It was about what one might have expected from Hawkins; but despite my long acquaintance with his bizarre mental machinery, I stood and gasped in sheer amazement. “Now, then,” pursued the inventor. “I have had a steel tube made, a little longer than the shaft, you understand.” “What! Even longer than sixteen stories?” “Of course. The tube fits the shaft exactly, just as an engine cylinder fits the plunger. The elevator stands upon the upper end of the tube. We let steam into the tube by operating this lever, which controls my patent, reversible steam-release. What happens? Why, the tube is forced upward and the elevator rises. I let out some of the steam--and the tube sinks down into the ground! That iron plate which you see is the manhole cover of the tube, as it were--it corresponds, of course, to the cylinder-head on an engine.” As the novelist puts it, I stood aghast. It overwhelmed me utterly--the idea that in a great, sane city like New York an irresponsible maniac could be permitted to dig a hole sixteen stories deep under a new office building and then fill up that hole with a shaft and a tube such as Hawkins had just described. “And the people who own this place--did they allow you to do it, or have you been chloroforming the watchman and working at night?” I inquired. “Don't be absurd, Griggs,” said Hawkins. “I pay a big rent here. The owners were very nice about it.” They must have been--exceedingly so, I thought; nice to the point of imbecility. Had they known Hawkins as I know him, they would joyfully have handed him back his lease, given him a substantial cash bonus to boot, and even have thrown in a non-transferable Cook's Tour ticket to Timbuctoo before they allowed him to embark on the project. It would have been a low sort of trick upon Timbuctoo, but it would have saved them money and trouble. “Well,” Hawkins said sharply, breaking in upon my reverie. “Don't stand there mooning. Did you ever see anything like it before?” “Once, when I was a child,” I confessed, “I fell while climbing a flagpole, and that night I dreamed----” “Bah! Come along and watch her work.” “No!” I protested. “Oh, no!” “Good Lord, why not?” cried Hawkins. “My wife,” I murmured. “She cannot spare me, Hawkins, you know--not yet.” “Why, there isn't the slightest element of danger,” the inventor argued. “Surely, Griggs, even you must be able to grasp that. Can't you see that that is the chief beauty of the Hydro-Vapor Lift? There are no cables to break! That's the great feature. This car may be loaded with ton after ton; but if she's overloaded, she simply stops. There are no risky wire-ropes to snap and let down the whole affair.” “I know, but there are no wire-ropes to hold her up, either, and----” Hawkins snorted angrily. Then he grabbed me bodily and forced me along toward the door of his Hydro-Vapor Lift. “Actually, you do make me tired,” he said. “You seem to think that everybody is conspiring to take your wretched little life!”