A friend of Platt's, a Dr. Wilhelmi of Zürich, arrived for a weekend. He was an archeologist and a dignified man. Staples felt a certain sympathy for him because he had even less hair than the geologist.
This Wilhelmi had been working in Anatolia, where he had found a carload of relics dating back to Tiridates the Great.
"You see, my fwiends," he explained, "they were mostly vessels and such of bwonze. Here is a picture of one as we found it. It is so corroded that it is nothing but a lump of oxide. Now, here is a picture of that one after we westored it by the anode pwocess."
"Say," said Staples, "are you sure that's the same one? The thing in the second picture looks like it was just fresh out of the shop."
"Ha-ha, that is witty. Yes, it is the same. We place it in an electwolytic bath, connected to one of the poles, and wun a current thwough. So all the copper and tin atoms in the oxide cwawl back to their pwoper places. It is quite wonderful to see."
After the Swiss gentleman had left, Platt went to Chicago for a consultation with his patent attorney. He returned looking thoughtful.
"Ken," he said, "let's play hooky for a few days."
Staples looked at him with a wary eye. "I suppose you mean to drop the prospector and work on your fossils for a while?"
"That's it exactly."
Thus it happened that the following day found them in the shop breaking a young Hyracodon--small hornless rhinoceros--out of its matrix. Staples remarked on what a dull piece the work was from a zoölogical point of view, compared to what it had been in times past.
"To some extent, yes," replied Platt. "Hand me the shellac, please. Though there may be a few whales left that haven't been turned into margarine and gun oil. We're living at the close of one of the many periodic extinctions of the larger forms. The only places you can find a fauna comparable with those of the Pleistocene is on a few preserves in Africa. And with our own bloodthirsty species infesting the earth, it's getting worse all the time. Hm-m-m. The left clavicle and left radius seem to be missing." He carefully chipped slivers of sandstone away with his needle. Being much more of a talker than his assistant, he continued: "I have an idea which, if it works, may do much to relieve the drabness of our present faunĉ. You heard Wilhelmi tell about restoring oxidized metal by the anode process. Well, why couldn't we work something like that on fossils?"
"You mean to grow a complete animal, hair and all, from a skeleton?"
"Why not? You know what extraordinary things they do in medicine nowadays--growing arms and legs on people who have lost their own."
"With all due respect, my dear employer, I think you're screwbox."
"We'll see about that. I'm going to try some experiments, anyway. We'll keep them to ourselves, of course. If they didn't work, a lot of our colleagues might agree with your opinion."
Platt began his work with rabbits--modern rabbits, that is. He would kill a rabbit, remove various parts, and hook it up in a Ringer's solution bath to a current source. To build up the missing parts he used bio-charged amino acids, which will combine to form proteins and, in the presence of other cells, form whole new cells.
After many failures, he one day observed that the tissues of one of the rabbits were building up. He pointed the phenomenon out to Staples.
The geologist protested: "But it can't be that one. I turned the juice off in that tank."
"Yes?" replied Platt. "Let's see. Ah! You thought you turned it off, but look at this switch!"
Staples saw that he had accidentally struck the open knife switch so that the bars barely touched the contacts.
Platt said: "Now I know; we've been using too much voltage. It wants something like point oh one volts." And the little man was off like a chipmunk with a bunch of nuts, changing the rheostats to one calibrated for higher resistance.
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