The Dirigibles of Death (5 page)

Well, I was just about knocked out when he started things going and there before me on the screen I saw the motor cars go whizzing by and folks walking on the sidewalks and a newsie handing a Telegram to an old man on the corner, and I heard the honking claxons and the traffic-cop's whistle and all. It was just like looking at a talkie, because there wasn't any color, but just all black and white. Bob was mighty disappointed. But I thought it wonderful and told him so. But he said he'd failed and his invention wasn't any better than the others, and natural colors were what he was after, and if he couldn't get them, he'd junk the whole thing. Well, of course, I could see that colors would be a lot better, so we got busy again. About that time I'd been doing a lot of work with color-screens and I'd been reading up on color photography and everything I could get hold of on color. One of the things that impressed me was that according to what I'd read there really wasn't any such thing as color anyhow. It was all a matter of waves. Light was just vibratory waves like radio waves and heat was another kind of waves, and heat waves could be made into light waves and vice-versa. It was all just a matter of the length of the waves whether a thing was blue or green or red or any other color. But, of course, everyone knows that, so it's just wasting time to talk about it. Well, anyhow, I hadn't known it before and it seemed a wonderful thing to me and set me thinking.

I laid awake pretty near all night thinking about it. If a fellow could make a piece of black iron into red iron, or even white iron, just by heating it until the heat waves became visible as color waves, then why couldn't a fellow make some sort of device for changing any kind of color waves into some other kind of color waves? And by reasoning backward, what was it in Bob's machine that picked up the color waves and changed them so they were just black and white? Of course, I knew the reason that color waves striking a sensitized film or plate were recorded in black and white was because the chemicals on the film were that kind, and could only turn black and not into colors. But Bob's arrangement wasn't like that. It wasn't a chemical thing like a plate, but the real thing shown on a screen. That is, the original rays—all in colors— were picked up and transformed to radio waves and then picked up by the receiver and changed back to light-waves.

But somewhere in the process they must have been changed, because when they were changed back from radio-waves to light-waves they'd lost all the variations that meant color. That was what I kept thinking all night. It was just as if the picture had been viewed through some sort of screen that cut out the color effect. You know how, when you look through a smoked glass, the colors sort of disappear, and if you look through a green or red glass how some colors look black and others gray and you lose the color values. Well, the effect of Bob's machine was like that. Only, of course, there wasn't any red or green or smoked effect so far as you could see.

Then I began to think about the effect of color-screens used in taking pictures and how a yellow screen cut out the blue light and brought out color value on the plate, and I began to wonder if Bob couldn't rig up some sort of screen in front of his machine and solve the problem. I guess I went to sleep then, for the next thing I knew it was daylight. Well, I lay there in bed a while thinking over all I'd thought about in the night, and I noticed a ray of sunshine shining in through a chink in the shade and striking on my bed. All of a sudden I got interested. The ray of light looked yellow all right, but where it hit the sheet it made a blue patch. Gosh, I thought to myself, that's funny. What's changed that light ray to a blue ray? Well, of course, it was as simple as two and two. The light was reflected from the edge of a glass on my dresser, but the glass was red, not blue, and it took me a long time to figure out how the blue rays were bent off and hit the bed while the red rays were shot through the glass.

I couldn't see that it had anything to do with Bob's puzzle though, but when I told Bob about all I'd been thinking about and the sunlight and everything he jumped up in the air and yelled.

"Hurrah!" he shouted. "You're the right man in the right place, Jimmy! I believe you've struck the nail on the head."

