t plate. But to an inhabitant of that other world, we are as
remote as the faintest stars of the heavens, diminished a thousand
times."

He paused a moment, signing the waiter to leave the room.

"This reduction of bodily size, great as it is, involves no deeper
principle than does a light contraction of tissue, except that it must
be carried further. The problem, then, was to find a chemical,
sufficiently unharmful to life, that would so act upon the body cells as
to cause a reduction in bulk, without changing their shape. I had to
secure a uniform and also a proportionate rate of contraction of each
cell, in order not to have the body shape altered.

"After a comparatively small amount of research work, I encountered an
apparently insurmountable obstacle. As you know, gentlemen, our living
human bodies are held together by the power of the central intelligence
we call the mind. Every instant during your lifetime your subconscious
mind is commanding and directing the individual life of each cell that
makes up your body. At death this power is withdrawn; each cell is
thrown under its own individual command, and dissolution of the body
takes place.

"I found, therefore, that I could not act upon the cells separately, so
long as they were under control of the mind. On the other hand, I could
not withdraw this power of the subconscious mind without causing death.

"I progressed no further than this for several months. Then came the
solution. I reasoned that after death the body does not immediately
disintegrate; far more time elapses than I expected to need for the
cell-contraction. I devoted my time, then to finding a chemical that
would temporarily withhold, during the period of cell-contraction, the
power of the subconscious mind, just as the power of the conscious mind
is withheld by hypnotism.

"I am not going to weary you by trying to lead you through the maze of
chemical experiments into which I plunged. Only one of you," he
indicated the Doctor, "has the technical basis of knowledge to follow
me. No one had been before me along the path I traversed. I pursued the
method of pure theoretical deduction, drawing my conclusions from the
practical results obtained.

"I worked on rabbits almost exclusively. After a few weeks I succeeded
in completely suspending animation in one of them for several hours.
There was no life apparently existing during that period. It was not a
trance or coma, but the complete simulat