“You know?——”
“I have two theories. I want to make sure which is right.”
“Do you really think I got the right meaning out of the hisses?”
“Precisely the correct meaning.”
“But it doesn’t tellmeanything, cousin Grover.”
“Use my formula. Dig past appearances that can be falsified, to the truth. Marshal your facts, test each one, eliminate the impossible and what you have left is the truth.”
Telephoning to summon a taxi for Roger, the laboratory head was busy for a moment. Roger tried to employ the method just named.
Youth, inexperience in doing such consecutive and eliminative thinking, he knew, hampered him. With a mind trained, through solving chemical, electrical and other industrial experimental difficulties, Grover’s clever mind had skipped many of the links that Roger, slowly, had to take up and examine.
He was in the taxi, with bundles of back issues of the city papers, on his way back, and still his mind was a maze of unfitted details.
In the office, combing the papers for notes about snakes, or any other escaped reptile—he had to keep in mind that trail on the edge of the steps alone!—he got nowhere.
No news showed up about lost, stolen or escaped animals or any form of brute or reptile.
Grover, he saw, had returned, and was not joyful.
“One theory went to smash,” he said, “I verified your sound—claws on glass was the right deduction. But—that doesn’t bring what I want.”
“What do you want?” asked Roger, eagerly.
“To capture the culprit.”
“Won’t the police?——”
“We have no justification for calling them in. Nothing has been stolen. Nothing has been harmed.”
“The rats——the menace to the public!”
“Roger, you haven’tstudiedthose films Potts took.”
Roger got them at once, projected, one at a time, examining the screen images carefully. The cellar views, only proving that some object left no other trace of progress than scraped dust on step-edges, he considered and discarded.
Those taken by windows, doors, intakes and outlets of the air-conditioning, and gas-exhausting roof, cellar and wall orifices gave no revealing clues.
When he got to the wide-angles of the lower floor and stairway, and found no reward for his long scrutiny, Roger was baffled.
Only the micrometric enlarged snaps and one time-exposure near the X-ray devices remained. He considered them ruefully. They gave no foreground evidence to help him.
Roger, with defeat creeping over his feelings, was about to give up.
He was fair, he told himself, when it came to interpreting sounds, but at the more important quality of being able to connect the clue with everything else, he was “stumped.”
What could those enlarged views hide from him?
The walls, with racks of test-tubes, some containing chemical solutions, others holding cultures of various forms of growth that Mr. Zendt had accumulated or was studying, told him——
He stared, bent closer, climbed up on a chair close to the screen!
After two minutes of close scrutiny, he jumped to the floor, and raced to find Grover.
“Just by chance, in taking the micro-lens pictures,” he gasped out, “Tip got in some of the test-tubes. Is that what you saw?”
Grover, smiling, agreed. “What did it tell you?”
“I arranged those racks yesterday. I have got a good memory.”
“I knew both those facts,” Grover admitted, “and I, too, helped in revising our arrangement of the racks. Go on!”
“The tubes that held the culture of the spinal disease germs—so dangerous that they had been delivered, personally, by the medical center bacteriologist, hadbluelabels!”
“You are ‘warm’ as the hide-and-seek game puts it.”
“I saw Doctor Ryder take them up, in his surgeon’s clothes to prevent infection.”
“So did I.” Grover acknowledged the fact.
“He actually took two tubes that must have had the right labels because he would have seen what they were marked.”
“Labels can be soaked off and transposed from one tube to another, Roger.”
“I think that happened. He took them, went up, and we both saw him use the hypodermic needle.”
“But—” Roger could hardly restrain his thrill at having made as clever a discovery as the coming one:
“Those two tubes—full!—are in back of others, right now. Not the two empty ones he incinerated to be sure the germs were all destroyed.”
“They are? How did you discover it?”
Roger told him: “Our chemical labels that are a green, photograph a darkish gray; and our culture labels, that are a buff, photograph lighter, but still grayer than white paper. The poisons are labeled red and come out in a picture almost black.
