Arthur Cheney Train

“ My mind gloated over the thoughts of the untold riches which lay so easily within my grasp if I could only learn Migraine's secret.
"For example," and the doctor's voice interrupted my vision of gold, "think of the enormous attention devoted by mankind to inventing machinery, making telescopes, breeding race—horses, and that sort of thing, when an equal amount of effort might have made engines and telescopes and horses entirely useless. I mean exactly what I say. Look at the pains men have been to to breed fox terriers and bulldogs and bloodhounds. Have they ever once tried to breed a man? ”

“ Clouds of red poured from the fireplace and circled toward the ceiling, and the mastiff reeked with it. I felt sick and sensitive, as if I had just had a fever. I tried to collect myself. Migraine and the Jap had disappeared. Only the dog remained, rigidly glaring at me—a sort of red devil of a dog. I looked at my hands and found that they were surrounded by the same red haze. I tried to screen my eyes from the light with my hand. To my astonishment, I could see the bones through the flesh, glowing white and distinct. I glanced quickly again at the dog ”

“ Only so much as our eyes, ears, tongue and fingers can perceive? And how much do they perceive? Only what is in their limited range of vision. One might as well say that, because you cannot perceive by the sense the electric wave that summons the trans-Atlantic liner to its sinking sister ship, it does not exist. There are sounds too fine for the ear to hear—the chirp of the minute insect—too low, like the throb of the organ. The ear is not tuned to receive the rapid vibrations of the insect voice or the slow vibrations of the organ's lowest notes. ”

“ A motor—going, I knew, at sixty miles an hour—moved along a distant highway. I could see every spoke of the lazily-turning wheels. I found that my eyesight had been so intensified that I could read the number of the car and distinguish a patch upon its tire.
In place of the noisome stenches of the night before, however, I breathed the pungent odors of the fields and herbs, and this afforded me the only relief that I experienced throughout this awful period of time, for my clothes still seemed heavy as chain mail and my shirt chafed me as if made of horsehair. ”

“ If it had not been for his immaculate appearance and the faint scent of heliotrope that always hung around him I should have doubted his identity.
"Sit down, sit down," said Doctor Migraine, waving me into a low chair as he poked up the dying embers in the grate. "Saki will have the cocktails here in a moment. What I lack in elegance I must try to make up in hospitality." ”

“ All we need is the eye to which they are visible. Increase in some way the power, the intensity, the range, capacity—what you will—of the senses, and a new world surrounds us. Intensify the power of the eye to receive and respond to increased vibrations of light, and man will see a myriad new forms and colors I've given you quite a scientific lecture," he concluded in a relaxed tone. ”

“ It is the red given off by rays whose vibrations are not taken in by the retina, just as at the other or upper end of the spectrum there is the ultra-violet, a violet imperceptible to the ordinary eye. Some few people can see it. But no one in the normal state can see the infra-red."
"Well," I remarked with an excited laugh, "the first fellow who gets keyed up to that sort of thing will have a rum time of it."
"He will be as a god," answered Migraine, "knowing not only good and evil, but all the secrets of a now invisible world." ”

“ The eye merely receives the light in sight waves which are thrown off by all physical objects within the range of its vision, and transmits them to the brain. Light waves are motion waves, heat and light being merely forms of motion, as, of course, you know. The retina is so constructed that it can absorb these light waves and communicate the vibrations thus received to the brain. The brain does the seeing. ”

“ Buck called it "uncanny." For a short haul the doctor seemed infallible. He never left an open order on our books—the deal had to be finished and the money in his pocket before he left the office. That was another thing that struck us as singular. Almost anybody will get a copper—fastened tip once in a while that will absolutely compel him, if he has any sort of a soul, to buy or sell the market as a matter of conscience with the certainty of a big profit some time in the course of a week, two weeks or a month. Migraine never did that sort of thing. ”

“ With all their optical science have they ever tried to develop the powers of the human eye? We have had Wagner, Mozart, Beethoven, and all the rest; but while composers have tortured themselves and the public by trying to invent some new combination of sound, has any one ever tried to increase the range of human hearing? ”

“ Sound is motion and comes to us in waves, like light and heat. The capacity of the eye and ear to respond to the vibrations of these waves determines our capacity to see and hear. A violinist can break a gas globe with a certain note, because the glass responds to the vibrations of the note, which it cannot do to a lower tone. So with color. The retinas of our eyes can absorb the visible colors of the spectrum—violet, blue, green, orange, yellow, red—but there are shades on either end of the color scale that our eyes cannot see, but could be made to see—yes, easily! ”

“ I had always rather fancied the idea that many apparently inanimate objects possessed life, and now, as I leaned against an elm by the park wall and felt its tremors, the giant stretching of its huge arms and the metallic clash of its foliage, I knew it to be endowed with superhuman power. ”

“ Now, imagine a different sort of light wave, and there is no reason for supposing that the brain could not absorb it directly without the assistance of the retina."
"But you were talking about mental telepathy," I said. "This does not explain how you can read another's thoughts, even if it shows the theoretical possibility of seeing things with your eyes shut."
"For mind to communicate with mind, all you have to presuppose are mind waves," answered Migraine. "But the thing is perfectly well understood in science. It is a recognized fact. Do you want another cigar? ”

“ In the same way, perhaps, can be explained the so-called telepathic powers of those gifted beings who can see what is happening in other places- perhaps on the other side of the world—clairvoyants, or what you will. Their brains are tuned to receive sight waves that need no optic nerves—waves that make no primary impression upon the retina of the eye at all, but are received direct by the brain itself. ”

“ What avails a man if he gain the whole world and then miserably die? What pleasure does one have who knows that joy is inevitably followed by pain? I am constantly astounded at the stupidity of mankind. ”

“ The new man will hear sweeter notes than mortal ear has ever heard before, see fairer visions than have been vouchsafed to poets and dreamers, experience sensations beyond the imagination of Mohammed's paradise! ”

“ The Russian Grand Duke business was instinctive with him, and the sight of his huge, whiskered frame wrapped in a black frock coat and surmounted by a gleaming silk hat was enough to make an office boy draw his heels together with a click and give a royal salute. That was another thing we never could understand—why he should come at all. Our biggest customers stay uptown and use the telephone. ”

“ Always when it works with the other fellow. You see, if some other chap, whose mind I am not in contact with, comes along and puts a new element into the situation, why, I may get left along with the others. ”