LIVING ISOTOPES
Super Science Stories – May 1940
(1940)
P. Schuyler Miller

	The forces that create life can destroy as well—but did they? Or is there at this moment, beneath your feet, a living, inhuman creature the fiber of whose body is silicon rock?

-

	BILL BISHOP'S telegram had caught Dunlop on the station platform, on the thin edge of a vacation. There were just seven words: "Making tests tonight. Come if still interested." 

	That was enough, because Frank Dunlop remembered the night, three years before, when Bill had tried to explain the thing that his mathematics had brought out of the chaos of conflicting theories about the structure of the atom. His voice had been triumphant as he spoke.

	"These equations mean life to me, Frank," he had said. "They mean freedom—freedom to go and do and think as I like. They are going to take me out of Corbin and its dinky little small-town minds and make me someone big out where it counts!

	"Frank, I know what life is! I can create it. And when I do—you'll see me do it!"

	And so, when Dunlop got the telegram, he walked over to the ticket-office, changed his Bangor express to a Corbin local, and in half an hour was rattling along over the rails of Massachusetts' sole remaining narrow-gauge railway.

-

	THE train panted into Corbin with a hat-box, just two hours late. Ten minutes walk brought Dunlop to the little campus with its velvet lawns and spreading elms, and in its cluster of dark buildings the single spark of light in the physics laboratory led him on.

	The door to the new wing was locked. He braced his feet and rattled it as though he were shaking down walnuts. There was no response. He peered through the glass, then up at the curtained windows from which that thread of light still gleamed. They were too high to reach. He resolved to give it another try.

	This time he made the very building quake. He stopped to listen, and down the gloomy corridor sounded the quick click, click of approaching footsteps. The light above the door went on. A girl glared at him through the glass.

	She had hair like the color that wells up out of mahogany when the sunlight falls slantingly across it. She had eyes like green, snapping sparks, almost black with anger, and a skin that only a master-photographer like Steichen could reproduce. The rest of her was hidden under the tattered smock that had hung in the corner of the senior lab at Corbin since before the oldest graduate could remember.

	She sprung the lock and threw the door open. "If you're Frank Dunlop," she snapped, "you're late. We waited an hour for you!"

	"I'm sorry," he apologized. "You might have known the train would be late."

	Her red mouth snapped shut, she whirled on her heel and stalked off down the hall toward the rear of the building. As she reached an open door, someone stuck his head out. It was Bill Bishop.

	"That you, Frank?" he called. "We've started. Come on in."

	The girl brushed past him and disappeared. Dunlop flicked off the lights—college economy was an old story to him—and walked down the corridor to the frame of light that was the door. Bishop thrust out his hand.

	"Too bad you were late," he said. "Everything was set up, and when you didn't come, I—we—started."

	The door opened on a little landing, halfway up the wall of a room like the den of the well known Mad Scientist of the science fiction yarns. What half of the colossal array of apparatus meant, Dunlop could not guess, but there was a general air of reasonableness about it that distinguished it from some of the imaginings in the magazines. It was an overgrown first cousin to the ingenious accumulations that any first-rate scientific laboratory has hidden away in its holy of holies for the Big Brains of its research staff to play with when they are not being awarded prizes.

-

	THE girl stood before a huge switch-board that covered all one end of the room. The size of the bus-bars that came in through the wall to that board made Dunlop whistle. Bishop was drawing enough current to make the General Electric's lightning shop over at Pittsfield look silly. But Bill had him by the elbow and was hustling him down the little iron stair.

	"Marge," he shouted above the drone of the transformers. "It's climbing too fast! Slow it down."

	Dunlop watched the ammeter needle slide back along its dial as the girl obeyed. Then she turned, smiling. The black flame of anger was gone out of her eyes. "Do your duty, Bill," she said.

	He flushed. "This is Dr. Whelan," he explained. "I met her in California, a year ago. Marge, this is Frank Dunlop. He's an old classmate of mine. Insurance salesman or something."

