Page:Avon Fantasy Reader 10.djvu/122

 True to his promise, he rang me up that evening.

"I have had wonderful success!" he cried exultantly. "So far I have experimented only in a small way, but at that my theory has been proven beyond the possibility of doubt. And there was one most interesting feature, Claybridge. Williams told me what would be the nature of my experiment tomorrow afternoon."

"And what will it be?" I asked.

"I am to make his material consciousness tangent with the end of the world." was the astonishing answer.

"Good heavens!" I cried in spite of myself. "Shall you do it?"

"I have no choice in the matter," he replied.

"Mortimer, you fatalist! You—"

"No, no," he protested. "It is not fatalism. Can't you understand that—"

But I interrupted him. "May I be present?" I asked.

"Yes," he answered. "You will be there. Williams saw you."

I had a good mind to deliberately not be there, just to put a kink in his precious theory; but my curiosity was too great, and at the appointed time, I was on hand.

"I have already put Williams to sleep," Mortimer said as I came in. "He is in my especially prepared room. Come and I will show him to you."

He led me down a long hall to a door which I knew had originally given upon a storeroom. Inserting a key in the lock, he turned it, and flung the door open.

In the room beyond, I could see Williams seated in a swivel chair. His eyes were closed and his body relaxed, as if in sleep. However, it was not he that awakened my interest, but the room itself. It was windowless, with only a skylight in the ceiling to admit light and air. Aside from the chair in which Williams sat, there was no furniture save an instrument resembling an immense telephone transmitter that a crane arm held about two inches from the hypnotized man's mouth, and a set of ear phones, such as a telephone operator wears, which were attached to his ears. But strangest of all, the walls, floors, and ceiling of the room were lined with a whitish metal.

"White lead," said Mortimer, seeing my eyes upon it; "the substance least conductive of thought waves. I want the subject to be as free as possible from outside thought influences, so that when he talks with me over that telephonic device, which is connected with my laboratory, there can be no danger of his telling me any but his own experiences."

"But the skylight," I pointed out. "It is partially open."

"True," he admitted. "But thought waves, like sound waves, travel upwards, and outwards; rarely, if ever, downwards. So, you see, there is little danger from the skylight."

He closed and locked the door, and we went back to the laboratory. In one corner was what looked like a radio loud speaker, while near it was a transmitter similar to the one in the room with Williams.