That evening, they sat in the lavish dining room of the mansion near Enwood, Pennsylvania, after a meal of duckling and asparagus, hearts of palm, sole meuniere, caviar, and baked Alaska. It was the grandest meal Riley had ever eaten. Afterward, he was offered a fine Havana cigar, while the butler poured a snifter of Napoleon brandy for his host.
"Think I could have a snort of that?" Riley asked pathetically.
"Absolutely not. If you agree to my contract, you'll never be permitted to drink again. It will interfere with my purpose."
Riley rose to leave. He didn't think he wanted to live in a world where every day started with a Blue Law. The butler restrained him.
"Hear me out," Foxx said, swirling the brandy temptingly in the snifter. The fire in the fireplace crackled. Through the open windows, the crisp smell of a
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cool April evening billowed in. "I have taken great trouble to find out about you, Sergeant Riley."
"Mr. Riley," he said bitterly. "I'm no sergeant anymore. That's over. I'm nothing but a dishwasher now. An ex-dishwasher."
Foxx raised an eyebrow. "Things are not always as they seem," he said. "As ! was saying, I believe I know quite a bit about you. I know, for example, what it is you want more than anything else in life."
"Easy. A tall one with ice." He guffawed roughly.
"I'm serious, Riley. Do you know? Think. If you could have anything you wanted, anything, barring no consideration whatever, what would it be?"
Riley thought a moment. Then he answered with perfect honesty. "A war," he said.
Foxx smiled. "Yes. I knew you were the man I wanted."
Riley passed ten days locked in a room in that house in Pennsylvania, while imaginary bugs crawled up his legs and elephants danced on the walls. Ten horrible days that left him senseless and drained and wishing he were dead. On the eleventh day, when Riley was too weak to sit up in his vomit-covered bed, Foxx came again.
He had a hypodermic needle in his hand. "With this, you will feel better than you ever did with alcohol," he said, and injected the needle into Riley's wasted arm.
Within minutes Riley felt stronger-so strong that he thought he could snatch the sun right out of the sky.
Foxx led him outside, into the garden. "Run as far as you can," he said. "But come back. If you don't return there will be no more injections."
Riley ran. He ran for miles, past ponds and forests and a farm, which, in later years, Foxx would buy and
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then destroy to ensure privacy. He ran to the nearest town, some thirty miles away, and, in less than two hours after his arrival, got a job loading produce for the Enwood Market. That evening Riley started to weaken. He began to sweat profusely, and a deep feeling of panic invaded every cell of his brain. He looked in the mirror. All of the newfound vitality offered by the shot was gone, replaced with a spectral emptiness.
The next day at work his boss complained that Riley was laying down on the job, but in truth he could hardiy raise his arms to lift the crates of melons and carrots. By mid-afternoon, Riley thought he was going to die.
He hitched a ride to Foxx's mansion. The driver of the car had wanted to take him to the hospital, but Riley said that his "uncle," Foxx, was a doctor. He crawled on hands and knees to the front door.
Foxx opened it, the hypodermic poised in his hand. "I thought you would come back," he said.
Riley was brought back to life, grateful and terrified. "Say, what is that stuff in that needle, anyway?" he asked, feeling his limbs come back to their former power.
"A special mixture of mine. It's based on a drug called procaine."
Riley learned that Foxx had been working on the formula for the past thirty years. With it, the ravages of time could be stopped. The young would stay young forever. Those on the brink of old age could hold off the final victory of death for all time.
"Holy cow," Riley said, filled with~ awe for the strange man with the magic needle. "You could make a fortune with that."
"I have," Foxx replied. "I've opened a clinic in
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Europe, where rich matrons and dandies afraid of growing old come to feed their vanity. But just as you have your dream, Riley, so do I have mine."
it was then that he told the soldier about the plan that began over the skies of Europe during the war to end all wars, before Foxx had even taken his name- he was Vaux then, a pilot.
Vaux had learned, through some recovered intelligence reports, that the U.S. Army was beginning some experiments using procaine as a base for injections that would increase the effectiveness of soldiers in combat.
He knew immediately that such a drug would change the course of history. His family, with wealth of their own, had provided for his schooling, including a diploma from medical school. But the healing of the sick held no attraction for him. What Vaux wanted to do was to fly. Flying was fun, and flying was how he passed his salad days.
But by the end of World War I, Vaux was thirty years old, and flying-what there was of it after the great aerial combats had stopped-was for the young and the foolish. Barnstorming, aerobatic displays, and the rest of the carnival-scented options open to wartime pilots during the early 1920s impressed a man of Vaux's breeding and upbringing as humiliating, akin to the plight of a great boxer forced to earn a living as a wrestler in rigged matches. Suddenly flying was no longer fun, and at thirty, the long road that stretched ahead of Vaux seemed to be filled with petty maladies and the interminable complaints of his future patients.
Like Riley, he missed the thrill of combat. His jaded appetite needed nothing less than total war to satisfy it.
And then he remembered the captured dispatches
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about the procaine experiments. Procaine. The very word held a sort of magic. A drug that wouid form an army of ageless soldiers. A drug that would take an ordinary foot slog and keep him in peak physical condition for thirty years, until his long training made him the greatest soldier who ever lived. A drug that would prevent the weakening of a man's body, while his mind absorbed decades of experience. A battalion of these men, fed on procaine and trained constantly, could rule the earth.
His credentials got him into the research program almost without question. Vaux was a rich man with an impeccable background, the right training, a medical degree, and a combat record on top of it. He was a welcome addition to the staff.
But the experiments at the research center near En-wood, Pennsylvania, were progressing too slowly to suit Vaux. No one was willing to take any chances with human subjects. A guinea pig, which demonstrated remarkable capacities for stress and physical deprivation, was not enough for those scientists. Oh, no. A hundred guinea pigs were not enough. Nor a hundred cats, dogs, and Rhesus monkeys. Oh, no. Not a human, not yet. The kinks weren't ironed out, they said.
Their fears filled Vaux with unbridled disgust. The only "kink" that Vaux could see were certain unpleasant effects on the subject once the drug was withdrawn. Ail right, he admitted. The guinea pigs had died. But that was minor, minor! The procaine formula could change the face of warfare for centuries to come! He wanted to scream it.
But nothing happened. He became the most senior member of the research team, and still nothing happened. The Pentagon wanted the "kinks" to be ironed out before the drug was tried on human subjects. He
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was at a dead end. The army would never accept the drug unless there was a war. And then it would be too late.
"Fine," Vaux said finally in resignation after the Pentagon turned down his last request to escalate the experiments. If the army didn't want the formula, the army wasn't going to have it. The procaine-and its promise-would be his alone.