He moved from the blue-green tanks with their faint stirrings of a nameless life shadowing the translucent glass. At the end of the screen he turned to look squarely back at Arbuthnot.
“Although a narrow and unimaginative man, you are an honest one,” he said. “You will know what to do. I am going back to nothingness!”
The physician heard him cross the room, caught the soft click of the lever as he threw open the great steel door. He leaped forward, overturning the screen, and beheld Slade with a quick motion cast aside his single garment and shuffle off his sandals. His naked body stood out for a second against the dark interior of the metal closet; and then the door closed noiselessly behind him.
Arbuthnot’s impulse to rush forward and open the door was arrested by a deep, musical tone which came from the closet. Slowly, and by infinitesimal tonal shadings, it rose through the scale, culminating at length in an incredibly thin and high note, like the keenest harmonic of a violin. It died away into silence; but he had a feeling that the sound was still mounting up and up, though now far beyond the range of his ear. Then he turned, steadily enough, and switched on the current in the electric incinerator.
The half-hour that followed was never anything save a horrible nightmare. The details were not clear, and he made no effort to recall them. On many a sleepless night he prayed to be able to forget them all.
When the furnace was white hot he began dropping into it, one by one, the living organisms from their glass tanks. As he moved back and forth, there were times when he felt that he was a malignant deity destroying a world. A sense of megalomania, like that induced by certain drugs, obsessed him. The poor creatures didn’t want to die; that was plain enough. They clung to their bleak, arid lives, and they feared and hated him. When Slade had approached their tanks they had evinced a feeble pleasure or, at least, a sluggish indifference. But from Arbuthnot they shrank, seeking to hide away among the pebbles and sand and fragments of coral. And into his mind came the words of Scripture, how on the Last Day the human mites shall call upon the mountains to cover them!
The little tree-man fought with a futile rage, seeking to bite his fingers, and making no more impression upon the skin than if it had been buffalo hide. Its tiny twig-like fingers struggled ceaselessly; and it seemed to feel acute pain as he uprooted it from its bed of clay. But the eel-woman offered no resistance; and her tragic despair was the harder to bear. She covered her wee breasts with her hands, and tears unbelievably minute rolled down her face.
Down Arbuthnot’s streams of perspiration poured, as one by one he dropped Slade’s creations hissing into the white-hot incinerator. When at length he had done, ending by burning the great book filled with the formulae which might conceivably enable another to recreate a forbidden microcosm, his limbs were trembling and his pulse racing.
Ordinarily, he would have dreaded to open the steel door which Slade had closed behind him; but after what he had done, anything else seemed commonplace. His nerves refused to react further. Listlessly, and almost incuriously, he crossed the room, turned the lever and pulled open the door.
A wave of heated air swept out, stirring the damp hair upon his forehead. But there was no one inside.
The steel closet was shining and empty.
Fit for a King
by Walter Deffenbaugh
I
Men who read books, with whom I have talked more than a little in my spare time, are fond of quoting Shakespeare. Perhaps they quote others, but mine is a mind like President Wilson’s — one poetic train is enough on my single-track — and so I can’t remember the rest. One quotation sticks particularly in my memory.
It is something about “There is a tide in human affairs which, taken at its flood, leads on to victory.” Perhaps that isn’t quite right. It has been a long time since I have read it, because working up and down the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the beaches of the North Pacific, one can’t carry much of a library.
But what made it stick with me was that thing in it about the tide. You know the tide and the waves are like a woman; they can’t keep anything secret for very long. Just give them time and they will tell all about it. A woman can’t keep a secret — neither can the sea.
That fellow knew what he was talking about when he wrote that, but he did not know it half so well as we did, because he did not know how much we depend on the tide and the surf for our tips on what the smugglers and other criminals are doing along our uninhabited coasts. If it were not for the help of the sea we would surely be lost.
It was a wave — a big one, unwelcome at the time, unasked and rough, as waves usually are — that solved for me one of the greatest mysteries our service was ever called upon to run down, and one which had baffled our best men for more than a year.
I’ll tell you about it.
Do you remember James J. Plainfield, the man who made twenty or thirty millions out of railway and steamship lines in the West and died a few years ago? You do, I guess; everybody does. I never met him myself, but at the time I am speaking of it was part of my day’s work to look up him and his past history pretty thoroughly.
Did you ever hear of a place he built out here on the West Coast to entertain a king? He called it the “Aerie” — eagle’s nest, you know. He was that kind of a fellow — big and rough and blustering but with a sort of poet’s imagination. It was that which had brought him up from a common sailor to what he was and which gave him the idea when his chance came to have a real king as a guest, to build this place up on the rocks to take him to and stand with him up there where he could take in the whole Pacific with one sweep of his hand and say, “Here, King, see this ocean? Well, I control that.”
He’s dead now, Plainfield is, but the king isn’t. I’ve got two letters at home from His Royal Highness — one asking for full details of what I found out about his friend’s house on the cliff and the other thanking me for my report. I don’t mind saying that in the second one he says that he feels sure that if I had been on the job he would have been perfectly safe.
Of course that is more of a compliment, like some kings like to make, than anything else, because this king never saw the “Aerie.” He got too busy with a war they were having over in Europe and had to cancel his acceptance of Jim Plainfield’s invitation. Jim Plainfield, himself, got pretty busy in that same war in the shipping end of it, and I guess he and all the rest of the world would have pretty nearly forgotten all about the “Aerie” if a newspaperman in Seattle hadn’t assembled a lot of facts and strung them together in a sensational story he called “The House of Fatal Mystery” which was copied all over the country.
That was the way I got in on it. The big chiefs in Washington read it and, as it was in our territory, we got orders to look into the matter, and it surely did seem serious and mysterious enough for somebody to look into.
It seems that in six months no less than four men, who were last seen in the neighborhood of the “Aerie,” had disappeared off the face of the earth. More than that, two women, who couldn’t tell what had happened to them or the missing men they had accompanied to the House on the Cliff, had been found exhausted and more than half crazy in the big woods that the place on three sides surround.
It was a House of Mystery all right, but as fine a structure as you ever saw. Plainfield had given orders that it was to be “fit for a king” — and it was in more ways than one.
It was a sort of glorified log-cabin, something like what I understand they call chalets or hunting lodges in Europe, but I don’t believe there is one in Europe like this House on the Cliff. Jim Plainfield, as I said, had been a common sailor, but he had a soul far above tar and ropes and canvas. He had roamed the far seas and seen a lot. He had studied a lot. And, when the riches came, he kept on traveling and seeing and reading. He loved the sea and his big yacht, the Fir, was a common sight on every ocean.