THAT WAS THE BEGINNING. The details of me are not important here; I need only say that I was twenty-four that summer. Dora and I were engaged to be married. Both of us were orphans. She was wealthy; I was not, so that I did not want to marry until I had made a success of an invention on which I was working—a ray-weapon with which I hoped, not to make war more deadly, but to make war impossible. It was a non-killing, paralyzing vibration. In theory, if I could project it any great distance—a vibration on speeding form—then with it whole armies would be stricken down, rendered helpless.
But I had not progressed that far as yet. I was living in Dora’s home, working in a small laboratory with which it was equipped. Just this week I had completed a miniature projector. With tests upon animals
