With the dictation completed, Algernon suddenly became conscious of the
fact that his system was demanding sustenance after his prolonged
fast--in plain words, that he was vulgarly hungry--and so, having no
time to partake of a regulation repast in the regulation manner, he
pulled a gold case from his pocket, extracted a couple of tablets
stamped:
“Equivalent--One Full Meal,” and hastily swallowed them.
Refreshed and invigorated by the nourishment so seriously needed, he
proceeded to quick, effective action.
Pressing a button in his desk marked: “P.T.”, an apparently ornamental
filigree upon the ceiling dropped and snapped into the form of a
suspended package transporter. Pushing a button on the receiver of the
transporter numbered: “7826,” a book, stamped with that number, promptly
slid into his hand. The book proved to be a Laird and Lee’s “Common
School Edition” of “Webster’s New Standard Dictionary” of the copyright
date of “1912.” He had chosen this as his and Esmeralda’s private
code-book, because he believed that the two copies possessed by them
were all that remained in existence.
Slipping the book into his “Lightning Code-decipherer,” he touched the
numbered keys of its keyboard in the numerical combination given him by
Esmeralda in her message, and the delicate wire arms quickly turned the
pages and picked out for him the words: “Parker,” “pass,” “mount,” and
“McKinley.” Remembering the “tiger” she had spoken of, he was puzzled
for a moment by the manifest absurdity of looking for such an animal in
the eternal snows of the Alaskan mountains!--and then he thought of the
“Electro-visional” dial.
Turning to a globe contained in a complicated mechanism behind him, he
picked two fine needle-points out of a holder, pressed one through its
gelatine surface at “Mt. McKinley” and the other into “New York City.”
Giving the globe a single revolution, the indicator of the “Lightning
Air-line Distance Calculator” promptly registered “3668 miles, 264 feet,
00 inches.” Throwing the clutch of his “Electro-visional” into the “3670
mile” circuit, he picked out, with the aid of his microscope, the faint
outline of the twin heads of “Denali and his Wife” barely within the
“W.N.W.” sector of the white circle that appeared on the dial. Inserting
a needle-point barely beyond and to the left of the higher of the two
mountain peaks, he took a delicate copper wire and connected this with
“Local.” Throwing the clutch back into “Local,” the faint outline of the
mountain disappeared, and a vivid picture of “Parker Pass” replaced it.
But, even with his microscope, he could find nothing of his Esmeralda!
Finally, in the lower end, he picked out a faint blur of fine
lines--flashing, disappearing, and flashing again--and, remembering that
she had her “Electric Spark-screen Broadcaster” working at the time of
her mishap, he reasoned that the thing was probably operating even yet,
and that, therefore, he had at last definitely located his beloved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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