To an athletic youth, with agility and endurance, to climb the steadily enlarging, inclined barrel was no hard task. Once at the top he got over onto the roof with skilful swings of his body and flexing muscles drawing him safely over the coaming.
Then he watched, unseen from below, careful to be on the side facing the sun so as not to let his shadow reveal his position.
There he watched for an hour as Doctor Ryder and Toby returned, and others came to the stock-room, but went away to await his arrival from the dark-room. Their wants must not be urgent.
The vigil was fruitless, though.
No one entered the dark-room, barely visible in his quick glances.
A new idea came. He went up the rainspout of the adjoining roof, using knees for grip and hands to pull him up from one bracing ring to another. Down the adjoining fire escape he went, to the top floor of the candy factory where, to the surprised girls, he whispered, pretending to be mischievous, “Playing a trick on the folks next door.” They all knew him, from seeing him going to and from work. He accepted some candy, and went down and out onto the street.
He saw no one watching. The brown mark of the torpedo detonation was still on the pavement. He slipped into the laboratory cellar, by way of its ash-lift, unobserved as far as he could tell.
To the air-conditioning system he made his way, trying to see if any of its outlets, especially one to the dark-room section, had been removed or tampered with. He saw some signs that a pipe wrench had ground rough bright spots on the piping, and smiled. His idea had been right as to where the gas had been sent up. A survey among old trash awaiting the attention of Potts revealed a large, empty tank. Some one must have charged it—whether by purchasing the materials or by injecting the exhaust from a car he never found out.
There, though, was his evidence. He left it as it was.
Grover had been right.
Some person or group, with intentions far more vicious than had been in evidence among the Tibetans, had marked him. Why? What did he know? Not the place of the lost Eye of Om. For that they would want to take him prisoner, to question him. This attack had been because someone was sure that he knew more than he did.
Could he find out what he was supposed to know?
To try was Roger’s immediate intention.
It was Roger’s plan to consult his list of “sound” evidence and try to make it tell him whatever secret must be hidden there.
No other plan seemed so likely to be fruitful. If he was supposed to be in the dark-room, his presence in the office must show to some guilty person that Roger was equally alert and crafty. He wanted to “start something” in the open. Underground methods, secret attempts to do away with him, were hateful to open-natured, frank Roger.
Strolling up from the cellar, he watched the effect of his arrival from that unexpected quarter. Mr. Millman, discovering him, looked up with a start.
“Hey! Thought you were developing the stuff Zendt took up.”
Zendt—Millman. Roger connected the two mentally.
“Those speed pictures are important.” Mr. Ellison scowled, and Roger began to wonder whether his anger was genuine or if he, himself, was giving too much importance to a mere annoyance.
“I was just testing my new ‘cloak of invisibility,’” Roger put on a careless manner. He would givethemsomething to puzzle about.
“Science is just the reality that used to be fairy stories,” he said, with a grin. “Pegasus, the flying horse, was just another way of prophesying airplanes. And if a magician could wave a wand and turn a beast into a Prince, doesn’t chemistry transmute base elements into wonderful, modern products? I got an idea that the cloak or helmet of invisibility, like the Helmet in Wagner’s opera that I heard on the radio, is just the prophecy of some Omega-ray, that makes things transparent and invisible without hurting them. It works, too. Did you see me go out?”
“No,” Mr. Millman snapped out the word, adding:
“But wewillsee you go out—to the observation ward of the psychopathic division in some hospital if you waste any more time with this crazy talk.”
Roger, thinking quickly, decided that he was hearing a threat. Millman was not joking. If an astrologer, coming into the office, had recognized the man, either facing him or hidden under the desk, and for that knowledge had come near to being “sent West,” then it would not be put past such desperate people to believe they would deliberately put him into the ward where supposedly insane people are kept, while doctors studied their mentality.
That, he reflected swiftly, would effectively get him out of the way; and it would discredit his ideas.
“I was only joking. What’s the matter with everybody? Snap me up because I chased out past you to see what the shooting was for.”
“Well, get back to your work. Potts isn’t here. It’s up to you to keep things going till the Chief says differently.”
Roger looked defiant. He meant to see how far the man—or the pair, would go.
Doctor Ryder and Mr. Zendt, who had evidently been conferring on the upper floor about some biochemical condition of the disease the doctor was studying, heard the raised voice of the electrical engineer and came down the stairway.
