lapsed into the imag- inary again. Upon the ceiling he saw ereat audiences clamoring for light, piles of telegrams, of press notices, volumes of scientific works. All these and infinitely more would be his re- ward—beginning tomorrow. Tomorrow he would sit down at his desk and very calmly and deliberately write a letter to the president of the American Academy. That letter would be a bulletin to the world at large that there had been brought to recognition a new vitamin, the anti-scrofula vita- min—Vitamin K, the Klausman Vita- min. Rigid with the magnitude of the thought, Dr. Albert Klausman re- laxed only after long minutes, and then he found his squat, heavy frame trembling a little. Rousing himself and moving to the window he watched the throngs far below him. Antlike they seemed, miserable, non- entities milling about blindly. The thought sent new blood. coursing through the doctor’s veins. He, from this pinnacle of near-fame, knew per- fectly his own destination. And this was precisely as it should be. Abruptly he turned away from the window and filled a hypodermic syr- inge with a fluid from a small bottle in his medicine cabinet. The instru- ment concealed in his pocket, he pro- ceeded down the corridor of the build- ing, round, ponderous head sunk low between his shoulders, turning neither to right nor left, stocky legs bringing him up before an unmarked door in another wing. With a pink, well- boiled hand he extracted a key and turned the lock. DEAD MAN’S MARTYRDOM eee er SAAC VOLNER faced him. A penned-up hyena, worn fleshless trying to escape, could not have ap- peared more eager to leap at the throat of his guard. Under the mercury lamp his pale face was an ashy green, its furrows deep shadows converging at the inverted curve of his mouth. And his eyes burned with a quickened heat. “Well, Isaac, dear fellow,” the doc- tor greeted fatuously, “your work is almost over.” “No.” The puckered lips of the other moved imperceptibly, his hands twitching at the test tube in his thin’ fingers. “No—my work has just be- gun. I told you, Dr. Klausman, that I alone am the discoverer of Vitamin K, and so I am going down in history. I begin now the task of making the name Volner unforgettable.” “Yes, I believe you did say some- _thing of the sort, Isaac.” Dr. Klaus- man settled his bulk to a stool and gazed at the array of flasks and re- torts, with scarcely a glance at the assistant. “But of course you realize what you say is drivel, only the warped notions of a confined brain. You—an obscure laboratory man, making such a prodigious announce- ment, would be laughed out of hear- ing. And besides, it is not true. I am the discoverer of Vitamin K, having furnished all the funds for the experi- ments, and being well known and the expected source of such a revelation, I expect to name it the Klausman Vitamin.” A surge of emotion cost the assist- ant’s lungs bitter convulsion as he at- tempted to reply. Controlling himself, he spoke with measured care: “It is not my brain that is warped, doctor, but your own. And your heart is corroded, Last year I came to you with the idea that the anti-scrofula vitamin could be traced. You accepted my proposition to let me experiment, you to pay the expense, both of us to share the victory. I have done all the work, shut up in this airless prison, breathing this gas until my lungs are > comicboo ‘S