Spice of Life

Spice of Life

Mark LaFlamme

Louie Spice was a simple man with a simple life, right up until the morning he awoke with knowledge to halt the aging process.

At about 9 a.m., as he did every morning since his lower back went bust and he had to abandon the bus route, Louie began to stir. As she did every morning since her husband began collecting disability, Maria Spice hovered over the bed with a cup of coffee clamped in one hand.

The gleaming orb of Louie’s bald head was sunk low in the pillow. The heap of blankets that entombed him began to tremble. There was a long sigh that was almost a groan as Louie began to wake.

Maria smiled at the familiar signs of stirring. Her husband was a man of habit in all things. Yet today, when his head lifted from the pillow and his body began to rise, instead of wishing his wife a good morning, Louie Spice said this:

“It is only a matter of protecting the mitochondrial DNA and using a simple solution to transplant it to the nucleus. All mutations will be mended and the enzymes will take care of the rest.”

Then his eyes blinked open and Louie rolled to the edge of the bed. He stared up at his frowning wife and smacked his lips. He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and rubbed them.

“Good morning, Maria.”

She was an easily rattled woman and showing each of her 52 years. Having experienced a ripple in the fabric of their routine, Maria only stood there, frowning and clutching the coffee. She looked down at her husband in his white, striped pajamas and wondered if she were somehow responsible for this lapse.

“What is this nonsense,” she said at last, handing over the mug so she could fold her arms appropriately. “What in God’s name are you ranting about, Louie?”

Louie stood, holding on to the cup with some effort. He pulled his shoulders back and yawned mightily. He reached back to scratch his backside, remembered that his lumbar would protest at such a motion, and decided to live with the itch.

“Nothing, Nothing, Maria. I was only dreaming of mitochondria, the amino acid chain and a small reworking of the DNA sequence.”

Louie had stepped from the bedroom, toes curled up against the cold, hard wood floor, when the import of his last sentence seized him. He stopped so suddenly, coffee spilled from the cup and his wife of 34 years bumped him from behind.

Louie wheeled, spilling more coffee. He stared down into the wide eyed gaze of his mousy wife. One beefy hand shot out and clutched her delicate shoulder.

“My God, Maria! Do you realize what I just said? I’ve dreamed of a way to put an end to aging!” Louie closed his eyes a moment, lips drawn in a frown. Then the eyes snapped open and they went as wide as his wife’s. “And I remember it! I remember it all!”

If there was something to be said about the dynamics of Louie Spice it was that he let go of dreams easily. As a boy, he fantasized about becoming the first astronomer to find proof of life on another planet. From his bedroom window, he’d stare into the night sky and imagine himself greeted by throngs of admirers as news of his historic discovery spread across the planet.

But he was lousy with math, his grasp of science was weak and, anyway, he learned it took years of college to break into the field. There was no time. He would lumber through school while some other scientist made the big discovery. He would wind up with a degree he’d sweated years for and would never be able to put to practical use.

The telescope sold at a yard sale for five dollars. Young Louie took the spaceship posters down from his bedroom wall.

As a teenager, he’d refined his dream and brought it down below the stratosphere. Louie longed to become an international airline pilot and fly to islands few people had visited. He would fly all his life and know the planet the way regular people knew their own neighborhoods.

But there was a small defect in the left ventricle of his heart detected when he was a child. The condition caused him few problems, but the Air Force rejected him outright. His medical prognosis might change in a few years, he was told. There was always the option to try again.

Louie watched commercial planes flying overhead and decided that time again had screwed him out of a dream. He didn’t linger long in his lament. He dismissed ideas of studying different worlds or flying across the planet. In time, he resisted the temptation to indulge in even the smallest of dreams.

Louie took a job driving a school bus and married a girl he knew in high school. He ultimately moved on to a route with the city bus service, but otherwise, he was unwavering about his new commitment to low goals.

He and Maria bought a small house at the end of a dead-end street and tried to have a child. When that proved impossible (it was learned that Maria had a defect in one ovary. From that pronouncement, she began to assume blame for any calamity that befell the couple), they accepted it and resigned themselves to a quiet, childless marriage.

Louie lost an occasional moment or two staring at planes flying overhead. Once in a while, he disappeared into daydreams while staring up into a sky full of stars. But they were brief lapses and he didn’t dwell on them. For the most part, the low hum of routine replaced the roiling uncertainty of dreams.