“What’s going on?” asked Doctor Ryder, twisting his watch chain, which hung across his ample chest. Roger, who saw the big charm, which hung on the chain, flicking its golden back in the light, realized, with an inward start, that the doctor seemed to be telegraphing with that “heliographic” flicker, as a Boy Scout would use a mirror to send a message from his camp to another, from a hilltop.
“Oho!” Roger’s mind was alert, “So he’s telegraphing somebody.”
He hid his smile of triumph.
“So you’re in it, are you?” he mentally accused. “Well, two can play that heliograph game. I can read if you can send.”
While he listened to Mr. Ellison’s angry commands to get that film developed or the Chief would be called up, Roger mentally received the flickers of the heliograph-like gold back of the twisting charm.
“B-e c-a-r-e-f-u-l.”
“Warning him,” Roger’s mental comment was not audible.
“More?” He saw the charm continue, as if the doctor was nervous.
“R-o-g-e-r,” it told him.
“He’s warningme!”
Roger, grateful, and glad that his first suspicion had been unwarranted, waited to see if more would come, while his facial expression was meant to infuriate Millman and Ellison.
“B-e-h-i-n-d y-o-u.”
Roger, turning his head, realized that therewasgood intention plainly apparent in that peculiar flicker-warning.
In the office doorway stood a stranger.
Whether he meant good or ill Roger did not know. But he swung sharply, about to demand the stranger’s right to intrude beyond the railing when he saw that the stenographer, Miss Murry, had sent him in.
Roger, taking him in, saw a short, bald-headed, thin gentleman in a frock coat, striped trousers and a high silk hat.
“I am looking for a Roger Brown,” the man studied the group. “The office girl thought I ought to find him in what she calls a dark-room up some stairs. Can you tell me?”
“I am Roger Brown, sir.”
Roger stepped forward.
“Can I see you in private?”
Roger saw that Doctor Ryder’s watch ornament, emblem of a secret fraternity, was flicking around again.
“S-a-y l-i-t-t-l-e,” it seemed to counsel.
“I can take you to my cousin’s private room, sir.” He nodded to show the doctor that he understood. “But I can say little about our work until my cousin is here.” He led the way to the private door. He had told the doctor that he caught the two words.
“So you are Roger Brown.” The man was seated in the “thinking den” opposite Roger, who stood by the window and admired the sumptuous limousine with its chauffeur, waiting outside.
“Yes, sir. How do you know my name, and what do you want to see me about?”
“I know your name—no matter how. As for what I came about, I want to dicker with you direct, instead of with anybody else.”
“Dicker?”
“For the Eye of—er—Aum or Ohm.”
“Why do you think you can dicker with me, Mister——”
The man did not reveal his name.
“You have the thing.”
“Who says I have?”
“I know you have it, Roger. The point is,” he glanced at his watch, “and I must hurry—the point is, you got it. Somebody else offers to get it from you and sell it to me but I think I may get a better price from you, direct.”
“Well, you can’t. Who says you could get it from him?”
“Young friend of yours—Tobias or something like that.”
“Toby Smith, huh? Well, he can’t sell it because I can’t turn it over to him. Only saw it in the Buddha’s head, and in a man’s hand. Maybe Toby already has it. Let’s go ask him.”
“Can’t waste time. What’s your best price?”
“Well——” Roger had an idea. “You leave your card and I’ll get in touch with you.”
“I won’t go higher than ninety thousand. If that suits, call up Clark, on Fifth Avenue, and say you are ready to close. He will understand, and will arrange everything. Good day.”
Brusquely, abruptly, the man left. Roger let him go.
But when the limousine had drawn away, Roger marked down its license number, and within five minutes, from the Bureau of Motor Vehicle Licenses he had information.
That license plate on the limousine belonged to a wealthy man, often mentioned in financial news. Roger, from a book of “Who’s Who” learned more; he was a collector, among other things.
But, Roger asked himself, was his wealth, position and hobby any reason not to place his name among those suspected, or at least connected with the Eye of Om mystery?
And Toby. And Clark. They came uppermost again.
If only he could get the hidden clue in his list!
Without consulting his list, because he did not want to have it in sight any more than he wanted its place in the files discovered, Roger used the “thinking den” for just what its name implied.
“Claws on glass,” he reflected. “Click of a contact. Voice of Doom upstairs from Balsa-wood speaker. That’s what the click was for. The plug-in that made the connection through the house-wiring from record to speaker-unit. The Voice again on a record that ought to have been blank?”
