Keely motor man?" cried Jennie, laughing.
"That arrant humbug! Why, all the papers in the world have exposed his
ridiculous pretensions; he has done nothing but spend other people's
money."

"Yes, the newspapers have ridiculed him. Human beings have, since the
beginning of the world, stoned their prophets. Nevertheless, he has
liberated a force that no gauge made by man can measure. He has been
boastful, if you like, and has said that with a teacupful of water he
would drive a steamship across the Atlantic. I have been silent, working
away with my eye on him, and he has been working away with his eye on
me, for each knows what the other is doing. If either of us discovers
how to control this force, then that man's name will go down to
posterity for ever. He has not yet been able to do it; neither have I.
There is still another difference between us. He appears to be able to
loosen that force in his own presence; I can only do it at a distance.
All my experiments lately have been in the direction of making
modifications with this machine, so as to liberate the force within
the compass, say, of this room; but the problem has baffled me. The
invisible rays which this machine sends out, and which will penetrate
stone, iron, wood, or any other substance, must unite at a focus, and
I have not been able to bring that focus nearer me than something over
half a mile. Last summer I went to an uninhabited part of Switzerland
and there continued my experiments. I blew up at will rocks and boulders
on the mountain sides, the distances varying from a mile to half a mile.
I examined the results of the disintegration, and when you came in and
showed me that gold, I recognized at once that someone had discovered
the secret I have been trying to fathom for the last ten years. I
thought that perhaps you had come from Keely. I am now convinced that
the explosion you speak of in the Treasury was caused by myself. This
machine, which you so recklessly threatened to throw out of the window,
accidentally slipped from its support when I was working here some
time after midnight on the seventeenth. I placed it immediately as you
see it now, where it throws its rays into mid-air, and is consequently
harmless; but I knew an explosion must have taken place in Vienna
somewhere within the radius of half a mile. I drew the pencilled
semi-circle that you saw on the map of Vienna, for in my excitement
in placing the machine upright I had not noticed ex