th, me and the landlord holding
lights and so forth."

"It was a cataleptic rigour at first, wasn't it?"

"Stiff!--wherever you bent him he stuck. You might have stood him on
his head and he'd have stopped. I never saw such stiffness. Of course
this"--he indicated the prostrate figure by a movement of his head--"is
quite different. And, of course, the little doctor--what was his name?"

"Smithers?"

"Smithers it was--was quite wrong in trying to 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--"

"Induction coils."

"Yes. You could see his muscles throb and jump, and he twisted about.
There was 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 waking or a death; sometimes first
one and then the other. Isbister noted the marks the physicians had
made in injecting nourishment, for that device 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. "An