The real story of Patrick Winningoes-1

 

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«I will soon be back, make yourselves at home, please» - the man said going out. We looked at each other, George and I. It had only been from the morning that we didn’t have a chance to stay alone, however I swear that it seemed to me as it was an eternity.

He spoke for the first . -«That’s a real story of madness! »– he burst out taking a seat in one of the four wood armchairs that were around a circular table in the center of the small room–«This man must be crazy ! Let's put him off as soon as is back and let's escape from here, until we are in time»–he added while I was taking a seat in front of him.

-«Just a moment, George, may be it will seem strange to you, but I don't feel afraid of this man! He inspires a sort of trust on me, despite his strangeness.»

-«But do you realize what are you talking about? Have you gone out of sense too? This man must have some extraordinary powers: hasn't he hypnotized us just slightly before? Have you also heard him talk of super-races and brain's experiments  or have I dreamed of it?»–George attacked me nervously.

-«Be quiet, please, George» - I told him in a calm voice. –«First of all, I don't believe he has hypnotized us, just before. Secondly, if he is really so powerful as you say, what could be his reaction, when we try to immobilize him? Make a point on it:  when we arrived here, we were both sleepy. Therefore if he  wanted to use us as guinea-pigs, two punctures were enough for him to knock us down!  On the other hand I have not still seen nor cats that resemble to mice, neither men with a square brain! Who can be sure that the old man is not inventing everything? It would not surprise me if this story derived from the imagination of some fantastical writer. I want to go to the end of all these circumstances. Don’t  you also want to know what kind of job's proposal Mr Winningoes is going to make us?»

George gazed for a long time in to my eyes, thoughtfully. Then, without answering, he relaxed on the back of the chair, releasing the muscles and breathing deeply.

He stood with half open  eyes crossing at once the feet and the hands softly on the womb,  with the right hand covering the palm of the left one. He seemed to me almost slept, while only the breath animated his body.

Won by all those unexpected and subsequent emotions, I also imitated him doing my best on sitting comfort on the wood ancient chair.

to be continued...

The story of Mr Winningoes

Prologue

Sometimes things happen in a strange way. The story I’m going to tell, as a matter of fact, it’s the most fantastic, incredible, astounding story I’ve ever lived through. I’ll try to resume the facts as I remember them, promising to be the most faithful that I can, though more than forty years have gone since then. It all happened in a month, from the first decade  of November, ‘till the first decade of December 1979, when George and I were in London, searching for a honest job. After visiting a lot of job’s agencies,  it seemed that eventually  we had found someone to work for. His name was

Mr Winningoes, the eccentric character of the story.  But before to take us in charge he demanded  that we heard to his story, as a condition for getting the job. Knowing him and finding ourselves at his home, without even knowing where we were, was a rapid and sudden succession of events that I later reconstructed over time. What I remember first is when he started his story.

First Part

Chapter 1

Journey over the ocean

«My name is Patrick Winningoes Parnell and I was born at Wadebridge, in Cornwall, in the south-west of England, to a Catholic Irishwoman and a Protestant Englishman. My father, Lord Isaac Winningoes, whose family was among the noblest and most ancient for English lineage, at that time, was a very close adviser of the British government. My mother was named Mary Josephine Parnell.

In those times Great Britain was still a vast empire and Ireland, born earth of my mother, made integrally part of it.

After a happy infancy, I was enrolled at a classical studies school, but when I was sixteenth something  happened to me such seriously  to change radically the course of my life.

Without any apparent reason my father  withdrawn me from the College and the same day of such a sudden resolution,  in a night of storm, I was embarked on a ship, “The Ulysses”, that anchored at Land's End, attended my arrival to set sail.

My father didn't want to give me any explanation and, despite I implored him crying, that I didn't want to depart without greeting my mother, he was inflexible. He delivered two letters to me: one for the reverend Jacob Sevear, who would have become my despotic guardian; the other for me, and I read it on tears, when my beloved coasts were already distant from sight.

 It contained, this letter, few recommendations on the principles that a good child has to observe, together with the information that my destination would have been Boston, in the U.S.A.,  and that I had to be in charge to reverend Sevear's.

The life that attended me beyond the ocean was, my friends, a hard life indeed to be sustained. Certainly, I had all the comforts of life, but I lived in a gilded isolation, without almost any contact with the outside world. My guardian was inflexible on applying those rules that, as he underlined, had been ordered to him by my father: I could not go out, if not in his company; I didn't have to possess any sum of money, providing himself to satisfy any my desire; even the newspapers and the magazines passed for his careful censorship, before I could read them.

After some time, my captivity slightly decreased, but I still felt as a prisoner and for my mind, offended and violated, to find a free play in the studies, in which my guardian worked out to be a wise and able preceptor, was a matter of surviving.

How many nights I dreamed to fly, like Icarus, over the Atlantic or to sail, as Ulysses,   searching for new, craving lands! How many nights I cried, thinking of my mother and  my distant born beaches ! How I felt heavy, then, my father's hand on my head and that of my sad destiny! For how much I tried on it, however, I didn't succeed on breaking those chains that tormented me. From time to time I contrived a plan to run away, but I always postponed it, hoping that the day after a letter from England would come, to bring me the freedom, the end of my nightmare and its mysteries.

After years of that life of segregation, finally came the very expected day: On my twenty-first birthday the reverend Sevear handed me over a letter  from my father on which he accounted the circumstances that were the origin of all my sufferings and that so much had to influence my life in the future. But the joy for the long, desired truth, was darkened by the sad news, in the same letter contained, that my mother, my beloved mother, had died, two years before, in the prison of Primestone.

I was acquainted through that letter that my mother, just a little before my departure for Boston, had been halted with the accusation of plot to overturn the institutions and the Crown, accusation much more serious, being my father a man at service of the State. She was recognized guilty, and only the interest that some friends of my father showed towards, saved her from the inglorious end that struck all the other heads of the revolt: the hanging in public square.