“But blue except very dark shades, will photograph nearly white!And those two labels, hidden in a dark corner, show up in the picture where they might not be noticed in the rack.”
“Can you go further and say why no culture was allowed to be given, although the inoculator evidently thought his serum was genuine?”
“Whoever was going to take the rats, did not want them to be dangerous to him.”
“Very nicely argued out, Roger,” his cousin complimented him. “Now, we must find a way to draw that criminal who trains animals to do his work, into the open where police can get him.”
Startling though Grover’s statement that a man trained animals to be criminals was, it gave Roger the one link to build what he knew into a chain.
Trained animals! That fitted in with claws on glass and made the rest of the puzzle fall into place.
To Roger, it seemed clear that a clever animal trainer could teach his beasts to obey criminally intended orders just as well as make them do the ordinary tricks.
What animal, he mused, would fit the conditions?
A monkey came to mind as the logical sort.
First of all, it was the one animal able to climb down a rope from the skylight on the roof, which it could have reached by being taken up the fire-escape on a candy factory next door, one story higher than Grover’s research laboratory.
Coming down in that fashion, it could have been made to do a trick taught for the purpose—take the white rats, put them in a sack, and fix it to the rope—or the sack could already be at the end of the rope. Then, unaware that it had set off an alarm, it could have wandered about, doing such tricks as getting into the light beams, pulling the switch to “on” for the X-ray and the other electrical devices.
Such an ape, too, with its master joining it during the time it wandered about, could have invaded Tip’s room, striking him with a huge paw, because it would be an ape; no smaller monkey could have reached down into the rats’ cage.
“How will you trap him?” Roger asked.
When his cousin outlined his plan, Roger was animated.
“It might work,” he exclaimed, “He will turn out to be the one who brought the white rats. They were trained, too, maybe.”
“I wondered that you did not see why I bought back issues of the newspapers,” Grover told him, “I had one idea that the thing might have been done by some zoo keeper; but the more possible notion was that some vaudeville act had trained animals. Now we do not need to comb through the advertisements of the theatre section. We know, by logical deduction, that we would find it.”
Roger, and Potts, carrying out instructions about which they said nothing to any member of the staff, assembled a mass of materials, apparatus and paraphernalia.
There were microphones; and they employed the laboratory’s device for producing infra-red rays, as well as a number of small cameras for taking motion pictures which Potts secured; to each one they applied a shutter-trip suggested by Grover, that would operate when a light-beam of the infra-red variety might be unknowingly broken by an intruder.
Other parts, and wiring by the yard, they connected up.
“But I don’t understand it,” Potts argued as they worked. “It’s all right to say a monkey climbed in through the skylight way; but how does that fit the snake-trail up the stairway?”
“I asked about that,” Roger told him, “Cousin Grover was more in a joking humor than I ever saw him, and he said I’d done so well, he would leave that for me to work out, too.”
“Did you?”
“I think so, Tip. How’s this? Monkey comes in. No alarm on the skylight, because the magnetic plate under it would be ‘on’ all night and would have caught anybody—anything but a monkey able to jump at a command while it swung clear—or the man above swung it.”
“So far, so good.” Potts waited expectantly.
“The ape wandered around, until it heard a call it recognized from outside, on the street. It was trained to open bolts, and the only other bolt that wouldn’t have a camera equipment and electric plate was our coal chute, that had the Chief stumped how to fix it.”
“And why would he have to go down there?”
“To let in his mate—another beast.”
“And what was it?”
“Well, what could leave a snake trail?”
“A boa-constrictor, or one of them bushmasters out of Australia?”
“What else—out of Australia?”
Potiphar stared, thinking hard.
“I don’t know.”
“Something that hops, and balances with its tail.”
“A—you mean a—kangaroo?”
Roger chuckled, nodding.
“But why did they go to all that trouble, when a man could of swarmed down a rope, and got the rats?”
