“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
