“The rats——the menace to the public!”
“Roger, you haven’t studied those films Potts took.”
Roger got them at once, projected, one at a time, examining the screen images carefully. The cellar views, only proving that some object left no other trace of progress than scraped dust on step-edges, he considered and discarded.
Those taken by windows, doors, intakes and outlets of the air-conditioning, and gas-exhausting roof, cellar and wall orifices gave no revealing clues.
When he got to the wide-angles of the lower floor and stairway, and found no reward for his long scrutiny, Roger was baffled.
Only the micrometric enlarged snaps and one time-exposure near the X-ray devices remained. He considered them ruefully. They gave no foreground evidence to help him.
Roger, with defeat creeping over his feelings, was about to give up.
He was fair, he told himself, when it came to interpreting sounds, but at the more important quality of being able to connect the clue with everything else, he was “stumped.”
What could those enlarged views hide from him?
The walls, with racks of test-tubes, some containing chemical solutions, others holding cultures of various forms of growth that Mr. Zendt had accumulated or was studying, told him——