The Beam

A friend had stolen a patent, the world thought him a little "off" and now Gayle would have his revenge!


excerpt

Gayle dropped the wrench with a sigh of satisfaction and stepped back to view the latest product of his delusion-tormented mind. To anyone else, the mass of apparatus assembled upon the table would have appeared a meaningless jumble of swooping tubes, arching cables and gleaming brass cylinders, all converging toward a slightly concave mirror before which was a squat glass bulb, remotely resembling an electric lamp. The wild confusion would have caused the spectatom immediately to classify the device as the work of a madman.


Gayle was slightly insane. Ever since the one really great idea of his then balanced mind had been purloined by one whom he had considered a friend, and had been developed and patented before he had completed experimentation, Gayle was certain that every person who evinced any interest in his creations, had, as an ulterior motive, the theft of those inventions. And so he secluded himself, admitting no one to the laboratory wherein he toiled endlessly. Now he gazed upon the machine before him, laughing softly and muttering incoherently.


A success! Another success! These were the thoughts tumbling through his deranged brain. Although not one of the many weird machines, which crowded the room, had ever functioned as intended, all were regarded by Gayle as successes, requiring but one slight adjustment (which was never made) to accomplish the miraculous wonders and to display the marvelous powers he ascribed to each. The officials of the Patent Office he cursed for being blind fools who could not, or would not, recognize genius.


Gloating over the culmination of months of concentrated effort, he caressed the glistening mirror and bulb and recalled the news that had plunged him into frenzied excitement. At last his great opportunity had come!


From Leningrad had arrived word of a remarkable discovery by one, Dr. Gurwitsch. Quite accidentally it had been found that the cornea of the human eye emitted rays, a fact formerly considered a superstition. The composition of this radiation, which was entirely invisible, was undetermined. Its peculiar property was stimulation of living things, stimulation of growth and reproduction. Yeast cells, gazed upon unvaryingly for a short period, were hastened in their processes of growth and reproduction to a surprising degree.


In his madness, Gayle at once perceived a means of revenge upon a society which would not accord him his proper position as the world's leading benefactor, and which described him as "cracked."


To him nothing was impossible; the greatest obstacles would fall before him, for obstinate natural laws would be superseded by his own laws, specially constructed to suit his needs.


With this thought in mind he proceeded to duplicate the experiments of the Russian, confirming all the latter' s statements. His joy was unsurpassed at the discovery that animal life was similarly affected when subjected to the influence of the radiation from the eye. Whereupon he rubbed his hands in glee, and set about building a device which would produce such rays with many thousand times the intensity of those generated by the cornea.