The sound-camera! It had been running perhaps, till its roll of non-flam film was done. It might tell him something.
Feverishly he got pyro, acid and the sodas into the developing water. He did not stop even for distilled water but took tap fluid.
He immersed the hurriedly rubber-wrapped celluloid.
As it stayed the required fifteen or eighteen minutes, he went over the lab. again, finding no more than before.
He took out the roll, dipped it into hypo-acid fixing solution, and impatiently watched its opaque yellowish high-lights slowly dissolve and lose the un-needed silver salts, to clear into transparency as grays and blacks became more evident.
Hastily washing the film, he unreeled an end, held it up under a light, to see if the sound-track at one side carried any shadows.
There was a recording!
Feverishly, forgetting his terrors, he raced to the projector in the screening room. Carefully in spite of haste he threaded the wet “stock” over the sprocket, down through the film gate, over another sprocket and clipped the end to the take-up reel. He snapped on the light.
At proper speed, and sorry that he must harm the wet emulsion, but eager to hear its story, he ran his find.
The picture was that of the upper room, narrowed down onto the various activities of the old star-reader. The first was a take of his rabbits as they scampered about under a change of ray-lamps.