But she could not stand up with the imprisonment as she wrote herself in one of the few letters that she was allowed to write to me, and which the reverend Sevear had been ordered not to deliver to me before my twenty-first birthday.

The scandal that followed the discovery of the plot to free Ireland from the oppressive English yoke, had also overwhelmed my father, who was forced by his political enemies to give the resignations. The aspect of the whole circumstance for me more spine-chilling was constituted by the fact that my father himself had discovered and denounced the secret activity of my mother, for whose he asked me to be forgiven and hoped that I would understand the involved, ethics implications.

How I hated him henceforth! I cursed him, one hundred, thousand times, from that day and for the days to come! How could he have chosen his stupid state’s reason against the love of a fragile and sweet creature as my mother? Why did he not embark her with me to subtract her to the jailers? His king, then, was more worth than his woman on his heart?

He recommended himself to my comprehension, since he did act for my own goodness, leaving me out, considering also my youth age, from the clamors and from the shame of the scandal that had overwhelmed our honorable name, and he finally, remembered me, that only God can judge men’s operates .That atrocious contradiction induced me to hate also “his” God. If only Him, could judge men’s behaviors, why did he denounce my mother to a Court of men?!?  »

That regrettable question concluded the monologue of our guest, to which we had assisted in a religious silence but with long live share.

While evoking his memoirs, that I imagined remote for forgetful time in his mind, above all speaking of his mother, in his voice a veiled tone of emotion had appeared.

And I don't know if I really perceived a mist in his eyes, ‘cause it  lasted only for a bit: after pouring a glass of water and drinking it with avarice, he fleetingly passed a candid napkin on his face, with which he suddenly cancelled any trace of it. Then he stayed immovably, absorbed in his sad memoirs, or perhaps picking up ideas to continue his story. George had followed him for the whole time with the chin supported  by the closed fists on the edge of the table. Without proffering a word he lit a cigarette and soon after pushed the packet to me. With peaceful and indifferent tone, Mr Winningoes took back on his speech.

«The same day I knew by my teacher that I was the only heir of my mother’s estates, and that since the day of her death, he had been its honest and prudent administrator, as he was ready to detail me on his account.

That man, I had so much hated and blamed, now that his ungrateful charge had come to end, seemed to me good and comprehensive, and his words calmed for a few time my incurable pain. thenceforth, however, I needed to think about my life, and in those places I would never succeeded in shaking off  my sad past. I begged the reverend to continue to administer my goods and I departed, to  discover  the world.

I travelled at first through the United States and Canada, then I went to Australia and New Zealand. After I visited Europe, without never finding the courage to return to my country. Tired of the European Countries, among which I mostly liked your Italy , I departed to India and finally, always curious of new lands, I went to Africa.

Neither women, neither alcohol, nor drugs not even the vices which I was devoted in those years succeeded in cancelling my bitter memoirs, until one day, while I was sojourning in Kenya, I fell ill, prey of strong fevers. Not a lot, then I gave, to live or die, but the Fate, had evidently prepared, that I survived, so that the programs could be realized, whose I will have the honor and the pleasure to communicate to you. Revealed therefore from the illness, I returned to America aiming however to south, that I had not visited yet.

Going up again homeward, I stayed for a long time in Mexico, that not little fascinated me. By then,  I had satisfied my world's curiosity, so I preferred to  take over again my studies, more strongly and surely than before. I was akin of all: medicine, biology, physics, mathematics, chemistry, hidden sciences, illusionism, magic arts, engineering, electronics, astrology, philosophy, astronomy, sociology, anthropology, theology, ethnology, history, juridical, economic and political sciences and every other thing attracted my mind curious of reaching new knowledge.

During the numerous years of my following study, it happened on me a gradual mutation that flowed, between  a short lapse of  time, in a great, bright revelation. I had realized, deepening on studies that any single subject lost, little by little, until vanish, its own contours and that all acquired information met in a bubbly melting pot, to form just one, immense nucleus of knowledge.

Yes, dear friends: our knowledge is an original, total unity. The single disciplines of human knowledge are but the infinitesimally small fragments that the mankind looks hopelessly for recomposing in to the aboriginal unity.

Two were the necessary consequent corollaries to this thrilling discovery. The first one is that the brain of both animal and human beings constitutes, though at a different evolutionary stadium, a microscopic part of the primordial totality. The second is that human thought search, yet in a blind and messy manner, to recompose, at a mental level, the great, primitive explosion, the Big-Bang, through a long and fatiguing marching back, up to the innumerable light years that separate it, from an equal, yet opposite, roaring and powerful implosion. And if you consider that our mind speculates in the space-time as fast as speed-light, this kind of final Big-Imbang will appear less far than any hasty forecast.

The burst of the second world war caught me surprised on this walk of studies and searches.

Bitterly I was forced to consider that human beings pursued their premature end, rather than search for the truth.

But at that time I hadn't understand yet that every human action, even the most iniquitous and bestial, has however its own reason to be done and for me, that war, would have been another fundamental step on the way of comprehension.

When Germany, violating the international agreements formerly undersigned, moved war to England, attacking London, I realized that the right moment had come for me to show that the Parnells loved to fight for freedom, under any flag and against whoever oppressed its exercise. I went to England and enlisted, as a volunteer,  in the Royal Air Force, despite I have to confess you that, after the betrayal of my father, I felt more Irish than English, also considering that in those days, as it is today, Ireland was divided in two parts, with a part still under the British dominion.

After a brief but intense training I was assigned, as I had required myself, having the pre-requisite for it, to pilot’s hunting squads. Between whiles of my missions I had the opportunity to deeply analyze the causes of those disastrous events. I had been, it is true, in the years immediately preceding the war completely devoted to my studies, in a way that I could call purely scientific of the phenomena which stand at the base of the human life, but it was not certainly in the fore coming years of war that we had to seek its reasons and inmost causes. The roots of hate and evil sank their extreme appendixes in the most tangled and lavish meanders of human mind. These deleterious feelings, so inherent to human mind, were to be conceived like the principal causes of that huge bath of blood.

