“Look here,” went on Bill, “I don’t know what you two think, but I’m fed up!
We’ve become nothing but dull business people now. It isn’t our sort of life. Repetition, repetition, repetition! I’m going crazy! We’re research workers, not darned piece-workers. For heaven’s sake, let’s start out in some new line!”
This little storm relieved him, and almost immediately he smiled too.
“But, really, aren’t we?” he appealed.
“Yes,” responded Joan and Will in duet.
“Well, what about it?”
Will coughed, and prepared himself.
“Joan and I were talking about that this morning, as a matter of fact,” he said.
“We were going to suggest that we sell the factory, and retire to our old laboratory and re-equip it.”
Bill picked up the ink-pot and emptied it solemnly over the Ming estimates. The ink made a shining lake in the centre of the antique and valuable table.
“At last we’re sane again,” he said. “Now you know the line of investigation I want to open up. I’m perfectly convinced that the reason for our failure to create a living duplicate of any living creature was because the quotiety we assumed for the xy action—”
“Just a moment, Bill,” interrupted Will. “Before we get on with that work, I—I mean, one of the reasons Joan and me wanted to retire was because—well—”
“What he’s trying to say,” said Joan quietly, “is that we plan to get married and settle down for a bit before we resume research work.”
Bill stared at them. He was aware that his cheeks were slowly reddening. He felt numb.
“Well!” he said. “Well!” (He could think of nothing else. This was unbelievable!
He must postpone consideration of it until he was alone, else his utter mortification would show.)
He put out his hand automatically, and they both clasped it.
“You know I wish you every possible happiness,” he said, rather huskily. His mind seemed empty. He tried to form some comment, but somehow he could not compose one sentence that made sense.
“I think we’ll get on all right,” said Will, smiling at Joan. She smiled back at him, and unknowingly cut Bill to the heart.
With an effort, Bill pulled himself together and rang for wine to celebrate. He ordered some of the modern reconstruction of an exceedingly rare ’94. The night was moonless and cloudless, and the myriads of glittering pale blue points of the Milky Way sprawled across the sky as if someone had cast a handful of brilliants upon a black velvet cloth. But they twinkled steadily, for strong air currents were in motion in the upper atmosphere.
The Surrey lane was dark and silent. The only signs of life were the occasional distant glares of automobile headlights passing on the main highway nearly a mile away, and the red dot of a burning cigarette in a gap between the hedgerows. The cigarette was Bill’s. He sat there on a gate staring up at the array in the heavens and wondering what to do with his life.
He felt completely at sea, purposeless, and unutterably depressed. He had thought the word ‘heartache’ just a vague descriptive term. Now he knew what it meant. It was a solid physical feeling, an ache that tore him inside, unceasingly. He yearned to see Joan, to be with Joan, with his whole being. This longing would not let him rest. He could have cried out for a respite.
He tried to argue himself to a more rational viewpoint.
“I am a man of science,” he told himself. “Why should I allow old Mother Nature to torture and badger me like this? I can see through all the tricks of that old twister. These feelings are purely chemical reactions, the secretions of the glands mixing with the bloodstream. My mind is surely strong enough to conquer that? Else I have a third-rate brain, not the scientific instrument I’ve prided myself on.”
He stared up at the stars glittering in their seeming calm stability, age-old and unchanging. But were they? They may look just the same when all mankind and its loves and hates had departed from this planet, and left it frozen and dark. But he knew that even as he watched, they were changing position at a frightful speed, receeding from him at thousands of miles a second.
“Nature is a twister, full of illusions,” he repeated…
There started a train of thought, a merciful anaesthetic in which he lost himself for some minutes.
Somewhere down in the deeps of his subconscious an idea which had, unknown to him, been evolving itself for weeks, was stirred, and emerged suddenly into the light. He started, dropped his cigarette, and left it on the ground. He sat there stiffly on the gate and considered the idea. It was wild—incredibly wild. But if he worked hard and long at it, there was a chance that it might come off. It would provide a reason for living, anyway, so long as there was any hope at all of success.
He jumped down from the gate and started walking quickly and excitedly along the lane back to the factory. His mind was already turning over possibilities, planning eagerly. In the promise of this new adventure, the heartache was temporarily submerged.
Six months passed.
Bill had retired to the old laboratory, and spent much of that time enlarging and reequipping it. He added a rabbit pen, and turned an adjacent patch of ground into a burial-ground to dispose of those who died under his knife. This cemetery was like no cemetery in the world, for it was also full of dead things that had never died—because they had never lived.
His research got nowhere. He could build up, atom by atom, the exact physical counterpart of any living animal, but all such duplicates remained obstinately inanimate. They assumed an extraordinary life-like appearance, but it was frozen life. They were no more alive than waxwork images even though they were as soft and pliable as the original animals in sleep.
Bill thought he had hit upon the trouble in a certain equation, but re-checking confirmed that the equation had been right in the first place. There was no flaw in either theory or practice as far as he could see.
Yet somehow he could not duplicate the force of life in action. Must he apply that force himself? How?
He applied various degrees of electrical impulses to the nerve centers of the rabbits, tried rapid alternations of temperatures, miniature ‘iron lungs’; vigorous massage—both external and internal—intra-venous and spinal injections of everything from adrenalin to even more powerful stimulants which his agile mind concocted. And still the artificial rabbits remained limp bundles of fur. Joan and Will returned from their honeymoon and settled down in a roomy, comfortable old house a few miles away. They sometimes dropped in to see how the research was going. Bill always seemed bright and cheerful enough when they came, and joked about his setbacks.
“I think I’ll scour the world for the hottest thing in female bunnies and teach her to do a hula-hula on the lab bench,” he said. “That ought to make some of these stiffs sit up!”
Joan said she was seriously thinking of starting an eating-house specialising in rabbit pie, if Bill could keep up the supply of dead rabbits. He replied that he’d already buried enough to feed an army.
Their conversation was generally pitched in this bantering key, save when they really got down to technicalities. But when they had gone, Bill would sit and brood, thinking constantly of Joan. And he could concentrate on nothing else for the rest of that day.
Finally, more or less by accident, he found the press-button which awoke life in the rabbits. He was experimenting with a blood solution he had prepared, thinking that it might remain more constant than the natural rabbit’s blood, which became thin and useless too quickly. He had constructed a little pump to force the natural blood from a rabbit’s veins and fill them instead with his artificial solution. The pump had not been going for more than a few seconds before the rabbit stirred weakly and opened its eyes. It twitched its nose, and lay quite still for a moment, save for one foot which continued to quiver. Then suddenly it roused up and made a prodigious bound from the bench. The thin rubber tubes which tethered it by the neck parted in midair, and it fell awkwardly with a heavy thump on the floor. The blood continued to run from one of the broken tubes, but the pump which forced it out was the rabbit’s own heart—beating at last. The animal seemed to have used all its energy in that one powerful jump, and lay still on the floor and quietly expired.