Once inside, he was directed through long corridors and past the doors of laboratories filled with gleaming apparatus and intent students, until he reached the door he sought. When he pushed it open he walked into a small ante-room in which two men of his own age and unscholarly appearance were lounging and smoking. They greeted him with calls of joy.
"Carton, you're not stuck with this yarn too?" one asked. "You'll be graduating to the Sunday supplements if you keep on."
"I can see the Inquirer's headlines tonight," chaffed the other. "'Noted scientist makes amazing discovery——'"
"Where is our noted scientist?" asked Carton of Burns, the Courier's man.
"Dr. Grantham is even now engaged upon the tremendous work which he will presently reveal to the eager press," said the other. "In other words, he and that sour-faced assistant of his, Gray, are cooking up something to get page-one space."
"I don't know about that, Burns, at that," put in the third reflectively. "Dr. Grantham's got a great rep among the science boys, and he's never been any space-hound."
"Well, why his announcement of this stuff, then?" demanded Carton. "Claiming to be able to make matter invisible at will—rot! It's just the old cancer-cure dodge the ambitious medics use, worked out in a different way."
"Perhaps so," said the other, "but—"
He was interrupted by the entrance of a man from the room beyond, at sight of whom Carton found himself revising some of his conceptions. Dr. Howard Grantham was a man of over middle age, big and of average appearance with his graying hair and clean-shaven face, but with very unaverage eyes, gray and strong and steady. When he spoke his voice seemed to hold a calm and contained power.