“I do,” I answered. “But—”
“Hold on till we finish the letter, Jim, and we’ll go over it.” I subsided and Dorothy went on.
“More than that, the distance from the point of generation of the wave, and the exact direction from which it comes, can be ascertained. It is, as you may see, the unique discovery of the past five years. In computing and making it, I have used some discoveries made by my late colleague, Professor Mingern. At his death, six years ago, he passed his work on to me. Now that my death approaches, I pass my work on to you. I have had many pupils in my long life, but none so worthy, none so able to carry on the work, as you, my dear friend and pupil. Farewell.
“Carl Denckel.”
“He was as fine an old chap as ever I knew,” said Tom, with deep feeling. “To think of his sending that to me. But what can have happened to it?”
Dorothy stood with a second sheet in her hand. “Here’s something about it,” she said. “Manuscripts sent under cover to same address, apparatus sent to New York via Hamburg-American line.”
“Then the first thing to do is to find the apparatus,” said Tom. “We can send a trailer after the manuscript, but we can’t bank on getting it. I’ll go down to the custom-house to-morrow morning. What a blow to science, if the whole thing were lost.” “But,” he went on suddenly, “isn’t it extraordinary that this should come along just now? It helps us a whole lot.”
“That is so,” remarked Dorothy reflectively. “We ought to be able to tell just where ‘the man’ is every time.”
“Once more I humbly confess my ignorance,” I remarked, “but will you kindly enlighten me as to the way in which this is to help us in the search for the man?”
“Certainly,” said Dorothy smiling. “We know that the reflectoscopes were charged by a wave which ‘the man’ sent out from some definite spot. Theoretically, that place might be anywhere in the world. Practically, it’s probably somewhere not many miles from the ship he is destroying. But it is somewhere. His waves start from some definite point. There is some single point of generation. Now, with this machine, I ought to be able to find out just where the place is from which the wave starts, and not only within a hundred miles, but within a very brief space. Say, for instance, we had the machine in London, I could tell that ‘the man’ started his waves from Sandy Hook, and not from Hell Gate. That power of fixing the exact position of ‘the man’ gives us a tremendous step.”