"Did you never hear of a substance called selenium?" asked Detmold with fine sarcasm, and as Lanier started, he added, "Ah, you begin to see! You remember that the electrical resistance of selenium varies enormously in light and in darkness, and you begin to perceive how the light striking that artificial retina could be translated into electricity and flashed to the brain. It is all so clear—now. But I was telling you about the eye. There's a shutter that closes across that lens, much like a high-speed camera shutter, but capable of being opened or closed by an inconceivably delicate force. I'm not going to tell you all about it, you or anyone, but watch it now," and taking a small flashlight from his pocket, he flashed its brilliant little beam directly on the inset lens.
Lanier watched intently. There was no change for a space of seconds, then, with a tiny click, the shutter closed across the lens. He drew a long breath as he straightened up.
"You saw!" asked Detmold, snapping off the switches. "The thing can see with that eye, just enough to differentiate between light and dark, and it hates bright light, so what? It closes the shutter, cutting off the light. Isn't that intelligence, mind, reason? Crude and feeble now, I grant you, but it will grow. I will develop it. I'll go farther yet." His voice dropped, and the brooding, sullen expression crept back over his face. "And yet those fools say, 'Impossible, impossible!' Damn them, this metal brain has more intelligence than they. Or it will have. It will have." As his friend remained silent he asked, "Do you think I am faking it, Lanier?"
"No," was the slow answer, "but I do think you're treading very near forbidden ground. That movement—that intelligence—have you considered, Detmold, what an intelligence might be like, that had no controlling, directing power, a brain without a soul?"
"Theology, mysticism!" cried the other. "No, Lanier, I am going on with this, if only to show these fools the depth of their folly. I have a place where I can work in peace, thank God, and where the confounded newspapers won't pester me, for I'll tell no one where I'm going. No, not even you," he added, clapping his friend on the back affectionately, "for you might talk in your sleep. But when I finish it, you'll hear from me. And so will the world."
Lanier did not reply, and in silence they began the work of packing. And the next day, when they stood on the station platform in the last few minutes before the train's departure, there seemed little to say. The whistle of the locomotive, a last clasp of Detmold's hand and a muttered "Good-bye," and the train was receding swiftly down the track, and he was gone.
More than one person wondered where Detmold had gone. His name was prominent in the newspapers that night, was mentioned often in homes and clubs and restaurants, with a chuckle or a sneer. It was not mentioned so much the next night; a month afterward it was seldom heard; and in a year not one person in ten thousand remembered the man. None knew where he had gone, his name and personality and strange ideas had sunk into silence and forgetfulness; and laughing, toiling, hurrying, the world sped on.
2
It was fully four years after Detmold's disappearance that the strange phenomena at Stockton began to attract attention. Stockton was a small steel town in northern West Virginia, set in a long valley between dark, thickly wooded hills, and from those hills came news of mysterious occurrences.