From this premise I puzzled out  that the basic beliefs of the national socialist philosophy were correct: the humanity, in order to be saved, needed a superior race to be raised over the others for leading them to salvation. But German race could not certainly be the chosen one. Not even any other among the existing races could be that, because it had to be a race who didn't know, in their hearts but goodness and love.

With a greater fury than before, I addressed all my energies against the hateful enemy: I challenged death ten, hundred, thousands of times, always defeating the adversary.

Little by little, I started perceiving  what role it was reserved to me in the history of the world and  the contours of my destiny assumed more and more its clean and precise outline.»

While pronouncing his last words Mr Winningoes, who had gradually been increasing his excitement during the narration, lifted up the right hand, tensing his forefinger as an accuser, and his eyes rotated a couple of times halting eventually in an insane expression of craziness depicted on his face. He remained for indefinite time with the lift forefinger, staring into space, with his muscles tended as if they had wanted to get out of standing. He seemed a statue of marble, immortalized in a grotesque pose. This sudden explosion of apparent madness came unexpected. Before we had the time to interact, however, the man seemed to recover himself. He looked around, lost and embarrassed and, grabbed a glass of water, voided all of it in a hit. The water seemed to calm the man. His eyes showed now a serene light and he looked like being almost absent, lost in his thoughts or perhaps looking for recomposing the interrupted line of his story. He pulled the refreshments trolley and picked up a crystal’s carafe filled of a golden colored liquid.

- «Have a drink, please. It is cognac from Charente, one of the few things that I appreciate of French people.»

This way saying he poured some of that liquid in a short, carved wine glass, explaining us that a cognac, to be really good, has to leave, if slightly rotated, a thin layer of color inside the glass.

As soon as I had drunk, I immediately felt a comforting warmth. On the warm’s alcohol wave I thought that that man surely knew so much indeed about life. His theories, nevertheless, yet quiet abstruse to me, showed however a sort of suggestive charm.

I imagined my brain imploding together with George’s, melting with it and flying, as a winged rocket, in the endless universe.  Mr Winningoes’ voice, starting over with his narration brought me, with equal quickness, again to earth.

- «You certainly know how has the second world war concluded» - said the man, who went on talking about the last phases of the war, mixing them with some personal circumstances and original points of view, totally different from official historical interpretation .

-«Excuse me, my friends, for detouring from the main path» - he returned to say taking back the main stream of his narration. -«After all, such problems, didn't interest to me so much at the time, neither they interest to me today. I had to follow my life, and rather, the use of the atomic bombs in Japan made me understand, even more, the urgency of stopping mankind’s foolishness, under the risk of destroying the world and all its living forms. When I was dismissed, appointed as a real hero, I decided to go to pay a visit to my father. I still felt some grudge towards him and perhaps, I thought, I would have thrown him all the medals which “his” king had given to me. But the memoirs of my happy infancy wound me in a veil of emotion and when I saw my father, old and tired, convicted on a wheels chair, I understood that was time to pass over and look at future.

He cried, my old father, seeing the medals that I had conquered in the hot skies of Europe. With pride he told me that he knew of my heroic deeds, and now that his name, the glorious lineage of Winningoeses had been fully rehabilitated, he could happily die. I wished to him a very long life, leaving his medals to consolation of my not dilatory departure. My books, my studies attended me again, in the United States, for a new thrilling issue on the walk of truth.

Taking back to my searches I considered that I had to continue in a forced direction, if it were true, as it is true, that the brain of every living being contains, even though modified by the evolution, the original matrix of our existence.

I resolutely threw myself heart and soul into brain’s study. I felt that I had to create a super brain in order to be reproduced and form a race of super-men able to drive on the right direction this dregs of humanity that inhabits the world.

After some rough attempts of surgical engineering, that occupied me for different years, whose initial success and following disappointed bitterness, almost led me to abandon the whole project, it was the fate to intervene and to point out the right way to me.

Which kind of proof  would I more need to wait for? The same celestial stars directly showed me the way!

A beautiful day, in fact, while I was observing under the microscope a cat’s brain, ulterior, fortunate guinea-pig, subtracted to the deprivations of its life for the glory of the Science, an amazing account happened to me.

I had set the small feline’s organ in a cylindrical open neck test-tube and I was continuously thinking about it, looking as usual for a sprout of understanding on its complex and mysterious composition. At a certain point, needing something to eat, I went upstairs. I left unwillingly open the microscope’s focus. I was going to have a cup of tea, with my daily survival meal, when I heard some beats on the door. The circumstance was quite unusual. Nobody ever came to find me and Soledad, the Mexican housemaid who was in charge for homework, as an invisible angel, entered in the house using her own key.

As I opened the door a young man introduced himself as an emissary of the English legal study “Heirs and Heirs” .

He was coming to inform me that my father had died and I had been named his only heir. He also told me that he had brought with him some letters of attorney to allow his fellows to look after the most urgent matters of administration.

I signed those proxies without not even reading them. On the financial plan I would have been now stronger than ever.

My studies would get a great advantage from this new decisive financial impulse. But why didn't I feel any pain? Yet I had loved him, in the cheerful days of the infancy; and he had loved me.

Thinking about the years of my infancy and the coasts of beloved and distant Cornwall, I finished to consume my poor meal, then I returned downstairs.

I immediately noticed that something strange had happened during my brief absence.

In the test-tube the brain of the cat had dried, acquiring a grey and pale color.

I extracted it with the pliers: it seemed a dry sponge without neither weight nor smell. What devil had it happened?

 It was a gust of wind which answered to me.

In that underground where I secretly developed my experiments, I had not left but a small window, that I wanted surfaced to the level of the ground.

It had slightly disclosed, quiet enough to allow the passage of a provident ray of sun which, intruding the optic circuit of the microscope, had poured in with all its mighty energy, dehydrating completely the object of my experiments.

But my light, initial disappointment had soon to be transformed in high exultation, when I closer observed the test-tube that had served like furnace to that unforeseen experiment. On its fund rested some drops of a dense and glimmering liquid! I had a lightning, an intuition that afterwards had to be exactly revealed.

Admirably exact, my friends! I had found the way to extract from the muscle that includes our life, from the brain that contains all the knowledge of a human being,  its own essence. An extract, a summary, that is the same, but free from the physical brain’s encumbrance, from the grey mash that comprises it. Free from the flesh as a soul is free from his body as an idea from his thinker as a thought from his action!

As you certainly know all our mental energy springs by a simple chemical reaction that is continuously produced in our brain. Such reaction, that the physicians define with the name of “synapse”, is originated by the reaction between the liquid whose any  brain is imbued and the cells it copiously contains.

In practice this liquid, that has equal molecular structure in every man, works as a tracing detector of the cerebral process, whose action is, instead, what countersigns a man from another.

The intimate reasons for such different action of the cerebral processing, have seen divided for a long time the humanity.

Manhood has however been until now incapable to intend the true reason for the difference of the beings of its species.

A human being, from the scientific point of view, it is only a product of a casual connection of the basically chemical mixtures that are contained in the cells. And all its activity is coordinated by the cerebral cells.

To succeed on obtaining a distillate of those cells, meant therefore to dispose of a substance of inestimable value.

You can of course imagine, what such an emotion I felt when I injected those drops that were deposed on the fund of the test-tube, to a guinea-pig.

The result was amazing, greater and more meaningful than I had been able to foresee myself. The mouse, a normal mouse of averages age and greatness, after spending twelve hours asleep, wakened up again.

Apparently he seemed to be the same as before the injection, but actually he moved in a different manner however.

He had, in a few words, a different air. He slowly started walking and moving its tail upwards, in a way quite unusually for a mouse; furthermore he sniffed and smelled the air and the ground of the cage. And I was much more surprised when I saw him stretching its legs towards and backwards and,  curving the backbone up,  forming a tall hunch. Its limbs still looked like those of a mouse, but they behaved as belonged to a cat! That was the exceptional result!

The animal seemed restless and took on turning around the cage with his feline behavior. He was surely looking for some food.

I gave him his usual mice food but after he had smelled it for a long time, he started over turning around visibly more nervous and hungrier. I opened a cat tin food and with my great surprise he devoured that meal in a flash.

He grew up constantly in the following days, assuming a double massive structure compared to the same aged of his own race, then his growth seemed to halt.

His epidermis had not suffered either big mutations;  nor  the bony structure, at least externally, showed to have acquired any peculiar characters, except for the moustaches and the legs, that seemed to have changed for a most congenial use to cat’s needing.

In the movements and in the external behavior he moved as a cat though having the semblances of a mouse.

A serious question had bothered me since the first days of the experiment: how would that animal relate with another mice? And how would other cats relate with him? In his more inner instinct had he become a cat or he had remained a mouse?

With much trepidation I moved him to captivity with other mice: they started to squeak very afraid; it was evident that those small rodents had immediately warned the hostile presence.

He had a good time pursuing them and grabbing them as cats make with mice, and at long, exhausted and satisfied, he rested quietly on a side of the big cage, while the little mice, remained farther all afraid and trembling.

He didn't show any interest to pursue them, more than in that joking  way, perhaps because he was not hungry or even because something inside prevented him from doing it.

The thing, after all, didn't interest me and I transferred him afterwards with a real cat, and also there the success arose to me: they behaved as two bosom and jovial friends.

At the beginning I thought to try his reproduction, but actually this would have been only an interesting and suggestive detour from my principal aim.

In order to reach it I had to gather all my efforts, and the results of that first experiments constituted the base of my following job.

First of all it was clear that the cerebral muscle, under particular conditions of temperature and environment, like those which took accidentally place that prophetic day in my laboratory, released a particular, liquid and dense substance, containing the fundamental geniuses, that I call primaries; those which are responsible of the most intimate and  proper characters of the race.

It was also evident that such substance appeared able to be moved into another brain,  creating there a new habitat in which to regenerate its cells and with them  repurchase its functions and its aboriginal characters.

I verified more times the exactness of these hypotheses, but only in a direction, that I define evolutionary. The experiment only succeed if the essence of a superior animal, in the steps of the evolutionary chain, was introduced in the brain of an inferior animal, while in the other way down, the phenomenon took place in a lesser and very attenuated tone deprived of significant consequence.

I baptized the liquid essence ‘nouchefalon ', and I prepared hence myself to develop in the foreseen direction my experiments.

What would it happen if I  transfused some ‘human nouchefalon ' in to the brain of another man?»

 1. to be continued...

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Chapter 3 The son of Mr Winningoes

At that question,  Mr Winningoes had set with extreme naturalness, George had brought a hand to his mouth, showing in his eyes an horrified gaze. Then he stood up, with the hand still on his mouth and ran out the room. I heard his long footsteps, through up the staircases.

-«I am sorry ! I am very sorry indeed»– said the man in a resigned and sincere tone –«I have tried to gradually introduce you to the difficult matter, in order not to upset you, but it’s quietly  evident that I have not succeeded it. Shall we go to see how your friend is?»– he concluded standing up.

- «May be it’s better if I go first to talk to him on my own! We need to stay alone for a while»  - I told Mr Winningoes.

-« As you like» – he said quietly, sitting again.

I followed George upstairs, thinking at Mr Winningoes’ story. I had also accused an emotional hit to that sorrowful question, although, to say the very truth, I had expected that point of landing in Mr Winningoes’ discourse.

I saw George coming out from the bath. He stared at me without saying nothing. I knew he needed to be on his own, so I went to our room and lay down at the bed without approaching him.

 I closed my eyes, trying to dominate all these emotions.  I recalled into my mind the last accounts had led me to  that house, with that strange man.

A little time later  we heard someone  knocking at the door.

-«Is everything all right?» –our guest asked. I went nearby George for asking him how he was feeling.

-«I am very well, thank you»– he answered trying to hide from Mr Winningoes’ sight. Then in a low voice, eluding the hearing of Mr Winningoes, who however had kept discreetly quiet distant, he added in anxious tone: - «What are we going to do? I can’t stand staying here anymore. Let’s jump on him and…»

-«Just excuse me for a while, my friends »- the man said with persuasive voice, still holding politely at the same distance–«before you turn a decision, that is up to you to be taken, I would like to ask you only the courtesy to be able to end my own history. You don't have to be afraid of me: if I wanted to hurt you I would have been able to do it and I will show you that I am not lying. Follow me, please.»

So saying he started walking for the long corridor. We followed him turning on the left; then we stopped in front of a wooden small door, on the top of the ample staircases that led underneath. He fumbled in the lock reassuring us with a mild look. A long snail iron scale, introduced us in a square big room. The room was bare and badly illuminated. Mr Winningoes directed toward the opposite wall to the entry and after opening a big window he said:

- «Please, lean out and take a look down there.»

We leaned out. The view gave on an ample downed square, visible over the brushes of tall and

mighty trees. I recognized the landing airfield of which Mr Winningoes had informed us, early in the morning. I realized that we had to find us on the central tower of the building. Then he opened a small door wall and after fumbling in a small niche recessed in the wall, he gently told us,  winking again with the chin besides the window:

- «Have a look now, would you!?»–

We benched outside: the open space, just a while before,  plainly empty, was now occupied by another vision. I kept for an endless time watching at it, astonished, incredulous, confused, while my heart was galloping fast and the blood pressed on to my temples as if it wanted to squirt out of them.

I crossed George’s eyes: he also was astonished and interdict;  then I looked again down there. With unchanged emotion I observed that scene once more. The same scene that we had seen, some days before, not far away from home, was there now, under my eyes! Everything was perfectly equal: the high enclosure of tables, the big working machines, immovable as they were sleepy animals, the long iron pylon  with the writing 'Winpey', in  red-dark block letters. It was with admiration and curiosity that I turned toward Mr Winningoes. I wanted to know, I had to understand what was going on!

The old man fixed me intensely with a mocking look. Fantastic and madding, diabolic and fascinating Mr Winningoes! What kind of cheat was he plotting at our expenses?
He fumbled in the niche again and invited us, with the usual accomplice air, to look down.
The scene had changed again: I immediately recognized the alley of the agency ‘Geenna Geld', with the big front door and the cardboard insignia  moved by the wind as that day. This scene, never the less, didn't have anything unreal. It seemed simply and naturally to be there, after all, where our eyes were seeing it, identical to the past, but still live and present. There must surely be a trick! Of course it had to be that! But which one?

- «I understand your wonder, my friends, but I can explain you everything».

What you see does exist indeed. Physically, however, it exists in another dimension. If you were not so convinced that only exists the reality that is shown and explained to us since our birth; if you, that day we met for the first time, had doubted of what your eyes were perceiving, and with a straight mental attitude you had verified the materiality of it, you would be aware that everything around you was just an illusion and there was not exactly the things that you were seeing; actually they were there, but in a different way from your being here now, or this house or those trees that outline the landscape over there!»

«Just a moment!»–George cried out, showing off his best grim–«if that day we had taken some pictures, would have come out those things that we perceived or they would not?»

«A camera is only a machine, without any mind, with no soul. I don't know what it would have come out if you had taken any photographs of it. Both of you would have certainly come out. Or may be only one of you would have been impressed.  But don't be concerned at it. My words didn't want to make any offence to you. I have spent all my life on studies and meditations to understand these things that only appear to be inexplicable. I assure you however,  that they show such appearance in the vision of our ordinary reality; in the description of the world that is provided by former and daily education, because we believe it as absolutely sure. As if our life were all in the banal obviousness of which we feed our mind. But is not this way! Oh certainly is not!»

«And the two men that we met there, on that day? Were also they an illusion?» –George burst out again in a pugnacious tone, not at all satisfied by those explanations.

«Such a question, my friends, belongs already to the following of my story. I hope you will allow me to conclude with it. I won't subtract me to your opinion and to your judge, but grant me to defend myself simply telling you ‘till the end about the suffering of a scientist, of a father and of a man. I want you to know, if this can reassure you, that I have only killed other men during the war. The war is always absurd, in some way and is pursued by manhood for greed of power, because men are sick of weakness and only in power they succeed in finding an antidote to their innate deficiency. And though after the war, the value of human life, for me was under graded, I have been preserved by the shame of killing another man and I think that it could not be otherwise, for the man predestined to lead the humanity through the path of the peace and the truth!»

These words of the man seemed to reassure George. From my point of view there was not one single reserve on that man. My adhesion to his request  was totally unconditional. We silently agreed to listen to the final part of Mr Winningoes’s  story. After all we didn't still know, incredibly, what that man really wanted from us. And in a way or in the other he succeeded capturing our attention again.

«Since you kindly grant me your time in order to conclude my story, we will do it sipping a good cup of tea that I want to prepare myself for you»–took back in jovial tone Mr Winningoes, squirting from his eyes a radiant and comradely satisfaction. He lead us back through the staircase down to the big room where we had our former lunch, with the table still prepared; finally we found, passed another door, in a pleasant small room, furnished in Renaissance style, with some pictures on the walls, which seem to be stupendous reproductions of work’s talent of the best pictorial school of that memorable epoch.

