He nodded.

"I went in to see your Russian friend. He's upstairs. He is not exactly
asleep. He is more like a man partially under the influence of a drug."

"I will go and see him," I said.

Sarakoff was lying on the bed with his eyes shut. He was breathing
quietly. His eyelids quivered, as if they might open at any moment, but
my entrance did not rouse him. His limbs were relaxed. I spoke to him
and tried to wake him, without result. Then I remembered how I had
stumbled across the body of Herbert Wain in the Park some days ago. He
had seemed to be in a strange kind of sleep. I sat down on the bed and
stared at the motionless figure of the Russian. There was something
strangely pathetic in his pose. His rough hair and black beard, his keen
aquiline face seemed weirdly out of keeping with his helpless state.
Here lay the man whose brain had once teemed with ambitious desires,
relaxed and limp like a baby, while the nails of his hands, turquoise
blue, bore silent witness to his great experiment on humanity. Had it
failed? Where was all that marvellous vision of physical happiness that
had haunted him? The streets of London were filled with people, no
longer working, no longer crying or weeping, but moving aimlessly, like
people in a dream. Were they happy? I moved to the window and drew down
the blind.

"This may be the end," I thought. "The germ will be sweeping through
France now. It may be the end of all things."

I rejoined Thornduck in the study.

"Sarakoff is in a kind of trance," I observed. "What do you make of it?"

"Isn't it natural?" he asked. "What kind of a man was he? What motives
did he work on? Just think what the killing of desire means. All those
things that depended on worldly ambition, self-gratification, physical
pleasure, conceit, lust, hatred, passion, egotism, selfishness, vanity,
avarice, sensuality and so on, are undermined and rendered paralysed by
the germ. What remains? Why, in most people, practically nothing
remains."

"Even so," I said, "I don't see why Sarakoff should go into a trance."

"He's gone into a trance simply because there's not enough left in him
to constitute an individuality. The germ has taken the inside clean out
of him. He's just an immortal shell now."

"Then do you think----?"

I stared at him wonderingly.

"I think that the germ will send most of the world to sleep."

He got up and walked to the window. The clear noonday light fell on his
thin sensiti