Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 181 by Maxwel l Grant

Author:Maxwel,l Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

CHAPTER XII. THE DOUBLE DILEMMA

NEXT day, the public began to get educated on the subject of the cosmic ray. No longer could the law keep all of crime's details quiet. The story had cracked wide open, with the crash of the Stuyvesant Bridge.

Newspapers, radio broadcasters, went into elaborate explanations, which boiled down into simple but rather meager facts.

The cosmic ray was one of nature's mysteries. Traveling with the speed of light, having a wave length shorter than any other known, those rays were bombarding the earth with a remarkable penetrative power.

Some scientists regarded them as the cause of the mysterious northern lights, otherwise known as the aurora borealis. Cosmic rays, it was known, produced a certain amount of radio interference. Their effect could be measured by vacuum tubes containing electrified platinum wire. But when it came to harnessing those rays, one man alone had managed to do the trick.

He was the missing inventor, Simon Zurm.

Cosmic rays could best be studied in the stratosphere, because the earth's atmosphere acted as a blanket against them. The rays were a potential source of power, but not at the earth's surface. Certain scientists believed that the total energy of all the cosmic rays at sea level would not exceed one hundred horse-power. But the peculiar action of those rays were definitely a different story.

They had a marked effect on weather conditions, and that, plus their penetrative ability that enabled them to pass through several feet of lead, was the basis upon which Simon Zurm had worked.

Deflected rays, intensified. That was the story in a nutshell. The concentrated force had shown its effect on steel, a man-made alloy. It could probably ruin duralumin and other alloys. But it had no effect on copper, lead, aluminum or zinc, which indicated that many other metals, and such alloys as brass, would

be immune.

Human beings, too, were safe against the ray. The Shadow, for one, could have testified personally to that fact. He actually owed his luck of last night to the ray's effects. In an ordinary type of crash, The Shadow would have rolled to destruction, trapped in his wrecked car. The ray, however, had served him.

Literally, the intensified force from the machine had crumbled the roadster's front. Powdered bolts had yielded; the car had fallen apart as its plunge began. The Shadow had struck ground just over the edge of the road. Holding tight, he had let the cracking vehicle bound over and beyond him.

Recalling his escape, The Shadow could testify to another effect of the concentrated ray. Judiciously applied, it had no effect upon electrical apparatus. The lack of alarms during certain robberies proved that fact. But when the converged rays were poured with furious intensity, as they had been at The Shadow's car, they created a disturbance. The Shadow remembered that the roadster's ignition had gone balky just before the crash.

The police supposed that crooks had been using the improved supermachine that they had taken from Zurm's laboratory. The Shadow was positive upon that particular point.

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