The man groaned again.
“If it wasn’t that,” said Dr. O’Grady, “you must have tied a string round your ankles, stuffed the legs of your trousers with boxes of matches, and then rubbed yourself against something until they went off. I can’t imagine anything else that could have got you into the state that you’re in.”
“I was smoking,” said the man at last, “in the Chamber of Research.”
“In the what?”
“It’s what ’e calls it,” said the man. “I don’t know no other name for it.”
“Perhaps the floor of the Chamber of Research was covered with gunpowder behind where you were standing, and you dropped a lighted match into it.”
“’Ow was I to know the stuff would go off?”
“If you knew it was gunpowder,” said Dr. O’Grady, “you might have guessed it would go off if you dropped a match into it.”
“It weren’t gunpowder, not likely. It were some bloomin’ stuff ’e made. ’E’s always messing about making stuff, and none of it ever went off before.”
“If you mean Mr. Red,” said Dr. O’Grady, “I can quite imagine that the stuff he made wouldn’t go off. Unless, of course, it was intended not to. From what I’ve seen of him so far, I should say that his notion of manufacturing dynamite would be to take a hundredweight or so of toothpowder, and say to it, ‘Powder, explode.’ Still, you ought to have been more careful.”