The Mystery of the Fifteen Sounds

by Van Powell

  Chapter 20 GHOST VOICES

  Roger's mind was more at ease. He had seen Mr. Clark pocket the gem forwhich they substituted their Eye of Aum. Outside the rock door as theyemerged from the fissure leading down from the temple, he had seen theman's hand pull it from his pocket and fling it away.

  "That's no good," the jeweler helping Doctor Ryder had chuckled.

  Definitely, in Roger's mind, Potts had found that cast-away imitation.He had not gone back through the tunnel!

  "Exonerated," he said, cheerfully, and they brushed a finely pulverizedcompound over the note, seeking to bring into relief the possiblefinger-prints thereon. Several faint smudges showed, and Potts made aphotographic exposure, also using chemicals, with other takes, to bringup possible marks, erasures and so on.

  Roger left him at his work, at a call from Astrovox, the scientificstudent of planetary vibration who had been a side-show astrologer.

  Joining the plump, bald-headed little man, close to sixty, whosedeep-set, shaggy-browed blue eyes twinkled with inward cheerfulness,Roger helped him rig up his seemingly crazy idea of avibra-spectra-telegraph-o-scope.

  That was what Roger mentally named it. The man wanted to catch thepossible vibrations of higher and lower frequencies than light range. Healso wished the various colors showing in a star ray to tell whateverspectrum bands it might contain. Besides, he had to hold this apparatustrained on a desired planet or star, by use of a mechanical movementthat enabled him, through a transit's hairlike "sight" to follow a staras the earth revolved. Furthermore, he wished photographs and a sort ofseismographic tape recording of vibration frequencies.

  The nine-power telescope he had to be satisfied with was set up to pokeits outer lens up through the skylight over the supply room.

  All around the smaller, adjoining, partitioned place formerly madenotable because of the vanishing rats and the strange voices, he hadcages of mice, squirrels and rabbits, under rays from electrical, andother forms of vibration. In hot-house "frames" or small beds underglass he kept living plants, with color-filters straining the lightplaying on them, to test reaction to heat, light and color.

  One bed, under a brownish glass, Roger noticed, had thin, stringy,sickly vegetation in it. In one under a short-wave irradiationtreatment, plants thrived.

  In tiny flat, glass-protected trays, specimens of cell-cultures intubes, and sections of living plant tissue were being exposed.

  "Guess we'll have to clean out the far corner," Astrovox suggested, "Idumped all the wrappings there. Might start a fire."

  Approaching to help, he finished his sentence with a chuckle.

  Roger nodded, and gathered up the papers, making a fine rattle in theprocess.

  A glow-bulb lighted in the interconnected tell-tale panel as a smallbell rang. Roger, glancing at the panel, saw that the summons was fromthe electrical division downstairs. He went to the head of the steps.

  "Want me?"

  "Yes," answered the voice of Professor Millman, electrical engineer."We're going to make a flat-table recording. I don't just see where weget power for the motor from."

  "Right down close under the recording machine table," Roger called downhis information. "You'll see an outlet set into the floor."

  "Oh--thanks, yes. I see."

  Roger went back to help Astrovox.

  "Can't risk it, with all the chemicals, and combustible stuff," heanswered the former phrases of the old astrologer.

  "Not with Neptune, the planet, in opposition to Saturn and with Marsopposing Uranus," the old man chuckled.

  Roger looked as if he did not see the point.

  "In our belief that the planetary positions influence chemicalreactions--and all life is chemical, or, at least electro-chemical," hewas told, "we use the known planets as symbols for forces of nature.Saturn, you might say, stands for cohesion--or, better, say forcrystallization, because Saturn makes gravity possible, makes density inour earth by cohering its quintrillions of atoms.

  "Mars we could say is a symbol for the combustion engendered by fire,the same as Uranus is, in a way, a symbol of explosiveness, and Neptuneseems to represent a sort of disintegration, diffusion and slowseparation of atoms, not by explosion but by attrition."

  To Roger it was all pretty much like Egyptian hieroglyphics but the manseemed to be talking what he considered sensible phrases.

  "Let us say that we place a pellet of putty between two machines, oneengendering a force like repulsion; the other giving quick, and veryhigh-frequency stabs of current toward the other. The answer might bethat the pellet would explode or fly into its atoms.

  "But," the old man went on, "The force of cohesion would hold our earthtogether in such an experiment, though the volume or size of the tinypellet would be too little for it to act on sufficiently to keep theform together. That, in a way, is what so many people misunderstand whenthey talk about astrology. Properly used, correctly interpreted, itenables us to understand our reactions--emotions----"

  Roger was in the next room, loading the papers on the dumb-waiter tosend to the cellar. As he came back, gathering up more, Astrovox, as ifhe had ranted along on his favorite topic without ceasing, said:

  "--fire." He stood up. "Where were you? I was telling about Mars andUranus exploding things and starting fires."

  "I have to work."

  "Yes, that's so. Well, this is your last load."

  Roger gathered the great heap of heavy wrapping paper, and left himshifting one bed of plants from under a deep ruby glass so that theywould be exposed to a pale green color filtration.

  Going down to remove the papers from the dumb-waiter, Roger saw Mr.Millman finish recording the multitude of gyrations of a sparking motorshaft which Mr. Ellison was photographing with his camera.

  "We are going to count the sparks," he told Roger, "just to check up onthe speedometer attached to the flywheel, which Millman says isoff-count by hundreds of revolutions to the minute."

  "I'll take the record up and have it made ready for a slow playback. I'mgoing up anyway."

  He turned it over to Potts as the note had been thoroughly revealed inall his exposures, and had shown no identifying finger-marks.

  Roger went back to Astrovox, and became deeply interested in thelatter's plans for night study of the spectra of stars.

  "I wonder if your cousin would arrange for one of his men to stay partof the night with me, to take down my data?"

  "We can set up a dictograph, and let you talk it onto a record."

  "That would do."

  "Or--we could mike down from here to one of our magazine-recorders thatputs a new record on the spindle of the turntable when the other hasbeen used up. That would run you for hours, if you'd stop it in betweendictating periods."

  The thing was arranged and Roger, before going home, demonstrated themechanism and was sure the old man understood its operation.

  Because of the threat implied in the forged note, Grover gave Pottsinstructions to transfer from Doctor Ryder's rooms the mechanisms hewanted to have installed for Roger's protection. With a changed switchoperated only from inside the room, the former ease of operation byothers, he thought, was eliminated.

  Roger, tired by celebration and resuming work, retired early, being surethat his switch was set, his room theoretically a sealed place.

  Sleep came. Rest, though was disturbed by weird dreams.

  Sometimes, he knew, dreams had outward causes stimulating them, ashappens if a draft on exposed limbs makes one dream of riding on a sledand falling into a snow bank in howling wind.

  His dream of a burglar, as he awakened and looked rather fearfullyaround, made him grin, though.

  That room had been sealed by no one other than himself!

  But a low, humming whine made him certain that machinery was inoperation--the hum of the recorder motor. He located it. Proved it.Shutting off the device in case some jar had started it, he went to testhis door. But he recalled that the motor sti
ll ran.

  To his dismay, the door was not merely unsealed. It stood ajar.

  Suddenly, startlingly, from behind him, his table radio spoke, in athin, strained, bizarre cry.

  "Fire!" and he heard, faintly, the crackle of flames.

  Then an uncanny silence, dreadful by contrast, came.

  He spied around the hall. It, too, was silent. He tiptoed down to thelibrary, telephoned the laboratory, and got no reply.

  Once again--something was wrong--in two places! He must go to thatlaboratory. Grover should have answered--or Tip--or Astrovox!