Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 07.djvu/88

Rh stinct with what you call 'life'. The rest He left to Evolution, which adapted them to changing conditions and environments through the aeons."

"If I understand you correctly," rejoined Mason, "Evolution, Nature, call it whatever you will, is the only true minister of the Deity?"

Doctor Santurn nodded, pleased.

"Call it that, or call it a physical, chemical, or a mechanical force, so long as you leave out all reference to the spiritual."

OMETHING clutched at Mason's heart then, perhaps the memory of his father, long ago on a Thanksgiving Day saying grace over the festive board of the little New England farmhouse. He thought too, of his mother, laid away to the accompaniment of a clerical assurance of her spiritual persistence; of his own wedding and the old phrase, "Whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder"; and of the same dear wife's promise, just prior to her decease, to wait for him on the 'Other Side'.

But Oliver Santurn would deny these blessed things to mankind, he thought bitterly. He would rob humanity of the fruits, and leave them the husks.

It was all too preposterous, of course! Neither the Doctor nor any other man could compass these wild visions and bring them to fruition; every wailing soul, outraged, from the time of Cro-Magnon on downward through the ages, would frustrate them.

It did serve to show him, however, a cold and sinister picture of one whom he had thought of warmly as a friend for almost forty years.

OCTOR Santum's main laboratory in the extension to the rear of the residence was brilliantly illuminated by searchlights set well away in the corners, so as to be non-interfering magnetically with the delicate apparatus assembled on the insulated table in the center. The clear, white beams were directed against a cluster of parabolic reflectors, suspended from the domed ceiling, which focused the light upon the table below.

The room itself was somewhat of a composite of the three Mason had visited in the morning, and was reserved for the purpose of correlating the separate facts ascertained in the individual departments, and applying them in actual experiment.

The Doctor and his assistants were garbed in sterile white surgeons' garb, gauze-masked and rubber-gloved, and they had provided the visitor with a similar outfit. He now stood listening attentively to the Chief's remarks.

"The slide is sterile, as you see, having been carefully subjected to heavy, moist heat pressure in the sterilizer for thirty minutes. The microscope shows it to be free from organisms. The instruments Bridges is using have also been carefully sterilized. Watch him carefully as I call off rates and quantities!"

Under what appeared to Mason as the central lens of a quadruplex microscope, Bridges placed another sterile glass slide, and to it transferred an infinitesimal speck of some element. The little man now bent to a stereoscopic eyepiece, and with a delicate stylus tapered down to the invisibility of a Wollaston wire, teased and crushed the speck until Mason; could no longer discern it.

"He is breaking down that particle into its basic crystals," murmured the Doctor in explanation. "It is an easier method—arrived at by us after considerable research—to use separate and individual crystals whose atomic weights we know, than to add or subtract via the scales method. We used to, at first; but now we have listed the exact weights of basic crystals."

He turned towards Bridges. "Three!" he ordered.

At Bridges' invitation, Mason peered through the eyepiece, and taking the fine probe in his unpracticed fingers, saw what appeared to be a telegraph pole prodding at a great pile of small, white, granular boulders. There was a deep valley beyond the mass, and across the gap lay three of the small builders by themselves.

Again and again the Doctor called off substances and quantities, until at last the requisite number of various crystals had been assembled in an inert mass on a fresh slide, a drop of clear blood serum added, and the whole surrounded by an incredibly thin iridium washer, and sealed by a cover glass.

Mason looked again through the quadruplex microscope and felt reassured that the mass was actually inert, a mound of chemicals in a puddle of clear fluid.

"Your turn, Stevens!" called the Doctor. "Have you found the rate?"

"Yes, Doctor. The wave is one hundred and five pentillimeters for human leukocytes. Various harmonics will produce mammalian, piscatory, or serpentine varieties. Shall I proceed?"

"By all means," urged the Chief.

BANK of twenty-four vacuum tubes, somewhat resembling those used for radio purposes, had been arranged at the end of the table opposite the microscopical and chemical apparatus; and to a metallic slab in their midst, Bridges now carefully transferred the slide with sterile tweezers.

Stevens then turned a milli-vernier lateral clamp so that its edges made contact with the flat iridium washer under the coverglass on the slide.

"With twenty four cascaded steps of radio frequency amplification ahead of it," explained Stevens," andStevens, "and [sic] the contents of this slide acting as the grid of the detector, a tremendous electronic impulse can be imparted."

He stepped to a corner of the room and wheeled into position a squat carriage from which a heavily insulated cable ran back to a special socket in the wall. Upon the carriage rested a box-shaped piece of apparatus the size of a large trunk, which Stevens referred to as a "neo-split-wave radio transmitter."

"It's just the reverse of the heterodyne principle, you know," he explained. "It steps the wave down as far as we want it, and we do need a very short wave to compete with and surpass the gamma rays of radium. Now we're ready," he said, focusing the wave director toward an almost invisible loop aerial on the receptor, and adjusting his controls.

"Six and eighty two hundredths of a second