“Orders are not to go there at night,” Roger told him.
“Well—but he said lock ’em in the safety cabinet, against fire. I forgot. Well——”
“But there won’t be any fire.”
“But—lookit, Roger—you didn’t notice, maybe——”
“That you had marked on a paper a list of words? I did. Fireworks. Pyrotechnics. Lycopodium.”
“Well—I mixed some—an’ left ’em in a big tray till tomorrow.”
Roger gasped, at his end of the connection.
Suppose a gas in the atmosphere reacted with some exposed ingredient?
All at once, though, a person so far totally unsuspected began to assume importance.
This Toby Smith! He had originally sold, for a camera, a gem supposed to have been both sacred and invaluable.
He had been to Tibet before, Doctor Ryder had mentioned. (He could have known the value of that gem).
Besides, here he was, at a time when Grover had explicitly forbidden Roger, for some hidden reason, against going near the lab. And he was insisting on his disobedience of orders by implying dire happenings!
Roger hesitated.
Why was it important for him to be lured to the laboratory? Had Clark not explained to the Tibetans about the blunder through which the real jewel, jettisoned by Clark, picked up by Potts, had been lost, they might want to lure him, to bring some idea of revenge to pass.
Why should Toby want to do that?
Perhaps, Roger speculated, the youth wanted to get him there and then by use of force open the safe or some other thing.
The value of their own laboratory formulae and data was not less, to them, than a jewel such as the Eye of Aum.
“Against orders!”
Roger, his decision made, started to hang up.
“You’d let that stuff explode, maybe——”
“Listen, Toby. I obey the Boss. Besides, don’t worry. We have a positive-action, fire smothering gas in drums, and a thermostat that operates a relay, much like those on heating equipment, at a rise of eight degrees from the normal shown by another thermometer outside the lab. The gas smothers any fire. Chemicals, even.”
“That’s good. Then I needn’t worry.”
“You needn’t worry, Toby.”
Hanging up, Roger waited for a further effort.
When it came—if itwasa new attempt!—its form was startling.
The inter-connecting fire alarm in the library of his home rang. Roger considered for a moment. Of course, the gas should cover every possible danger, save everything. Even against the delicate electric adjustments and the unreplaceable devices, the gas would work without harming them as water might do.
The thought brought another.
“Water!”
The firemen would respond to the alarm, sent out over the telephone, to Headquarters, automatically.
Water would ruin the delicate armatures, coils, etc.
And how could the alarm go off by human means when he had made so certain that no one could enter?
He decided to try to get Grover at the hospital where he waited for any word, or murmur, raving or otherwise, from the unconscious astrologer.
Grover was not available, they told him. He had gone out to get a late repast.
Grover would not be available for an hour. Roger could not see the laboratory electrical apparatus ruined. The order to stay away had not taken this development into account.
He got a taxi and was hurried to the vicinity of the lab.
Already he heard the screech of sirens, as at the start of the queer chain of contradictions, impossibilities and misfits.
This time, though, a weird orange-reddish glow came up into the cloudy sky from above their skylight!
As Roger leaped out, flinging the taximan a dollar, the glow was quashed as if by magic. The system of protection had worked.
He stopped the breaking of the door, as before, but this time with no need for argument. The X-Ray and fluoroscope were not going as they had been that former time.
Hastily Roger located the Captain of the first company to have arrived: he knew that the one so scoring a beat was in charge, stayed till last, was responsible. It was “his fire.”
Rapidly he told as much as was necessary to convince the man that no further damage could possibly ensue, but he found the man hard to convince.
“But I declare,” Roger insisted, “the lycopodium and stuff that you saw blazing up through the skylight was just fireworks compounds, made up—I begin to think—for just that use. It made a grand glow, but probably blazed only in a tray. The room it was in is fireproof. Our film is all non-flam, in sealed or airtight cans. Our chemicals are in airtight containers.”
He added that his check of the tell-tale, on the brief entry he had made, disclosed no entrances by others. Such was impossible.
“Then how was the stuff ignited? Spontaneous combustion.”
“I suppose some gas was left open, on purpose, that would in time penetrate to the chemicals in the mixture. But the heat of that little couple of pounds of powder burning ten minutes would not raise our fire-thermostat more than a degree, and it must go up six or eight to set off the alarm.”
“The alarm came in, young fellow. How?”
