Peculiar Tales Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned out. It’s really too bad it didn’t work for the doctor himself. His treatment was just all wrong for living flesh, you see.”
    “Hold on...”
    “Say, this is really funny!” he laughed, slapping his knee with the palm of his hand. “I had no idea! You don’t tell me...Oh, this is really rich! You didn’t really think all along that that thing out there was the monster and I was the doctor?”

DEUX EX MACHINA
    1. Then
    L ynn, Massachusetts was an ideal location for the birth of the Physical Savior, the New Motive Power, Heaven’s Last Gift to Man. There had always been a toleration of unusual religious beliefs peculiar to New England and the town had long been a hotbed of Spiritualism, social reformers and utopianists. Small wonder, then, that John Murray Spear, a little-known Unitarian minister and newly converted Spiritualist, found himself attracted to the bustling little town, whose busy shoe factories seemed to epitomize the success of the Industrial Revolution, a herald of the new age of the Machine.
    One momentous night, after months of making a tenuous living through mediumship (even though he advertised direct communication with such popular spirits as Emmanuel Swedenborg and Benjamin Franklin), Spear was conducting what he thought was to be yet one more ill-paying seance. A short, broad man with the long, curling hair of the dreamer or philosopher, and a wide, open, not very intelligent face, Spear had never been a terribly convincing medium. Showmanship was certainly not in his blood—not as it had so copiously flowed in the veins of the fabulously successful Fox Sisters—possibly because he took his calling too seriously and possibly because the messages he delivered from the Other Side were both banal and boring. But that night in 1853 something came to him that transformed not only his life and the life of everyone in Lynn, but the human population of the earth itself.
    Instead of the words of Emmanuel Swedenborg coming from Spear’s lips in a nasal Yankee drawl that did not seem much like what most people expected from the great Swedish philosopher, Spear began writing. As he stared blankly ahead, his eyes half-rolled into their sockets, his hand flew over sheets of paper like a bird frantically pecking out worms. Words, hundreds of words, flowed onto the paper in a tidy, workmanlike penmanship that most witnesses agreed was most unlike Spears’ usual illegible scrawl.
    It was, it turned out, a message from the great American patriot and scientist, Benjamin Franklin. John Murray Spear, Franklin declared, had been selected as the earthly representative of the Band of Electricizers—an ethereal academy of departed scientists who were dedicated to raising the status of the human race through the application of technology.
    Franklin explained that his organization was composed of several sub-committees with such names as the Healthfulizers, the Educationalizers, the Agriculturalizers and so forth, each of whom was to be assigned an earthly representative. The Electricizers were the most important, however, and Spear, to his astonishment, had been made its official liaison with Earth.
    No one had ever heard anything like this, not even from the Fox Sisters or Andrew Jackson Davis, and word began to get around that maybe this fellow was really onto something.
    The sole interest of the Electricizers, Spear said, was the promotion of “man-culture and integral reform with a view to the ultimate establishment of a divine social state on earth.” They had some pretty definite plans on just how this was to be carried out, too. There would be great cities built, of course, laid out in a sensible, circular plan just as the Utopianists had been urging all along. And people would travel between these cities in electrically powered vehicles and flying machines. And they would no longer curl the hair on the backs of their heads because this interfered with the proper functioning of the brain.
    But