«I will soon be back, make yourselves at home, please»- the man said going out. We looked at each other, George and I. It had only been from the morning that we didn’t have a chance to stay alone, however I swear that it seemed to me as it was an eternity and, I was certain of it, George was feeling the same sensation too.

He spoke first . «That’s a real story of madness! »– he burst out taking a  seat in one of the four wood armchairs that were around a circular table in the centre of the small room–«This man must be crazy! Let's put him off as soon as is back and let's escape from here, until we are in time»–he added while I was taking a seat in front of him.

«Just a moment, George, may be it will seem strange to you, but I don't feel afraid of this man! He inspires a sort of trust on me, despite his strangeness.»

«But do you realize what are you talking about? Have you gone out of sense too? This man must have some extraordinary powers: hasn't he hypnotized us just slightly before? Have you also heard him talk of super-races and brain's experiments  or have I dreamed of it?» –George attacked me nervously.

«Be quiet, please, George» - I told him in a calm voice. «First of all, I don't believe he has hypnotized us, just before. Secondly, if he is really so powerful as you say, what could be his reaction, when we try to immobilize him? Make a point on it:  when we arrived here, we were both sleepy. Therefore if he  wanted to use us as guinea-pigs, two punctures were enough for him to knock us down! On the other hand I have not seen, so far,  neither  cats which resemble to mice, nor men with a square brain! Who can be sure that the old man is not inventing everything? It would not surprise me if this story derived from the imagination of some fantastical writer. I want to go to the end of all these circumstances. Don’t  you also want to know what kind of job's proposal Mr Winningoes is going to make us?»

George gazed for a long time in to my eyes, thoughtfully. Then, without answering, he relaxed on the back of the chair, releasing the muscles and breathing deeply.

He stood with half open  eyes crossing at once the feet and the hands, which put softly on the womb,  with the right hand covering the palm of the left one. He seemed to me almost slept, while only the breath animated his body.

Won by all those unexpected and subsequent emotions, I also imitated him doing my best on sitting comfort on the wood ancient chair.

This was the way Mr Winningoes found us, time afterwards. His discreet touch at the door dissuaded me from my drowsy and confused thoughts.

Reopening the eyes we saw the man  reentering with a tray in a hand on which there were a stumpy teapot in porcelain and three handless cups, decorated with Chinese ideograms.

«I apologize for leaving you alone for such a long time »–he happily said–«but to make tea is a very serious matter, that requires time and skill. Help yourselves please.»

I filled with a lot of attention the three cups. George, taking one on his hand, gazed its outside and the inside for a long time. He seemed particularly interested at the small yellowish petals that floated on the surface.

«They are  jasmine's flowers »–Mr Winningoes prevented him–«I get this tea directly from China. It is delicious, isn't it?»–he added turning to me, while  I was trying   to sip it slowly, in order not to burn me.

«Yes, certain. It is very tasteful! Does the Chinese cuisine also like you? »–I returned him on my time.
«Oh, yes, indeed so much!» –he answered with a light flash on his face–«I remember when my son Adam was still alive…»

But suddenly we saw that flash of light illuminating his face transformed in a dark and sad countenance.

«My son Adam…»– he echoed bitterly himself, with a smile of self-pity on the pale lips.

We observed a respectful silence for the pain of that man who appeared,  at times,  as  proud as a  lion, full of projects for his future, to become afterward, instead,   a man tired of striving,  overpowered by disgraces and time.

I would  have liked to master a better English to show him my solidarity and to tell him that I didn't even know he had had some children, not even he had gotten married, forming a proper family; apart, of course,  his father and mother, whom he had spoken of to us for long time  throughout his story.

But I didn't have the time even to collect my thoughts. Without moving from the position he had assumed, he took back with sad voice to tell his tale.

«After so many  experiments and such a meditation, I definitely decided to make the big footstep. I would  inject the “nouchefalon” of a man in the brain of another being of the same kind. The basic job was entirely developed.

The premises seemed to be straight very good: all the similar experiments on the other animals had been conducive to improvement.

So the dogs, since the first injections of canine “nouchefalon”, improved their smell, their strength and the whole psycho-physical complex sensitively descending from the brain. The same can be said for the cats; made object of analogous experiment, they became more agile, stronger and more cunning. And the same had still happened with the mice.

It was clear, at that point, that the cells of the “nouchefalon” were reversing: they were able, that is it, to be reduced from the normal organic state to a synthesis, through thermal  process, and from this state, be brought again to the aboriginal state continuing on developing their natural function.

Of course to subtract some dogs to the amusement of selfish and insensitive masters or the cats to their miserable existence of sterilized animals and foolish by the stupidity of their masters, repulsed a great deal less than to deprive a family, a man or a woman from the affection of a beloved face.
But finally, this was what the fate wanted  me,  and the ideal night at long finally came, for me and for the world, resolving me to the action!

I set out toward the poor districts of the city, immediately encouraged by the full smile of the moon. There, where people mostly suffered, I would have found easier to get what I needed and consume the necessary holocaust for  the ransom of the humanity.

I didn't have any idea how to manage the whole thing, but I had a great trust inside of me. I advanced in the miserable roads and wandered for a long time, without destination. After so much to wander, when I already thought about abdicating, some cries attracted my attention: two men quarreled, at the very bottom of an alley, between cans full of garbage.

I decided immediately to follow unmolested the scene. Words gave soon places to  knives as in facts they appeared in their hands.

The fastest and most fortunate succeeded on splitting the stomach of the adversary.
It was enough: I run toward the two men. The hurter was just more than a boy, and now was standing, in despair, with the knife, still tightened in his fist. I could see it reddish at the light of the moon.

«Quick» - I spurred  him. – «I am a physician, just help me! I have nearby  the car: we will bring him home and try to save him.»

«I drove like a crazy man through the desert roads. I was a physician and my duty was to try to save that young life from death.

