GHOST VOICES
Roger's mind was more at ease. He had seen Mr. Clark pocket the gem for
which they substituted their Eye of Aum. Outside the rock door as they
emerged from the fissure leading down from the temple, he had seen the
man's hand pull it from his pocket and fling it away.
"That's no good," the jeweler helping Doctor Ryder had chuckled.
Definitely, in Roger's mind, Potts had found that cast-away imitation.
He had not gone back through the tunnel!
"Exonerated," he said, cheerfully, and they brushed a finely pulverized
compound over the note, seeking to bring into relief the possible
finger-prints thereon. Several faint smudges showed, and Potts made a
photographic exposure, also using chemicals, with other takes, to bring
up possible marks, erasures and so on.
Roger left him at his work, at a call from Astrovox, the scientific
student of planetary vibration who had been a side-show astrologer.
Joining the plump, bald-headed little man, close to sixty, whose
deep-set, shaggy-browed blue eyes twinkled with inward cheerfulness,
Roger helped him rig up his seemingly crazy idea of a
vibra-spectra-telegraph-o-scope.
That was what Roger mentally named it. The man wanted to catch the
possible vibrations of higher and lower frequencies than light range. He
also wished the various colors showing in a star ray to tell whatever
spectrum bands it might contain. Besides, he had to hold this apparatus
trained on a desired planet or star, by use of a mechanical movement
that enabled him, through a transit's hairlike "sight" to follow a star
as the earth revolved. Furthermore, he wished photographs and a sort of
seismographic tape recording of vibration frequencies.
The nine-power telescope he had to be satisfied with was set up to poke
its outer lens up through the skylight over the supply room.
All around the smaller, adjoining, partitioned place formerly made
notable because of the vanishing rats and the strange voices, he had
cages of mice, squirrels and rabbits, under rays from electrical, and
other forms of vibration. In hot-house "frames" or small beds under
glass he kept living plants, with color-filters straining the light
playing on them, to test reaction to heat, light and color.
One bed, under a brownish glass, Roger noticed, had thin, stringy,
sickly vegetation in it. In one under a short-wave irradiation
treatment, plants thrived.
In tiny flat, glass-protected trays, specimens of cell-cultures in
tubes, and sections of living plant tissue were being exposed.
"Guess we'll have to clean out the far corner," Astrovox suggested, "I
dumped all the wrappings there. Might start a fire."
Approaching to help, he finished his sentence with a chuckle.
Roger nodded, and gathered up the papers, making a fine rattle in the
process.
A glow-bulb lighted in the interconnected tell-tale panel as a small
bell rang. Roger, glancing at the panel, saw that the summons was from
the electrical division downstairs. He went to the head of the steps.
"Want me?"
"Yes," answered the voice of Professor Millman, electrical engineer.
"We're going to make a flat-table recording. I don't just see where we
get power for the motor from."
"Right down close under the recording machine table," Roger called down
his information. "You'll see an outlet set into the floor."
"Oh--thanks, yes. I see."
Roger went back to help Astrovox.
"Can't risk it, with all the chemicals, and combustible stuff," he
answered the former phrases of the old astrologer.
"Not with Neptune, the planet, in opposition to Saturn and with Mars
opposing Uranus," the old man chuckled.
Roger looked as if he did not see the point.
"In our belief that the planetary positions influence chemical
reactions--and all life is chemical, or, at least electro-chemical," he
was told, "we use the known planets as symbols for forces of nature.
Saturn, you might say, stands for cohesion--or, better, say for
crystallization, because Saturn makes gravity possible, makes density in
our earth by cohering its quintrillions of atoms.
"Mars we could say is a symbol for the combustion engendered by fire,
the same as Uranus is, in a way, a symbol of explosiveness, and Neptune
seems to represent a sort of disintegration, diffusion and slow
separation of atoms, not by explosion but by attrition."
To Roger it was all pretty much like Egyptian hieroglyphics but the man
seemed to be talking what he considered sensible phrases.
"Let us say that we place a pellet of putty between two machines, one
engendering a force like repulsion; the other giving quick, and very
high-frequency stabs of current toward the other. The answer might be
that the pellet would explode or fly into its atoms.
"But," the old man went on, "The force of cohesion would hold our earth
together in such an experiment, though the volume or size of the tiny
pellet would be too little for it to act on sufficiently to keep the
form together. That, in a way, is what so many people misunderstand when
they talk about astrology. Properly used, correctly interpreted, it
enables us to understand our reactions--emotions----"
Roger was in the next room, loading the papers on the dumb-waiter to
send to the cellar. As he came back, gathering up more, Astrovox, as if
he had ranted along on his favorite topic without ceasing, said:
"--fire." He stood up. "Where were you? I was telling about Mars and
Uranus exploding things and starting fires."
"I have to work."
"Yes, that's so. Well, this is your last load."
Roger gathered the great heap of heavy wrapping paper, and left him
shifting one bed of plants from under a deep ruby glass so that they
would be exposed to a pale green color filtration.
Going down to remove the papers from the dumb-waiter, Roger saw Mr.
Millman finish recording the multitude of gyrations of a sparking motor
shaft which Mr. Ellison was photographing with his camera.
"We are going to count the sparks," he told Roger, "just to check up on
the speedometer attached to the flywheel, which Millman says is
off-count by hundreds of revolutions to the minute."
"I'll take the record up and have it made ready for a slow playback. I'm
going up anyway."
He turned it over to Potts as the note had been thoroughly revealed in
all his exposures, and had shown no identifying finger-marks.
Roger went back to Astrovox, and became deeply interested in the
latter's plans for night study of the spectra of stars.
"I wonder if your cousin would arrange for one of his men to stay part
of the night with me, to take down my data?"
"We can set up a dictograph, and let you talk it onto a record."
"That would do."
"Or--we could mike down from here to one of our magazine-recorders that
puts a new record on the spindle of the turntable when the other has
been used up. That would run you for hours, if you'd stop it in between
dictating periods."
The thing was arranged and Roger, before going home, demonstrated the
mechanism and was sure the old man understood its operation.
Because of the threat implied in the forged note, Grover gave Potts
instructions to transfer from Doctor Ryder's rooms the mechanisms he
wanted to have installed for Roger's protection. With a changed switch
operated only from inside the room, the former ease of operation by
others, he thought, was eliminated.
Roger, tired by celebration and resuming work, retired early, being sure
that his switch was set, his room theoretically a sealed place.
Sleep came. Rest, though was disturbed by weird dreams.
Sometimes, he knew, dreams had outward causes stimulating them, as
happens if a draft on exposed limbs makes one dream of riding on a sled
and falling into a snow bank in howling wind.
His dream of a burglar, as he awakened and looked rather fearfully
around, made him grin, though.
That room had been sealed by no one other than himself!
But a low, humming whine made him certain that machinery was in
operation--the hum of the recorder motor. He located it. Proved it.
Shutting off the device in case some jar had started it, he went to test
his door. But he recalled that the motor still ran.
To his dismay, the door was not merely unsealed. It stood ajar.
Suddenly, startlingly, from behind him, his table radio spoke, in a
thin, strained, bizarre cry.
"Fire!" and he heard, faintly, the crackle of flames.
Then an uncanny silence, dreadful by contrast, came.
He spied around the hall. It, too, was silent. He tiptoed down to the
library, telephoned the laboratory, and got no reply.
Once again--something was wrong--in two places! He must go to that
laboratory. Grover should have answered--or Tip--or Astrovox!