“The fellow just refuses to understand anything.”

“He must love my daughter, though,” reflected Elson who, although panic-stricken, remained practical, and was ready to demonstrate just how practical he was, even to the point of absurdity.

“Surely, doctor, science must be able to devise something!”

Bathybius’ motley science could well have been compared to a compass with its needle gyrating like a pinwheel and coming to rest at random at any point but north. The physician’s brain must have been more or less in the same state as the dynamometer that the Supermale had once demolished.

“The ancients had their philters,” mused the chemist. “We should need to be able to rediscover processes, as old as human superstition, which force a soul to love!”

Arthur Gough was consulted, and said:

“There is suggestion. . . hypnotism. . . it’s infallible, but that’s the doctor’s department.”

Bathybius shuddered.

“I saw him put the woman to sleep. . . put her to sleep. . . in articulo mortis. . . just when she was about to jab his eyes out with a pin. . . His eyes would knock anyone right over. . . No one is mad enough, is he, to look into the eyes of the double headlights of a locomotive at night, which loom larger and larger as they bear down on him?”

“Well then,” said Arthur Gough, “let’s go back to the ancient processes. The Desert Fathers were acquainted with a machine that might possibly serve our purpose. It is described in Saint Jerome’s Life of St. Hilarion:

“ ‘Certainly thy strength, (O Demon) must be very great, as thou art thus bound and halted by a strip of copper and a braided wire!’ ”

“An electromagnetic device,” said William Elson, without hesitation.

And thus it was that Arthur Gough, the engineer who could build anything, was called upon to create the most unusual machine of modern times, a machine not designed to produce a physical effect, but to act on forces hitherto considered out of reach: the machine-to-inspire-love.

If André Marcueil were a machine, or endowed with an iron constitution that enabled him to overcome machines, why then, the combined efforts of the engineer, the chemist, and the physician would pit one machine against another for the greater good of bourgeois science, medicine, and morality. Since this man had become a mechanism, the equilibrium of the world required that another mechanism should manufacture – a soul.

The construction of the device was simple enough for Arthur Gough. He gave no explanation to his two colleagues. It was all set up within two hours.