Page:Fantastic v08n11 1959-11.djvu/72

per Mr. Espy, seemed equally obliging and would almost certainly have been willing to tackle the doorbell, but now Mrs. Wycherly had Ronald for those things.

Ronald had picked out the three freshest looking dry cells, setting the other two, which still had short bent lengths of wire untidily attached to their terminals, down on the scarred top of an upended trunk beside the stepladder on which he was working. It was still day outside, barely, although of course he had a flashlight to see up into the cobwebby rafters, and just as he'd about connected up the three newer looking cells properly, working a little gingerly because of his apprehension of spiders, a beam of yellow light from the setting sun struck brightly through one of the low oblong windows and across the top of the trunk. It showed a lot more dust motes trembling in the air than Ronald's flashlight revealed, and immediately Ronald felt a sneeze coming on. But then it showed something so much more strange and arresting that the sneeze never came and Ronald quite forgot that his nasal passages had been tickling.

One of the rejected batteries carried attached to one terminal a length of gray-insulated wire so sharply curved that its other end now chanced to touch the other terminal, shorting the battery out—except that the battery had looked to Ronald too dingy and old to have any juice left to short.

The dust motes were whirling in orderly circles around the wire, forming a dim tube that curved from terminal to terminal with the wire running down the center or axis of the shadowy tube. The circular orbiting of the dust motes was clearest within an inch of the wire, but even as he watched he saw some of the more distant motes begin to take up the movement, swinging in larger, slower circles.

Ronald's face grew blank with attention. He leaned down very slowly until his eyes were only inches from the phenomenon. Fearfully, almost reverently he blew softly at the wire. The motes eddied away wildly and then almost immediately began to resume their circling, those nearest the wire taking it up most quickly, then those further off starting once more to join in.

Ronald thought: There's a