I told him I didn't see how, and asked him to explain. Well, the way he explained it was this. What he needed was a light ray of some sort. In transforming lightwaves to radio-waves, they lost their relative lengths and all had the same length, so they became white light-waves. Then he went into a long rigamarole about infra-red rays and X-rays, and so on, that I couldn't follow, but the upshot of it was that there must be something in existence that we didn't see and didn't know about that controlled the light-waves' lengths, but was lost when they were changed to radio-waves. And he felt cocksure that it was some sort of wave or ray. Well, he spent about ten days reading everything he could find on rays and he, filled up a dozen notebooks with notes on chemical-rays, and death-rays and poison-rays and every kind of ray, real or imaginary, that had ever been invented or made or discovered or faked. He was just ray-crazy, and he spent all the money he had—which wasn't such a lot at that—on apparatus and chemicals and what not. And the things he did! Gee, I never saw anything like it. He made one ray that looked like a white light, but that would burn paper half-way across the room. And he made one that you couldn't see, but when he turned it on a colored thing the thing changed color. He'd focus it on a red thing, and, believe it or not, the thing would be bright blue; if he turned it on a green thing it would be purple, and so on. He called it an interference ray and explained how it worked, but Gosh, I don't remember now, and anyhow it doesn't have a bearing on the case. Well, I couldn't see as he was getting any nearer to solving his puzzle, but he thought he was, and one morning when I came in he was ready to dance he was so excited.

"I believe I've struck it at last," he yelled. "Hurry up, get over back of the receiver and we'll test it."

"Great jumping jiminy crickets!" I yelled, when he turned on the machine. It was just like looking at the street through the wrong end of a field glass. Everything perfect and natural colors, but reduced, and all the sounds perfect as could be. There was only one trouble. The sounds were too loud for the picture. It didn't seem right to hear a motor-car half an inch long toot a horn that could be heard all over the room, or to hear a tiny figure of a traffic-cop blow a speck of a whistle so loud it made your ears ring. But Bob didn't mind that. He said he could enlarge the picture to suit the sounds or reduce the sounds to harmonize with the picture, and he was as near crazy over what he'd done as I ever expect to see anybody. But he wouldn't tell me much about his ray. As a matter of fact, I don't believe he knew much about it himself. All I could get out of him was that he passed a sort of X-ray through a grid or screen treated with some radio-active composition and got the results. He said it was analogous (I got that word from him just as he said it) to passing the electrons from the filament of a radio tube to the plate through a grid. Not knowing a darned thing about radio, except that the family which rooms below me in Earl's Court keeps the darned radio going so I can't sleep, Bob's explanation didn't mean much. But the idea I got was that it sort of straightened out the wave-lengths of colors so they came through 0. K.

"But, Jimmy, that’s not the half of it," he said. "This new ray's got properties that are going to revolutionize a lot of things. And it will interest you because with it you can take photographs in the dark."

"Tell me another," I came back at him. "Don't try to kid me on photography just because I'm a dumbell on radio."

"I'm not trying to kid you," he says. "I can prove it to you. Just you darken this room."

"Go to it," I told him.

Well, the long and short of it was that we darkened the room as well as we could (and it was plenty dark at that) and I set up my camera and Bob turned on his ray machine. Well, I sure laughed. It didn't show any light at all; just a sort of pale, pinkish glow like a firefly under a red glass in the machine.

"He who laughs last laughs best," Bob reminded me. "Now Jimmy, shut off your lens and develop your plate and see what you see."

And believe it or not. Bob was right. I'd got as good a negative of the inside of the laboratory as though I'd given it a time exposure in broad daylight.

"You win," I told him. "But how did you know? You're no photographer."

He laughed. "I tried my machine last night after dark, and everything came through as if it had been light outside," he told me. "And so I knew the ray would in all probability have the same effect on your photographic plate."

Well, now that Bob had the ray, he was all for trying all sorts of tests to see how far he could send his pictures. Of course, he kept things secret, for he wanted to be sure, and he hadn't taken out patents. Well, it was away ahead of anything he had expected. I went out to Long Island and worked the transmitter and Bob got the picture 0. K. Then I went farther and farther, until we were sending from Chicago. But Bob wasn't satisfied yet. He was the darndest fellow to be satisfied I ever knew. Anyhow, there was nothing to it but I must go over the pond and try to see if we could transmit across the Atlantic.

