We returned from our errand, bearing a duplicate of the shade which we had found on a shelf. Dorothy, who by this time had come down from the table where Hamerly and Tom still stood, took the shade from my hands and held it to the light.
“This shade is nothing but ordinary glass. There’s nothing unusual about it,” she exclaimed. “The effect of the shade up there must be due to a gas inside.”
As Tom and Hamerly leaped from the table to inspect the shade, I seized the opportunity to ascend, and mounting, gazed through the hemispherical glass. A strange world met my eyes. Everything seen through the glass was bent around at extraordinary angles. Tom’s legs, seen below the shade, were perfectly natural and upright, but his torso, seen through the shade, was bent like the body of a Japanese contortionist engaged in extremest posturing. The straight line of the door casing beyond was broken short off where the line of the shade intersected it, and the top of the casing appeared in a wholly different place. As I gazed, I struggled to think what common everyday thing acted in much the same way. Eureka, I had it.
“Why, whatever is inside this globe bends everything seen through it, something as a spoon is bent in a glass of water or an oar in a pond,” I cried.
Hamerly looked up. “That’s about right, Orrington. Or better yet, you could say it bends the things you see, as the hot gases rising from a chimney bend everything behind them into wavy lines. Haven’t you ever watched the queer waviness that shows in a wintry atmosphere above chimneys, when you look over them?”
“Many a time,” I replied.
“Well, that’s just the same type of thing we have here. When you look across a chimney, where hot gases from a fire are coming off, you are looking from air through lighter gases (for such hot gases are lighter than cold air) to cold air again. That extreme bending of light rays that we call refraction is the reason why we hope we have a new gas.”
“If we can test the gas to find out what it is, it ought to be a big lift in finding out what really happened,” I said, as I descended from the table.
“That won’t be hard at all,” interrupted Dorothy. “We’ll test it with the spectroscope in the next room. Here comes Tom now, with the apparatus to catch and confine the gas.”
With glass tubes and air pumps, with platinum and flame, they strove for half an hour, Tom, Hamerly, and Swenton together. Dorothy threw in a quiet word of suggestion now and then, but the most of the time she stood back with me. This was a matter for experts, and left nothing for me to do. As we waited, I asked Dorothy two questions. “Where do you think the gas came from? Has it been here since Heidenmuller’s death?”