This is Mr. Bartlett Finchley, age forty-eight, a practicing sophisticate who writes very special and very precious things for gourmet magazines and the like.
He has no purpose to his life except the formulation of day-to-day opportunities to vent his wrath on mechanical contrivances of an age he abhors.
In short, Mr. Bartlett Finchley is a malcontent, born either too late or too early in the century, and who, in just a moment, will enter a realm where muscles and the will to fight back are not limited to human beings.
After rudely dismissing the attending police officer and neighbors, Finchley returns to his house, drinks, and passes out.
After the police pull him out, neither they nor the ambulance personnel can explain how he sank without being weighted, and theorize he may have had a heart attack.