“Yes, the newspapers have ridiculed him. Human beings have, since the beginning of the world, stoned their prophets. Nevertheless, he has liberated a force that no gauge made by man can measure. He has been boastful, if you like, and has said that with a teacupful of water he would drive a steamship across the Atlantic. I have been silent, working away with my eye on him, and he has been working away with his eye on me, for each knows what the other is doing. If either of us discovers how to control this force, then that man’s name will go down to posterity for ever. He has not yet been able to do it; neither have I. There is still another difference between us. He appears to be able to loosen that force in his own presence; I can only do it at a distance. All my experiments lately have been in the direction of making modifications with this machine, so as to liberate the force within the compass, say, of this room; but the problem has baffled me. The invisible rays which this machine sends out, and which will penetrate stone, iron, wood, or any other substance, must unite at a focus, and I have not been able to bring that focus nearer me than something over half a mile. Last summer I went to an uninhabited part of Switzerland and there continued my experiments. I blew up at will rocks and boulders on the mountain sides, the distances varying from a mile to half a mile. I examined the results of the disintegration, and when you came in and showed me that gold, I recognized at once that someone had discovered the secret I have been trying to fathom for the last ten years. I thought that perhaps you had come from Keely. I am now convinced that the explosion you speak of in the Treasury was caused by myself. This machine, which you so recklessly threatened to throw out of the window, accidentally slipped from its support when I was working here some time after midnight on the seventeenth. I placed it immediately as you see it now, where it throws its rays into mid-air, and is consequently harmless; but I knew an explosion must have taken place in Vienna somewhere within the radius of half a mile. I drew the pencilled semi-circle that you saw on the map of Vienna, for in my excitement in placing the machine upright I had not noticed exactly where it had pointed, but I knew that, along the line I had drawn, an explosion must have occurred, and could only hope that it had not been a serious one, which it seems it was. I waited and waited, hardly daring to leave my attic, but hearing no news of any disaster, I was torn between the anxiety that would naturally come to any humane man in my position who did not wish to destroy life, and the fear that, if nothing had occurred, I had not actually made the discovery I thought I had made. You spoke of my actions being childish; but when I realized that I had myself been the cause of the explosion, a fear of criminal prosecution came over me. Not that I should object to imprisonment if they would