“I know I’m asking a hell of a lot. This affair reaches deeper than a scientific curiosity. No feeling man can contemplate such a proposal without misgivings, for his wife and for himself. But honestly, Will, I cannot see any possible harm arising from it. Though, admittedly, the only good thing would be to make a selfish man happy. For heaven’s sake, let me know what you think.”
Will sat contemplating, while the distracted Bill continued to pace. Presently, he said, “You are sure no physical harm could come to Joan in the course of the experiment?”
“Certain—completely certain,” said Bill.
“Then I personally have no objection. Anything but objection. I had no idea you felt that way, Bill, and it would make me, as well as Joan, very unhappy to know you had to go on like that.”
He caught sight of his wife approaching with a laden tray. “Naturally, the decision rests with her,” he said. “If she’d rather not, there’s no more to it.”
“No, of course not,” agreed Bill.
But they both knew what her answer would be.
“Stop the car for a minute, Will,” said Joan suddenly, and her husband stepped on the foot-brake.
The car halted in the lane on the brow of the hill. Through a gap in the hedge the two occupants had a view of Bill’s laboratory as it lay below in the cradle of the valley.
Joan pointed down. In the field behind the ‘cemetery’ two figures were strolling. Even at this distance, Bill’s flaming hair marked his identity. His companion was a woman in a white summer frock. And it was on her that Joan’s attention was fixed.
“She’s alive now!” she whispered, and her voice trembled slightly. Will nodded. He noticed her apprehension, and gripped her hand encouragingly. She managed a wry smile.
“It’s not every day one goes to pay a visit to oneself,” she said. “It was unnerving enough last week to see her lying on the other couch in the lab, dressed in my red frock—which I was wearing—so pale, and—Oh, it was like seeing myself dead!”
“She’s not dead now, and Bill’s bought her some different clothes, so cheer up,”
said Will. “I know it’s a most queer situation, but the only possible way to look at it is from the scientific viewpoint. It’s a unique scientific event. And it’s made Bill happy into the bargain.”
He ruminated a minute.
“Wish he’d given us a hint as to how he works his resuscitation process, though,” he went on. “Still, I suppose he’s right to keep it a secret. It’s a discovery which could be appallingly abused. Think of dictators manufacturing loyal, stupid armies from one loyal, stupid soldier! Or industrialists manufacturing cheap labour!
We should soon have a world of robots, all traces of individuality wiped out. No variety, nothing unique—life would not be worth living.”
“No,” replied Joan, mechanically, her thoughts still on that white-clad figure down there.
Will released the brake, and the car rolled down the hill toward the laboratory. The two in the field saw it coming, and walked back through the cemetery to meet it. They reached the road as the car drew up.
“Hello, there!” greeted Bill. “You’re late—we’ve had the kettle on the boil for half an hour. Doll and I were getting anxious.”
He advanced into the road, and the woman in the white frock lingered hesitantly behind him. Joan tightened her lips and braced herself to face this unusual ordeal. She got out of the car, and while Will and Bill were grasping hands, she walked to meet her now living twin.
Apparently Doll had decided to face it in the same way, and they met with oddly identical expressions of smiling surface ease, with an undercurrent of curiosity and doubt. They both saw and understood each other’s expression simultaneously, and burst out laughing. That helped a lot.
“It’s not so bad, after all,” said Doll, and Joan checked herself from making the same instinctive remark.
“No, not nearly,” she agreed.
And it wasn’t. For although Doll looked familiar to her, she could not seem to identify her with herself to any unusual extent. It was not that her apparel and hairstyle were different, but that somehow her face, figure and voice seemed like those of another person.
