Chapter 33
A NEW SUSPICION
It was Roger’s plan to consult his list of “sound” evidence and try to make it tell him whatever secret must be hidden there.
No other plan seemed so likely to be fruitful. If he was supposed to be in the dark-room, his presence in the office must show to some guilty person that Roger was equally alert and crafty. He wanted to “start something” in the open. Underground methods, secret attempts to do away with him, were hateful to open-natured, frank Roger.
Strolling up from the cellar, he watched the effect of his arrival from that unexpected quarter. Mr. Millman, discovering him, looked up with a start.
“Hey! Thought you were developing the stuff Zendt took up.”
Zendt—Millman. Roger connected the two mentally.
“Those speed pictures are important.” Mr. Ellison scowled, and Roger began to wonder whether his anger was genuine or if he, himself, was giving too much importance to a mere annoyance.
“I was just testing my new ‘cloak of invisibility,’” Roger put on a careless manner. He would give them something to puzzle about.
“Science is just the reality that used to be fairy stories,” he said, with a grin. “Pegasus, the flying horse, was just another way of prophesying airplanes. And if a magician could wave a wand and turn a beast into a Prince, doesn’t chemistry transmute base elements into wonderful, modern products? I got an idea that the cloak or helmet of invisibility, like the Helmet in Wagner’s opera that I heard on the radio, is just the prophecy of some Omega-ray, that makes things transparent and invisible without hurting them. It works, too. Did you see me go out?”
“No,” Mr. Millman snapped out the word, adding: