“With the electric arc, sir,” answered the chemist, mopping his brow. This grilling method reminded him of what he had heard of “Third Degree” torments. “That’s the best method, sir.”
“Now in use, anywhere?”
“In Notodden, Norway. They have firebrick furnaces, you understand, sir, with an alternating current of 5000 volts between water-cooled copper electrodes. The resulting arc is spread by powerful electro-magnets, so.” And he illustrated with his eight acid-stained fingers. “Spread out like a disk or sphere of flame, of electric fire, you see.”
“Yes, and what then?” demanded Flint, while his partner, forgetting now to smile, sat there by the window scrutinizing him. One saw, now, the terribly keen and prehensile intellect at work under the mask of assumed foppishness and jesting indifference—the quality, for the most part masked, which had earned Waldron the nickname of “Tiger” in Wall Street.
“What then?” repeated Flint, once more levelling that potent forefinger at the sweating Herzog.
“Well, sir, that gives a large reactive surface, through which the air is driven by powerful rotary fans. At the high temperature of the electric arc in air, the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen dissociate into their atoms. The air comes out of the arc, charged with about one per cent. of nitric oxide, and after that—”
“Jump the details, idiot! Can’t you move faster than a paralytic snail? What’s the final result?”
“The result is, sir,” answered Herzog, meek and cowed under this harrying, “that calcium nitrate is produced, a very excellent fertilizer. It’s a form of nitrogen, you see, directly obtained from air.”
“At what cost?”
“One ton of fixed nitrogen in that form costs about $150 or $160.”
“Indeed?” commented Flint. “The same amount, combined in Chile saltpeter, comes to—?”
“A little over $300, sir.”
“Hear that, Wally?” exclaimed the Billionaire, turning to his now interested associate. “Even if this idea never goes a step farther, there’s a gold mine in just the production of fertilizer from air! But, after all, that will only be a by-product. It’s the oxygen we’re after, and must have!”
He faced Herzog again.
“Is any oxygen liberated, during the process?” he demanded.
“At one stage, yes, sir. But in the present process, it is absorbed, also.”
Flint’s eyebrows contracted nervously. For a moment he stood thinking, while Herzog eyed him with trepidation, and Waldron, almost forgetting to smoke, waited developments with interest. The Billionaire, however, wasted but scant time in consideration. It was not money now, he lusted for, but power. Money was, to him, no longer any great desideratum. At most, it could now mean no more to him than a figure on a check-book or a page of statistics in his private memoranda. But power, unlimited, indisputable power over the whole earth and the fulness thereof, power which none might dispute, power before which all humanity must bow—God! the lust of it now gripped and shook his soul.
Paling a little, but with eyes ablaze, he faced the anxious scientist.
“Herzog! See here!”
“Yes, sir?”
“I’ve got a job for you, understand?”
“Yes, sir. What is it?”
“A big job, and one on which your entire future depends. Put it through, and I’ll do well by you. Fail, and by the Eternal, I’ll break you! I can, and will, mark that! Do you get me?”
“I—yes, sir—that is, I’ll do my best, and—”
“Listen! You go to work at once, immediately, understand? Work out for me some process, some practicable method by which the nitrogen and oxygen can both be collected in large quantities from the air. Everything in my laboratories at Oakwood Heights is at your disposal. Money’s no object. Nothing counts, now, but results!
“I want the process all mapped out and ready for me, in its essential outlines, two weeks from today. If it isn’t—” His gesture was a menace. “If it is—well, you’ll be suitably rewarded. And no leaks, now. Not a word of this to any one, understand? If it gets out, you know what I can do to you, and will! Remember Roswell; remember Parker Hayes. They let news get to the Dillingham-Saunders people, about the new Tezzoni radio-electric system—and one’s dead, now, a suicide; the other’s in Sing-Sing for eighteen years. Remember that—and keep your mouth shut!”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
“All right, then. A fortnight from today, report to me here. And mind you, have something to report, or—!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well! Now, go!”
Thus dismissed, Herzog gathered together his books and papers, blinked a moment with those peculiar wall-eyes of his, arose and, bowing first to Flint and then to the keenly-watching Waldron, backed out of the office.