He went through his list, mentally, to get all fifteen sounds clear in his brain again.
“The call of ‘Fire’ and paper rattle sounding like flames,” he completed his silent inventory.
“Of course,” he told himself, “the last one links up with the Voice of Doom on the record, and that links up with the Voice out of the speaker upstairs. And the click, as the plug-in was made is a link there too. Then, again, the thump in the corner that made me start the picture machine—that could have been disconnecting the plug-in. Doctor Ryder had thought it was going to be more, for he was with me and cried out, ‘start the machine’ or something.”
The clicks that he had first misread as dripping faucets in a washing-sink, that had turned out to be the safe combination being manipulated by an expert, he put out of mind as explained.
“The claws on glass hooks up with the film that showed the ghost-kangaroo,” he decided. “That can be side-tracked. Now, that leaves the talk that named Clark, after the Voice of Doom—all three times it could have been the same record, of course—what is left?”
He re-pictured his clues.
“The grind of moving rocks on the records. None in real rocks. A thump on the record. How do they tell me anything? The record was not really made in Tibet. It was made in America. I seem to remember that the Tibet voice was deeper than the one on the record. But why did the record add something not in Tibet? The rock rasp. Is that my real clue?”
Puzzling about it, and trying to see what link there was between the thump and that additional grinding sound, he got no inspiration.
His meditation was interrupted by the arrival of a caller, a man from the Museum of Natural History.
He wanted the laboratory to work out some extremely complete system for protecting the museum’s very valuable collections, such as the gem exhibit, and other priceless collections.
Roger had to explain the absence of his cousin on “business” and to accept the assignment conditionally on Grover’s acceptance.
“Probably some short-wave system could be worked out,” he said, and the caller left.
Grover telephoned. Told of the call, he agreed to accept the commission and would call at the museum before coming to the lab., when relieved by Potts toward nightfall.
Roger went back to his broken thread of meditation.
An attempt had been made to get into his room. Millman had been caught. His motive, he had said, was to learn whether Roger played scientific tricks. Did that ring true? Or, as Roger felt, could he have wanted to silence a tongue able to accuse him about Astrovox?
Roger tried to fit that theory in.
“It just won’t quite come,” he mused, despondently. “But I must be considered fair game because I know something. There is the man who thinks I have the Eye. Having it wouldn’t make them want to get me out of the way. Only the Tibetans would try that, andnot untilI said where the Eye is hidden. And I don’t know. Still, I have been attacked by some gas in the dark-room. Now whatamI supposed to know that would reveal the ‘who’ in this?”
A shout from the upper floor broke his reflections.
With a sinking feeling in his stomach and with heart skipping, he opened the private door and looked, listening, toward the stairs.
Millman and Ellison, Hope and others, were stampeding toward the steps.
“What was it?” he called.
“Doctor Ryder—something has happened——”
He joined the hurrying group.
In the partitioned room, among the cages and plant-housing, on the floor, lay Doctor Ryder, with Toby standing beside him, his face looking horrified.
“What is it?” Mr. Zendt came stamping up the steps.
Ellison, bending in a crouch over the prone figure, looked up.
“Did he faint?” he asked Toby sharply.
“N—no, sir. Just fell down that way.”
“Are you—sure?”
“Ye—yes-sir.”
Roger moved closer. “Is he—alive?”
“His pulse is very low, but he breathes. Now,” Ellison stood up, organizing them dictatorially, “Toby, bring ammonium—any form.”
It flicked through Roger’s subconscious mind that the electrician knew chemicals. He had not used the ordinary, every-day “ammonia” but then he had not added the word to indicate the chemical nature of an ammonia solution. It might be because he was excited.
“Roger, have the stenographer call a doctor—or an ambulance from police Headquarters is a quicker call. Zendt, what do you say this is?—Stroke? Coma?” The bio-chemist bent down, squatted.
“Did he stand in front of that Beta-ray?” he asked Toby.
The helper, apparently very much frightened, perhaps afraid of being accused of something, grasped at this eagerly.
“Oh, yes-sir. He was right in front of it, working on them new rats he got in. Why? Will that lamp burn him?”
“Those rays may have a disintegrative effect, some reaction in the human body. I can’t say. I saw it was on, and asked.”
If that was a solution, there was tragedy, but not a culprit—a careless accident, instead, Roger mused.
