Once determined on the line of his endeavors, he briefly marvelled again on the still unexplored potentialities of his brain. The weapon would be mounted on his own cart and electricity could either be broadcast or self-contained. For mobility, he decided on a power pack. The weapon itself evolved so easily that he wondered why no one had thought of it before now. Special type condensers built a battery charge up to over a million volts for a split second. This charge, invisible until it hit an object more solid than air, was contained in a very narrow beam by strong screens of opposite polarity. The entire sequence of operation was almost instantaneous, and the bolt was more in the nature of an electrical projectile than a continuous beam.
He decided that the unit, resembling a flashlight, could be mounted in a concealed spot under his "eye" so that it could be fired at whatever he might be looking at.
Now that he had a means of defending himself, Mel felt more at ease but at a loss for his next step. Merely eliminating both Jenkins and Neil would gain his revenge but what then? He could always notify the authorities but mentally flinched at exposing himself to the world as a freak and being at the mercy of the morbid curiosity of millions.
He had hardly begun to lay his plans before disaster struck. Neil came in early one morning and had Mel begin working on a problem concerning a new type of steel that would combine structural strength with the lightweight qualities of aluminum. Mel energized his calculators that were, electrically, practically part of his brain. He briefly wondered why Neil appeared so restless, wandering around the room with his hands behind his back, studying everything. Then the problem became so intriguing that he completely forgot that anyone was in the room.
His first inkling that anything was wrong was when Neil straightened up from the cart with a twisted smile on his face and exclaimed:
"Ha!"
Mel's first, startled conjecture was that the other had discovered the special weapon. He tried to rotate the lens so that the weapon would point at Neil but could see, by other stationary lenses in the room, that the one on the cart remained motionless. The same was true of the mechanical arm. In fact, the entire cart was dead.
"I pulled the main power fuse," said Neil, a slight smile on his face. "I suppose you thought you were getting away with it completely." Not positive as to how much his partner knew, Mel, decided on silence as his defense. The smile disappeared from the other's face and he continued, slowly:
"Something must be wrong with your reasoning. I knew something was up when the power company's statement showed an unusually high increase in power consumption. From there on it was easy to read the meters at night myself, and then the next morning. What were you up to anyway?" Mel still maintained his silence.
"Okay if that's the way you want it," said Neil more harshly. He walked to the end of the tank and Mel felt his brain telegraphing warnings to severed nerve connections not yet again in use. Neil reached out to a valve Mel recognized as controlling the minute amount of chemicals that served to nourish the cells in his brain. Relays were connected to it that also regulated the injection of oxygen proportionately into the fluid. He turned it slightly then began watching the oscilloscope closely. In a matter of seconds, Mel felt his usually sharp senses begin to dull. The oscilloscope blurred until, by great effort, he brought it into focus again. He saw that the height of the wavy line denoting the strength of his brain's output was abnormally low.