“Not terrible, Dotty, just extraordinary. So outrageously extraordinary that before I begin I wish you’d look me in the eye and tell me if you have any doubts about my sanity.”
She led him into the living room, held his face up to the light, and made a pretense of studying his eyes.
“Richard Ballinger Seaton, I certify that you are entirely sane—quite the sanest man I ever knew. Now tell me the worst. Did you blow up the Bureau with a C-bomb?”
“Nothing like that,” he laughed. “Just a thing I can’t understand. You know I’ve been reworking the platinum wastes that have been accumulating for the last ten or fifteen years.”
“Yes, you told me you’d recovered a small fortune in platinum and some of those other metals. You thought you’d found a brand-new one. Did you?”
“I sure did. After I’d separated out everything I could identify, there was quite a lot of something left—something that didn’t respond to any tests I knew or could find in the literature.
“That brings us up to today. As a last resort, because there wasn’t anything else left, I started testing for trans-uranics, and there it was. A stable—almost stable. I mean—isotope; up where no almost-stable isotopes are supposed to exist. Up where I would’ve bet my last shirt no such isotope could possibly exist.
“Well, I was trying to electrolyze it out when the fireworks started. The solution started to fizz over, so I grabbed the beaker—fast. The wires dropped onto the steam-bath and the whole outfit, except the beaker, took off out of the window at six or eight times the speed of sound and in a straight line, without dropping a foot in as far as I could keep it in sight with a pair of good binoculars. And my hunch is that it’s still going. That’s what happened. It’s enough to knock any physicist into an outside loop, and with my one-cylinder brain I got to thinking about it and simply didn’t come to until after ten o’clock. All I can say is, I’m sorry and I love you. As much as I ever did or could. More, if possible. And always will. Can you let it go—this time?”
“Dick . . . oh, Dick!”
There was more—much more—but eventually Seaton mounted his motorcycle and Dorothy walked beside him down to the street. A final kiss and the man drove away.
After the last faint glimmer of red tail-light had disappeared In the darkness Dorothy made her way to her room, breathing along and slightly tremulous, but supremely happy sigh.
Chapter 3
SEATON’S childhood had been spent in the mountains of northern Idaho, a region not much out of the pioneer stage and offering few inducements to intellectual effort. He could only dimly remember his mother, a sweet, gentle woman with a great love for books; but his father, “Big Fred” Seaton, a man of but one love, almost filled the vacant place. Fred owned a quarter-section of virgin white-pine timber, and in that splendid grove he established a home for himself and his motherless boy.
In front of the cabin lay a level strip of meadow, beyond which rose a magnificent, snow-crowned peak that caught the earliest rays of the sun.
This mountain, dominating the entire countryside, was to the boy a challenge, a question, and a secret. He accepted the challenge, scaling its steep sides, hunting its forests, and fishing its streams. He toughened his sturdy young body by days and nights upon its slopes. He puzzled over the question of its origin as he lay upon the needles under some monster pine. He put staggering questions to his father; and when in books he found some partial answers his joy was complete. He discovered some of the mountain’s secrets then—some of the laws that govern the world of matter, some of the beginnings man’s mind has made toward understanding the hidden mechanism of Nature’s great simplicity.
Each taste of knowledge whetted his appetite for more. Books! Books! More and more he devoured them; finding in them meat for the hunger that filled him, answers to the questions that haunted him.
After Big Fred lost his life in the forest fire that destroyed his property, Seaton turned his back upon the woods forever. He worked his way through high school and won a scholarship at college. Study was a pleasure to his keen mind; and he had ample time for athletics. for which his backwoods life had fitted him outstandingly. He went out for everything. and excelled in football and tennis.
In spite of the fact that he had to work his way he was popular with his college mates, and his popularity was not lessened by an almost professional knowledge of sleight-of-hand. His long fingers could move faster than the eye could follow, and many a lively college party watched in vain to see how he did what he did.
After graduating with the highest honors as a physical chemist, he was appointed research fellow in a great university, where he won his Ph.D. by brilliant research upon rare metals—his dissertation having the lively title of “Some Observations upon Certain Properties of Certain Metals, Including Certain TransUranic Elements.” Soon afterward he had his own room in the Rare Metals Laboratory, in Washington, D.C.
He was a striking figure—well over six feet in height, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, a man of tremendous physical strength. He did not let himself grow soft in his laboratory job, but kept in hard, fine condition. He spent most of his spare time playing tennis, swimming, and motorcycling.
As a tennis player he quickly became well know in Washington sporting and social circles. During the District Tournament he met M. Reynolds Crane—known to only a very few intimates as “Martin”—the mutli-millionaire explorer-archaeologist-sportsman who was then District singles champion. Seaton had cleared the lower half of the list and played Crane in the final round. Crane succeeded in retaining his title, but only after five of the most bitterly contested sets ever seen in Washington.
Impressed by Seaton’s powerful slashing game, Crane suggested that they train together as a doubles team. Seaton accepted instantly, and the combination was highly effective.
Practicing together almost daily, each came to know the other as a man of his own kind, and a real friendship grew up between them. When the Crane-Seaton team had won the District Championship and had gone to the semi-finals of the National before losing, the two were upon a footing which most brothers could have envied. Their friendship was such that neither Crane’s immense wealth and high social standing nor Seaton’s comparative poverty and lack of standing offered any obstacle whatever. Their comradeship was the same, whether they were in Seaton’s modest room or in Crane’s palatial yacht.
Crane had never known the lack of anything that money could buy. He had inherited his fortune and had little or nothing to do with its management, preferring to delegate that job to financial specialists. However, he was in no sense an idle rich man with no purpose in life. As well as being an explorer and an archaeologist and a sportsman, he was also an engineer—a good one—and a rocket-instrument man second to none in the world. The old Crane estate in Chevy Chase was now, of course, Martin’s, and he had left it pretty much as it was. He had, however, altered one room, the library, and it was now peculiarly typical of the man. It was a large room, very long, with many windows. At one end was a huge fireplace, before which Crane often sat with his long legs outstretched, studying one or several books from the cases close at hand. The essential furnishings were of a rigid simplicity, but the treasures he had gathered transformed the room into a veritable museum.
He played no instrument, but in a corner stood a magnificent piano, bare of any ornament; and a Stradivarius reposed in a special cabinet. Few people were asked to play either of those instruments; but to those few Crane listened in silence, and his brief words of thanks showed his real appreciation of music. He made few friends, not because he hoarded his friendship, but because, even more than most rich men, he had been forced to erect around his real self an almost impenetrable screen. As for women, Crane frankly avoided them, partly because his greatest interests in life were things in which women had neither interest or place, but mostly because he had for years been the prime target of the man-hunting debutants and the matchmaking mothers of three continents.
Dorothy Vaneman with whom he had become acquainted through his friendship with Seaton, had been admitted to his friendship. Her frank comradeship was a continuing revelation, and it was she who had last played for him.
She and Seaton had been caught near his home by a sudden shower and had dashed in for shelter. While the rain beat outside, Crane had suggested that she pass the time by playing his “fiddle”. Dorothy, a Doctor of Music and an accomplished violinist, realized with the first sweep of the bow that she was playing an instrument such as she had known only in her dreams, and promptly forgot everything else. She forgot the rain, the listeners, the time, and the place; she simply poured into that wonderful violin everything she had of beauty, of tenderness, of artistry.