Roger took him across to a drug store. In its window, against the wall, a huge advertising thermometer registered Fahrenheit degrees and stood at sixty-four. He hurried the man back, showed him the small interconnected thermometer for registering air temperature, against which the other inside one reacted. This one stood at fifty-five.
“Somebody wanted the alarm set off to lure me here—simple trick. Only had to hold ice on this one till it dropped eight degreesbelowthe other and then the other would be eight above it and off went the alarm.”
Fire, an alarm adjusted for heat, set off by ice! Toby? Who else?
From the pay station in the drug store Roger got the hospital and was connected with Grover.
“Is Astrovox all right? Did he say anything?”
“He will probably recover, Roger, but he won’t talk for many days, perhaps for weeks.”
Rapidly, concisely, Roger outlined the situation.
“But I told you——”
“I am not in the lab. I went right away from there, making sure all the safety things were still on, before the firemen had pulled away.”
“Don’t go back, no matter what. And—Roger—be sure your room is protected fully before you go to bed.”
“What’s the matter? Do you know?—who is it?”
“I don’t know who it is, but some desperate person has determined to protect him or herself by any necessary means.”
“The Tibetans?”
“I think not, Roger.”
It was some person or group recognized by Astrovox. That recognition had led to the blow he was suffering from.
“Fortunately, it was not fatal,” Grover continued, “and I stayed here less to hear him, for I knew that would not be probable. I was here to protect him if anyone, knowing he lived, tried more desperate methods still.”
“You can’t stay day and night.”
“No,” answered Grover. “Potts is on his way here now. I will be home in an hour or a little more than an hour.”
Roger asked one more question.
“Why would they want to lure me to the lab?”
“No other way to get in.”
“But they did get in, Grover. The lyco——”
“Probably touched off with a long pole, from the skylight. They could break the glass, insert a long pole, like the one we use to shift the ventilators. To draw firemen who would smash in—or set off an alarm that would bring you, especially after the preparation by Toby.”
“Then he——”
“Probably someone either paid him well, or else, as I think is more likely, he really had left the powder there. Some one knew it.”
“Why should I be bothered?”
Grover’s theory was that through his reputation as the Ear Detective, or else because of some film or other data, the suspected miscreant feared him as he had feared Astrovox.
The conversation ended and Roger, finding his old friend, the taxi driver, on his night station, used his car.
At home he made certain that the devices, moved from Doctor Ryder’s residence, which no longer seemed threatened, because the absence of the Eye of Om had been explained to the Tibetans, all worked. He shifted the recording needle a dozen turns of the threaded arm that made it follow a spiral path. The call of “fire” and the crackling noises occupied only the start of the disk. He set the recorder to fall in place further over toward the center.
Switching on the electrically charged locks, he kept his desk lamp burning while he retired.
Just as he was about to turn it out, the light died.
Thinking that the bulb had been used up, he tried another light, just as a precaution, recalled to mind by the doctor’s experience.
That light was unresponsive.
At once Roger raced to the door into the hall.
With no current the lock, with his key inside, turned readily.
Intuition told him what had happened here, as in the other instance.
The cellar fuse box had been opened and a fuse had been removed. That prevented current from entering the circuits, and even the alarm was silent, although he knew that cutting off the current served as well as any other way to start the recorder disk and the camera. He cut them off hurriedly.
“I’ll want them, maybe, a little later,” he told himself. “Whoever did this will have to come up two flights of stairs. It will give me just time to re-adjust them to go on again, if I want. And I hope he or she or it left the fuse by the box.”
He had a plan. A trap, made useless to protect him, could be made useful to hold someone else!
Slipping into his bathroom, with his clothes carefully tucked under his arm, Roger unlocked the door into Grover’s adjoining room.
He went in there stealthily.
Then, waiting, he listened.
His one danger lay in the chance that the miscreant might come by way of Grover’s room, if it was known to be empty.
As he heard someone working a jimmy or other springing implement on his door, very quietly, though, he slipped into the hall with as little noise as the hinges of the door allowed. It was hardly likely that the slight squeaks were audible down the hall.
He saw a man, bent low, his back fortunately turned that way, as he tried to snap open the lock without much noise, perhaps trusting that Roger slept soundly and would not awaken.
Like a wraith slipping without sound along a haunted hallway, Roger got to the stairway. Its noise must be risked. He trod close to the wall side, stepping two lifts down to avoid a known faulty stair.
It required nice psychological deduction to enable him to use his trap, if the fuse was available. The marauder, or worse, must be in the room, and as Roger hoped, he would probably have shut the door to muffle any commotion from getting to other possibly occupied rooms.
Once in, the person would see he was not in bed, and had not been, and would either take a moment to discover if he hid, or would pause to consider; he must have been watching, must have seen Roger arrive.
The fuse, when he snapped on a cellar bulb in the garage, was on a ledge under the switch box. Was it too soon, Roger wondered, to screw it into the tiny receptacle?
He must not wait too long. His absence once assured, suspicion and fear would drive out the one who was nowhisquarry.
He must risk it at once.
He screwed home the small 15-ampere fuse.
With hopeful heart and padding feet he ran up the cellar steps, up the next flight, and paused to take observations.
All was quiet.
Had his trap sprung? He could tell by finding a rubber glove among Grover’s things, with which to try the knob he had so recently turned with ease into his bathroom.
He got the insulating glove from among some old laboratory togs, too big for him but satisfactory for his need.
With care he turned the knob. The door did not yield. The system was on.
A difficulty came into mind.
To see if he had a captive he must release the heavy charge, by use of a small cable-key that broke the circuit. If his presumable evil-wisher was caught, he might get out before Roger could re-set the system.
He listened. There was not an audible sound, coming through the door.
A sound in the lower hall made Roger turn. To his delight, Grover came in. Quickly the younger cousin set out the situation.
“Go down and draw the fuse again,” Grover suggested. “Queer that I did not think of that simple way to nullify all our protection. It explains how the safe was so easily opened, as well as Doctor Ryder’s situation. When you are ready, pull only the ten ampere fuse in the equalizer of the circuit marked number four.”
Roger knew that the switch and fuse box held different fuses for various parts of the home, with two heavier fuses set into the main feed from the street. Grover’s idea was, he saw, to eliminate the front portion of the house including his room, while the light in the rear of the hall, and his aunt’s quarters, would be left on. In that way, with a front hall light going, Grover could tell when the fuse was out and have light enough in the hall to work by.
As soon as he had performed his task he ran up the steps, to find Grover, extremely surprised, facing, in the hall, the last man they had suspected of interest in the matter.
The assistant electrical engineer, Mr. Millman, stood there.
“A lame explanation,” Grover was saying as Roger arrived.
“To you, maybe. To me it seems reasonable that I would have hit on the method somebody used to get to the safe and I think it is perfectly logical that I should test out my theory that Roger had been playing all those tricks in the laboratory.”
“What tricks?” Roger demanded.
“This one, if you want a sample.”
Millman walked over to the recording device, exchanged from his pocket a reproducer, made a quick wire connection to Roger’s compact table radio, as Roger had had the connection when the recorder had roughly re-played the formerly recorded cry and crackles.
“I was making a recording of motor sparking, and just as I set our lab. machine going, I realized that the diamond was cutting a sound record, not just running smoothly. You can tell if you are watching closely, as I was. We cut out the record, took it off, and I told Ellison and Zendt to say nothing. I began to suspect that Roger, who was up with Astrovox, was having fun at our expense.”
He set the machine going and the needle, automatically dropping onto the groove just beyond the cuttings, as Roger had set it, had to be lifted back. Then Grover heard, as had Roger before, the cry, “Fire” and the rattling, crackling as if flames ate dry wood or paper.
“Now if that was recorded, it had to come from somewhere. We had not started the sparking motor.” Millman was earnest. “And I knew that Roger was up there. Later, unable to find this record, at the laboratory, I reasoned that it must be that Roger had brought it to his home. Evidently, I thought, he wanted to hide it. I decided to make sure. Being an electrician, I thought, at once, how to get in by pulling a fuse, not needing to cut wires or put the safety devices out of commission permanently.”
“What do you think, Roger?” Grover turned to his younger cousin, “Does it strike you as convincing?”
“Maybe he might feel that way.”
“But—with some desperate person abroad——”
“Do I look desperate?” Millman laughed. He was tallish, and a most serious mannered, quiet, earnest person. “What motive couldIhave for wanting to hurt Roger?”
“You can best answer that,” Grover said quietly.
“I simply wanted to justify my belief that Roger was behind all the spooky goings-on; the animals on the films, and so on.” He nodded to show his satisfaction. “I think I have proved it.”
