me and laboratory.

"I'll look, anyway," said Tommy less skeptically. "But it is rather
incredible, you know!"

"It is impossible," said Von Holtz stiffly. "You are right, Herr
Reames. It is quite impossible. But it is a fact."

He turned and stalked toward the big brick barn behind the house.
Tommy went with him, wholly unbelieving and yet beginning to wonder
if, just possibly, there was actually an emergency of a more normal
and ghastly nature in being. Von Holtz might be a madman. He might....

Gruesome, grisly thoughts ran through Tommy's head. A madman dabbling
in science might do incredible things, horrible things, and then
demand assistance to undo an unimaginable murder....

* * * * *

Tommy was tense and alert as Von Holtz opened the door of the barnlike
laboratory. He waved the lean young man on ahead.

"After you," he said curtly.

He felt almost a shiver as he entered. But the interior of the
laboratory displayed no gruesome scene. It was a huge, high-ceilinged
room with a concrete floor. A monster dynamo was over in one corner,
coupled to a matter-of-fact four-cylinder crude-oil engine, to which
was also coupled by a clutch an inexplicable windlass-drum with
several hundred feet of chain wrapped around it. There were ammeters
and voltmeters on a control panel, and one of the most delicate of
dynamometers on its own stand, and there were work benches and a
motor-driven lathe and a very complete equipment for the working of
metals. And there was an electric furnace, with splashes of solidified
metal on the floor beside it, and there was a miniature casting-floor,
and at the farther end of the monster room there was a gigantic
solenoid which evidently had once swung upon gymbals and as evidently
now was broken, because it lay toppled askew upon its supports.

The only totally unidentifiable piece of apparatus in the place was
one queer contrivance at one side. It looked partly like a
machine-gun, because of a long brass barrel projecting from it. But
the brass tube came out of a bulging casing of cast aluminum and there
was no opening through which shells could be fed.

* * * * *

Von Holz moved to that contrivance, removed a cap from the end of the
brass tube, looked carefully into the opening, and waved stiffly for
Tommy to look in.

Again Tommy was suspicious; watched until Von Holtz was some distance
away. But the instant he put h