“What happened was this: I went to the temple with a native priest to see the marvel I had heard of. While we were entering, a figure slipped away out of another door to the sacred crypt. As we approached the great figure of Buddha, I saw a vacant hole in it and realized that the priceless jewel was gone. Terrified at the thought of being caught, suspected or in some way associated with the crime against their holiest treasure and venerated religious symbol, the priest and I hurried away just as other temple attendants discovered the situation.”
Without being certain, the rest of the gem’s history was assumed to be that the thief, terrified, had thrown away his loot. One of his camp staff, an ignorant, though strong pack-carrying youth from an American city, whose way the doctor had paid for his ability to obey orders without trying to improve on them, had found the gem, in a fissure of the great mountain pass they traversed in escaping.
He had evidently taken it to be only a beautiful native art object and had put it in his pack, apparently, without mentioning it, meaning to bring it back to America to “give to his sweetheart,” as the medical experimenter supposed.
“At any rate,” Doctor Ryder summed up, “he is living here in the city, his sweetheart had forgotten him, he has that treasure, put away, and I dare not go and talk to him about it. I know he has it because he has shown it, as a souvenir, to people who have recognized its worth without knowing just what it is. He would probably sell it for a fairly good sum, if approached by someone from a museum; but if he was told its history, and knew its real value, he might sell it to some gem dealer who would put it beyond my reach in some private collection. And my life would be forfeit, because I cannot prove, in the circumstances, my innocence to the Tibetan Dalai Lama and his vindictive, fanatical subordinates.”
Grover, as Roger watched him eagerly, anxiously, considered the situation thoughtfully.
“I suppose that there are complications,” he said, finally. “Some international jewel thieves must know the affair.”
“Exactly.” The other man nodded. “That accounts for the entry, here, night before last. From the use of a kangaroo I would assume that an Australian is interested——”
“An ape would mean somebody from Africa,” Roger argued.
“While the strange projection of the Voice of Doom implies that the Tibetans are preparing to strike at me,” Doctor Ryder added.
Grover sat considering the matter.
“With that all granted,” he said, finally, “it is easy to see what caused the queer ghost-figures in our film. I assume that the purpose of using the trained boxing kangaroo with a pouch to carry its young, also trained to ‘rescue’ from fire, was to furnish a novel way of hiding and removing the gem which evidently the thieves think, as do the Tibetans, that you have.”
“Certainly. In your safe.”
“And whoever came,” Roger was able to fill it all in, now, “with the kangaroo, meant to get into the safe, get the gem, put it in the animal’s pouch, and then, to make it go away safely, he had to turn on the fire alarm that rang a bell, the way it must ring in the act, for the kangaroo’s signal to rescue the rats. It rescued them, and hopped away, to its attendant, just the way it would in the theatre.”
“And what about the film?” asked Doctor Ryder.
“Some was probably in the ‘sound camera’ by the cage. Either in trying to shut it off or in an accidental knock against it by the animal, the ‘continuous’ lever was thrown. Focused with a diaphragm opening to catch the white rats’ movements under a vivid light, the lens got only an under-exposure in the light from the ceiling!”
“Logically,” Grover finished up for his younger cousin, “the man knew the camera had been running. He took out that magazine, took the blank film from the new can to replace it, making as many snaps as had been made of the rats, jarred the continuous-take lever on by accident, giving us the clue of claws-on-glass as his animal came to the cage, with the ringing of the alarm bell.”
“Science to the rescue!” Roger exclaimed. “Now we know it must be the animal trainer who is the key-man. If he did it for his own greed, we can protect ourselves from him in the future.”
“If he was a hired accomplice of others, as I assume to be most likely,” Grover added, “he can be compelled to tell us the facts.”
Declaring that he would interview the man in person, bidding Roger to add to the few hours of sleep secured before their midnight watch, the laboratory head, as the staff began to arrive, urged Doctor Ryder to say little, and to wait until consideration could be given to his plea that they help him get the Eye of Om.
