During breakfast it had been agreed that Lamson, as the discoverer of
the mysterious tin box, should open it by himself, and, after
examining its contents, report on them to Hardress.
This was a speculative suggestion, made by Lady Olive, seconded by
Miss Chrysie, and so, perforce, agreed to. And thus it came about that
all the essentials of Doctor Emil Fargeau's great discovery fell into
the hands of a man who, by virtue of imagination, intellect, and
scientific training, was the one man in Europe, perhaps in the world,
who could either use it or abuse it to the best or worst advantage.
He took the box into his cabin, and opened it as carelessly as though
it might have contained a few old love letters, or the story of some
obsolete Anarchist conspiracy. But as soon as he had read the first
page of the closely-written manuscript, he got up from his chair and
locked the cabin door. As he went back to his seat, he caught a
glimpse of his face in the mirror. It looked almost strange to him; so
he stopped and looked at it again.
"Good Lord!" he muttered, "is that me?" And then he said aloud: "You
infernal scoundrel!"
He didn't go back to the little table on which the manuscript was
lying. He looked at the pages as a man might look at a cheque that he
has just forged. His hand, which had never trembled before, trembled
as he took his cigar-case out of his pocket; and as he lit the cigar
he could hardly hold the match steadily. He dropped full length on the
sofa, looked sideways at the fatal sheets of paper on the table, blew
a long stream of smoke up towards the port-hole, and began to talk
with his own soul.
"The Empire of the World. I've read enough to see that it comes to
that. Yes, Faraday was right; and so was this poor wretch that we
fished out of the water this morning. A Frenchman, an Alsatian, who
has made the biggest discovery that ever was made, who has practically
achieved a miracle, offers the result to his country and gets refused,
and then, for some reason or other, commits it and his body to the
deep!
"Curious, very curious, from anything like a scientific point of view.
What an infinite mercy it is for us, who have reason to believe that
we possess a little brains, that the majority of men are fools, and
that the official person is usually a bigger fool than the man in the
street. Now, suppose our unknown and deceased genius had put even that
first page that I have read before our good friend Clifford K. Vandel
instead of, I suppose, the French Minister of War. Jump--why, he'd
have got into it with both feet, as they say in the States. A man
worth millions. Oh, millions be hanged! How many millions could buy
that? Of course, that's one way of looking at it--but Frank Lamson, as
I said before, you're in the way of becoming an infernal scoundrel.
Perhaps I'd better interrupt this little monologue, and read the rest
of what our deceased genius has to say."
He reached out and took the papers off the table, and for an hour
there was silence in the cabin. He read the sheets over and over
again, making rapid mental calculations all the time. Then, after a
long look at the open port-hole over the sofa, he folded the sheets
up, and stuffed them into the hip-pocket of his trousers. Then he got
up, and looked at himself in the glass again.
"You scoundrel!" he whispered at the ghastly image of himself. "You
thief--you utter sweep--who would accept the hospitality of an old
college chum, and then, when the possibility of illimitable millions,
when the empire of the earth, the means of enslaving the whole human
race, the absolute control of every civilised Power on earth, gets
fished up by accident out of the waters of the English Channel, you
think about robbing him of it. You are not fit to live, much less
to----"
He flung himself down on the sofa again, with his hands clasped hard
over his brow, and there he remained, without moving a limb, until he
was called out of his waking dream by a rap on the cabin door and the
sound of Hardress's voice saying:
"Come now, Lamson, buck up! Are you going to be all the morning
getting through that tin box? The women folk are on the point of
mutiny with curiosity to know what there is in it. Hurry up!" And
then, with a sudden drop in the tone, "You're not ill, old man, are
you?"
"All right, Hardress," he replied, in a voice which, by a supreme
effort of will, he managed to keep steady. "I have had a bit of a
shock--heart, I think. I wish you'd tell Evans to bring me a
brandy-and-soda, will you?"
As he said this, he unlocked the cabin door, and as his host saw him
he exclaimed:
"My dear fellow, you do look bad; sit down, and I'll get you the
B.-and-S. myself in a moment."
He disappeared, and Lamson sat down again on the sofa. Again he looked
up at the open port-hole. There were only a few moments left him now
to decide what might really be the fate of the human race. No man had
ever been face to face with such a tremendous responsibility before.
No mortal had ever passed through such a terrible temptation as he had
done during the last hour. Should he fling the priceless papers, the
warrant for the mastery of the world, into the sea and be done with
it? Should he keep them in his pocket and make untold millions out of
the power that they placed in his hands? After all, he had discovered
this priceless treasure-trove. But for him it would have been buried
with the hideous relics of humanity lying in the forward hold sewn up
in a canvas sack. Was it not his by right? Did any human law compel
him to share it with anyone?
But, again, ought he or anyone else to be entrusted with such a
tremendous power for good or evil as this?--the power, literally, to
reduce mankind to slavery. He was a man of average morals himself; he
had lived a clean, hard, studious life, and no man could say that he
had done him a mean action. Hardress, too, was well up to the high
standard of the British aristocracy--but his partner had married an
American girl--the daughter of a man who had made millions out of
railway developments after the Civil War. He was either in love or
falling in love with the daughter of another American millionaire who
had made his millions out of electrical storage. The first thing
Hardress would do would be to take the papers over to America and put
them before him. Clifford Vandel would grasp their gigantic
possibilities instantly, a trust, commanding millions of capital,
would be formed, and the world would become an American dependency.
"Here you are, old man," said Hardress, coming into the cabin with a
long glass in his hand, "I've made it pretty stiff, because you look
as if you wanted it. Why, what's the matter?"
