“No.” Craig seemed to be hesitating. He returned to his desk. “But I shouldn’t quit this job until it’s finished.”
He resumed his glasses and studied the remarkable diagram pinned to the drawing board. He seemed to be checking certain details with a mass of symbols and figures on a large ruled sheet beside the board.
“Of course,” he murmured abstractedly, “I might easily finish at any time now.”
The wonder of the thing he was doing, a sort of awe that he, the humble student of nature’s secrets, should have been granted power to do it, claimed his mind. Here were mighty forces, hitherto no more than suspected, which controlled the world. Here, written in the indelible ink of mathematics, lay a description of the means whereby those forces might be harnessed.
He forgot Frobisher.
And Frobisher, lighting his cigar, began to pace the office floor, often glancing at the absorbed figure. Suddenly Craig turned, removing his glasses.
“Are you bothered about the cost of these experiments, Mr. Frobisher?”
Frobisher pulled up, staring.
“Cost? To hell with the cost! That’s not worrying me. I don’t know a lot about the scientific side, but I know a commercial proposition when I see one.” He dropped down into an armchair. “What I don’t know is this.” He leaned forward, his heavy brows lowered:
“Why is somebody tracking me around?”
“Tracking you around?”
“That’s what I said. I’m being tailed around. I was followed to my club today. Followed here. There’s somebody watching my home up in Connecticut. Who is he? What does he want?”
Morris Craig stood up and leaned back against the desk.
Behind him a deep violet sky made a back-cloth for silhouettes of buildings higher than the Huston. Some of the windows were coming to life, forming a glittering regalia, like jewels laid on velvet.
Dusk was falling over Manhattan.
“Astoundin’ state of affairs,” Craig declared—but his smile was quite disarming. “Tell me more. Anyone you suspect?”
Frobisher shook his head. “There’s plenty to suspect if news of what’s going on up here has leaked out. Suppose you’re dead right—and I’m backing you to be—what’ll this thing mean to Huston Electric?”
“Grateful thanks of the scientific world.”
“Damn the scientific world! I’m thinking of Huston’s.”
Morris Craig, his mind wandering in immeasurable space, his spirit climbing the ladder of the stars toward higher and more remote secrets of a mysterious universe, answered vaguely.
“No idea. Can’t see at the moment how it could be usefully applied.”
“What are you talking about?” Michael Frobisher was quite his old roaring self again. “This job has cost half of a million dollars already. Are you telling me we get nothing back? Are we all bughouse around here?”
A door across the office opened, and a man came in, a short, thick-set man, slightly bandy, who walked with a rolling gait as if on the deck of a ship in dirty weather. He wore overalls, spectacles, and an eye-shade. He came in without any ceremony and approached Craig. The forbidding figure of Michael Frobisher disturbed him not at all.
“Say—have you got a bit of string?” he inquired.
“I have not got a bit of string. I have a small piece of gum, or two one-cent stamps. Would they do?”
The intruder chewed thoughtfully. “Guess not. Miss Navarre’s typewriter’s jammed up in there. But I got it figured a bit of string about so long”—he illustrated—”would fix things.”
“Sorry, Sam, but I am devoid of string.”
Sam chewed awhile, and then turned away.
“Guess I’ll have to go look some other place.”
As he went out:
“Listen,” Frobisher said. “What does that moron do for his wages?”
“Sam?” Craig answered, smiling. “Oh, sort of handyman. Mostly helps Regan and Shaw in the laboratory.”
“Be a big help to anybody, I’d say. What I’m driving at is this: We have to be mighty careful about who gets in here. There’s been a bad leak. Somebody knows more than he ought to know.”
Morris Craig, slowly, was getting back to that prosaic earth on which normal, flat-footed men spend their lives. It was beginning to dawn upon him that Michael Frobisher was badly frightened.
“I can’t account for it. Shaw and Regan are beyond suspicion. So, I hope, am I. Miss Navarre came to us with the highest credentials. In any case, she could do little harm. But, of course, it’s absurd to suspect her.”
“What about the half-wit who just went out?”
“Knows nothing about the work. Apart from which, his refs are first-class, including one from the Fire Department.”
“Looks like he’d been in a fire.” Frobisher dropped a cone of cigar ash. “But facts are facts. Let me bring you up to date—but not a word to Mrs. F. You know how nervous she is. Some guy got into Falling Waters last Tuesday night and went through my papers with a fine-tooth comb!”
“You mean it?”
Craig’s drawl had vanished. His eyes were very keen.
“I mean it. Nothing was taken—not a thing. But that’s not all. I’d had more than a suspicion for quite a while someone was snooping around. So I laid for him, without saying a word to Mrs. F., and one night I saw him —”
“What did he look like?”
“Yellow.”
“Indian?”
“No, sir. Some kind of Oriental. Then, only today, right in my own club, I caught another Asiatic watching me! It’s a fact. Dr. Pardoe can confirm it. Now—what I’m asking is this: If it’s what we’re doing in the laboratory there that somebody’s after, why am
“The answer is a discreet silence.”
“Also I’d be glad to learn who this somebody is. I could think up plenty who’d like to know. But no one of ‘em would be an Asiatic.”
Morris Craig brushed his hair back with his hand.
“You’re getting
“It’s going to be looked into,” Frobisher grimly assured him. “When you come up to Falling Waters you’ll see I’m standing for no more monkey tricks around there, anyway.” He stood up, glancing at the big clock over Craig’s desk. “I’m picking up Mrs. F. at the Ritz. Don’t have to be late. Expect you and Miss Navarre, lunch on Saturday.”
Chapter II
Mrs. F., as it happened, was thoroughly enjoying herself. She lay naked, face downward, on a padded couch, whilst a white-clad nurse ran an apparatus which buzzed like a giant hornet from the back of her fluffy skull right down her spine and up again. This treatment made her purr like a contented kitten. It had been preceded by a terrific mauling at the hands of another, muscular, attendant, in the course of which Mrs. F. had been all but hanged, drawn, quartered, and, finally, stood on her head.
An aromatic bath completed the treatment. Mrs. F. was wrapped in a loose fleecy garment, stretched upon a couch in a small apartment decorated with Pompeian frescoes, and given an Egyptian cigarette and a cup of orange-scented China tea.
She lay there in delicious languor, when the draperies were drawn aside and Professor Hoffmeyer, the celebrated Viennese psychiatrist who conducted the establishment, entered gravely. She turned her head and smiled up at him.
“How do you do. Professor?”
He did not reply at once, but stood there looking at her. Even through the dark glasses he always wore, his regard never failed to make her shudder. But it was a pleasurable shudder.
