A "THERMAL" TRICK
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?