I hadn't believed Dampier's story until then. It was fantastic, this spy business, with a man like Nebel in the villain's role. Things like that don't happen any more. Yet Wilhelm Nebel stood there with a smile on his heavy lips and no smile at all in his pale little eyes. He came down the stairs, treading silently like a cat. He was like a cat in his black and white evening attire, white-bosomed and sleek. He had in his slender fingers a thick golden chain, with a heavy seal of gold made from an ancient coin. A crimson ribbon stretched across his breast like a line of blood. Satan at the sacrifice! And then the illusion broke. Those devil fingers went into the pocket of his vest, brought out thick, steel-rimmed spectacles, perched them precariously on the thin-bridged nose. The massive shoulders slouched over, trousers drew tight across his heavy buttocks as he bent and stared into the shining globe. I had never thought of Nebel as fat or gross, in spite of his size, but that single act showed him to me as a Teuton peddler, stooping to finger the weave of some shoddy cloth, to decide how high a price would be safe and how low a one profitable. Satan from his throne! He stood erect again, but his massive face was red with the effort. Me he ignored. I was nobody. He bowed to Dampier and again I heard the cloth of his breeches creak. "We meet again, Monsieur." Dampier answered nothing. He too had his fine tradition of insolence. Nebel's slim hand flicked toward the machine. "This, I presume, is the great weapon that is to be the salvation of _la belle France_. This shining ball that floats in the empty air. Will you show us what it can do?" The Frenchman's eyes never left Nebel's suave face as he went to the machine. His fingers darted here and there among the dials, tugging and twisting. Above his head the coils stirred in their massive bearings, and within their compass the silver sphere swelled like an inflating balloon to the size of a man's head--of a basketball--larger and larger while its shimmering surface took on a steely hardness. We seemed to be staring into unfathomable depths, out of which tiny distorted replicas of ourselves peered curiously. I had a feeling that I was two men, one here in this buried room and the other there in that twisted other room, staring inscrutably into my own eyes. "Stop!" Nebel's voice rapped in my ears. The sphere was huge--ten feet and more in diameter. "It is large enough," he said. "What else will it do?" I saw Dampier's eyes then. I knew that this time there would be no stopping him. Step by step I withdrew toward the wall. One of the guards saw me and turned his pistol to cover me, but made no other sign.