seems natural to blame your battery. But what divine fingers could shape the lightning into a steady brain and quiet glands?

Yet for a while this miracle was happening in Marvin. His limbs held still while he thought. His glands stored up their treasures unnoticed, or sent them secretly through his blood.

How could he think of Gratia when he was swimming in low-temperature coal-tar, or convincing himself that coal cannot be turned into water gas at the mine? Gratia was sweet—men cannot speak of girls without using that carbonic word—but he had not time to smell even the jasmine of coal-tar, much less its orange blossoms.

What was worse, he found it hard to stick to carbon. His mind kept running ahead. As the avaricious are fascinated by crystals of carbon, so he was fascinated by crystals of ordinary calcite. He could not keep away from a certain laboratory to which new crystal spectrometers were being added for the study of atomic structure.

Grein, the young dean and professor of radiochemistry, soon found him there, and a real friendship sprang up. Grein found that Marvin not only knew about Moseley but had read Harkins’s June article proposing a definite hydrogen-helium theory for the constitution of all atoms. And Marvin seemed to like a man for being overworked and irritable.

In Marvin’s room there was a telephone, and one August morning it rang with the sudden pressure of Grein’s voice against its carbon granules.

“Come over here, prepared for a shock.”

Marvin ran to the laboratory, and Grein handed him a cable message:

Lieutenant Moseley shot through head instantly killed tenth Suvla Bay while telephoning as signal officer.

The look on Marvin’s face was ghastly. At last he managed to ejaculate, “Only twenty-seven!”

“Yes,” muttered Grein, “and any one of his frequencies was worth more to England than the whole damned British army!”

Marvin’s unconscious fingers closed like clenching tools as he dully uttered one word:

“Lead!”

“Exactly. Lead driven through the one brain that really understood lead. Better drop your fuels and study lead.”

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