When the door had closed behind him, Flint turned to his partner with a nervous laugh.
“That’s the way to get results, eh?” he exclaimed. “No dilly-dallying and no soft soap; but just lay the lash right on, hard—they jump then, the vermin! Results! That fellow will work his head off, the next two weeks; and there’ll be something doing when he comes again. You’ll see!”
Waldron laughed nonchalantly. Once more the mask of indifference had fallen over him, veiling the keen, incisive interest he had shown during the interview.
“Something doing, yes,” he drawled, puffing his cigar to a glow. “Only I advise you to choose your men. Some day you’ll try that on a real man—one of the rough-necks you know, and—”
Flint snapped his fingers contemptuously, gazed at Waldron a moment with unwinking eyes and tugged at his mustache.
“When I need advice on handling men, I’ll ask for it,” he rapped out. Then, glancing at the Louis XIV clock: “Past the time for that C.P.S. board-meeting, Wally. No more of this, now. We’ll talk it over at the Country Club, tonight; but for the present, let’s dismiss it from our minds.”
“Right!” answered the other, and arose, yawning, as though the whole subject were of but indifferent interest to him. “It’s all moonshine, Flint. All a pipe-dream. Defoe’s philosophers, who spent their lives trying to extract sunshine from cucumbers, never entertained any more fantastic notion than this of yours. However, it’s your funeral, not mine. You’re paying for it. I decline to put in any funds for any such purpose. Amuse yourself; you’ve got to settle the bill.”
Flint smiled sourly, his gold tooth glinting, but made no answer.
“Come along,” said his partner, moving toward the door. “They’re waiting for us, already, at the board meeting. And there’s big business coming up, today—that strike situation, you remember. Slade’s going to be on deck. We’ve got to decide, at once, whether or not we’re going to turn him loose on the miners, to smash that gang of union thugs and Socialist fanatics, and do it right. That’s a game worth playing, Flint; but this Air Trust vagary of yours—stuff and nonsense!”
Flint, for all reply, merely cast a strange look at his partner, with those strongly-contracted pupils of his; and so the two vultures of prey betook themselves to the board room where already, round the long rosewood table, Walter Slade of the Cosmos Detective Company was laying out his strike-breaking plans to the attentive captains of industry.
CHAPTER IV.
AN INTERLOPER.
On the eleventh day after this interview between the two men who, between them, practically held the whole world in their grasp, Herzog telephoned up from Oakwood Heights and took the liberty of informing Flint that his experiments had reached a point of such success that he prayed Flint would condescend to visit the laboratories in person.
Flint, after some reflection, decided he would so condescend; and forthwith ordered his limousine from his private garage on William Street. Thereafter he called Waldron on the ‘phone, at his Fifth Avenue address.
“Mr. Waldron is not up, yet, sir,” a carefully-modulated voice answered over the wire. “Any message I can give him, sir?”
“Oh, hello! That you, Edwards?” Flint demanded, recognizing the suave tones of his partner’s valet.
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. Tell Waldron I’ll call for him in half an hour with the limousine. And mind, now, I want him to be up and dressed! We’re going down to Staten Island. Got that?”
“Yes, sir. Any other message, sir?”
“No. But be sure you get him up, for me! Good-bye!”
Thirty minutes later, Flint’s chauffeur opened the door of the big limousine, in front of the huge Renaissance pile that Waldron’s millions had raised on land which had cost him more than as though he had covered it with double eagles; and Flint himself ascended the steps of Pentelican marble. The limousine, its varnish and silver-plate flashing in the bright spring sun, stood by the curb, purring softly to itself with all six cylinders, a thing of matchless beauty and rare cost. The chauffeur, on the driver’s seat, did not even bother to shut off the gas, but let the engine run, regardless. To have stopped it would have meant some trifling exertion, in starting again; and since Flint never considered such details as a few gallons of gasoline, why should he care? Lighting a Turkish cigarette, this aristocrat of labor lolled on the padded leather and indifferently—with more of contempt than of interest—regarded a swarm of iron-workers, masons and laborers at work on a new building across the avenue.
