THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC GUN
“What shall we do?” demanded Burke, instantly taking in the dangerous
situation that the Baron’s sudden change of plans had opened up.
“Call O’Connor,” I suggested, thinking of the police bureau of missing
persons, and reaching for the telephone.
“No, no!” almost shouted Craig, seizing my arm. “The police will
inevitably spoil it all. No, we must play a lone hand in this if we are
to work it out. How was Fortescue discovered, Burke?”
“Sitting in a chair in his laboratory. He must have been there all
night. There wasn’t a mark on him, not a sign of violence, yet his face
was terribly drawn as though he were gasping for breath or his heart
had suddenly failed him. So far, I believe, the coroner has no clue and
isn’t advertising the case.”
“Take me there, then,” decided Craig quickly. “Walter, I must trust
Miss Lowe to you on the journey. We must all go. That must be our
starting point, if we are to run this thing down.”
I caught his significant look to me and interpreted it to mean that he
wanted me to watch Miss Lowe especially. I gathered that taking her was
in the nature of a third degree and as a result he expected to derive
some information from her. Her face was pale and drawn as we four piled
into a taxicab for a quick run downtown to the laboratory of Fortescue
from which Burke had come directly to us with his story.
“What do you know of these anarchists?” asked Kennedy of Burke as we
sped along. “Why do you suspect them?”
It was evident that he was discussing the case so that Paula could
overhear, for a purpose.
“Why, we received a tip from abroad—I won’t say where,” replied Burke
guardedly, taking his cue. “They call themselves the ‘Group,’ I
believe, which is a common enough term among anarchists. It seems they
are composed of terrorists of all nations.”
“The leader?” inquired Kennedy, leading him on.
“There is one, I believe, a little florid, stout German. I think he is
a paranoiac who believes there has fallen on himself a divine mission
to end all warfare. Quite likely he is one of those who have fled to
America to avoid military service. Perhaps, why certainly, you must
know him—Annenberg, an instructor in economics now at the University?”
Craig nodded and raised his eyebrows in mild surprise. We had indeed
heard of Annenberg and some of his radical theories which had sometimes
quite alarmed the conservative faculty. I felt that this was getting
pretty close home to us now.
“How about Mrs. Annenberg?” Craig asked, recalling the clever young
wife of the middle-aged professor.
At the mere mention of the name, I felt a sort of start in Miss Lowe,
who was seated next to me in the taxicab. She had quickly recovered
herself, but not before I saw that Kennedy’s plan of breaking down the
last barrier of her reserve was working.
“She is one of them, too,” Burke nodded. “I have had my men out
shadowing them and their friends. They tell me that the Annenbergs hold
salons—I suppose you would call them that—attended by numbers of men
and women of high social and intellectual position who dabble in
radicalism and all sorts of things.”
“Who are the other leaders?” asked Craig. “Have you any idea?”
“Some idea,” returned Burke. “There seems to be a Frenchman, a tall,
wiry man of forty-five or fifty with a black mustache which once had a
military twist. There are a couple of Englishmen. Then there are five
or six Americans who seem to be active. One, I believe, is a young
woman.”
Kennedy checked him with a covert glance, but did not betray by a
movement of a muscle to Miss Lowe that either Burke or himself
suspected her of being the young woman in question.
“There are three Russians,” continued Burke, “all of whom have escaped
from Siberia. Then there is at least one Austrian, a Spaniard from the
Ferrer school, and Tomasso and Enrico, two Italians, rather heavily
built, swarthy, bearded. They look the part. Of course there are
others. But these in the main, I think, compose what might be called
‘the inner circle’ of the ‘Group.’”
It was indeed an alarming, terrifying revelation, as we began to
realize that Miss Lowe had undoubtedly been telling the truth. Not
alone was there this American group, evidently, but all over Europe the
lines of the conspiracy had apparently spread. It was not a casual
gathering of ordinary malcontents. It went deeper than that. It
included many who in their disgust at war secretly were not unwilling
to wink at violence to end the curse. I could not but reflect on the
dangerous ground on which most of them were treading, shaking the basis
of all civilization in order to cut out one modern excrescence.
The big fact to us, just at present, was that this group had made
America its headquarters, that plans had been studiously matured and
even reduced to writing, if Paula were to be believed. Everything had
been carefully staged for a great simultaneous blow or series of blows
that would rouse the whole world.
As I watched I could not escape observing that Miss Lowe followed Burke
furtively now, as though he had some uncanny power.
