Beyond the Vanishing Point | Page 5

me."
His face was white and drawn, but his hands had steadied. The tremble
was gone out of his voice.
"I'm going after him, George! Now! Understand that? Now? His place
is only thirty miles from here, out there in the mountains. You can see
it in the daylight--a wall around his property and a stone castle which
he built in the middle of it. A gold mine? Hell!"
There was nothing to be seen now out of the window but the
snow-filled darkness, the blurred lights of Lower Quebec and the line

of dock lights five hundred feet below us.
"Will you fly me, George?"
"Of course."
I was the one trembling now; the cool feel of the automatic which Alan
thrust into my hand seemed suddenly to crystallize Babs' peril. I was
here in her room, with the scent of her perfume around me, and this
deadly weapon was needed! But the trembling was gone in a moment.
"Yes, of course, Alan. No use talking to the police. I gave them all the
information--a description of her, what you said she was wearing. No
sense dragging Polter's name into it, with nothing tangible to go on.
The police won't ransack the castle of a rich man just because you can't
find your sister. Come on. You can tell me what this place is like as we
go."
* * * * *
Bundled in our flying suits we hurried from the Hotel, climbed the
Citadel slope and in ten minutes were in the air. The wind sucked at us.
The snow now was falling with thick, huge flakes. Directed by Alan, I
headed out over this ice-filled St. Lawrence, past the frozen Ile
d'Orleans, toward Polter's mysterious mountain castle.
Suddenly Alan burst out, "I know what father's secret was! I can piece
it together now, from little things that were meaningless when I was a
kid. He invented the electro-microscope. You know that. The infinitely
small fascinated him. I remember he once said that if we could see far
enough down into smallness, we would come upon human life!"
Alan's low, tense voice was more vehement than I had ever heard it
before. "It's clear to me now, George. That little fragment of golden
quartz which he wanted me to be so careful of contained a world with
human inhabitants! Father knew it, or suspected it. And I think the
chemical problem on which he was working aimed for some drug. I
know it was a drug they were compounding, Polter said so once, a

radioactive drug; I remember listening at the door. A drug, George,
capable of making a human being infinitely small!"
I did not answer when momentarily Alan paused. So strange a thing.
My mind whirled with it; struggled to encompass it. And like the
meaningless individual pieces of a puzzle, dropping so easily into place
when the key piece is fitted, I saw Polter stealing that fragment of gold;
abducting Dr. Kent--perhaps because Polter himself was not fully
acquainted with the secret. And now, Polter up here with a fabulously
rich "gold mine." And Babs, abducted by him, to be taken--where?
It set me shuddering.
"That's what it was," Alan reiterated. "And Polter, here now with what
he calls a 'mine.' It isn't a mine, it's a laboratory! He's got father too,
hidden God knows where! And now Babs. We've got to get them,
George! The police can't help us! It's just you and me, to fight this thing.
And it's diabolical!"
CHAPTER II
We soared over the divided channel of the St. Lawrence, between
Orleans and the mainland. Montmorency Falls in a moment showed
dimly white through the murk to our left, a great hanging veil of ice
higher than Niagara. Further ahead, the lights of the little village of St.
Anne de Beaupré were visible with the gray-black towering hills
behind them.
"Swing left, George. Over the mainland. That's St. Anne. We pass this
side of it. Put the mufflers on. This damn thing roars like a tower
siren."
I cut in the muffler and switched off our wing-lights. It was illegal but
we were past all thought of that. We were both desperate; the slow
prudent process of acting within the law had nothing to do with this
affair. We both knew it.
Our little plane was dark, and amid the sounds of this night blizzard our

muffled engine couldn't be heard.
Alan touched me. "There are his lights; see them?"
We had passed St. Anne. The hills lay ahead--a wild mountainous
country stretching northward to the foot of Hudson Bay. The blizzard
was roaring out of the North and we were heading into it. I saw, on
what seemed like a dome-shaped hill perhaps a thousand feet above the
river level, a small