They followed, as follow they must, down a long, echoing, empty corridor. Far away, low, weird, they could hear male voices, deep, rather disturbing in tone, chanting some uncouth succession of notes.
Their slow walk behind the aged conductor brought them constantly nearer to the chant, for the voices grew louder.
At a doorway, heavily shrouded in lustrous woven velvet or other drapery, the guide swung, and an attendant, bowing, moved the cloth to one side. The chanting swelled suddenly.
Resistance was futile. As the guide moved aside, motioning, Roger, and Tip after him, passed under the great stone door-lintel, into a large square chamber full of the chanting lamas.
And at the end, in a niche, on a sort of raised dais, sat the huge carved wooden image or statue of the Meditating Buddha or prophet of their religion, and in its forehead glowed, in the flickering torchlight, the great, green duplicate—it appeared—of the Eye of Om.
At first it flashed through Roger’s mind that this was strange; but at once he realized that, of course, they would have replaced the gem with a substitute or an imitation, and would not tell many of the loss.
Thrust forward by the lama who had brought them there, Roger and Potts were ushered down the aisle between rows of kneeling, low-and-mocking-voiced monks or lamas, to the space below the great figure.
Words in Tibetan, answered by hoarse responses from the crowd, seemed to be some ceremony or invocation of judgment, in which, they sensed, the two white people were the sacrifice or center of the rite. Standing silently, Tip was watchful but helpless. Roger, too, kept an alert mind but saw no means of escape.
“You seek to hear the Voice. You wish to know the secret.”
The venerable man who appeared to be some sort of super-lama, to whom even their former captor deferred, knelt and pronounced some low, weird and long-winded invocation.
At his gesture they both knelt, submissive if not willing, and he bowed his head to the floor and stayed that way.
All the rest were in similar positions.
And then, blood-curdling in its startling suddenness, after an interval of suspense, there came, but not softly or in small volume as in their recordings it had been, a scream that was as weird as the howl of a soul in torment; and after it followed, louder, but duplicating, the decreasing pitch and growing volume of the howl, roar and groan, that ceased abruptly on a hoarse note.
Apparently, and they all seemed to believe it, the Image had spoken.
Certainly, to Roger, still able to be alert enough to trace sound, it issued from the head or face, possibly the small, slitted mouth of that statue.
“The Doom has judged,” the old man told them in precise English, but in a very formal and cold tone, “the judgment is pronounced. I am to show you our secret and allow your science to prove its worth.”
A mocking twitch took the place of a smile as he added:
“Or, from our viewpoint, its worthlessness.”
As he spoke, with no sound an orifice opened in the wall behind the idol. In its cavernous depths, dark and forbidding, Roger guessed that the stone had withdrawn up or sidewise, or had turned on a pivot.
He and Tip, hesitating, were prodded gruffly forward.
Into the decreasing light they moved—were forced to move.
The darkness became abruptly intense. The noiseless door had closed!
Echoing still to their last footstep, the silence slowly became complete.
“Science!” grunted Tip, “Without no scientific impediments.”
“Implements.” Roger spoke from habit, still too dazed to feel, with completeness, the horror that must soon come.
And far away, the last exhalation of the “s” he had spoken was flung mockingly back by echo, a hiss of multiplied duration, fainter as it echoed to and fro.
Trying to hold calm, Roger felt an impulse to scream, to beat on the callous stone, to beg for mercy.
Instead, feeling that Tip also must feel the dread he felt, he nerved himself to be not only calm, but matter-of-fact.
“Well,” he remarked, “We’ve heard the Voice and found the secret way. And that’s that!”
Without looking up from the radio over which he was fussing, Doctor Ryder spoke snappishly. His nerves were on edge.
“We ought not to have brought him.”
“But he was so clever,” protested Clark, “and surely if anybody ever could interpret what that temple must hide in that queer sound, he’d be the one. He interpreted claws on glass, you said—and——”
“Be still. Let me listen.”
The doctor fidgeted, trying to tune, to amplify, to adjust knobs on the unresponsive radio set.
“We had no intention of getting him into hot water,” Clark said, morosely. “We did want to get into that temple. The bandits were unforeseen complications; but when the Lama came, I thought that for Roger it would all be simple, once he got into the lamasery.”
He watched a few minutes.
“Can’t you raise even a whisper?”
“No! And it has been three nights. And besides we can’t operate the wireless, because you don’t know code. Brown, in America, will be wild. Our three days of uncertainty is nothing. He hasn’t heard since Roger left us, and that was a week before our last contact with him.”
“Let me try. You go and turn the dynamo.”
“I wish I knew more about it. I know precious little, come to find out, whether it’s burned out, or the brushes gone, or how to adjust these things.” The doctor relinquished his place, went into the tent.
At the tuning dial and control knobs, as he whirled them and almost frantically called into the telephone transmitter, Clark worked.
In the tent his companion swung the flywheel over, and around, and then stopped, groaning.
“Guess we are licked,” he came out.
“You go back. We’ll keep trying.”
Doctor Ryder nodded.
Ten minutes of silence.
“I’m—sh-h-h!”
Clark tuned delicately, getting the “hang” of the controls.
Out of the receiving diaphragm issued a low, male voice.
“You will return to your America.”
Desperately Clark swung the switch to the sending side.
“Who are you? Where is our boy? Roger? Is he there? Is he——”
“He is gone. The Voice of Doom spoke his sentence. He has learned the secret of the hidden darkness.”
“We’ll have a hundred thousand American troops in your darn country if that boy has been hurt——”
The other end of the transmission mocked with a hoarse laugh.
That was all.
Doctor Ryder, informed, looked defeated.
“And all for a tawdry jewel. And we still have——”
Clark motioned for silence, trying desperately, vainly, to raise a response from the dead ether waves.
They retired, at last, because with the glowering clouds hanging low in a star-obscured sky, with possible guards in sight, they dared not make a move.
Discussion had been fruitless. They had drawn only blanks in their search for a course of action.
Clark, lying on his cot, tossing, got up.
“I can’t sleep. I’m going to walk around—see if I can think up some way to find out about Roger—and that man with him, too, of course, because what happens to one will happen to the other.”
He went out into the somber blackness of midnight.
Walking did not keep him from brooding, nor help his brain to do its task.
He sat on a large tussock of dry turf.
“For a tawdry gem!” he muttered.
A slight sound made him leap up, revolver drawn.
Had it been the ever-blowing gale, stirring something? Or some fresh menace, some creeping creature, some vindictive priest, who had made that tiny sound of a scraping shoe?
“Who’s there? Speak or I’ll fire!”
He knew no direction to shoot in. But the light might disclose something. He raised the weapon.
“Mr. Clark, don’t——”
“Roger!”
“In person, and not a ghost.”
In a heavy sheeps-wool coat, shaggy and rough, the figure came to his side. His grip of the young hand was sincerely strong.
“Quick!” Roger gasped, “give me the Eye of Om—I can exchange it and get back and we can go before they discover me.”
“Where have you been?” as they walked fast toward camp. “What happened?”
“They tried us, and the Voice of Doom sentenced us, and they put us in the chamber behind the image. But we can’t stop to talk.”
“Are you all right? Is Potts safe?”
“Yes. Yes. Hurry!”
“Let me go with you.”
“Only hurry, and bring the Eye.”
Dashing into the tent, scattering explanations to befuddled Doctor Ryder as he broke apart the small secret compartment in a bedroll and got the gem, Clark met Roger and handed him the stone.
Instantly Roger fled into the darkness.
When Clark overtook him he saw Potts holding two ponies. Sending Tip to camp, the pair mounted and galloped away.
