“That’s it!” agreed Garry. “Now that I come to think about it, I remember that every night the spectre seemed to appear, there were clouds. In June there were fleecy, fluffy ones, and in July they were whitish thunderheads.”
“We’d better be sure, though,” Don argued. “I meant that we may know how the spectre was made to appear, but that wouldn’t be evidence in a court if we told Uncle Bruce and he had Mr. Tew arrested for trying to ruin the airport by scaring everybody.”
“But the courts accept what they call ‘precedents,’ I know,” Garry insisted. “If a lawyer says that another case was decided, before, on a certain kind of evidence, then the judge has to decide the same sort of case, on the same sort of evidence, in the same way.”
“But how does that help?” Don demanded.
“Well—look here!” Garry was very earnest. “I can give you precedents about pictures on smoke. One night I was taken to a film showing part of a prizefight, and there were a whole lot of men in the audience who smoked, so that the hall had a thick curtain of cigar smoke between the screen and the projecting machine—and the picture showed on the smoke—and, what’s more, the smoke was all glowing between the lens and where the smoke was so thick that the picture was clear.”
“I’ve read about a picture theatre out in the desert section of the country,” Chick stated. “I read it in a moving picture ‘trade’ journal Mr. Tew loaned me—about a dust storm in Kansas, I believe it was, where the dust was so thick in a theatre that the pictures they had to show appeared on the dust almost as well as on the screen!”
“What of it?” argued Don. “I’m trying to make you see that proving how a vision is made to appear doesn’t prove who made it show!”
“I see your idea!” agreed Chick. “It could have come from the control room, if the man on duty happened to have the right kind of apparatus to use for showing a film and could fix it to use the powerful airport searchlight.”
“Yes,” argued Garry, convincing himself. “I see that! And Mr. Vance could be there alone, any time, any night. He could have a projector ‘head’—the thing that snatches the films down in front of the lenses and then holds them each a fraction of time before the light to let the image get itself impressed on your eye. He could fix it to use the search beam, probably. He’s a wizard about lighting for night work on airways and in airports.”
“Look!” Don pointed down the street. “There’s his car. He was in the Palace, I think. Even if we didn’t see him, that’s where he was. Now I say, let’s get our bicycles and hurry down to the airport, and look around, before he comes back to his cottage to sleep.”