  With every meaning that he tried to attach to his listings, Roger found himself growing more confused. He had only imaginative evidence against any of the names he had inserted in his diary-like notations. As he scanned his list Roger saw that he had done less interpreting than speculating; but he saw no way to make interpretation of the listings get him anywhere. He filed it with his former list, and went to his routine, so that Toby could go to dinner. The rest of the day was without apparent development. Toby, leaving the suitcase, at closing time, went home. The others did the same. Roger and Tip remained until last. “Well, Grover has stayed close to Doctor Ryder’s patient,” Tip mused, aloud. “That is, the patient Doctor Ryder just missed getting, because I told the druggists I wanted ‘aggrenalin’ and they said they never heard of nothing like it. If I’d of got the right name, he’d of saved Astrovox ’stead of the internes doing it.” “I talked over the wire with my cousin,” responded Roger. “Just make an extra check on everything for safety’s sake, and he says for us to stay away from here, tonight, no matter what we hear. You are to go to a hotel to sleep. And he says you must.” “What’s going to happen here?” “I wish I guessed,” Roger retorted, “but I don’t seem able to do even that. With all the clues on my list or somewhere in the films and so on, I just see new developments, and they are worse than before, and confuse me.” “What say we go to one of those spirit mediators.” “A medium? A fortune teller?” “She might coagulate our ideas.” “Curdle them? She probably would.” “It means to make ’em set—hang together.” Roger chuckled and refused. He wanted to work out every circuit, trace every wire, be certain that when he locked up, nothing could get in or out of that research laboratory without leaving a record and if anything happened then—well—he’d have to look to Tip about it! Potts said good-night, and went away as instructed. At home, telling with some reserves his experiences of the night before, to his aunt, Roger felt a constant tugging of desire to go and see if all was right. Grover’s orders to stay away were, he felt, a magnet drawing, tugging, pulling him toward the forbidden place. What danger, he wondered, might lurk in just a visit? Still, he obeyed, against every dragging urge. Toby Smith telephoned about nine o’clock. “Say, can we get into that lab?” “Why, Toby?” “I clean forgot to put away Doctor Ryder’s compounds. I put down his suitcase, and got busy with Mr. Zendt who wanted a heap of chemicals, and it slipped my mind.” “Orders are not to go there at night,” Roger told him. “Well—but he said lock ’em in the safety cabinet, against fire. I forgot. Well——” “But there won’t be any fire.” “But—lookit, Roger—you didn’t notice, maybe——” “That you had marked on a paper a list of words? I did. Fireworks. Pyrotechnics. Lycopodium.” “Well—I mixed some—an’ left ’em in a big tray till tomorrow.” Roger gasped, at his end of the connection. Suppose a gas in the atmosphere reacted with some exposed ingredient? All at once, though, a person so far totally unsuspected began to assume importance. This Toby Smith! He had originally sold, for a camera, a gem supposed to have been both sacred and invaluable. He had been to Tibet before, Doctor Ryder had mentioned. (He could have known the value of that gem). Besides, here he was, at a time when Grover had explicitly forbidden Roger, for some hidden reason, against going near the lab. And he was insisting on his disobedience of orders by implying dire happenings! Roger hesitated. Why was it important for him to be lured to the laboratory? Had Clark not explained to the Tibetans about the blunder through which the real jewel, jettisoned by Clark, picked up by Potts, had been lost, they might want to lure him, to bring some idea of revenge to pass. Why should Toby want to do that? Perhaps, Roger speculated, the youth wanted to get him there and then by use of force open the safe or some other thing. The value of their own laboratory formulae and data was not less, to them, than a jewel such as the Eye of Aum. “Against orders!” Roger, his decision made, started to hang up. “You’d let that stuff explode, maybe——” “Listen, Toby. I obey the Boss. Besides, don’t worry. We have a positive-action, fire smothering gas in drums, and a thermostat that operates a relay, much like those on heating equipment, at a rise of eight degrees from the normal shown by another thermometer outside the lab. The gas smothers any fire. Chemicals, even.” “That’s good. Then I needn’t worry.” “You needn’t worry, Toby.” Hanging up, Roger waited for a further effort. When it came—if it was a new attempt!—its form was startling. The inter-connecting fire alarm in the library of his home rang. Roger considered for a moment. Of course, the gas should cover every possible danger, save everything. Even against the delicate electric adjustments and the unreplaceable devices, the gas would work without harming them as water might do. The thought brought another. “Water!” The firemen would respond to the alarm, sent out over the telephone, to Headquarters, automatically. Water would ruin the delicate armatures, coils, etc. And how could the alarm go off by human means when he had made so certain that no one could enter? He decided to try to get Grover at the hospital where he waited for any word, or murmur, raving or otherwise, from the unconscious astrologer. Grover was not available, they told him. He had gone out to get a late repast. Grover would not be available for an hour. Roger could not see the laboratory electrical apparatus ruined. The order to stay away had not taken this development into account. He got a taxi and was hurried to the vicinity of the lab. Already he heard the screech of sirens, as at the start of the queer chain of contradictions, impossibilities and misfits. This time, though, a weird orange-reddish glow came up into the cloudy sky from above their skylight! As Roger leaped out, flinging the taximan a dollar, the glow was quashed as if by magic. The system of protection had worked. He stopped the breaking of the door, as before, but this time with no need for argument. The X-Ray and fluoroscope were not going as they had been that former time. Hastily Roger located the Captain of the first company to have arrived: he knew that the one so scoring a beat was in charge, stayed till last, was responsible. It was “his fire.” Rapidly he told as much as was necessary to convince the man that no further damage could possibly ensue, but he found the man hard to convince. “But I declare,” Roger insisted, “the lycopodium and stuff that you saw blazing up through the skylight was just fireworks compounds, made up—I begin to think—for just that use. It made a grand glow, but probably blazed only in a tray. The room it was in is fireproof. Our film is all non-flam, in sealed or airtight cans. Our chemicals are in airtight containers.” He added that his check of the tell-tale, on the brief entry he had made, disclosed no entrances by others. Such was impossible. “Then how was the stuff ignited? Spontaneous combustion.” “I suppose some gas was left open, on purpose, that would in time penetrate to the chemicals in the mixture. But the heat of that little couple of pounds of powder burning ten minutes would not raise our fire-thermostat more than a degree, and it must go up six or eight to set off the alarm.” “The alarm came in, young fellow. How?” Roger took him across to a drug store. In its window, against the wall, a huge advertising thermometer registered Fahrenheit degrees and stood at sixty-four. He hurried the man back, showed him the small interconnected thermometer for registering air temperature, against which the other inside one reacted. This one stood at fifty-five. “Somebody wanted the alarm set off to lure me here—simple trick. Only had to hold ice on this one till it dropped eight degrees below the other and then the other would be eight above it and off went the alarm.” Fire, an alarm adjusted for heat, set off by ice! Toby? Who else? |
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