The Lost Machine

“Father, here, quickly,” Joan's voice called down the long corridor. Dr. Falkner, who was writing, checked him­self in mid-sentence at the sound of his daughter's urgency.

“Father,” she called again.

“Coming,” he shouted as he hastily levered him­self out of his easy-chair.

“This way,” he added for the benefit of his two compa­nions.

Joan was standing at the open door of the labo­ra­tory.

“It's gone,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he inquired brusquely as he brushed past her into the room. “Run away?”

“No, not that,” Joan's dark curls fell forward as her head shook. “Look there.”

He followed the line of her point­ing finger to the corner of the room.

A pool of liquid metal was seeping into a widen­ing circle. In the middle there rose an elong­ated, silvery mound which seemed to melt and run even as he looked. Speech­lessly he watched the central mass flow out into the surround­ing fluid, pushing the edges gradually farther and farther across the floor.

Then the mound was gone – nothing lay before him but a shape­less spread of glittering silver like a minia­ture lake of mercury.

For some moments the doctor seemed unable to speak. At length he recovered himself suffi­ciently to ask hoarsely:

“That – that was it?”

Joan nodded.

“It was recog­niz­able when I first saw it,” she said.

Angrily he turned upon her.

“How did it happen? Who did it?” he demanded.

“I don't know,” the girl answered, her voice trembl­ing a little as she spoke. “As soon as I got back to the house I came in here just to see that it was all right. It wasn't in the usual corner and as I looked around I caught sight of it over here – melting. I shouted for you as soon as I realized what was happening.”

One of the doctor's compan­ions stepped from the back­ground.

“This,” he inquired, “is – was the machine you were telling us about?”

There was a touch of a sneer in his voice as he put the question and indi­cated the quiver­ing liquid with the toe of one shoe.

“Yes,” the doctor admitted slowly. “That was it.”

“And, therefore, you can offer no proof of the talk you were handing out to us?” added the other man.

“We've got film records,” Joan began tenta­tively. “They're pretty good...”

The second man brushed her words aside.

“Oh yes,” he asked sarcas­tically. “I've seen pictures of New York as it's going to look in a couple of hundred years, but that don't mean that anyone went there to take 'em. There's a whole lot of things that can be done with movies,” he insinu­ated.

Joan flushed, but kept silent. The doctor paid no atten­tion. His brief flash of anger had sub­sided to leave him gazing at the remains before him.

“Who can have done it?” he repeated half to himself.

His daughter hesitated for a moment before she suggested :

“I think – I think it must have done it itself.”

“An accident? – I wonder,” murmured the doctor.

“No – no, not quite that,” she amended. “I think it was – lonely,' the last word came out with a defiant rush.

There was a pause.

“Well, can you beat that?” said one of the others at last. “Lonely – a lonely machine: that's a good one. And I suppose you're trying to feed us that it committed suicide, Miss? Well, it wouldn't surprise me any; nothing would, after the story your father gave us.”

He turned on his heel and added to his com­panion:

“Come on. I guess some­one'll be turnin' this place into a sanita­rium soon – we'd better not be here when it happens.”

With a laugh the two went out, leaving father and daughter to stare help­lessly at the residue of a vanished machine.

At length Joan sighed and moved away. As she raised her eyes, she became aware of a pile of paper on the corner of a bench. She did not remem­ber how it came to be there and crossed with idle curiosity to examine it.

The doctor was aroused from his reverie by the note of excite­ment in her voice.

“Look here, Father,” she called sharply.

“What's that?” he asked, catching sight of the wad of sheets in her hand.

As he came closer he could see that the top one was covered with strange charac­ters.

“What on earth...?” he began.

Joan's voice was curt with his stupidity.

“Don't you see?” she cried. “It's written this for us.”

The doctor brightened for a moment; then the expression of gloom returned to his face.

“But how can we...?”

“The thing wasn't a fool – it must have learned enough of our lang­uage to put a key in some­where to all this weird stuff, even if it couldn't write the whole thing in English. Look, this might be it, it looks even queerer than the rest.”

Several weeks of hard work followed for Joan in her efforts to decipher the curious docu­ment, but she held on with pain­staking labour until she was able to lay the complete text before her father. That evening he picked up the pile of typed sheets and read steadily, with­out inter­ruption, to the end...