The Wizard runs a laboratory with frenzied energy, leaping from project to project with vigor and little sleep. He requests new books from the librarian every day, and speeds through them in the morning. He checks in on various branches of the lab, pinpointing problems and solutions in designs ranging from speaking dolls to magnetic ore-separators. The Box is his private domain, a mysterious lab in the basement kept locked at all times.

The librarian is tasked with keeping up on all means of scientific literature to remain abreast of relevant findings. One day, full of curiosity, he asks his coworker Earnshaw to let him into the box as return for a favor. He finds an odd glove that, once a hand is inserted, gives the impression of a handshake. The glove is called the haptograph, an experiment recreating the sensations of touch.

Kistenmacher, a coworker with access to the Box, invites the librarian and Earnshaw to partake in the experiment within, a rare invitation. The haptograph has expanded into a dummy, into which the librarian is strapped. Kistenmacher runs through a series of sensations and asks for observations, each mimicking precisely certain actions - putting on a hat, holding a ball, being tickled, and something else the librarian has never felt before. Kistenmacher explains the ingenious design of the machine, impressive given how little is known about the sensation of touch and the organ of the skin.

The librarian becomes consumed with thoughts of the haptograph between sessions, taken by the prospect of inventing sensations never before felt by humans. It's as if a new world is opening, one he's never accessed before. Earnshaw becomes more discomforted by the machine as the librarian falls more and more in love with it. He seems to feel normal sensations more acutely all the time now.

One night Kistenmacher enters the lab to find the haptograph flung onto the ground, loose wires and pins scattered everyone. Earnshaw, it transpires, has attempted to ruin the machine in his hatred. He is dismissed immediately, but the Wizard pulls Kistenmacher off the project after the incident to focus on something more lucrative. Deprived of his joy, the librarian stews in his obsessive notion of old bodies slipping off to reveal a new universe.