Alfred's eyes widened at the sight of it, and an expression of triumph began to enliven his face. In another bay there was more the suggestion of a sculptor's studio, with moulds and casts lying about on tables. Farther on were large presses, and sizeable electric furnaces, but most of the gear other than the simplest conveyed little to me.
“No cyclotron, no electron-microscope; otherwise, a bit of everything,” — I remarked.
“You're wrong there. There's the electron — Hullo! Your friend's off.”
Alfred had kind of homed at the operating-table. He was peering intently all around and under it, presumably in the hope of bloodstains. We walked after him.
“Here's one of the chief primers of that ghastly imagination of yours,” Dixon said. He opened a drawer, took out an arm and laid it on the operating table. “Take a look at that.”
The thing was a waxy yellow, and without other colouring. In shape, it did have a close resemblance to a human arm, but when I looked closely at the hand, I saw that it was smooth, unmarked by whorls or lines: nor did it have finger-nails.
“Not worth bothering about at this stage,” said Dixon, watching me.
Nor was it a whole arm: it was cut off short between the elbow and the shoulder.
“What's that?” Alfred inquired, pointing to a protruding metal rod.
“Stainless steel,” Dixon told him. “Much quicker and less expensive than making matrices for pressing bone forms. When I get standardized I'll probably go to plastic bones: one ought to be able to save weight there.”
Alfred was looking worriedly disappointed again; that arm was convincingly non-vivesectional.
“But why an arm? Why any of this?” he demanded, with a wave that largely included the whole room.
“In the order of askings: an arm — or, rather, a hand —because it is the most useful tool ever evolved, and I certainly could not think of a better. And ‘any of this’ because once I had hit upon the basic secret I took a fancy to build as my proof the perfect creature — or as near that as one's finite mind can reach.”
“The turtle-like creatures were an early step. They had enough brain to live, and produce reflexes, but not enough for constructive thought. It wasn't necessary.”
“You mean that your ‘perfect creature’ does have constructive thought?” I asked.
“She has a brain as good as ours, and slightly larger,” he said. “Though, of course, she needs experience — education. Still, as the brain is already fully developed, it learns much more quickly than a child's would.”
“May we see it — her?” I asked.
He sighed regretfully.
“Everyone always wants to jump straight to the finished product. All right then. But first we will have a little demonstration — I'm afraid your friend is still unconvinced.”
He led across towards the surgical instrument cases and opened a preserving cupboard there. From it he took a shapeless white mass which he laid on the operating table. Then he wheeled it towards the electrical apparatus farther up the room. Beneath the pallid, sagging object I saw a hand protruding.
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “Bill's ‘bolster with hands’!”
“Yes — he wasn't entirely wrong, though from your account he laid it on a bit. This little fellow is really my chief assistant. He's got all the essential parts; alimentary, vascular, nervous, respiratory. He can, in fact, live. But it isn't a very exciting existence for him — he's a kind of testing motor for trying out newly-made appendages.”
While he busied himself with some electrical connections he added:
“If you, Mr. Weston, would care to examine the specimen in any way, short of harming it, to convince yourself that it is not alive at present, please do.”
Alfred approached the white mass. He peered through his glasses at it closely, and with distaste. He prodded it with a tentative forefinger.
“So the basis is electrical?” I said to Dixon.
He picked up a bottle of some grey concoction and measured a little into a beaker.
“It may be. On the other hand, it may be chemical. You don't think I am going to let you into all my secrets, do you?”
When he had finished his preparations he said:
“Satisfied, Mr. Weston? I'd rather not be accused later on of having shown you a conjuring trick.”
“It doesn't seem to be alive,” Alfred admitted, cautiously.
We watched Dixon attach several electrodes to it. Then he carefully chose three spots on its surface and injected at each from a syringe containing a pale-blue liquid. Next, he sprayed the whole form twice from different atomizers. Finally, he closed four or five switches in rapid succession.
“Now,” he said, with a slight smile, “we wait for five minutes — which you may spend, if you like, in deciding which, or how many, of my actions were critical.”
After three minutes the flaccid mass began to pulsate feebly. Gradually the movement increased until gentle, rhythmic undulations were running through it. Presently it half-sagged or rolled to one side, exposing the hand that had been hidden beneath it. I saw the fingers of the hand tense, and try to clutch at the smooth table-top.
I think I cried out. Until it actually happened, I had been unable to believe that it would. Now some part of the meaning of the thing came flooding in on me. I grabbed Dixon's arm.
“Man!” I said. “If you were to do that to a dead body...!”
But he shook his head.
“No. It doesn't work. I've tried. One is justified in calling this life — I think— But in some way it's a different kind of life. I don't at all understand why...”
Different kind or not, I knew that I must be looking at the seed of a revolution, with potentialities beyond imagination ...
And all the time that fool Alfred kept on poking around the thing as if it were a sideshow at a circus, and he was out to make sure that no one was putting anything across him with mirrors, or working it with bits of string.
It served him right when he got a couple of hundred volts through his fingers...
“And now,” said Alfred, when he had satisfied himself that at least the grosser forms of deception were ruled out, “now we'd like to see this ‘perfect creature’ you spoke about.”
He still seemed as far as ever from realizing the marvel he had witnessed. He was convinced that an offence of some kind was being committed, and he intended to find the evidence that would assign it to its proper category.
“Very well,” agreed Dixon. “By the way, I call her Una. No name I could think of seemed quite adequate, but she is certainly the first of her kind, so Una she is.”
He led us along the room to the last and largest of the row of cages. Standing a little back from the bars, he called the occupant forward.
I don't know what I expected to see — nor quite what Alfred was hoping for. But neither of us had breath for comment when we did see what lumbered towards us.
Dixon's ‘Perfect Creature’ was a more horrible grotes-querie than I had ever imagined in life or dreams.
Picture, if you can, a dark conical carapace of some slightly glossy material. The rounded-off peak of the cone stood well over six feet from the ground: the base was four foot six or more in diameter; and the whole thing supported on three short, cylindrical legs. There were four arms, parodies of human arms, projecting from joints about halfway up. Eyes, set some six inches below the apex, were regarding us steadily from beneath horny lids. For a moment I felt close to hysterics.