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He gazed down on the lake and the shoreline where the hotel would be built, and the places where roads came out of the wilderness. There were changes since the time he'd looked down from Vale's survey post and before the terror beam captured him. He catalogued them mentally, but the sight before him was intolerable.
And Jill's over at the construction camp " Lockley was unreasonably relieved. If Jill was at the camp, at least she wasn't alone with a man gone out of his mind. The reaction was normal. Lockley had seen nothing out of the ordinary, so Vale's report seemed insane. "Listen here!" panted Vale again. "The thing came down. There was a terrific explosion. It vanished. Nothing happened for a while.
The truth of the situation was, that John had received by post, from he knew not whom, a newspaper report of the inquest held on the body of Grace Danver, wherein, of course, was an account of what had happened to Clara Vale; in the margin was pencilled, 'Clara Vale's real name is Clara Hewett. An hour after receiving this John encountered Sidney Kirkwood. They read the report together.
The fact seemed to him dangerous and appalling. His mind revolted at the idea of non-human creatures who could build ships and travel through space, but radars had reported the arrival of a ship, and there were official inquiries that nearly matched Vale's account, which was therefore not a mere crackpot claim to have seen the incredible.
Lockley said, "Probably what'll happen to us." "Which is what?" asked the chunky man. Lockley did not answer. He thought of Jill, waiting anxiously at the edge of the woods not far from the camp. She'd surely have watched him climbing. She might have followed his climb all the way to where he went around to Vale's post. But she wouldn't have seen his capture and she might be waiting for him now.
There was a pause after this, and then young Morris got up slowly and painfully. "I don't want it to be thought," said he "that I was directly responsible for Miss Vale's adventure of last night or for any of the others, for the matter of that. If I had known at the time that she proposed visiting Locke's, or Hume's, either upon the night of the murder, or last night, I would have prevented it."
And why? because every object which met us was unknown and full of mystery. A tree or two in the distance seemed the beginning of a great wood, or park, stretching endlessly; a hill implied a vale beyond, with that vale's history; the bye-lanes, with their green hedges, wound and vanished, yet were not lost to the imagination.
What he said was partly to make her sure that it was he who appeared in the darkness. But it was technically true, too. It was within reason to hope for Vale's ultimate safety. One can always hope, whatever the odds against the thing hoped for. But Lockley thought that the odds against Vale's living through the events now in progress were very great indeed. Jill stepped out into the starlight.
"I don't think that's true," said Jill. He did not answer. If Vale was alive, Jill was engaged to him; although if matters worked out, Lockley would not be such a fool as to play the gentleman and let her marry Vale by default. On the other hand, if Vale was dead, he wouldn't be the kind of fool who'd try to win her for himself before she'd faced and recovered from Vale's death.
Robert Mushet, The Bessemer-Mushet process, Cheltenham, 1883, p. 24; The Engineer, 1861, vol. 12, pp. 177 and 189. Further support for the thesis that Ebbw Vale's policy was in part dictated by a desire to make Bessemer "see the matter differently" is to be found in the climatic episode.
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