THE FOUR-SIDED
TRIANGLE
Three people peered through a quartz window.
The girl was squashed uncomfortably between the two men, but at the moment neither she nor they cared. The ob-ject they were watching was too interesting. The girl was Joan Leeton. Her hair was an indeterminate brown, and owed its curls to tongs, not to nature. Her eyes were certainly brown, and bright with unquenchable good hu- mour. In repose her face was undistinguished, though far from plain; when she smiled, it was beautiful.
Her greatest attraction (and it was part of her attraction that she did not realise it) lay in her character. She was soothingly sympathetic without becoming mushy, she was very level-headed (a rare thing in a woman) and completely unselfish. She refused to lose her temper over anything, or take offence, or enlarge upon the truth in her favour, and yet she was tolerant of such lapses in others. She possessed a brain that was unusually able in its dealing with science, and yet her tastes and pleasures were simple.
William Fredericks (called ‘Will’) had much in common with Joan, but his sympathy was a little more disinterested, his humour less spontaneous, and he had certain prejudices. His tastes were reserved for what he considered the more worthy things. But he was calm and good-tempered, and his steadiness of purpose was reassuring. He was black-haired, with an expression of quiet content. William Josephs (called ‘Bill’) was different. He was completely unstable. Fiery of hair, he was alternately fiery and depressed of spirit. Impulsive, generous, highly emotional about art and music, he was given to periods of gaiety and moods of black melancholia. He reached, at his best, heights of mental brilliance far beyond the other two, but long bouts of lethargy prevented him from making the best of them. Nevertheless, his sense of humour was keen, and he was often amused at his own absurdly over-sensitive character; but he could not change it. Both these men were deeply in love with Joan, and both tried hard to conceal it. If Joan had any preference, she concealed it just as ably, although they were aware that she was fond of both of them.
The quartz window, through which the three were looking, was set in a tall metal container, and just a few feet away was another container, identical even to the thickness of the window-glass.
Overhead was a complex assemblage of apparatus: bulbous, silvered tubes, small electric motors that hummed in various unexpected places, makeshift screens of zinc, roughly soldered, coils upon coils of wire, and a network of slung cables that made the place look like a creeper-tangled tropical jungle. A large dynamo churned out a steady roar in the corner, and a pair of wide sparkgaps crackled continuously, filling the laboratory with a weird, jumping blue light as the day waned outside the windows and the dusk crept in.
An intruder in the laboratory might have looked through the window of the other container and seen, standing on a steel frame in a cubical chamber, an oil painting of
‘Madame Croignette’ by Boucher, delicately illuminated by concealed lights. He would not have known it, but the painting was standing in a vacuum. If he had squeezed behind the trio at the other container and gazed through their window he would have seen an apparently identical sight: an oil painting of ‘Madame Croignette’ by Boucher, standing on a steel frame in a vacuum, delicately illuminated by concealed lights.
From which he would probably not gather much.
The catch was that the painting at which the three were gazing so intently was not quite the same as the one in the first container—not yet. There were minute differences in colour and proportion.
But gradually these differences were righting themselves, for the whole of the second canvas was being built up atom by atom, molecule by molecule, into an exactly identical twin of the one which had felt the brush of Francis Boucher. The marvellously intricate apparatus, using an adaption of a newly-discovered magnetic principle, consumed only a moderate amount of power in arranging the lines of sympathetic fields of force which brought every proton into position and every electron into its respective balancing orbit. It was a machine which could divert the flow of great forces without the ability to tap their energy.
“Any minute now!” breathed Will.
Bill rubbed his breath off the glass impatiently.
“Don’t do that!” he said, and promptly fogged the glass over again. Not ungently, he attempted to rub a clear patch with Joan’s own pretty nose. She exploded into laughter, fogging the glass hopelessly, and in the temporary confusion of this they missed seeing the event they had been waiting days for—the completion of the duplicate painting to the ultimate atom.
The spark-gaps died with a final snap, a lamp sprang into being on the indicator panel, and the dynamo began to run whirringly down to a stop. They cleaned out the window, and there stood ‘Madame Croignette’ looking rather blankly out at them with wide brown eyes that exactly matched the sepia from Boucher’s palette, and both beauty spots and every hair of her powdered wig in place to a millionth of a millimetre.
Will turned a valve, and there was the hiss of air rushing into the chamber. He opened the window, and lifted the painting out gingerly, as if he half-expected it to crumble in his hands.