“Did Potts put this record here?” demanded Grover, and Roger saw that he was thinking fast.
Hating to add still one more count against the handy man who had only his own word to support his declaration that he had flung away a supposably priceless Eye of Om when Clark had made his blunder in the temple, and Potts had found the discarded gem, Roger nodded.
“And how was the recording made? Do you know?”
Again Roger nodded. Grover frowned.
“How?”
“I was helping Astrovox carry away packing papers; and he mentioned that Mars, the planet, ruled fire. That word, and the crackle of the paper bunched up in our arms, would make that sound.”
“Was there an open microphone near you?”
Then Roger started.
“No.”
“Then—how?——”
“If we could go to the lab.” Roger had an inspiration, “I could show you.”
It would keep till morning, Grover decided; and dismissing Millman with a warning that his actions were at least not beyond suspicion, Grover set the cable-switch on, and prepared to sleep with Roger.
During the balance of the night their rest was undisturbed.
As soon as they reached the laboratory, Roger took Grover to the recording machine.
“You will think I did this, because I know so much about it,” the youthful radio and sound expert said, “but it is just putting a meaning behind certain sounds on my list, and adding the natural explanation.”
His reasoning proved to have been correct.
A strange voice had come unexplainably from an upper room having no occupant:
Roger bent, examining the mechanism under the recording turntable. He investigated the contacts whereby the electrical impulses sent from the small “mike” at the sparking motor, through the selenium cell, got into the amplifying transformer-coil to be increased enough to operate the recording diamond attaching to a special diaphragm over the disk on the turntable.
“A wire had been soldered on, here—see,” he pointed. “Somebody had a wire that didn’t need to be there. Now, if I just wind this end of a bit of wire around that contact, to replace the missing one—” he made the temporary connection, “and lead it down to one or the other side of the floor outlet, and there attach it even loosely around one prong of the little plug-in that furnishes current for the motor of our recorder, we may discover where the speaker upstairs is located.”
Hastily he made a temporary splice onto the plug prong. Grover went up the steps, pausing as Roger put a commercial test-record in place, switched on the motor and set the reproducing needle on the groove.
Immediately, from upstairs, there came the recording, in a booming, hollow distortion, natural to the poor connection and the device they had to locate above.
Grover, walking over to the corner from which came the sound, gave a surprised call for his cousin who shut off the record and ran to the disclosure he was sure he would find. His guess was right. There, laid practically flat on one of the empty cabinet shelves, with its small speaker-unit set into a cutout spot of the shelves, and concealed by the thick wood it was let into, was a good sized slab of thin wood.
The wires to the small operating battery concealed in a non-flam film can, and from that running to a wall outlet that connected the room devices with the main source of current, they traced.
A recording had been made, downstairs, of voices in the upper room.
To all appearances there was no microphone up there to have conveyed the voice and paper-rattle. Apparently there was no loud speaker up there to have broadcast the Voice of Doom so bafflingly.
“You say to dig past appearances,” Roger reminded his cousin, “and while they can be falsified, the truth never changes. Well, if it ‘appears’ that there is no mike, and that there is no speaker, we know we heard the Voice of Doom, and we know we heard the recording made by Astrovox, upstairs, on a record, downstairs.”
“There is, naturally, some connecting wire. But—it does not show. You know more about radio than I, Roger. Have you located it?”
“Well, when we used to build experimental sets, before commercial radios got to be common and reasonable in price, I used to try to record my own voice, so I could play it back. I used the same sort of radio hookup for that, I think, that is used in making commercial phonograph records—only, I didn’t have a carbon mike, so I tried reversing the function of the speaker I had. It was a Balsa-wood one, that I assembled from a small vibrator-unit, and a flat slab of thin Balsa-wood.”
“Used the speaker as a microphone or telephone receiver would be used today.”
“Right, Grover. And, another thing I remember from my experiments. There was a device that was supposed to use the house electric wiring as an antenna—an aerial. If you put a special plug, with onlyoneprong instead of two the way regular electric contacts are made, in a wall outlet, the circuit of the house current was not carried at all, and the single contact went to the aerial binding-post of my set, and made the whole house wiring act like an antenna. There was a terrible line-hum. It wasn’t practical. But I think——”
“As long as only one ‘side’ of the house current is tapped,” Roger told his cousin and Chief, “and the part it connects with is not grounded, it will act like an antenna—or, in this hookup, it makes any of our outlets a conductor between whatever is plugged into it and the Balsa-wood speaker.”