“If he’d got caught—not knowing everything about the inside of our lab, maybe,” Roger responded, “He’d go to jail. But if we got a kangaroo, or an ape, the animal trainer could know it and have an ad. in next day’s papers, get back his animal that couldn’t tell what it was there for, and——”
“Well, whatwasit here for? What made all that compulsatory?”
“The motive made it compulsory, Tip.”
“You didn’t tell me about any motive. Or how all this wire and stuff will catch anything when we don’t know anything will come tonight, like you hint at.”
“The motive, Cousin Grover thinks, is to get into our safe, for our data and formula for synthetic camphor.”
“Well, come to think—one nation practically controls the camphor gum output, and if they want to raise the price——”
“Or forbid export to any other country, in war——”
“I can see how much it would be worth to have what we developed for one client. Maybe some foreign nation wants the secret.” Tip was alert. His pale blue eyes and almost albino-white hair made him seem, usually, washed-out and not very bright. But with this thrilling possibility of intrigue and excitement brewing, he was as alert and intelligent as anyone could be.
“We don’t know. But Cousin Grover thinks he will draw them on, and he publishes in the evening papers quite a write-up about the completion of the data. A friend, a newspaper fellow, will help us get it into good space.”
“And so the Chief thinks this fellow with the ape and the mouses and the kangaroo is a criminal and made them criminals?”
Roger nodded.
They waited until the staff checked up with Grover all results from the day’s experiments, and departed. Doctor Ryder, assured that his rats were not a menace, left with the rest.
Then, carrying from the doors, windows, coal-chute, skylight and all other available openings, wires from microphones set there, Roger and Potts led them all to a three-stage amplifier, having a delicately diaphragmed headset in circuit.
With that headset on, if a heart beat within a foot of any mike, a drum-beat could be heard in the headset.
Light-beams criss-crossed the entrances so that they must be interrupted by anybody or any thing that came along. Each was in circuit with one lamp of a number in a shadow-box, and the one that would stop glowing would show which beam had been broken.
Thus prepared to be warned well in advance of any intrusion, Roger sat wearing the headset as he monitored the volume controls.
Police hid inside and outside of the laboratory.
The safe, bathed in invisible rays, was provided with a new form of “capacity” protection so that anybody or anything touching the metal and standing with feet on the floor, would form a circuit and overload a sensitive and delicately balanced radio tube, that would operate a relay, putting into the circuit a criss-crossed series of small water-hoses, two playing along each side of a square around the safe, not easily observed when inactive.
And in that water would be an electric current strong enough to paralyze and chain, without permanently harming the invader!
He could not avoid it, because the water must fall and no one, even aware what would happen, could dodge or avoid the spray and the stream.
The precious, priceless synthetic camphor secret was protected.
As he sat, knowing that in the dark around him were Doctor Ryder, Potts, and his cousin, Roger felt a little thrill of expectancy and uneasiness.
Had he foreseen the outcome of the ruse, it is a question whether he would have danced for joy or shuddered in terror.
The trap caught something unexpected.
To Roger, the presence of Doctor Ryder showed that Grover suspected him. Of the whole staff only he had been told, included in this vigil.
The headset was shifted slightly away from his ears; Roger listened, as midnight approached, to his cousin’s chat with the experimenting medical man.
“Of course I know that I am under suspicion,” Dr. Ryder said. “The culture was hidden in my section. Other things look bad——”
“Of the whole staff you are the only man I neednotsuspect,” Grover saw deeper into things than had Roger. “It is an old trick, to turn suspicion toward an innocent man by ‘planting’ something.”
That, Roger decided, was sounder sense than he had used. He had forgotten to dig past appearances to the heart of truth!
“What do you expect will happen here?” asked the doctor.
“The miscreant will come, with his menagerie, for the priceless camphor secret.”
“Pretty smart stuff,” broke in Potts, “coagulating camphor with kangaroos.”