“It was easy to find the secret,” Roger said as they made a quick ride toward the distant cliffs, “Tip helped me keep my head. We figured out that somebody worked the Voice, and it was louder than human sound. We were in a tunnel. It sloped downwards. It seemed as though the Buddha image had howled. That meant a way to get into the image or open a port from the tunnel to it. Phonograph records wouldn’t have been their way.
“The wind always howled around the lamasery, up so high. From what we knew about acoustics and how they shaped the old phonograph horns to increase sound amplification, we worked it out that we were in a sort of wind-tunnel or horn, and it didn’t seem that they opened any rock at the image or we would have heard it. If the far end of the tunnel opened, and wind howled in and through the hollow image, it could make those weird howls, high and low, moans and screeches. So we followed the tunnel down, and by using Tip’s pencil flashlight we located a lever, and risked making the sound. But we got out.”
By reversing the method, he and Mr. Clark also got in, and with the older traveler’s wisdom they found the trick of getting into the image, and saw that when the way was closed, the tunnel did not make it howl. Also, from the eye-places, they made sure the temple was deserted, and soon enough the change of gems was complete and later, blocking the lower door lever with a wedge of stone, they prevented pursuit from that direction and eventually reached camp safely. On the way Mr. Clark discarded his now useless Eye taken from the prongs, and Roger, at last safe, with a plane radioed for, slept and dreamed that he was being awarded a medal “for ‘sound’ wisdom.”
“After all,” he said in his dream, “my deduction was ‘sound’.”
Reunion with Grover and the laboratory staff, was, as Tip put it, “the best part of assimilating Tibet.” He explained that he meant “taking in” the country.
Roger agreed with his spirit if not with his choice of words.
It did give him a little twinge of dismay, a slight blow to his vanity, to discover that during his absence Toby Smith had been put to work in the stock and supply department. Toby Smith, who had sold them the priceless emerald Eye of Om for a movie camera!
At once Roger pushed away the feeling of disappointment and did not let it become envy. This world and its work, he realized, had to keep moving, no matter who dropped out. Instead of being hurt, he dismissed his emotion by telling himself that it showed that any person, no matter how able, could be replaced. The important idea to have, he told himself, was that if one made one’s self so capable as to be missed when away, more than that could not be done.
After a while he was glad he had not cherished mean feelings, for Toby had not replaced him. He had merely done his best. Roger, as the staff soon let him know, had been missed for his competent way of handling needs, keeping everything neat and available, and being cheerful and useful under any circumstances.
“Am I glad you’re back!” Toby hailed him. “This chemistry is too much for me. One day Mr. Zendt asks for me to pack some frozen H—two—O around a can of stuff. How’d I know the man wanted ice?”
“It takes study to understand the chemical symbols,” Roger said.
“Yeh. And they have so many things that sound safe, and they’re dynamite in disguise. Like a guy wanted some citric acid, and I got picric acid, and I spilled some and was swabbing it up with cotton, and I used it to swab up something else—I forget what, but when I was going to chuck it in the furnace, they almost had a fit. It had turned into lyddite or some other sort of explosive. Looked like the same cotton to me.”
“I never could get them sodium calorides straight, neither,” Potts took up the complaint against chemistry’s “cheating” symbols. “They say it’s made out of a gas in the ocean. And the ocean’swater, and here comes gas, and they put metal, mind you—sodium—on top of it, and it turns out to be common table salt.”
“It’s sodium chloride,” Roger corrected him, “not caloride.”
“And they talk the craziest lingo, here,” Toby insisted. “Mr. Ellison asked for motor brushes, so I looked, and the only brush I could find was what we sweep up dust with, so I took that. Was he mad!”
Roger’s return to his duties in charge of stock was acceptable!
Grover, when the celebrations were concluded and routine had been resumed, sat down in the private “thinking den” as Roger called his office, and chatted.
“We have quite a few new interests,” he gave information. “Mr. Ellison has perfected his speed camera with stroboscopic lamps so strong that they beat sunshine. He can’t use a shutter: nothing mechanical can be made to work as fast as he wants it to. So he uses alternate flashes of the lamp, and his film runs so fast past the aperture that not even daylight fogs it. Of course you know he was busy with it, but you don’t know that he has succeeded in perfecting it, and is studying some amazing chemical and other operations of Nature.