"If we can do that," said Bob, "I'll take out patents and launch the thing right away. But if we can't, I'm going to hold on until we can. If I don't, some other guy will come along and make some improvement so transatlantic pictures can be transmitted and I'll be out of it." Well, that's how I happened to be over here, as I said when I started to write, and it seems to me it's taken an awful lot of time and paper to say it. Gee, if It takes all this space and all this writing just to tell how I happened to be over here in London, how the devil and all do these fellows get all they have to say into a book, I wonder.

Well, just as soon as I got here I began making tests and Bob cabled back they came through pretty fair, but not good enough, and he wrote saying he was working on an improvement he'd send over, and to stay on here until it arrived. So that's why I was here partly on pleasure, as I said, for while I was waiting for the dinkus he mentioned, I had nothing to do but to enjoy myself.

It was while I was doing London and the Thames and knocking about the Tower and putting in nights at Ciro's and Prince's and imagining I was a regular guy with plenty of dough, instead of a bum photographer with less than a grand in the world, that the mysterious blimps began to arrive.

Of course, they didn't mean much to me. In the first place, as I said, everything was kept quiet and I only knew what the papers were allowed to print, and in the second place, none of them came near London and so I didn't pay much attention to them. But pretty soon I noticed the sky was buzzing with airplanes, and everyone was talking about them, and I got wise to the fact they were patrolling to keep the "night-blooming-cereuses," as folks called them, from dropping in on us. Well, there was a pretty strict censoring on all mail going out and on all cables, and taking photographs in a lot of places was forbidden, and tourists and strangers were not allowed to travel through certain parts of the country, and I began to suspect there was a lot going on we didn't know about. But just the same London kept on the same as ever. The Strand and Piccadilly and Shaftsbury Avenue were just as crowded, and the buses rolled along same as ever, and all the theatres and night-clubs and restaurants were going full blast, so why should I worry?

Well, in about ten days I got the dinkus Bob had made, and a long letter telling me how to use it. I studied it till I got the idea, and then set up the machine and gave it a test, and back came Bob's cable saying, "Wonderful. Results perfect. Try night shot."

Well, I decided the best night shot I could try, as a real good test, was a shot across London from my room, because I knew if I set up the thing on the street I'd have a crowd around and some polite-speaking bobby asking me what it was all about and perhaps I'd have to explain and give my friend's secret away.

Then while I was getting the machine ready, I heard an airplane buzzing away somewhere up in the sky, and I got a sudden idea that it would be great to get a shot that would show the bird. So when he seemed about where I was pointing the transmitter, I started it going. For about a minute everything ran along fine and I was just about to shut it off when the whole sky seemed to burst into flame, the buildings and trees in the park stood out black in the glare, and there was a terrific explosion somewhere up aloft. The next minute all was the same as before, only people were running and shouting in the streets.

Well, of course, I thought the plane had gone up and I wondered if Bob got the shot that must have been a corker. So I packed the things away and waited to hear what he'd say. But Bob didn't wait to cable. A "buttons" came up to tell me I was wanted on the phone, and who do you suppose was on the wire but Bob talking from New York.

"Say, for the love of Mike, what's happening over there?" he says. "I got the shot—Westminster tower, Big-Ben, trees, houses, everything okay, and up in the sky three big planes. But what the devil were those two black blimps that exploded? Say it quick because this call's costing me plenty, and the three minutes is about up."

"Ask me another," I called back. "You're forgetting it was all black here and I couldn't see the planes or the blimps. But I saw and heard the explosion. The papers'll be full of it tomorrow, and I'll cable you if you don't get it there before we do here. So long."

Well, I hadn't any more than hung up and got back to my room ready to go out for a pleasant hour or two, when someone knocked at my door and I called "Come in," thinking it one of the maids or maybe the valet or some of the staff.

Instead I saw a nice-looking chap in a tweed suit and carrying a stick, and with a close-clipped moustache.

"I beg your pardon, are you Mr. James Nash?" he asks.

"The same," says I. "Anything I can do for you?"

"Possibly a great deal," he says with a smile. "May I have a few moments' conversation with you?"