Was Toby’s word, he mused, having made the stenographer contact the police—was Toby’s word to be trusted. Or had he—what?
The ammonia, and chafing of wrists, had no beneficial effect.
Almost immediately a police car came; and soon afterward the interne from the ambulance was examining the man who had been put on the laboratory’s emergency cot.
The doctor bent close, sniffed at the faint breath.
“Get the stretcher,” he ordered abruptly.
“What is it?” Roger’s voice shook.
“Poison, I think.” He used their medicinal emetics as a first-aid measure, but almost without waiting for effects, took the inert figure away.
Mr. Zendt, standing reflective among the group of stunned laboratory workers, suddenly confronted Toby.
“Did he—drink anything?”
“Y—er——”
“Did he?”
“I—no—yes, sir.”
“Water?”
“Y—yes, sir.”
“Did he get it himself—where? What glass did he use? A clean one?”
Under the fire of questions Roger saw Toby redden and then whiten, heard him stammer and try to evade.
Out of it all came a sudden declaration.
“I never give him no poison. He told me to get him a drink. I went to the cooler, and drawed water in the glass. I knowed it was clean. I always get told about washing everything the minute it’s done with, and I did it even with the glass.”
If he had washed the glass, no evidence or clue to its former contents would remain in it. Was that, thought Roger, a way that a person might behave who had put something in the water? Or was Toby, as he insisted, innocent. But no one else had been there! Or had Zendt, formerly up with the doctor, put anything in that glass perhaps intended for either of the pair working there?
It was a maze.
And out of the staff, two were impotent.
Roger shuddered. A thought turned him all goose-flesh.
Might some one else be the next?
Which of them?
Maybe he, himself, might be.
Or—he thought—was it all over? Was the real culprit caught?
The police arrested Toby, took him away.
Roger left the laboratory. He located Grover. His recital amazed and stunned his cousin.
“Astrovox unconscious still. Ryder hovering in the balance. Toby in a cell.” Grover summed up. “Two attempts to reach you—and why? Can’t you think, Roger?”
“I’ve mauled my brain, but I just don’t see what I seem to be expected to know.”
“And the missing jewel,” groaned Grover. “Where is it?”
“I haven’t seen it since Clark put it in his pocket, in the temple, Grover.”
His cousin considered the matter as they took lunch in a quiet corner of an uptown restaurant.
“You lock up securely and make certain that the devices all work.” Grover said, as they separated, “I shan’t have to stay with the old man, because it isn’t expected that he will regain his wits for at least several days. I must go to the museum. Business has to go on. Then I will have a talk with Potts. We have given him what the French call a ‘white card’—a clean slate. But—I want to question him. He might have picked up the real gem. He could have realized what a find it was. He may not have discarded it. And while I hate to suspect him—”
“But he wasn’t there, today, when Doctor Ryder—”
“How do you know?”
Roger was silent. Like Grover he hated the idea; but Potts had been free, supposedly resting. He might have been around. If anybody could know ways to get in—oh, it was not thinkable, though!
Much more Roger preferred to mistrust the electricians, or the bio-chemist.
On his way back he stopped at home to get the record carrying the “fire” and crackles. He would need a fresh record for that night.
With his package he returned to the laboratory. Everything was quiet, there. The men, in their activities, were sober but busy. Zendt greeted Roger.
“How is Astrovox?”
Roger told him. It was suspicious, the young cousin decided, that Zendt was so anxious. Less so, it seemed, about Doctor Ryder. He made no inquiry, though Roger, coming in, had called up the hospital to learn that the man was out of danger due to the prompt action of the interne at the laboratory. He must be quiet, for ten days or, at least, for a week, Roger had been told.
“Astrovox,” he told Zendt, “is unable to say anything, and they don’t expect anything else for days.”
That, he hoped, would “spike” any intentions the man might have to harm the old astrologer. Not wishing to say more he hurried to the dark-room, quickly put the waiting films in a time-and-temperature regulated bath and went out of the place for the eighteen minutes that would elapse during development. He busied himself clearing out the waiting requisitions for minor needs from the stockroom, tested the glass used by the doctor with no result, and then put the films in hypo. for fifteen minutes, staying in the open rooms during fixing period and washing afterward. He was not going to be caught in that dark-room, with Grover and Potts away and some stalking menace quite possibly still abroad.
His list was still in the file, he made certain. He had thought that it might have been taken; but he realized that whatever was on the paper was also in his head, and that was why he was endangered.