“Mr. Zendt has brought in rather an unusual man for us. He was an astrologer—a man who reads ‘destiny’ in the planets by making a chart of the zodiac for the moment a person was born. He used to sell his ‘fortunes’ at so-much a ‘destiny’ on a Coney Island boardwalk.
“Now, though, he has turned scientist.”
His interest, Grover explained, was in studying in a scientific way the reactions of cells, tissues, plant and animal life to various rays of light, heat and other frequencies of vibration. His theory was that as the sun awakened life in the Spring, as the moon partly governed tides, so other planetary vibrations, reflections and modifications of sun rays, made changes in chemical constituents of cells; and if plants were made up of cells, and if animals ate the plants and in their own bodies modified and incorporated these cells, then the rays must act on animals also; and from that, to saying they influenced the bodies of men in some way was not a far step.
With telescope, vibration-recorders, ray-filters, lamps and spectrum devices he was carrying forward experiments in the room next to Roger’s supply department.
“You will probably have to help Astrovox—he says he is ‘the voice of the stars!’—with his apparatus,” Grover added.
The most interesting point to Roger was the fact that nothing new had occurred in their mysteries.
“I guess everything is settled,” Roger declared. “With the Eye in its place, there isn’t any more danger for Doctor Ryder, and I saw Mr. Clark exchange the one he had for it, and even helped.
“The big jewel was in a sort of depressed place, with prongs to hold it,” he reconstructed the event, “and we found a way to make the prongs loosen, by working out that the gem had to be put in, and it was too finely cut to enable them to hammer the prongs down, so we hunted for some secret springs, and the Buddha image had a finger that could be bent back, and it turned the prongs outwards, so we substituted the real gem and then set the prongs, and all was well.”
“I am not satisfied about the business, though,” Grover stated. “In the first place, although we have explained a good deal, and what you say about replacing the gem is true, some of the manifestations we experienced are sticking in the back of my head. They seemed so—so ‘out of character’ with what Tibetans, or gem thieves either, would have done.”
“But if the gem is replaced and there isn’t any more need for the ‘manifestations,’ we won’t have any more, and we can forget the whole thing.”
Grover smiled.
“Suppose that a series of experiments were going forward to find a more durable resistance wire for rheostats,” he suggested, “and the firm that commissioned us said to drop it, how would you want to do?”
“The same as you always do in such a case, Grover. Go through with it. I see your idea.”
The sound of the Voice of Doom, he asserted, was explained. There really had been such a natural phenomenon, caused by wind let into a tunnel and making the sounds through the shape like a whistle in the tunnel and in the Buddha image.
“But how did it get on the records?”
Roger was equally unable to answer that.
“Besides,” Grover insisted, “those priests are curious folk. You saw the gem replaced, and to white people that would end the need for stalking a culprit; but they seem bent on punishing people.”
“‘Seem’?” Roger caught the present tense.
“Why, your own letter says so.”
“My—which letter?”
“The last one you wrote. It came yesterday.”
Grover drew from the drawer an envelope postmarked, as Roger saw, from Bombay. They had come on down the caravan trails, until they had met an English airplane that had been arranged for. It had “set down” on the plain. In that they had flown to India, leaving their stuff to be brought along by the next caravan and shipped home.
The address seemed very like his own handwriting—close enough to have fooled Grover, evidently.
And yet—he had been on a packet boat, bound for Europe, on the day shown by the postmark.
Quickly, startled, he opened the letter. In the same close imitation of his exact, clear script, he read:
Bombay, before sailing.Dear Grover,Well, we are homeward bound now. At the cost of a radio and camera left in the Lamasery of the Holiest Ones, I abandoned them. So far, no event has come from my visit there. But of course with the Eye of Om stolen, the Guardians of the Eye may strike. In haste, to catch the mail, I am,Affectionately,Your cousin.
