Chapter 5: The Color-Storm

The corridor was stopped by a heavy metal door. As the small party approached, it swung inward in two halves, and a figure clad in a white surgeon’s smock emerged. He was a white man, tall, with highly intelligent face but eyes strangely dull and lifeless, like those of the coolie-guards. His gaze rested on Ku Sui, and the Eurasian asked him:

“Is it ready?”

“Yes, lord,”--tonelessly.

“Through here, then, my friends.” The door opened and closed behind them as they stepped inside. “This is my main laboratory. And there, friend Carse, is the object which is to concern us.”

With one glance the adventurer took in the laboratory. It was a great room, a perfect circle in shape, with doors opening into the four wings of the building. The walls were lined with strange, complicated machines, whose purpose he could not even guess at; in one place there was a table strewn with tangled shapes of wire, rows of odd-bulging tubes and other apparatus; and conspicuous by one door was an ordinary operating table, with light dome overhead. A tall wide screen placed a few feet out from the wall hid something bulky from view. Carse noted all these things; then his gaze went back to the object in the middle of the floor which Ku Sui had indicated.

It was, primarily, a chair, within a suspended framework of steely bars, themselves the foundation for a network of fine-drawn colored wires. Shimmering, like the gossamer threads of a spider’s spinning, they wove upward, around and over the chair, so that he who sat there would be completely surrounded by the gleaming mesh.

Within the whole hung a plain square boxlike device, attached to the chair and so placed that it would be directly in front of the eyes of anyone sitting there. Ropes were reeved through pulleys in the ceiling, for raising the wire-ball device to permit entrance. And standing ready around it, were four men in surgeons’ smocks--white men with intelligent faces and dull, lifeless eyes.

The Hawk knew the answer to the question he curtly asked. “Its purpose, Dr. Ku?”

“That,” came the suave reply, “it will be your pleasure to discover for yourself. I can promise you some novel sensations. Nothing harmful, though, however much they may tire you. Now!” He gave a sign; one of his assistants touched a switch. The wire ball rose, leaving the central seat free for entrance. “All is ready. May I ask you to enter?”

Hawk Carse faced his old foe. There was stillness in the laboratory then as his bleak gray eyes met and held for long seconds Ku Sui’s enigmatic green-black ones.

“If I don’t?”

For answer the Eurasian gestured apologetically to his guards.

“I see,” Carse whispered. There was nothing to be done. Three coolies, each with ray-guns at the ready; four white assistants ... No hope. No chance for anything. He looked at the negro. “Don’t move, Friday,” he warned him. “They’ll only shoot; it can do no good. Eight to two are big odds when the two are unarmed.”

He turned and faced the Eurasian, holding him with his eyes. “Ku Sui,” he said, clipping the words, “you have said that this would not permanently harm me, and, although I know you for the most deadly, vicious egomaniac in the solar system, I am believing you. I do not know you for a liar ... I will enter.”

The faint smile on the Oriental’s face did not alter one bit at this. Carse stepped to the metal seat and sat down.

The web of shimmering wires descended, cupping him completely. Through them he saw Ku Sui go to a switchboard adjoining and study the indicators, finally placing one hand on a black-knobbed switch and with the other drawing from some recess a little cone, trailing a wire, like a microphone. A breathless silence hung over the laboratory. The white-clad figures stood like statues, dumb, unfeeling, emotionless. The watching negro trembled, his mouth half open, his brow already bedewed with perspiration. But the only sign of strain or tension that showed in the slender flaxen-haired man sitting in the wire ball in the center of the laboratory, came when he licked his dry lips.

Then Dr. Ku Sui pulled the switch down, and there surged out a low-throated murmur of power. And immediately the ball of wire came to life. The fine, crisscrossing wires disappeared, and in their stead was color, every color in the spectrum. Like waves rhythmically rising and falling, the tinted brilliances dissolved back and forth through each other; and the reflected light, caroming off the surfaces of the instruments and tables and walls, so filled the laboratory that the group of men surrounding the fire-ball were like resplendent figures out of another universe.