"You will find where you are," he said over his shoulder, "when the time comes and you are a blood member with us. For the present, the temporary laboratory is directly under us."
The two guards, both of them with guns in their hands now, motioned Van and Lannigan to follow their leader. Van, while he had been talking, had been using his hands casually, feeling of his clothes and secret pockets. His captors appeared not to have taken time to search him thoroughly.
Even though unarmed, he and the Champ might have put up a fight in an attempt to break free. But the information he wanted was evidently down here, not elsewhere.
Escape now would have defeated his purpose.
Guarded by the two armed men, Van and Jerry followed the robed figure through the door which he opened, down a steep incline that turned twice at right angles and brought them out into a deeper, smaller cavern cut into the earth directly below the subterranean chamber above.
Heat greeted them as they entered this room.
Four burly men, stripped to the waist, eyed them curiously. A fifth man who appeared to be a hunchback looked up leeringly with small pale eyes set deep and wide apart in a distorted, twitching and scarred face.
But it was the glow in the center of the room that held Van's attention. Through a small opening in the rock a thin flame stood up from the floor for almost a foot in height. The rock from which this jet spurted was white hot, and the flame itself was perfectly colorless at the base but flowered into vivid blues and yellows before it expended itself.
The room was filled with a constant hissing sound, a miniature roar that made speech difficult.
The Phantom tore his eyes from that fascinating light, and for a moment as he looked away he was blinded. Then vision returned swiftly, but he kept his eyes off that flame, and noticed that about the necks of the four workmen and the hunchback hung thick goggles.
The cloaked leader indicated the short squat man with the hunched back, and said to Van, "This is Doctor Kag. Professor Kag was one of the foremost metallurgists in the world until one of his experiments blew up and crippled him. He is temporarily—" He emphasized the word forebodingly—"in charge of the experiments we are conducting here. The gas flame in this room, with the addition of oxygen, is the hottest torch that has ever been discovered—two thousand degrees centigrade higher than that electric arc oven of Dr. Junes at Niagara Falls."
The Phantom's eyes showed a sharpened interest that he did not have to fake.
The man-made oven of Dr. Junes, built by the General Electric Company for experimental purposes, had the highest temperature of any arc furnace thus far designed. And arc furnaces were the hottest known to man.
Yet, by the statement of one of the engineers in this hooded organization, seven hours of that arc heat had failed to fuse the two metals whose union had been the aim of Doctor Junes. Van did not doubt the statement of the leader standing before him now. And two thousand more degrees of heat, he realized, would be more than sufficient, if properly controlled, to effect that world-important fusion of those two metals.
He was about to speak, when Kag came swaying toward him, leering, pawing with gnarled, crippled hands.
"Professor Junes!" Kag's voice was shrill, piercing.
"He's not Junes," the hooded man shouted. "He's another scientist. Junes is dead, burned up in his own furnace!"
Kag's pale eyes rolled wildly in their sockets. "You're not Junes?" he cried querulously.
"No," Van admitted, watching the man narrowly. There was near insanity in those crazy, rolling eyes.
Suddenly the hunchback's fawning attitude changed. Crazed genius glittered in his rocking gaze.
"Ach!" he screamed. "A scientist, are you? It is I who am the scientist—the greatest scientist in the world! What do you know of science—of fire—of metallurgy?"
"I was a friend and contemporary worker with Dr. Junes," Van answered as calmly as he could. This hunchback, he knew, could trip him with questions, show him up as an impostor. "Tell me, Professor Kag, what experiments you are working—"
"Kag!" The hunchback's shrill voice trembled with frenzy. "Kag! I shall tell you nothing! I shall ask you questions! You do not even know who I am. Kag!"
The Phantom saw the mistake he had made, tried to stop the man's wild screeching by correcting the error. This man was unquestionably Dr. Gulliver Vonderkag, once the foremost metallurgical scientist in Germany—but now only the shell of him, yet his genius still raged.
But Van could not make himself heard.
"A metallurgist, are you? Tell me quickly the fusion point of antimony and copper."
The Phantom's muscles tensed at the suddenness of this crisis.
"Antimony and copper—"
Van had to hesitate, grope an instant before the answer came to him. Then he gave it, watching the hunchback nervously. If the German scientist shot many more such questions at him, he'd be stuck, and his Bendix role unmasked.
"Slow," Kag cried in disgust. "Dr. Junes, he would have been quicker. I could have used him in my work. But you—"
"You've no choice in the matter, Kag," the hooded leader said flatly. "Test him again."
The Phantom's mind fought against Vonderkag's warped brain, beat the crippled scientist's formulating question by sheer audacity and drive.
"Doctor!" Van shouted. "Let us stop this kindergarten child's game. I am interested only in your knowledge of Dr. Junes' work—his experiment which he refused to continue."
"Refused to continue?" Kag demanded shrilly. "What is that?"
"Fusing aluminum and calbite," the Phantom declared in a loud, challenging voice. "Dr. Junes, as you've been told, was killed, but before he died, he had refused to carry on the fusion. He was afraid. I know what he feared. Do you?"
"Afraid?" Kag screeched the word as though it had come from a foreign tongue and had no meaning for him. "Are we men of science?"
Somebody pounded on the door. The hooded leader swung round, unlocked the door, let in a man dressed similarly in hood and robe but without a mask. On the sleeve of the newcomer was a green circle with a zigzag line running through it.
"What's the trouble, Sergeant?" the masked man demanded.
The hooded sergeant saluted briskly, swinging his arm in toward his stomach and out again. He stepped around a water pail, his leg brushing the dipper sticking out of it as he handed over a sealed envelope.
"Something that demands immediate attention," he stated.
As the man in the mask ripped open the envelope and extracted the folded sheet of note paper it contained, Van signaled Lannigan to be ready, and edged closer to the leader whose eyes narrowed dangerously as he read the penciled notation.
For a swift instant, Van caught a glimpse of that note, got a flash view of the words:
Professor Bendix suspected of being sent as a scientist spy from the capitalist