On the emergency couch, in a small combination of rest-and-first-aid room, Roger stretched out without feeling the least bit drowsy.
The excitement was still keeping him alert.
“Science to the rescue,” he mused. “Modern apparatus is wonderful and understanding how it works and what can be done with it ought to help people solve many mysteries. They have developed instruments to measure nerve responses and other things. There is the lie-detector for one device to help fight crime.
“And if scientific appliances, and scientific understanding, both can be coupled with Cousin Grover’s axiom about ignoring appearances and digging to the heart of truth, analyzing down to the basic element of a complex combination, it will be even better.”
He thought back along the course of the many happenings, and of all the clues that scientific apparatus and wisdom had opened up.
He sat up suddenly.
“Science to the rescue!” he repeated to himself. “We don’t need to wait to see if the animal trainer will tell the truth. We can find out right away.”
In the files he found the enlargements made the day before, from the “routine” wide-angle and close-up views Potts had taken.
The folder full of pictures, and the rolls of film from the cabinet he studied carefully.
Roger’s study was concentrated on the close-up and magnified detail of door locks, window catches and all openings.
If any catch had been moved the picture should show to the screen-observing youth, some abrasion, or some disturbance of rust, or at least a displacement of the accumulated dust.
Nothing. Nothing in any picture, on any film!
“That tells me that the entry was made through the skylight, as we had thought,” he decided, but added:
“Or—does it tell more?”
An ape, he felt sure, could not have been trained, or have sense, to swing so as not to touch a magnetized and super-charged metal plate concealed by being painted the same color as the wooden floor under the skylight.
A man, dressed as an ape, might. But it seemed like a long way to go around to get through, when a more simple possibility was open.
Roger assumed that it might be possible that one of the people interested in securing that priceless treasure which could be supposed to be in their safe, could work there!
The fact that no pressure from outside had given its clue in the pictures, showed him that some “insider” might have opened the only possible place to get the kangaroo in—the coal chute.
His examination, with a high-powered, beam-focusing light and a magnifying lens, revealed that rust under the bolt had been scraped.
But the pictures had shown no sign of the use of “jimmy” or other implement for prying back bolts!
An “insider” was responsible for opening that chute trap.
It would be simple to associate kangaroos with Australians, apes with Africa, possibly India. It would be just as easy to narrow it down to whether any of the staff connected-in with either place.
A man from Australia would naturally think of a kangaroo and its peculiar qualities and usefulness for his plan. A man familiar with a country wherein apes were found might see the usefulness of that animal, or would resort to a costume for disguise that a man from the coal counties of Pennsylvania, for instance, would not have thought of.
To the office files Roger hurried. All the data concerning each employe, such as age, experience and so on, was there.
When he had looked, Roger put away the sheets of data carefully, and waited eagerly for Grover to return from interviewing the trainer.
Two sheets had told him much. One had given its maker’s experience on an expedition to India for a power-plant construction job. There was India, ape country. Roger knew that in many sections of India, apes were sacred.
The other sheet had told him that its maker had worked in Australia under Government chemists, studying the inroads of a destructive insect.
He had two names to give Grover.
Science, with brains,hadcome to the rescue.
“Admitting your cleverness,” Grover, informed by Roger, was more than surprised, “I still find it hard to accept your deductions.”
“I don’t deduce anything,” Roger argued, “I only got the facts. I think I would almost as soon suspect you as to suspect Mr. Zendt, or Mr. Ellison. But——”
“The appearances certainly look bad,” Grover agreed.
Zendt, quiet, calm, thorough, had been in Australia, his own record attested. Mr. Ellison, than whom no one was more clever in electrical matters, had built power plants for a big utility company, some of his work having been in Calcutta and Karachi, both Indian cities.
“I will watch them unobtrusively,” Grover stated, “while you do an errand for me.”
Roger waited for instructions.
