“It goes this evening. By the way, though, what am I just at present?”
Durkin thought for a moment, and then suddenly remembered her incongruous love for needlework.
“You had better be a hard-working maker of cotillion-favors, don’t you think? You might have a little show-case put up outside.”
She pondered the matter, drumming on the table with her impatient fingers. “But how is all this going to put us inside that eight-ton safe?”
“That’s the trouble we’ve got to face!” he laughed back at her.
“But haven’t you thought of anything, candidly?”
“Yes, I have. I’ve been cudgeling my brains until I feel light-headed. Now, nitro-glycerine I object to, it’s so abominably crude, and so disgustingly noisy.”
“And so odiously criminal!” she interpolated.
“Precisely. We’re not exactly yeggmen yet. And it’s brain we’ve got to cudgel, and not safe-doors! I mean, now that we really are mixed up in this sort of thing, it’s better to do it with as clean fingers as possible. Now, once more, speaking as an expert, by lighting a small piece of sulphur, and using it as a sort of match to start and maintain combustion, I could turn on a stream of liquid oxygen and burn through that safe-steel about the same as a carpenter bores through a pine board. But the trouble is in getting the oxygen. Then, again, if it was a mere campaign of armour against the intruder, I could win out in quite a different way. I could take powdered aluminum, mixed with some metallic superoxide, such as iron-rust, and get what you’d call thermit. Then I could take this thermit, and ignite it by means of a magnesium wire, so that it would burn down through three inches of steel like a handful of live coals through three inches of ice. That is, if we wanted to be scientific and up-to-date. Or, even a couple of gallons of liquid air, say, poured on the top of the safe, ought to chill the steel so that one good blow from a sledge would crack it.”
“But that, again, is only what cracksmen do, in a slightly different way!”