THE MYSTERY OF THE FIFTEEN SOUNDS

By Van Powell

The Goldsmith Publishing Company CHICAGO

Copyright 1937 by The Goldsmith Publishing Company MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOREWORD

“No wonder I’m blue,” Roger told his father, “You’re packing to head a museum expedition into the heart of Borneo. You’ll have thrills.”

“Probably I will get my sort of excitement in plenty, Roger. It won’t be what you are always dreaming about—the ‘good old days’ of Pirates and Cowboys and Stage-Coach Bandits.”

“No,” Roger agreed, “the real thrills are all gone. But you can go on an expedition, instead of having school and——”

“There will be vacation time—baseball——”

“But I want real excitement. I’d like to be a Modern Pioneer. You are one, going off to Borneo for the museum just the way Columbus set out for Queen Isabella.”

His father looked up.

“You can be a Modern Pioneer. I will show you a House of Mystery, and once you step into its door you are in a land where there are more exciting activities packed into one day than you could get being a combination cow-hand, bad man, pirate and pony express rider. You may not be able to convoy an ox-team across a prairie, carry a squirrel gun and stand off scalping Sioux; but you will help battle against Pirate Fire, and Bad Man Erosion, and Bandit Microbe.”

“You mean—work in cousin Grover’s research lab?”

That was it, he found. And under the brilliant training of his older cousin, as he came to be the supply clerk and learned more about the work of the active place, Roger saw how truly his father had spoken.

There was fun, and mystery, and excitement, even in the work. Also, there was the feeling of being a Modern Pioneer, one who belonged to the band that had substituted electricity and wings for ox-wagon and candles, who gave the world instead of the pony rider carrying news, the radio and radio-telephone. Science was the Modern Pioneer.

Where their forefathers sought new borderlands, these modern way-showers explore the stratosphere. As their trail-blazing ancestors fought Indians and hardship and poor crops, these men battle against disease germs, and soil erosion, and eye-straining light and every other detriment to safer, happier existence.

As great as the feat of Columbus, Roger found the announcement that a cure had been found for a terrible disease.

On a par with Daniel Boone’s fame was the renown of the research worker who extended the range of compact radio receivers.

In such privately owned laboratories as that of his cousin, Grover Brown, and in those associated with universities and colleges and other institutions, the work of the Modern Pioneers went on.

They loved it, found adventure in it, and joy of achievement.

Not always was there the sort of mystery usually read about in detective stories; but when such problems did come up, Roger realized how the equipment of scientific research could be a useful aid to the clever deductive brain in solving the puzzle.

It is to show how much of adventure and thrill, excitement and romance can hide behind electrical transformers and tubes of germs, bags of sodium carbonate and humming motors that this experience of a boy in a scientific research laboratory is offered. Perhaps some boy, who has almost decided that the only “real” life involves guns and “rackets,” will be shown how the useful life of the fellow who fights for humanity and not against it brings more thrill and joy and contentment than any of the risky, falsely stimulating adventures that only lead to discredit, sorrow and punishment.

Van Powell

NOTE

Names used in this story are purely fictitious and if any name is like that of a real person it is coincidence and no libel or aspersion on character is intended or implied. However, every scientific device, process and theory herein is based on electrical, chemical and other data of developed apparatus and procedure or on theories so far perfected as to be acceptable to Science.

Chapter 1 “THEM MOUSES IS EXTRAVERTED!”

Something was wrong at the laboratory! Ringing bells, long before dawn, awakened Roger Brown.

Dazed at first, he became alert as a strange, cold foreboding made him leap out of bed.

“Just the telephone,” his thirty year old cousin, head of the laboratory, called from his room beyond the adjoining bath. Roger, who was already on his way to the downstairs library of his cousin’s home, paused.

“No!” Well built and athletic, sharp-eyed, keen minded, a worthy student under his brilliant scientific cousin, Roger spoke earnestly, “It wasn’t just the protective beam system, or just the fire alarm, either. Grover, it was both!”

“Impossible! Why have they stopped ringing?” Tying his robe cord, the older cousin followed Roger. He knew that “Ear Detective’s” reputation for reading sounds, even if his own incisive reasoning made him feel that this time Roger had been too drowsy to live up to his nickname.