“I went to the address given by Doctor Ryder, just to check up and see if his fantastic story had any basis of fact,” Grover told his cousin. “Sure enough, there was dull-witted Toby Smith, and when I represented myself as an attaché of a museum—I am, you remember, one of the sub-committee on Egyptian Embalming research—the young fellow, about twenty-two, promptly enough produced and let me study the memento of his adventurous trip into Tibet. He certainly does not realize its value, and to me, inexperienced as I am, it appears to be a marvel of Nature’s crystallizing stresses, as well as a credit to the Tibetan jeweler’s craftsmanship.”
Roger was all ears.
“To him it was a souvenir, with little other value—a bit of art-glass, he told me he supposed it was.
“I bought it. You are to go and get it.”
“Why wouldn’t he let you bring it?”
“I thought of the possibility of being watched——”
Oh, boy! was Roger’s mental comment.
“I satisfied myself that I had not been; however, I had arranged to have you take him, in return, a small moving-picture hand-camera that he had confided to be his heart’s desire. In exchange, he will surrender to you a large envelope which will contain, disguised in heavy documentary-looking papers, the art-glass.” Grover smiled amusedly.
“And if you have any matches or duplicates in your stamp collection, you might get intimate enough to trade for some of his foreign over-stock of stamps.”
“I’ll take a batch of duplicates,” agreed Roger.
His taxi, depositing him at the address given by Dr. Ryder, waited.
The Smith chap, he found, was intensely interested in collecting, and had a fine collection of stamps; in fact, he spent most of his small earnings as a dishwasher, on philatelic prizes.
He and Roger grew intimate and compared notes, exchanged stamps, and chatted about the Tibetan expedition Smith had joined as a young man, several years ago, he claimed.
He told about a Devil Dance, a religious rite, he had seen, wherein all the devils and evil spirits were represented by disguised and horrible-looking men, who chased a wildly terrified human soul, as a boy represented himself to be in the pantomimic dance. Exhausted, unable to escape, at last, he was supposed to be destroyed.
“It is supposed to show how we are chased by temptations and all,” Toby Smith explained; and he told of the Tibetan huts and other nomadic possessions of the ever-moving grazers, and other interesting sights. Then he gave Roger the heavy, sealed packet—Roger felt the lump supposed to be the gem. Putting it in his coat with his stamp envelope, Roger took his leave a little regretfully. Smith had been an interesting person to talk with.
However, he concluded, he would, as he had promised, help with the new and mystifying hobby of taking “movies.”
The taxi—he had forgotten about it—was gone.
That did not much surprise Roger. The man had no doubt gone back to the laboratory or had gone on elsewhere. In the first case they would have told him they had a charge account with his company; in the other, knowing it, he would have picked up other fares and forgotten the young man he had brought there.
Roger, rather closely confined indoors by his laboratory work of giving out hypo, sodium bisulphite, or, perhaps, electrical requisites, decided that the air would be beneficial. He walked.
It came to him after a few squares that Cousin Grover had thought of being watched. Roger glanced around hastily.
He wondered if that slouching fellow with the low-brimmed hat, could be following him. He whirled in his tracks, to retrace his way past the other, but the youth turned in at a cigar store, and Roger, with reassurance making him whistle gaily, walked on.
Almost at the laboratory street he looked back again—and was puzzled.
The youth was on the trail, possibly, once more. But he had not kept close; instead he was leaning against another smoking goods shop window-frame. Roger, thinking to himself that such espionage could do no harm, changed his course, and instead of going directly down to the laboratory street, he turned into the one behind the laboratory, so that if the youth had gone into the store to telephone his progress, he would prevent being met by anyone at the logical corner he had been heading for. He would approach from the far end of the block.
To his dismay, this seemed to have been anticipated. There were about a dozen boisterous, rowdyish young men and boys racing to and fro in a rough, noisy game of tag. They might be innocent of any interest in him and his tight-buttoned coat; but he was taking no chances. He turned, retracing his way. To his dismay, one, being chased by the pack, came with long legs down the street. Roger stopped at a drug store intending to go in and telephone for Tip; but a woman with a baby carriage obstructed the entranceway.