Louie didn’t mingle with the other drivers from his route. Maria worked two afternoons a week at the fabric store but didn’t have friends of her own. They ate supper at 6 each night. They were in bed by 10.

Once a year, they spent a week in Bar Harbor 200 miles to the north. They took that vacation almost perfunctorily because it was expected of them. Seven days of shops and hotels and beaches and mountains wore on them much more than the tedium of their lives at home. For Maria, any place beyond a mile radius of their little house was too loud and raucous. For Louie, the smiling arrogance of youth in Bar Harbor reminded him that his own life had grinded away without event. The misplaced couple pretended to have a grand old time and then returned home to the prosaic comfort of their daily customs.

Louie was not a brilliant man or even very smart. The few novels he had read all the way through, he didn’t quite understand. He was handy with a drill gun or a table saw, but most of what he read in the newspaper confused him.

He was not a poetic man nor one given to creative inspiration. He drove a bus, drove well, and deposited the same amount into a savings account each week. Time marched on.

When his back finally went, at the end of a shift three months ago, it was chaos in the Spice household. The disruption to the treadmill repetition of their lives was like a death in the family. Suddenly, there were appointments at the chiropractor and at the office of disability. There were long hours at home together and strange silences to fill.

Maria began working three afternoons instead of two. Louie replaced the chiropractor with a hypnotist to manage his back pain. That was all the shaking up they could stand. Their lives in turmoil, the harried couple battled to regain some semblance of routine. Louie saw the hypnotist at the same hour of the same day each week and the pain was managed. Maria worked out a schedule at the fabric store so that her hours did not fluctuate. And with those details in place, the quiet couple returned to their lives of invariant routine and all was well again. Without words, they congratulated each other on getting through the hard time. The tick tock passage of time again filled the Spice household with its soothing rhythm.

And now this. Louie Spice had awakened with a wonderful, horrible knowledge and their lives were again in tumult.

He paced the house in his pajamas, bare feet slapping on wooden floors. He mumbled to himself. He absently arranged pillows on the couch, a centerpiece on the kitchen table, chairs in the dining room. Through it all, Maria followed him faithfully, wringing hands in front of her bosom.

“What is it, Louie? Is it a sickness?”

But Louie didn’t hear. He straightened a picture (the two of them looking glum in ill fitting evening wear at a city banquet honoring the bus drivers) and continued to pace.

“The free radicals, that’s all it is. The damage to the mitochondria is small, but ultimately fatal. Protect the mitochondrial DNA from mutations and the trigger to the aging process is blocked.”

The tight bun had come apart at the back of Maria’s head. Now gray strands flew wild around her scalp like floating snakes. Her eyes were wider than ever. Her lower lip trembled. White knees cracked beneath the hem of her dress as she followed her husband to and fro.

In the living room, he turned on her. Both hands were free now and this time he clutched both of her shoulders and held her fast. He was wincing as though in agony and his wide, round face was very red.

“But that’s not all of it. There is Ribosome to consider, and the nucleotide bases. The codon has three nucleotide bases and, that… that…”

The big hands on Maria’s shoulders lost their strength. Her husband’s shoulders sagged and it appeared he would fall to the floor. Instead, he released his grip and felt his way to an easy chair behind him. He fell down into it with a tired moan. His hands went to his face and covered his eyes. Louie Spice looked like a man in the grip of a migraine.

“I was wrong, Maria. I don’t know it all. The mitochondrial aspect of it is there as clear as the alphabet. The rest is lost to me.”

Astonishingly, Louie’s chest began to hitch. Beneath the hands, he was sobbing. Maria watched with growing horror as her husband, for the first time in their marriage, began to weep before her.

“Breakfast. You need breakfast, Louie.”

And with that, she scurried off to the kitchen, convincing herself as she went that pancakes and bacon would cure him of this entire ordeal. And as she whisked the eggs and measured out the milk, Maria Spice began to believe that this was all her doing. Somehow, the fever that gripped her husband’s brain was all her fault.

Louie had flown only once in his life, ten years ago to visit his dying brother in Nebraska. But he remembered vividly the feeling of climbing up and up and up as the 767 shot toward the clouds. He recalled the awesome sight of land falling away to miniature form beneath them. He had, at times, held his breath as they banked in one direction or another. The vision of lakes snaking through green, fuzzy land from high above was so stunningly beautiful it was other worldly.

