"No," said the other patiently. "I wasn't going to kill you."
Jerry Foster stared, open-mouthed. The pistol lagged in his limp hand. "To the moon!" he gasped.
Then: "See here," he said firmly. "I've got you where I want you."--he held the pistol steady--"and now I'm going to learn what's back of this. I think you are crazy, absolutely crazy. But, tell me, who are you? What do you think you're doing? What was the meaning of that roaring blast?"
The man looked up. "You don't know?" he asked eagerly. "You really don't?"
"No," said Jerry; "but I'm going to find out."
"Yes," the other agreed. "Yes, you can, now that you've got the upper-hand. I guess I was half crazy when I thought I had been spied out. But I'll tell you."
He sat erect. "I am Thomas J. Winslow," he said, and made the statement as if it were an explanation in itself.
"Well," said Jerry, "that's no burst of illumination to my ignorance. Come again."
The man called Winslow was ready--anxious--to talk.
"I am an inventor. I have made millions of dollars"--Jerry looked at the disheveled apparel of the speaker and smiled--"for other people. The Stillwater syndicate stole my valveless motor. Then I developed my television set. Goodwin beat me out of that: he will have it on the market inside of a year. I swore they should never profit by this, my greatest invention."
Jerry was impressed in spite of himself by the man's earnest simplicity.
"I've broken the atom," said Winslow. "First tore the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen apart--dissociated them in the molecule of water--and have resolved them into their energy components. That's what you heard--the reaction. It it self-sustaining, exothermic. That hot blast carried off the heat of my retort."
Winslow rose from the bunk. Gone was his listless despondency.
"Put up that gun," he said: "you don't need it now. I think we understand each other better than we did." He crossed with quick strides to the door leading into the cliff.
"Come with me," he told Foster. "I am leaving to-day. You will not stop me. But before I go I will show you something no other man than myself has ever seen."
He led the way through the doorway. There was another room beyond, Jerry saw. It was a cave. Plainly Winslow had taken these caves in the rocks and had made of them a laboratory.