“It’s a clever exit, nevertheless,” thought Johnny, “and worth remembering. ‘Five minutes,’ he said, ‘then stand up.’”
Focusing the flashlight on his watch, he waited. The conveyor was moving. He could see the shadows of cement beams slowly rise and pass by him. The place was fairly spooky—“like a tomb,” he said to himself. It was dead still, too. Nothing save the almost noiseless motion of the conveyor broke the silence. “What a spot for a tragedy,” he thought. “A fight here in the night; the victor escapes; the dead body is carried silently on to the scrap-pile.”
One minute passed, two, three, four. The silence grew oppressive. Five! Then came a sudden flood of light from above him. Leaping to his feet, he reached up to the edge of a cement floor and vaulted up to it. Silently a second trapdoor closed behind him. His employer stood beside him.
“Have a nice ride?” he smiled.
“Fine! A bit spooky, though,” Johnny grinned back.
“Could you use it in an emergency?”
“I think so. It’s the wire of the lamp hanging directly above it, isn’t it?”
“Right. Works electrically. Pulling that wire does the trick. There are some others, though. We must hurry on. I have a directors’ meeting at eight.”
The marvels, the tricks of magic which Johnny witnessed during the tense half-hour that followed, thrilled, charmed and at times frightened him. Now he caught himself leaping aside, as if to avoid the blow of a hidden force, and now frozen in his tracks, he felt chills race up and down his spine, while cold perspiration stood out upon his brow. Convinced as he was that he was in the hands of a friend, he could not fully overcome the spell of this seemingly magic factory. While standing idly leaning against a wall, he would suddenly become conscious of a movement in front of him, and there, not three feet before him, a second wall towered. Whether it had risen from the floor, dropped from the ceiling or developed out of thin air, he could not tell, so sudden and silent was its motion. Again, he was standing talking to his employer and, having been attracted by a sound in the distance, turned away for an instant, only to find on turning again to his friend that he had vanished; the pillar beside which he had been standing had swallowed him up.
After initiating him into the secret mysteries of six of these strange devices, his employer promised him more in the future, then took him over to the front of a massive vault built into the wall of the factory.