Those memories kept him awake almost until midnight. Next to him in the double bed, Maria snapped out of sleep every time her husband stirred. It was a bad night for the Spices, by their standards. But eventually, visions of flying were replaced by the soft, cottony images of dreams, and Louie fell to sleep with nonsense in his head.

In the morning, Maria puttered around the house in a worry until it was time for her husband to wake. She started the coffee machine at quarter to nine before discovering she had forgotten to put grounds in the bucket. The morning frown deepened as she started the process over.

At 9 a.m., she was hovering over the bed and waiting for the first signs of waking. Within minutes, the heap of blankets began to tremble. The shiny head twisted on the pillow. Maria hovered and prayed her husband would greet her with a simple good morning.

It was not to be. Louie lifted his head slightly, sighed, and said: “polyribosomees are needed for synthesis. The five S is found in the mitoplasts and the apocytochome needs to be altered to convert DHEA into estrogen and testosterone.”

Then he blinked and became fully awake. With uncommon haste, he flung the blankets from his body and spun in the bed so that his feet were on the floor. Louie stared up at his wife but his gaze bore right through her.

“Good God. Good God, Maria, it’s that simple. Such a small alteration to the apocytochrome, I can’t believe I didn’t see it yesterday.”

Then Louie was on his feet and parading around the house again. And again his small wife followed and fretted as her normally staid husband continued to rant. He ranted about things like acridines and ethidium and bumped into furniture. He babbled about mitochondrial genome maintenance and poured into a cereal bowl. To Maria, it could not have been more disturbing if Louie had begun to levitate or to speak in tongues. It was as though her husband of three decades were possessed by a demon with a particular love of science.

“A doctor. We’ll get you to a doctor, Louie. Maybe you bumped your head and don’t even know it.”

Louie hissed at her (another first), mumbled something about the quack diagnoses of his left ventricle, and then went back to raving. It was terrible. It was frightening. Midway through their third trip across the living room, with rain pelting the windows and her husband roaring on about nucleotides, Maria was spent. She collapsed into a heap on the couch and began to bawl.

It took several moments before her husband noticed her breakdown. But he did notice at last, and he stopped pacing in the middle of the living room. He winced as though he’d been slapped. The reverie was over. Louie rushed to his gushing wife and knelt before her, clutching her pale, bony hands in his large, meaty ones.

“No, Maria. Don’t cry. This is a wonderful thing. Really it is.”

“It’s not wonderful,” she sobbed, staring at her husband with the wide-eyed look of hysteria. “It’s awful and frightening. Something’s wrong with you. Something is horribly, horribly wrong.”

Louie, unaccustomed to comforting a weeping wife, tried to make soothing sounds as he caressed her hands. He forced a smile and tried a soft look.

“But it is wonderful. I can’t explain it, not any of it. But imagine it, Maria. Imagine if I can make it so we never grow older. We’re still young enough to have magnificent lives. We can do all the things we always wanted to do but never had the time.”

The suggestion only made Maria wail louder. She flung her head back in absolute despair at this unbelievable disruption to their lives.

“But I don’t want to do anything more. I like things the way they are. Aren’t you happy, Louie? Don’t you like our lives the way they are?”

Louie thought: airplanes and space ships. I might be around long enough to see life discovered up there, yet. I might be here to take rocket rides through the cosmos. It will only be a few decades. There might be time after all.

Louie was dreaming of things heretofore unattainable.

But of course, he said none of this to his inconsolable wife. He only stroked her hands and made shhhh noises to tempt her out of her gloom. And after several minutes, the unprecedented storm of her emotions began to subside. Her chest heaved as she swallowed large gulps of air. Her chin quivered but the bawling had ceased. Maria sat primly with her hands at war in her lap and tears drying on her cheeks. Louie stood and pulled her up with him. He returned his hands to her shoulders and stared earnestly down into her face.

“One chance, that’s all I want. Just let me get a few things, try a few experiments and I’ll be done with it. I’ll use the far corner of the basement so you won’t have to see any of it. Just a few simple things, Maria, and I’ll be done.”

She hitched in one last sob and stared back at her husband. Hope was dawning in her eyes, like a child who believes he might get the bicycle for Christmas after all.

“And then you’ll stop all of this? You promise? Promise me, Louie.”

He smiled for the second time today. “I promise.”

Maria assessed him and judged him sincere. She mustered a smile of her own, though it vanished quickly.

“Do you really know it all, Louie? Do you really know enough.”