Bombay, before sailing.
Dear Grover,
Well, we are homeward bound now. At the cost of a radio and camera left in the Lamasery of the Holiest Ones, I abandoned them. So far, no event has come from my visit there. But of course with the Eye of Om stolen, the Guardians of the Eye may strike. In haste, to catch the mail, I am,
Affectionately,Your cousin.
Roger looked up.
“But the Eye of Om was replaced! I helped.”
“Then why did you write?——”
“I was on a boat when that letter was posted, Grover!”
He bent forward, earnest and eager.
“Who?—And the Eye wasnotsto——”
His lips closed. His face changed.
He remembered something.
It was unjust to let it mean anything. But——
Why had Potiphar Potts gone back to that secret tunnel?
Of all his loyal staff, most dependable, sincere and trustworthy was the handy man, Potiphar Potts. Roger knew that.
Honesty compelled him, all the same, to connect the fact stated in that mystifying letter with a fact that had not been important when it had come to him.
Potts, on that memorable night, holding the ponies while Roger had gone to Clark, had, as they discovered on their safe return, gone on into the camp.
When they had gotten back, to report to Doctor Ryder the substitution for the false Eye of the one they had brought, Potts had seemed uneasy, though Roger had accepted the man’s own explanation.
“I’m worried about our idea of you leaving the wedge in the thing that works the rock door,” he had said, “it sounded good when we made the plan. If we wedged the mechanical levers, we said, they couldn’t get out that way and chase us or anything.”
Roger said he still thought it a sound idea.
“I don’t, now,” Tip had declared. “They may not go in at the temple to see about us for days, and what difference would it make whether the lower end is blocked if they did come down that way? They’d go back, mad as hornets, and wewouldbe in for it!”
If they had left everything as before, Potts had insisted, anyone using the lower entrance would suspect nothing, and might not even know they had come out that way.
“I’m going back and fix it the way we found it,” he had said.
Loyal, honest, faithful Tip! Why, Roger wondered, did his mind persist in telling him that Potts had stayed away from camp a long time and why did he associate that with the present threat?
Truly enough, hehadactually seen—helped replace—that gem. With equal sureness, the note said that the gem was gone. It was no trick of deduction to assume that the note had been prepared by the lamas, soon after he had escaped. They had shown how clever they were at pretending to be able to read his mind, telling about the lab.
He recalled that he had kept a record in a booklet, of radio conversations from his portable set in the lamasery to the camp set.
They had specimens of his handwriting. A clever man, forging for the purpose of conveying a threat, perhaps planning some harm to Roger on the trip home, had certainly, to all appearances, made the note.
Well, his mind ran on, if they had been so sure that the gem was gone, and if they had supposed that in vanishing he and Potts had taken it, the note would be their natural Tibetan way to account to Grover for anything that might have happened to Roger later.
Nothing had; but the note had been despatched, with the probable knowledge that the letter, by mail, might get a faster trip, a more direct route than the travelers might use. It had been so.
Who besides Potts could have known that the genuine gem was in its place?
Not the camp people; and they did not know the secret of the tunnel.
Neither Clark nor Doctor Ryder had left camp for any protracted period.
“But,” Roger remonstrated with his stubborn idea, “if Tip had been tempted to take it, the Eye of Om was available all the way there.”
His prodding deduction shook that off. Potts would not have dared to try for it on the way to the temple. But—after it was supposed to be in place, so that his party would not know of its abstraction!——Roger fought, but so did his insistent suspicion.
He decided not to tell Grover.
“I—I hesitated because—well, it came to me that somebody elsecouldhave taken it, later. We got away from that locality as fast as we could, and met the ’plane the next day, after I had radioed our agreed signal to a British aviation field in India to despatch it.”
“We can find out something by photographing the fingerprints on the note, and so on, with routine procedure,” Grover dismissed Roger’s poorly explained hesitation. “Suppose you let Tip do it.”
