The magnificent possession
So there were two others trying to beat me to it. This seems to be a
very popular place.”
* * * * *
Sills and Taylor stared stupidly, while Hornswoggle’s teeth chattered
energetically. The first mobster moved back uneasily, muttering as he
did so, “For Pete’s sake, it’s Mike the Slug.”
“Yeah,” Mike rasped, “Mike the Slug. There’s lots of guys who know me
and who know I ain’t afraid to pull the trigger anytime I feel like.
Come on, Baldy, hand over the works. You know--the stuff about your
fake gold. Come on, before I count five.”
Sills moved slowly toward the old safe in the corner. Mike stepped back
carelessly to give him room, and in so doing, his coat sleeve brushed
against a shelf. A small vial of sodium sulphate solution tottered and
fell.
With sudden inspiration, Sills yelled, “My God, watch out! It’s
nitroglycerine!”
The vial hit the floor with the smashing tinkle of broken glass, and
involuntarily, Mike yelled and jumped in wild dismay. And as he did so,
Taylor crashed into him with a beautiful flying tackle. At the same
time, Sills lunged for Taylor’s fallen weapon to cover the other two.
For this, however, there was no longer need. At the very beginning of
the confusion, both had faded hurriedly into the night from whence they
came.
Taylor and Mike the Slug rolled round and round the laboratory floor,
locked in desperate struggle while Sills hopped over and about them,
praying for a moment of comparative quiet that he might bring the
revolver into sharp and sudden contact with the gangster’s skull.
But no such moment came. Suddenly Mike lunged, caught Taylor stunningly
under the chin, and jerked free. Sills yelled in consternation and
pulled the trigger at the fleeing figure. The shot was wild and Mike
escaped unharmed. Sills made no attempt to follow.
A sluicing stream of cold water brought Taylor back to his senses. He
shook his head dazedly as he surveyed the surrounding shambles.
“Whew!” he said, “What a night!”
Sills groaned, “What are we going to do now, Gene? Our very lives are
in danger. I never thought of the possibility of thieves, or I would
never have told of the discovery to the newspapers.”
“Oh well, the harm’s done; no use weeping over it. Now listen, the
first thing we have to do now is to get back to sleep. They won’t
bother us again tonight. Tomorrow, you’ll go to the bank and put the
papers outlining the details of the process in the vault (which you
should have done long ago). Staples will be here at 3 p.m.; we’ll close
the deal, and then, at last, we’ll live happily ever after.”
The chemist shook his head dolefully. “Ammonium has certainly proved to
be very upsetting so far. I almost wish I had never heard of it. I’d
almost rather be back doing ore analysis.”
AN UNEXPECTED SURPRISE!
As Walter Sills rattled cross-town towards his bank, he found no reason
to change his wish. Even the comforting and homely jiggling of his
ancient and battered automobile failed to cheer him. From a life
characterized by peaceful monotony, he had entered a period of bedlam,
and he was not at all satisfied with the change.
“Riches, like poverty, has its own peculiar problems,” he remarked
sententiously to himself as he braked the car before the two-story,
marble edifice that was the bank. He stepped out carefully, stretched
his cramped legs, and headed for the revolving door.
He didn’t get there right away, though. Two husky specimens of the
human race stepped up, one at each side, and Sills felt a very hard
object pressing with painful intensity against his ribs. He opened his
mouth involuntarily, and was rewarded by an icy voice in his ears,
“Quiet, Baldy, or you’ll get what you deserve for the damn trick you
pulled on me last night.”
Sills shivered and subsided. He recognized Mike the Slug’s voice very
easily.
“Where’s the details?” asked Mike, “and make it quick.”
“Inside jacket pocket,” croaked Sills tremulously.
Mike’s companion passed his hand dexterously into the indicated pocket
and flicked out three or four folded sheets of foolscap.
“Dat it, Mike?”
A hasty appraisal and a nod, “Yeh, we got it. All right. Baldy, on your
way!” A sudden shove and the two gangsters jumped into their car and
drove away rapidly, while the chemist sprawled on the sidewalk. Kindly
hands raised him up.
“It’s all right,” he managed to gasp. “I just tripped, that’s all. I’m
not hurt.” He found himself alone again, passed into the bank, and
dropped into the nearest bench, in near-collapse. There was no doubt
about it; the new life was not for him.
But he should have been prepared for it. Taylor had foreseen a
possibility of this sort of thing happening. He, himself, had thought a
car had been trailing him. Yet, in his surprise and fright, he had
almost ruined everything.
He shrugged his thin shoulders and, taking off his hat, abstracted a
few folded sheets of paper from the sweatband. It was the work of five
minutes to deposit them in a vault, and see the immensely strong steel
door swing shut. He felt relieved.
“I wonder what they’ll do,” he muttered to himself on the way home,
“when they try to follow the instructions on the paper they _did_ get.”
He pursed his lips and shook his head. “If they do, there’s going to be
one heck of an explosion.”
Sills arrived home to find three policemen pacing leisurely up and down
the sidewalk in front of the house.
“Police guard,” explained Taylor shortly, “so that we have no more
trouble like last night.”
The chemist related the events at the bank and Taylor nodded grimly.
“Well, it’s checkmate for them now. Staples will be here in two hours
and until then, the police will take care of things. Afterwards,” he
shrugged, “it will be Staples’ affair.”
