He slipped the bolt, threw open the door.
“Come in,” he said, and then gasped his astonishment.
The figure that entered the room was that of a young woman, well-formed, beautiful. She smiled at him graciously.
“You are Dr. Zean? I was to receive certain things. Doubtless there is no explanation necessary,” and her lips parted in a smile.
Art Swift floundered in a confused greeting, invited her to be seated.
Should he tie and gag her? But she was so smiling, so innocent in appearance, so refined in her manner. Violence was unthinkable!
Then, as he hesitated, another thought flashed across his mind. Why not give her that which she sought, send her away, and follow? She would lead him to the rest of the gang.
He bowed deeply.
“If you’ll excuse me a moment,” he said, and went toward the door of the laboratory. He was careful to open it in such a manner that she could not see the corpse, and promptly closed it behind him.
He searched shelves, finally found that which he sought, a little pile of metal boxes in which were capsules similar to the ones the doctor had shown him.
He took a box of the extract, returned to the girl, and gave her as much of the doctor’s talk as he could remember.
“You look as though it was all news to you!” he stormed, just as the doctor had stormed at him. “I can’t run a kindergarten here. Why can’t they explain these rudimentary preliminaries to you before you come? Take this box and go.”
“Hadn’t I better try a capsule?”
He grunted, still keeping in the part of a testy scientist, impatient at having to explain fundamentals to an ignorant woman.
“I don’t care what you do!”
She flashed him a smile, opened the box, took out a capsule, took a deep breath, jabbed the needle into her arm, squeezed the capsule.
Then Art Swift realized that he, too, must test this diabolical extract of some nameless gland, or the girl would be able to vanish, moving a hundred times more rapidly than he could.
He grabbed a capsule from the box she held in her hand.
“I’ll take one with you,” he said, and took a deep breath.
The girl was breathing deeply. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were brilliant with excitement and with the stimulus of this strange substance.
Swift felt the bite of the needle, felt his blood tingle with the sting of the extract, and glanced at the clock on the wall. It was precisely two fifteen. The second hand of the mechanism was tick-tocking around its smaller circle. The minute hand pointed at the figure three, the hour hand at two.
The girl’s potion took effect first.
He suddenly saw her start to get up. Then it was as though she became a blur of motion. She walked, and her feet moved so rapidly the eye could scarcely follow. She talked, and her lips showed only as a filmy substance. The sound of her words was as the clatter of a watchman’s rattle.
She made toward the door, moving so fast that she was as a streak of whizzing speed, and then something clicked in Swift’s brain. Just as he was trying with leaden feet to move and intercept her, he suddenly saw her moving at normal speed, her hand on the door-knob.
“Well, I guess I’ll be going,” she said.
Swift wondered if the effect of the extract had worn off so quickly.
“Just a moment,” he said, sparring for time.
“Yes?” she asked.
“You felt the effect of the extract?” he wanted to know, curious as to her feelings.
“Just a slight dizziness. When does it take effect? It seemed to make you almost unconscious. You must have sat motionless for nearly five minutes. I talked to you and you didn’t answer. You seemed sick. I was alarmed.”
A sudden explanation flashed upon Art Swift. He looked at the clock. It was three seconds past two fifteen. The second hand seemed to have stopped in its motion. But there was a low-pitched sound coming from the clock, a long-drawn rasping of some sort of slow-moving mechanism.
He listened, attentively.
“T... O... C... K,” said the clock, and the second hand moved an infinitesimal fraction of an inch of crawling motion.
He pointed toward the clock.
“Can’t you see? You’re under the influence of the extract now.”
She regarded him with startled eyes, then moved toward the clock.
As she walked, Art watched her clothing. It was flattened against her figure as though pressed by some invisible hand. Then he remembered a strange, whizzing sound that had been in his ears as he had moved.
The girl modestly pulled at her skirt. It remained plastered against her limbs.
Swift laughed.
“The atmospheric pressure remains the same,” he said. “You are moving just one hundred times more rapidly than normal. Naturally, your speed through the atmosphere forces your clothing against you. There’s no use struggling with it. You’d have to remain still for some apparently perceptible interval to give the air currents a chance to adjust themselves.”
The girl laughed, a nervous, throaty laugh.
Swift found himself keenly interested in the various physical phenomena which surrounded them.
“Do you mean to say we’ve speeded up our lives so we live fifty minutes while that second hand clacks through thirty seconds?”
He nodded.
“And when I’m in the room,” said the girl, “and take the drug, then what do I do?”
Of a sudden, Art Swift knew exactly what she was to do.
“Simple,” he said. “Train yourself to sit absolutely still. Remain motionless with your body for minutes on end. Move only your right arm. That will enable you to put the poisoned cigarette in the hand of the victim without being detected. The motion of the hand will be far too swift for ordinary senses to detect. If any one should happen to be looking directly at you he will see your right hand apparently disappear. So be careful not to make the motion until every one is looking in some other direction.”
“But what if they should flash me a quick glance?”
“Quick?” He laughed. “The quickest glance they could flash you would be so slow that you would see their eyeballs move as though by slow clockwork.”
“And the cigarette?”
“Will have the extreme end of it filled with the poison. The victim inhales it fully into his lungs and dies. The other occupants of the room sense only the greatly diluted odor of the poison gas as a sickening sweet smell.”
“Goodness!” she exclaimed. Then, her eyes filling with some sort of emotion he could not fathom: “I must be going.”
She moved toward the outer door.
“I’ll see you to the elevator,” said Swift, and opened the door, taking care to slip a metallic box of the capsules into his hip pocket.
The outer office looked just as it had when Swift had first seen it. The furniture, the windows, the rugs. But as he opened the door he seemed pulling against a great weight, and he noticed the sudden vacuum swirl the rugs into bulging ripples of slow motion.
He understood then what he had done. He had jerked that door open with a motion one hundred times as swift as the ordinary opening of a door. It had disturbed the atmospheric equilibrium of the room.
Alarmed, he glanced at the stenographer to see if she had noticed it, to see if she would sense anything unusual in a strange man’s emerging from the private office, escorting a young woman to the door.
As he looked, she was about to glance up from her typewriter. She was striking the letters of the machine, glancing toward the door. Swift; pressed the arm of the girl.
“Notice the mechanics of alarm,” he said.
They watched.
Slowly, the girl’s eyes swung upward. The lips sagged open in what was doubtless to be a gasp, but it was so ludicrously slow that they both laughed. The right hand pressed down on one of the keys of the typewriter. They saw the type bar slowly move upward to strike the paper.