	She laughed. "I know. You told me he was coming. Besides, I accused him of it a moment ago, at the door, and he took it like a gentleman." She held out her hand. "Supposing we do our fighting as friends."

	"Dr. Whelan!" Frank bowed low, with mock courtesy. "If you'd been teaching physics when I went to college, maybe I'd have given Bill a run for his money. What do you say—can you tell me about all this without using ten-dollar words?"

	She laughed again. He liked her laugh. "I think so," she replied. "It's really very simple." She led him across the floor to a small quartz cube, set in the heart of a maze of giant coils. It was sheathed with thick sheet lead and clamped between the poles of the biggest magnet he had ever seen. One face was exposed over an area of less than a square centimeter, and opposite that open space was hung a giant ray tube.

	"There it is," she announced. "In that little chunk of crystal are all our hopes for immortality."

	He tried to look impressed. It didn't work. "You don't believe me," she accused. "Very well—now you'll have to listen to the whole story. Come back here out of the way. There may be stray radiation that wouldn't do us any good."

	She made a fetching picture as she sat on the edge of the laboratory bench, swinging her feet like a schoolgirl. "You know about Dr. Bishop's discovery," she began. "Life is a fundamental property of the universe. It seems to be energy, but it acts more like some queer sort of strain, inherent in the very nature of things, which makes them sensitive to outside forces—makes them what we call alive. Years ago, men like Crile made inanimate chemicals go through all the physical motions of living cells. They could move, eat, reproduce, but they weren't alive. There was something else—the something that we call life—needed to control them and give them will—purpose—intelligence.

	"Then there are the viruses—protein molecules like those in meat or eggs—that become deadly living enemies of life or inert crystals, almost at will. Some biologists think they are true living molecules—the smallest living things—creatures on the very borderline between the animate and the inanimate. But Bill's equations went beyond that point. Any molecule—any atom can be alive!

	"Bill Bishop broached that idea to some of the masterminds that run the scientific congresses and they laughed at him. They said that even if a complex protein molecule could be alive, it was nonsense to think that a simpler molecule could be, much less an atom. They said life is an accident, the result of some metastable balance in certain compounds, and that apart from that it couldn't exist. So he thumbed his nose at them and proved them wrong! He started where none of them had dared to start—at the beginning."

-

	SHE stopped, staring through the maze ^ of apparatus at Bill, bent over his instrument board, intent on his sheets of scribbled figures. Her left fist was clenched, and Frank saw that there was a diamond on the ring finger.

	She came out of her reverie with a start.

	"I'm sorry," she said. "I was thinking. Tonight we're making a test that will change scientific history, and all because one man discovered a new way to look into the gizzard of an atom.

	"It's the atomic nucleus that really counts, you know. The real, fundamental properties of matter—of the world and everything in it—depend on the way in which the nuclei of some ninety-two different atoms are put together. And that is where the secret of life lies.

	"I said there were ninety-two kinds of atoms—the chemical elements. There are really many more, because every element has a number of isotopes—other atoms' with the same general chemical properties, but which differ physically because the weight and structure of their nuclei are different. The deuterium in heavy water is a double-weight isotope of hydrogen. Lead has more than sixteen different isotopes. Every element has them. Some of them are radioactive. And some of them are—alive.

	"Bill, with his new kind of mathematics, worked out a set of equations that described what we know about the inside of an atom. Any atom. A sort of general atom. They show why bromine vapor is brown, and chlorine green, and iodine violet—why mercury is liquid, and carbon diamond-hard or soft as graphite. They show why platinum is inert and oxygen active as the devil. And they show that for every chemical element there exists a single, unique isotope whose properties set it apart from every other atom—a living isotope!"

	She waved her hand at the array of crowding apparatus. "This means nothing to you," she said. "There's no reason why you should try to understand it. One thing is all you need to know—in the heart of that little crystal cube we are duplicating the contorted, unstable fields of force that make an atom live. The atoms at the center of the block are strained and twisted to the breaking point, and bombarded with powerful short rays until they have absorbed vast quantities of energy. Where it goes we don't know. Not even Bill's equations can tell us. But somehow its presence and its release means—life.

	"Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, in a way it is. But if Bill is wrong—if it all turns out to be moonshine and champagne bubbles, in spite of our having had two pretty level heads bent over it for the last three years—you can't be too far from Corbin when things let go!"

	Dunlop stared at her. She meant it. There was danger in this thing—big danger. But to her and Bill Bishop it meant less than nothing, compared to their chance to prove their theory to the world. He shrugged.

	"I'm still single," he told her. "Besides, I never did like running. What comes next?"

	Her laugh pealed out. "I'm glad! And—you can't run now. It's too late. Look."

-

	"THE crystal cube swam in a haze of violet light—light that beat out of it in a blinding storm of radiation pitched at the very edge of visibility. Strange things were happening in that little block of space—colossal things! Vast forces of the kind that molded stars were warping and buckling its atoms until a queer, shimmering halo of mirage surrounded it, through which the walls beyond seemed oddly twisted. Almost he could see the mighty twisting lines of intra-atomic force that converged on that pin-point of tortured space, and feel the cataract of surging energy that beat into its hell of shuddering atoms!

	A grey moth drifted aimlessly down out of the shadowed ceiling. The violet midst fell on its dusty wings and Frank saw them blaze with cold green light. Its wavering flight bent upward, circling the haloed quartz like a tiny, glowing comet. Closer it swung and closer—then an atom of blinding light burnt its image into his dazzled retinas. A crash like the crack of a thousand lightnings split his ears. The room reeled and he was crouching against the concrete wall, the girl sheltered in his arms, while Bishop, his mouth shouting words that Dunlop could not hear, rushed toward them through a storm of dancing lights.

	Half an hour later Frank was still sitting on the bottom step of the little stair, while Bill and the girl checked and re-checked every tiny detail of their apparatus. The reek of burnt copper was in the air and thin curls of bluish smoke were rising from the massive cables. As Dunlop stared, he heard again the mutter of the great transformers, like the ominous distant thunder of disapproving gods.

	He went to them. Marge's face was white, her dark eyes troubled. "It's like a warning," she pleaded. "You've gone farther than any man has ever gone—seen things happen that no man has ever seen—but there is more beyond that. More than you or anyone dreams! Let's be careful. We're learned a lot. Wait until we know just a little more—until we're surer of ourselves and what we're doing."

	Bill laughed—a nervous bark. "We can't stop now. You told Frank that. We don't dare. There is a zone of disruption bordering the region of greatest strain, where our fields converge. If we tip our balance ever so little in the wrong direction, we'll go pfft! like that moth! Only the moth never got past the weakest fringe of what is really there! No—we'll go on all right. We have to!"

	The rise of the slim black needles on their dials was slower—the sweeping purple curve of the recorder pen was changing, flattening, reaching equilibrium. Somewhere in that holocaust of battling forces a balance had been reached—a check on the vast, straining, cosmic energies that were the stuff of life!

	A minute passed and another. Bill's eyes were glued on that levelling curve. Beside him, the girl was a tense arc of eager beauty. His hand hovered above the master switch—swooped down. Twin arcs of blue-white electric flame blazed across the poles. The tang of ozone was in the air. Then Marge's hard heels went click-clicking across the floor. Bill Bishop padded after her, Frank following them.

-

	THE quartz was white hot. Bill pulled on a robe of stiff leaded cloth, slipped a hood with weird dark goggles over his head. He motioned to them to step back as he pulled away the lead sheathing.

	It was a mere shell, the inside melted away by the fierce heat released when those warring forces reached stalemate. Marge tugged at Dunlop's sleeve. She pulled forward a tall leaden screen on little wheels. It had a window of thick, dark glass. Cheek to cheek, the scent of her hair in his nostrils, they watched Bill Bishop's every move.

	He had on thick leaded mittens with loose gauntlets. Lifting the cube from its setting, he carried it over to the bench under the stairs, beside them. A strange contraption stood there, with a disc of frosted glass on which flecks of greenish light flashed intermittently. As Bill sat down the cube, a veritable blizzard of green fire swept over the milky disc.

	"Look at the ray-counter," Marge whispered. "That quartz is giving off enough hard radiation for a gram of radium!"

	Bishop was holding the cube close to the strange apparatus. Frank saw that the first fury of green fire was dying, the sparks of emerald light becoming fewer. Bill's voice sounded strangely loud with the thunder of the generators stilled.

	"There's something queer here. No radioactive element I know anything about has so short a life." He shrugged. "Well—next time we'll be on the lookout for it. You can come out now—it's safe."

	He pushed back his goggles with one clumsy glove and squinted at the cube. There was a tiny hollow at its center, a ghostly bubble in the clear crystal, its walls dewed with shining metallic droplets. Frank bent close to it. The shining dew was condensing into a tiny pool of bright liquid metal, no bigger than the head of an old-fashioned glass-headed pin. It was in constant motion, trembling and quivering with a kind of nervous energy.

	"It's mercury," Bishop volunteered. "Quicksilver. Marge—will you get the mortar?"

	She brought a huge steel cylinder, scoured until it shone, and a stubby pestle. Dropping the cube inside, Bill steadied it with one gloved hand and chipped gingerly at it with the other. Tiny flakes of quartz began to pile up in the bottom of the mortar, like shavings of clear ice. Soon there was only a roughly spherical lump the size of a walnut. Bill emptied the mortar and dusted it with a fine brush. He struck a harder blow, and another. The third blow found some strain in the crystal. There was a sharp report and he stood looking down at a heap of glittering quartz dust.

	With a steel spatula Bill carefully ladled out the fragments of shattered quartz, dumping them in a heap on the table. Marge brought him a small evaporating dish and a thin-edged horn spoon, and as the tiny droplet of quivering metal appeared at the bottom of the mortar, he scooped it up and transferred it to the dish. A few glittering spicules of crystal glinted on its surface—quartz-dust, atom-fine—but he brushed them gently aside. Breathlessly they watched the shining surface. Every light and object in the laboratory was reflected in twisted miniature. It was like a tiny metallic eye staring unwinkingly up at them from the bottom of the white dish—an eye through which stared the intelligence of a life alien to everything man had ever experienced—metallic life!

	Bishop stretched out his hand to pick up the little dish—and stopped!

-

	THE tiny globule was changed—dulling—scumming over with a skin of steel-grey crystals. Across its middle a hair-thin line appeared—broadened and deepened to a fissure that cleft the drop in two symmetrical halves. And with uncanny speed those halves were splitting, separating, dividing again and again into a myriad of infinitesimal grains of metallic sand—into a shimmering dust of metallic molecules which had lost their dull greyness and were alive again with the glistening sheen of metallic mercury.

	He looked up at Bill. There was a gleam of triumph in the scientist's eyes, and his lips were curved in a satisfied little smile. He was right and all world of science with its smug experts was wrong. And he liked the feeling.

	Bishop picked up the dish. "Let's have a look at it," he said. A binocular microscope stood on the table under the windows, opposite the switchboard. Carefully decanting the shining grains into a glass cell he slipped it under the objective. A moment of focussing and he beckoned.

	It was like looking into the faceted eye of some weird metallic insect. The granules that they had seen with the naked eye were in turn made up of geometrically packed clusters of still tinier droplets—not the normal spheres of mercury, but angular, crystalline-seeming particles that shone with the mirror-luster of the pure metal.

	Bishop was fixing a burette over the microscope and filling it with clean mercury from an earthenware jug. He slid it down until the tip of the burette protruded into the field of the microscope.

	"Let's feed it," he said.

	A shining droplet of mercury slid into the glass enclosure of the cell. It lay close to the other, oscillating gently in the concavity of the glass.

