“There…uh…was none today.”
“Very well. Graham, serve coffee and sandwiches here in twenty minutes.”
“Very good, sir. Come along, Jeff.”
“Coming. ”
As they left, Ardmore turned back to Calhoun. “In the meantime, Colonel, let’s go to the laboratory where the catastrophe originated. I still want to find out what happened here!”
The other two scientists and Scheer hesitated; he picked them up with a nod, and the little party filed out.
“You say nothing in particular happened, no explosion, no gas — yet they died?” They were standing around Dr. Ledbetter’s last set-up. The martyred scientist’s body still lay where it had fallen, a helpless, disorganized heap. Ardmore took his eyes from it and tried to make out the meaning of the set-up apparatus. It looked simple, but called no familiar picture to mind.
“No, nothing but a little blue flame that persisted momentarily.
Ledbetter had just closed this switch.” Calhoun pointed to it without touching it. It was open now, a self-opening, spring-loaded type. “I felt suddenly dizzy. When my head cleared, I saw that Ledbetter had fallen and went to him, but there was nothing that I could do for him.
He was dead — without a mark on him.”
“It knocked me out,” offered Wilkie. “I might not have made it if Scheer hadn’t given me artificial respiration. ”
“You were here?” Ardmore asked.
“No, I was in the radiation laboratory over at the other end of the plant. It killed my chief.”
Ardmore frowned and pulled a chair out from the wall. As he started to sit down there was a scurrying sound, a small gray shape flashed across the floor and out the open door. A rat, he thought, and dismissed the matter. But Dr. Brooks stared at it in amazement, and ran out the door himself, calling out behind him: “Wait a minute — right back!”
“I wonder what’s gotten into him?” Ardmore inquired of no one in particular. The thought flashed through his mind that the strain of events had finally been too much for the mild little biologist.
They had less than a minute to wait in order to find out. Brooks returned as precipitately as he had left. The exertion caused him to pant and interfered with articulation. “Major Ardmore! Dr. Calhoun!
Gentlemen!” He paused and caught his breath. “My white mice are alive!”
“Huh? What of it?”
“Don’t you see? It’s an important datum, perhaps a crucially important datum. None of the animals in the biological laboratory was hurt! Don’t you see?”
“Yes, but — Oh! Perhaps I do — the rat was alive and your mice weren’t killed, yet men were killed all around them.”
“Of course! Of course!” Brooks beamed at Ardmore.
“Hm-m-m. An action that kills a couple of hundred men through rock walls and metal, with no fuss and no excitement, yet passes by mice and the like. I’ve never before heard of anything that would kill a man but not a mouse.” He nodded toward the apparatus. “It looks as if we had big medicine in that little gadget, Calhoun.”
“So it does,” Calhoun agreed, “if we can learn to control it.”
“Any doubt in your mind?”
“Well — we don’t know why it killed, and we don’t know why it spared six of us, and we don’t know why it doesn’t harm animals.”
“So — Well, that seems to be the problem.” He stared again at the simple-appearing enigma. “Doctor, I don’t like to interfere with your work right from scratch, but I would rather you did not close that switch without notifying me in advance.” His gaze dropped to Ledbetter’s still figure and hurriedly shifted.
Over the coffee and sandwiches he pried further into the situation.
“Then no one really knows what Ledbetter was up to?”
“You could put it that way,” agreed Calhoun. “I helped him with the mathematical considerations, but he was a genius and somewhat impatient with lesser minds. If Einstein were alive, they might have talked as equals, but with the rest of us he discussed only the portions he wanted assistance on, or details he wished to turn over to assistants.”
“Then you don’t know what he was getting at?”