A LETTER ROGER HAD NOT SENT
Reunion with Grover and the laboratory staff, was, as Tip put it, "the
best part of assimilating Tibet." He explained that he meant "taking in"
the country.
Roger agreed with his spirit if not with his choice of words.
It did give him a little twinge of dismay, a slight blow to his vanity,
to discover that during his absence Toby Smith had been put to work in
the stock and supply department. Toby Smith, who had sold them the
priceless emerald Eye of Om for a movie camera!
At once Roger pushed away the feeling of disappointment and did not let
it become envy. This world and its work, he realized, had to keep
moving, no matter who dropped out. Instead of being hurt, he dismissed
his emotion by telling himself that it showed that any person, no matter
how able, could be replaced. The important idea to have, he told
himself, was that if one made one's self so capable as to be missed when
away, more than that could not be done.
After a while he was glad he had not cherished mean feelings, for Toby
had not replaced him. He had merely done his best. Roger, as the staff
soon let him know, had been missed for his competent way of handling
needs, keeping everything neat and available, and being cheerful and
useful under any circumstances.
"Am I glad you're back!" Toby hailed him. "This chemistry is too much
for me. One day Mr. Zendt asks for me to pack some frozen H--two--O
around a can of stuff. How'd I know the man wanted ice?"
"It takes study to understand the chemical symbols," Roger said.
"Yeh. And they have so many things that sound safe, and they're dynamite
in disguise. Like a guy wanted some citric acid, and I got picric acid,
and I spilled some and was swabbing it up with cotton, and I used it to
swab up something else--I forget what, but when I was going to chuck it
in the furnace, they almost had a fit. It had turned into lyddite or
some other sort of explosive. Looked like the same cotton to me."
"I never could get them sodium calorides straight, neither," Potts took
up the complaint against chemistry's "cheating" symbols. "They say it's
made out of a gas in the ocean. And the ocean's _water_, and here comes
gas, and they put metal, mind you--sodium--on top of it, and it turns
out to be common table salt."
"It's sodium chloride," Roger corrected him, "not caloride."
"And they talk the craziest lingo, here," Toby insisted. "Mr. Ellison
asked for motor brushes, so I looked, and the only brush I could find
was what we sweep up dust with, so I took that. Was he mad!"
Roger's return to his duties in charge of stock was acceptable!
Grover, when the celebrations were concluded and routine had been
resumed, sat down in the private "thinking den" as Roger called his
office, and chatted.
"We have quite a few new interests," he gave information. "Mr. Ellison
has perfected his speed camera with stroboscopic lamps so strong that
they beat sunshine. He can't use a shutter: nothing mechanical can be
made to work as fast as he wants it to. So he uses alternate flashes of
the lamp, and his film runs so fast past the aperture that not even
daylight fogs it. Of course you know he was busy with it, but you don't
know that he has succeeded in perfecting it, and is studying some
amazing chemical and other operations of Nature.
"Mr. Zendt has brought in rather an unusual man for us. He was an
astrologer--a man who reads 'destiny' in the planets by making a chart
of the zodiac for the moment a person was born. He used to sell his
'fortunes' at so-much a 'destiny' on a Coney Island boardwalk.
"Now, though, he has turned scientist."
His interest, Grover explained, was in studying in a scientific way the
reactions of cells, tissues, plant and animal life to various rays of
light, heat and other frequencies of vibration. His theory was that as
the sun awakened life in the Spring, as the moon partly governed tides,
so other planetary vibrations, reflections and modifications of sun
rays, made changes in chemical constituents of cells; and if plants were
made up of cells, and if animals ate the plants and in their own bodies
modified and incorporated these cells, then the rays must act on animals
also; and from that, to saying they influenced the bodies of men in some
way was not a far step.
With telescope, vibration-recorders, ray-filters, lamps and spectrum
devices he was carrying forward experiments in the room next to Roger's
supply department.
"You will probably have to help Astrovox--he says he is 'the voice of
the stars!'--with his apparatus," Grover added.
The most interesting point to Roger was the fact that nothing new had
occurred in their mysteries.
"I guess everything is settled," Roger declared. "With the Eye in its
place, there isn't any more danger for Doctor Ryder, and I saw Mr. Clark
exchange the one he had for it, and even helped.
"The big jewel was in a sort of depressed place, with prongs to hold
it," he reconstructed the event, "and we found a way to make the prongs
loosen, by working out that the gem had to be put in, and it was too
finely cut to enable them to hammer the prongs down, so we hunted for
some secret springs, and the Buddha image had a finger that could be
bent back, and it turned the prongs outwards, so we substituted the real
gem and then set the prongs, and all was well."
"I am not satisfied about the business, though," Grover stated. "In the
first place, although we have explained a good deal, and what you say
about replacing the gem is true, some of the manifestations we
experienced are sticking in the back of my head. They seemed so--so 'out
of character' with what Tibetans, or gem thieves either, would have
done."
"But if the gem is replaced and there isn't any more need for the
'manifestations,' we won't have any more, and we can forget the whole
thing."
Grover smiled.
"Suppose that a series of experiments were going forward to find a more
durable resistance wire for rheostats," he suggested, "and the firm that
commissioned us said to drop it, how would you want to do?"
"The same as you always do in such a case, Grover. Go through with it. I
see your idea."
The sound of the Voice of Doom, he asserted, was explained. There really
had been such a natural phenomenon, caused by wind let into a tunnel and
making the sounds through the shape like a whistle in the tunnel and in
the Buddha image.
"But how did it get on the records?"
Roger was equally unable to answer that.
"Besides," Grover insisted, "those priests are curious folk. You saw the
gem replaced, and to white people that would end the need for stalking a
culprit; but they seem bent on punishing people."
"'Seem'?" Roger caught the present tense.
"Why, your own letter says so."
"My--which letter?"
"The last one you wrote. It came yesterday."
Grover drew from the drawer an envelope postmarked, as Roger saw, from
Bombay. They had come on down the caravan trails, until they had met an
English airplane that had been arranged for. It had "set down" on the
plain. In that they had flown to India, leaving their stuff to be
brought along by the next caravan and shipped home.
The address seemed very like his own handwriting--close enough to have
fooled Grover, evidently.
And yet--he had been on a packet boat, bound for Europe, on the day
shown by the postmark.
Quickly, startled, he opened the letter. In the same close imitation of
his exact, clear script, he read:
Bombay, before sailing.
Dear Grover,
Well, we are homeward bound now. At the cost of a radio and camera
left in the Lamasery of the Holiest Ones, I abandoned them. So far, no
event has come from my visit there. But of course with the Eye of Om
stolen, the Guardians of the Eye may strike. In haste, to catch the
mail, I am,
Affectionately,
Your cousin.
Roger looked up.
"But the Eye of Om was replaced! I helped."
"Then why did you write?----"
"I was on a boat when that letter was posted, Grover!"
He bent forward, earnest and eager.
"Who?--And the Eye was _not_ sto----"
His lips closed. His face changed.
He remembered something.
It was unjust to let it mean anything. But----
Why had Potiphar Potts gone back to that secret tunnel?