“Oh, splendidly!” the inspector answered. “He’s got a very fine business.” Local pride made him add, “The firm’s very well known”; and he amplified this with: “A very wealthy man, and a learned one, too. He does nothing but make experiments.”

“Mixa Street!” cried Bondy to his chauffeur.

“Third on the right!” the inspector called after the car.

Bondy was soon ringing at the residential part of quite a pretty little factory.

“It’s all very nice and clean here,” he remarked to himself. “Flower-beds in the yard, creeper on the walls. Humph! There always was a touch of the philanthropist and reformer about that confounded Marek.” And at that moment Marek himself came out on the steps to meet him; Rudy Marek, awfully thin and serious-looking, up in the clouds, so to speak. It gave Bondy a queer pang to find him neither so young as he used to be nor so unkempt as that inventor; so utterly different from what Bondy had imagined that he was scarcely recognizable. But before he could fully realize his disillusionment, Marek stretched out his hand and said quietly, “Well, so you’ve come at last, Bondy! I’ve been expecting you!”

II. The Karburator

CHAPTER II

THE KARBURATOR

“I’VE been expecting you!” Marek repeated, when he had seated his guest in a comfortable leather chair. Nothing on earth would have induced Bondy to own up to his vision of the fallen inventor. “Just fancy!” he said, with a rather forced gaiety. “What a coincidence! It struck me only this very morning that we hadn’t seen one another for twenty years. Twenty years, Rudy, think of it!”

“Hm,” said Marek. “And so you want to buy my invention.”

“Buy it?” said G. H. Bondy hesitatingly. “I really don’t know . . . I haven’t even given it a thought. I wanted to see you and––––”

“Oh, come, you needn’t pretend,” Marek interrupted him. “I knew that you were coming. You’d be sure to, for a thing like this. This kind of invention is just in your line. There’s a lot to be done with it.” He made an eloquent motion with his hand, coughed, and began again more deliberately. “The invention I am going to show you means a bigger revolution in technical methods than Watt’s invention of the steam-engine. To give you its nature briefly, it provides, putting it theoretically, for the complete utilization of atomic energy.”

Bondy concealed a yawn. “But tell me, what have you been doing all these twenty years?”

Marek glanced at him with some surprise.

“Modern science teaches that all matter—that is to say, its atoms—is composed of a vast number of units of energy. An atom is in reality a collection of electrons, i.e. of the tiniest particles of electricity.”