The stone stood upon an ornamental plinth and was carved with two columns of figures and letters:
E 6 O 1
T 2 D 4
H 4 L 1
A 1 N 3
W 1 U 1
R 2 B 1
I 3 S 2
“But what on earth does that mean?”
“It is a cryptogram,” said Mr. Colson quietly. “When Heyghens made his discovery about Saturn’s rings, he adopted this method to prevent himself from being forestalled in the discovery. I have done the same.”
“But what does it mean?” asked the puzzled Tim.
“That you will one day learn,” said the professor, as they walked back to the house.
His keen ears heard a sound and he pulled out his watch.
“Our friends are here already,” he said in a lower voice.
They went back to the library and closed the door, and presently the butler appeared to announce the visitors.
The attitude of the two newcomers was in remarkable contrast. Mr. Hildreth was self-assured, a man of the world to his fingertips, and greeted the professor as though he were his oldest friend and had come at his special invitation. Mr. Dawes, on the contrary, looked thoroughly uncomfortable.
Tim had a look at the great financier, and he was not impressed. There was something about those hard eyes which was almost repellent.
After perfunctory greetings had passed, there was an awkward pause, and the financier looked at Tim.
“My friend, Mr. Lensman, will be present at this interview,” said Colson, interpreting the meaning of that glance.
“He is rather young to dabble in high finance, isn’t he?” drawled the other.
“Young or old, he’s staying,” said Colson, and the man shrugged his shoulders.
“I hope this discussion will be carried on in a calm atmosphere,” he said. “As your young friend probably knows, I have made you an offer of a million pounds, on the understanding that you will turn over to me all the information which comes to you by — er — a — —” his lip curled— “mysterious method, into which we will not probe too deeply.”
“You might have saved yourself the journey,” said Colson calmly. “Indeed, I could have made my answer a little more final, if it were possible; but it was my wish that you should be refused in the presence of a trustworthy witness. I do not want your millions — I wish to have nothing whatever to do with you.”
“Be reasonable,” murmured Dawes, who took no important part in the conversation.
Him the old man ignored, and stood waiting for the financier’s reply.
“I’ll put it very plainly to you, Colson,” said Hildreth, sitting easily on the edge of the table. “You’ve cost me a lot of money. I don’t know where you get your market ‘tips’ from, but you’re most infernally right. You undercut my market a month ago, and took the greater part of a hundred thousand pounds out of my pocket. I offer to pay you the sum to put me in touch with the source of your information. You have a wireless plant here, and somewhere else in the world you have a miracle-man who seems to be able to foretell the future — with disastrous consequences to myself. I may tell you — and this you will know — that, but for the fact that your correspondent speaks in a peculiar language, I should have had your secret long ago. Now, Mr. Colson, are you going to be sensible?”
Colson smiled slowly.
“I’m afraid I shall not oblige you. I know that you have been listening-in — I know also that you have been baffled. I shall continue to operate in your or any other market, and I give you full liberty to go to the person who is my informant, and who will be just as glad to tell you as he is to tell me, everything he knows.”
Hildreth took up his hat with an ugly smile. “That is your last word?” Colson nodded.
“My very last.” The two men walked to the door, and turned.
“It is not mine,” said Hildreth, and there was no mistaking the ominous note in his tone.
They stood at the window watching the two men until they had gone out of sight, and then Tim turned to his host.
“What does he want really?” he asked.
Mr. Colson roused himself from his reverie with a start.
“What does he want? I will show you. The cause of all our burglaries, the cause of this visit. Come with me.”
They turned into the passage, and as the professor stopped before the door labelled “Planetoid 127,”
Tim’s heart began to beat a little faster. Colson opened the door with two keys and ushered him into the strangest room which Tim had ever seen.
A confused picture of instruments, of wires that spun across the room like the web of a spider, of strange little machines which seemed to be endowed with perpetual motion — for they worked all the time — these were his first impressions.
The room was lined with grey felt, except on one side, where there was a strip of fibrous panelling. Towards this the professor went. Pushing aside a panel, he disclosed the circular door of a safe and, reaching in his hand, took out a small red-covered book.
“This is what the burglars want!” he said exultantly. “The Code! The Code of the Stars!”
Chapter III
Tim Lensman could only stare at the professor.
“I don’t understand you, Mr. Colson,” he said, puzzled. “You mean that book is a code…an ordinary commercial code?”
Colson shook his head.
“No, my boy,” he said quietly; “that is something more than a code, it is a vocabulary — a vocabulary of six thousand words, the simplest and the most comprehensive language that humanity has ever known! That is why they are so infinitely more clever than we,” he mused. “I have not yet learned the process by which this language was evolved, but it is certain that it is their universal tongue.”
He turned with a smile to the bewildered boy.
“You speak English, probably French; you may have a smattering of German and Spanish and Italian. And when you have named these languages, you probably imagine that you have exhausted all that matter, and that the highest expression of human speech is bound up in one or the other, or perhaps all, of these tongues. Yet there is a tribe on the Upper Congo which has a vocabulary of four thousand words with which to voice its hopes,
