was meaningless to me. Chiefly I think I was amazed at the evidence that there was really a human being, capable of feeling, inside that shell of mind and matter and handsome clothes which we had all called by his name. He was a new man—; able to suffer. But he began now to speak—and his story was beyond belief.
Some months after I sailed, Vinton had been the victim of a motor accident, going home late one night through the familiar streets. Night was like day to him—but alas, not to the driver of the car that crushed him!
He could speak when they picked him up, and he begged to be taken to Murtha’s room. Murtha, he knew, was a physician, and he did not want his mother alarmed unnecessarily. He had no idea how badly he was hurt; but a moment’s examination told Murtha he could do very little. He stopped the hemorrhages, and tried with local anaesthetics to make the poor broken body temporarily comfortable—but there was no cure ever again for Vinton. Life—yes; but helplessness, and probable pain as long as he might live; pain that would stand between him and his fancies, pain that in time would wear down his courage and break his self-control. He told it all to the boy, with his blunt, unfeeling tactlessness. I cannot believe he deliberately made the picture dark.
Details of the Awful Experiment
But while he was speaking the temptation came—the idea he had cherished as a wild impossible fancy. How he presented it I do not know. He could be very subtle when he chose. Perhaps he promised Vinton immortality in this world—freedom from the body’s limitations, time without end for learning and thought and the creative activity the boy loved. Perhaps he only suggested the possibility of escape from pain, and a share in a daring venture. But I can imagine how it was—the confident, self-assured man, speaking as one with authority to the discouraged, tortured youth who was trying to make up his mind to face a future of helpless idleness. He who was to have been the support of that mother who was eyes to her son—who by the magic of his fancy was to have kept them in comfort—must be a burden to her as long as he lasted alive.
At this point Murtha threw his wealth into the scales. He would make her an allowance to keep her comfortable—-he would represent it as insurance and furthermore make her his heir. Remember, he was the hero who was slowly giving him back his sight. Vinton knew the things Murtha had accomplished; he knew of the work of Loeb and Carrel. If a heart could be kept beating in a bottle for years at a time, why should not a brain be kept thinking in a bottle forever? There seemed nothing impossible in the plan. How could he communicate? That was simple—for he knew his Morse, and Murtha had solved the problem of efferent impulses. He must trust the man to carry out his promise about the money; but if he did not, there was the certainty of poverty for the woman struggling to support her invalid son. Insurance policies contain “suicide clauses,” I was well aware—men had been known to kill themselves to get money for someone as dear as this mother was to her boy. I was not surprised to hear that he had said “Yes.”
Murtha was his own anaesthetist. He wheeled the operating table under the lights, brought the head from his wax figure (with its brain-shaped cavity ready and waiting) and set it beside the table, coolly mixed and spread the cleansing, nourishing liquids in the wax interior, made his temperature coils and capillary tubes ready, completed his electrical connections, and applied the ether-cone. The skull was fractured, and he cut along the fracture; he severed the spinal cord with infinite skill, working feverishly. Probably in his excitement he forgot what manner of thing he was doing; but before the night was gone he had moved—Vinton—from the kind, familiar habitation of flesh and blood to that still, dead body of wax and steel which was never meant to hold a fragile living spirit. When he had finished, he collapsed. He slept out the night in the very chair where I was sitting.
His dreams were ghastly; but in the morning he took himself strongly in hand, and forced himself through the routine duties of a physician reporting a death. His certificate was accepted without question then, because of his connection with the University, although he was not yet known locally as a medical man but as a teacher. Then he telephoned the mother and broke the news, calling on her immediately after as her son’s friend and physician. He told his lie about the insurance, and faithfully carried out the promised deception. He left her with a check and a promise of more to come; and it is probable that she never noticed that it was a personal check on a local bank. Going back to his rooms he wrote out a clear, short, simple will in her favor, had it witnessed, locked it away, and faced the placid waxen features of his apparatus.
Dreadful Messages from the Transplanted Brain of a Dead Man
He took the speaking tube in hand, and in a trembling voice—for by now he was feeling “strangely” about it all—he spoke some words. Instantly the telegraph key began to chatter—weak, wobbly, uncertain Morse, but clear enough to be unmistakable. Vinton was there, alive!
He could not tell what it meant. He did not know the code. He took down the dots and dashes with infinite care for a long time, and closing the key rushed out to buy a code-book. The rest of the day he spent working out the message.
And such things as it contained! Curses, prayers, pleading, long stretches of incoherent letter-groups, quotations from the boy’s verse and evidence of frequent delirium! It was dreadful—I am using Murtha’s word. His horror grew, and often he sprang up from the table, only to return and plunge again into the work. Very soon he had memorized the dots and dashes, and could read whole sentences—always bitter and terrible sentences. In time he could endure no more, and stole away to walk wild-eyed through the streets fighting for sanity and composure. But always, drawn by a fascination, irresistible, he returned to his rooms.
He opened the door again, and the awful metallic voice seemed to condemn him in the rattling language which he could not yet translate by ear. This time he took it gradually, a few sentences at a time
(Continued on page 478)
