Pygmalion's Spectacles, Stanley G. Weinbaum [mystery books to read txt] 📗

had disappeared; he hated the little professor. Professor? Hypnotists called themselves "professors." He dragged through a weary day and then a sleepless night back to Chicago.

It was mid-winter when he saw a suggestively tiny figure ahead of him in the Loop. Ludwig! Yet what use to hail him? His cry was automatic. "Professor Ludwig!"

The elfin figure turned, recognized him, smiled. They stepped into the shelter of a building.

"I'm sorry about your machine, Professor. I'd be glad to pay for the damage."

"Ach, that was nothing—a cracked glass. But you—have you been ill? You look much the worse."

"It's nothing," said Dan. "Your show was marvelous, Professor—marvelous! I'd have told you so, but you were gone when it ended."

Ludwig shrugged. "I went to the lobby for a cigar. Five hours with a wax dummy, you know!"

"It was marvelous!" repeated Dan.

"So real?" smiled the other. "Only because you co-operated, then. It takes self-hypnosis."

"It was real, all right," agreed Dan glumly. "I don't understand it—that strange beautiful country."

"The trees were club-mosses enlarged by a lens," said Ludwig. "All was trick photography, but stereoscopic, as I told you—three dimensional. The fruits were rubber; the house is a summer building on our campus—Northern University. And the voice was mine; you didn't speak at all, except your name at the first, and I left a blank for that. I played your part, you see; I went around with the photographic apparatus strapped on my head, to keep the viewpoint always that of the observer. See?" He grinned wryly. "Luckily I'm rather short, or you'd have seemed a giant."

"Wait a minute!" said Dan, his mind whirling. "You say you played my part. Then Galatea—is she real too?"

"Tea's real enough," said the Professor. "My niece, a senior at Northern, and likes dramatics. She helped me out with the thing. Why? Want to meet her?"

Dan answered vaguely, happily. An ache had vanished; a pain was eased. Paracosma was attainable at last!

End of Project Gutenberg's Pygmalion's Spectacles, by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum