The World Masters Read online

  CHAPTER IV

  During breakfast it had been agreed that Lamson, as the discoverer ofthe mysterious tin box, should open it by himself, and, afterexamining its contents, report on them to Hardress.

  This was a speculative suggestion, made by Lady Olive, seconded byMiss Chrysie, and so, perforce, agreed to. And thus it came about thatall the essentials of Doctor Emil Fargeau's great discovery fell intothe hands of a man who, by virtue of imagination, intellect, andscientific training, was the one man in Europe, perhaps in the world,who could either use it or abuse it to the best or worst advantage.

  He took the box into his cabin, and opened it as carelessly as thoughit might have contained a few old love letters, or the story of someobsolete Anarchist conspiracy. But as soon as he had read the firstpage of the closely-written manuscript, he got up from his chair andlocked the cabin door. As he went back to his seat, he caught aglimpse of his face in the mirror. It looked almost strange to him; sohe stopped and looked at it again.

  "Good Lord!" he muttered, "is that me?" And then he said aloud: "Youinfernal scoundrel!"

  He didn't go back to the little table on which the manuscript waslying. He looked at the pages as a man might look at a cheque that hehas just forged. His hand, which had never trembled before, trembledas he took his cigar-case out of his pocket; and as he lit the cigarhe could hardly hold the match steadily. He dropped full length on thesofa, looked sideways at the fatal sheets of paper on the table, blewa long stream of smoke up towards the port-hole, and began to talkwith his own soul.

  "The Empire of the World. I've read enough to see that it comes tothat. Yes, Faraday was right; and so was this poor wretch that wefished out of the water this morning. A Frenchman, an Alsatian, whohas made the biggest discovery that ever was made, who has practicallyachieved a miracle, offers the result to his country and gets refused,and then, for some reason or other, commits it and his body to thedeep!

  "Curious, very curious, from anything like a scientific point of view.What an infinite mercy it is for us, who have reason to believe thatwe possess a little brains, that the majority of men are fools, andthat the official person is usually a bigger fool than the man in thestreet. Now, suppose our unknown and deceased genius had put even thatfirst page that I have read before our good friend Clifford K. Vandelinstead of, I suppose, the French Minister of War. Jump--why, he'dhave got into it with both feet, as they say in the States. A manworth millions. Oh, millions be hanged! How many millions could buythat? Of course, that's one way of looking at it--but Frank Lamson, asI said before, you're in the way of becoming an infernal scoundrel.Perhaps I'd better interrupt this little monologue, and read the restof what our deceased genius has to say."

  He reached out and took the papers off the table, and for an hourthere was silence in the cabin. He read the sheets over and overagain, making rapid mental calculations all the time. Then, after along look at the open port-hole over the sofa, he folded the sheetsup, and stuffed them into the hip-pocket of his trousers. Then he gotup, and looked at himself in the glass again.

  "You scoundrel!" he whispered at the ghastly image of himself. "Youthief--you utter sweep--who would accept the hospitality of an oldcollege chum, and then, when the possibility of illimitable millions,when the empire of the earth, the means of enslaving the whole humanrace, the absolute control of every civilised Power on earth, getsfished up by accident out of the waters of the English Channel, youthink about robbing him of it. You are not fit to live, much lessto----"

  He flung himself down on the sofa again, with his hands clasped hardover his brow, and there he remained, without moving a limb, until hewas called out of his waking dream by a rap on the cabin door and thesound of Hardress's voice saying:

  "Come now, Lamson, buck up! Are you going to be all the morninggetting through that tin box? The women folk are on the point ofmutiny with curiosity to know what there is in it. Hurry up!" Andthen, with a sudden drop in the tone, "You're not ill, old man, areyou?"

  "All right, Hardress," he replied, in a voice which, by a supremeeffort of will, he managed to keep steady. "I have had a bit of ashock--heart, I think. I wish you'd tell Evans to bring me abrandy-and-soda, will you?"

  As he said this, he unlocked the cabin door, and as his host saw himhe exclaimed:

  "My dear fellow, you do look bad; sit down, and I'll get you theB.-and-S. myself in a moment."

  He disappeared, and Lamson sat down again on the sofa. Again he lookedup at the open port-hole. There were only a few moments left him nowto decide what might really be the fate of the human race. No man hadever been face to face with such a tremendous responsibility before.No mortal had ever passed through such a terrible temptation as he haddone during the last hour. Should he fling the priceless papers, thewarrant for the mastery of the world, into the sea and be done withit? Should he keep them in his pocket and make untold millions out ofthe power that they placed in his hands? After all, he had discoveredthis priceless treasure-trove. But for him it would have been buriedwith the hideous relics of humanity lying in the forward hold sewn upin a canvas sack. Was it not his by right? Did any human law compelhim to share it with anyone?

  But, again, ought he or anyone else to be entrusted with such atremendous power for good or evil as this?--the power, literally, toreduce mankind to slavery. He was a man of average morals himself; hehad lived a clean, hard, studious life, and no man could say that hehad done him a mean action. Hardress, too, was well up to the highstandard of the British aristocracy--but his partner had married anAmerican girl--the daughter of a man who had made millions out ofrailway developments after the Civil War. He was either in love orfalling in love with the daughter of another American millionaire whohad made his millions out of electrical storage. The first thingHardress would do would be to take the papers over to America and putthem before him. Clifford Vandel would grasp their giganticpossibilities instantly, a trust, commanding millions of capital,would be formed, and the world would become an American dependency.

  "Here you are, old man," said Hardress, coming into the cabin with along glass in his hand, "I've made it pretty stiff, because you lookas if you wanted it. Why, what's the matter?"

  Lamson took the glass, and as he put it to his lips Hardress saw hishand tremble and heard the glass rattle against his teeth. He drainedit in two gulps, put it down on the table beside the sofa, threwhimself back on the cushions at the end, looked once more at the openport-hole with the fate of a world on his soul, and said in a shakingvoice:

  "Lock the door, Hardress, and sit down. I've something to say to you."

  "Why, my dear chap, what's up? You look positively ghastly," said theViscount, as he closed the door and locked it.

  "I don't suppose you'd look much better if you'd spent an hour inhell, as I have."

  "An hour in--Oh, come now, old fellow," Hardress interrupted, with alook which Lamson instantly interpreted as a query as to his sanity."Don't you think you'd better turn in for a bit? You really do lookill; just as if something had shaken you up very badly. Is it anythingto do with that infernal tin box?" he went on, pointing to it on thetable.

  "Yes," said Lamson, pulling himself together with a struggle, andsitting up on the sofa. "I wish to heaven I hadn't got up just at thatmoment on the bridge and we'd left our unknown deceased to the mercyof the waves. But, even then, somebody else might have discovered it."

  "Discovered what? The corpse?"

  "Yes; and----Look here, Hardress, I've been horribly tempted--tempted,perhaps, as no other man ever was; but my father was a gentleman, andI'll do the straight thing. How would you like to be master of theworld?"

  "Master of the--Oh, look here, Lamson, this won't do at all, you know.You're as pale as a ghost; your eyes are burning, and your hands areshaking. You must have got a touch of fever, or something of thatsort. Take a dose of quinine and turn in. We'll be at Southampton intwo or three hours, and then you can see a doctor."

  Lamson laughed. It was a laugh that wouldn't have done anyb
ody muchgood to hear, and Hardress shivered a little as he heard it.

  "I see what you mean. You think I'm a bit off my head. To tell you thetruth, I almost wish I were, or that this infernal thing were only adream--nightmare, I should say."

  "What thing?"

