smile was still strong and warm, but it was no longer youthful. There was a look of deep wisdom in his blue eyes that finally justified the magnificent play he had written.
“Money,” he answered briefly.
“Haven’t my checks been reaching you?” I asked in amazement.
“Oh, yes. Very gratifying,” he said pacing a groove in the deep carpet pile. “But I’m moving into prenatal memory now, and I accomplished it by administrations of a new B vitamin derivative. I have a staff of biochemists working for me producing this substance, but it’s fearfully expensive. I need more of it, larger lab facilities to produce it secretly. I want to buy the sanitarium.”
“Buy the—”
“Lock, stock and personnel,” he nodded. “I’m three months before birth, already. My goal is conception.”
A big, brassy gong chimed in my brain. “That sounds like this dianetics business that was going the rounds awhile back.”
Hardy nodded. “In some respects, yes. But I have a single goal, total recall, and I’m taking a more comprehensive approach. Psycho-therapy helped a great deal, but I have traced-out every angle of mnemonics, improved on most and invented some new ones. The final problem is one of improving synaptic potentials and actual tissue tone in the brain. Biochemistry is giving me the answers. With enough of the new B vitamin derivative I’m confident I can reach conception—and a totality of recall.”
“But Hardy, what have you got when you get there? I still say, what’s the percentage?”
*
The look he gave me was puzzled but completely tolerant. “You raved to me about my last play, yet you don’t see what I’m getting at?” He stopped pacing and sat opposite me with his muscular hands knotted into fists on my desk.
“George,” he said with quiet intentness, “I will be the first man since creation to have the full potential of his brain at his creative disposal.”
“How do you figure that?”
“The brain has three principal functions. It can store information for recall, it can analyze and correlate this information and finally it can synthesize creatively. Now the latter two functions are inherently dependent upon the quality of the first, or memory recall. As a truly thinking animal, man considers he has reached some acme of perfection because his brain is so superior to the lower animals. Actually, the real gulf is between what man has achieved and what he can achieve with his brain.
“The key lies in perfecting his recall. What good does it do to keep pouring in information when most of us are forgetting old things almost as rapidly as we are learning new ones? Of course, we don’t really ever forget anything, but our power of exact recall grows fuzzy through disuse. Then when we need a certain name or factual bit of information we can’t quite dig it up, or it comes up in distorted approximations.
“The same holds for calling on experience to help us with new problems. We may grasp the general lesson of experience, but most of the specific incidents of our lives are dulled in time. The lessons we paid dearly to learn are largely useless. So we go on making the same mistakes, paying the same penalties over and over again.”
I shrugged. “Everybody would like a better memory, I suppose, but I’ve never known anyone to go off the deep end over it like you have. What more can you gain?”
“Can’t you visualize what it would be like to have even a short life-time of knowledge and experience laid out in sharp detail of recall? Think of the new associations of thoughts and concepts that would be possible! Consider the potential for creating drama, alone! Every word ever read or spoken, every emotion ever conveyed, every gesture of anger, love, jealousy, pain, pleasure—all this raw material glittering brightly, ready to pour out in new conflicts, dramatic situations, sharp pungent dialogue—”
He made me sense his enthusiasm, but I couldn’t quite feel it. Would such a tremendous ability necessarily be good? Something about its immensity frightened me, and I didn’t care to consider it for my own use at all.
I said, “Don’t get me wrong. If this is what’s going into your playwriting, I’m all for it. And what you do with your money is your own business. What do you propose?”
“Can you absorb more of my work?” he asked abruptly.
“I’m your agent, aren’t I? I’ll peddle it if I can’t use it myself,” I told him, not that I was so eager for the broker’s 10% so much as I wanted to have the pick of his output for my own productions.
I didn’t know what I was taking on. He turned out his third play in just ten days. Ten days, I said. I read to the bottom of page two and decided to hell with peddling this one. I’d produce it myself.
Before I got into second gear on Beach Boy, however, Hillary sends a messenger over with Madame President, a satire so sharp I knew it would make Call Me Madame look like Little Women.
What do you do? There are just so many legitimate theaters in the city.
While I’m pondering this and negotiating with a Hollywood agent to maybe take Beach Boy off my hands, along comes Red Rice, an epic novel of Communist China that out-Bucked Pearl a hundred heart-wrenches to one.
One phone call sold that one to McMullin, and when they got a look at the manuscript they raised the advance to $10,000. This was not bad for a first novel, and I didn’t resent my $1000 agent’s fee.
Before the summer was over I was about ready to give up show business and become a one-author agent. Hillary was keeping four secretaries busy taking dictation and transcribing. He never researched, never revised, never even glanced at the copy. I’ve known some prolific writers, but none could grind it out like Hillary Hardy.
And it was good! Every piece was better than the last. His characters were strictly 3-D right on paper, and word pictures! When he mentioned bedbugs, you itched and bled; when the villain slugged the hero a low-blow, you felt it in your guts; and when boy got girl—brother, turn up the house-lights, quick.
I got so involved trying to produce five plays at once, making dickers with publishers and motion picture studios, fighting off television people and answering mail demanding a chance at foreign rights, that it was mid-November before I realized that it was over a month since I’d heard from the golden goose.
In fact Ellie drew my attention to it one morning. “Hadn’t you better call the sanitarium?” she suggested. “Maybe he had a breakdown or something?”
The thought chilled me. Not only had I sold Hillary’s complete output to date, but I had a file full of contracts for future novels and movie scripts worth a couple of million dollars.
I didn’t phone—I went. To Hoboken.
In the outskirts I found his private hospital, demanded to see Sam Buckle and was told to sit down and wait. He was in therapy.
*
Two hours later they took me to him. He lay on a hospital bed in his shorts, staring at the ceiling and the sweat all over him like he had just stepped out of a showerbath.
“Hello, George,” he said, still looking at the ceiling.
“Hi,
