Evening Star Newspaper, January 28, 1929, Page 27

V78N i eV 7@\ T8N THE VICARION (Copyright, 1928, by Public Ledger) By Gardner Hunting. In the year 1935 Radley Brainard has in- yented the Vicarion, a device with which 1t is possible to re-create scenes out of the Past. The invention is a_sensational suc- Cess, with all the theaters installing it in Place of motion pictures. Complete Iilu- slons, Inc.. which at that time controls all he improvements on the movie, faces ruin, but when Ferdinand Mortimer and Jerry Ballard, heads of the company, call on him, Brainard refuses to make terms Brainard’s records of the past are tained in “bombs’ which hold lquid end while he is_projecting one of +“bombs,” was unmarked, he sees a, ner-ciad girl, with whom he | ove, although he is_enkaged to | Phyllis Norman. During the first demon- | glration of the Vicarion, with Phyllis and her family looking on, & strange man stag- gers into the studio. ' He is unable to tell ¥l s and Brainard names him Van Winkle and makes him his aide. Brainard calls in the operator who made the unmarked record, but gains no informa- tion from him. He orders Van Winkle to investigate the making of the bomb. Brain- ard projects one of the three remaining bombs containing the woodiand scene in Fhich the girl with whom he is infatuated decides the records were made by Jeftry Honer. a_criminal whom he has employed. _Phyllis receives a telephone call from Van Winkle telling her to come to the studio, con- air, hy (Continued from yesterday’s Star.) INSTALLMENT XXII y HE answered breathlessly, feeling that this was the summons fol- lowing upon presentiment. She decided not to wait for the car, but ran down to the street and summoned a passing taxi. It was not a long ride to the building where Radley lived and worked. When the cab reached its doors she flung a bill to its chauffeur, over which that young gen- tleman gaped. Hallmen and officers on the marble stairs in the entrance knew who she and admitted her to the elevators without question, but she real- ?d that the place was guarded like a oor to a national treasury. Sentinels had been redoubled between Radley and the street At the floor which he reserved for his more private use she found officers again—men_in & new livery which he seemed to have adopted for employes of his own, but wearing the shields of the police. But she forgot these when Van Winkle met her. He had been ‘watching for her arrival. “What is it?” she asked him, her voice trembling in spite of her. He seemed surprised at her agitation. “What? Oh, I hope I didn’t startle you. It’s nothing to be upset about. T've just come across something that concerns me rather deeply—and you a litt “Where is Mr. Brainard?” “In the small studio.” “Is he——" She hesitated. ‘Locked in,” said Van Winkle. ‘Is he always locked in?” she asked, ‘without realizing that her companion could have no clue to the origin of such @ notion, “He's experimenting,” Van Winkle told her, “Then he didn't know I was coming?” “Not unless he sees records of your fmovements as soon as you make them.” But at that moment the studio door opened and Brainard himself came out. His appearance amazed her. She had guessed vaguely what some of his ex- eriences of these days must be; but hey were transforming him. He seemed to be graying under her eyes. Past question, his face, which had had a distinct boyishness in it a few weeks ago, was older by years now. The rugged look he had always had was now a look of iron. His eyes, always keen and shrewd and full of humor, ‘were like the eyes of a falcon, to her fancy, seeing only enemies and prey. His face was gaunt, sharpened—but his figure was erect, with an unbending quality that did not soften as she ap- proached and greeted him. She felt it; miready his world must come to him! He looked down at her without a hint of relaxation—and his glance had no welcome in it, though his words simu- Aated it. v “well,” he said, “glad to see you again at last. Have you been waiting— or have you just come in?” ‘The studio door swung softly shut and locked itself behind him. He moved past her in the hall and walked toward the door of his office, expecting her to follow without his invitation. ‘When he had opened the door he left it so, but did not wait for her there. Still she followed him. Even without that vision she had caught of him at home, this altered manner of his would have drawn her to follow him. His ways seemed to her now like the vaga- ries of a sick man, nothing for her pride to take exception to. o ¢ things to change me,” | desire. when she found him sitting down at his desk. He turned to her with a smile and called out to Van Winkle, who had lingered outside, to come in. ‘Then he offered her a cigarette and lighted one. But Phyllis was in no mood to gmoke. “You're so changed, Radley,” she heard herself quite involun- tarily. He smiled again. saying, “Maybe I've had he answered easily. “I seem to have become all at once something of a marked man— marked as a target for a lot of people who are taking pot shots at me for one reason or another. I shall presently have marks all over me, I suspect.” “Radley!" He pushed the