“Besides Ellison and Millman, both electricians,” Grover mused out loud, “Potts would know, at least from observation, a lot of electrical ‘stunts’. This one, possibly. And he knows how to record; and all about microphones, speakers and other apparatus that he has to adjust in his regular laboratory duties.”
Another count against Potts, Roger thought—at least by implication in the evidence.
But, then again, it also pointed to Ellison or Millman, maybe both.
Toby arrived. As with Roger he viewed the cremated powders, and the melted metal tray on a scorched table of fireproofed wood under a zinc sheathing, where his “pyrotechnics” had burned, Roger had to admit to himself that the youth’s manner and expression indicated sincere shame that he had experimented and had left his combustibles exposed. But, then, the call had come, last night, so close ahead of the fire alarm that had led to his trip to the lab. Had Toby been lurking nearby after having chilled the outside thermometer enough to cause the one on the alarm system to be higher and to set off the device? There had not been enough heat to release the gas, he made certain of that at once. Tobymightbe one of those “dumb”-clever fellows who pretended to be ignorant to cover up something, to keep suspicion away from themselves. He decided to add Toby to his list of potentially suspectable people.
Since Astrovox would be away for a good while and his experiments could hardly be picked up by anyone else, Roger was told to arrange a temporary home for the rabbits, squirrels and mice and rats he had been experimenting on; and a nearby pet shop agreed to house them.
In assembling their cages, Roger noticed several of the mice showing symptoms of being very nearly done for.
“What do you suppose is wrong?” he asked Doctor Ryder, who was clearing aside some of the absent man’s apparatus in order to set up his cages again. He expected a fresh litter of white rats for his medical experiments.
“There was a fire, wasn’t there?”
“You think the smoke overcame them, Doctor?”
“Exactly, Roger.” He wrote down some stimulating combinations of medicinal chemicals to try on them.
The bio-chemist, Zendt, also took an interest.
“Of course, if the lamps are already turned off,” he said, “it is that the smoke overcame them. That little fellow is particularly bad.”
He indicated a tiny mouse of the sort used in the experiments, lying almost as if in a coma.
Roger, with his quick sympathy, and with Toby eagerly obeying orders, improvised a makeshift “oxygen tent” and since it would be in the way in the room already crowded with the cages and plant-beds, he took the small stimulator with its tiny occupant into the dark-room where he could attend to it and watch the mouse’s reaction and response while he developed some plates taken by the staff the afternoon before.
The mouse, Roger saw with pleasure, gave signs of reviving.
So quickly it recuperated that he put it back into a cage, but kept it near him in the dark-room while he saw, on the developing plates, slow images emerge.
The pictures, photographs of crystal formations, he finished, making wet-contact prints. These he took to Mr. Zendt. Others, of the old astrologer’s, he put aside to print later. They would not be needed for some time.
Coming back, Roger observed that his tiny patient was apparently much better. He dissembled the oxygen apparatus, and was about to take it to his stock-room, to the section where spare apparatus was stored, when he had a visitor.
Mr. Clark, his Tibetan traveling companion, the well-to-do jeweler, came in through the light-trap, with a cheerful greeting.
“How are you doing?” he inquired, “and what is the latest quotation on Tibetan’s, common.” His stock-market joke made Roger grin.
“Glad you didn’t say ‘Tibetan’s, preferred.’” he answered. “As far as I know, they certainly are not preferred. The quotation is lower-than-minus. No sale.”
He was wondering what might be the object of the call.
Not a visit for love he was sure.
“I hear there was almost a tragedy here,” the rich gem expert was getting to the point, Roger surmised.
“Yes, sir.”
He was not going to give information.
“Poor old star-gazer. He should have seen his fate coming. If his star-reading could warn him, why didn’t he take care?”
“I don’t know. He had said something about Neptune and Saturn in opposition and Mars opposed to Uranus, with the world between the opposite planets, pulled this way and that, if I understand him. Maybe he was trying to take care of himself, but he always says we are put into this world to have certain experiences. We cannot escape them, and what the stars’ forces did to influence our cells in brain and body at birth, he thinks, indicates what sort of experiences we will have.”
Roger, seldom over-talkative, was willing to expand this idea.