Flint, meanwhile, had entered the great mansion, its bronze doors—ravished from the Palazzo Guelfo at Venice—having swung inward to admit him, with noiseless majesty. Ignoring the doorman, he addressed himself to Edwards, who stood in the spacious, mahogany-panelled hall, washing both hands with imaginary soap.
“Waldron up, yet, Edwards?”
“No, sir. He—er—I have been unable—”
“The devil! Where is he?”
“In his apartments, sir.”
“Take me up!”
“He said, sir,” ventured Edwards, in his smoothest voice. “He said—”
“I don’t give a damn what he said! Take me up, at once!”
“Yes, sir. Immediately, sir!” And he gestured suavely toward the elevator.
Flint strode down the hall, indifferent to the Kirmanshah rugs, the rare mosaic floor and stained-glass windows, the Parian fountain and the Azeglio tapestries that hung suspended up along the stairway—all old stories to him and as commonplace as rickety odds and ends of furniture might be to any toiler “cribbed, cabin’d and confined” in fetid East Side tenement or squalid room on Hester Street.
The elevator boy bowed before his presence. Edwards hesitated to enter the private elevator, with this world-master; but Flint beckoned him to come along. And so, borne aloft by the smooth force of the electric motor, they presently reached the upper floor where “Tiger” Waldron laired in stately splendor, like the nabob that he was.
Without ceremony, Flint pushed forward into the bedchamber of the mighty one—a chamber richly finished in panels of the rare sea-grape tree, brought from Pacific isles at great cost of money and some expenditure of human lives; but this latter item was, of course, beneath consideration.
By the softened light which entered through rich curtains, one saw the famous frieze of De Lussac, that banded the apartment, over the panelling—the frieze of Bacchantes, naked and unashamed, revelling with Satyrs in an abandon that bespoke the age when the world was young. Their voluptuous forms entwined with clustering grapes and leaves, they poured tipsy libations of red wine from golden chalices; while old Silenus, god of drink, astride a donkey, applauded with maudlin joy.
Flint, however, had no eyes for this scene which would have gladdened a voluptuary’s heart—and which, for that reason was dear to Waldron—but walked toward the huge, four-posted bed where Wally himself, now rather paler than usual, with bloodshot eyes, was lying. This bed, despite the fact that it had been transported all the way from Tours, France, and that it once had belonged to an archbishop, had only too often witnessed its owner’s insomnia.
“Hm! You’re a devil of a man to keep an appointment, aren’t you?” Flint sneered at the master of the house. “Eleven o’clock, and not up, yet!”
“Pardon me for remarking, my dear Flint,” replied Waldron, stretching himself between the silken sheets and reaching for a cigarette, “that the appointment was not of my making. Also that I was up, last night—this morning, rather—till three-thirty. And in the next place, that scoundrel Hazeltine, trimmed me out of eighty-six thousand in four hours—”
“Roulette again, you idiot?” demanded Flint.
“And in conclusion,” said Wally, “that the bigness of my head and the brown taste in my mouth are such as no ‘soda and sermons, the morning after’ can possibly alleviate. So you understand my dalliance.
“Damn those workmen!” he exclaimed, with sudden irritation, as a louder chattering of pneumatic riveters from the new building all at once clattered in at the window. “A free country, eh? And men are permitted to make that kind of a racket when a fellow wants to sleep! By God, if I—”
“Drop that, Wally, and get up!” commanded Flint. “There’s no time for this kind of thing today. Herzog has just informed me his experiments have brought results. We’re going down to Oakwood Heights to sea a few things for ourselves. And the quicker you get dressed and in your right mind, the better. Come along, I tell you!”
“Still chasing sunbeams from cucumbers, eh?” drawled the magnate, inhaling cigarette smoke and blowing a thin cloud toward the wanton Bacchantes. He affected indifference, but his dull eyes brightened a trifle in his wan face, deep-lined by the savage dissipations of the previous night. “And you insist on dragging me out on the same fatuous errand?”
“Don’t be an ass!” snapped the Billionaire. “Get up and come along. The sooner we have this thing under way, the better.”