	A tremor shook the mound of metallic sand. It was fusing into a flattened disc of liquid silver that glided with uncanny swiftness across the cell. The two drops met—melted together—and then again the mercury was dulling, splitting, dividing into hundreds and thousands of infinitesimal grains of shimmering metal that were alive and eagerly aware of the nearness of food.

	Again and again Bill fed it, watching every change. As it grew, the metal beast-let became more active. It kept its liquid form longer and longer—slid out gleaming silver pseudopods and slipped like a questing beast of prey around the walls of its prison. The mere uncorking of the mercury-flask would throw it into a frenzy that threatened to send it bounding out of the cell. Soon Bill transferred it to a beaker, and then to a larger one, until by the time it was the size of a pigeon's egg he had it in a thick-walled Erlenmeyer flask whose sloping walls would prevent it from escaping.

-

	MARGE WHELAN had separated a portion of the stuff with a spatula and was studying it. Neither it nor the parent thing seemed harmed. Feed them enough, and like Carrell's chicken-heart they would live and grow forever. It fought death savagely, resisting even the strongest acids. It seemed that the tiny bubbles of hydrogen that formed on its surface were absorbed to form a protective coating that shielded it from the acid. Nor would it amalgamate with gold or copper or any of the usual metals.

	Somehow the life-energy which had been poured into it was acting to adapt it protectively against harmful environments. It was evolving—changing into a creature better able to take care of itself than the thing Bill had created—but vastly faster than any normal form of life of Earth.

	By now it formed an inch-deep pool on the bottom of the flask. Bill was dictating notes to Marge—scientific stuff that meant exactly nothing to Dunlop's untuned brain. He tilted the flask and watched the thing slide sluggishly along the glass with the viscosity of molasses or heavy oil. It looked soft and velvety, like the coat of some silvery animal.

	He poked at it. It was soft—cool and yielding like ordinary mercury, yet somehow different. Dunlop pushed his finger deeper into the mass of shining dust and felt the displaced metal rise slowly around it. Then with a yelp he dropped the flask.

	It smashed on the floor at his feet as he gaped dumbly at his bleeding finger, crushed by a force like a closing trap. Before he could stop it, the metal thing had elongated to a shining ribbon that vanished into a crack between the wooden blocks of the floor. Behind him came the crash of breaking glass, and he heard Marge gasp. He turned.

	It was like staring into Ali Baba's cave.

	The floor was heaped with blazing diamond crystals, red and white and rich purple, needles of congealed flame that grew visibly as he stared. The walls were covered with them, growing like a glittering moss on the grey concrete, bristling from the soapstone top of the laboratory table, furring every bottle and piece of glassware. Whole areas the size of a man's head would shoot steepling up in a minaret of bristling crystal, furred with tinier spines of a myriad gaudy colors, then crash in a crumbling ruin of broken jewels.

	By the far wall a greater mass was growing, of which the rest was but an outgrowth. Squat—hexagonal—blunt-tipped—it was like a vast living crystal of smoky quartz, and it was growing larger with every minute!

	"Silicon!" It was the girl. "Oh, Bill! The quartz—that's living too!"

	Frank realized what she meant. Stray force-fields in that mad chaos that swirled about the droplet of mercury had formed another, unintended pattern—had brought life to an atom of silicon in the quartz cube. Swiftly the infection had spread until now the quartz-beast was gorging itself on all the vast reserve of silica in the concrete walls, in the soapstone table-tops, in the bottles and dishes of glass and quartz. Half the Earth was silicon! There was no limit to the food the thing could get!

	"Frank!" Bill grabbed his shoulder. "Get the broom—there by the stairs. Empty the trash cans. Quick!"

-

	HE DROVE through a door in the wall, Marge after him. There was a clang of metal and he was back, dragging an empty ash-can and brandishing a shovel. There were others in the corner under the stairs.

