Van Powell

“ 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!” ”

“ So interested were the men in following the developing solution that they had forgotten how bizarre was this relation of a mystery and its unveiling—to a beast.
The animal seemed fascinated, or cowed, or subdued in some way. Perhaps, thought Roger, the plight of the hidden keeper made it tame.
Grover drew his theories into shape.
“Naturally, with the real gem, Clark and Ryder made all speed to radio the prepared airplane. It met them. In Bombay, as he had no desire to be further involved, Potts discarded the false gem he had picked up.” ”

“ Roger smiled to himself.
Good old Astrovox, he mused, with his oppositions and “aspects” and all, was, still, a very clever scientist, and must be humored.
“Yes,” he chuckled, “and if I remember all you told me, something like this was in the ‘horoscope’ that day. The ‘sixth house’ has to do with animals—smaller animals, and Neptune with larger ones.”
“That is my astrological teaching.”
“Well, Neptune is in that sixth house, and if Saturn is the planet of obstruction it shows why the false doctor in his deceptive disguises, would be obstructed or caught.” ”

“ Roger told himself musingly. “Not the sort of a place to look for kidnapers or jewel thieves. Unless—as Grover is always so fond of saying: ‘I dig past appearances that can be falsified, to the heart of truth that can’t be changed.’”
He turned it over in his mind. Of course, it would not be past reason that a prosperous man, with a millionaire’s residence, might smuggle gems, even make a man his prisoner to secure a gem with the world-wide reputation Doctor Ryder had ascribed to the 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. ”

“ One of Grover’s constantly repeated axioms about laboratory work was:
“Do the first thing first!”
All life, the scientific student always had insisted, was like the chemical compounds they handled. No matter what the problem might be, no matter how it looked, it could be analyzed the way compounds would be analyzed, the elements could be isolated, and the base—the guide to the whole condition—could be known. Sodium, a metal, very unstable, combined with chlorine, a gas, turned into sodium chloride, and that was a salt—common table salt, in fact. ”

“ That record he had managed to slip onto their own recorder-reproducer machine, with a hookup which Roger knew all about, Grover went on. The weird manifestation had startled them, while watching for the man, one night. With a Balsa-wood speaker hidden flat on a dusty shelf, he had caused a spooky voice to draw them up where the prepared film, in a can carefully re-sealed, was handy to be taken and, later, developed, to complicate mysteries further with the spooky animals, he added. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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.
43
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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Admits it. And Mr. Clark vows he had blundered, and threw away the good gem,” persisted Roger, sure of his incriminating clues. “Who says the gem was left in India? Who had the sense to pull fuses, to stop our devices? Who else but somebody trained by you, Grover——”
“Well, you was trained, too,” cried Potts, angry.
“The gas is expelled by now,” Grover had not lost his cold, serious expression. “There is desperate need for action, more than for recrimination. Let’s go in.” ”

“ His first rush took Roger to the panel.
Not a bulb glowed! He stared, unable to accept the story it told—somebody had set off every light-beam-trip! That put out the lights.
Not one of the row connected-in with the magnetized plates was lit, either, and yet no living person should have walked or crept or climbed away through door, window, coal-chute or other exit without getting caught. But Roger did not pause. He ran to Tip’s room. ”

“ 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.
What they could want (or what he could 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. ”

“ While the beast shackled in the chair kept up its hoarse growls and struggles, Grover outlined, for the benefit—it seemed—of a kangaroo—or the one in the chair—his deductions.
“Was that clever? You know it was. To plan to steal a sacred gem under the pretext of replacing a fake one with the true Eye.”
Roger had not guessed that, nor, by the exclamations, had the rest of the group—or most of them.
“The mystery of the white rats, supposed to be deadly menaces because we thought they were inoculated with germs of a spinal malady, got our attention turned to every possible idea but the real one. ”

“ To write, with Roger’s discarded note book as a guide, in a semblance of his writing, was easy. The letter had come by fast mail steamers and had further confused him.
“Then the thief, with the gem in his fellow-worker’s possession, encountered difficulties,” went on Grover; “the man who had been intending to buy the jewel probably became frightened, afraid of the danger that the stone might bring around him. So many priceless jewels carry curses, or bring disaster, that he must have gotten ‘cold feet’ and a new buyer had to be sought. ”

