"That's the ambulance."
"Will you really require me at the police station?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Will it be necessary to prove who I am?"
He smiled.
"You won't need to prove that you're a doctor, sir," he said genially. "We have a lot to do with doctors. I could tell you were a doctor after talking a minute with you. You are all the same."
"What do you mean?"
"Well—it's the things you say. Now only a doctor could have said what you did—about life being a cell. Do you know, sir, I sometimes believe that doctors is more innocent than parsons. It's the things they say...."
The low rumbling began again in his interior. I waited silently until the ambulance came up. I felt a slight shade of annoyance. But how could I expect the enormous uneducated bulk beside me to take a really intelligent and scientific view of life? Of course life was a cell. Every educated person knew that—and now that cell was, for the first time in history, about to become immortal—but what did the policeman care? How stupid people were, I reflected. We moved off in a small procession towards the police station. Half an hour later I was on my way west, deeply pondering on the causes of that extraordinary expression of fear in the dead sailor's face. Never in my life before had I seen so agonized a countenance, but I was destined to see others as terrible. As I walked, the strangeness of the dead man's tragedy grew in my mind and filled me with a tremendous wonder, for who had ever seen a dead Immortal?
On reaching home I roused Sarakoff and related to him what I had seen.