Roger agreed eagerly.
A fine way that would be to see Tip’s reaction.
Roger took him the note with Grover’s orders.
“Gone? The Eye—gone?”
Surprise seemed genuine. And Tip—Roger felt sure—was too slow of wit to act so cleverly as to seem innocent under this surprise.
“Glory-to-Grandma!” Potts gasped, “And—I—went back——”
“But you wouldn’t take it!”
Potts made a wry face.
“Maybe—maybe—” he seemed to find it hard to go on; but he forced his lips to form the sounds sent up by his vocal chords.
“I declare, Rog’, if I took the Eye, I didn’t mean to.”
“If you took it—how could you help meaning to?”
“I picked up what I thought was the subterfuge——”
“Substitute?”
“Yes. Thrown away by Clark, I supposed. Like Toby done before.”
“Where is it?”
“I—uh—why—tell truth, Rog’, I—I thrown it away. Back in Bombay. I figured it wasn’t a safe idea to keep it, after all.”
So there it stood!
Roger’s mind was more at ease. He had seen Mr. Clark pocket the gem for which they substituted their Eye of Aum. Outside the rock door as they emerged from the fissure leading down from the temple, he had seen the man’s hand pull it from his pocket and fling it away.
“That’s no good,” the jeweler helping Doctor Ryder had chuckled.
Definitely, in Roger’s mind, Potts had found that cast-away imitation. He had not gone back through the tunnel!
“Exonerated,” he said, cheerfully, and they brushed a finely pulverized compound over the note, seeking to bring into relief the possible finger-prints thereon. Several faint smudges showed, and Potts made a photographic exposure, also using chemicals, with other takes, to bring up possible marks, erasures and so on.
Roger left him at his work, at a call from Astrovox, the scientific student of planetary vibration who had been a side-show astrologer.
Joining the plump, bald-headed little man, close to sixty, whose deep-set, shaggy-browed blue eyes twinkled with inward cheerfulness, Roger helped him rig up his seemingly crazy idea of a vibra-spectra-telegraph-o-scope.
That was what Roger mentally named it. The man wanted to catch the possible vibrations of higher and lower frequencies than light range. He also wished the various colors showing in a star ray to tell whatever spectrum bands it might contain. Besides, he had to hold this apparatus trained on a desired planet or star, by use of a mechanical movement that enabled him, through a transit’s hairlike “sight” to follow a star as the earth revolved. Furthermore, he wished photographs and a sort of seismographic tape recording of vibration frequencies.
The nine-power telescope he had to be satisfied with was set up to poke its outer lens up through the skylight over the supply room.
All around the smaller, adjoining, partitioned place formerly made notable because of the vanishing rats and the strange voices, he had cages of mice, squirrels and rabbits, under rays from electrical, and other forms of vibration. In hot-house “frames” or small beds under glass he kept living plants, with color-filters straining the light playing on them, to test reaction to heat, light and color.
One bed, under a brownish glass, Roger noticed, had thin, stringy, sickly vegetation in it. In one under a short-wave irradiation treatment, plants thrived.
In tiny flat, glass-protected trays, specimens of cell-cultures in tubes, and sections of living plant tissue were being exposed.
“Guess we’ll have to clean out the far corner,” Astrovox suggested, “I dumped all the wrappings there. Might start a fire.”
Approaching to help, he finished his sentence with a chuckle.
Roger nodded, and gathered up the papers, making a fine rattle in the process.
A glow-bulb lighted in the interconnected tell-tale panel as a small bell rang. Roger, glancing at the panel, saw that the summons was from the electrical division downstairs. He went to the head of the steps.
“Want me?”
“Yes,” answered the voice of Professor Millman, electrical engineer. “We’re going to make a flat-table recording. I don’t just see where we get power for the motor from.”
“Right down close under the recording machine table,” Roger called down his information. “You’ll see an outlet set into the floor.”
“Oh—thanks, yes. I see.”