“ Roger reminded his cousin, “and while they can be falsified, the truth never changes. Well, if it ‘appears’ that there is no mike, and that there is no speaker, we know we heard the Voice of Doom, and we know we heard the recording made by Astrovox, upstairs, on a record, downstairs.” ”

“ 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!” ”

“ 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 need not suspect,” Grover saw deeper into things than had Roger. “It is an old trick, to turn suspicion toward an innocent man by ‘planting’ something.” ”

“ As arranged, at one of the halting places, during the night, the quartet, met by guides and bearers as arranged for by the caravan leader, quietly forsook the caravan, and rode, on wiry ponies, into darkness and a land over which brooded the mysterious, terrible Himalayas.
Far away, in a city laboratory, with Roger’s chum, Billy Summers, an expert radio “op,” Grover tuned a set, amplified, increasing output strength; and then, as Roger, in the Tibetan night, increased his own signal power as Tip ground at the generator, each knew that with the other all was well. Yes. ”

“ Roger, mounted and riding beside his friendly captor, with Tip and his apparatus on another pony and on a led carrier-animal, noted the tiny prayer-wheels by the ascending roadside, saw the other lamas they met with their prayer-wheels and prayer-papers, observed the reverent attitude of the peasants herding cattle or grazing sheep, and felt a renewed confidence in the outcome. ”

“ Grover hurried along, “because, for a time, the Tibetan Voice of Doom manifestation, and the robbery of our safe, confused me. It was easy to do that last by de-fusing our cellar switch-boxes, a point I had never thought of. Scientists, like criminals—or average people—trip up often enough on some minor point in a plan.”
Because the radio would allow him to be in touch, and for the sake of the travel, adventure and scientific aid Roger would get and give, his older cousin confessed that he had been glad to see Roger help the supposed replacement of a sacred relic. ”

“ As if unaware of the plan to attack, he went on, “Om man-u pad-mi om,” knowing that the first utterance had started Tip to whirling his generator armature.
The man made a grab. As though turning, Roger maneuvered so that his ladle was just where the man made the grab—but Roger was beyond the wet spot on which the man stepped.
Stepped up to stronger voltage, carried along the wire fixed to the ladle handle held in his rubber-gloved hand, Roger was immune to the current that had better conductivity through the man standing on wet earth. ”

“ That, Roger knew, led to a device like the seismograph which registers earthquake tremors. Its purpose was to show, by the vibration of a pen across a moving tape, when the rats developed any unusual excitement or stress, which was not expected but was provided for in that way.
A camera of the moving picture type, but set to snap one take at minute intervals, would check also; and if the seismograph got to zig-zagging sharply, it would make contact on one side with a relay, and throw on the “continuous” mechanism of the marvelous camera. ”

“ The bio-chemist, Zendt, came in with a film magazine of exposed celluloid in one hand.
“How are my diffusion shots coming along?”
“In the hypo.”
Roger watched narrowly.
Zendt was either a master of facial control or he was one of those “innocent bystanders” who manage to intrude when some crucial point of a drama is about to be played.
“Please develop this run from the speed camera. Ellison and Millman have caught the torque of their erratic motor on film. Sixteen exposures to a foot—a million to the minute. Shooting time, one half minute. Does that tell you the size of reel to wind it on?” ”

“ Doctor Ryder and Toby went with the rest. The way must be free.
Roger, emerging, saw that his guess had been correct.
There, poked up through the skylight coaming, was the long, and large-girth telescope of Astrovox.
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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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It made him sickish.
“Am I out of my mind?” he asked himself. “Is this a dream?”
There must be some loose end of this amazing situation that he could get hold of, to reel in the story and steady his rapidly failing sense of reality.
The sound-camera! It had been running perhaps, till its roll of non-flam film was done. It might tell him something.
Feverishly he got pyro, acid and the sodas into the developing water. He did not stop even for distilled water but took tap fluid.
He immersed the hurriedly rubber-wrapped celluloid. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 give them something 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. ”