The Skylark of Space | Page 2

of either a bottle or a needle. Did you see a pink serpent
carrying it away? Take my advice, old son, if you want to stay in Uncle
Sam's service, and lay off the stuff, whatever it is. It's bad enough to
come down here so far gone that you wreck most of your apparatus and
lose the rest of it, but to pull a yarn like that is going too far. The Chief
will have to ask for your resignation, sure. Why don't you take a couple
of days of your leave and straighten up?"
Seaton paid no attention to him, and Scott returned to his own
laboratory, shaking his head sadly.
Seaton, with his mind in a whirl, walked slowly to his desk, picked up
his blackened and battered briar pipe, and sat down to study out what

he had done, or what could possibly have happened, to result in such an
unbelievable infraction of all the laws of mechanics and gravitation. He
knew that he was sober and sane, that the thing had actually happened.
But why? And how? All his scientific training told him that it was
impossible. It was unthinkable that an inert mass of metal should fly off
into space without any applied force. Since it had actually happened,
there must have been applied an enormous and hitherto unknown force.
What was that force? The reason for this unbelievable manifestation of
energy was certainly somewhere in the solution, the electrolytic cell, or
the steam-bath. Concentrating all the power of his highly-trained
analytical mind upon the problem--deaf and blind to everything else, as
was his wont when deeply interested--he sat motionless, with his
forgotten pipe clenched between his teeth. Hour after hour he sat there,
while most of his fellow-chemists finished the day's work and left the
building and the room slowly darkened with the coming of night.
Finally he jumped up. Crashing his hand down upon the desk, he
exclaimed:
"I have liberated the intra-atomic energy of copper! Copper, 'X,' and
electric current!
"I'm sure a fool for luck!" he continued as a new thought struck him.
"Suppose it had been liberated all at once? Probably blown the whole
world off its hinges. But it wasn't: it was given off slowly and in a
straight line. Wonder why? Talk about power! Infinite! Believe me, I'll
show this whole Bureau of Chemistry something to make their eyes
stick out, tomorrow. If they won't let me go ahead and develop it, I'll
resign, hunt up some more 'X', and do it myself. That bath is on its way
to the moon right now, and there's no reason why I can't follow it.
Martin's such a fanatic on exploration, he'll fall all over himself to build
us any kind of a craft we'll need ... we'll explore the whole solar system!
Great Cat, what a chance! A fool for luck is right!"
He came to himself with a start. He switched on the lights and saw that
it was ten o'clock. Simultaneously he recalled that he was to have had
dinner with his fiancée at her home, their first dinner since their
engagement. Cursing himself for an idiot he hastily left the building,

and soon his motorcycle was tearing up Connecticut Avenue toward his
sweetheart's home.
CHAPTER II
Steel Becomes Interested
Dr. Marc DuQuesne was in his laboratory, engaged in a research upon
certain of the rare metals, particularly in regard to their electrochemical
properties. He was a striking figure. Well over six feet tall, unusually
broad-shouldered even for his height, he was plainly a man of
enormous physical strength. His thick, slightly wavy hair was black.
His eyes, only a trifle lighter in shade, were surmounted by heavy black
eyebrows which grew together above his aquiline nose.
Scott strolled into the room, finding DuQuesne leaning over a delicate
electrical instrument, his forbidding but handsome face strangely
illuminated by the ghastly glare of his mercury-vapor arcs.
"Hello, Blackie," Scott began. "I thought it was Seaton in here at first.
A fellow has to see your faces to tell you two apart. Speaking of Seaton,
d'you think that he's quite right?"
"I should say, off-hand, that he was a little out of control last night and
this morning," replied DuQuesne, manipulating connections with his
long, muscular fingers. "I don't think that he's insane, and I don't
believe that he dopes--probably overwork and nervous strain. He'll be
all right in a day or two."
"I think he's a plain nut, myself. That sure was a wild yarn he sprung on
us, wasn't it? His imagination was hitting on all twelve, that's sure. He
seems to believe it himself, though, in spite of making a flat failure of
his demonstration to us this morning. He saved that waste solution he
was working