and again stared out of
the window.

He was aroused from his stunned inaction by the entrance of his colored
laboratory helper, and silently motioned him to clean up the wreckage.

"What's happened, Doctah?" asked the dusky assistant.

"Search me, Dan. I wish I knew, myself," responded Seaton, absently,
lost in wonder at the incredible phenomenon of which he had just been a
witness.

Ferdinand Scott, a chemist employed in the next room, entered breezily.

"Hello, Dicky, thought I heard a racket in here," the newcomer remarked.
Then he saw the helper busily mopping up the reeking mass of chemicals.

"Great balls of fire!" he exclaimed. "What've you been celebrating? Had
an explosion? How, what, and why?"

"I can tell you the 'what,' and part of the 'how'," Seaton replied
thoughtfully, "but as to the 'why,' I am completely in the dark. Here's
all I know about it," and in a few words he related the foregoing
incident. Scott's face showed in turn interest, amazement, and pitying
alarm. He took Seaton by the arm.

"Dick, old top, I never knew you to drink or dope, but this stuff sure
came out of either a bottle or a needle. Did you see a pink serpent
carrying it away? Take my advice, old son, if you want to stay in Uncle
Sam's service, and lay off the stuff, whatever it is. It's bad enough to
come down here so far gone that you wreck most of your apparatus and
lose the rest of it, but to pull a yarn like that is going too far. The
Chief will have to ask for your resignation, sure. Why don't you take a
couple of days of your leave and straighten up?"

Seaton paid no attention to him, and Scott returned to his own
laboratory, shaking his head sadly.

Seaton, with his mind in a whirl, walked slowly to his desk, picked up
his blackened and battered briar pipe, and sat down to study out what he
had done, or what could possibly have happened, to result in such an
unbelievable infraction of all the laws of mechanics and gravitation. He
knew that he was sober and sane, that the thing had actually happened.
But why? And how? All his scientific training told him that it was
impossible. It was unthinkable that an inert mass of metal should fly
off into space without any applied force. Since it had actually
happened, there must have been applied an enormous and hitherto unknown
force. What was that force? The reason for this unbelievable
manifestation of energy was certainly somewhere in the solution, the
electrolytic cell,