Lamson took the glass, and as he put it to his lips Hardress saw his
hand tremble and heard the glass rattle against his teeth. He drained
it in two gulps, put it down on the table beside the sofa, threw
himself back on the cushions at the end, looked once more at the open
port-hole with the fate of a world on his soul, and said in a shaking
voice:
"Lock the door, Hardress, and sit down. I've something to say to you."
"Why, my dear chap, what's up? You look positively ghastly," said the
Viscount, as he closed the door and locked it.
"I don't suppose you'd look much better if you'd spent an hour in
hell, as I have."
"An hour in--Oh, come now, old fellow," Hardress interrupted, with a
look which Lamson instantly interpreted as a query as to his sanity.
"Don't you think you'd better turn in for a bit? You really do look
ill; just as if something had shaken you up very badly. Is it anything
to do with that infernal tin box?" he went on, pointing to it on the
table.
"Yes," said Lamson, pulling himself together with a struggle, and
sitting up on the sofa. "I wish to heaven I hadn't got up just at that
moment on the bridge and we'd left our unknown deceased to the mercy
of the waves. But, even then, somebody else might have discovered it."
"Discovered what? The corpse?"
"Yes; and----Look here, Hardress, I've been horribly tempted--tempted,
perhaps, as no other man ever was; but my father was a gentleman, and
I'll do the straight thing. How would you like to be master of the
world?"
"Master of the--Oh, look here, Lamson, this won't do at all, you know.
You're as pale as a ghost; your eyes are burning, and your hands are
shaking. You must have got a touch of fever, or something of that
sort. Take a dose of quinine and turn in. We'll be at Southampton in
two or three hours, and then you can see a doctor."
Lamson laughed. It was a laugh that wouldn't have done anybody much
good to hear, and Hardress shivered a little as he heard it.
"I see what you mean. You think I'm a bit off my head. To tell you the
truth, I almost wish I were, or that this infernal thing were only a
dream--nightmare, I should say."
"What thing?"
"This," replied Lamson, putting his hand into his hip-pocket and
pulling out some crumpled sheets of paper. "You thought I was mad when
I asked you if you'd like to be master of the world. When you've read
that you'll see that you can be. They're what I found in that tin box.
There's no name or address or any mark of identification on them, but
they were written by a man, a Frenchman, who has discovered a means,
as one might say, of soaking up all the electricity of the earth in
one huge storage system, and then doling it out to the peoples of the
earth like gas or water or electric light."
"Great Scott, what a gorgeous idea!" exclaimed Hardress, jumping from
his seat and holding out his hand for the papers. "Why do you want to
get ill over a thing like that, man? Don't you see there are millions
in it if it's true, and of course you'll come in on the ground-floor?
Great Caesar's ghost! It'll be the very thing for old Vandel. The
Morgan Steel Trust won't be in it with this."
"I thought you'd say that," said Lamson. "That's the American blood
talking in you. Now, I'll tell you candidly that I've only given you
those papers from a sense of honour and friendship. I admit that my
first impulse was to throw them out of the port-hole; and my second,"
he went on, after a little pause, "was to keep them to myself, and
tell you some lie about the box being empty."
"You might have done the first, old man, but you couldn't have done
the second," replied Hardress, putting the papers into his hand.
"There, take them back; I don't suppose I should understand them.
Anyhow, you can make a better use of them than I can; and if there's
anything in it we'll share alike. In fact, after all, the whole thing
really belongs to you, for if you hadn't discovered the body, it might
have drifted around till it went down to feed the fishes. Really, I
don't see what there is to be so upset about in it."
"My dear fellow, hasn't it struck you yet," said Lamson, "that if this
discovery works out all right, as I'm certain it will, it will really
mean, as I said just now, the mastery of the world? For instance, to
put the thing into a nut-shell: Here we are, on this seven-hundred-ton
yacht of yours, steaming at a speed of eighteen or twenty knots,
engines working smoothly, and so on. Now, if this man's scheme were
put into practice, the _Nadine_ would be, as I might say, for want of
a better word, electrolised. That is to say, every atom of metal in
her would lose its tone; the boilers would burst, the engines fly to
pieces, and even the hull would splinter up into a thousand fragments,
just as though she were made of glass, and she got hit with a hundred
sledge-hammers at the same minute."
"Is that really so, Lamson? Are you quite serious?" said Hardress,
gravely, for he was just beginning to grasp the enormous possibilities
of the discovery. "Do you really mean to say that that is actually
feasible? Of course, I know what a swell you are at these subjects,
and I don't suppose for a moment that you would say it if you didn't
believe it; but are you quite sure that your--well, that this
scientific imagination that I've heard you talk about hasn't run away
with you?"
"My dear Hardress," replied Lamson, getting up from the couch, "there
is no imagination whatever about this. I can assure you it is just a
matter of hard facts and figures. Whoever that poor fellow was that
we're going to bury at Southampton, it's quite certain that the world
has lost one of its most brilliant physical scholars. The man who
discovered this scheme and worked it out in these papers was a second
Newton or Faraday. In short, I can tell you in all seriousness--I will
pledge my reputation, such as it is--that, granted the necessary
capital, which would certainly run to a million or two, I could work
this scheme out myself. I could construct works that would mop up the
electricity out of the earth as a sponge takes water. I could change
climates as I pleased. I could hurl my thunders where I chose like a
very Jove. I could make myself arbiter of life and death on earth. In
fact, I could be everything that a mortal ought not to be."
"There; I can't say that I quite agree with you," said Hardress.
"Personally, I can't see why a man shouldn't be all that he can be,
and there's no reason why you and I and the governor and Chrysie's dad
shouldn't syndicate this business and run the earth. You say it's
possible. That's good enough for me. We'll find the millions and
you'll find the brains, so we'll consider that settled. Fancy picking
a thing like that up out of the sea on a pleasure cruise! Talk about
luck! Well, come along; let's go and break it as gently as we can to
the girls."