“But none of these little things begin to satisfy me yet,” he told me nearly a year ago. “Either they increase the central energy without affecting the nerves or they simply increase the available energy by lowering the nervous conductivity; and all of them are unequal and local in their operation. One wakes up the heart and viscera and leaves the brain stupefied, one gets at the brain champagne fashion and does nothing good for the solar plexus, and what I want--and what, if it's an earthly possibility, I mean to have--is a stimulant that stimulates all round, that wakes you up for a time from the crown of your head to the tip of your great toe, and makes you go two--or even three--to everybody else's one. Eh? That's the thing I'm after.” “It would tire a man,” I said. “Not a doubt of it. And you'd eat double or treble--and all that. But just think what the thing would mean. Imagine yourself with a little phial like this”--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--”