He changed his plan quickly. Dodging around her, he walked rapidly toward the candy factory adjoining the laboratory. The roughs were passing him. Suddenly they were all thronging around, pushing, not caring whether he got into the mixup of thrusting, hoarse-yelling gamesters or not. Roger felt a little bit dismayed.
One of the tougher and taller youths caught hold of his tightly buttoned coat.
“What you buttin’ in our game fer, huh?”
Roger spoke quietly.
“I wasn’t.”
The hold on his coat was too tight to break; they were behind him as well, and escape was impossible.
“What you got in your coat—candy?”
“Nothing much but a packet of lyddite—the explosive. Be careful!”
His ruse was not successful. One caught his shoulder.
“What’s that, now lyddite?”
The grip of the other held, and Roger felt the buttons rip out.
As quick as a flash he had his hands on the packets: feeling told him which was which. He snatched one out, and with his eyes fixed over the heads of those he faced, he shouted:
“Catch it, Tip. Here she comes!” and he made a move to back out when they would turn to see who he spoke to. But that ruse also failed and in sudden desperation Roger realized that he must keep them from noticing that his coat pocket still held something.
His basket-ball skill, that had enabled him to make goals by the tosses that seemed impossible with antagonists all around him, he summoned to help in his crisis.
He had noticed in the second floor office window, the work basket some woman had put aside, full of samples she had brought in from the wrapping machines.
With a deft flexing of muscles and a quick eye-glance to make sure of distance, wind and other factors, as hands stretched to snatch his packet, Roger gave it the well-rehearsed basket-ward toss. He saw it, as baffled, disconcerted youths looked up, fly in a clean trajectory to lose momentum just above the basket. It seemed to hover in the air. It dropped into the basket. It stayed therein.
As if trying to recover a loss caused by such quick thinking, the ringleader wheeled and raced into the building, evidently to ask for the envelope thrown up by a boy at play.
Roger, as the rest hesitated, pushed through, and hurried for the lab. The others broke and fled.
“Tip,” Roger greeted the handy man as he entered, “I’m going to phone the people next door to hold an envelope full of stamps I threw into one of their baskets to save it from a gang of rowdies. Will you go and recover it, please? I have to deliver a more precious pack to my cousin.”
Tip brought back the stamps, quite safe.
And, also quite safe, their strong-box held a scintillating, vivid, thousand-faceted emerald, flashing its sun-fires of refracted light; as it had done when in the forehead of the Buddha it had symbolized, the all-seeing, all-ways-looking Eye of Om!
“Had your sleep out?” Grover shook his cousin. “It’s almost eight and Aunt Ella has the bacon on.”
Roger rubbed his eyes, snapped awake.
“Is it all right at the lab.?”
“I knew it would be. We left Tip to take turns watching with the men from the Falcon Patrol Agency. Two at a time, one on each floor. But I never count on human watchmen alone. They can be careless,” Grover talked as Roger dressed.
“I know. Capacity-overloading plates all around, so that anybody or anything that got near any apparatus would overload an aerial field and upset a delicate tube and open a relay, stamping the time, and starting cameras with sound-films in them.”
“Exactly. Just talked to Potts. Nothing at all happened.”
Arriving at the laboratory, earlier than the staff, Roger and the Chief verified the static condition.
“What do you think of this?” Grover took his cousin to the sound-recording mechanism, the type that uses a large phonograph record for the sound that synchronizes with a film in certain motion picture studios.
He explained that as a double-check on any possible development, he had hooked up the recorder to a separate microphone system, all concealed flat-disk, super-sensitive diaphragm models, that were set in operation by any interruption of infra-red beams.
“That’s something!” commended Roger, examining the arrangements, “of course, with the reports in, I may as well put away the record to keep dust off it during the day.”
