Thunder and Roses Read Online Free PDF

with some heat. “Is he going to be all right?”
    “That’s all of the immediate reactions that I suspected. There’ll be some accelerated mental states—melancholia and exuberance alternating pretty rapidly and pretty drastically. He’ll have to have some outlet for stepped-up muscular energy. Then he’ll sleep.”
    “I’m glad it’s over.”
    “Over?” said Warfield, and went out. She called after him, but he went straight out through the office.
    Robin sat up and shook his head violently. “How did—”
    Peg took his upper arm. “Sit up, Robin. Up and go.” She raised him, but instead of merely sitting up, he rose and pulled away from her. He paced rapidly down the laboratory, turned and came back. His face held that pitiable, puzzled look, with the deep crease between his brows. He walked past her, his eyes distant; then he whirled suddenly on her. His smile was brilliant. “Peg!” he shouted. “I didn’t expect to see you here!” His eyes drifted past her face, gazed over her shoulder, and he turned and looked around the walls. “Where, incidentally, is ‘here’?”
    “Dr. Warfield’s laboratory.”
    “Mel. Oh … Mel. Yes, of course. I must be getting old.”
    “Perhaps you are.”
    He put his hand on his chest, just below his throat. “What would my thymus be doing about now? Trying to think of something quotable to say as its last words?”
    “It may be some time,” she smiled. “But I imagine it’s on its way out. Get your coat on. I’ll go home with you.”
    “What on earth for?”
    She considered, and then decided to tell him the truth. “You’re full of sterones and hormones and synthetic albuminoids, you know. It isn’t dangerous, but glandular balance is a strange thing, and from the treatment you just got you’re liable to do anything but levitate—and knowing you,” she added, “even that wouldn’t surprise me.”
    “Gosh. I didn’t realize that I might be a nuisance to people.”
    “You didn’t realize … why, there was a pretty fair list of possibilities of what might happen to you in that release you signed.”
    “There was? I didn’t read it.”
    “Robin English, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with you.”
    “Haven’t you already done it?” he shrugged. “What’s the odds? Mel said I’d have to sign it, and I took his word for it.”
    “I wish,” said Peg fervently, “that I could guarantee the change in your sense of values the way I can the change in your hormone adjustment. You’re going to have to be educated! And let this be the first lesson—
never
sign anything without reading it first! What are you laughing at, you idiot?”
    “I was just thinking how I would stall things if I go to work for some big outfit and have to sign a payroll,” he chuckled.
    “Get your coat,” said Peg, smiling. “And stop your nonsense.”
    They took a taxi, after all. In spite of Robin’s protests, Peg wouldn’t chance anything else after Robin:
    Nearly fainted on the street from a sudden hunger, and when taken to a restaurant got petulant to the point of abusiveness when he found there was no Tabasco in the place, advancing a brilliant argument with the management to the effect that they should supply same to those who desired it even if what the customer
had
ordered was four pieces of seven-layer cake.
    Ran half a block to give a small boy with a runny nose his very expensive embroidered silk handkerchief.
    Bumped into a lamp-post, lost his temper and swung at it, fracturing slightly his middle phalanx annularis.
    Indulged in a slightly less than admirable remorseful jag in which he recounted a series of petty sins—and some not too petty at that—and cast wistful eyes at the huge wheels of an approaching tractor-trailer.
    Went into gales of helpless laughter over Peg’s use of the phrase “Signs of the times” and gaspingly explained to her that he was suffering from sinus of the thymus.
    And the payoff—the instantaneous