“This may be something for us,” Nace told her.
“Who’s going to pay us?” Julia was highly commercial. “Since when did we start working for nothing?”
“Was anything said about you hanging around?” Nace demanded. “Drag your skirt out of here and look at the fair.”
Julia hung around. She kept away from Nace, and pretended elaborately not to know him.
They core-drilled the diamond out about dark. The gem was taken into a private room to be put under microscopes. Three policemen accompanied the two experts who were to do the examining.
Nace tried to get in. The sergeant in charge of the cops apparently did not like private detectives. He refused to let Nace be present.
Nace went to a phone booth nearby and called the head of the Chicago police. That worthy requested that police sergeant be put on the wire, and he would damn well see that Nace was present at proceedings.
Nace started to get the sergeant.
Then things happened.
Over where the remnant of the meteor lay, there was a terrific, white-hot glare. Nace tried to stare at the spot. It was as if he had been in a darkened room, and had suddenly sought to peer into the eye of a powerful searchlight. He was blinded.
Men and women screeched in fright and agony. There was a panic-stricken rush from the spot.
Nace felt a wave of heat against his face. It was if a welding torch had been held a few inches from his features. He spun and ran with the others. But he veered to the right as he did so. The room where they were inspecting the diamond was over there.
The angle of a wall cut him off from the terrific glare. But even the reflected blaze of the hellish light ached his eyes. He made small caverns over his eyes with his hands, peering through the thin flesh where his long, bony fingers rested together. So incredibly brilliant was the luminance that it went through his palms as though tablet paper. Sunlight never equaled it.
He reached the door of the room which held the diamond.
The door burst open. Behind it was another white-hot glare. It was as if the lid of Hades had been shoved ajar.
The three cops plunged out. The two scientists trailed them. They slammed the door.
Nace put a palm against the door, with the idea of shoving it open again. But it was so hot that he wrenched his hand away. The plywood began to smoke. Paint curled off.
Who-o-sh! The door burst into flame.
Nace retreated.
The other glare was subsiding rapidly. Nace approached it, eyes shaded.
The meteor was glowing with an awful heat. It lay in a pit it had melted in the floor. It had rested on a metal table. Molten metal from the table and liquidized sand from the concrete poured down the side of the pit.
It was impossible to approach within twenty feet of the spot. Modernistic fittings all about were smouldering or blazing. Smoke was filling the great exhibition buildings.
Backing away, Nace shook his head rapidly. On his forehead, a small patch of scarlet flushed out and rapidly assumed a definite form. The mark had been unnoticeable heretofore.
The crimson blotch had the shape of a coiled serpent — an adder. A Chinaman had once hit Nace on the forehead with the hilt of a dagger which bore the carving of a coiled snake. He was destined to carry the scar. It was garishly noticeable under the shock of blond hair. It came only when he was angry or puzzled.
He was puzzled now. He had never before seen such infernal heat as this.
There was another thing which worried him. Red-headed Julia was nowhere in sight.
Emergency fire apparatus arrived and extinguished the blazing parts of the exhibition building. Great clouds of steam poured from the supposed meteor. It cooled enough that it could be examined.
It was put under the X-ray again. The human skull was no longer discernible. It had melted into nothingness by the amazing heat.
The diamond was found to be missing from the room where it had been taken for examination.
Nace collared one of the scientists who had been making the inspection.
“I don’t know what happened!” the man groaned, and wiped his forehead. “We were just starting to inspect the stone, and there was a blinding light in the ceiling. We looked up. All hell seemed to be coming through the plaster. The light was so bright we couldn’t tell what it was. We ran!”
Nace prowled a little. He found one of the strange meteor-like lumps of metal in a self-melted pit in the floor. Its heat, he concluded, had been terrific enough to dissolve the diamond!
Most of the ceiling was gone. The room above, he found, had been one used only for storage.
Nace said nothing. But he thought a lot. The skull in the meteor and the diamond had been evidence. By striking twice, the hellish heat, whatever it was, had wiped out both skull and diamond.
With a hammer, Nace knocked off a hunk of the strange, clinker-like metal. He borrowed a microscope from an optical concern exhibit, some chemicals from another display, and retired to a theatre where television shows were given periodically. It was not show hour and the theatre was empty.
Nace was something of a scientist himself. He set to work making an analysis, applying various acids and watching the resulting reactions.
The adder scar became even more pronounced on his forehead as he proceeded. The first half dozen tests had gotten him nowhere. The job was going to take some time.
He pocketed the bit of clinker, went out and circled for some minutes through the crowds. There was much excitement. Gaunt and blond, only a little under seven feet in height, Nace skirted the throng, threaded its center.
Red-headed Julia, his assistant, was still nowhere in evidence.
Nace returned to the television theatre. He moved his microscope and chemicals to the projection booth behind the screen. There was more privacy in the booth. He turned out the other lights.
Before resuming his task, he crumpled twenty or thirty advertising pamphlets he found on a table and strewed them along the aisles of the darkened theatre.
He was back in the booth, applying a chemical mixture to the meteor fragment when he heard one of the paper balls crackle. Someone had stepped on it.
Nace had planted the paper in hopes it would give him just such a warning.
His eyes roved, came to rest on a spool of fine insulated wire. He seized the wire and tied the end to the neck of a small chemical bottle. This he placed in the glass bowl in which he was mixing ingredients.
He tweaked the wire. This caused the bottle to rattle in the bowl, giving off a tinkling sound, as if chemicals being mixed.
He eased out of the booth. From time to time, he tugged the wire, which he unspooled as he backed away. Glassy jingles came from the booth each time he yanked. From the noise, the prowler would think he was still at work.
Someone had spotted his lone-wolf investigations. He was not displeased. Such a possibility had been in his mind when he went about them so openly.
Nace circled warily in the darkness, found an aisle and eased down it, still unspooling his wire. He felt out the location of his crumpled paper balls and carefully avoided them.
From time to time, he gave the wire a gentle jerk. The bottle in the bowl tinkle-tinkled.
He listened carefully. No sound — except the bottle in the bowl.
He crept toward the door, ears aching from the strain of listening. At the entrance, the nearness of the light switch intrigued him. He considered, put a hand on the switch, hesitated, tinkled his bottle in the bowl. Nothing happened.
He turned on the lights.
No one was in the television theatre.
Absently, Nace fished a pipe out of a pocket. It was stubby, with a big bowl. He clamped it in his teeth. He liked to bite on something when the going got bewildering or tough.