sunburn. I
inquired about the windows of your solarium, for ultra-violet light will
not pass through a lead glass. When the Admiral told me that the glass
had been replaced with fused quartz, which is quite permeable to
ultra-violet and that the change had been almost coincident with the
start of your malady, I asked him to get you out of the solarium and let
me examine it.

"By means of certain fluorescent substances which I used, I found that
your pillow was being bathed in a flood of ultra-violet light, and the
fluoro-spectroscope soon told me that lunium emanations were present in
large quantities. These rays were not coming to you directly from their
source, but one of the windows of the State, War and Navy Building was
being used as a reflector. I located the approximate source of the ray
by means of an improvised apparatus, and we surrounded the place.
Stokowsky was killed while attempting to escape. I guess that is about
all there is to it."

"Thank you, Doctor," said the President. "I would be interested in a
description of the apparatus which he used to produce this effect."

* * * * *

"The apparatus was quite simple, Sir. It was merely a large collector of
moonlight, which was thrown after collection onto a lunium plate. The
resultant emanations were turned into a parallel beam by a parabolic
reflector and focused, through a rock crystal lens with an extremely
long focal length, onto your pillow."

"Then Stokowsky had isolated Von Beyer's new element?" asked the
President.

"I am still in doubt whether it is a new element or merely an allotropic
modification of the common element, cadmium. The plate which he used has
a very peculiar property. When moonlight, or any other reflected light
of the same composition falls on it, it acts on the ray much as the
button of a Roentgen tube acts on a cathode ray. As the cathode ray is
absorbed and an entirely new ray, the X-ray, is given off by the button,
just so is the reflected moonlight absorbed and a new ray of
ultra-violet given off. This is the ray which Von Beyer detected. I
thought that I could catch traces of Von Beyer's lines in my
spectroscope, and I think now that it is due to a trace of lunium in the
cadmium plating of the barrels. Von Beyer could have easily made the
same mistake. Von Beyer's work, together with Stokowsky's opens up an
entirely new field of spectroscopic research. I would give a good deal
to go over