“Listen, Gene,” the chemist put in suddenly, “I’m worried about the
ammonium. I haven’t tested its plating abilities and those are the most
important things, you know. What if Staples comes, and we find that all
we have is pigeon milk.”
“Hmm,” Taylor stroked his chin, “you’re right there. But I’ll tell you
what we can do. Before Staples comes, let’s plate something--a spoon,
suppose--for our own satisfaction.”
“It’s really very annoying,” Sills complained fretfully. “If it weren’t
for these troublesome hooligans, we wouldn’t have to proceed in this
slipshod and unscientific manner.”
“Well, let’s eat dinner first.”
* * * * *
After the mid-day meal, they began. The apparatus was set up in
feverish haste. In a cubic vat, a foot each way, a saturated solution
of Ammonaline was poured. An old, battered spoon was the cathode and a
mass of ammonium amalgam (separated from the rest of the solution by a
perforated glass partition) was the anode. Three batteries in series
provided the current.
Sills explained animatedly, “It works on the same principle as ordinary
copper plating. The ammonium ion, once the electric current is run
through, is attracted to the cathode, which is the spoon. Ordinarily it
would break up, being unstable, but this is not the case when it is
dissolved in Ammonaline. This Ammonaline is itself very slightly
ionized and oxygen is given off at the anode.
“This much I know from theory. Let us see what happens in practice.”
He closed the key while Taylor watched with breathless interest. For a
moment, no effect was visible. Taylor looked disappointed.
Then Sills grasped his sleeve. “See!” he hissed. “Watch the anode!”
Sure enough, bubbles of gas were slowly forming upon the spongy
ammonium amalgam. They shifted their attention to the spoon.
Gradually, they noticed a change. The metallic appearance became
dulled, the silver color slowly losing its whiteness. A layer of
distinct, if dull, yellow was being built up. For fifteen minutes, the
current ran and then Sills broke the circuit with a contented sigh.
“It plates perfectly,” he said.
“Good! Take it out! Let’s see it!”
“What?” Sills was aghast. “Take it out! Why, that’s pure ammonium. If I
were to expose it to ordinary air, the water vapor would dissolve it to
NH₄OH in no time. We can’t do that.”
He dragged a rather bulky piece of apparatus to the table. “This,” he
said, “is a compressed-air container. I run it through calcium chloride
dryers and then bubble the perfectly dry oxygen (safely diluted with
four times its own volume of nitrogen) directly into the solvent.”
He introduced the nozzle into the solution just beneath the spoon and
turned on a slow stream of air. It worked like magic. With almost
lightning speed, the yellow coating began to glitter and gleam, to
shine with almost ethereal beauty.
The two men watched it with beating heart and panting breath. Sills
shut the air off, and for a while they watched the wonderful spoon and
said nothing.
Then Taylor whispered hoarsely, “Take it out. Let me feel it! My
God!--it’s beautiful!”
With reverent awe, Sills approached the spoon, grasped it with forceps,
and withdrew it from the surrounding liquid.
What followed immediately after that can never be fully described.
Later on, when excited newspaper reporters pressed them unmercifully,
neither Taylor nor Sills had the least recollection of the happenings
of the next few minutes.
What happened was that the moment the ammonium-plated spoon was exposed
to open air, the most horrible odor ever conceived assailed their
nostrils!--an odor that cannot be described, a terrible broth of Hell
that plunged the room into sheer, horrible nightmare.
With one strangled gasp, Sills dropped the spoon. Both were coughing
and retching, tearing wildly at their throats and mouths, yelling,
weeping, sneezing!
Taylor pounced upon the spoon and looked about wildly. The odor grew
steadily more powerful and their wild exertions to escape it had
already succeeded in wrecking the laboratory and had upset the vat of
Ammonaline. There was only one thing to do, and Sills did it. The spoon
went flying out the open window into the middle of Twelfth Avenue. It
hit the sidewalk right at the feet of one of the policemen, but Taylor
didn’t care.
“Take off your clothes. We’ll have to burn them,” Sills was gasping.
“Then spray something over the laboratory--anything with a strong
smell. Burn sulphur. Get some liquid bromine.”
* * * * *
Both were tearing at their clothes in distraction when they realized
that someone had walked in through the unlocked door. The bell had
rung, but neither had heard it. It was Staples, six-foot, lion-maned
Steel King.
One step into the hall ruined his dignity utterly. He collapsed in one
tearing sob and Twelfth Avenue was treated to the spectacle of an
elderly, richly-dressed gentleman tearing uptown as fast as his feet
would carry him, shedding as much of his clothes as he dared while
doing so.
The spoon continued its deadly work. The three policemen had long since
retired in abject rout, and now to the numbed and tortured senses of
the two innocent and suffering causes of the entire mess came a roaring
and confused shouting from the street.
Men and women were pouring out of the neighboring houses, horses were
bolting. Fire engines clanged down the street, only to be abandoned by
their riders. Squadrons of police came--and left.
Sills and Taylor finally gave up, and clad only in trousers, ran
pell-mell for the Hudson. They did not stop until they found themselves
neck-deep in water, with blessed, pure air above them.
Taylor turned bewildered eyes to Sills. “But how could it emit that
horrible odor? You said it was stable and stable solids have no odors.
It takes vapor for that, doesn’t it?”
“Have you ever smelled musk?” groaned Sills. “It will give off an aroma