The inspector looked startled and Dennis stared but they made no comment and one official mounted the ladder while the other turned the cock. There was a gurgle and then a swishing rush as the liquid poured into the slender, solid pipe.
“It’s going down,” the man on the ladder announced. “Whatever this greasy stuff is, it’s slipping through the pipe, all right! What do you think is at the bottom of it, Mac?”
“I’m not wanting to think of it till I have to!” McCarty groaned. “Sing out if—if it stops running out before the vat’s empty.”
But the official, did not “sing out” and the waiting seemed interminable. At last, after the longest half-hour that any of them had known, he announced:
“Vat’s quite empty, Mac! Except for scum it’s as clean as the floor! There’s six little things that look like pebbles rolling around in it, though; shall I climb down and get them?”
“For heaven’s sake, no!” McCarty sprang to his feet. “’Tis sudden death and a horrible one, if you so much as touch the stuff that’s left there! Go and ask André for a lead spoon from the kitchen, and mind it’s lead!”
The man obeyed and McCarty threw off his coat, climbed the ladder, and perched on the rim of the vat, while Dennis uttered agonized warnings from below. Then he drew up the ladder, planted it firmly inside the vat and when the detective returned with the required spoon he descended carefully to the lowest rung and scooped up the six gray pellets from the slime of the bottom.
When he had climbed over and down once more, guarding his find with the utmost caution the others gathered around him and he shuddered as he addressed the inspector.
“That vat is lined with lead, sir; nothing else but lead could hold that stuff for it eats everything away as if it hadn’t even been! You notice that ladder was purposely fixed with lead tips to the feet of it or it would have melted under me! I’ve heard of it but I never saw it before. It’s hydrofluoric acid. ’Twill go through steel and rock and—and flesh and bone, and leave no sign! Do you get me?”
“I do, but it’s horrible!” The inspector shivered. “You mean that Orbit—! Was that what he meant by ‘annihilation’?”