A moonlight walk through the low streets, transfigured by the silver gleam into fairy vistas—all but the odor—brought him to Herr Lebensfunke’s house. Simple birdling, on the lookout for him, piloted him through the unsafe channel, and brought him to anchor in the dimly-lit room.
“All is ready,” said the philosopher, as he trembled forward and shook Ronald’s hand. “See here.” Zig-zags of silk-bound wire squirmed hither and thither from the life-magnet. Two of them ended in carbon points. “And here, too, my young friend, is your new finger.”
It lay, detached, in the central globe, and on its severed end atoms of protoplasm were already clustered. “Literally a second-hand article,” thought Ronald; but, not venturing to translate the idiom, he only bowed and said, “Ach so!” which means any thing and every thing in German.
It was not without a very natural sinking of the heart that Ronald Wyde divested himself of his clothing, and took his position, by the old man’s direction, on the stout table, side by side with the dead. A flat brass plate pressed between his shoulders, and one of the carbon points, clamped in a little insulated stand, rested on his bosom and quivered with the quickened motion of the heart beneath it. The other point touched the dead man’s breast.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
The old man pressed a key, and as he did so a sharp sting, hardly worse than a leech’s bite, pricked Ronald Wyde’s breast. A sense of languor crept slowly upon him, his feet tingled, his breath came slowly, and waves of light and shade pulsed in indistinct alternation before his sight; but through them the old man’s eyes peered into his, like a dream. Presently Ronald would have started if he could, for two old philosophers were craning over him instead of one. But as he looked more steadily, one face softly dimmed into nothing, and the other grew brighter and stronger in its lines, while the room flushed with an unaccountable light. The little key clicked once more; a vague sensation that the current had somehow ceased to flow, roused him, and he raised himself on his elbow and looked in blank bewilderment at his own dead self lying by his side in the daylight, while the sunrise tried to peer through the webbed panes.
“Is it over?” he asked, with a puzzled glance around him; and added, “Which am I?”
“Either, or both,” answered Herr Lebensfunke. “Your identity will be something of a problem to you for a day or two.”
Aided by the old man, Ronald awkwardly got into the sleazy clothes that went with the exchange—growing less and less at home each minute. He felt weak and sore; his head ached, and the wound left by the fresh amputation of his little finger throbbed angrily.