Grover agreed.
Roger moved aside the recorder which had rested on the outer edge of the disk, just past the polished edge of the wax.
“Here!” he cried out in surprise, “this isn’t right. There is a sound-track cut!”
“There can’t be!”
“Well, look, Grover.”
The older cousin stared at the abraded surface, the cuts in the surface of the composition.
“But that is impossible,” he stared, unbelievingly.
“Let’s give it a playback,” urged Roger. He hurried to give the surface a good brushing with a soft brush, exchanged the diamond-pointed recorder for the type that hooked up with the electrical amplifiers and speaker in the screening room.
He adjusted the mechanism to run a minute before lowering the pickup onto the disk, to give him and his cousin and Tip time to get into their tiny theatre.
The low rasp of the needle as it ran over ungrooved parts was all they heard, for several breaths.
Then:
Out of the speakers, amazing, booming like the hollow groans that had followed the voices—as they now did!—came the ghostly salutation and warning:
“Hear me! I am the Voice of Doom.”
Again, while they stared at each other with dilated eyes, the needle ran with no pickup. Then, again:
“Hear me! I am the Voice of Doom.”
There rose that whining, shrieking moan of the demented and tortured puppy, lowering in pitch until it became a hoarse and strident howl, slowly falling away in volume but dropping in pitch until it sounded like the moan of wind through stretched silk, ending, as had ended the original, spooky manifestation upstairs, in a grinding, abrupt rumble and silence.
Before the staff got there Roger had developed the sound-films of all the small cameras, but not one had been impressed with picture or audible sound record.
It was uncanny and inexplicable.
The Falcon men and Potts declared solemnly, and with sincerity, that they had seen nothing, had heard nothing.
This supernatural appearance startled even Grover. Though he did not depart from his usual calm or drop his cold poise, he looked more than ever solemn, and even mistrusted human watchers and his electricity-and-water protective device so far as to search the safe.
The jewel, as well as the camphor data and other precious things, to his, and Roger’s, relief, were intact.
Doctor Ryder, who was given a demonstration of the spectral recording, looked dismayed.
“If I do not return that stone,” he gasped, “my life is not worth insuring. This is the third warning, and conveyed in a way that makes me very certain that we are dealing with a sinister and very occult body of priests.”
“How do you propose to return the jewel?” Grover was practical.
“I dare not let it be known that I have it,” the medical experimenter declared. “I have thought of going to Tibet—but how shall I get into that temple, and how give back the gem? White people will be all the more forbidden access to the place; and I am already suspected of having taken the Eye.”
Grover considered it seriously.
Roger, too, gave his best thought to the puzzling complications.
“I don’t suppose they’d have radios in temples in Tibet,” Roger said, half-hopefully.
“In the Dalai Lama’s palace there is a radio, yes.”
“Short-wave?”
“Probably of the best. We cannot resort to broadcasting, Roger,” his cousin objected, “the international gem thieves might pick it up.”
“That’s so——”
“Besides, to ask them to come and take it, as I suppose you had in mind, would bring every gem hunter, in disguise or otherwise. And it might lead to worse consequences than theft. They are fairly desperate, cold blooded people,” was the doctor’s objection.
Tip, listening, put in a suggestion.
“Let one o’ them that’s been fetchin’ kangaroos and apes take it.Thenradio who’s in the possessive case. Letthemget the Voice of Doom after them.”
Grover smiled, shaking his head.
“Tip and I could take it in an airplane,” Roger hinted eagerly.
“There is only one logical course open,” Grover gave final decision, “hold everything static. Make no move. Safeguard Doctor Ryder, with the same type of protection we have given the safe, in a modified form. Then, when the promised Doom arrives, its emissaries can be informed that if they furnish proper credentials they may have their Eye of Om.”
Tip looked as disappointed as did Roger.
No Tibet? No adventure? No thrills?