“All right, anything to oblige,” conceded Waldron, inwardly stirred by an interest he took good care not to divulge in word or look. “Give me just time for a cold plunge, a few minutes with my masseur and my barber, a bite to eat and—”
Flint laid hold on his partner and shook him roughly.
“Move, you sluggard!” he commanded. And Tiger Waldron obeyed.
Forty-five minutes later, the two financiers were speeding down the asphalt of the avenue at a good round clip. Flint’s gleaming car formed one unit of the never-ending procession of motors which, day and night, year in and year out, spin unceasingly along the great, hard, splendid, cruel thoroughfare.
“I tell you,” Flint was asserting as they swung into Broadway, at Twenty-third Street, and headed for South Ferry, “I tell you, Wally, the thing is growing vaster and more potent every moment. The longer I look at it, the huger its possibilities loom up! With air under our control, as a source of manufacturing alone, we can pull down perfectly inconceivable fortunes. We shan’t have to send anywhere for our raw material. It will come to us; it’s everywhere. No cost for transportation, to begin with.
“With oxygen, nitrogen and liquid air as products, think of the possibilities, will you? Not an ice-plant in the country could compete with us, in the refrigerating line. With liquid air, we could sweep that market clean. By installing it on our fruit cars and boats, and our beef cars, the saving effected in many ways would run to millions. The sale of nitrogen, for fertilizer, would net us billions. And, above all, the control of the world’s air supply, for breathing, would make us the absolute, undisputed masters of mankind!
“We’d have the world by the windpipe. Its very life-breath would be at our disposal. Ha! What about revolution, then? What about popular discontent, and stiff-necked legislators, and cranky editors? What about commercial and financial rivals? What about these damned Socialists, with their brass-lunged bazoo, howling about monopoly and capitalism and all the rest of it? Eh, what? Just one squeeze,” here Flint closed his corded, veinous fingers, “just one tightening of the fist, and—all over! We win, hands down!”
“Like shutting the wind off from a runaway horse, eh?” suggested Waldro
n, squinting at his cigar as though to hide the involuntary gleam of light that sparkled in his narrow-set eyes.
“Precisely!” assented Flint, smiling his gold-toothed smile. “The wildest bolter has got to stop, or fall dead, once you close his nostrils. That’s what we’ll do to the world, Wally. We’ll get it by the throat—and there you are!”
“Yes, there we are,” repeated Waldron, “but—”
“But what, now?”
Waldron did not answer, for a moment, but squinted up at the tall buildings, temples of Mammon and of Greed, filled from pave to cornice with toiling, sweated hordes of men and women, all laboring for Capitalism; many of them, directly or indirectly, for him. Then, as the limousine slowed at Spring Street, to let a cross-town car pass—a car whose earnings he and Flint both shared, just as they shared those of every surface and subway and “L” car in the vast metropolis—he said:
“Have you weighed the consequences carefully, Flint? Quite carefully? This thing of cornering all the oxygen is a pretty big proposition. Do you think you really ought to undertake it?”
“Why not?”
“Have you considered the frightful suffering and loss of life it might entail? Almost certainly would entail? Are you quite sure you want to take the world by the throat and—and choke it? For money?”
“No, not for money, Waldron. We’re both staggering under money, as it is. But power! Ah, that’s different!”
“I know,” admitted Waldron. “But ought we—you—to attempt this, even for the sake of universal power? Your plan contemplates a monopoly such that everybody who refused or was unable to buy your product would, at best, have to get along with vitiated air, and at worst would have to stifle. Do you really think we ought to undertake this?”
Keenly he eyed Flint, as he thus sounded the elder man’s inhuman determination. Flint, fathoming nothing of his purpose, retorted with some heat:
“Ha! Getting punctilious, all at once, are you? Talk ethics, eh? Where were your scruples, a year ago, when people were paying 25 cents a loaf for bread, because of that big wheat pool you put through? How about the oil you’ve just lately helped me boost by a 20 per cent. increase? And when the papers—though mostly those infernal Socialist or Anarchist papers, or whatever they were—shouted that old men and women were freezing in attics, last winter, what then? Did you vote to arbitrate the D.K. coal strike? Not by a jugful! You stood shoulder to shoulder with me, then, Wally, while now—!”
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