The Indomitable

A cellar laboratory of a medical school in Brooklyn on a hot summer night, an angular magnet block of bare stained steel one metre eighty high with a large round opening lined by a shiny inner ring, across its top a long cylindrical metal tank with pipe stubs, white frost on one stub and a wisp of cold vapour, a coil of black cables on the tank, through the opening a wooden rail carrying a platform of stacked plain wooden boards on a steel frame with one upright plain wooden post, a hand in a leather work glove turning a valve, white tiled walls, pipes along the ceiling, a bare bulb.