“I suppose,” Doctor Ryder shrugged, “it is the sure way, though not too safe for me, no matter what devices you arrange. If you knew the hidden forces of Nature that those Lamas can call into play, modern scientific protection would be as useful as a child’s toys to combat unseen dangers that strike through the air.”
“I will pit my laboratory equipment against any force you can tell me about,” Grover spoke confidently.
“Well—as one example—how would you guard against mental suggestions sent by a powerful will, in my sleep, perhaps causing me to leap out of a window?”
“I have heard of such powers,” Grover admitted. “I have never seen them verified. However, for any occult science I am sure that we can find a material device to counteract at least the effect on your safety.”
Although Doctor Ryder was skeptical, he shrugged and submitted.
“I will arrange your room so that nothing can get in, you cannot creep, crawl, run, jump, push or otherwise escape,” smiled the scientist. “I shan’t say what will be set up, and then there can not be any way for you to frustrate my plan to keep you safe.”
Potiphar, with Roger, heard some quiet instructions. The sketch and specifications they got made both of them chuckle.
Any secret schemer, thief, priest of Tibet, or what, must “go some” to cheat the mass of light-beams, selenium cells, the recording phonograph, a camera, and electrified door and window seals that as long as current held them tight, could open only to Grover’s own secret key, filed to touch only certain contacts in a tiny slot on the circuit-cable just outside the rooms of the doctor.
Tired and full of content after saying good-night to their protegé, Roger saw the switch set “on” and went home with Grover to sleep soundly. Nothing could enter or leave that sealed place!
And to show the fallibility of human wisdom, Roger waked again in the hour before dawn to hear Grover answering a wild summons from a Falcon Patrol Agency guard at the Ryder home.
“Better come,” he was telephoning, “I can’t rouse him or get him to answer; and from the observation port I can’t even see him in that room!”
Shudders of superstitious fear shook Roger’s nerves as he flung on his clothes.
Rooms that were locked and barred he had read about in detective stories; they had been entered. A room not only so sealed but, far better, sealed by locks that not even Potts or Roger could have unsealed, was as impenetrable as a solid block of metal.
Yet some uncanny, mysterious thing, force or creature had penetrated!
Unless, and he caught at the idea, unless Doctor Ryder had been worked-up and nervous, and had dreamed some nightmare that had made him hide.
No matter what had happened, no matter what force had beaten the scientific measures employed, they would know the facts, because the registering devices could not have been stopped by the doctor himself, let alone any outside person or power. While that current flowed in the circuits, the devices must operate; and even if any wires were cut, still the automatic mechanical springs would run the recorder and the camera.
Driving on speeding wheels, Roger and Grover got there in quick time. The Falcon man rushed up as they leaped out of the car.
“Every fifteen minutes,” he reported, “the way you said, I put my copper key in the slot on the plate over the observation port you had cut in his room door, so the plate would move aside as long as I needed to look to see him in bed. Last time he wasn’t there. Up to then he’d looked to be sleeping sound.”
They hurried to the room door, on the second floor, down a hall.
Swiftly, while Roger watched, helping as he could, Grover took an observation, let Roger see the empty bed and vacant room. The next move was to test, with ammeter and test-circuit, every electrical wire that had been necessarily exposed outside the room.
Not a circuit was broken. Not a wire had been cut.
“Very strange,” even Grover was baffled, “the current is on, full strength, in each circuit. Try to get in.”
Roger, at a signal from the Falcon man, worked on the door locks with the keys that rightfully opened them; while the man, on a ladder outside a window, tried to pry open catches or shift the burglar stopper built into the casing. No success.
“The man may be dying,” the Falcon agent grumbled, “and we stay out here, testing.”
Roger, too, wondered at such callous but methodically exact procedure.
Grover, paying no attention to their tell-tale faces, calmly inserted his key in the secret cable-slot, and cut out the circuits.
At once Roger was able to turn his door key.
They hurried in.
