Albert felt a deep twinge of remorse as he remembered that weekend, now. He had brought his candid camera along with him — the love he held for cameras amounted to a craze with Albert — and had made himself the hit of the weekend taking pictures of all the assembled guests. Major Mastiff had beamed into his lens, Aunt Annabelle had even consented to pose, and Albert had had a merry time dashing about and clicking his shutter.
Everything had been rosy, and his courtship had never looked more favorable. Albert left Mastiff Manor that Sunday with high hopes of an early marriage. But then his plans hit a sudden snag.
Albert developed the pictures he’d taken. The developed prints showed all too clearly that Albert Addin was a rotten photographer. The shots of the guests were fuzzy, odd-shaped, monstrous, and accidentally screamingly funny. Albert determined to burn them, to make up some plausable excuse for not shooting the prints along to the guests.
But before Albert was able to burn them, they were seen, and howled at, by a friend of his who had dropped in for a drink. The friend was the editor of that nasty little picture magazine, Gaze. It seemed that the editor of Gaze wanted to publish the pictures in his humor section. It seemed that Albert was — as usual — broke. It also seemed that the offer made by Albert’s pal editor for the pictures was tempting — too tempting for the pecunious Albert to resist.
The snapshots appeared in Gaze.
The nation laughed uproariously. Major Mastiff had a stroke. Margot was almost prompted to give Albert the gate. Aunt Annabelle tried to bring suit against the “sniveling young upstart.” Albert was banned from Mastiff Manor, and from that day forward was forced to conduct his courtship of Margot on the sly.
Until now.
“A master diplomat, Margot,” Albert sighed happily. “A veritable genius at pouring oil on troubled waters!” And then he shook his head in admiration at the tremendous bit of soothing-over which his fiancée had accomplished since his banishment.
Albert felt warm inside, and very happy indeed. He could even gaze down at the crumpled dun letters in the wastebasket beside him and beam cheerfully. For bills were no longer of any consequence, now that his courtship troubles were straightened out. For after all, the girl he was soon to marry had a filthy-rich father, didn’t she?
So Albert rose happily, making his way across the lounge to the elevators, conscious that he had never loved Margot Mastiff more than at this moment. As the elevator took him up to his rooms, he broke forth into a light rendition of the second verse of “Mamma Your High-Falutin’ Baby’s Gone to Texas on a Jive Bar for a Break Bath.”
His bags were on the bed and almost packed, half an hour later, for Albert wasn’t going to waste any time in catching the swiftest train for Mastiff Manor. Glancing swiftly at his watch, Albert closed his bags and reached for his hat and coat. Then, for an instant, he hesitated, his glance going to his bathroom door a few steps away.
“Damn, I almost forgot,” Albert said snapping his fingers. Then he stepped swiftly over to the bathroom door and opened it very, very carefully so that too much light wouldn’t stream into its darkened interior. The management of the Tennis and Topper Club, not to mention that worthy organization’s board of directors, would have been extremely shocked — not to mention angered — to know that young Albert Addin had turned the luxurious sunken bathroom of his suite into a photographic darkroom!
And now, with the door closed safely behind him, Albert turned on the faint light in his combination bathroom-darkroom, and gazed lovingly down into the washbowl at the photographic prints he’d left soaking. The photography bug in Albert had been too strong to allow him to pop off for a weekend while developing fluid ate away the artistry he’d caught in his latest camera efforts.
There were some special shots he’d taken — still life — of tables and oranges and bowls in his rooms, and now Albert was eagerly curious to see how they’d turned out. He’d been using a new technique picked up in a photography guide — infra red film filtering on still life shots.
Tenderly, Albert removed the prints from the fluid. Lovingly, he peered at them. Delightedly, he whistled. They weren’t bad at all, which, for Albert, was a major triumph in camera lore.
“This shot of the apple on the table beside the couch is rather fine,” he told himself exultantly. “Salon stuff, that’s what it is!”
“Yes, indeed,” Albert continued aloud, gazing at the print, “it’s a duezzy, it’s—”
Suddenly a frown broke out on Albert’s face.
Something was screwy, definitely.
For, beside the apple on the table there was something else!
“Why,” Albert gasped in astonishment, “that’s an ancient oriental lamp, there!” He pursed his lips in bewilderment, for he was certain that when he’d photographed the apple there hadn’t been any lamp on the table. The table had been bare but for the apple. He’d been shooting “simple, artistic” stuff, not cluttered tables!
As Albert looked again, the lamp was still there in the print. Rubbing his finger across it didn’t make it go away. He frowned, and still carrying the print, stepped swiftly out of his bathroom laboratory. Albert stepped across his bedroom and into his drawing room. There, in the corner, was the table. Beside it was the couch.
The table was the one he’d used in the shot. As a matter of fact, the apple was still on the table — with a piece bitten out of it — just as he’d left it the night before. Just as he’d left it after finishing his photographic efforts.
But there was no lamp there, and the realization of this seemed to reassure Albert. After all, if he’d photographed a lamp he would have been aware of it wouldn’t he?
“Of course I would,” Albert declared. “I most certainly would have been aware of a lamp, if one had been there!”
But when he looked quickly at the print in his hand, Albert was again shaken. There was a lamp, directly beside the apple on the table! But another glance at the actual table showed that there couldn’t be.
“We’ll see about this,” Albert muttered resolutely stepping over to the table.
Albert put his hand down on the table, moving it slowly along the smooth wood surface. Then, suddenly, his hand stopped, sweat broke out on his forehead, and he gulped. Something was there beside the apple!
Something that he could feel, but couldn’t see!
Carefully Albert allowed his hand to caress the object. It was rather small, pitcher shaped, metallic. Albert gulped again, and sweat broke out anew.
“And I haven’t had a drop,” Albert muttered. “Not a drop in three days!”
Gingerly, Albert lifted the invisible something-or-other, his hand trembling badly. Frantically, he strained his eyes, as if the very effort of their peering would bring this invisible thing-ama-jig into view.
And then, quite suddenly, as his hand trembled more than before, the invisible what zit slipped from his clammy fingers, thudding onto the floor.
Instinctively, Albert’s eyes followed the invisible drop. And at the instant his ears heard the “thunk” of the object hitting the floor, Albert’s eyes widened in startled incredulity. The thing was now visible![1]
It was as if the jar had shaken off its cloak of invisibility. And Albert, pop-eyed in astonishment, gazed down at the same oriental lamp that was seen on the print he held in his trembling hand!
“Presto,” Albert gasped. “First I didn’t see it, now I do!”
Handling the lamp carefully, Albert turned it over in a sort of stupefied curiosity. His mind was frantically trying to change gears, to adjust itself to the realization that here was an object which a moment before hadn’t been visible for the naked eye to view. An object which he had unwittingly photographed, even though he hadn’t been able to see it at the time.
1
Science has made things invisible, by means of reflected light rays, bending them around an object until no light is reflected back to a certain point, where the observer is stationed. Thus, an object may be made invisible. However, in this instance, it is obvious that the reflective properties of the surface of the lamp were such that all light was bent around the lamp and not reflected back at all. Thus, with no light turned more than momentarily from its course, no object could have been visible.
When Albert Addin dropped the lamp, this perfect, non-reflecting, light-bending surface was dented enough to totally destroy the delicate balance of curving surface and reflecting angle. Thus, the lamp snapped into visibility. In photographing with an infra-red light filter, it seems that Albert unwittingly captured the only rays which were not by-passed around the lamp, which in normal color range, are invisible to the eye.