o fetch him round too soon,
according to all accounts. The things he did! Even now it makes me feel
all--ugh! Mustard, snuff, pricking. And one of those beastly little
things, not dynamos--"

"Coils."

"Yes. You could see his muscles throb and jump, and he twisted about.
There were just two flaring yellow candles, and all the shadows were
shivering, and the little doctor nervous and putting on side, and
_him_--stark and squirming in the most unnatural ways. Well, it made
me dream."

Pause.

"It's a strange state," said Warming.

"It's a sort of complete absence," said Isbister. "Here's the body,
empty. Not dead a bit, and yet not alive. It's like a seat vacant and
marked 'engaged.' No feeling, no digestion, no beating of the heart--not
a flutter. _That_ doesn't make me feel as if there was a man present. In
a sense it's more dead than death, for these doctors tell me that even
the hair has stopped growing. Now with the proper dead, the hair will go
on growing--"

"I know," said Warming, with a flash of pain in his expression.

They peered through the glass again. Graham was indeed in a strange
state, in the flaccid phase of a trance, but a trance unprecedented in
medical history. Trances had lasted for as much as a year before--but at
the end of that time it had ever been a waking or a death; sometimes
first one and then the other. Isbister noted the marks the physicians
had made in injecting nourishment, for that had been resorted to to
postpone collapse; he pointed them out to Warming, who had been trying
not to see them.

"And while he has been lying here," said Isbister, with the zest of a
life freely spent, "I have changed my plans in life; married, raised a
family, my eldest lad--I hadn't begun to think of sons then--is an
American citizen, and looking forward to leaving Harvard. There's a touch
of grey in my hair. And this man, not a day older nor wiser (practically)
than I was in my downy days. It's curious to think of."

Warming turned. "And I have grown old too. I played cricket with him when
I was still only a boy. And he looks a young man still. Yellow perhaps.
But that _is_ a young man nevertheless."

"And there's been the War," said Isbister.

"From beginning to end."

"And these Martians."

"I've understood," said Isbister after a pause, "that he had some
moderate property of his own?"

"That is so," said Warming. He coughed primly. "As it happens--I have
charge of it."

"Ah!" Isbist