“Yeah, sure,” said Smitty. “I can see that, all right. But how do they do this?”
“Barium stearate,” said Mac. “That’s the whitish, fatty stuff in the metal drum. For some time now, a few chemists have known what barium stearate does to glass.
“Ye put a little barium stearate into plain water. It spreads into a film on the water so thin ye can’t see it. Ye dip glass into the pan. The barium stearate forms a transparent coating over the glass only a molecule in thickness. Ye do that thirty or forty times and ye have a shell over the glass about a millionth of an inch thick that makes it absolutely transparent — kills light reflection — an’ hence makes it invisible.”
“But that stuff can’t be glass,” argued Smitty. “You couldn’t make a plane out of glass. It’s too brittle.”
“Glassite,” Mac corrected him. “The stuff the Warwick Corporation has recently perfected. It’s as clear as glass, but as tough as steel. A brand-new plastic. That was one of the Gant brothers’ inventions: they found that ye can treat Glassite with barium stearate to make it invisible, just as ye can treat glass. Only ye can make things out of Glassite that you couldn’t out of ordinary glass. Like planes.”
“And the other invention of the Gant brothers?” said Smitty.
“It’s no doubt the thing that devil, Darcey, called ‘the little device that has been such an important cargo’ in the invisible plane. What that is, we can’t guess yet. But it’s somethin’ that can disintegrate solid steel from a mile or two up in the air.”
They stared for a moment more at the plane — wings, fuselage, pontoons, even seats, made of the stuff that had been rendered almost invisible by the barium stearate.
Then their eyes swung suddenly toward the lake end of the hangar. Toward the broken plank there that made such an innocent-looking small door.
The eyes of the gang swung that way, too. And then they were jumping around like a bunch of startled fawns, with guns in their hands that they obviously hated to use for fear the shots would be heard on some distant farm and the new location of the ferry prematurely discovered.
A man was coming in the door, dripping, of course, because you had to swim to get to it from shore.
He was an elderly man, with thin gray hair and a pinkish face, drawn now from fear and rage. His expensive clothes were ripped from passage through the underbrush around the beached ferry. There were bruises and blood on his face.
“Carlisle!” he yelled. “Hold that man calling himself Darcey! Get him — I say!”
The gang gaped at each other. And Smitty and Mac and Josh and the two girls stared with dawning amazement at the man who had been talking to Carlisle.
That man bent like a flash, straightened. There was a flick of his arm, and something thudded lightly into the timbers between Rosabel and Nellie Gray’s bound figures.
Then the man with the bruised face rushed from the door.
CHAPTER XVII
Twins — One Killer
The gang stared at those two with something like superstitious horror in their eyes.
One was scratched and bruised and dripping. He gesticulated excitedly. The other was immaculate and so calm that his face didn’t move a line.
But otherwise the two were as identical in appearance as any set of twins.
Both were elderly looking, of a size, with pinkish, clear skin and light-gray eyes. Both had thin gray hair. They were dressed the same.
There were two Abel Darceys in the ferry where there should only have been one. And the gang, seven men counting Carlisle, glared in stupefaction first at one and then the other.
“The chief!” breathed Smitty, tensing.
“Yes, but which one?” Mac breathed back.
The gang were wondering that, too.
“I told you to seize that man!” panted the Darcey who had just struggled into the ferry’s hull. He pointed at the calm and collected Darcey. “That man knows everything about us. Impersonating me, he entered my office and later my home, and went over every paper in both places. Then he came here, still impersonating me. Kill him or we’re all lost!”
“That’s the chief,” said Mac, nodding to the dripping Darcey. “Ye know his way. He never kills himself, he traps his crooks into killin’ each other or into bein’ killed by poetic justice.”
Carlisle started to swing his gun bewilderedly on the Darcey who had come in here with him.
“That’s the man to take,” the immaculate Darcey said, nodding toward the dripping one. “Don’t you see? He must be this man Benson. I’ve heard that he can make his face up to resemble anyone. He has come here to try to rescue his associates, and is trying it in this way. Tie him up. We’ve been waiting for just this visit from him — and now he’s here and he’s ours. He wasn’t as smart as he thought.”
Two of the gang laid uncertain hands on the dripping Darcey, who began to act a little like a maniac.
“You fools! He’s the one! He waylaid me in my car just outside Gary, and left me tied in an old shed. I got loose and came here to warn you, and to get him. I tell you he went through my private documents.”
For a moment Carlisle was convinced. Also, he was murderously angry.
“You mean to say you — if you are Darcey — left papers around that would tie us in with the wrecks and building collapses?”
“No! Certainly not! There’s nothing to carry weight in a law court. But he knows the whole thing now, even if he couldn’t prove it. And he could prove it if he got away with that plane and the little destructive engine aboard it. Kill him, I say!”
The calm Benson stared coldly at the excited one, who glared back with maniacal hate.
Carlisle spoke, after a little while. The sleek young man-about-crime had a head on him.
“This is getting us no place,” he said. “One of you is Darcey, one of you isn’t. What we want to do is find out which is which. It wouldn’t do much good to search you both — I suppose each of you has some sort of identification papers, either real or faked. But there must be some way to tell the difference.”
“You might pull our hair and see if one of us is wearing a wig,” said the immaculate Darcey ironically.
The dripping Darcey suddenly calmed down.
“There is a way,” he said, with a dangerous new note of confidence in his voice.
Carlisle stared cautiously at him.
“As soon as we learned Benson was fighting us,” the man went on, “we set out to find as much as we could about him, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” nodded Carlisle.
“Well, we learned that he had gone white-haired overnight because of a shock. And we learned also that the same shock had paralyzed his face. It is because the flesh of his face is dead, and stays wherever his fingers put it, that he can mold his features to resemble any other man. It’s that paralysis that makes him a man of a thousand faces, as they call him.”
“But his face,” the dripping Darcey pointed out, “can’t move of its own volition. It’s paralyzed. Now — the one of us who can make his features move — smile, frown, anything — will be the real Abel Darcey. The other, who can’t — will have to die.”
There was silence in the big hangar. And the five leaning bound against the side wall felt their flesh creep in that silence.
“As you can see,” said the man who had just come into the hangar, “I can move the muscles of my face.” He grimaced, wrinkled nose and forehead.
Almost holding their breaths, all turned from him to the figure of Darcey standing calm and cool a little to one side.
“All right,” said Carlisle. “Now move your face.”