Roger left him at his work, at a call from Astrovox, the scientific student of planetary vibration who had been a side-show astrologer.
Joining the plump, bald-headed little man, close to sixty, whose deep-set, shaggy-browed blue eyes twinkled with inward cheerfulness, Roger helped him rig up his seemingly crazy idea of a vibra-spectra-telegraph-o-scope.
That was what Roger mentally named it. The man wanted to catch the possible vibrations of higher and lower frequencies than light range. He also wished the various colors showing in a star ray to tell whatever spectrum bands it might contain. Besides, he had to hold this apparatus trained on a desired planet or star, by use of a mechanical movement that enabled him, through a transit’s hairlike “sight” to follow a star as the earth revolved. Furthermore, he wished photographs and a sort of seismographic tape recording of vibration frequencies.
The nine-power telescope he had to be satisfied with was set up to poke its outer lens up through the skylight over the supply room.
All around the smaller, adjoining, partitioned place formerly made notable because of the vanishing rats and the strange voices, he had cages of mice, squirrels and rabbits, under rays from electrical, and other forms of vibration. In hot-house “frames” or small beds under glass he kept living plants, with color-filters straining the light playing on them, to test reaction to heat, light and color.
One bed, under a brownish glass, Roger noticed, had thin, stringy, sickly vegetation in it. In one under a short-wave irradiation treatment, plants thrived.
In tiny flat, glass-protected trays, specimens of cell-cultures in tubes, and sections of living plant tissue were being exposed.
“Guess we’ll have to clean out the far corner,” Astrovox suggested, “I dumped all the wrappings there. Might start a fire.”
Approaching to help, he finished his sentence with a chuckle.
Roger nodded, and gathered up the papers, making a fine rattle in the process.