while the liquor spilled out the sides of his glass and trickled down his unshaven chin and onto the expensively tailored suit Perdeau's money had purchased.
When Perdeau returned to the room with a small glass for himself he smiled. Mortain was snoring drunkenly, stretched out on the divan. The bottle showed Perdeau that his blackmailer had finished off a few more in the few moments he'd been out of the room. It was sooner than Perdeau had hoped for. But so much the better. Past experience in watching Mortain had enabled the scientist to judge that the hulking lout would be unconscious for fully ten hours now.
Somehow, Perdeau managed to lift Mortain from the divan. And somehow he managed to carry him down the rear stairs of the apartment and into the alley. And unobserved, he finally managed to bring the body of Mortain to the laboratory . . .
NOW Perdeau moved across the laboratory. In the far corner was a casketlike affair beneath a series of webbed lights and wires.
Mortain, snoring drunkenly and still deeply under the influence of the brandy, lay inertly in that wired casket.
Perdeau stood over the thick-featured blackmailer for a moment, grinning in gnome-like triumph. Then he picked up the headpiece apparatus lying beside the front of the casket. The plate of the headpiece was attached to wires which led to the battery of lights above the body of Mortain. Perdeau carefully placed the headpiece on his own brow, and producing a similar headpiece fastened it over the thick skull of Mortain.
Unsmiling now, Perdeau turned to a control lever at the side of the casket and threw the switch full on. Wires hummed, and the lights above the casket flickered ghostily in the semi-darkness of the little laboratory. Perdeau's expression was changing. Slowly at first, then more rapidly. He seemed to reel, almost drunkenly.
Mortain's snoring was diminishing. Perdeau's eyes were closing. Suddenly the snoring was issuing from Perdeau's lips!
Perdeau slumped senseless to the floor.
The wires continued to hum. The lights flickered only intermittently now. But something was happening to the figure in the casket. It was rising, slowly, surely!
The body of Mortain sat upright in the casket, eyes slowly opening. Looking over the side of the casket, Mortain's body perceived Perdeau's inert form slumped along the side. Mortain's mouth grinned goulishly.
The switch had been accomplished. Jacques Perdeau now inhabited the body of Mortain. The drink-fogged mind of Mortain snored onward in the body of the dapper Jacques Perdeau lying senselessly on the floor![1]
Perdeau—in Mortain's body—reached out and switched off the lever. The wires stopped humming and the lights ceased flickering. Perdeau removed the headplate from his new body, climbing from the casket as he did so.
There was a mirror in another corner of the laboratory, and Perdeau stepped around his own body and walked clumsily over to it. He looked
- ↑ Whatever means Perdeau used to transfer the mind of Mortain to his own skull, and his own mind to that of Mortain (possibly a molecular transference of matter after breaking it down into energy and reassembling it), the alcoholic content of Mortain's brain, which was also transferred, caused the body of Perdeau to succumb to an apparent drunkenness, even though no alcohol was present in the body. And similarly, although Mortain's body was saturated with the poison, Perdeau's mind was not, and though he might experience some effects after the blood began to circulate, he would not become drunk.—Ed.