Roger went back to help Astrovox.
“Can’t risk it, with all the chemicals, and combustible stuff,” he answered the former phrases of the old astrologer.
“Not with Neptune, the planet, in opposition to Saturn and with Mars opposing Uranus,” the old man chuckled.
Roger looked as if he did not see the point.
“In our belief that the planetary positions influence chemical reactions—and all life is chemical, or, at least electro-chemical,” he was told, “we use the known planets as symbols for forces of nature. Saturn, you might say, stands for cohesion—or, better, say for crystallization, because Saturn makes gravity possible, makes density in our earth by cohering its quintrillions of atoms.
“Mars we could say is a symbol for the combustion engendered by fire, the same as Uranus is, in a way, a symbol of explosiveness, and Neptune seems to represent a sort of disintegration, diffusion and slow separation of atoms, not by explosion but by attrition.”
To Roger it was all pretty much like Egyptian hieroglyphics but the man seemed to be talking what he considered sensible phrases.
“Let us say that we place a pellet of putty between two machines, one engendering a force like repulsion; the other giving quick, and very high-frequency stabs of current toward the other. The answer might be that the pellet would explode or fly into its atoms.
“But,” the old man went on, “The force of cohesion would hold our earth together in such an experiment, though the volume or size of the tiny pellet would be too little for it to act on sufficiently to keep the form together. That, in a way, is what so many people misunderstand when they talk about astrology. Properly used, correctly interpreted, it enables us to understand our reactions—emotions——”
Roger was in the next room, loading the papers on the dumb-waiter to send to the cellar. As he came back, gathering up more, Astrovox, as if he had ranted along on his favorite topic without ceasing, said:
“—fire.” He stood up. “Where were you? I was telling about Mars and Uranus exploding things and starting fires.”
“I have to work.”
“Yes, that’s so. Well, this is your last load.”
Roger gathered the great heap of heavy wrapping paper, and left him shifting one bed of plants from under a deep ruby glass so that they would be exposed to a pale green color filtration.
Going down to remove the papers from the dumb-waiter, Roger saw Mr. Millman finish recording the multitude of gyrations of a sparking motor shaft which Mr. Ellison was photographing with his camera.
“We are going to count the sparks,” he told Roger, “just to check up on the speedometer attached to the flywheel, which Millman says is off-count by hundreds of revolutions to the minute.”
“I’ll take the record up and have it made ready for a slow playback. I’m going up anyway.”
He turned it over to Potts as the note had been thoroughly revealed in all his exposures, and had shown no identifying finger-marks.
Roger went back to Astrovox, and became deeply interested in the latter’s plans for night study of the spectra of stars.
“I wonder if your cousin would arrange for one of his men to stay part of the night with me, to take down my data?”
“We can set up a dictograph, and let you talk it onto a record.”
“That would do.”
“Or—we could mike down from here to one of our magazine-recorders that puts a new record on the spindle of the turntable when the other has been used up. That would run you for hours, if you’d stop it in between dictating periods.”
The thing was arranged and Roger, before going home, demonstrated the mechanism and was sure the old man understood its operation.
Because of the threat implied in the forged note, Grover gave Potts instructions to transfer from Doctor Ryder’s rooms the mechanisms he wanted to have installed for Roger’s protection. With a changed switch operated only from inside the room, the former ease of operation by others, he thought, was eliminated.
Roger, tired by celebration and resuming work, retired early, being sure that his switch was set, his room theoretically a sealed place.
Sleep came. Rest, though was disturbed by weird dreams.
Sometimes, he knew, dreams had outward causes stimulating them, as happens if a draft on exposed limbs makes one dream of riding on a sled and falling into a snow bank in howling wind.
His dream of a burglar, as he awakened and looked rather fearfully around, made him grin, though.
That room had been sealed by no one other than himself!
But a low, humming whine made him certain that machinery was in operation—the hum of the recorder motor. He located it. Proved it. Shutting off the device in case some jar had started it, he went to test his door. But he recalled that the motor still ran.
