Chapter 2: The Pact

“What are we going to do to-night?” asked Jim.

Dennis looked quizzically at his big friend. Jim was pacing restlessly up and down the living room of the bachelor apartment, puffing jerkily at his eternal pipe. Dennis knew the symptoms. Though he hadn’t seen Jim for over a year, he remembered his characteristics well enough.

Some men seem designed only for action. They are out of step with the modern era. They should have lived centuries ago when the world was more a place of physical, and less of purely mental, rivalry.

Jim was of this sort. Each time he returned from some trip--to Siberia, the Congo, the mountainous wilderness of the Caucasus--he was going to settle down and stop hopping about the globe from one little-known and dangerous spot to another. Each time, in a matter of weeks, he grew restless again, spoiling for action. Then came another impulsive journey.

He was spoiling for action now. He didn’t really care what happened that evening, what was planned. His question was simply a bored protest at a too tame existence--a wistful hope that Denny might lighten his boredom, somehow.

“What are we going to do to-night?”

“Well,” said Denny solemnly, “Mrs. Van Raggan is giving a reception this evening. We might go there and meet all the Best People. There is a lecture on the esthetics of modern art at Philamo Hall. Or we can see a talkie--”

“My Lord!” fumed Jim. Then: “Kidding aside, can’t you dig up something interesting?”

“Kidding aside,” said Dennis, in a different tone, “I have dug up something interesting. We’re going to visit a friend of mine, Matthew Breen. A young man, still unknown, who, in my opinion, is one of our greatest physicists. Matt is a kind of savage, so he may take to you. If he does--and if he’s feeling in a good humor--he may show you some laboratory stunts that will afford you plenty of distraction. Come along--you’re wearing out my rugs with your infernal pacing up and down!”

Matt Breen’s place was in a ratty part of the poorer outskirts of town; and his laboratory was housed by what had once been a barn. But place and surroundings were forgotten at sight of the owner’s face.

Huge and gaunt, with unblinking, frosty gray eyes, looking more like an arctic explorer than a man of science, Matt towered over the average man and carelessly dominated any assembly by sheer force of mentality. He even towered a little over big Jim Holden now, as he absently shook hands with him.

“Come in, come in,” he said, his voice vague. And to Denny: “I’m busy as the devil, but you can watch over my shoulder if you want to. Got something new on. Great thing--though I don’t think it’ll have any practical meaning.”

The two padded after him along a dusty hallway, up a flight of stairs that was little more than a ladder, and into the cavernous loft of the old barn which had been transformed into a laboratory.

Jim drew Denny aside a pace or two. “He says he’s got something new. Isn’t he afraid to show it to a stranger like me?”

“Afraid? Why should he be?”

“Well, ideas do get stolen now and then, you know.”

Denny smiled. “When Matt gets hold of something new, you can be sure the discovery isn’t a new kind of can-opener or patent towel-rack that can be ‘stolen.’ His ideas are safe for the simple reason that there probably aren’t more than four other scientists on earth capable of even dimly comprehending them. All you and I can do--whatever this may turn out to be--is to watch and marvel.”

Matt, meanwhile, had lumbered with awkward grace to a great wooden pedestal. Cupping down over this was a glass bell, about eight feet high, suspended from the roof.

Around the base of the pedestal was a ring of big lamp-affairs, that looked like a bank of flood-lights. The only difference was that where flood-lights would have had regular glass lenses to transmit light beams, these had thin plates of lead across the openings. Thick copper conduits branched to each from a big dynamo.

Matt reached into a welter of odds and ends on a bench, and picked up a tube. Rather like an ordinary electric light bulb, it looked, save that there were no filaments in the thin glass shell. Where filaments should have been there was a thin cylinder of bluish-gray metal.

“Element number eighty-five,” said Matt in his deep, abstracted voice, pointing at the bluish cylinder. “Located it about a year ago. Last of the missing elements. Does strange tricks when subjected to heavy electric current. In each of those things that look like searchlights is one of these bulbs.”

He laid down the extra tube, turned toward a door in the near wall, then turned back to his silent guests again. Apparently he felt they were due a little more enlightenment.

“Eighty-five isn’t nearly as radioactive as the elements akin to it,” he said. Satisfied that he had now explained everything, he started again toward the door.

As he neared it, Dennis and Jim heard a throaty growling, and a vicious scratching on the wooden panels. And as Matt opened the door a big mongrel dog leaped savagely at him!

Calmly, Matt caught the brute by the throat and held it away from him at arm’s length, seeming hardly to be aware of its eighty-odd pounds of struggling weight. Into Jim’s eyes crept a glint of admiration. It was a feat of strength as well as of animal management; and, himself proficient in both, Jim could accord tribute where it was due.

“You came just as I was about to try an experiment on the highest form of life I’ve yet exposed to my new rays,” he said, striding easily toward the glass bell with the savage hound. “It’s worked all right with frogs and snakes--but will it work with more complex creatures? Mammalian creatures? That’s a question.”

Denny forbore to ask him what It did, how It worked, what the devil It was, anyway. From his own experience he knew that the abstraction of an experimenter insulates him from every outside contact. Matt, he realized, was probably making a great effort to remain aware that they were there in the laboratory at all; probably thought he had explained in great detail his new device and its powers.

Vaguely wrapped in his fog of concentration, Matt thrust the snarling dog under the bell, which he lowered quickly till it rested on the pedestal-floor and ringed the dog with a wall of glass behind which it barked and growled soundlessly.

Completely preoccupied again, Matt went to a big switch and threw it. The dynamo hummed, raised its pitch to a high, almost intolerable keening note. The ring of pseudo-searchlights seemed in an ominous sort of way to spring into life. The impression must have been entirely imaginary; actually the projectors didn’t move in the slightest, didn’t even vibrate. Yet the conviction persisted in the minds of both Jim and Dennis that some black, invisible force was pouring down those conduits, to be sifted, diffused, and hurled through the lead lenses at the dog in the bell.

Thrilled to the core, not having the faintest idea what it was they were about to see, but convinced that it must surely be of stupendous import, the two stared unwinkingly at the furious hound. Matt was staring, too; but his glance was almost casual, and was concentrated more on the glass of the bell than on the experimental object.

The reason for the direction of his gaze almost immediately became apparent. And as the reason was disclosed, Dennis and Jim exclaimed aloud in disappointment--at the same time, so intense was their nameless suspense, not knowing they had opened their mouths. It appeared that for yet a little while they were to remain in ignorance of the precise meaning of the experiment.

The glass of the bell was clouding. A swirling, milky vapor, not unlike fog, was filling the bell from top to bottom.

The dog, rapidly being hidden from sight by the gathering mist, suddenly stopped its antics and stood still in the center of the bell as though overcome by surprise and indecision. Motionless, staring vacantly, it stood there for an instant--then was concealed completely by the rolling vapor.

But just before it disappeared, Jim turned to Denny in astonishment, to see if Denny had observed what he had; namely, that the fog seemed not to be gathering from the air penned up in the bell, but in some strange and rather awful way to be exuding from the body of the dog itself!