Just the same, he followed.

“As long as the beam was broken,” he insisted, “The bells ought to continue to ring. I think your fame as a sound interpreter is done.”

Roger did not try to defend himself.

“It was probably a wrong number on the telephone.” Grover was five steps behind his younger relative, “If you are so sure it was our alarm system, especially both bells, why aren’t you dressing to rush to the lab?”

“I’m getting down to be ready when Tip calls.”

Potiphar Potts, nicknamed Tip, was handy man at the scientific research plant. He slept there. In a moment Roger expected to have him call up to report the reason for the alarm.

“You will never hold your reputation now.” Grover turned at the library door as Roger, inside, stared, baffled, at the annunciator panel.

The reputation his cousin spoke about had come when a chemist, sent to them to help the laboratory develop a new series of dyes for a textile mill, had begun to “hear things.” Deaf, wearing an Amplivox, composed of a chest microphone, batteries and an ear piece, the man had been nearly crazed by a persecuting, accusing voice picked up, it seemed, by his device. Roger, by identifying an odd click he got in a makeshift imitation Amplivox set, gave Grover the clue through which a revengeful enemy who had sought to terrify the man had been discovered. As The Ear Detective, Roger, who was in charge of the laboratory stock-room, had really been the means of solving the mystery.

“I know I heard the laboratory bells,” Roger insisted.

“But the lights on our tell-tale are not lit.”

“I can’t help it. Both the fire alarm bell and the system that warns us if anybody enters——”

“But Potts has not called up, either. Go back to bed.”

Grover turned to leave the room. Roger, who was staying with his cousin while his own father headed an exploring expedition into Borneo for a museum, knew that his ears had not betrayed him.

His cousin, several years before, had secured capital with which to start a scientific research laboratory for the use of small companies unable to maintain equipment and an expensive staff.

Every form of research, electrical, chemical, industrial, and in one instance medical, had been successfully undertaken.

The “lab” prospered, and enjoyed a reputation for scientific and human thoroughness and dependability.

Priceless secrets, formulae, data and results were always in the laboratory, and its owner had devised seemingly perfect methods for safeguarding the secrets which rivals, or competing firms, might covet. A completed series of experiments to find a synthetic substitute for camphor gum, an industrial formula almost beyond price, was reposing in the safe on this early morning of Spring.

The safeguards comprised two:

There was a series of light-beams, interconnected with microphones and tiny speed cameras, at every possible entrance. Any broken beam, telling of wrongful entry, set off a laboratory bell in the room where Potts slept; and it also was wired to ring a bell at the owner’s home; and on a panel, numbered lights would show, by the one that glowed, which entrance had been used.

To protect the laboratory from fire, and warn of its existence, a bell of a higher tone with a thermostat connection in the laboratory, in each section, would give warning; and if the blaze was in the cellar, a green bulb would glow; if in the main floor, a red bulb, and for the upper section a blue bulb would be lit.

Naturally, Grover felt that his younger cousin had mistaken the sound that had awakened both.

Roger, still feeling his weird and unexplainable sense of hidden danger, picked up the telephone.

The laboratory, when he dialed repeatedly and waited long, did not respond. Tip, trusted, loyal, paid extra salary because he was counted on not to leave the mechanical devices to give the sole protection, should have answered his extension telephone.

“I tell you there is something wrong,” insisted Roger.

His cousin, partly convinced, taking on some of Roger’s concern, began to dress.

Just as he came down Roger knotted his tie.

In the car kept handy in the garage, they drove the several blocks to the two-story building.

Before they got near it, Grover put on speed.

Fire sirens and the scream of the warning signal on a police car made both cousins wonder what terrible situation they might face.

Had some one, entering the laboratory, set off the first alarm as fire broke out? Had Potts, fighting either fire or intruder, been rendered incapable of responding to their telephone call?

“Oh, I hope nothing has happened to Tip.”

Roger was very fond of the dull-witted, but dependable man, almost an Albino with his sandy hair and light eyes, who loved to use big words whether they fitted his idea or not, and who helped in the many mechanical, photographic and other activities involved in their work.