When it came close to closing time he helped clear away used trays and other chemical apparatus, washing-up. He gathered up all films and got ready for the next day’s work. The developed and printed film he left on the drying drums, not caring to stay long in the dark-room.
When, close to the office at all times, he was certain that the staff was absolutely out of the building, he began a careful and thorough, but hurried series of operations.
His decision to stay there all night, discussed with Grover, had finally been agreed to by his older cousin.
At home, there was no way to avert the trick used before. The fuse box could not be guarded unless they hired a Falcon patrolman.
That the laboratory was more impregnable had been proved the night before by the effort used to enter. The fire, set off probably by a pole carrying a light, inserted from above the telescope, had been assurance that even the skylight was considered too risky by whoever had wanted to enter. That one had set the fire, hoping that firemen would have broken in, giving him—not her unless the stenographer was suspectable—a chance to run in with them.
Whattheycould want (or whathecould want), Roger did not seem able to decide. Not the laboratory’s secrets. When the false gem had been sought in the safe, nothing else had been disturbed.
Roger, determined to stay all night in the laboratory, made his preparations with thoroughness and care in spite of his speed.
The old microphones set at doors, windows and other probable entrances, he tested. The cameras he took out of circuit. They would not need to record, because no one must get in to be snapped.
From the upper room he resurrected the old shadow-box with its panel of lights, connecting them into circuits so that the least disturbance by any microphone, even a vibration of its sensitive diaphragm by slight sounds, would cut a relay and light the right lamp.
The connections of the magnetic plates he traced, to be sure no one had cut a cable. Where they all came together at the transformer Roger transferred the connection from the 180-volt step-up to the next higher output. Anyone touching any plate must receive a 300-volt charge. He would not risk anyone getting away, granting that such a one got past the bolts he wired fast, as he did with window catches.
The fuse-box bothered him. If an intruder could in any way get in and pull out fuses, perhaps all his precautions to hold them would be futile.
Presently a solution of that difficulty came to his trained mind.
With the fuses left in place, he disconnected the cables that fed the protective devices, wearing heavy rubber gloves and with rubbers on his feet.
Taking that set of flexible cables back behind the furnace and to the main box of the electric company input, he risked later censure for tampering with their property by breaking their seal on the box, throwing off the big, main switch, and connecting-in his cables to the main line just within the input lines. He closed the box, sealed it with the switch again in the “on” blades, and knew that any outsider must be ignorant of his precaution. The fuses could be pulled, the wires at the switch-boxes could be cut, and still his plates and microphones would be actively charged, potent and effective.
Roger, effectively sealed in, he felt, sat down with the supper he had ordered in, saving milk and sandwiches for later, and ate with a feeling that he was safe.
Half way through the meal, with an inspiration, he took a charged wire from the main-line up to the telescope still poked up out of the skylight. He had climbed up. If anyone started to climb down—what a shock that telescope would give.
Contentedly he closed his meal with a big cream-puff.
Soon after that darkness came. Roger, unwilling to discover his presence by lighting a light, sat comfortably in Grover’s “thinking den,” and put his thoughts to work on the problem of that list of sounds.
If he had only guessed it, his very elaborate precautions had been overdone by just one protective effort.
Night chased the western glow away and brought stars to look down upon a very quiet, apparently deserted building.
Roger, restless after an hour of fruitless thinking, wandered at slow pace toward the upper floor, planning to start there on an inspection route that would kill time and give new assurance.
He had not completely mounted the stairs when he heard a sharp, almost explosive crackle. His eyes were dazzled by a flash as if it had begun to storm and lightning had flashed. He stood, transfixed. The flash died, and to his amazement he heard a queer sound as if splintered glass were dropping, tinkling and scattering; and yet it was a muffled sort of clinking noise.
He summoned his best courage and with shaking limbs crept on up to the second story. There, looking around half-fearfully, he was more amazed than ever. In the gloom, objects he knew well by location loomed without any apparent change. The telescope pushed its long barrel upward, the table and chairs, cabinets and cages, seemed as before.
He threw on a switch for light.
None came!
He stood there, baffled. Had the power-house cut off their “juice” or had a dynamo cut out for the time? No. There had been that detonation and flash. A torpedo such as he had made? No—more like the spark from their high-tension transformer jumping a gap.
As he stood there, something below him went over with a crash!
Roger, in the dark, hearing the echoes of that crash, felt fright that nearly swept him into unreasoning panic.