Coagulating was the wrong word, Roger knew; and the others saw through the meaning.
“Claws on glass implied something tall enough to reach up that high on top of the cage,” Grover explained. “The ‘snake’ trail and an animal with a dragging tail ‘coagulated.’”
“But why did the man take the white rats?” Potts was beaming, in the faint glow from the bulbs in the shadow box; tickled that his word had been so good; not dreaming that Grover was inwardly amused.
“With the same motive that makes a magician do meaningless movements with his left hand while he really palms cards in his other hand,” Dr. Ryder explained, “to make you look away from the real motive.”
“And he brought the kangaroo and the ape to confusicate us,” Potts was being clever, he felt.
“I’d say the ape came so he could be used to climb down a rope, and go and open the cellar trap that had no beam-alarm,” Roger spoke up. “I looked up notices in the theatre columns and there is an act that has a boxing kangaroo, and the critic called it ‘she.’ In the act, she ‘brings down the house’ when a fire is supposed to trap the trained rats on the roof of a little house, and ‘she’ makes everybody laugh by taking the rats and putting them in the pouch they have to carry their young in.”
“Oh, yes, that coagulates,” Potts agreed.
Although all the others realized that the word meant to clot or curdle, and wanted to smile when it was used to mean “connects up,” Potts, had they known it, was precisely correct—for they were to find that many deductions certainly coagulated, in a broad way of speaking, the real truth, instead of solving the mystery.
If clotting and curdling means to thicken and make lumpy, then as Potts said, Roger’s explanation did exactly that to their deductive cleverness.
Roger, as the slow minutes dragged along, picked up with his headset whispers of the policemen outside a window, exchanging ideas about their tedious watch; and even the slip and rattle of shifting coal in the cellar bin.
No invading menagerie, though, brought news to his intent ears.
A tiny, but sharp click broke a long silence. The oil-burner relays of heating plants in adjoining buildings made such “static” on his home radio, he knew, but the heat would not be used in the hour after midnight.
None of the apparatus or light was on the laboratory.
The interpretation Roger gave was that in moving he had jarred some poor connection that made loose contact in his circuits; and he began testing his wires at soldered points, seating tubes, and shaking headset binding posts.
He did not succeed in locating the source of the single sound, because things began to happen.
From the darkness, and apparently from the upper floor, in a hollow, grave-yard sort of tone, an unexpected voice spoke.
Roger, with power full-on, got a roar, and dashed aside the set to save his ear-drums, for a microphone had caught and had brought him what the others heard naturally.
The voice spoke in English, low, deep, mournful and yet, somehow, menacing, as it said:
“Hear me. I am the Voice of Doom!”
Roger felt his blood “coagulate” in very truth. Grover, never more calm, although the unforeseen and uncanny call galvanized and terrified Potts and made the Doctor’s face look absolutely horrified, leaped up, and vanished out of the small pool of dull light from the shadow-boxed panel. With the ease of familiarity, he got past their great transformers, and the storage batteries from which direct current was drawn for certain types of experimentation. He avoided, in the gloom, the new high-intensity-spark mechanism, and took the stairs two at a bound.
Roger, impulsively starting to follow, remembered his duty, and in spite of his shuddering nerves and the cold fear always coming from any uncanny and unexplained happening, he stuck to his post.
Doctor Ryder, attempting to follow, ran into the recording equipment and stopped, hesitating, as Grover, from above, threw on the lights. Roger got the switch-snap, but it differed from his other “click.”
“Nothing here,” Grover called down. “Strange!”
“Potts,” Doctor Ryder turned his head, half accusingly, “are you a ventriloquist?”
“A——”
“Ventriloquist! Able to throw your voice so that it sounds as if it came from somewhere else than where you are.”
“Are you?” asked Roger suddenly.
The other laughed.
Grover, leaving the lights going, came down, switching on illumination all over the building; while several policemen came from concealment, blinking and staring around uncertainly, the experimenter in the bright light walked over and sat beside Roger.