The car, racing forward, turned into the proper street and they saw fire apparatus gathering in front of the building. Roger, as the car slowed, leaped out, crouching and running to avoid being thrown down by the momentum.

“Don’t break in!” he shouted to firemen, “Our protective gas will prevent damage—and water would ruin our electrical things.”

The company captain paused as he saw, behind the youthful caller, the taller laboratory owner striding forward.

His men, with a battering ram, delayed.

The helmeted men, some with axes, others with scaling ladders, hose, or the rubber covers used by the emergency squad from the Fire Underwriters, paused.

“What-da-ya mean, nothing more won’t burn?” growled a policeman from the patrol car standing nearby.

His finger pointed toward the glass panel of the main door.

Roger, looking in, saw the curious orange glow and the weirdly bluish-violet splaying out across the office from the inner spaces.

“Who—what set off the flouroscope and the X-rays?” he gasped, while Grover reassured the gathered people.

Unobtrusively setting one foot well to the side on the top step, so that his toe, pressed forward, found the small protecting pin, he unlocked the door, careful to keep the knob turned toward the left, instead of in the natural hand-turn to the right.

That, Roger knew, cut out that particular light-beam system, so that they could enter without altering the present status of the tell-tale panel inside that would reveal where entry had been made, and by which magnetized plate the marauder would be held in trying to escape.

They rushed in. His first rush took Roger to the panel.

Not a bulb glowed! He stared, unable to accept the story it told—somebody had set off every light-beam-trip! That put out the lights.

Not one of the row connected-in with the magnetized plates was lit, either, and yet no living person should have walked or crept or climbed away through door, window, coal-chute or other exit without getting caught. But Roger did not pause. He ran to Tip’s room.

Tip, tied tightly to a bedpost, his lips taped shut, his eyes rolling as he sweated in his frantic effort to escape, saw him.

Roger first took the tape off as gently as haste allowed.

Just as soon as he was able to speak, Tip gasped:

“Tell Grover them mouses ain’t is.”

“Ain’t is?——”

He knew that Potts used queer phrases, trying to fit big words in, and this might be his way of leading up to some puzzling declaration.

“What happened? Stop being smart, and tell me!” ordered Roger.

“If mouses is here, you say they is here?”

“Well?——”

“They ain’t is.”

“Gone?” Roger stared, “The white rats. Gone?”

“They done extraverted.”

Roger had to study that out. He knew that the psychological word was used by analysts of human minds to indicate people whose outlook on life was normal, while introverts were shy, timid people who were afraid of life. “Extraverted” must mean that the animals had turned outward toward the world—run away, or escaped.

“But those white rats—Doctor Ryder’s—were in a cage with a trap door on top, and they’d been inoculated with cultures of a spinal disease,” cried Roger. “How do you know?”

“I was up lookin’ at ’em, and somethin’ with a hand like a ham hit me back of the ears, and when I come to, tied, them rats was evacuated. I was drug down here by a ape and tied. An’ there was somethin’ else I didn’t get a look at, behind the ape.”

Was the man crazed? It worried Roger.

But a call from Grover, upstairs, quickly told him that Potts had not been talking wildly.

“Roger,” called his cousin, “The white rats’ cage is empty!”

Chapter 2 A CREEPING THING!

It took Roger a moment only to realize the enormous danger that was behind the loss of those inoculated rats.

When Doctor Ryder had been allotted space in which to conduct his experiments to see if he could perfect a cure for a horribly deadly spinal affliction, he had decided to experiment, first, on animals.

Such experiments had been gotten under way the night before.

The rats, inoculated, were carriers of the deadly germs. If some ignorant person had taken them, and the public was not warned to be careful, anything might happen!

One of Grover’s constantly repeated axioms about laboratory work was:

“Do the first thing first!”

All life, the scientific student always had insisted, was like the chemical compounds they handled. No matter what the problem might be, no matter how it looked, it could be analyzed the way compounds would be analyzed, the elements could be isolated, and the base—the guide to the whole condition—could be known. Sodium, a metal, very unstable, combined with chlorine, a gas, turned into sodium chloride, and that was a salt—common table salt, in fact. Yet the restrainer used in photography, a dissolved salt, was sodium bromide, another gas and the metal, and to find out what a compound held, one had to separate all parts by test and find the base or original element.