Not that he wholly grasped what it meant. Nor was he “sold” on the star philosophy. But it diverted Mr. Clark from whatever plan he had come there to try, Roger thought; and if he was right about it, Clark would come back to his subject and would thus show Roger what it was.
“Astrovox often said,” he hurried on with the topic, “we cannot avoid our Destiny, escape experiences. But we have what he called Free Will to decide how we will meet them.”
“A very sound philosophy, Roger. But——”
“Now he’s going to give himself away,” decided Roger.
“But—where have you put The Eye of Om?”
Roger, petrified by amazement, could only stare, in the dim, ruby dark-room light. “I?——”
“Yes. Eye of Om. You really took it, of course.”
“Mr. Clark!” Roger drew himself to his full height in sudden anger at the challenge, the accusation.
“Well, how else could it have happened? You know, for you saw, when the prongs in the Buddha’s forehead socket were loosened, I took out the old gem and put in a new one—the one we had brought. And when you sent Potts back, do you imagine I am idiot enough to believe thatheknew one stone from another, or that he found the one I chucked away into a regular abyss, there in the Himalayas?”
He scowled.
“You went there. You saw the real stone put in. You sent Potts to—shall I say the real word? No—to bring it—that’s close and not quite so evil-sounding as the fact. Anyway, Roger, do you think we don’t how loyal Potts is to you? He would tell any sort of story, just to protect you.”
“Say, you go and tell Grover that.”
Roger was boiling.
Clark, scanning his working face, calmly chuckled.
“Your films will be overdone, or whatever happens if you forget them.”
Roger, reminded, hastily extracted from trays the plates of an experiment with chemical diffusion, and got them into hypo.
“I shan’t bother Grover. We discussed it and he suggested coming to you. As long as this way doesn’t elicit the information, perhaps there will be other methods. You know what taking the gem means to those Tibetans?”
Roger, fuming, smarting under the unjust accusation, refused to reply.
Turning on his heel, Mr. Clark left.
Roger washed his negatives, made his prints.
To his surprise his pet, the tiny mouse, began to run about, to show unmistakable signs of animation—or was it of excitement?
Roger studied him.
The tiny animal was racing around its cage.
Memory of the fact that such mice on submarines indicated the presence of leaks from battery or engine of undetected gases such as sulphuric acid gas came. He wondered if his dark-room held such a menace to respiration. He decided to take the mouse to the outer air and observe its reaction.
To his dismay, the inner door of the light trap did not respond.
He was wedged or otherwise fastened in. And the mouse was certainly exhibiting signs of uneasiness.
Instead of shouting, beating on the door and otherwise wasting energy and using up the available oxygen of the room, Roger paused, taking only the precaution of mounting on a high developing table, to avoid any floor accumulation of poisonous fumes.
Such mice, he remembered, could detect a dangerous fume long before human nostrils caught the odor; and this made them life-savers on submarines. They gave the crews time to trace gas fumes and suppress or nullify their effect.
“Now, there isn’t any gas I know of in what I am using,” Roger spoke, under his breath, to his tiny companion, just as most people will discuss an emergency with a dog or cat.
Fumes of such chemicals as he might use for “reducing” and “intensifying” improperly exposed negatives gave off offensive odors in certain mixtures; but he had mixed none. Hypo was not dangerous: and the ventilating system should have sucked away any fumes of whatever sort, he knew.
Nevertheless, the animal grew still more excited.
Roger lighted the white, glaring dome light, ignoring possible ruining of the developing plates in his trays.
He knew every content of that room.
Nothing was out of place except what he had been using.
There was the extra paraphernalia of the oxygen apparatus. Nothing else was visible.
It came to him that no odor or fume could be liberated that would cause such frenzy in the little white savior unless it was introduced from an outside source.
He would find out.
He went to the intake of the ventilator, and with litmus paper, and other handy agents, he made several tests, keeping his nose and lips within the tight folds of a handkerchief as he did it.
The litmus did not at once indicate anything. But when he thought of what he had sometimes read of closed garages, with car engines running, in which people had been overcome by exhaust fumes such as carbon monoxide, he made a hasty test, with what he had available, and was very sure that the gas or one of that nature, was in the air.
A tiny animal might be going to save his life. Roger knew his next move. He would shut the ventilator, prevent the inflow of any more fumes, leaving the exhaust openings to suck clear the accumulation which would lie near the floor. He got his oxygen equipment, and climbing onto the highest table, he made an improvised airman’s outfit such as they used when ascending beyond the human range of breathable air. He used his oxygen and mixed it with air inhaled only through a handkerchief strainer.
