On the way to Marchare’s laboratory I did some thinking. He was a brilliant man capable of almost anything, a man who seldom made mistakes. His tongue wouldn’t slip--not on a thing like that. If he said underground he meant underground. It was a statement I had to accept. By the time the cab pulled up in front of Marchare’s laboratory in Alexandria I knew exactly where I stood. I knew for sure that he had gone and invented a diving suit that would go underground. “Doc” Marchare was dressed in his usual clothes, which is just another way of saying he looked as though he’d only recently got back from an unsuccessful, but jovial panhandling expedition. “You got over here quickly, Carl. You’re anxious to get going, eh?” I forced a sickly smile. “That’s the spirit,” he said, thumping me on the shoulder. “Come along, let’s have a look at it.” He led me down the hall and into a cluttered work room where Hamilton Eskew, his cadaverous assistant, was working on something that looked like a large pair of coveralls. Marchare said, “I’ll describe the suit to you, If you have any questions just break in and ask them. It’s really quite simple.” I said, “Uh-huh,” pulled out my notebook, flexed my fingers, and was all set. “Externally,” he said, “it closely resembles any self-contained underwater suit. The body portion is all in one piece. The helmet clamps down over the head, and the pack on the back contains the power supply. Any power supply can be used so long as it delivers approximately ten amperes at ten thousand volts for a reasonable period of time.” I scribbled busily. “Got it,” I told him. “The current passes to a cabbagite crystal, then to a selector box, and finally to the surface of the suit,” he went on. “Control dials mounted inside the hands of the suit enable the operator to control the amount of current at various places on the surface.” I broke in, “Cabbagite sounds familiar. Precisely what is it?” “Well,” said Marchare, “I’m not quite certain. Carbon, you see, occurs in two allotropic crystalline forms--diamonds and graphite. I’ve prepared a third allotrope that I call cabbagite. It is a twinned crystal with peculiar properties, to say the least. When an electromotive force is impressed at one end of it the other end emits energy of varying wave lengths. The bombardment of this energy seems to nullify the cohesive forces between the molecules of matter. “Up until now the only use I could find for it was in transforming oxygen to ozone. When you plug it into the wall socket, you have a wonderful cabbage-cooking deodorizer, Spardleton filed a case on that use a couple of years ago. A few weeks ago I discovered the crystal had other possibilities. I’ve now discovered that it works on solid matter as well as oxygen. The solid matter yields and flows when pushed on by a conductive object that is connected to an activated cabbagite crystal.”