“Watch me closely,” he half-smiled, but kept his eyes glancing around half fearfully. “I did not dream—it would happen—again—and here!”
He spoke as if to himself.
“No, that is not ventriloquism,” he muttered. “It is some art of the Far East, known to the Lamas of Tibet——”
Again, and in the same hoarse, menacing, hollow way, the sound was repeated:
“Hear me! I am the Voice of Doom.”
Potts was shaking with fright. Uncanny and weird, the sound woke in the rather poorly educated man all the primitive fears and superstitions of his ancestors.
Grover, listening with his head on one side, his eyes on the Doctor, spoke:
“He isn’t a ventriloquist, Roger. The changes in muscular and other throat parts developed by constant ventriloquial practice, do not show. We took a film, remember, of just such throat development in connection with our research for the clue to our case when the deaf man ‘heard things.’”
Roger, recalling that in that case a tiny click had also come, when he had listened on a headset, jumped to the conclusion that he had before found correct.
“Somebody is using Mr. Ellison’s little radio test-sender,” he declared, confidently.
Grover nodded. “Possibly. Go and see.”
“His private locker needs a key that is in the safe.”
“Never mind, then. I think you have the explanation, Roger.”
Grover sat down again, relieved, as was Potts.
Dr. Ryder, though, seemed unconvinced.
“Sorry, but I must dispute your deduction,” he asserted. “I have heard that voice before, and it is sent by some Asiatic, wise in use of the hidden forces of Nature. It is a manifestation that is directly intended for me.”
Roger stared at him.
“‘Manifestation’? You mean—like thought transference or the ‘ghosts’ that spirit-mediums pretend to call on?”
“Only this is more sinister and terrible, because it is the way that the Far East makes known to some intended victim the fact that he is to be punished.”
He rose, and began to pace.
Roger, suddenly intent, caught at a passing “hunch.”
“Appearances” could be falsified. It appeared to be fact that something uncanny was happening. Might it not be the same sort of misleading use of one hand to distract attention while the other did some trick, as with the white rats that “appeared” to have been inoculated, were apparently “stolen” and so on?
Quickly the headset was put on. He cut the output strength to avoid having his ears blasted if the microphone upstairs picked up that booming, hollow voice again.
Grover, intently considering the Doctor’s last words, spoke:
“What do you mean by saying that you are being warned by some occult means that you are marked to be a victim?”
The man addressed held up a hand.
“It will tell you!” His face was set; he was listening.
Again Roger heard the inexplicable sound.
This time, no voice! Beginning in a low moan, faint and very much like the whine of a puppy that is hungry, it grew in volume, and its tone changed from a high falsetto, running down the scale and then up again, in cycles, constantly growing louder, while Grover, again rushing to the upper floor, stood looking around as, with a great grinding and rumble, following the last piercing roar of the sound, there fell silence.
Doctor Ryder, rising, walked around the recording machinery and Mr. Ellison’s newest camera, that worked with a stroboscopic lamp and ran its film so fast that no shutter was needed, as daylight did not act on it long enough in any spot to fog it.
“That,” he called upward, “was the real Voice of Doom.”
Grover, bidding Roger turn over the monitoring work to Potts, summoned his younger cousin.
“Roger,” as the hurrying figure came into the room with the vacant glass experiment-cage, “are you afraid to stay up here?”
“Not much—but if I am, I will stay, just the same.”
“Then set up that sound camera, with film, so you can take in every foot of this partitioned room. Be ready, and if the voice comes again, switch on, for continuous takes.”
“You think—anybody is hiding?”
“No. But a voice means something vibrating. I could not locate anything. The camera might do so.”
He went down, to give Potts some instructions and took over the monitor’s post while the handy man executed his order, which was to mix fresh developers and fixing baths, and to be ready for whatever Roger caught.