But first, one must do the first thing—and in this situation Roger knew that the first thing was to get busy on the telephone.

White rats had been inoculated with dangerous germs. A bite from such an animal was ten times more terrible than that of a plain rat, poisonous though that would be. Therefore, if those inoculated animals were now missing, Grover, up where their cage had been, would know it already; but the public, exposed to possible contamination, must be warned.

Roger plugged in the upstairs telephone so that the policeman could reach his headquarters and start a widespread search of all cars on the roads, all suspicious people carrying sacks or other possible packages or cases that could hide the rats. The Health Department and news and radio agencies must be asked to broadcast public warnings. And the owner of the rats, Doctor Ryder, should be called.

Therefore, when Roger went upstairs, his report made his cousin nod approvingly. Roger had done all he could to avert danger if the rats had been taken ignorantly by some idiot who might let one or more escape and spread disease germs.

With his story told, Potts was busy doing what Grover had ordered as one way to secure clues: a motion picture camera using non-flam film, flashbulbs of the latest type, tripod for time exposing, and both wide-angle and micrometric lenses, to give large views of big spaces or vastly magnified details of practically invisible things, formed the kit that the handy man worked with.

Because he had used his wit Grover had no orders for Roger as the firemen, police and officers departed.

Nothing could be done until Potts developed his “takes” so they could be run in the laboratory screening-room.

Grover, in his small, private “thinking den,” would want to be left to think out and separate all the mysteries, so that he could get to the heart of the affair and thus decide what to do about it.

Alone, wide-awake, with the dawn just beginning to lighten the skylight in the roof over his stock-room, Roger stood thinking.

He knew that if the small, partitioned space set aside for Doctor Ryder had held clues, Grover would have told him.

The germs supposed to have been injected into rats the night before could not have produced much effect that past night. The doctor had not felt that he had to observe, personally, as he would have done later.

Instead, automatic “observers” had been set up.

Inside the empty cage, a dictagraph microphone showed, fixed to the glass inside the cage top. That, Roger knew, led to a device like the seismograph which registers earthquake tremors. Its purpose was to show, by the vibration of a pen across a moving tape, when the rats developed any unusual excitement or stress, which was not expected but was provided for in that way.

A camera of the moving picture type, but set to snap one take at minute intervals, would check also; and if the seismograph got to zig-zagging sharply, it would make contact on one side with a relay, and throw on the “continuous” mechanism of the marvelous camera.

To discover by calculating how much of the tape had been unreeled when something had stopped it, was easy; and in that way Roger knew the time that the mechanism had stopped, although he did not dare fix that as the time the rats had vanished, because the tape had started at five in the afternoon, and had unreeled to the point to show that it had stopped at four in the morning; but the alarm had not sounded until half an hour or so later.

The tape showed excited swerves of the recording stylus, but not apparently enough to start the continuous takes, because Grover had left the magazine as it was until Potts should be ready to develop all prints at one time.

With his snapshots and time exposures of wide-angles of windows, doors, floors, air-conditioning intake, exhaust, cellar openings and floors, and his micrometric detail close-ups of parts of all these, Potts went to the dark-room adjoining Roger’s stock-room. The film he had taken would fill all tanks, so he left the other till later.

The authorities had been warned; and nothing more could be done.

Roger, as the sun rose, telephoned for light breakfast to be sent from a nearby restaurant, taking Potts his share in the dark-room.

As he ate, Roger tried to bring some sense into the baffling set of conditions:

The white rats, in their cage, with the observation apparatus and chart with notations, should have been recognized by anybody who could see and who could read, as dangerous to handle, much more to remove.

With the protecting system set, it should have been impossible to enter, at all, and more impossible to get out.

Yet the rats had not by any magic been evaporated into thin air.

Furthermore, Roger mused, why had the fluoroscope and X-ray machinery been put into operation?

The entire situation seemed to be too bizarre to be true: more than all the rest, the mad story of Potts that he had felt a hand as “big as a ham,” hit him before he had lost his senses!

Nothing fitted anything else.