cigarettes toward Van Winkle, “Oh,” he said, “it's just that various people, firms, combinations and syndicates are trying in one way or an- other to get me. The latest events in the campaign are that somebody has tried to buy Ushigi—and that I just got an infernal machine—actually—by ex- press. It was a neat little thing—you'd have thought it was a French clock. But—Ushigi seems still to like me, wliether anybody else does or not—and I'm enforcing the good old rule that all packages must be delivered in the rear, where I have an ex-yegg to open them for me. I'm glad they never perfected that 1ay they used to talk about for disposing of an enemy at a distance without betraying the disposer.” “You may have to changé your ad- dress without advising the public,” said Van Winkle calmly., He seemed not unduly concerned. “No, T've a notion to stay here,” said Brainard, quite genuinely expressing a “It would be a nuisance to move. Of course, now that I have room in the Complete studios, I am going to spread out. I'm just working out a multiple condenser to make 20 or more records at once. I don’t know yet what I've got.” “Do you mean to make 20 records of the same event at the same time?"” asked Phyllis. “I don't see how you can.” “Not exactly of the same event; that s, not of the same part of the same event. But I want to enlarge my field —the Vicarion’s fleld of vision. The ouly way I've discovered so far is to make a combination of records, rather like a panoramic photograph, which I may hope to exhibit all together and s0 produce things on a spectacular scale, I don't know yet what may happen when I try it. But one thing it is going to do is to furnish me with a means of broadcasting to pick up events for which I have no exact index. And it will give me a sort of dragnet for enemies.” He seemed to lose the sense of talk- ing directly to listeners as he finished. Perhaps he was thinking of enemies in shoals. “You see” he said slowly, “nobody has ever indexed real history—only the little volumes they have written about it. I have got to—even to number the pages for myself! And it makes no difference how near or how far away a thing is—a thing that I may want to find—it is more like the proverbial needle in the haystack than—than any needle ever was.” He seemed to be thinking aloud. He paused again 'and looked off absently through the window past Phyllis. Then his eyes came back to her as if he had Jjust noticed her presence. “Am I talking incoherently?” he asked. “Are you so tired that you do not know?” she asked him. “Oh, no.” He shrugged. “But I'll give you an idea of one or two of my problems. An enemy came into my office here—this private office, I mean— some days ago. I might better scy, nights—for it was in the night. How e got in I do not know. Who he was I do not know. I have condensed rec- ords of his coming in and his going out, and of what he did while he was here, though I already knew that. He brought me another unlabeled bomb.” Phyllis chilled. She wondered that he could talk calmly of it. “Of course, he was one of my own operators—or an agent of one of my operators. Because nobody else con- denses records.” “Can’t anybody else make con- densers like yours?” “Not like mine.” He smiled. “If I tell you that there is in my vibrator one bit of substance which is a selec- tion from more than 30,000 substances tried for its purpose—and a substance But he did not look like a sick man e the lanes of navigation The officers and crews aboard such ice-breakers are picked hardiness, Yet they take no chances with dreaded colds, as their medicine chests show. Most of them are amply stocked with GROVE'S BROMO QUININE. At the very first hint of headache, that defies analysis, I think, besides— THE EVENING you will gather a notion of my enemies’ problem in that direction. But I found a record here on my desk one morning that somebody had put here in the night. It was made on one of the ma- chines downstairs—and was for the purpose of startling me by showing me that somebody else had the power to record my own movements when I be- lieved myself unobserved.” “Why, you didn’t tell me this,” ex- claimed Van Winkle, “No,” returned Brainard simply. “This enemy of mine thought appar- ently that he was going to frighten me, His record showed me—in the midst of experiment.” His eyes again lost their direct glance at Phyllis. “Experiment,” he repeated slowly. “And naturally he expected me to think that he could watch my secret results. Of coursé— you realize that the Vicarion offers sin- gular opportunities to the blackmailer.” “I—should think so!" “Well, I've been trying to trace the man who came in here,” Brainard con- tinued. “But he was clever. He came in the dark, masked, lighted no lights, and went away in the dark. barely see his figure. He walked through the streets where lights neces- sarily struck him, still masked. Once he had to run away from an officer who was curious about him. But he got away. And where he went remains a mystery, for he had the forethought to walk out into the pitch black flelds and just vanish there, so far as records of the condenser are concerned.” “Oh!" murmured Phyllls, to