MAN AND BEAST
With his mocking smile Grover walked over to their safety cabinets,
unlocked and threw one wide open.
Roger, with Potts, sidled over near the door, to block the beast if it
had been taught to snatch anything in its paws and hop away.
"No need," Grover laughed, "with its partner, the ape, bound. There is
no way to get out of that hide." He gestured toward the cabinet. "There
it is, just as you hid it, the True Eye, in a can supposed to contain
medicating compounds to use on the rats. Clever, just as was entry into
Roger's room, with the 'Fire' record, by that often-used idea of the
pulled fuse. I have wondered why you did nothing to him. Or did Millman
come along too soon and scare you off?"
He paused, and they all stared. Could Grover have miscalculated, Roger
wondered, in implying that the kangaroo was the impersonator? He had
assumed it was the ape.
The beast, on its haunches and flatly extended tail, reached two clawed
paws upward, caught one of the round cans from the front row, and
dropping it in the loose pouch, in the skin, turned and started hopping
toward the door, its claws upraised.
Grover, as it moved toward the chair occupied by the ape, deftly caught
its tail and swung an end around a chair leg.
"Shall I turn on the current?" he chuckled.
The animal became quiet, stopped.
Once only he tried to escape and when Potts made a move to obstruct the
way Grover calmly waved him back.
"But he's got the can, Grover!" Roger also stepped forward.
Grover actually grinned at them.
"Let him go," Grover waved back Potts and Roger as the thing began to
hop toward them and they made preparations to try to stop it.
"The Doctor," went on Grover as the animal paused an instant, "to get
Toby where his word would not be trusted, to remove him from the
laboratory before he could take away the gem he knew about, planned his
own poisoning this morning. He sent Toby for a drink, and by swallowing
some quick-acting sedative, perhaps strong codein, or another of the
poppy derivatives, he seemed to be poisoned. To make it appear like
strychnine or some other--wait! I'll venture to assert that in the other
room Roger will find the shell of some pit such as you crack in a peach
and extract a tiny kernel. Those inner kernels of a peach pit, chewed
up, would leave on his breath just the same odor as a very dangerous
poison which I shan't name."
Later that was verified. Roger found the cracked peach pit.
"It was easy to 'recover' and come here tonight," Grover ended.
He stood, looking with a mocking smile at the crouched beast and the
bound animal. The latter, quiet for a moment, growled deeply.
"The ape, trained at a certain point, to unfasten the kangaroo-skin so
that Doctor Ryder can wriggle out of it, can't help," he remarked. "Oh,
yes," to Millman's question, "the ape is genuine, a well trained animal.
The kangaroo--shall we help him?"
He walked over, and with a quick motion pointing out the laced
arrangement of eyelets under an armpit--or forepaw--he dragged the
lacing apart.
Revealed, it was seen by all that Doctor Ryder actually was in the skin,
crouched down as the size of the animal compelled him to be so that he
could barely get his forearms into the front paws.
The head, too small to hold his own cranium, was fixed almost in one
position by supports, and eye-holes were cut lower in the skin, well
concealed by the way the skin of the chest was sewed and the animal hair
arranged.
"He rented it from the animal trainer, who sometimes put it on, and
played the part of his own animal in the act if the kangaroo became too
fractious or when it was ill in our varied climate as they travelled
from theatre to theatre."
Cramped, scowling, Doctor Ryder emerged.
"Very cleverly worked out," he growled. "Yes, it is all true. I did plan
to have your laboratory staff help me steal the Eye, just the way you
have it worked out. And if it had not been for Roger, almost at the
beginning thinking of developing a sound-film I had neglected to put out
of commission, you might not have found out."
"Probably we never would," Grover agreed, and as bluecoats came tramping
up the stairs, with a man who went at once to his animal, and with
soothing words quieted it, released and removed it, the Tibetan lama and
his cohorts came in.
"But what _was_ the sound-clue?" asked Millman, "the fire-cry on a
record supposed to be unused? I got that, you know. But it meant only a
prank of Roger's to me."
"Neither that, which revealed how the Balsa-wood was connected up, nor
the Voice of Doom, made by Ryder, here, but not traceable to him alone;
nor the click as he switched on the motor; nor the clicks as his trained
thief's fingers manipulated our safe; nor the rest."
"Well, what _did_ the sound that Roger described as claws on glass
really signify that linked up Ryder and not any of us?" asked Zendt.
The pseudo-physician, scowling, was twirling his watch-charm with
nervous fingers as he watched the Tibetans who scowled at him.
"He is showing you," Grover remarked.
"Don't you see?" Roger turned to Millman. "I got the right idea only
just tonight."
"The watch-chain? But----"
"You, Mr. Millman, and Mr. Ellison, were on the ground floor when the
man came down because he had seen the rich man arrive in his car, and
knew Toby had played false to him," Grover stated.
"Think," Roger hinted, "he twitched and twirled that charm so it flicked
light from the gold, the way a heliograph does."
"That, when Roger told me, connected him with the first sound-clue of
the scratching, hissing, clicking sound at first claimed to be a snake,
then supposed to be his kangaroo."
"Don't you see," interposed Tip, who was improving, by leaving out the
big words, "he had to bend over to get the rats out of the trap on top
of the cage. He brought the ape to unlace his disguise. And his watch
chain and charm scraped and rattled and slid on the cage, and our
sound-camera film got the sound from the microphone inside the cage."
"Of course--and no one else wears a chain and charm," agreed Zendt, "we
all have wrist-watches."
"Well, what's the use of holding me for all this?" growled the man by
the skin. He picked it up.
"I'll just return this--go on and arrest me if you have any charge you
can support with evidence that a clever lawyer can't break down,"
snarled the man.
"A sound record, through your own Balsa-wood device, and down to our
recorder, will do the trick," Grover smiled. "Made by you, just now,
when you admitted all my previously recorded accusations."
"All right. I'm licked. Good night, all."
He turned as if to give himself up to a policeman.
"He's got the Eye, in with that compound!" cried Roger, as Toby pointed
at the pouch in the Kangaroo skin.
"Oh, no he hasn't," Grover actually chuckled in triumph, "in the same
way that he substituted the prepared can of film for a blank strip when
he handed Roger the can to load the magazine--so his animal ghosts would
seem to appear on an unexposed film when developed, I substituted a can
of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and a trace of ozone, perhaps, and a few
other gases----"
"Air?" gasped Ryder, shaking the can taken from the skin.
"A free sample of air that is no longer contaminated by the gas Roger so
cleverly used to drive you out--a ruse that enabled me to get here
before you could return in disguise."
The man was defeated.
He was allowed to remain only long enough to make Grover's triumph
complete by sending Roger to the cabinet to take down the can just
behind the place from which he had removed his false one.
Therefrom, the Tibetans were glad to receive, as they forgot all
animosity toward Roger, the true Eye of Om.
For his attempts on Roger's safety and his act toward Astrovox, Ryder
stayed behind bars a long time.