And so the night watchman and the janitor both said good night to the machine. Later, in the very early morning, the janitor stole back into the laboratory with a book and read some strange, strange things out loud and then stole out of the room again and locked the door behind him. Shortly after, Samuel, the night watchman, passed by.
He was surprised at an unearthly glow coming from within and a peculiar grating noise as if someone were stepping on a radio. Then the unearthly glow appeared on the fire escape and Samuel, rushing out to observe, thought the glow seemed to fly up through a hole in the low clouds where a thousand stars still blazed brightly. In its wake there was a sound like laughing.
A few hours later Dr. Henderson unlocked the door of his laboratory and pushed a cart full of mice in before him.
During the morning he dissected three hundred mice, popping out liver, spleen and kidneys as if he were shelling peas. In the afternoon he made sections of the organs, stained them with hematoxylin and eosin, mounted them on slides and looked at them under his new stereoscopic microscope. Five minutes before five, Dr. Henderson's friend, Colonel Smith, came in and watched as Henderson somewhat dubiously fed the three hundred mice, now in statistical form, into the machine. The machine whirred efficiently and shot out the answer in seconds.
"Statistically significant," said the machine.
Henderson followed his friend Colonel Smith out the door, looking neither right nor left, and locked it behind him. It had been a good day.
Behind, in the laboratory which contained within its confines all that could be known about the universe, about man, and about mice, the machine squatted in silence, the approaching darkness already enfolding it like a shroud.