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* * * * *

“Vic! Hope!” I pounded as hard as I could, shouting their names. There was no response.

“Is there another key, Perrin?” I snapped.

“No, sir; none that I know of. The master was mighty fussy about his workroom.”

“Can we get in through the windows?”

“No. They’re barred, if you remember rightly, and fitted with this frosted glass, so you can’t see in, even.”

“Then get me an ax!” I commanded. “Quick!”

“An ax?” hesitated Perrin.

“An ax–and be quick about it!”

Perrin mumbled a protest and hurried away. I turned to Mrs. Perrin, who had come up to determine the result of my shouting.

“How long is it since Miss Hope went in there?”

“How long, sir? I’d say about twenty minutes before you came. Maybe twenty-five. I wasn’t paying any particular attention, sir. She just got the key and went in. After a few minutes I heard something buzzing in there, and I thought maybe Mr. Butler was showing her some new gadget of his, like he was always doing. Then there was a telephone call for him, and I couldn’t make neither of them answer; that’s when Mr. Perrin and I began to get worried.”

“I see.” Perrin came hurrying up with the ax, and I motioned them aside. I swung the ax, and the head of the weapon crashed against the lock. The knob dropped to the floor with a clatter, but the door gave not at all.

I brought the ax down again, and something cracked sharply. The third blow sent the door swinging wide.

Cautiously, fearing I know not what, I entered the familiar room. Nothing, apparently, had been disturbed. There was no sign of disorder anywhere. The blankets on the narrow cot in the corner of the room had not been unfolded.

But neither Vic nor Hope were anywhere in sight.

* * * * *

“You and Mrs. Perrin stay there by the door,” I suggested. “I don’t know what’s wrong here, but something’s happened. There’s no need for all of us entering.”

My second glance around the room was more deliberate. To my right were the big generators and the switchboards, gleaming with copper bus-bar, and intricate with their tortuous wiring. Directly before me was the long work-bench that ran the full length of the room, littered with a dozen set-ups for as many experiments. At my left was a sizable piece of apparatus that was strange to me; on a small enameled table beside it was a rather large sheet of paper, weighted down with a cracked Florence flask.

In a sort of panic, I snatched up the paper. Vic had said in his note, that he would leave another note for me here. This was it, for in a bold scrawl at the top was my name. And in hardly decipherable script, below, was his message:

Dear Pete:

First of all, let me say that you’ve no particular call to do anything about this. If I’m in a jam, it’s my own doing, and due to my bull-headedness, of which you have so often reminded me.

Knowing your dislike for science other than that related to aeronautics, I’ll cut this pretty short. It’ll probably sound crazy to you, anyway.

You know that there’s sound above the frequencies to which the human ear will respond. You know there are light rays that the human eyes can’t perceive. Some work I’ve been doing the last five or six months indicates that there’s a form of life about us, all around us, which isn’t perceptible to our senses–which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

Well, I’m going to do a little exploring. I’m going to take a whirl at what I’ll call the Infra-Median existence. What I’ll find there, I don’t know. Life of some kind, however, for my experiments prove that. Possibly not friendly.