As he looked around, at the crumpled bed sheets, at the hollow on the pillow, Roger knew that a man had slept there. How had he been spirited away? The closet was wide open, and although clothing had been flung down, although bureau and chifforobe drawers had been upset as if in a search for something, no signs of violence showed.
“Get the record from the phonograph,” Grover had made swift inspection, “and the camera film. They operated, of course. You can see the grooved track on the record. We cannot waste time looking for clues here. They will come from our spies, the film and record, at the studio.”
Rapidly they assembled the things needed and drove to the lab.
With Tip, ready, eager, and quick to help, Roger got the film into the tank waiting on their arrival, and set the screening room turntable for the playback. In no time after their arrival they listened to the revealing details—and were again baffled.
The record, after running along for a few seconds, suddenly spoke that weird warning, “The Voice of Doom!”
As before, it was repeated and was followed by the uncanny and shrill screech that ran down the scale to a groan that died in a sudden sharp grinding stop.
“Let it run!” begged Roger as Grover was about to stop the motor, “maybe he gave us a clue after that waked him up.”
There was a scraping of the recording needle running without vibration over the disk for a few seconds, and then they heard, very faintly recorded:
“You—Clark!——”
“Who’s Clark, Cousin Gro——”
“Sh-h-h!”
The recording was again audible:
“How did you get in? What do you want?”
A few instants of silence. How could the answer fail to be recorded? Roger thought swiftly that a whisper should have left a faint report of its existence.
“It isn’t here.... Look, then.... What doyouknow about any laboratory?... I don’t know the combination to any safe!... Yes, let’s go there. I will be very glad to go with you, Clark! The great Joseph Z. Clark——”
Only Doctor Ryder’s very easily identified voice gave the responses and although Roger cut in more output power and added a stage of transformer-coupled audio, the speakers gave no intermediate words.
They were easily guessed at, of course.
Potts, bringing the film, still sopping, groaned.
“Not a thing on it. Wasn’t even exposed.”
Grover and Roger looked.
When light acts on a silver-bromide emulsion, it develops dark grains of silver where light has fallen, leaving the shadows unaffected within the degree that they lack light, thus giving the shadings that become a picture in the positive print.
All over, and for its whole length, the film that had run fully three minutes showed as clear of developed silver as if it had not run through the machine as evidence proved that it had done.
“A card over the lens,” Grover grunted. “Of course! This Joseph Z. Clark is a clever man.”
“And so is Doctor Ryder, for he must have guessed that the recording was going ahead, and he told us all he could.”
“Yes, Roger. And they haven’t been here yet.”
“So they will walk into a trap,” finished Tip.
They made hurried preparations, hiding the Falcon guards and finding concealment for themselves.
Doctor Ryder had said he would “gladly” bring the man. How wise! He would know that they would get him, there.
They did not have a long vigil.
In the tell-tale shadow-box panel of lights wired for all entrances, the one to the cellar coal chute died out.
Roger felt his nerves quiver, his muscles grow taut.
All they had to do was to wait.
When the pair got in, came up the stairs, walked over to the safe, the infra-red beam would break, tripping relays that set off small water-streams that would go all ways around the safe, charged with a current that could chain a marauder in his tracks. Doctor Ryder, knowing about it, would stay out of range, sending his captor, the miscreant they wanted, to his defeat.
They crouched, Roger behind the recording device, Grover in the office, Tip near the stairs to the upper floor, the Falcon guards at three strategic points near ground-floor windows.
There was the silence of a deserted building as they waited.
Minutes passed. The intruding thief was careful, Roger decided.
Still more time passed draggily.
Roger began to grow cramped, and also very uneasy in his mind.
What was going on? Was it so wise to wait? Why not throw on some light. Better sidle over and ask Grover? No. Better wait.
He strained his ears.
He heard only what seemed to be the drip of a faucet in the chemical washing-sinks. Tick! Tick-et-y—tick. Silence. Tick! Tic-tic—tick-y. A wait. Tick-tick.