  "This," replied Lamson, putting his hand into his hip-pocket andpulling out some crumpled sheets of paper. "You thought I was mad whenI asked you if you'd like to be master of the world. When you've readthat you'll see that you can be. They're what I found in that tin box.There's no name or address or any mark of identification on them, butthey were written by a man, a Frenchman, who has discovered a means,as one might say, of soaking up all the electricity of the earth inone huge storage system, and then doling it out to the peoples of theearth like gas or water or electric light."

  "Great Scott, what a gorgeous idea!" exclaimed Hardress, jumping fromhis seat and holding out his hand for the papers. "Why do you want toget ill over a thing like that, man? Don't you see there are millionsin it if it's true, and of course you'll come in on the ground-floor?Great Caesar's ghost! It'll be the very thing for old Vandel. TheMorgan Steel Trust won't be in it with this."

  "I thought you'd say that," said Lamson. "That's the American bloodtalking in you. Now, I'll tell you candidly that I've only given youthose papers from a sense of honour and friendship. I admit that myfirst impulse was to throw them out of the port-hole; and my second,"he went on, after a little pause, "was to keep them to myself, andtell you some lie about the box being empty."

  "You might have done the first, old man, but you couldn't have donethe second," replied Hardress, putting the papers into his hand."There, take them back; I don't suppose I should understand them.Anyhow, you can make a better use of them than I can; and if there'sanything in it we'll share alike. In fact, after all, the whole thingreally belongs to you, for if you hadn't discovered the body, it mighthave drifted around till it went down to feed the fishes. Really, Idon't see what there is to be so upset about in it."

  "My dear fellow, hasn't it struck you yet," said Lamson, "that if thisdiscovery works out all right, as I'm certain it will, it will reallymean, as I said just now, the mastery of the world? For instance, toput the thing into a nut-shell: Here we are, on this seven-hundred-tonyacht of yours, steaming at a speed of eighteen or twenty knots,engines working smoothly, and so on. Now, if this man's scheme wereput into practice, the _Nadine_ would be, as I might say, for want ofa better word, electrolised. That is to say, every atom of metal inher would lose its tone; the boilers would burst, the engines fly topieces, and even the hull would splinter up into a thousand fragments,just as though she were made of glass, and she got hit with a hundredsledge-hammers at the same minute."

  "Is that really so, Lamson? Are you quite serious?" said Hardress,gravely, for he was just beginning to grasp the enormous possibilitiesof the discovery. "Do you really mean to say that that is actuallyfeasible? Of course, I know what a swell you are at these subjects,and I don't suppose for a moment that you would say it if you didn'tbelieve it; but are you quite sure that your--well, that thisscientific imagination that I've heard you talk about hasn't run awaywith you?"

  "My dear Hardress," replied Lamson, getting up from the couch, "thereis no imagination whatever about this. I can assure you it is just amatter of hard facts and figures. Whoever that poor fellow was thatwe're going to bury at Southampton, it's quite certain that the worldhas lost one of its most brilliant physical scholars. The man whodiscovered this scheme and worked it out in these papers was a secondNewton or Faraday. In short, I can tell you in all seriousness--I willpledge my reputation, such as it is--that, granted the necessarycapital, which would certainly run to a million or two, I could workthis scheme out myself. I could construct works that would mop up theelectricity out of the earth as a sponge takes water. I could changeclimates as I pleased. I could hurl my thunders where I chose like avery Jove. I could make myself arbiter of life and death on earth. Infact, I could be everything that a mortal ought not to be."

  "There; I can't say that I quite agree with you," said Hardress."Personally, I can't see why a man shouldn't be all that he can be,and there's no reason why you and I and the governor and Chrysie's dadshouldn't syndicate this business and run the earth. You say it'spossible. That's good enough for me. We'll find the millions andyou'll find the brains, so we'll consider that settled. Fancy pickinga thing like that up out of the sea on a pleasure cruise! Talk aboutluck! Well, come along; let's go and break it as gently as we can tothe girls."