To his dismay, the door was not merely unsealed. It stood ajar.
Suddenly, startlingly, from behind him, his table radio spoke, in a thin, strained, bizarre cry.
“Fire!” and he heard, faintly, the crackle of flames.
Then an uncanny silence, dreadful by contrast, came.
He spied around the hall. It, too, was silent. He tiptoed down to the library, telephoned the laboratory, and got no reply.
Once again—something was wrong—in two places! He must go to that laboratory. Grover should have answered—or Tip—or Astrovox!
Half way to the laboratory, Roger pulled up in his stride, half ready to laugh at his stupidity. A joke? Of course.
Potts, on Grover’s instructions, had made the room installation. To “get back” at his chum for the suspicion about the Eye of Om, the handy man could have made that “Fire” cry on a record, could have known how to break a light beam. He, alone, could have prepared the impregnable place so that it might be entered, it seemed to Roger.
A recording, he also knew, was the other end of a reproduction. To print a sound-track on a disk, one used a microphone; its diaphragm sent vibrations through a selenium cell and other apparatus until it actuated the recording diamond: to play it back, the process was reversed.
The use of the diamond, instead of a smooth reproducing needle on a hardened surface,couldcause that high, thin, scratchy voice.
“But Cousin Grover was not at home,” his mind prompted, “and the door was open, and the light would not work. The lab. telephone was dead, too!”
Perhaps Potts had tried a joke; but it seemed as if it had turned into a warning, a summons; because, when he reached the building, the door was not secured, no protective beam had been set; and in the main office, he smelt the sharp, acrid odor of burned powder.
A gun must have been fired in there, he reasoned. By whom? For what? His mind raced to terrifying impressions. Explosion! Shot!
The place was jet-dark. As he investigated he decided that odor was strongest close to the interviewing desk, pungent enough to choke him.
Into the larger main room he made his way, finding the powder odor was less strong beyond the main office as he switched on lights and took broader observations.
On the large desk used for interviewing visitors he saw that the framed photograph of his aunt, Grover’s sister, had been knocked down, and lay on its face. An inkwell, in a pool of black on the floor beyond the desk, was shattered into large fragments, and tiny bits.
He stood still, and shouted.
“Tip! Tip! Potiphar Potts! Tip!”
Getting no answer he raced across the chemical section to the man’s small quarters.
The bed had been used, its covers had been thrown back, as if in haste.
No Potts, as once before, stood tied to the bedpost.
The room was empty.
He shouted for Astrovox, feeling a strange desire to laugh at the sound of the name when it was shouted. “Astro—vox!”
He called for his cousin.
Then, with every light going, in spite of queer terrors, Roger made a thorough search of the lower floor.
That brought no result. Nothing seemed to have been moved and as far as he could tell the safe was all right and the device that now made it sink into a channel in the cellar, so that a steel plate could slide over and make it impregnable, seemed to be in working condition.
Reluctantly, forcing his dragging feet, he crept upstairs.
No one was in sight. The old star-gazer was gone also!
Roger stood, uncertainly glancing around.
Had this been tragedy? A shot? At whom? Where were the rest?
Of a sudden the threat in the note became his uppermost thought. Had someone—or something!—drawn the rest away, and luredhimthere?
Roger, nervously, glanced around him.
The innocent squirrels and rabbits and mice curled up in their temporary respite from the ray-baths. The machines set up earlier hummed quietly, recording, slowly moving the telescope, casting spectra of a star’s light in bands of greenish-brown, yellow and indigo on a flat paper-table. Everything seemed innocent enough.
But where, he mused, had the scientific star-student gone to?
Where was Cousin Grover? And, above all, where was Tip, one out of all of them who ought to have been on duty, if not asleep.
Roger glanced up at the clock.
Not five, but two, was the hour toward which the smaller hand was dropping as the minute hand marked the quarter-of.
Ithadbeen “fire” that his record had screeched at him.