“Thank you, Mr. Griffith. We had the pleasure of seeing Is This Seat Taken? shown by a Humanova troupe at our wedding feast on Mauretania.”

Griffith rolled his eyes. “With the director putting words in my actors’ mouths?”

“I’m afraid so. That’s what we’ve come to talk to you about. This is Mr. Clyde Lynds. He has invented a wonderful machine to make and show talking pictures.”

“That’s been tried before.”

“But mine works,” said Clyde.

“I’ve never seen voice and picture synchronized for longer than five seconds.”

“You’ll see mine for five reels.”

Griffith glanced from the brash young scientist into the steady gaze of the tall detective.

“My firm, Dagget, Staples and Hitchcock, is betting it will work,” said Bell. “Clyde developed a new process with Professor Franz Beiderbecke, who was an electro-acoustic scientist at the Imperial-Royal Polytechnic Institute in Vienna.”

Griffith said, “I would love to make talking pictures. The human voice is a wondrous factor at intense moments But I am not in any position to invest.”

“I don’t need your money,” Clyde shot back. “All I need is a laboratory like you’ve set up in that shed. And a machine shop like you have for the cameras. And—”

“Most of all,” Isaac Bell interrupted, “Clyde needs an important director to make a picture show with his machine.”

“That would be me,” said Griffith, “Except I’m only here until we finish In Old California. Then it’s back to New York, and I doubt very much that Biograph will have any interest in a machine that would compete with Mr. Edison. But—” Here, with a dramatic pause, he raised a finger for emphasis. “By coincidence, I was, only yesterday, approached by the Imperial Film Manufacturing Company offering to woo me away from Biograph.”

Bell did not like coincidences. “Who is Imperial?”

“They showed me their cinematography studio, and I’ll tell you it’s the finest motion picture plant in the West. Four hundred hands, a corps of stage directors, magnificent stages, complete laboratories, darkrooms, and machine shops. All installed at a cost that must have run into big money, thanks to financial backing by the Artists Syndicate.”

“What is the Artists Syndicate?” asked Bell.

“They’re a combine of Wall Street bankers who don’t give a hoot for the Edison Trust. Wait until you see Imperial. They have a wealth of brand-new equipment capable of turning out a quantity of film, and they’ve engaged stars, both legit and vaud. They’re all set to make big plays—longer, multi-reel pictures.”

Clyde said to Isaac Bell, “Imperial sounds up-to-date.”

“Could you arrange an appointment, Mr. Griffith?”

“I’ll do better than arrange an appointment. I’ll tell them I’ll make the first picture with sound as soon as you’ve perfected it. That ought to get their attention.”

“Don’t you have a contract with Biograph?”