The Sign at Six Part 13

They felt their way down the ten flights of stairs like blind men. A few inmates of the building they jostled, or pa.s.sed, or picked up on the way.

"This settles it," one remarked profanely. "My lease quits. They can sue and be d.a.m.ned. I decline to have anything more to do with any freak-lined skysc.r.a.per of this description."

In the lower corridors Darrow halted them.

"Here's another thing," said he: "if I'm right, we should run out of this just eleven feet beyond the last elevator cage."

He felt his way along the grill, made four paces forward, and uttered a little cry of satisfaction. The two men followed him blindly. As though stepping from one room to another they emerged into glaring daylight!

Both involuntarily looked back. The darkness hung there like a curtain, just inside the outer walls of the building. Already a crowd had gathered to observe this new and strange phenomenon of the now celebrated Atlas Building. It was a curious and a facetious crowd, but not awestricken, as it had been at the first manifestations of this freakish upset of natural forces.

A man observing the flight of an aeroplane for the first time loses his sense of strangeness inside of a few minutes; and yet flying has been since the days of Icarus considered one of the impossible achievements. So the general public of Manhattan were becoming accustomed to reversals of form in the affairs of the physical world. The frivolous majority, having discovered nothing to be apprehended from the phenomena save a few hours'

helplessness of a sort, and much to be gained through the savor of novelty, were inclined to an amused or irritated att.i.tude, depending on the extent to which its occupations were interfered with. The minority took to religious meetings and interpretations.

Darrow's exit, and that of his companions, was greeted uproariously.

"'Please go 'way an' let me sleep!'" sang one, at the blinking men.

"Here's another!" shrilled a gamin. "Get up! The porter wants to make up your berth!"

Several of the crowd, pending the usual arrival of the police to clear the corridor, had ventured through the wide portals, and were experimenting with this strange palpable quality of darkness. One or two popped inside the curtain, but emerged quickly, looking a little scared.

A bright youth made the discovery that if one lighted a match and stepped within the blackness, the match was immediately extinguished, but that upon emerging into daylight the flame came up again. Some one happened along with a plumber's gasoline torch. Immediately this was lighted and the experiment repeated. The bearer of the torch, astonished at the instant extinguishment of the flame, felt with his hand to see what could be the matter. Instantly he uttered a yelp of pain, and leaped outside, displaying a badly burned palm.

"There wasn't no flame; I swear it!" he explained excitedly, "but she burned, just the same!" He rushed about from one to another, displaying his injured palm to whoever would look.

Darrow paid little attention to this gathering crowd. First of all, he scanned a paper he held in his hand; then plunged back again into the blackness.

Jack Warford and Hallowell, left together, hesitated uncertainly.

"He'll be back," the reporter decided finally, "and he's the man to tie to."

While waiting, he proceeded to pick up what information he could from the bystanders. It seemed that the first intimation of anything wrong was followed very shortly by the emergence of McCarthy, disheveled, hatless, staring, gasping. The boss had stumbled into the street, hesitated, then started south on a run. Before any one could stop him, he had turned a corner and disappeared. The excitement at the Atlas Building had distracted attention from him. n.o.body wondered at his getting rattled and running away. The few tenants remaining in the building had stumbled forth, vowing never to return to such a--a.s.sorted adjectives--building. That was all there seemed to be to say.

In the meantime the crowd had increased from a few hundred to thousands.

Police appeared. The corridors were cleared of all but a few. Among these were Hallowell and Jack Warford; the former as a reporter, the latter as the reporter's companion. Doctor Knox and Professor Eldridge arrived shortly. After a time Darrow reappeared, sauntering quite calmly from the pall of darkness, as though emerging from behind a velvet curtain.

CHAPTER XII

THE UNKNOWN

It will now become necessary to glance in pa.s.sing at the personal characteristics of Professor Eldridge. This man was in about his fortieth year, tall, spare, keenly intellectual in countenance, cold, possessed of an absolute reliance on the powers of science, beyond which his mental processes did not stray. His manner was distinguished by a stiff unbending formality; his expression by a glacial coldness of steel-gray eyes and a straight-line compression of thin lips; his dress by a precise and unvarying formalism, and his speech by a curious polysyllabic stiffness.

This latter idiosyncrasy would, in another, have seemed either priggish or facetiously intended. With Professor Eldridge it was merely a natural method of speech. Thus, arriving once at the stroke of the dinner hour, he replied to compliments on his punctuality by remarking:

"I have always considered punctuality a virtue when one is invited to partake of gratuitous nourishment."

Withal, his scientific attainments were not only undoubted, but so considerable as to have won for him against many odds the reputation of a great scientist. His specialty, if such it might be called, was scientific diagnosis. The exactness of scientific laws was so admirably duplicated by the exact.i.tudes of his mind that he seemed able, by a bloodless and mechanical sympathy, to penetrate to the most obscure causes of the strangest events. It might be added that practically his only social ties were those with the Warfords, and that the only woman with whom he ever entered into conversation was Helen.

At sight of him Percy Darrow's lounging gait became accentuated to exaggeration.

"h.e.l.lo, Prof!" he drawled. "On the job, I see. Good morning, Doctor," he greeted Knox. "What do you make of it?"

"I make of it that the Atlas Building will shortly be without tenants,"

replied the doctor; "me, for one."

Eldridge surveyed Darrow coldly through the glittering toric lenses of his gla.s.ses.

"The cause of these extraordinary phenomena is self-evident," he stated.

"You mean their nature, not their cause," replied Darrow. "In nature, they refer back to the interference with etheric and molecular vibrations.

That," he added, "is a fact that every boy in the grammar-school physics cla.s.s has figured out for himself. The cause is a different matter."

"I stand corrected," said Eldridge. "Such lapses in accuracy of statement are not usual with me, but may be considered as concomitant with unusual circ.u.mstances."

"Right-o!" agreed Darrow cheerfully. "Well, what about the causes?"

"That I will determine when I am satisfied that all the elements of the problem are in my hands."

"Right-o!" repeated Darrow. "Well, I'll bet you a new hat I'll land the cause before you do. Be a sport!"

"I never indulge in wagers," replied Eldridge.

"Well," said Darrow to Jack and Hallowell, "come on!"

Without waiting to see if he was followed, the young man again plunged into the black and clinging darkness.

"Get hold of my coat," his voice came to the others. "We're going to climb."

Accordingly they climbed, in silence, up many flights of stairs, through the cloying darkness. At last Darrow halted, turned sharp to the left, fumbled for a door, and entered a room.

"Simmons?" he said.

"Here!" came a voice.

"I thought you'd be on the job," said Darrow, with satisfaction. "How's your instrument? Going, eh? We are in the wireless offices," he told the others. "Sit down, if you can find chairs. We'll wait until the sun is s.h.i.+ning brightly, love, before we really try to get down to business. In the meantime--"

"In the meantime--" repeated both Jack and Hallowell, in a breath. "Go on, my son," conceded the latter. "I bet we have the same idea."

"Well, I was going to say that I'm not in the grammar-school physics cla.s.s, and I want to know what you meant by your remark to Eldridge," said Jack.

"That's my trouble," said Hallowell.

"It's simple enough," began Darrow. "We have had, first, a failure of all electricity; second, a failure of all sound; third, a failure of all light. The logical mind would therefore examine these things to see what they have in common. The answer simply jumps at you: _Vibration_.

Electricity and light are vibrations in ether; sound is vibration in air or some solid. Therefore, whatever could absolutely stop vibration would necessarily stop electricity, light and sound."