The idea staggered Hugo. It paralyzed him and he heard his father’s voice come from a great distance. “Up in the attic in the black trunk are six notebooks wrapped in oilpaper. They were written in pencil, but I went over them carefully in ink. That is my life-work, Hugo. It is the secret—of you. Given those books, a good laboratory worker could go through all my experiments and repeat each with the same success. I tried a little myself. I found out things—for example, the effect of the process is not inherited by the future generations. It must be done over each time. It has seemed to me that those six little books—you could slip them all into your coat pocket—are a terrible explosive. They can rip the world apart and wipe humanity from it. In malicious hands they would end life. Sometimes, when I became nervous waiting for the newspapers, waiting for a letter from you, I have been sorely tempted to destroy them. But now—”

“Now?” Hugo echoed huskily.

“Now I understand. There is no better keeping for them than your own. I give them to you.”

“Me!”

“You, son. You must take them, and the burden must be yours. You have grown to manhood now and I am proud of you. More than proud. If I were not, I myself would destroy the books here on this bed. Matilda would bring them and I would watch them burn so that the danger would go with—” he cleared his throat—“my dream.”

“But—”

“You cannot deny me. It is my wish. You can see what it means. A world grown suddenly—as you are.”

“I, father—”

“You have not avoided responsibility. You will not avoid this, the greatest of your responsibilities. Since the days when I made those notes—what days!—biology has made great strides. For a time I was anxious. For a time I thought that my research might be rediscovered. But it cannot be. Theory has swung in a different direction.” He smiled with inner amusement. “The opticians have decided that the microscope I made is impossible. The biochemists, moving through the secretions of such things as hippuric acid in the epithelial cells, to enzymes, to hormones, to chromosomes, have put a false construction on everything. It will take hundreds, thousands of years to see the light. The darkness is so intense and the error so plausible that they may never see again exactly as I saw. The fact of you, at best, may remain always no more than a theory. This is not vanity. My findings were a combination of accidents almost outside the bounds of mathematical probability. It is you who must bear the light.”

Hugo felt that now, indeed, circumstance had closed around him and left him without succour or recourse. He bowed his head. “I will do it, father.”

“Now I can die in peace—in joy.”