[Dark Saint Alaick]

"Pianos! Pooh! Consider the grasshoppers. Make a man as strong as a grasshopper--and he'll be able to leap over a church. I tell you, there is something that determines the quality of every muscle and nerve. Find it--transplant it--and you have the solution."
His wife interrupted at that point. "I think this nonsense has gone far enough. It is wicked to tamper with God's creatures. It is wicked to discuss such matters--especially on the Sabbath. Abednego, I wish you would give up your work in the laboratory."
Danner's cranium was overlarge and his neck small; but he stiffened it to hold himself in a posture of dignity. "Never."
His wife gazed from the defiant pose to the locked door visible through the parlor. She stirred angrily in her clothes and speared a morsel of food. "You'll be punished for it."
On Monday Danner hastened home from his classes. During the night he had had a new idea. And a new idea was a rare thing after fourteen years of groping investigation. "Alkaline radicals," he murmured as he crossed his lawn. He considered a group of ultra-microscopic bodies. He had no name for them. They were the "determinants" of which he had talked. He locked the laboratory door behind himself and bent over the microscope he had designed. "Huh!" he said. An hour later, while he stirred a solution in a beaker, he said: "Huh!" again. He repeated it when his wife called him to dinner. The room was a maze of test tubes, bottles, burners, retorts, instruments. During the meal he did not speak. Afterwards he resumed work. At twelve he prepared six tadpole eggs and put them to hatch. It would be his three hundred and sixty-first separate tadpole hatching.