Whiff & Pouf

DR. OX'S EXPERIMENT by Jules Verne. 100 pages. Macmillan. $3.95.

Whether his imagination was soaring around the world or burrowing into the center of it, Jules Verne was a delightful storyteller. Among his chief attractions, of course, was his infectious fascination with the science of his day (1828-1905), to say nothing of the remarkable prescience that some of his wildest fantasies showed. An account of the newly discovered properties of oxygen set his fertile mind spinning--and out spun the absurd tale of Dr. Ox.

The Flanders village of Quiquendone is a study in slow motion. The burgomaster is "phlegm personified." Conversations are punctuated by extended periods of silence. It is a town, says one man, "where there has not been the shadow of a discussion for a century, where the cartmen do not swear, where the coachmen do not insult each other, where horses do not run away, where the dogs do not bite, where the cats do not scratch." For lovers to marry before they have courted languorously for ten years is a scandal.

Now comes the mysterious Dr. Ox, who builds a "gasworks" and begins laying pipe so that the good villagers can enjoy the luxury of gaslight in their homes. Or so everybody thinks. Actually Dr. Ox plans to flood the place with oxygen to see if things perk up a little.

They perk. Take the opera: usually, three evenings are required for the performance of one work; Dr. Ox sprays the hall with his secret ingredient, and pouf! The joint goes wild. Frenzied musicians bust their instruments, and the audience whips into a wild free-for-all. In the gardens, shrubs become trees, cabbages become bushes, mushrooms become umbrellas. Kids take to throw ing things at the teachers, townspeople eat and drink as never before, a couple gets married after only two months of courtship, two people fight a duel.

And so it goes, until Quiquendonians, unaccountably infected with this un quenchable need for activity, decide to declare war on a neighboring village for an offense committed 500 years earlier. The gasworks blows up just in time, and Quiquendone relapses harmlessly into its familiar stupor.

The story, first published in 1874, is dressed up with charming illustrations by William Pene du Bois and an intro duction in the form of a biography of Verne by Scientist Willy Ley. But there is perhaps one Oxphyxiated refugee from Quiquendone who now works for Macmillan. He is the fellow who de cided to print the book so that it must be held 90DEG around from the normal, so that pages must be turned from top to bottom instead of right to left. But this should not deter true lovers of the Vernacular. Dr. Ox is a gasser.

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