He tried to focus his hearing on any other possible sound. The drip-drip effect seemed to cease. He wondered about it, but decided that it had not been a faucet but had been a few drops of collected water running down the drain and striking in the trap.
But as he wondered about it, he began to feel that it had been a metallic sound, not so much a soft drip.
Risking censure, in his growing uneasiness, he leaped to his feet and threw into circuit his small pocket flash. Its beam stabbed the darkness, here, there.
He shouted in dismay and horror.
The safe door, caught in a flick of the beam, stood wide open!
Tip threw a wall switch. No light came.
Then, suddenly, the lights leaped on, water flowed from the hose.
Too late!
Science had been cheated of its guarded treasure!
While Tip was rushed out to the street, to drive Grover’s car to and fro, and all around, in pursuit of the elusive, uncanny pair—or had the man left Doctor Ryder elsewhere?—Roger made the routine photographic study of every place that could give a clue to that almost spectral arrival, manipulation of a safe, and retreat.
If only, Roger thought, as he made wide-angle and micro-lens exposures, if only Tip, excited, had not fumbled that switch!
Had he gotten the lights on a few seconds sooner, they might have seen what was going on, or could have seen the departing figure. If someone had been set to watch down cellar! If——!
No use bewailing the past. No use wishing the past could be altered. Doctor Ryder was evidently a prisoner. His gem—the Tibetan jewel, was gone. The Voice of Doom had spoken, but it had apparently turned out to be some person known to the doctor, whom he had recognized, and had identified for them.
Tip came dashing back. The car had been taken. Later a policeman returned the abandoned vehicle, and Tip had more photographs to make of its wheel, door-grips, seats, pedals.
Tracks in the soft smeared stuff with which Grover had made such clues possible, they found in plenty from coal pile upstairs and straight to the safe, and, less defined, returning cellarward.
Only one set! Great, over-size tracks. Defeat again, as Roger realized. Someone had worn huge boots! The shoe-size was unguessable from those elephantine clues.
Gloves, as well as boots, left them no usable evidences.
Roger, turning over to Tip the final stages of his work, went to Grover, who sat in the screening room, as dawn broke, and brooded. It seemed to Roger that his clever cousin, so often hoodwinked and made cheap by some seemingly more astute operator, was discouraged and certainly baffled.
“Don’t lose heart,” Roger urged, “we’ll get everything to come out right. All you need is one tiny hint of the truth.”
“I must have a dozen,” groaned his cousin. “What good are they? My wits seem to be fogged.” He looked disheartened. “I can’t get my old sense of proportion. Everything seems crazy and impossible. You can’t enter an electrically sealed room! You can’t open a safe protected by water-jets and high voltage streams. You can’t take camera pictures of animals jumping around where no animals are visible to the eye!”
“Ican’t,” Roger tried to be jolly and pretend to make a joke. “Butyouwill see how somebody else did. When we had that mystery about the revengeful man who nearly sent a chemist crazy, all you needed was one hint. I happened to be lucky enough——”
“Smart enough!”
“Well—I caught the sound that got me named the Ear Detective. I’m going to live up to my reputation.”
He crossed and stood in front of the downcast cousin.
“Yousolved the puzzle. You were called, in magazine articles in true-mystery write-ups—and by the newspaper men—the Mystery Wizard, who solved scientifically from one tiny sound-clue that haunted-laboratory thing. You’ll do the same with this.”
Grover failed to snap out of his dejection.
“You run up and get out your requisitions for needed supplies,” Grover suggested. “I will check up that Clark man, and try to work out a course of action.”
Roger obeyed.
His work was light, and after laying out dark-room supplies, a set of new distributor points and a replacement insulator on their high-voltage transformer line, and a few other needs, he sat down to try to think out some way to help Grover.
With pencil and paper he carried out a decision made during their chat.
In a list, on the order they had come, he put down the sounds he thought might be important, and even those that did not seem to have any bearing on the mystery. Opposite them, he set down as many interpretations as he could figure out.