Fortescue’s laboratory was in an old building on a side street several
blocks from the main thoroughfares of Manhattan. He had evidently
chosen it, partly because of its very inaccessibility in order to
secure the quiet necessary for his work.
“If he had any visitors last night,” commented Kennedy when our cab at
last pulled up before the place, “they might have come and gone
unnoticed.”
We entered. Nothing had been disturbed in the laboratory by the coroner
and Kennedy was able to gain a complete idea of the case rapidly,
almost as well as if we had been called in immediately.
Fortescue’s body, it seemed, had been discovered sprawled out in a big
armchair, as Burke had said, by one of his assistants only a few hours
before when he had come to the laboratory in the morning to open it.
Evidently he had been there undisturbed all night, keeping a gruesome
vigil over his looted treasure house.
As we gleaned the meager facts, it became more evident that whoever had
perpetrated the crime must have had the diabolical cunning to do it in
some ordinary way that aroused no suspicion on the part of the victim,
for there was no sign of any violence anywhere.
As we entered the laboratory, I noted an involuntary shudder on the
part of Paula Lowe, but, as far as I knew, it was no more than might
have been felt by anyone under the circumstances.
Fortescue’s body had been removed from the chair in which it had been
found and lay on a couch at the other end of the room, covered merely
by a sheet. Otherwise, everything, even the armchair, was undisturbed.
Kennedy pulled back a corner of the sheet, disclosing the face,
contorted and of a peculiar, purplish hue from the congested blood
vessels. He bent over and I did so, too. There was an unmistakable odor
of tobacco on him. A moment Kennedy studied the face before us, then
slowly replaced the sheet.
Miss Lowe had paused just inside the door and seemed resolutely bound
not to look at anything. Kennedy meanwhile had begun a most minute
search of the table and floor of the laboratory near the spot where the
armchair had been sitting.
In my effort to glean what I could from her actions and expressions I
did not notice that Craig had dropped to his knees and was peering into
the shadow under the laboratory table. When at last he rose and
straightened himself up, however, I saw that he was holding in the palm
of his hand a half-smoked, gold-tipped cigarette, which had evidently
fallen on the floor beneath the table where it had burned itself out,
leaving a blackened mark on the wood.
An instant afterward he picked out from the pile of articles found in
Fortescue’s pockets and lying on another table a silver cigarette case.
He snapped it open. Fortescue’s cigarettes, of which there were perhaps
a half dozen in the case, were cork-tipped.
Some one had evidently visited the inventor the night before, had
apparently offered him a cigarette, for there were any number of the
cork-tipped stubs lying about. Who was it? I caught Paula looking with
fascinated gaze at the gold-tipped stub, as Kennedy carefully folded it
up in a piece of paper and deposited it in his pocket. Did she know
something about the case, I wondered?
Without a word, Kennedy seemed to take in the scant furniture of the
laboratory at a glance and a quick step or two brought him before a
steel filing cabinet. One drawer, which had not been closed as tightly
as the rest, projected a bit. On its face was a little typewritten card
bearing the inscription: “E-M GUN.”
He pulled the drawer open and glanced over the data in it.
“Just what is an electro-magnetic gun?” I asked, interpreting the
initials on the drawer.
“Well,” he explained as he turned over the notes and sketches, “the
primary principle involved in the construction of such a gun consists
in impelling the projectile by the magnetic action of a solenoid, the
sectional coils or helices of which are supplied with current through
devices actuated by the projectile itself. In other words, the sections
of helices of the solenoid produce an accelerated motion of the
projectile by acting successively on it, after a principle involved in
the construction of electro-magnetic rock drills and dispatch tubes.
“All projectiles used in this gun of Fortescue’s evidently must have
magnetic properties and projectiles of iron or containing large
portions of iron are necessary. You see, many coils are wound around
the barrel of the gun. As the projectile starts it does so under the
attraction of those coils ahead which the current makes temporary
magnets. It automatically cuts off the current from those coils that it
passes, allowing those further on only to attract it, and preventing
those behind from pulling it back.”
He paused to study the scraps of plans. “Fortescue had evidently also
worked out a way of changing the poles of the coils as the projectile
passed, causing them then to repel the projectile, which must have
added to its velocity. He seems to have overcome the practical
difficulty that in order to obtain service velocities with service
projectiles an enormous number of windings and a tremendously long
barrel are necessary as well as an abnormally heavy current beyond the
safe carrying capacity of the solenoid which would raise the
temperature to a point that would destroy the coils.”
He continued turning over the prints and notes in the drawer. When he
finished, he looked up at us with an expression that indicated that he
had merely satisfied himself of something he had already suspected.
