I
An hour later the Doctor alone paced the floor of the little surgery.
He had done everything possible to calm himself. He had taken bromide;
he had been out for a smart turn around the roads; he had forced
himself to sit down and answer some letters. But it was impossible to
ease the pressure of his thoughts; he felt that his brain would never
cease from working round and round in a circle of hopeless enquiry. In
the end, and late as it was, he had telephoned for Gregg.
The Clockwork man lay in the coal cellar, which was situated in the
area, just opposite the surgery door. He lay there, stiff and stark,
with an immobile expression upon his features, and his eyes and mouth
wide open.
After that final collapse, the Doctor had succeeded somehow in
restoring him to his normal shape; and then, by miraculous chance, he
discovered a hand that, when turned, had the effect of producing in
the Clockwork man an appearance of complete quiescence. He looked now
more like a tailor's dummy than anything else; and the apparent absence
of blood circulation and even respiration rendered the illusion almost
perfect. He looked life-like without seeming to be alive.
But he was alive. The Doctor had made sure of that by certain tentative
experiments; and he had also taken advantage of his passive condition
in order to make a thorough examination--so far as was possible--of
this marvel of the future. As a result of his investigation, the
Doctor had failed to come to any definite conclusion; there was merely
deepened in him a sense of outrage and revolt. It was impossible to
accept the Clockwork man as a human being.
He was a tissue of physiological lies.
It could be proved beyond a shadow of doubt, and by reference to all
known laws of anatomy, that he did not exist.
His internal organs, heard in action through a stethoscope, resembled
the noise made by the humming of a dynamo at full pitch.
And yet this wildly incredible being, this unspeakable travesty of
all living organisms, this thing most opposite to humanity, actually
breathed and conversed. He was a sentient being. He was more than man,
for he could be turned into something else by simply pressing a stop.
Properly understood, there was no doubt that the mechanism permitted
the owner of it to run up and down the evolutionary scale of species
according to adjustment.
There were one or two other details which the Doctor had not failed to
observe.
The Clockwork man had no apparent sex.
His body was scarred and disfigured, as though many surgical operations
had been performed upon it.
There was some organ faintly approximating to the human heart, but it
was infinitely more powerful, and the valvular action was exceedingly
complex.
Fitted into the clock, in such a way that they could be removed, were
a series of long tubes with valve-like endings. The Doctor had removed
one or two of these and examined them very closely, but he could not
arrive at any idea of their purpose.
At every point in his examination the Doctor had found himself
confronted by an elaboration, in some cases a flat contradiction,
of ordinary human functions. He could not grasp even the elementary
premises of a state of affairs that had made the Clockwork man
possible.