whom this idea came as a revelation of many things. “You see, the condenser gives me records visible by yesterday's light— and I haven't invented a method yet for throwing today's light back into yes- terday.” “But can’t you make records of what all your operators do in the condensing room?” “Yes. But my operators spend their days filling bombs. I have no means of making sure just which of hundreds is the bomb left on my desk.” “Radley,” said Phyllis, suddenly re- membering, “whatever became of that second garden record you ordered made the night that man tried to shoot you?” “I have it,” he answered. “But I've lost him.” “What? I thought he was the man who jumped—" She paused. “He was the man you all thought jumped from our window out here. I told Van Winkle—but I haven't told you—he didn’t jump. The police couldn’t find his body, and I told them I couldn’t with the condenser.’ I showed them the scenes in which I failed. But instead of finding him in the air out- side the open Vindow I found him in the mop closet in our hall. I told him to be good and put him to work on a condenser downstairs.” “And, of course, he is the man who is guilty of unlabeled bombs."” “He admits unlabeled bombs—you heard him—but not the one I found on my desk., However, he is doubtless the guilty party. My own trouble in dealing with him just now is that he has vanished again!” “Quit?” asked Van Winkle, “Didn't Welling tell you? Yes, he has quit—quit his machine, quit our employ, quit the place where he lived, quit his haunts—quit the face of the globe, so far as I can find out at the moment.” Rising irritation was in Brainard's tone. “And what—then?” asked Phylls, watching him. “I fancy I shall hear from him” returned Radley, getting up from his chair. And Phyllis wondered why he was telling her this. What about this <omparatively simple episode could so deeply stir him when real menace to his personal safety appeared to leave him_untouched? “Radley,” she asked, “are you afraid of him?"” He turned to her. “Afraid of him!” he echced angrily. “Certainly not!” He was! There was no other ex- planation for his sharp resentment of the idea. He burst out into further protest! “Why, he will be sending me a letter pretty soon. Do you realize that I can trace a letter from my desk back to the hand that mailed it? If I choose to take the time I can look on while my secretary puts it with my other mail. I can look back at the postman delivering it. I can follow him back to the office from which he brought it. I can watch it while incoming letters are distributed —oh, yes, close-ups on it to identify it whenever necessary. I can see it taken from the box that receives drop- letters. I can see it drop from the slot. I can look outside and see the hand that drops it—and the man—and fol- low him back to his writing of it, if I choose. I have followed one letter back to a woman who wrote it and to the moment she signed it—while she told her husband she was writing her mother —1I heard her say that, in her boudoir— with her husband between where I listened and the door. Quick relief for COLDS & since 1889 open. for courage and fortified against Tg no chances wi colds ‘The good ship Lady Axctic shakes and as she smashes at the jagged floes. The wind screams at her upj works, The ice thunders from her bows. 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Yet he was— | It's that I remember—remember that some things that have happened in the | little out of touch with progress, haven't | But Bralnard had turned restlessly | Van Winkle! night, and what it meant to me—what dark—when I once have a clue to the | you?” to papers on his desk. Van Winkle| “I—I remember that night,” faltered | you meant to me! But you—do notl when and the where. And it’s going to “Then, the phone—" had spoken to her. She said conven- | Phyllis, her mind whirljng. “But—oh, | And I—remember nothing else! I -ll-t tional things without knowing what they were and found herself presently in one of the white exhibition rooms. She did not hear the explanation of- fered her by the man at her side, but abruptly she was looking into a great ballroom, where hundreds of dancers thronged the floor, where the dulcet strains of a languorous waltz swung them in its cadences, where mellow light changed in slow, kalefdoscopic shifting —glitter of costume, glimpses of sweet, youthful faces, flashes of grace in swa ing figures and slender feet, gay, guard- ed and gracious eyes—all of the undy- ing charm of earth’s oldest pastime in loveliest of settings, a profusion of flow- ers, ferns, palms and fountains stretch. ing away in dimming vistas to white stairways and moonlit lawns! And as the scene began to warm her senses, into the foreground out of the crowd danced a lovely figure, star-eyed, flush- ed, joyous, radiant, a bright spark from the glowing whole, and paused and was—herself! Some half-forgotten myth of nymph or woman enamored of her own reflect- ed loveliness floated through Phyllis Norman’s mind. She was not vain of | her beauty, but she had now a sense | of never having seen it! But the man— her partner—was bowing, and the woman beside the slender pillar was