Spaulding looked back at the apparatus. A wisp of smoke was rising slowly from a big coil.
A relay clicked minutely.
WHAP!
For a confused second, everything seemed to happen at once.
But it didn't; there was a definite order to it.
First, a spot on the ceramic tile wall of the room became suddenly red, orange, white hot. Then there was a little crater of incandescent fury, as though a small volcano had erupted in the wall. Following that, there was a sputtering and crackling from the innards of the device itself, and a cloud of smoke arose suddenly, obscuring things in the room. Finally, there was the crash of circuit-breakers as they reacted to the overload from the short circuit.
There was silence for a moment, then the hiss of the automatic fire extinguishers in the testing room as they poured a cloud of carbon dioxide snow on the smoldering apparatus.
"There," said Davenport with utter satisfaction. "What did I tell you?"
"You didn't tell me this thing was a heat-ray projector," said Colonel Spaulding.
"What are you talking about?" Dr. Davenport said disdainfully.