“No. Not all of it and not enough. The rest will come tonight, though. I’m sure of it.”

Louie was right. In the morning, he awoke just before nine. His feet kicked at the blankets. His head lolled on the pillow. He groaned softly and smacked his lips.

“The rate and pattern of sequence substitutions in the mitochondrial DNA must be altered precisely. The human mitochondrial mutation MT DNA 4977 is a 4,977-bp deletion that originates between two 13-bp direct repeats.”

The eyes snapped open. A thrashing, a twisting and his feet were on the floor. He reached out to his wife and grabbed her wrists. Maria recoiled and uttered a short, sharp scream. The coffee cup fell to the floor and exploded, spraying Louie’s feet. He didn’t notice.

“Maria. Quick! A pencil and pad!”

“Louie, what…”

“Quick, I said! Get me a pencil and pad. The drawer with the phone book. Hurry, Maria. Hurry!”

She was whining in her chest like a child on the verge of a tantrum, but Maria moved out of the room quickly. Louie could hear her in the kitchen, sobbing but rifling through the drawer. He sat on the edge of the bed, fingers pressed into his temples. After a moment, his wife returned holding a small, square pad of paper and a pencil with the tip dulled to a shiny ball. Louie snatched it from her and began to write, the pad pressed into an upper thigh.

Maria watched the pencil fly across the paper. She had never seen her husband do so much as a crossword puzzle, but he wrote now with a finesse that hinted of passionate knowledge. He quickly jotted four numbers and beneath them, a long string of letters. When he reached the bottom of the page, he flipped to the next one, the pencil never pausing in his fingers. His face was red again, and sweat streamed down the sides of his face, over his collar bone and down into his pajama top.

Maria leaned in close to watch him write. More letters. Only long rows of letters like one huge, nonsensical word. Maria bit her lower lip to keep from crying and watched her husband write. Page after page, he filled with letters. Occasionally, he placed a pair of them in parenthesis and separated them by comas. Maria started to ask what that meant and thought better of it. And as her husband flipped the last page in the pad, she was stricken with panic, wondering where she would find more paper. But then Louie departed from the long river of letters and wrote a strange formula at the bottom of the page: 5.95 x 10(-8). And then, grinning gleefully, he scratched a circle around the odd group of numbers and drew a line through it, like a no smoking sign. The pencil snapped in half. Maria gasped. Then Louie was on his feet so swiftly, it startled her. She stepped back, but Louie seized her, laughing. He reached for her, pulled her close and hugged her with a ferocity she had not experienced since the honeymoon. He hugged her tight and then drew away, cupping her horrified face in his giant hands.

“That’s it. That’s all, Maria. It’s that easy. We are going to live long, long, long lives. Very long lives indeed!"

The insanity of the past three days reached a peak that afternoon. Maria was exhausted, physically and emotionally, from watching her husband’s ascent into whatever form of genius or madness had befallen him. She felt like a woman perpetually falling back in a chair, that jolting moment of panic sustained forever.

But Louie insisted they not deviate from the day’s routine. It was Thursday and she was expected at the fabric store. Louie would keep his appointment one last time and then treat the back pain with Advil alone. The pain would not last forever. And forever, to Louie, was something close to attainable.

“When my appointment is over, I have several stops to make. The pharmacy, the university, the toy store. I’ll need to…”

“The toy store, Louie?”

They were sitting together on the sofa in the living room. Rain had given way to sun and the room was bright and warm. Louie sat with his arm draped over her shoulder, something he had not done in many years.

“The toy store, yes. I need a very basic chemistry set, just like the ones we had when we were kids.”

Maria, who had been very poor as a child, looked at her hands, as if in shame. “I never had a chemistry set.”

Louie hugged her tighter. “Well, you’ll have that and more. All those things you thought had vanished with time? There is time yet to have them. All the time in the world. What did you want when you were young, Maria? What was it that you wanted but never had?”

“Oh, Louie…”

He poked her ribs. He tickled her. Maria giggled and then gasped at the sound. She fell silent, pondering.

“A rocking horse. I always wanted a rocking horse like Sally Nagem from Brookside Street. A brown, wood one, with real hair on the mane.”

Louie slapped her leg. “Consider it done! The lady wants a rocking horse, the lady gets a rocking horse. But that’s such a little thing. What about the big things? Big, beautiful and expensive things that always seemed beyond your reach?”

“Louie, that’s just crazy talk.”