He thought in this way he could hold out, and then whoever had come so close to being in line for the electric chair——. He watched the mouse for signs.
After a few minutes the animal, at his level, quieted.
Roger, allowing still more time, finally laid aside his protective “gas mask” arrangement, and quietly tried the door. It had been unwedged. He did not emerge, however, but went into a corner to wait.
Whoever might open that door, he thought——
A criminal would haunt the scene, to see the effect of his plan.
Would it, he wondered, be Clark? He had threatened. Or—Toby? Or Millman? Of course not the Tibetans. They were not chemists: they were priests.
He grew tense, watchful.
The outer light-trap door was being opened.
Watching, Roger saw and recognized the man who entered. The bio-chemist, Zendt, came in with a film magazine of exposed celluloid in one hand.
“How are my diffusion shots coming along?”
“In the hypo.”
Roger watched narrowly.
Zendt was either a master of facial control or he was one of those “innocent bystanders” who manage to intrude when some crucial point of a drama is about to be played.
“Please develop this run from the speed camera. Ellison and Millman have caught the torque of their erratic motor on film. Sixteen exposures to a foot—a million to the minute. Shooting time, one half minute. Does that tell you the size of reel to wind it on?”
Roger, making mental computation with one side of his mind as he studied the situation with the other, nodded.
He would put the ceiling light out, but he would not satisfy Zendt by staying there. Perhaps the man came prepared to hold him at his dark-room work in case he had not yet been sufficiently dosed.
“Bring you prints soon,” he told Zendt. “I’ll get this into a developing tank.” He risked a question.
“Is anybody in the cellar? The ventilator seems to be choked. No air comes in. It’s—stuffy.”
“Maybe. Millman was down, earlier. Potts hasn’t come. Grover has gone out.” To let Potts get sleep, to stand guard over Astrovox, Roger decided.
“I’ll telephone down and see—oh, look. It was shut off.”
Clever actor or innocent intruder, Zendt betrayed neither interest nor disappointment. He simply nodded and went out.
Roger considered his position.
He reasoned: if Zendt was blameless, some one else was watching. From seeing Zendt emerge the unknown would be sure that Roger was still all right. But if he left, all possibility of detecting who was the culprit might be gone.
Still, he had no chemicals in assortments that would enable him to detect the possible introduction of some fume through a hole in the walls, or some other move. Besides, he was open to bodily attack.
He must not be there. No one must see him leave.
He remembered that there were chemicals that he would need, and inasmuch as he was known to be all right, he could easily get them.
He emerged, seeing Doctor Ryder busy with his arrival of white rats, with Toby helping him put them into the glass pen through the trapdoor in the top that prevented them from escaping.
“Got to force-up some underexposed negatives,” he remarked as he passed them. To the stock-room he went, and procured the ingredients he needed; but not for an intensifier for under-exposed film! Returning, he noticed Zendt, watching the rats also.
Once more in the dark-room Roger proceeded methodically and carefully to produce a very businesslike detonating torpedo with crystals of gritty hard iron oxide-rust! to take the place of the gravel usually packed in a commercial torpedo of the sort formerly sold for exploding by contact with the sidewalk.
The other ingredients he mixed with care as to method, as well as formula, knowing that certain chemicals must be combined in a certain sequence. Wrapped in a fairly good paper taken from a packet of printing paper, he had his torpedo ready at last.
There was no window from which to fling it, but he knew that by putting a chair on the developing table by the wall, he could get his hands up to the small outlet around the exhaust fan. The old equipment, discontinued since the laboratory had put in air-conditioning, led to the open air.
He got to the position carefully, took his torpedo, and adjusting the small exhaust fan so that its blades would interfere the least with an open passage for the missile, he took his chance, against striking the blades, flinging with a quick jerk of his wrist that sent the detonator straight through past the fan.
Hurriedly he climbed down and got the chair back in place as he heard, muffled by the drop, a sharp explosion on the pavement in front of the laboratory.
He was certain that the noise would draw everybody.
In the space between the outer and the inner light door he listened. Doctor Ryder and Toby went with the rest. The way must be free.
Roger, emerging, saw that his guess had been correct.
There, poked up through the skylight coaming, was the long, and large-girth telescope of Astrovox.