suddenly her mother, to whom he wasg surrendering her; and he turned and came out toward where—— “Look, look!" gasped the man beside | | her. “Do you know me—do you re- member-—-do you understand?” ‘The man approaching there out of | that re-created scene of a bygone night | was strong, erect, full of the vigor of | f health—little like this still, haggard, half-broken unfortunate he: whose “It would be possible to phone me in the dark—but dangerous; and every repetition would multiply the danger, “A message could be sent me by radio, but every radio message can be traced to its sending station. Telegrams are kept in duplicate in the filing office, where I have access to them even if it is refused me. Do you begin to realize that T am a dangerous man?” Brainard laughed again. Phyllis whirled. “Radley, do you never think of your—responsibility?” He looked at her gravely. “I'm a good deal occupied just now in think- ing of self-defense.” He shrugged, and his lips took on the faint sneer she had seen there before. He picked up a pen- cil and began turning it in his fingers, regarding the slight action as if it were important. “In making my own ex- periments in my own studio—where I now have a condenser for my personal use—I have had to protect myself by working in the dark, and I've had raised figures made on my dials so that I can be certain by touching them just what they register. I shall find better means, of course, but meanwhile no one else is likely to oversee what I am do- ing or to learn the indices of what I choose to record secretly.” “We shall all have to begin to live mostly in the dark,” said Van Winkle, “I already feel intermittently like one of those intermittent electric adver- tising signs, demonstrating my brand of pajamas and bath soap! It's well !enough to look at the other fellow through the Vicarion, but it will take time to get used to being the vica- ri-eel” “Do you remember, Phyl,” said Brain- ard, his eyes narrowing slightly at her, “what Aunt Relief said about my show- ing you human transparencies? Did it never occur to you that life might grow beautiful if it were made transparent? L’igilzt might bleach the dark spots out of it.” She looked into his eyes. He was not joking now. He was bitterly sin- cere. Had those fine eyes of his, then, vision—vision above her own little glimpses that stirred only terror in her? Indeed, what real grasp had she of the thing she attempted to discuss? Again | it overwhelmed her. Suppose life could be held up to the race as it is. Ideal- ism itself was a kind of secrecy men spread over truth, “Know thyself” was a mandate to the individual—why not I don’'t—remember you “When—where was it? “Why, it was—why, it was at the a wrecked and meaningless thing! is only my body that is here! I—now, here—am like the man we just saw in New Embassy—Ilast Winter—in Decem- | that scene from a dead year—the walk- ber!” ing, living body of a dead man, without “Last Winter!” groaned the other.|a spirit—without a soul!” Then he raised his head. “But—it is (To be continued tomorrow.) ble difficult for people not to leave clues.” “You have too much power, Radley— always providing you can hold it,” said Phyllis slowly. “I can hold it.” The girl caught her breath. “Radley,” she said, “I've heard you talk of unity as applied to drama and to events. Do you realize that there is a unity of emotion, of sentiment, of passion, too. ‘There is a unity of all things that will strike a balance when & power is mis- used—you almost said so, once yourself! But masses, swayed by passion will con- centrate with unity of passion. The mob’s passion mes an entity against the common foe. I warn you, Radley, some day those who unite now to fear you will unite to hate you! Now they cringe and obey—then they will attack —and destroy!” l,ill:ainnrd shrugged. “What can they “It would be possible to kidnap you —and to devise a means to wring a secret from you.” “When anybody does that, you see, the secret will cease to be a valuable monopoly. I've arranged that. It will be automatically scattered to everybody. There'll be as many brands of con- densed records as there are now of con- densed milk. Or every man will main- tain his own family condenser in his stable and have his neighbors’ doihgs with his breakfast food. It's going to have an advantage over the newspaper in more ways than one—wife can read it, too. And hubby can't hide behind it.” He could be facetious about what might seem a real possibility; and angry at a trifle! Nerves? Did he realize that the all-conquering sword he had seized, already discovered to have two edges, might prove unobedient in his hands? Only an Arthur could wield Excaliber. Did the gift of a super- natural weapon necessarily endow a man with the strength of a demigod? But he baffled her. She had come here to him that she might find a way to give of herself, her love, her loyalty, in the time of his need. But where was the need? One cannot give of one’s self {o the self-sufficient— one cannot pour into a vessel that is full! She turned away fromt him and looked from the window down into the street. 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