He wrapped both arms around her this time. He kissed her forehead. It was such a strange reaction, Maria felt as though she were dreaming.

“None of it’s crazy,” he said. “None of it at all. We’ll take trips to places where we can be alone together, instead of fighting the crowds in Bar Harbor. I’ll learn to fly and we’ll buy an airplane. We’ll fly up and down New England, for starters. Stay in quiet, little inns down in Martha’s Vineyard, zip over to Marblehead… We can build a big, beautiful house wherever we want, and leave this cramped, drafty hut behind.”

Maria flinched in his arms. “I love our house, Louie. I never want to leave it. And anyway, we don’t have that kind of money.”

He rolled his eyes and waved the comment away. “Money! When you live forever, I imagine you collect quite a hefty bank account. And anyway, I’ll sell this knowledge of mine. After I’ve treated us both, of course. I’ll sell it for millions and then we’ll be on our way.”

Maria was still trying to get her mind over the idea that her simple husband had developed a means to end aging. Part of her still suspected he might be insane. Part of her believed him. The confidence about him, why it was near a swagger. Maria remembered the young Louie Spice who once swaggered through the halls of Lewiston High School.

She looked at him. “This treatment. I’m not so sure I like the sound of that.”

“It’s a mere shot. Or rather, a series of shots. Just one a day over three days and we’re done. We’ll roll up our sleeves, pick a vein and then it’s over, Maria. We won’t have to worry all the time about our health, our retirement fund, our burial plots.”

She thought of that, not quite warming to the idea just yet, but thawing a little.

“It will make us younger?”

Louie laughed. “No. Not younger. But we’re young enough, yet. The perfect age, if you don’t have to worry about getting any older.”

Maria thought some more, but Louie interrupted her. It was time to go. To work, to appointments, just like the old routine. Tonight he would get to work in the basement. By morning, he would have everything he needed.

“It’s just like that old saying,” he told her, backing the Buick out of the short driveway. “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives. I always wondered what the hell that meant.”

Maria sat stiffly in the passenger seat, hands at war in her lap.

Time flew at the fabric store. Maria wandered in a daze, cutting swatches, taking inventory of the stacks and carrying unfinished quilts to the back of the store, where they would be stitched to completion on the giant machine.

She had chosen not to mention it to Louie, but Maria had always wanted one of the big machines. She could finish her own quilts without sending them out for final stitching. She could take in work from others. One day, she imagined, she might make so much money, she wouldn’t need the job at Fab Fabrics anymore.

But the machines cost nearly a thousand dollars and there was no room for one in the small house. She was getting older and may not have the eye for detail much longer. It was a notion Maria had long ago tucked away.

But now. Louie spoke so convincingly of his inexplicable knowledge of the aging process, that Maria was beginning to believe. What if it could be done? What if they were not entering the twilight of their lives, but the infancy?

She was an unremarkable woman and she knew it. Maria had never been remarkable. She had grown up poor and bland and she stayed that way, rather than engage in the fierce battle required to overcome the resign.

Once or twice, she wondered what she might look like with a complete makeover, the kind you get in the big cities and that cost a small fortune. Occasionally, she wondered if she might experience a flicker of confidence if she were pretty instead of drab, if her clothes were not ten years out of style, if she dyed her hair and let it down instead of hiding it in a bun.

What if they had money and years to burn? What repairs to her outer and inner being might be made if she had years to do it, and the comfort of time to rely on? She might be pretty under all those years of shyness and resign. She might be charming in her own, awkward way.

Maria tucked bundles of fabric onto long shelves and allowed herself the luxury of dreaming. She imagined them building additions to the small house while aging neighbors looked on in wonder. She imagined trading in the Buick and buying something sleeker and shinier. She imagined the remarks from people, who noted that Maria looked younger and perkier than ever before, even as those people gave way to the ravages of time.

There was a thread of guilt in her as she thought these things, but it was overcome. That gnawing guilt was smited by the idea that she might one day be a wife to make her Louie proud. Why, in 50 years, they might be the favored guests at the social events they had one day avoided. They might laugh and hold hands as they strolled about the shops, like those beautiful people in Bar Harbor.

For a solid minute, Maria stared vacantly into nowhere, trying to shove a bundle of fabric into a space that was already occupied. She caught herself and smiled. It was a wonder, alright. Over the course of an afternoon, she had come to believe her husband wasn’t sick or insane after all. She came to believe he had been endowed with a beautiful gift and was at this moment, preparing the final preparations.

