"Well, keep trying. My hunch is that everything depends on whether or not you solve those hieroglyphics. I've got some checking to do on this end. I'll call you if anything turns up." The detective hung up. Rocks went back to the basement. His job was to crack the language. And what a job that was! The night ended. Dawn came. The morning was passing. Rocks worked on. The museum was closed that day. The police were not willing to take a chance on some visitor stumbling into a death that came in silence. Nor was the museum itself. Sharp called in and gave explicit orders on that point. Rocks drank strong coffee, and worked, and failed. The language was not similar to cuneiform. It was not like any language he knew. Every time he realized that fact, he shivered. It had either been invented by a people so long lost in the past that history had no record of them, or it didn't belong on earth at all. Yet someone, somewhere, had constructed that box, and had used it to safeguard something. Perhaps they had used it as a prison, to cage a creature they could not control, an entity unknown to the science of the present. Perhaps later peoples had created legends about it--Pandora's Box. Perhaps this was really Pandora's Box that Morton had brought back from Asia Minor. The creature had waited in that box for uncounted centuries. Now a new race had opened the door of his prison. Now the Lord of the Silent Death was free again. Rocks Malone kept wondering when and where he would strike. During the whole day there was not even a whisper of the incredible silence in which men's lives were blotted out. But when the second night came-- CHAPTER IV At nine o'clock that night Rocks was ready to drop from exhaustion. He was not only so tired that the hieroglyphics blurred before his eyes, but he had failed. That hurt worse than anything else. Everything depended on his cracking the lost language, and he had failed. At nine o'clock it happened. There were three officers on duty at the museum. They had been sent there as a guard detail and they had brought in a radio so they could listen to the police calls. They had the radio in a room on the first floor, so it would not disturb Rocks. At nine o'clock one of them came stumbling downstairs. His face was ashen. "Hell's broken loose," he said tersely. "It's coming in over the radio. Come on upstairs if you want to listen. You might as well forget that language now."