Wires encased in gutta-percha and green silk led to the electrodes and held the Supermale as though by a leash attached to his temples. They wound and dangled, passing through the wall like vermin gnawing an avenue of escape somewhere in the direction of the crackling and rumbling of the dynamo.

William Elson, a curious scientist and a practical parent, prepared to throw the current.

“One minute,” said Arthur Gough.

“What is it?” asked the chemist.

“Although this device may produce the desired effect,” said the engineer, “it may also yield nothing at all, or something quite different. Besides, it was made rather hastily.”

“That’s fine, it’ll make this an experiment,” interrupted Elson, pressing the switch.

André Marcueil did not budge.

He seemed to be feeling a rather pleasant sensation.

The three scientists, spying on him, gathered that Marcueil distinctly understood what the machine required of him. For at that very moment, still dreaming, he said:

“I adore her.”

The machine was working, then, according to its builders’ calculations, but an indescribable phenomenon occurred, one which should nevertheless have entered into their equations.

Everyone knows that when two electrodynamic machines are coupled together, the one with the higher output charges the other.

Within this antiphysical circuit connecting the nervous system of the Supermale to the eleven thousand volts, transformed perhaps into something that was no longer electricity, neither the chemist nor the doctor nor the engineer could deny the evidence: it was the man who was influencing the machine-to-inspire-love.

Thus, as might mathematically have been foreseen, if the machine really did produce love, it was THE MACHINE THAT FELL IN LOVE WITH THE MAN.

Arthur Gough, in a couple of leaps, was down inspecting the dynamo; horrified, he telephoned up that it was now receiving current and revolving backward at an unknown and astonishing speed.

“I should never have thought it possible. . . never. . . but it’s really so natural!” murmured the doctor. “In these days when metal and machines are all-powerful, man, if he is to survive, must become stronger than the machines, just as he became stronger than the beasts. . . A mere adaptation to his environment. . . But this man is the first of a new race. . .”

Arthur Gough, however, with a mechanical gesture – he was, like the others, a practical man – Arthur Gough, so as not to waste this unexpected energy, linked up the dynamo with a group of accumulators. . .

When he got back upstairs he was faced with a terrible sight. Either it was that the Supermale’s nervous tension had reached too fabulous a potential, or, on the contrary, that it had grown weaker (perhaps because he was beginning to wake up) and the previously overcharged accumulators had grown stronger and reversed the flow of the current, or there was perhaps quite a different cause, but the platinum crown grew first red- and then white-hot.