He opened a small door and they were in the laboratory.
"I'm afraid I'll have to lecture a bit," said Teddy. "Here's how the professor used to work out what was taking place out in the harbor."
He showed an intricate combination of silvered globes, tubes, and half a dozen thermometers.
"You see," Teddy began, "the water in the harbor was at a certain temperature. At this time of the year it would be around 52° Fahrenheit. The professor knew that fact, and then the fact that a huge mass of it was turned into ice. When you turn water into ice you have to take a lot of heat out of it, and that heat has to go somewhere. When water freezes normally in winter that heat goes into the air, which is cold. In this case the air was considerably warmer than the ice, and was as a matter of fact, undoubtedly radiating heat into the ice, instead of taking it away. The heat that would have to be taken from say ten pounds of water at 52° to make it freeze, if put into another smaller quantity of water would turn the smaller quantity of water into steam. You see?"
"The steam plume!" exclaimed the reporter.
"Of course," said Teddy. "We measure heat by calories usually. That's the amount of heat required to raise a pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. Suppose you have a mass of water. To make it freeze you have to take twenty thousand calories of heat out of it. Suppose you take that heat out. You've got to do something with it. Suppose you put it into another smaller mass of water. It will make that second mass of water hot, so hot that it will turn into steam at a high temperature."
"Then Varrhus," said the reporter thoughtfully, "was taking the heat from a big bunch of water and putting it into a small bunch, and the small bunch went up in steam. Is that right?"
"Precisely." Teddy turned to a file on which hung a number of sheets of paper covered with figures. "Here are the professor's calculations. We could only figure approximately, but we knew the size and depth of the ice cake, very nearly the temperature of the water that had been frozen, and naturally it was not hard to estimate the number of calories that had had to be taken out of the harbor water to make the ice cake. To check up, we figured out how much water that number of calories would turn into steam. The professor appealed to the government scientists who had watched the cake from the first. He found that from the size of the plume and the other means of checking its volume, he had come within ten per cent of calculating the amount of water that had actually poured out in the shape of steam."
"But—but that's amazing!" said the reporter.
"It was good work," Teddy said in some satisfaction. "Then we knew what Varrhus had done, and it remained to find out how he'd done it. Nothing like that had ever happened before. He couldn't very well have an engine working there in the water. The professor took to his mathematics again. Assume that I have a stove here that will make it just so warm at a distance of five feet. I'm leaving warm air out of consideration now and only thinking of radiated heat. If I put my thermometer ten feet away how much heat will I get?"