“You were right, Burke,” he said. “The final plans are gone.”
Burke, who, in the meantime, had been telephoning about the city in a
vain effort to locate Baron Kreiger, both at such banking offices in
Wall Street as he might be likely to visit and at some of the hotels
most frequented by foreigners, merely nodded. He was evidently at a
loss completely how to proceed.
In fact, there seemed to be innumerable problems—to warn Baron Kreiger,
to get the list of the assassinations, to guard Miss Lowe against
falling into the hands of her anarchist friends again, to find the
murderer of Fortescue, to prevent the use of the electro-magnetic gun,
and, if possible, to seize the anarchists before they had a chance to
carry further their plans.
“There is nothing more that we can do here,” remarked Craig briskly,
betraying no sign of hesitation. “I think the best thing we can do is
to go to my own laboratory. There at least there is something I must
investigate sooner or later.”
No one offering either a suggestion or an objection, we four again
entered our cab. It was quite noticeable now that the visit had shaken
Paula Lowe, but Kennedy still studiously refrained from questioning
her, trusting that what she had seen and heard, especially Burke’s
report as to Baron Kreiger, would have its effect.
Like everyone visiting Craig’s laboratory for the first time, Miss Lowe
seemed to feel the spell of the innumerable strange and uncanny
instruments which he had gathered about him in his scientific warfare
against crime. I could see that she was becoming more and more nervous,
perhaps fearing even that in some incomprehensible way he might read
her own thoughts. Yet one thing I did not detect. She showed no
disposition to turn back on the course on which she had entered by
coming to us in the first place.
Kennedy was quickly and deftly testing the stub of the little thin,
gold-tipped cigarette.
“Excessive smoking,” he remarked casually, “causes neuroses of the
heart and tobacco has a specific affinity for the coronary arteries as
well as a tremendous effect on the vagus nerve. But I don’t think this
was any ordinary smoke.”
He had finished his tests and a quiet smile of satisfaction flitted
momentarily over his face. We had been watching him anxiously,
wondering what he had found.
As he looked up he remarked to us, with his eyes fixed on Miss Lowe,
“That was a ladies’ cigarette. Did you notice the size? There has been
a woman in this case—presumably.”
The girl, suddenly transformed by the rapid-fire succession of
discoveries, stood before us like a specter.
“The ‘Group,’ as anarchists call it,” pursued Craig, “is the loosest
sort of organization conceivable, I believe, with no set membership, no
officers, no laws—just a place of meeting with no fixity, where the
comrades get together. Could you get us into the inner circle, Miss
Lowe?”
Her only answer was a little suppressed scream. Kennedy had asked the
question merely for its effect, for it was only too evident that there
was no time, even if she could have managed it, for us to play the
“stool pigeon.”
Kennedy, who had been clearing up the materials he had used in the
analysis of the cigarette, wheeled about suddenly. “Where is the
headquarters of the inner circle?” he shot out.
Miss Lowe hesitated. That had evidently been one of the things she had
determined not to divulge.
“Tell me,” insisted Kennedy. “You must!”
If it had been Burke’s bulldozing she would never have yielded. But as
she looked into Kennedy’s eyes she read there that he had long since
fathomed the secret of her wildly beating heart, that if she would
accomplish the purpose of saving the Baron she must stop at nothing.
“At—Maplehurst,” she answered in a low tone, dropping her eyes from his
penetrating gaze, “Professor Annenberg’s home—out on Long Island.”
“We must act swiftly if we are to succeed,” considered Kennedy, his
tone betraying rather sympathy with than triumph over the wretched girl
who had at last cast everything in the balance to outweigh the terrible
situation into which she had been drawn. “To send Miss Lowe for that
fatal list of assassinations is to send her either back into the power
of this murderous group and let them know that she has told us, or
perhaps to involve her again in the completion of their plans.”
She sank back into a chair in complete nervous and physical collapse,
covering her face with her hands at the realization that in her
new-found passion to save the Baron she had bared her sensitive soul
for the dissection of three men whom she had never seen before.
“We must have that list,” pursued Kennedy decisively. “We must visit
Annenberg’s headquarters.”
“And I?” she asked, trembling now with genuine fear at the thought that
he might ask her to accompany us as he had on our visit to Fortescue’s
laboratory that morning.
“Miss Lowe,” said Kennedy, bending over her, “you have gone too far now
ever to turn back. You are not equal to the trip. Would you like to
remain here? No one will suspect. Here at least you will be safe until
we return.”
Her answer was a mute expression of thanks and confidence.