The startling fact that they’d called him by a different name. “George” had been the name used by the man who’d been beside his bed last night. “Mr. Vine,” the nurse had called him. George Vine, an English name, surely.
But there was one thing a thousand times more startling than either of those: It was what last night’s stranger (Could he be the “cousin” of whom the doctor had spoken?) had told him about the accident. ” You ran that coupe of yours head-on into a gravel truck.”
The amazing thing, the contradictory thing, was that he knew what a coupe was and what a truck was. Not that he had any recollection of having driven either, of the accident itself, or of anything beyond that moment when he’d been sitting in the tent after Lodi—but—but how could a picture of a coupe, something driven by a gasoline engine, arise to his mind when such a concept had never been in his mind before.
There was that mad mingling of two worlds—the one sharp and clear and definite. The world he’d lived his twenty-seven years of life in, in the world into which he’d been born twenty-seven years ago, on August 15th, 1769, in Corsica. The world in which he’d gone to sleep—it seemed like last night—in his tent at Lodi, as General of the Army in Italy, after his first important victory in the field.
And then there was this disturbing world into which he had awakened, this white world in which people spoke an English—now that he thought of it—which was different from the English he had heard spoken at Brienne, in Valence, at Toulon, and yet which he understood perfectly, which he knew instinctively that he could speak if his jaw were not in a cast. This world in which people called him George Vine, and in which, strangest of all, people used words that he did not know, could not conceivably know, and yet which brought pictures to his mind.
Coupe, truck. They were both forms of—the word came to his mind unbidden—automobiles. He concentrated on what an automobile was and how it worked, and the information was there. The cylinder block, the pistons driven by explosions of gasoline vapor, ignited by a spark of electricity from a generator.
Electricity. He opened his eyes and looked upward at the shaded light in the ceiling, and he knew, somehow, that it was an electric light, and in a general way he knew what electricity was.
The Italian Galvani—yes, he’d read of some experiments of Galvani, but they hadn’t encompassed anything practical such as a light like that. And staring at the shaded light, he visualized behind it water power running dynamos, miles of wire, motors running generators. He caught his breath at the concept that came to him out of his own mind, or part of his own mind.
The faint, fumbling experiments of Galvani with their weak currents and kicking frogs’ legs had scarcely fore-shadowed the unmysterious mystery of that light up in the ceiling; and that was the strangest thing yet; part of his mind found it mysterious and another part took it for granted and understood in a general sort of way how it all worked.
Let’s see, he thought, the electric light was invented by Thomas Alva Edison somewhere around—Ridiculous; he’d been going to say around 1900, and it was now only 1796!