	Dunlop sent papers, filings, broken glass spilling on the floor and joined the battle. He with one broom, the girl with another, sweeping back the crystal tide! Bill with his shovel, hacking, scraping, filling the Cans with glittering quartz-jewels that blazed like the wealth of Golconda under the naked lights. Can after can—and that creeping advance was checked! Faster than it could grow they swept it back, scraped at the walls, gouged at the eaten floor.

	Before them in the corner of the laboratory, that huge crystal mass loomed, half buried in a talus of gems—the heart, the unnatural brain of the thing! If only they could destroy it!

	A thick wax bottle lay in the heap of chemicals tumbled from the fallen shelves, where the thing had eaten away the supports. Another lay beyond it, and another. Dunlop saw the yellowed label—HF. Hydrofluoric acid! He remembered his college chemistry. Hydrofluoric would dissolve quartz!

	He gathered the three wax bottles into his arms. He seized one by the neck, its stopper jammed tight against his palm, and hurled it like a bomb at the crystal thing! Again—again—again—the brittle wax shattering, the smoking acid streaming down the jewel mass. And Bill yelling in terror:

	"No, Frank! No!"

	What did he mean? Already the up-thrusting angle of the giant crystal was crumbling under the attack of the acid. The vital force which imbued it seemed to make it vastly more active than would normally be the case. The vapor rising from it was a shimmering sheet like the air over a hot radiator.

	"Frank! You fool! Don't you see—that gas will be alive!"

	See? Of course he saw—now. Quartz, dissolving in the acid, formed silicon fluoride—the colorless vapor rising from the dissolving crystal. Silicon atoms, alive in the molecules of quartz, were still alive in that invisible, venomous vapor that he had freed!

	Close under the ceiling the rising vapors had collected, swirling, cooling, sinking again in a heavy blanket heavier than air. Moisture in the air attacked it, forming tiny particles of silica gel that gave it visibility. A blanket of living, poisonous vapor, spreading sluggishly, sinking slowly to cover the entire room. A sea of opalescent mist that was gathering itself together in a great sphere of saffron cloud that drifted slowly, purposefully, toward them! Above the stanch of chemicals from the fallen shelves Frank scented a sharp, acrid odor.

	"Get Marge out—quick!" Bill lunged past him, a carboy of ammonia in his arms. Into the midst of the jeweled sea he plunged. He swung the bottle high above his head in both hands and sent it crashing against the crystal monster. Instantly a white cloud of mingling vapors closed over him. Alkali against acid, counteracting the damage Frank had done, coagulating the living atoms of silicon in jelly, where they could be trapped, starved, even killed.

	The globe of yellow vapors burst through the white mist. Tentacles of cloud hung from it, spinning, shaping themselves into down-reaching tendrils as a tornado forms its vortex of destruction. They swung lower and Dunlop caught the girl up and raced for the stairs.

-

	AS HE reached the landing she tore loose and tried to duck past him. He yanked the hall-door open and shoved her through, snapping the lock on the inside. He turned.

	One end of the laboratory was paved with wooden blocks. As he looked, an area three feet square popped into the air and a metal football rolled out on the floor. Under the mocroscope table he saw the tell-tale debris of shattered earthenware from the flasks of mercury on which the thing had fed. Then a searing tendril brushed his cheek and he stared up into an umbrella of swirling mist, like a colossal jellyfish, dropping on him from the ceiling.

	Dunlop went down the steps like a vaudeville tumbler. It was a matter of seconds since Bill Bishop had vanished in that swirling fog, but it seemed hours. Out of the fog came the tinkle and crash of falling crystal, and a high-pitched, singing twang that chilled his spine. He trod on the scurrying metal globe, skidded and fell flat among needles of broken crystal that gashed his bare hands cruelly. He saw the mercury-creature scuttling like a rat for the shelter of the great switchboard, and as it vanished Bill's voice screamed in pain.

	The swirling vapors parted. Bill hung there kicking, impaled on a thin blade of blood-red crystal that sprang from the side of the giant thing. Again that shrilling twang sounded, and a second blade flashed with incredible speed to pierce his throat. Then came the sputtering roar of electric fires, a choking rush of ozone, and the mass of apparatus blazed with intolerable violet flame!