Doctor Ryder, helpful and desiring, as he made plain, to take away Roger’s sense of fear by explaining how the Far East made so uncanny a manifestation by mental powers, handed him the can of non-flam negative so that Roger lost no time in “threading up” and getting all ready for his duty.
Alert and steady, in spite of his chill of nervous uncertainty as to what might come next, Roger heard, seemingly from a corner of the small room, a thump.
“Start it!” gasped the man beside him.
But when two minutes of time had run out the film in his magazine and nothing more had come, Roger disappointedly took the film into the dark room and changed the magazines, hurrying back.
Half an hour later, with nothing to break the tedium, the next amazing development came. Potts, in the dark-room, shouted, and tore out into the light, waving a damp strip of film. He had developed the film on the chance that the thump had caused some change.
Instead, developing that film, he had brought, to wave before Roger’s startled eyes, an impossible thing.
On that film, in a different position on each Frame, or individual picture, a spectral monkey and an equally indistinct kangaroo hopped, bounced, and skipped, finally vanishing into thin air!
When that uncanny film was projected before him Grover seemed unwilling to believe the testimony of his eyes.
“It simply could not be,” he declared. “That film was taken from a brand new shipment, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Roger asserted.
“And there were no animals in the laboratory.”
“Not animals we could see,” said Doctor Ryder meaningly.
Grover, rather sharply, demanded his exact reason for saying that.
“I have heard the voices that seem to come out of nowhere,” the experimenter explained. “I have traveled in the Oriental countries. I have heard strange things; and I haveseenthings even more odd. In India, in China, and all the more in Tibet, there is what they call the sect of the Bon—Black Magicians.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Grover.
“To a scientific mind—yes. To an ignorant native of a country without educational facilities or communication such as our radio, telephone and so on—not so nonsensical. Besides, I have heard and I have seen curious things.”
“Like what?” Tip demanded.
“In India, a seed planted and an orange bush growing before my eyes. Or a rope flung into the air, staying aloft as if hooked to some invisible support, while a boy clambers up and seems to vanish.
“In Tibet, as well as in India, men who can apparently walk on water. Of course, our science explains it as hypnotism—the man who performs the feats is able to secure control over some part of the onlooker’s mind, impresshisthoughts on the other mind, and make one believe the trick is a real occurrence.”
“I have read about men who can walk on pits of live coals,” Roger added.
“Those tricks or those marvels do not explain this film,” Grover was not satisfied, Roger knew by his tone.
“How about telepathy? Thought transference?”
“I believe,” Grover answered, “there is some ground for accepting that as possible. It might be reasonable to admit that if a man, by years of practice, can train himself and also treat his feet so that he can walk on fiery coals, a man might become able to impress a powerful idea on another without words. But—on a film!”
“In the sect of the Bon, or manipulators of the darker forces of Nature and of man’s superstition which is half of black magic,” the experimenter declared, “strange powers exist. I have read of a French scientist who has succeeded in developing a film so sensitive that a powerful thought, held by his trained mind, seemed to cause some changes in the film. This is a similar situation produced by some Oriental master mind, probably.”
“Or it could be that things like ghosts are true,” Potts volunteered. “What do we know about the unseen things? Even science is finding things like bacterions——”
“Bacteria,” Grover corrected, smiling.
“—In the air and water and blood. Well—I went to a spirit-meeting once. The woman threw a fit and talked awful funny about my ‘deceased aunt on the other side’ and told me things—now, if we brought in one of them there test mediators——”
“Test mediums,” Roger knew the right word. “They pretend to be able to communicate with spirits of people, but has it been verified?”
Potts was too eager to argue that. He stuck to his suggestion:
“All right. If we call in a trance medium, she’d tell us them spooks is around us, right now.”
“Just because the appearance seems to be that,” Grover stated, “is no basis for accepting the explanation of telepathy. In that case, Doctor,wewould have seen the objects, the animals. We did not. You and Roger are sure you saw nothing. There are only two possible ways the phenomenon could happen.”
“How?” Potts was anxious, eager.