Not quite, though!
With every effort of will he held his muscles steady when he wanted to run. Clear faculties would be all he had left to pit against an adversary certainly more than simply vindictive. The unknown was almost as brilliant in mind as was his cousin, Grover.
Grover? Whyhewould have thought out that one and only way in.
Roger, forcing himself to be calm, realized at once how his extra protection had been turned against him.
He had wired to the telescope. Some one, climbing the candy factory fire escape, looking down from the roof of that building, could, by the angle of view, have seen him attach that wire, peering down past the bulk of the telescope. Thus charged, all the miscreant had to do was to lay a wire or rod or any metallic carrier, from the candy factory drains or rainspouts across to the skylight. By pushing it into contact with the heavy charge in the telescope, a short-circuit could be established that would blow even the main-line fuses.
Thus, and in no other way, could the devices have been rendered impotent, the locks be only held by wires which a powerful implement in hands so adroit could easily sever.
Even the alarms would not work. They had undoubtedly operated at the instant of the break, and in time a Falcon patrol agent and anyone who called police from home, would help him. But until then!——
He must, Roger knew, be his own protector.
At ten Grover would arrive, using a pre-arranged signal.
Not for an hour would he come.
“Self-preservation is the first law of Nature,” Roger’s mind in a whimsical flash reminded him. Instead of throwing his faculties into a turmoil, the imminent danger calmed him. That much Grover had made him learn.
By opening a way in, the miscreant had, for Roger, made clear a way out. He was, then, in no vital trap.
He could afford to drive back panic, to think carefully what to do.
If the whole building had been short-circuited, the telescope was no longer charged. He had climbed it. Climb it he could again.
His problem, though, was to trap his unknown adversary if he could.
With no electrical help he must think out a plan.
It must be clever, Roger knew. His menace was from a man as brainy as was his cousin. And that, Roger felt, was a compliment to a very unjustified person.
He thought he knew what the crash had been. Something deliberately upset in the cellar, to scare him. It had come about as long after the flash as would have been consumed in rising to the roof on a rope, scuttling down the fire escape, opening the cellar coal chute, and climbing down.
He estimated the time that had since elapsed. The adversary had by now gotten up the cellar stairway and would be on the ground floor.
Would he come further or try to lure Roger down, the solitary youth wondered.
He must let that become apparent by what his keen ears would detect.
He discarded all but attentive listening, making his mind focus on some plan to trap his adversary.
What his mind had, with seeming whimsicality, obtruded during his moment of terror, came back to Roger. “Law of Nature.” seemed to prod at his thoughts.Whatlaw of Nature? How would it help?
Almost as though some inner monitor was going to save him, a mental visualization of the laboratory seemed to become clear to his mind. He saw the ceilings, with the slim pipes that ran here and there to openings; and he connected the vision with the fact that their fire-protective apparatus hadnotfunctioned, when the alarm had been set off. The tanks of heavy gas, under pressure, were still charged.
“Gravity!” Roger’s mind grasped at an idea, “that’s the Law of Nature I am trying to think up.”
As if he had received a key to a tantalizing problem, Roger solved his course of procedure in a flash. In his mind he ran over their stock of chemicals. Hydrocyanic acid, a stinging, powerful combination of cyanogen and hydrogen; and hydrochloric acid—and many more.
One of these, akin to a tear gas, would do. But he was cautious, and in spite of the pressing uncertainty he paused to be sure he would not take for his plan anything that could, in combination with the fire-smothering gas, cause an explosion.
Almost at once he had the solution. Sulphuretted hydrogen—the common, refined gas that comes in the city mains from gas plants to stoves and gas jets—thatwould not explode in combination with the heavy gas in the compression-tank system!
He wanted a gas that would stupefy: but he needed to be sure that it would lie, close to the floor.
The gas in the fire-prevention apparatus was such a heavy gas that on being liberated, under pressure, it would settle rapidly, diffusing and spreading, as if it could be likened to a cloud, surcharged with moisture, settled on the earth, enfolding it like a blanket.
There, in the upper room, was the means of releasing the city gas, which, Roger knew, would stupefy of its own constituents—even kill, in time. He did not intend to give it that much time! He merely had the desire to put his assailant into a state where he could not leave.
Either the intruder was hesitating because of Roger’s silence or he was very quiet in his actions.