	Behind the switchboard there were naked bus-bars which the metal creature shorted with its body. Surging uncontrollably into Bill Bishop's vast array of apparatus, the unleashed current freed a barrage of radiations beside which cosmic rays were puny patterings. The wand of life may also be the staff of death. Dunlop saw the quartz-thing die.

-

	AS RAYS condense the vapor of a cloud-chamber, the mist was driven down in milky dust. He saw all that jeweled mass afire with blue fluorescense. He saw thin spires of crystal crumbling, minarets toppling—saw the vast, barrel-bodied thing in the corner slump in a heap of glittering fragments from which the broken body of his friend protruded grotesquely. He smelled the reek of mercury vapor, and the odor of burning wood.

	The trash they had spilled on the floor was ablaze, ignited by the flame-burst as one of Bill's great tubes blew out. Smoke and the reek of boiling chemicals choked him. He stumbled knee-deep through a mass of yielding sand and dragged Bill's limp body out of the ruin of the crystal monster. Then his feet were on the little iron stair, his fingers fumbling numbly with the lock of the outer door. Marge Whelan's voice was crying in his ears. And all the world went black.

	There was a while when he seemed to rise up out of the darkness and then sink sickeningly back. Up—and down, up and down, and then after a time he got a toehold somewhere and hung on. He opened one eye, but there was something over it. He opened the other.

	He saw a waving mass of mahogany hair and a pair of green eyes and a red mouth. There were big blue moons under the eyes, and lines on the white face. He tried his own mouth—it would open a little.

	"What happened?" he whispered. She bent closer. "You're all right?" she demanded.

	He closed his good eye wearily. Women were all the same! "Sure, sure," he whispered, "I'm fine. But what happened?"

	The green eyes were black again, but with pain, not anger. Bill Bishop was dead—he remembered that—and they had been engaged. Maybe time would heal that scar.

	"The laboratory was a wreck, Frank," she told him bitterly, "but I saved his notes and mine—I have it all. We—we can do it again. We can publish Bill's notes and his equations, and there will be someone who will try to duplicate his experiments. Then they'll know he was right! Even if he is dead, he was right, and his death proved it!"

	Dunlop's bandaged hand, burnt by the same penetrating rays which had blasted unnatural life out of the crystal thing, found her limp fingers and squeezed them. He closed his eye and lay in the darkness, remembering. A moth dying in a puff of intolerable flame—a man, spitted by a blade of living stone—saffron mist that swirled hungrily, and a shining metal thing that scuttled in the shadows.

-

	BILL BISHOP had learned a truth, and tested it. Truth killed him. But it would not kill again—Marge Whelan above all. A moth and a man, and they must be the last!

	"That thing that killed him," he whispered. "It's—dead?"

	"Yes." Her voice sounded very small and far away. "They cleared away the debris. There was a tube running down through the floor of the laboratory where the crystal was. It was lined with little needles of quartz, but they are just so many crystals. We dug down twenty feet and there was nothing else. It's gone, I think."

	"Then listen," he said gently. "You're as badly cracked up as I am, inside. You must be. You have folks back in California or some place. I'm O. K. here. I'll be out of these bandages by the time my vacation's up, and then we'll get together and decide what to do. Prexy knows me pretty well, and he knew Bill well enough to let him play around with what looked like craziness. Leave those notes with us, and when you're feeling better come on back and we'll get Bill his monument, if you still want to. Now scram—I'm going to take a nap, and when I wake up I want you to be on your way. Leave all the details to us."

	He smelled the perfume on her hair as she bent over him, and felt the pressure of her lips on the bandages. Her heels click-clicked on the linoleum and the door closed softly. She'd go—and she'd come back again. But no one was going to do what Bill Bishop had done. Prexy would agree to that.

	She could leave it to them ... 

The End