“First: the film had been exposed, previously. Second: some one hiding in the dark-room, while Potiphar was not closely observing the developing tank, changed for the original film in its rubber wrapping, this one.”
“I used a deep tray, full of pyro,” Potts stated, “wound the negative around in the rubber, but didn’t use a tank, on account of them bein’ stained, and you was so positive about fresh stuff, I got a deep tray, never used before, and watched every step of developin’. The second way of it happening is ‘out.’”
“Then we will test the possibility of the first,” Grover beckoned to Roger.
“Telephone downstairs for a taxi, and meanwhile, plug in the telephone in the screening room for me.”
When Roger had summoned a night-hawk car, his cousin reported his own activity.
“I got the night-watchman at the Bizarre Theatre, where the animal act finishes its engagement tonight,” he said. “The white rats and dogs, and several monkeys are quartered at a pet shop near the theatre. There is a kangaroo, and it stays in a stable. Here is the address, Roger. I want you to talk to the keeper, or some stable attendant who can say when the animal was taken out and when returned.”
Roger, when the taxi arrived, sped to his task.
He found a sleepy attendant, surprised at the time, so near dawn, for a visit from a young fellow who wanted details about the kangaroo.
“She ain’t been out this night,” the youth assured Roger.
“How about last night? Or the night before?”
“Neither time.”
“Oh, but she must have been.”
“Well, she wasn’t.”
“Well, then, was the ape?”
“What ape?”
“Doesn’t the man who has the trained animals use an ape?”
“Never saw nor heard of no ape.”
Roger was puzzled.
“Well—” He recalled a flash of inspiration that had been all his own. He pulled from his pocket the tiny, compact camera, small magnesium-flash gun, and tripod folding like a pocket ruler, very slender, but sturdy when unfurled.
“Can I snap her picture? Our laboratory wants it to study.”
“Cost you—how much you want to pay?”
“A quarter.”
“Go to it, buddy.”
Roger, with the hand of the youth clutching the coin, got a good snap just as the flash startled and almost stampeded the kangaroo and several horses and a few mules quartered there.
He returned by taxi as the East streaked rosily to the rising of the sun.
“There was the kangaroo, but she had not been out—at least, the attendant vowed she hadn’t,” he said. “But I’ve got her picture to compare with the ghost-one.”
“Clever head,” commended his older cousin. He went away, pleased, to develop, print and fix his prize.
While negative and contact print were being fixed and washed, he sat at the table in the adjoining room where the mysterious voice and roaring cry had been located, thinking hard.
“I wonder,” he mused, “if itcouldbe that the film I used had some sort of emulsion that would be sensitive to rays we don’t see. You can take a picture through a quartz lens in a room that seems to be pitchy black. I’ve done it, with our special equipment. Maybe a film coating that has some light-sensitive ingredient sensitive to high-frequency vibrations of light, could catch what we don’t see, and—who can dispute this?—there may be in the air, all around us, forms of things that we can’t see.”
Science, he reflected, had managed to develop instruments so delicately adjusted that they caught earth tremors and recorded them, when the disturbance might be hundreds, thousands of miles away from the seismograph.
Their own Mr. Ellison, the cleverest and best informed man in the city, on electrical matters, was preparing a camera that ran its film at high speed past an aperture: a light more actinic than sunshine alternately lit and was out, but so rapidly that its flashes impressed pictures lit by it on the film, as many as a half million or more a minute, he believed. The papers had written it up as that many.
And scientific instruments pictured, in graphs, of course, such invisible things as electrical waves; yes, and radio made audible the inaudible electrical frequencies sent by an aerial, caught by another, transformed into sounds by other invisible agencies.
Grover, when appealed to, nodded.
“Anyone who has operated a modern laboratory knows better than to make fun of any theory,” he admitted. “What our Pilgrim ancestors would have called a witch talking to Satan, we see as an old crone listening to her radio.”
“They had their witches-on-broomsticks,” Roger chuckled. “We see airplanes. That’s so.”
