"Is that all?" Nebel's face was purple with rage. They hated each other bitterly, these two, and Dampier had given him not the slightest satisfaction as yet.
The Frenchman shrugged. "It is not complete. Nothing can pass the completed zone, though it is good enough now for anything your blundering fools have invented or will invent. However—"
He turned to the dials. Then suddenly he wheeled. His thin lips were drawn back in a snarl of fury, his eyes were sunken pools of black hate. With a scream he leapt at Nebel's throat.
The first slug caught him in mid-air. The shock dropped him in a crooked heap. Five more bullets smacked into him as he lay there, then Nebel's polished shoe went out and turned him over on his back. He lay there, a bloody froth on his contorted lips, sneering up at the man who had killed him.
For the first time Nebel turned to me. "It was in self defense. You will remember that, Mr. Crandall, if I decide to let you live." He went to the machine, as Dampier had done, and tapped the dials lightly with his long white fingers.
"These red marks—they are, I suppose, the settings with which Monsieur Dampier was working. He would not go beyond, for me. And yet, they are less than halfway to the limit of the dials. What will happen, if I turn them so—a hair beyond?"
His fingers twisted once, twice, and behind us Bill Porter's voice cried out. "Stop, you fool! Stop!"
He stood in the door of the temperature room, the sheaf of Dampier's notes in his hand. Nebel's thin eyebrows went up. "Mr. Porter! I had forgotten you. And why am I a fool?" His fingers spun another of the dials.
"You murdering Teuton fool!" Bill's tone was venomous. "What do you know about science? Your agents bring you this and that. You pay them or kill them, as may be convenient, but what do you know or care about what they have given you, so long as it can be sold at a profit: Mike, come here."
No one moved to stop me. Bill held out the papers, his thumbs marking a certain line. I saw that the margins were filled with his spidery writing.