of the jacket that I couldn't get back
into my body again. I mean that my body would be dead for keeps. And I
didn't want it to be dead. I didn't want to give Captain Jamie and the
rest that satisfaction. But I tell you, Darrell, if you can turn the
trick you can laugh at the Warden. Once you make your body die that way
it don't matter whether they keep you in the jacket a month on end. You
don't suffer none, and your body don't suffer. You know there are cases
of people who have slept a whole year at a time. That's the way it will
be with your body. It just stays there in the jacket, not hurting or
anything, just waiting for you to come back.

"You try it. I am giving you the straight steer."

"And if he don't come back?" Oppenheimer, asked.

"Then the laugh will be on him, I guess, Jake," Morrell answered.
"Unless, maybe, it will be on us for sticking round this old dump when we
could get away that easy."

And here the conversation ended, for Pie-Face Jones, waking crustily from
stolen slumber, threatened Morrell and Oppenheimer with a report next
morning that would mean the jacket for them. Me he did not threaten, for
he knew I was doomed for the jacket anyway.

I lay long there in the silence, forgetting the misery of my body while I
considered this proposition Morrell had advanced. Already, as I have
explained, by mechanical self-hypnosis I had sought to penetrate back
through time to my previous selves. That I had partly succeeded I knew;
but all that I had experienced was a fluttering of apparitions that
merged erratically and were without continuity.

But Morrell's method was so patently the reverse of my method of self-
hypnosis that I was fascinated. By my method, my consciousness went
first of all. By his method, consciousness persisted last of all, and,
when the body was quite gone, passed into stages so sublimated that it
left the body, left the prison of San Quentin, and journeyed afar, and
was still consciousness.

It was worth a trial, anyway, I concluded. And, despite the sceptical
attitude of the scientist that was mine, I believed. I had no doubt I
could do what Morrell said he had done three times. Perhaps this faith
that so easily possessed me was due to my extreme debility. Perhaps I
was not strong enough to be sceptical. This was the hypothesis already
suggested by Morrell. It was a conclusion of pure empiricism, and I,
too, as you shall see, demonstrated it empiricall