“It doesn’t pay to scoff at your theory. It may be a scientific possibility to prove it correct, some day. But, just yet, let’s not take it as the only explanation of our ghosts. I realize that the film can was one of our last shipment, that you had to break the label, proving it had not been tampered with, apparently. Still, some test made at the film plant could have been inadvertently packed. We got it.”
“My snap of the kangaroo will prove or disprove that.” Roger went to get the force-dried bromide enlargement and the camera film taken in the haunted room. Comparison showed, apparently, the same animal, in one case sharply defined, a solid object; and in the other, just a shadowy specter. They looked to have the same proportions, though.
“My theory is that someone hired the animal trainer to send his rats here, so they could be removed. He could have read notes of the Doctor’s planned experiment in a science column of the papers.”
“Then where did the ape come from? The attendant was sure the act did not have any ape in it.” Roger was still unconvinced.
“That may have been the trainer, an agile man, in a masquerade costume of Tarzan-type.”
“It might.”
“I will admit that Doctor Ryder tells a story that makes wilder theories possible,” Grover added. “The policemen are gone, now. He gave me an outline that made me discard the theory about danger to our camphor substitute. Suppose you listen with me to the full recital.”
The narrative the man spun was amazing.
“Shortly after I left college,” Doctor Ryder began, “I became interested in study of medicinal herbs, because an old Indian in up-state New York, who had earned a reputation as an occult doctor, had made some astonishing cures of seemingly incurable cases. A friend and I got into an argument. I supported the Indian’s claims; and my chum argued it was impossible, that it was pure medication and not at all due to magical powers as the people claimed.
“I went to the Indian to study,” he went on. “He took a liking to me, and after a long time, teaching me secrets of wayside weeds and the properties of common plants in medication, he confided that in the Far East there were schools in which full knowledge of herbal medication could be learned by those qualified to share the secret—a dangerous one, because knowledge of it might enable some evil-doer to procure enough deadly poison among common wayside flowers and herbs to destroy a city’s populace.”
Skipping his explanations of how he finally secured the Indian’s help in reaching some one who knew more, and of how he finally found himself an accepted student journeying toward a Lamasery in far-away Tibet, Roger’s next intense interest came with the declaration:
“I learned something about what Ponce de Leon spent his time seeking, the secret of eternal youth. I learned much about marvelous properties of common plants—and then, through a desire to view with my own eyes the greatly revered Eye of Om—a precious jewel set in the forehead of a sacred statue of Buddha—I became a hunted man, suspected of a theft I never dreamed of committing, then. The Eye disappeared. I was suspected. My perils were many. I finally escaped from the land. But twice, since I began my private researches, I have been reached by that strange warning, the Voice of Doom—just as you, who have been my friends, heard it tonight.”
He bent forward in his chair, earnest, eager.
“I know who took the Eye of Om. If only you would help me to restore it—if only youcould.”
When he heard Doctor Ryder’s startling plea, Roger’s clear, gray eyes lighted with a fire of hope and excitement.
To be involved in a mystery in the laboratory was thrilling; but to have a share in restoring the Eye of Om, evidently a priceless gem, would be more so.
His quick mind flashed over the fascinating prospect; but with equal quickness he saw the reason why Grover sat so silent and unimpressed.
A man accused, anxious to return a jewel, would merit help. A man who knew the real taker of the gem and wanted it restored meant possible trouble. He might want them to help him get the gem away from its possessor.
That was not their duty. It was police work.
“Please be more definite,” Grover said.
“I don’t want you to help me ‘steal’ the gem from anybody,” the medical experimenter declared. “I need financial help to buy it.”
“To buy it,” Roger exclaimed. “That would take a lot of money. Would the people in Tibet pay you?”
“They would pay a handsome profit, Roger. But it would not cost such a vast sum as you may think. You see, the one who has it is not aware of its value.”
“That is curious,” remarked Grover.