The Haunted Bell | Page 8

a retort partially filled
with some purplish, foul-smelling liquid, yonder a sinuous copper coil
winding off into the shadows, and moving about like an alchemist of
old, the slender, childlike figure of Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van
Dusen, Ph. D., LL. D., F. R. S., M. D., etc., etc. A ray of light shot
down blindingly from a reflector above and brilliantly illuminated the
laboratory table. The worker leaned forward to peer at some minute
particle under the microscope, and for an instant his head and face were
thrown out against the darkness of the room like some grotesque,
disembodied thing.
It was a singular head and face--a head out of all proportion to body,
domelike, enormous, with a wilderness of straw-yellow hair. The face
was small, wizened, petulant even; the watery blue eyes, narrow almost
to the disappearing point, squinted everlastingly through thick
spectacles; the mouth drooped at the corners. The small, white hands
which twisted and turned the object-glass into focus were possessed of
extraordinarily long, slender fingers.
This man of the large head and small body was the undisputed leader in
contemporaneous science. His was the sanest, coldest, clearest brain in
scientific achievement. His word was the final one. Once upon a time a
newspaperman, Hutchinson Hatch, had dubbed him The Thinking
Machine, and so it came about that the world at large had heard of and
knew him by that title. The reporter, a tall, slender young man, sat now

watching him curiously and listening. The scientist spoke in a tone of
perpetual annoyance; but a long acquaintance had taught the reporter
that it was what he said and not the manner of its saying that was to be
heeded.
"Imagination, Mr. Hatch, is the single connecting link between man
and the infinite," The Thinking Machine was saying. "It is the one
quality which distinguishes us from what we are pleased to call the
brute creation, for we have the same passions, the same appetites, and
the same desires. It is the most valuable adjunct to the scientific mind,
because it is the basis of all scientific progress. It is the thing which
temporarily bridges gaps and makes it possible to solve all material
problems--not some, but all of them. We can achieve nothing until we
imagine it. Just so far as the human brain can imagine it can
comprehend. It fails only to comprehend the eternal purpose, the
Omnipotent Will, because it cannot imagine it. For imagination has a
limit, Mr. Hatch, and beyond that we are not to go--beyond that is
Divinity."
This wasn't at all what Hatch had come to hear, but he listened with a
sort of fascination.
"The first intelligent being," the irritated voice went on, "had to
imagine that when two were added to two there would be a result. He
found it was four, he proved it was four, and instantly it became
immutable--a point in logic, a thing by which we may solve problems.
Thus two and two make four, not sometimes, but all the time."
"I had always supposed that imagination was limitless," Hatch ventured
for a moment, "that it knows no bounds."
The Thinking Machine squinted at him coldly.
"On the contrary," he declared, "it has a boundary beyond which the
mind of man merely reels, staggers, collapses. I'll take you there." He
spoke as if it were just around the corner. "By aid of a microscope of
far less power than the one there, the atomic or molecular theory was
formulated. You know that--it is that all matter is composed of atoms.

Now, imagination suggested and logic immutably demonstrates that the
atoms themselves are composed of other atoms, and that those atoms in
turn are composed of still others, ad infinitum. They are merely
invisible, and imagination--I am not now stating a belief, but citing an
example of what imagination can do--imagination can make us see the
possibility of each of those atoms, down to infinity, being inhabited,
being in itself a world relatively as distant from its fellows as we are
from the moon. We can even imagine what those inhabitants would
look like."
He paused a minute; Hatch blinked several times.
"But the boundary lies the other way--through the telescope," continued
the scientist. "The most powerful glass ever devised has brought no
suggestion of the end of the universe. It only brings more millions of
worlds, invisible to the naked eye into sight. The stronger the glass, the
more hopeless the task of even conjecturing the end, and here, too, the
imagination can apply the atomic theory, and logic will support it. In
other words, atoms make matter, matter makes the world, which is an
inconceivably tiny speck in our solar system, an atom; therefore, all the
millions and millions of worlds are mere