  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!” “I can’t,” Roger tried to be jolly and pretend to make a joke. “But you will 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. “You solved 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. His list, finished, he scanned thoughtfully. It ran:
He seemed not to remember any more. He studied his list, trying to find others to add, new interpretations; but to no avail. He thought that if he tried increasing and adding radio-frequency tuning and amplification to his speaker-circuit—make it a regular radio, in fact, he might get any possible radio sending if that could account for the silent spaces on the last record. He made his circuits up, set the electric pick-up over the start of the record; but with the new hookup he got no new slant. Only one small addition to his list of sounds, bringing his total up to eleven sound-clues—possibly—was the little thump, or thud that the needle transmitted before starting in on the voice with no speaker answering in its silent waits. Roger could get no further. He took his series of eleven sounds, including the alarm bell and the thump that could have been a tiny flaw of the record just on the sound track, and went to Grover. “Here are the sounds,” he declared. “Maybe one will clear up all your tangles.” At least, studying the list, Grover was more alert, less depressed, Roger saw with relief. He examined the last-made record for the fault that made the odd jarring of its recording. No flaw showed, even under magnification. “It’s actually part of the record,” he got Grover to add to his list of notes; and then he said to his cousin, “it may mean that the locks went off, somehow, just there.” “But it doesn’t record the re-locking, so that doesn’t fit.” “If only we could see any cause for that thumping sound,” Roger reflected out loud. “We might have one more real clue.” If only he had been able to decode the key hidden there! |
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