Criminals -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Physicists -- Fiction; Science fiction
"It was he, I tell you!" he was exclaiming. "It couldn't have been
anyone or anything else but the Invisible Master--the package vanished
right before my eyes!"
"Who's the youngster?" Carton asked of one of the reporters beside him.
"Harkness, the teller," said the other. "He's claiming that a package
of fifty one-thousand dollar bills vanished in front of his eyes,
and it looks as though he's going to have a hard time convincing his
bosses," added the other cynically.
Grantham was calming the excited young teller. "Let's just hear all
about it," he told him. "We know that the thing's unprecedented, and no
one thinks you took the money."
Harkness made an effort to appear calm. "It was just half an hour
ago," he said. "I was arranging some entries in my sheets and the
package was lying with some others beside me, just inside the grille's
opening. It was really in reach from outside, of course, but there was
no danger because everyone knows how impossible it is to snatch money
in a bank and escape with it. I thought I heard someone step up to my
window and looked up, but there was no one there. Then in a minute it
happened--the whole front of the grille and counter seemed to vanish
for a second and then reappear. But when they reappeared the package of
thousand-dollar bills was gone! I could only stare, stupefied, for no
one had been at the window, and then suddenly I remembered about the
Invisible Master and gave a shout. The guards came running--but there
was no one there by then. It was the Invisible Master--and he had gone!
And it was he--I tell you it must have been!"
Harkness' calm broke down at the end of his story, but Grantham
encouraged him with a few words and then turned to Wade.
"The boy's telling the truth, Wade," he said simply. "It was the
Invisible Master--and he's given us the first sample of what his being
loose in this city means!"
The officials and reporters were silent, Wade thoughtful. "Would it be
possible for him to make the whole front of the counter disappear for
an instant like that?" he asked Grantham.
The physicist nodded. "Quite possible. You see, the projector when
attached to the body, projects a force for a radius of a few feet
around the body and makes all in that radius invisible as well as
the person wearing it. Thus when the Invisible Master stepped close
up to the window, it and everything in the projector's radius became
invisible for a second, and in that second he needed only to grasp the
package of bills and then step quickly back and walk out."
"It's a tough problem," Wade admitted. He and Grantham had stepped
aside from the group, who were now sharply questioning Harkness, and
Carton had followed them.
"But how are you going to deal with it?" Grantham demanded. "For all
we know, Wade, the Invisible Master may be even now going through bank
after bank. It's not a question of doing anything about this robbery so
much as of preventing others."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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