“Get along with you, girls,” O’Brien said gruffly. He turned to Whelpley. “Is it far? I’m getting thirsty.”
“We’re almost there,” Whelpley said. They had been passing business buildings with ornate stone or cast-iron fronts, but now a row of decaying mansions was on their left, massive staircases leading to small porches. “Here,” Whelpley said.
O’Brien looked up at the building. “Like me, you live in a boarding house. Where will we put those million people, do you think?”
“Housing will be built, some kinds of apartments, I would guess.”
Whelpley led the way, unlocking the front door, and entering a once stately hall, now stained and marred by time. To the left was what had once been a sitting room, with a cheerful fireplace and a scattering of chairs and tables. To the right was a dining room with a big table surrounded by chairs. This part of the house, at least, had been kept up, although the hall smelled of boiled potatoes and onions and fried meat. Ahead was a broad staircase leading to an upper floor. Up that staircase Whelpley led O’Brien and then, ignoring the smaller staircase leading to the upper floors, he turned right and unlocked a door.
Inside was not simply the single room of most boarding houses but several rooms. Whelpley lit a gas jet to reveal the first of them, a physician’s office with desk and chairs and bookcases, examining table and glass cases filled with instruments and bottles filled with pharmaceuticals, and charts of the human anatomy upon the walls. Beyond, to the right, O’Brien glimpsed what seemed a bedroom; to the left, as Whelpley lit the gas there as well, O’Brien could see a third room fitted out as a kind of laboratory. Racks of chemicals filled the walls and experimental tables, equipped with retorts and tubes and bottles of fluid, were arranged neatly about the bare floor.
“You are a scientist as well as a physician,” O’Brien observed. “Now about that claret….”
Whelpley motioned O’Brien into the laboratory. Indicating a stool in front of a bench on which stood some kind of instrument draped with an off-white canvas cover, Whelpley left the room and a few moments later returned, absent his cloak, with a decanter half full of reddish liquid and a couple of tumblers. “Forgive the absence of amenities,” he said. “I don’t entertain in my rooms.” He poured both tumblers half full.
“Nor do any of us unlanded gentry.” O’Brien picked up the glass and sipped it as if judging its age and character. “That is good stuff,” he said, “as good as ever I had in London or Paris.” He drained it in a couple of swallows and held out his glass for a refill.
“First let me show you what I brought you here to see,” Whelpley said. He lifted the cover from the instrument on the table in front of O’Brien. It was a microscope, almost a work of art with a slender brass barrel extending above brass feet, an exquisitely machined knob on the side, and a silvered mirror below. Whelpley lit a small gas jet on the table, took up an eyedropper full of water from a nearby jar, squeezed a drop onto a glass slide, and slipped it into arms just above the mirror. Looking through the eyepiece, he adjusted the mirror and the knob to bring the slide into focus. “Now,” he said, lifting his head and gesturing for O’Brien to take his place.
O’Brien hesitated and then, shrugging, peered into the eyepiece. He raised his head. “I don’t see a thing.”
“Take a moment for your eye to adjust,” Whelpley said. “Just relax. Don’t try to make something happen.”
O’Brien sighed and looked again through the eyepiece. After a moment he twitched and said, “Fascinating!”
“What do you see?”
“Lots of little creatures moving around as if in another world. What is it?”
“That’s a drop of water I got from a nearby well. And those little creatures, or animalcules, are part of the process of life. We drink them. They live within us or they die. They may even make us ill. They share our world, but they—and we—know nothing of the other. Until now.”
Like all active microscopists, I gave my imagination full play. Indeed, it is a common complaint against many such, that they supply the defects of their instruments with the creations of their brains. I imagined depths in Nature which the limited power of my lenses prohibited me from exploring. I lay awake at night constructing imaginary microscopes of immeasurable power, with which I seemed to pierce through all the envelopes of matter down to its original atom.
O’Brien looked at the microscope with greater respect. It was not only an artificer’s work of art, it had the unsuspected power of revealing the unknown, perhaps the unknowable. “I’ve heard of the microscope, of course, but I had no idea—. What kind of microscope is it?”
“It’s called a Spencer Trunion,” Whelpley said. “But that’s not important.”
“To a writer everything is important.” O’Brien was excited now. He had forgotten about the claret. Once more he peered into the eyepiece and studied the slide. “Incredible!” he muttered.
“What is incredible is what it means.”
“Of course. What a fine story it would make.”
“Perhaps you can use it for one of your ‘Man About Town’ columns for Harper’s.”
“It’s too good an idea to waste on a column. No, it should be a story in its own right. Someone looks through a microscope, maybe a really big one, and sees—what? Something wonderful!”
Whelpley half-filled O’Brien’s glass but O’Brien ignored it. “Perhaps we should talk in the other room where there are chairs.”
The physician picked up both glasses and moved into the examination room. He put the glasses on the desk, took his seat behind it, and motioned O’Brien into the chair in front.
“You want me to write about the unsuspected creatures that lurk around us, that we breathe in and we drink, that may make us ill,” O’Brien said.
Whelpley shook his head. “They may indeed injure us. A German physiologist has already speculated about the microscopic basis of life itself, and biology is destined to become the queen of the sciences. But what I am concerned about is even more basic than that, and that is the growing conflict between reason and emotion.”
“What if a microscopist should actually see another world?” O’Brien said. “It would have to be a different kind of microscope, of course, or someone would have seen it before.”
“People will make better microscopes,” Whelpley said, “just as they improve on everything. McCormick’s reaper has been around a quarter of a century, the telegraph for two decades, nitroglycerin for a dozen years. Invention is changing our lives. Why, I hear that someone had invented an elevator, which means that the height of buildings in Manhattan no longer will be limited by the distance people can climb stairs.”
“How could a better microscope be built?” O’Brien said. “More lenses? Different materials? Is there something exotic one could make a lens out of? A diamond, perhaps?”
“Actually a diamond was used for a lens sometime in the 1820s with no improvement in resolution,” Whelpley said. “What I want to talk to you about, however, is the way science is changing our lives. A couple of European political philosophers commented on the process a decade ago.” He removed a book from the shelves behind his desk, flipped it open, and began to read from it. “ ‘The bourgeoisie during the rule of scarce 100 years has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor.’ ”