"Herbert George Wells. When the Sleeper Wakes" - читать интересную книгу автора

Wookey-a boy. I missed all that. . . . What a fuss we had with him! My
landlady wouldn't take him in, wouldn't let him stayhe looked so queer when
he was rigid. We had to carry him in a chair up to the hotel. And the
Boscastle doctor-it wasn't the present chap, but the G.P. before him-was at
him until nearly two, with, me and the landlord holding lights and so
forth."

"It was a cataleptic rigour at first, wasn't it?"

"Stiff!-wherever you bent him he stuck. You might have stood him on his
head and he'd have stopped. I never saw such stiffness. Of course this" -he
indicated the prostrate figure by a movement of his head-" is quite
different. And, of course, the little doctor-what was his name?"

"Smithers? "

"Smithers it was-was quite wrong in trying to fetch him round too soon,
according to all accounts. The things he did. Even now it makes me feel
allugh! Mustard, snuff, pricking. And one of those beastly little things,
not dynamos-"

"Induction coils."

"Yes. You could see his muscles throb and jump, and he twisted about. There
was just two flaring yellow candles, and all the shadows were shivering,
and the little doctor nervous and putting on side, and him-stark and
squirming in the most unnatural ways. Well, it made me dream."

Pause.

"It's a strange state," said Warming.

" It's a sort of complete absence," said Isbister.

"Here's the body, empty. Not dead a bit, and yet not alive. It's like a
seat vacant and marked 'engaged.' No feeling, no digestion, no beating of
the heart-not a flutter. __That__ doesn't make me feel as if there was a
man present. In a sense it's more dead than death, for these doctors tell
me that even the hair has stopped growing. Now with the proper dead, the
hair will go on growing-"

"I know," said Warming, with a flash of pain in his expression.

They peered through the glass again. Graham was indeed in a strange state,
in the flaccid phase of a trance, but a trance unprecedented in medical
history. Trances had lasted for as much as a year before -but at the end of
that time it had ever been waking or a death; sometimes first one and then
the other. Isbister noted the marks the physicians had made in injecting
nourishment, for that device had been resorted to to postpone collapse; he
pointed them out to Warming, who had been trying not to see them.