Please!" gasped the dying man. "I want her--my Ana!"

Sir Basil sucked in his breath sharply. "What's this? Have you been
making love to Ana again, after my warning to you?"

The sufferer stirred uneasily. "No!" he panted. "But perhaps my hour of
release has come, and I want to look at her--once more."

The scientist smiled unpleasantly as he eyed the magnificent body which
looked like a broken statue in bronze.

"Some human characteristics are strange," he muttered. "In spite of
everything I do, this fellow continues to love Ana: Ana whom I intend
for myself."

He stepped to the apparatus and swiftly changed one of the adjustments.

"Perhaps," he resumed, with a gleam in his eyes that chilled Hale, "this
will forever cure him."

* * * * *

In another moment, the still, half-dead body was lifted and gently
slipped into a compartment.

Before Hale's horrified gaze fastened on the eye-piece which revealed
moving pictures of every process that went on within, Unani Assu's body
was reduced almost instantly to a fine, silvery dust.

"Good God!" he cried. "You have killed him."

The scientist's teeth showed in his wide smile. "Think so? Does a woman
destroy a dress when she rips it up to make it over?"

"Do you mean me to understand that you can reduce a living body to its
basic elements and then rebuild these elements into a remade man?"

"Watch!" warned the scientist.

Hale looked again and saw the silver dust that was once a living body
being whirled into a tiny, grublike thing. He saw the grub expand into
an embryo, and the embryo develop into a foetus. From now on the
development was slower, and he often stopped to talk with Sir Basil.

Once he asked: "If this man had died naturally, could you have brought
him back to life?"

Sir Basil shook his head. "No. When once the mind-electron is completely
freed from its enslavement by matter, it is forever beyond recall by the
body it has just vacated. Like atomic electrons, whose equilibrium
disturbed break away from their planetary system and go dashing off into
space, only to be drawn into another planetary system, the mind-electron
may be enslaved almost immediately by extraneous matter. Had Unani Assu
died, his liberated mind-electron might at once have been captured by a
jungle flower going to seed. Immediately a new seed would be started.
And now the former Unani Assu would be a seed of a jungle flower, later
to find new l