Though having already appraised the gravity of his wounds, I felt inside that the hoarse man, in the back of my car, was the victim designated by the destiny for the beginning of the big experiment that would have transformed the world and the history of the man.

Don't look with mercilessness's eyes at me, my friends, for these words I have told you.
The life of a man is worthless in the mysterious, spinning wheels of the Cosmos. Nobody in the world dies by random, yet hundreds and thousands of deaths a day, leave unchanged the course of the humanity.

Somehow, I have anticipated and studied for all my life, because this course was completed in the right way. And though I was ready to do anything in order to accomplish with my programs, I was exempted to committee the most atrocious of crimes: the Fate itself killed for me, through the irresponsible hand of an outcast young man.»

Mr Winningoes kept silent for a long an instant, maybe finding a confirm in our eyes to the sentiments he had expressed.

The excited and emphatic tones he had firstly used to relate the purposes of his studies, had left place to most calm tones, yet still impassioned, he sounded now  measured  with impartial criticism.

From my point of view, I had already forgotten some insane light that I had glimpsed in his eyes, a little before, during his story. And now reassured by those noble words, I perceived the mind of a balanced and wise old man.

It seemed to me that also George was expressing in his eyes my same feelings, so that the man, after having greedily drunk a glass of water, revolved to his narration in the same calm tone as before.

We were ready to listen to him with much of attention.

«During the sorrowful trip homeward, the young assaulter, whose name was Adam, told me, amid tears of desperation for his companion’s misfortune, to be a son of illegal immigrated from Mexico, and to have quarreled with that companion just for futile motives. As I had foreseen, every effort to save his life had to reveal useless. When his youth heart uttered the last faint pulsation I asked to Adam, who had assisted him with me in that night of agony, what he wanted to do.
Adam said to be prepared to pay for his guilt gesture, but I tried to convince him the uselessness to decay in a cell for the rest of his days, or much worse, to end stupidly his life on the electric chair.

I told him, without going down in any details, totally incomprehensible for him, the big events that would have seen him protagonist in the future destinies of humanity, and, yet with no little resistance, at lenght he accepted to undergo trough the experiment of transmission of the “nouchefalon”, also encouraged by the fact that perhaps his unfortunate fellow would  relived in him, through the essence of life, and much more, for the reason that I promised a strong money reward to him .

Which the young man gratefully accepted, not so much for himself, but for the family of his killed companion.

What admirable example of superiority and excellence!

In the scurvy world of money, that man, just little more than a boy, son of miserable emigrants, grown in a numerous family at the borders of the disgusting American opulence, abdicated the money that the fate offered to him for the advantage of other poor people.

Day after day, I realized that my scientific interests were connected to another, indefinable feeling, utterly new for me, and my heart was increasingly caring for the life of the young Adam.

From time to time I sent a conspicuous check to his family and that of his unlucky dead friend, unintentionally offended, to make their lives less poor and miserable.

Also in the choice of the young man, the Fate had shown to be wise. And how it would have been otherwise? The founder of the new, future race; the man who would have conducted Manhood on the straight binary of material and spiritual progress , he who would have been the head of the new big tribe of the chosen people, couldn’t he have been perhaps but a sublime mind?
Without delay and with trepidation, but also with lucidity and extreme skill, I drew, with an apparatus by myself built and already tested, the liquid jewel and transfused it in the man selected by the Stars, the young Adam, attending with long live emotion the results.

In the meantime I introduced him to  studies, while I was going more and more fond of him.
The young man learned with unbelievable promptness and, constantly, I saw him grow in wisdom and intelligence, unstoppable as the rise of the sun. But I would have stopped, by now, only at the peak of the most perfection.

It happened  in those years, that the press, with alarm and indignation, reported of numerous news of horrid mutilations of dead bodies, that were but mere brain’s amputations; grisly but necessary holocaust to the prosecution of my experiments.

The unaware journalists didn't succeed in making sense of why the defaced dead bodies were all belonged to young people aged between 18 and 25 years, dead for accidental causes, and above all why  they were been removed only by the heads.

Of course the investigators attributed the unusual thefts to a crazy person and being worried from a public opinion more and more alarmed and timorous (foolish are the men, who instead of worrying about the threats to the alive people, feel panic for bodies without more soul), predisposed some more rigorous controls so that I was forced to interrupt my removals. When I took back with them, in order to prevent other public alarm, I started removing only their precious brain, sewing to perfection their craniums shortly after. What allowed me to continue to work unmolested at my project, and the police officers to boast  another, undeserved  success.

The job however proceeded very slowly. It appeared to me so evident therefore that the reversibility of human “nouchefalon” was slower and more hard-working than that of other animals. But it didn't bother me for nothing.

After all, as I’ve already said, the young Adam became more and more endearing to me, and together with the scientific successes I also pursued those of father, and these last involved the accomplishment of duties, that were also means of pleasures.

Unexpectedly, while the father seemed to overwhelm the scientist, I realized that I had succeeded.
My student, my pupil, was flowing on the wings of the clearest and pure intelligence. The Euclidean geometry,  Algebra, Galileo’s and Newton’s laws , Mendelèev’s periodic table, Maxwell, Einstein, had already become patrimony of his knowledge and his own science.
Even more he was already able to criticize its defects, to make evidence of its limits, to point out its necessary evolutionary developments. And the same happened for other branches of science: he was endued with  Philosophy,  Letters,  Social Sciences,  Biology, Medicine.

Any claw of the human knowledge, which he turned his own mind to, surrendered every inmost secret to him. I already found, despite of my numerous decades spent on the books, some difficulties  comparing  my knowledge with his. That was enough!
I decided to adopt him, so that he could take on my name and my titles, and built up on my patrimony the basis of the new world. He would have stop the violence, the wars, the sufferings of humanity. He would sum up in his hands the power of the whole world and dominate for the sake of Art and  Science, leading Manhood to the discovery of the endless universe and his absolute dominion. He would  become the uncontested Lord all over the world. Over daily baseness, over mediocre rivalries between mankind, over the miserable earthling power, and much more there was to be conquered!»

