Dr. Ivan Brodsky believes death is not an ending but a doorway—and he intends to step through it on his own terms. Convinced that a child in his care was born without a soul, he designs an electrical apparatus that will hurl both himself and the boy across the threshold of life and back again. The plan is precise, deliberate, and irreversible. What follows leaves his assistant staring into a glass globe where two lights circle like trapped butterflies—and watching as only one body awakens.
But Brodsky’s true design does not end in the laboratory. A sealed letter reveals a deeper ambition: not rescue, but replacement. If the experiment succeeded, the child now carries more than restored intelligence. He may carry the mind of a man who refused to grow old. Years later, as the boy approaches manhood and begins to show flashes of uncanny memory, the assistant faces a burden heavier than grief. He alone knows what knowledge was hidden in a secret drawer—and why he chose to burn it. If the past returns in full, will he keep it buried again?
Victor Rousseau crafts this tale with the calm authority of early twentieth-century speculative fiction, where scientific audacity meets moral restraint. Rousseau, a Belgian-born writer who became a prolific contributor to American pulp magazines, published widely in Adventure, Argosy, and later Weird Tales. His fiction often blended occult speculation with technological daring, and he wrote dozens of novels and short stories across adventure and science fiction markets. In The Ultimate Problem, his fascination with psychic research and electrical theory converges in a story that questions whether knowledge itself can be too powerful to survive.
