It was, in short, the old story of the ingenious man-on-the-ground, the “good match,” aided and abetted by the patronesses of the “poor relation.” The discriminating Marsden naturally fell in love with Venice, and to his great surprise and chagrin, was decisively repulsed by her. Never before having been refused anything he really wanted in his comfortably arranged life, he became passionately desirous of possessing her. Accordingly, my darling was shown a letter, forged with such diabolical cleverness as to be almost indistinguishable from my own hand. It purported to intrigue me with a very ordinary female at a period coincident with the time I had been so fervently courting my dear one.
She refused to credit the document and dispatched me a voluminous explanation of the whole occurrence. Attributing my silence to the exigencies of distance, she continued to write me for over a month. When no answer arrived after nearly three long months, she at length delivered a hastily planned ultimatum, to which she was later persuaded to adhere through the combined pressure of Marsden and her family, beating against the razed defences of her broken heart. Then it was that I received the betrothal announcement, the only communication her watchful family had permitted to escape their net of espionage.
As the story unfolded, my heart pounded with alternate waves of exaltation and red rage at the treacherous Marsden. Because of selfish duplicity, he had robbed us both of five years’ happiness, for I had forced my darling’s admission that she had never loved him, and now despised him as a common thief. My brief moment of delirious joy was sharply curtailed, however, when I came to press her to separate from this selfish swine. After some demur she confided that he was a drug addict. She said that he had been fighting desperately to break this habit ever since their marriage, for his jealous love of her was the only remaining weapon with which to combat his deep rooted vice. Deprived of his one motive, my darling earnestly assured me that it would be a matter of but a few short years before the white powders wrote Finis to yet another life. I could see but a balancing of an already overdrawn account in such an event, and said so in no uncertain terms. She did not chide me, merely patiently explained with sweet, sad resignation that she held herself responsible for his very life for the present. That although she could not love and honor him as she had promised, yet she was bound to cleave to him during this, his “worse” hour. And so we left it for the time, our future clouded, yet with no locked door to bar the present from us.
We met almost daily, unless Marsden’s activities interfered. At those times I was like a raging beast, unable to work, consumed with a livid hatred for the cunning thief who had stolen my love while my back was turned. I could not shake her resolution to terminate this loveless match, even though she now loathed the mate she had once tolerated. But in spite of the formlessness of our future, my work progressed as never before. Now my days were more than a mere procession of dates, for each was crowned with the glow of those few stolen moments with my darling Venice.
Came the day of my first complete success. Some weeks previously I had finally succeeded in transmitting a small wooden ball by radio. Perhaps I should say that I had “dissolved” it into its vibrations, for it was not until this later day that I had been able to materialize or “receive” it after it had been “sent.” I see you start and re-read this last sentence. I mean just what I say, and Marsden will bear me out, for as you shall see, he has witnessed this and other such experiments here in my laboratory. I have explained to him as much as I wanted him to know of the process, in fact, just enough so that he believes that a little intensive research and experimentation on his part will make him master of my secret. But he is entirely ignorant of the most important element, as well as of the manner of its employment.
Yes, after years of study and interrupted experimental research I was enabled finally to disintegrate, without the aid of heat, a solid object into its fundamental vibrations, transmit these vibrations into the ether in the form of so-called “radio waves” which I then attracted and condensed in my “receiving” apparatus, slowly damping their short kinked vibration-rate until finally there was deposited the homogeneous whole, identical in outline and displacement,—entirely unharmed from its etheric transmigration!
My success in this, my life’s dream, was directly the result of our discoveries on that bitter expedition into Afghanistan. All my life I had been interested in the study of vibrations, but had achieved no startling successes or keen expectations thereof until we stumbled upon that strange mineral deposit on what was an otherwise ill-fated trip for me. It was then that I realized that radioactive niton might solve my hitherto insurmountable difficulty in the transmission of material vibrations into electronic waves. My experiments thereafter, while successful to the degree that I discovered several entirely new principles of resonic harmonics, as well as an absolute refutation of the quantum theory of radiation, fell far short of my hoped-for goal. At that time I was including both helium and uranium in my improved cathode projectors, and it was not until I had effected a more sympathetic combination with thorium that I began to receive encouraging results. My final success came with the substitution of actinium for the uranium and the addition of polonium, plus a finer adjustment which I was able to make in the vortices of my three modified Tesla coils, whose limitations I had at first underrated. I was then enabled to filter my resonance waves into pitch with my “electronic radiate rays,” as I called them, with the success I shall soon describe.
Of course, all this is no clearer than a page of Sanskrit to you, nor do I intend that it shall be otherwise. As I have said, such a secret is far too potent to be unloosed upon a world of such delicately poised nations, whose jaws are still reddened from their recent ravening. It needs no explanation of mine to envision the terrible possibilities for evil in the application of this great discovery. It shall go with me—to return at some future, more enlightened time after another equally single-minded investigator shall have stumbled upon it. It is this latter thought which has caused me to drop the hints that I have. My earnest hope is that you will permit the misguided Marsden to read the preceding paragraph. In it he will note a reference to an element which I have not mentioned to him before, and will enable him to obtain certain encouraging results,—encouraging but to further efforts, to more frantic attempts. But I digress.
With my success on inanimate objects, I plunged the more enthusiastically into my work. I should have lost all track of time but for my daily tryst with Venice. Her belief in me was the tonic which spurred me on to further efforts after each series of meticulously conducted experiments had crumbled into failure. It was the knowledge that she awaited me which alone upheld me in those dark moments of depression, which every searcher into the realms of the unknown must encounter.
Then came the night of November 28th, the Great Night. After countless failures, I finally succeeded in transmitting a live guinea pig through the atmosphere and “received” it, alive and well, in the corner of my laboratory. Think of it! A twist of a switch and the living, breathing piglet slowly dissolved before my eyes and vanished along a pair of wires to my aerial, whence it was transferred as a set of waves in the ether to the receiving apparatus,—there to reincarnate into the living organism once more, alive and breathing, unharmed by its extraordinary journey! That night I strode out into the open and walked until dawn suddenly impressed the gray world upon my oblivious exaltation, for I was King of the Universe, a Weaver of Miracles.