But when he came for her, Louie did not look gifted or inspired at all. He sat in the Buick on the far side of the parking lot, slumped tiredly behind the steering wheel. Maria trotted across the lot (it had been years since she had trotted) and expected to see glee in her husband’s face. Instead, Louie looked five years old than he had just hours ago. His eyes were puffy and lidded. His mouth was drawn in a frown, and there was nothing gleaming about his eyes.

Maria watched him as she pulled open the passenger side door and lowered herself in. Louie looked over at her without much interest and sat up in his seat. His hands fumbled for the keys and twisted them. The Buick roared to life.

“How are you, Louie?”

“Good, Maria, good.”

He sat back in the seat again, rubbing his face with both hands. Maria glanced toward the backseat and did not see any bags or boxes filled with strange, wondrous gizmos and gadgets. She saw no sign that her husband had been off on a marvelous mission.

“Did he help with the pain? Like before?”

Louie stretched and considered this. He nodded.

“Yes. Yes, he did. There’s no pain at all.”

Maria fretted and bit her lower lip. The giddiness that had enveloped her in previous hours was dissolving like fog at sunrise.

“What about the other stuff, Louie? The toy store? The university?”

He looked over at her with tired confusion. Then he nodded and resumed staring through the windshield.

“That was a lot of nonsense, Maria. That DNA stuff. What do I know about that kind of thing? Really. I’m sorry for all the commotion the last few days. I must be coming down with something.”

And to verify this idea, he cupped his forehead with one giant hand as if to confirm the heat of fever. Louie looked so, so tired.

“Let’s go home,” he said. “We’ll have dinner and watch the news before bed. I feel like I haven’t slept in days.”

As they rolled across the long, empty parking lot and joined the flow of traffic beyond it, Maria felt newborn dreams tugged away from her. The quilting machine, the makeover, the blossoming social grace. All of it was yanked from her like a toy being snatched from a child who has just learned to enjoy it.

She stared glumly out the window into the darkening world and saw things she had not seen in years. Big, elegant homes, filled with people seen through brightly lit windows. Handsome, young couples hand-in-hand, smiling with the kind of vibrancy that comes when dreams are wrestled to fruition. Young people and old people, all with the kind of glow she had never once radiated, herself. People with dreams and indestructible belief that those dreams will be realized.

For Louis, it was over. He drove and saw nothing beyond the ambition to get home in time for dinner and the evening news. For his shy, mousy wife, the brief flicker of alien hope, and then the theft of it, might prove catastrophic. Having seen the green, green grass on the other side, the old routine might never be as sweet.

And if those small dreams were stolen from her in their infancy, the thief was a man named Paulo Rathbun, who sat in a small, dark office just a mile away. Rathbun was tall and lean and he sported a handlebar mustache for effect. He looked like a carnival barker or a man selling cure all potions on the dusty streets of the old West.

But Rathbun was neither of those things. He was a hypnotist who cured patients of pain and helped them to break their vices. He was good at what he did, but those tasks were mainly a sideline these days. Paulo was moving on to bigger things.

At a small, scarred desk in the corner of the dim room, he stared at the notebook pages filled with gibberish. It all made little sense to him, these long words and a river of seemingly meaningless letters and numbers. But these pages were filled with magic. Once it was all deciphered, Paulo Rathbun would own the coveted gift of endless life.

When the bell above the door to the street jingled, the hypnotist slapped the notebook closed and shoved it in a desk drawer. A frumpy, middle-aged man stepped into the office, looking tired and miserable.

“I’m here for my 5 o’clock, doc. Let the healing begin.”

Rathbun stood and rose behind his desk. The man before him was a car dealer trying desperately to quit smoking. The hypnotist could help him, he was sure of it. But in the meantime, he would plant a small suggestion in the man’s unconscious mind and instruct him to dream of the fastest, most effective ways to conquer the stock market. Financial secrets Rathbun would pilfer while the car salesman awoke with only dim memories of what he had learned.

Every man has the potential to unravel the most complex of mysteries if the right part of his brain is manipulated. The bus driver had proven that and what harm was done?

The hypnotist bade his new patient into a small room in back of the office and set about his work. In the gloom of the room, the man fell under very quickly and Rathbun whispered his instructions. He sat back before the mesmerized man and smiled, dreaming of things small and lofty. Fantastic dreams heretofore unattainable.