“We could make that do; though, of course, any one in his office would be more likely to suspect a call from the Astor, being a public place. You must find out, definitely, this afternoon, just who it is closes up tomorrow. Then we must get hold of some little business detail or two, to fling in at him in case he has any suspicions.”
“That shouldn’t be so very difficult. Though I do wish you could get something nearer Ottenheimer’s voice!”
“I’ll have a rehearsal or two alone—though, I guess, we can muffle up that ’phone to suit our purpose. My last trouble now, is to find out how I’m going to get through those two doors without powder.”
Again he fell to pacing the little room with his abstracted stride, silently testing contingency after contingency, examining and rejecting the full gamut of possibilities. Sometimes he stood before the woman with the receiver, staring at her with vacant and unseeing eyes; at other times he paced between her and the window. Then he paused before the little green coils of wire that stretched across the room. He studied them with involuntary and childish movements of the head and hands. Then he suddenly stood erect, ran to the back window, and flung it open.
“My God, I’ve got it!” he cried, running back to where the woman still sat, listening, “I’ve got it!”
“How?” she asked, catching her breath.
“I’ve got to eat my way through what may be, for all I know, a full inch of Harveyized steel. I’ve got to burrow and work through it in some way, haven’t I? It has to be done quickly, too. I’ve got to have power, strong power.”
He stopped, suddenly, and seemed to be working out the unmastered details in his own mind, his eyes bent on a little shelf in one corner of the room.
“Have you ever seen an electric fan? You see this shelf, up here in the corner! Well, at one time, an electric fan stood there—see, here are the remnants of the wires. It stood there whirling away at five or six thousand revolutions to the minute, and with no more power than it takes to keep an ordinary office-lamp alight. Right at the back of this house is a wire, a power-circuit, alive with more than two hundred times that voltage, with power in plenty—a little condensed Niagara of power—asking to be taken off and made use of!”
“But what use?”