he had in hand. He could afford private assistants, but he used them purely as mechanical hands. Unless they could guess for themselves, they learned nothing of the ultimate object in view in the researches they helped him with. He did his own thinking and kept the results to himself. The last line he'd been on before I left for Africa had been a parallelism between response in living and in non-living materials. And when his name came up, I remember vaguely that Milton had been one of these mechanical hacks employed in the private laboratory.
"Are you still with Stevenson?" I inquired. "What's he on, nowadays?"
MILTON seemed a bit confused by the direct question. He hunted in his pocket for a moment or two without answering, and I began to fear I had been too inquisitive. After all, one can't expect a paid assistant to be overfree about his chief's private work. However, at last he fished out a pocket-book and extracted a newspaper cutting which he flipped across to me. As far as I can remember, it ran something like this:
DISAPPEARANCE OF WELL-KNOWN
SCIENTIST
It appears probable that the well-known physicist. Professor Loraine Stevenson, has been drowned. He was spending his vacation on his estate in the Hebrides, and on Tuesday morning he and his assistant went out in a motor-launch. A storm came on during the afternoon, and it is feared that the launch capsized. No trace of the launch or its occupants has been found. The name of the assistant has not transpired. A peculiar feature of the case is the disappearance of a number of bearer bonds which the late professor is known to have had in his possession at the time of his disappearance.
I handed him back the cutting.
"Who was the assistant they mention? It must be fairly well known, who he was."
Milton looked at me and I seemed to see a flicker of something in his glance, something I couldn't put a name to, a disturbing thing like the gleam of insanity in a lunatic's eye.
"Well," he answered haltingly, "the fact is . . . I mean . . . well, you see, I was the assistant."
"So the boat wasn't lost at all? What became of Stevenson, then? And how did it come that your name was left out of that yarn?"
And at that, out came his tale. I don't say I believe it, nor do I say I disbelieve it. Queerer things than that have turned out to be true, in the scientific field. I put it down as he told it to me—in his own words as far as I can remember them.
Mind, I don't expect you to believe this {he began}. It's a bit out of the common—so much so, that I'd prefer to leave the newspaper story as it stands, rather than contradict it. You'll see why, later on.
This is how it happened. Last summer, Stevenson offered to take me up north with him. You know he had a place up there? He'd a big bit of work on hand that he wanted to finish, and he needed help with it. I was to get some fishing, but it was really work he was taking me there for. There was to be a good bonus in addition to my ordinary screw, so long as I kept my mouth shut. I wasn't even to say I was going up with him.
Of course I jumped at the bonus suggestion. We got up there at the end of the week. A God-forsaken establishment: a rambling old house on a drafty headland. An old housekeeper, stone-deaf—cooked divinely, though, I must say. She never knew my name. No letters were sent on to me, you know, and I didn't trouble to bawl into her ear.
For a month or so, Stevenson kept me hard at it, measuring potential-differences
