his"--he held up a little bottle of green glass and marked
his points with it--"and in this precious phial is the power to think
twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice as much work in a given
time as you could otherwise do."

"But is such a thing possible?"

"I believe so. If it isn't, I've wasted my time for a year. These
various preparations of the hypophosphites, for example, seem to show
that something of the sort... Even if it was only one and a half times
as fast it would do."

"It WOULD do," I said.

"If you were a statesman in a corner, for example, time rushing up
against you, something urgent to be done, eh?"

"He could dose his private secretary," I said.

"And gain--double time. And think if YOU, for example, wanted to finish
a book."

"Usually," I said, "I wish I'd never begun 'em."

"Or a doctor, driven to death, wants to sit down and think out a case.
Or a barrister--or a man cramming for an examination."

"Worth a guinea a drop," said I, "and more to men like that."

"And in a duel, again," said Gibberne, "where it all depends on your
quickness in pulling the trigger."

"Or in fencing," I echoed.

"You see," said Gibberne, "if I get it as an all-round thing it will
really do you no harm at all--except perhaps to an infinitesimal degree
it brings you nearer old age. You will just have lived twice to other
people's once--"

"I suppose," I meditated, "in a duel--it would be fair?"

"That's a question for the seconds," said Gibberne.

I harked back further. "And you really think such a thing IS possible?"
I said.

"As possible," said Gibberne, and glanced at something that went
throbbing by the window, "as a motor-bus. As a matter of fact--"

He paused and smiled at me deeply, and tapped slowly on the edge of his
desk with the green phial. "I think I know the stuff.... Already I've
got something coming." The nervous smile upon his face betrayed the
gravity of his revelation. He rarely talked of his actual experimental
work unless things were very near the end. "And it may be, it may be--I
shouldn't be surprised--it may even do the thing at a greater rate than
twice."

"It will be rather a big thing," I hazarded.

"It will be, I think, rather a big thing."

But I don't think he quite knew what a big thing it was to be, for all
that.

I remember we had several talks about the stuff after that. "The New
Accelerator" he called it, and his tone about it grew more confident on