All the sets of instruments and the crowd of bottles shone in the light of the rising sun. Antiseptic dressings lay on a little table in a woolly cloud.
The two nickel-plated spheres on their supports, showed round, like divers’ helmets. A spirit lamp was burning under them. I nearly fainted with horror. At the side behind the curtain something was going on. A penetrating odor of ether came from it.
The secret, the secret always!
“What’s behind that?” I cried.
From between the wall and the curtain Karl and Wilhelm appeared, leaving the room which had thus been contrived on the other side of the compartment. They also had put on white overalls, though they were only assistants, but Lerne had seized something, and I felt, on the back of my neck, the chill touch of steel.
I uttered a cry.
“Idiot!” said my uncle, “it’s a clipper.”
He cut my hair, and shaved my hairy scalp close. At every touch of the razor I thought I felt the edge in my flesh.
After that, they soaked my skull again, dried it, and the Professor, by means of a soft pencil and calipers, covered my baldness with cabalistic lines.
“Take off your shirt,” he said to me. “Take care, do not spoil my diagrams.”