“There is usually very little about a battle-ship that is not known before her keel is laid, or even before the signing of the contracts.  At any rate, when it is asserted that the plans represent the dernier cri in some form of war preparation, it is well to remember that a ‘last cry’ is last only until there is a later.  Naval secrets are few, anyway, and as it takes some years to apply them, this loss cannot be of superlative value to any one.  Still, there is, of course, a market for such information in spite of the progress toward disarmament, but the rule in this case will be the rule as in a horse trade, ‘Caveat emptor.’”

“So there you are,” I concluded.  “You pay your penny for a paper, and you take your choice.”

“And the Star,” inquired Kennedy, coming to the door and adding with an aggravating grin, “the infallible?”

“The Star,” I replied, unruffled, “hits the point squarely when it says that whether the plans were of immediate importance or not, the real point is that if they could be stolen, really important things could be taken also.  For instance, ’The thought of what the thief might have stolen has caused much more alarm than the knowledge of what he has succeeded in taking.’  I think it is about time those people in Washington stopped the leak if—­”

The telephone rang insistently.

“I think that’s for me,” exclaimed Craig, bounding out of his room and forgetting his quiz of me.  “Hello—­yes—­is that you, Burke?  At the Grand Central—­half an hour—­all right.  I’m bringing Jameson.  Good-bye.”

Kennedy jammed down the receiver on the hook.

XIX

THE SUBMARINE MYSTERY

“The Star was not far from right, Walter,” he added, seriously.  “If the battleship plans could be stolen, other things could be—­ other things were.  You remember Burke of the secret service?  I’m going up to Lookout Hill on the Connecticut shore of the Sound with him to-night.  The rewrite men on the Record didn’t have the facts, but they had accurate imaginations.  The most vital secret that any navy ever had, that would have enabled us in a couple of years to whip the navies of the world combined against us, has been stolen.”

“And that is?” I asked.

“The practical working-out of the newest of sciences, the science of telautomatics.”

“Telautomatics?” I repeated.

“Yes.  There is something weird, fascinating about the very idea.  I sit up here safely in this room, turning switches, pressing buttons, depressing levers.  Ten miles away a vehicle, a ship, an aeroplane, a submarine obeys me.  It may carry enough of the latest and most powerful explosive that modern science can invent, enough, if exploded, to rival the worst of earthquakes.  Yet it obeys my will.  It goes where I direct it.  It explodes where I want it.  And it wipes off the face of the earth anything which I want annihilated.