Roger, equally quiet, was extremely active. He had unlaced and had slipped off his shoes at once. On stocking feet he tiptoed to the large gas outlet set into the wall for use with Bunsen burners or gas heaters used in experiments where a regulated heat was needed.
This he opened, full, by turning the valve one half a revolution.
Darting swiftly away from its low, humming release of a heavy flow, he ran quietly across to the thermostat on the wall, connected into the fire alarm and release system. Under it was a manual lever, one to be operated by hand, in any emergency where the thermometer failed.
Swiftly Roger threw this on, and with his handkerchief tied over his nostrils and back of his head, for already he smelled the gas of the opened outlets, he swarmed up the telescope.
The house-lighting gas, he knew, would be held down, running to the lower floor down the stairway, and the amount released would be enough to stupefy quite soon. Even if the adversary climbed the stairs, he would be in a bath of the sleep-inducing sulphuretted hydrogen.
With his arms and legs helping him rise, Roger clambered up the inclined metal barrel of the telescope. At the top, above the flow of smother-gas to kill fires, he paused, listening.
Not a sound.
To the roof he clambered, and sat on the coaming of their skylight, looking down, waiting a few moments in case the other tried to come up.
Below him all was silence.
Soon Roger felt that he had given the gases time to flow down, to produce at least inertia or coma. He must not dally too long. He scrambled up the rain-drain as he had previously done.
Down the front fire escape of the candy factory he scuttled.
No one seemed to be near, as he gave a hasty survey.
Then Roger stiffened, on the lower stage of the fire escape. On the other side of the street some one emerged from a doorway.
Hearing the man walk rapidly across, Roger dropped, landing in a crouch that broke his fall.
He meant to accost the person openly, and risk consequences.
“Stop!” he shouted.
He got almost as great a shock as had come from the flash of the short-circuited telescope.
“Rog’!”
“Tip!”
He recovered from his daze. A cold horror stole over him.
Potts, their handy man, around there. And no one else. Or—was another inside? More probably, smelling gas, Potts had retreated the way he had come, escaping.
“What are you doing here?” Roger demanded.
“Watching. Grover bid me to.”
“Well, we will soon know. He’s due at ten.”
Roger pretended he had something in his coat pocket.
“You’re covered, Potiphar. Don’t try to escape.”
“Me?” in surprise. “Are you batty?”
“Somebody short-circuited the telescope after seeing me wire to it, to be sure no one got in to attack me. You’d know how to do that!”
“Oh, yeah?”
There would be a way to tell whether Potts was aware of the gas.
“Easy to prove you’re innocent. Let’s go in and search.”
Briefly, not entirely, he stated the case, omitting the gas.
Potts drew back. “We ain’t—armed. I see through your scheme, with your hand in that empty pocket. Nix. I go in when we get a cop or somebody.”
He might know about the gas and that would account for his lame excuse. It was not like Potiphar, Roger thought, to shirk danger.
“All right. But I’ve got to get in and shut off that gas.”
He had to let Potts go, just in case there was any other inside the fume-filled lab. Roger, running to the drug store, where an ex-service man was on duty as he remembered, begged him to find an old gas-mask. The man hunted through some things in a back room, and gave Roger the proprietor’s old war trophy, which Roger, with his aid, adjusted.
Thus protected, and aware that Tip still waited, he ran in with no fear of setting off electrified alarms, dashed up to the second floor by aid of a flashlamp picked up in the office, seeing no one.
The gas he shut off hurriedly and then he set the thermostat lever back in case the tanks held more unexpelled fumes.
Throwing wide all the windows on the ground floor, he wished that they had current for the fans to blow out more quickly the gases.
Potts, waiting, wanted to quarrel about Roger’s suspicions; but Roger sent him to the drug store to return the mask and call the lighting company, tell the rough conditions and get an emergency squad in to re-fuse and seal their input boxes.
Grover came along about the same time that the truck finished and departed.
Quickly, on the sidewalk, Roger recounted the situation.
With current on, in spite of the company’s annoyance at this tampering with sealed boxes, Roger, smelling less gas than would be dangerous in a momentary invasion, set fans going and rushed out.
On the pavement they discussed conditions. Roger could not help feeling that Potts was to blame, had been, in spite of all loyalties, in face of past good conduct—Potts had been his adversary.
“He was the one who put the record on my home recorder, with the fire-call on it already.”
“How’d I know?” flared Potts, “I—it was with the unused ones.”
“Oh, yeah?” Roger threw back at him his former grunt.