This new final access, almost declaimed in prophetic and delirious tone, brought me back to reality.
I found myself wandering, once more, how was that man able to embody lucidity and folly in such a natural manner.

How could cohabit so deeply in his mind those noble, human feelings with the others, diabolic and perverted? But by now my interest for his story was at the peak and, however, my mind was quiet and serene. I was ready, therefore, to keep on listening his telling.

«It was my desire, my friends, that the ransom of the new world set off from my motherland, the land my mother had loved so much, up to sacrifice her liberty and even her own life.
We moved therefore to Ireland, my child and I; my mother's country at that time was still suffering split up in two parts. We moved to the free part, in a house in the centre of Dublin, since a long time ownership of the Parnells.

From there, as I told you, the new course of the world would have set up.
I married Adam to a sweet, Gaelic, young girl, named Eva, who had to become the mother of the new world. You can easily imagine, my friends, how great was my exultation, when I knew that that girl, the Adam’s wife, had been conceived.

I could consider that all my efforts had been well repaid! I was so happy that all my past sufferings, fell in to oblivion. But alas! What a grief destiny was hanging over me! My child, my beloved Adam, in an access of folly, killed his pregnant wife before killing himself.

Only a brief, arid message he left on justification of his insane gesture: ‘My dear Father, we dared too much. Might God forgive us.' and nothing more than that.

What did it happen? What did determine on him the insane decision? Perhaps a disease? A sudden raptus? A premonition? Or perhaps I had unconsciously transfused  him some sick geniuses of craziness??? How much I would have preferred that my experiments had failed! I would have easily given up my life of studies and searches, and also the success that I got to, yet in the ignorance of the academicians and the official science, for having still with me my Adam, my dear, beloved family. How I would then prefer, even to be died.

This time I didn't have any doubt about it. There were really tears, some plain, true tears sparkling in those intelligent and tired eyes. But also this time the man, with a sudden gesture of the hand, got off any trace of them by his napkin. I thought embarrassed how much force owed to possess the mind of that strange old man. George seemed embarrassed too. He lit a cigarette, before passing his packet to me. We were prepared  to follow the story of Mr Winningoes which was going to end.

«I lived innumerable days of sadness and deep sufferings, always thinking to finish my useless and empty existence. And I would have certainly done it if one day the destiny had not driven my tired footsteps toward a new dawn.

I was sitting in a solitary bench in O'Connol street, in the centre of Dublin, looking at the intense traffic of the city, considering inside of me how much the human provision is vain, when a sudden gust of wind threw me a sheet of an old newspaper. I picked it up and, when I was about to roll it up, a capital block title attracted my attention.

The article brought the news that two American biologists, Watsons and Crick, had succeeded in the admirable and revolutionary enterprise to isolate the DNA, the nucleic acid responsible of the transmission of the geniuses in all the animal species.

The news struck me as a light, giving me back the energy and a new desire for life that I had considered forever lost. If every man had a genetic code and if this genetic code was transmitted with the acid nucleic DNA, it would have been possible, then, through the new discovery, to isolate the genetic patrimony of the cleverest individuals and to transmit it to other human beings, in order to form the new super-race, the new dominant class, the elite of the new universal order! For Adam, for me, for my maternal ancestors and for the whole humanity, I felt to be my duty to take back my studies. That new spark had re lighted on me the sacred fire of  Science. My mission on the earth had to be taken back ‘till conclusion!»

While narrating these last events, Mr Winningoes had transformed again. From the sad and resigned man who had just cried the death of his family and the end of his same own life, he was returned a pugnacious and strong man, lifting up the head and squirting a new and powerful energy from his green little eyes. I imagined him in the same metamorphosis, in that solitary bench in the centre of Dublin while he was reawakening from the compassionate numbness of the anguish, rising to new battles and new aims.

«The rest of the story, my friends, makes a sole contest with  now day's circumstances, even if it is made of a long and twisted thread. I left soon after Ireland, where nothing more held me back, and I returned again to my studies, once more in the United States of America, eager to undertake my studies again.

At the beginning I didn't have a precise plan. I threw myself in the direction which had been showed to me by the two American researchers who had succeeded isolating the DNA, subject in which I was already however enough advanced, connecting such new events to my former studies on ‘nouchefalon ', always maintaining them to a level of theoretical study.

In those same years, another big frontier of knowledge was opening to human science: the Artificial Intelligence! At first vaguely, then with increasing insistence and precision, the creation of mechanical machines, prognosticated able to think, such intelligent to replace men in the most complexes and difficult duties advanced in the programs of science and  industry.

In that  field my theoretical studies would have been aimed in order to find practice application. For my mind, even if tired and exploited, it was not difficult to acquire that new ulterior branches on science. It was even easier for me than for other researchers, because my study didn't know neither distractions, nor conditionings of any kind.

It was a new radiant youth which drove me in that marvelous meander, to the discovery of unexpected, admirable horizons. I can't certainly explain to you, here, in a few words, all the passages of my complex program, that foresaw new tests and new studies. You must know however that I had conceived to build a machine, intelligent and perfect, able not only to analyze, to deduce, to synthesize; what would have set it, however, higher than the most actual and advanced generations of computers, but also able to reproduce living beings to itself alike. I prompted a technique of laboratory able to allow the endless duplication of the DNA.

Then, admitting and developing these duplicates of cell, I would have been possible to procreate and to produce the perfect, infallible, invincible masters of the future world, destined to put an end to every war and every violence in our sick planet.

And when in this I had succeeded, I would have into my hands the opening key of the door that conducts to a New History of Manhood on Earth!»

to be continued...https://www.amazon.it/dp/B07JKFNCDG