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“Yes, rod bacilli,” added Dr. Leslie, also looking. “Like long rows of hyphens, slender cylindric, non-motile chains joined end to end.”

We looked at Craig inquiringly.

“Like that,” he indicated, substituting another slide.

We looked again. The field had somewhat the appearance of an exaggerated war map with dark units of supposed troops.

“That’s it,” nodded Haynes.

Kennedy removed the slide. “Those are some anthrax germs I obtained here in the city from a pathologist,” he said, turning a switch that threw on in a lamp a peculiar, purplish light. “This is a machine for the propagation of ultra-violet rays.”

He placed the second slide, with its germs of anthrax, in the light, allowing it to play over the slide.

“Now look,” he said.

We did. Something had evidently happened. The chains were broken and smaller units were moving.

“If anthrax germs are exposed for a few seconds, even, to ultra-violet light, they change more or less,” Kennedy proceeded. “These new forms are not stable. They quickly change back again into their original form.”

For about ten minutes we sat in silence while the weird light played as if with ghostly fingers on the deadly invisible peril on the little glass microscope slide.

“But if the action of the ultra-violet rays is continued,” went on Craig, “the microbe changes into a coccus, and then into a filiform bacillus. This form is stable. And the germ is changed in other respects than mere shape. It has entirely new characteristics. It is a true mutation. It produces a disease entirely different from that of the anthrax bacillus from which it is derived. I have tried it on a guinea pig–and it has died in forty-eight hours.”

Startled as I was by this remarkable discovery, I yet had time to watch Haynes. He had not taken his eyes off Kennedy once since he began to speak.

“In anthrax,” continued Craig, “an autopsy reveals an enormous serous swelling, about the point of inoculation, with a large gathering of microbes which are formed in the blood and spleen. Death seems to be due to septic poisoning. But this new microbe–super-toxicus, I think it might well be named–produces no swelling and scarcely any microbes are to be found in the blood.

“The lungs are inflamed, with innumerable small abscesses. That is the internal form of the disease from breathing in the spores of these microbes. It has an external form, also, but that is by no means so deadly. One would say that death from the internal form of the disease was due to poisoning. The toxin of this microbe produces a sort of asphyxiation, cutting off and eating up the supply of oxygen.

“Such a condition is called cyanosis. That is why in Delaney it had the appearance of cyanogen poisoning. The effect was the same. But the trace of cyanogen in the air was merely a coincidence, Haynes. It wasn’t cyanogen that killed. But it was something quite as deadly–and far harder to trace–a new germ!”

We listened, fascinated.

“A French scientist, a woman, Madame Victor Henri, a student at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, has shown that a new microbe can actually be created from anthrax germs by the use of ultra-violet rays. It is not like anthrax, but may be quite as deadly, perhaps more so.

“This discovery,” he added earnestly, “proves for the first time that a living organism can be changed suddenly and artificially into an organism of a new and entirely different species. One can scarcely appreciate the importance of it. If the germs of different diseases can be transformed, the germ of one being changed into the germ of another, it will be a first step toward finding a way to change deadly germs into others that will be quite innocuous.”

Kennedy paused impressively to let the horror of the thing impress itself on our minds. “But this criminal has been working for evil purposes in the wrong direction–creating a disease in order to cover up his tracks!”