I was coming out from the news editor's room, turning over my
new mission in my mind, when I heard my name called from the
waiting-room below. It was a telegraph-boy with a wire which had
been forwarded from my lodgings at Streatham. The message was
from the very man we had been discussing, and ran thus:--

Malone, 17, Hill Street, Streatham.--Bring oxygen.--Challenger.

"Bring oxygen!" The Professor, as I remembered him, had an
elephantine sense of humour capable of the most clumsy and
unwieldly gambollings. Was this one of those jokes which used to
reduce him to uproarious laughter, when his eyes would disappear
and he was all gaping mouth and wagging beard, supremely
indifferent to the gravity of all around him? I turned the words
over, but could make nothing even remotely jocose out of them.
Then surely it was a concise order--though a very strange one.
He was the last man in the world whose deliberate command I
should care to disobey. Possibly some chemical experiment was
afoot; possibly----Well, it was no business of mine to speculate
upon why he wanted it. I must get it. There was nearly an hour
before I should catch the train at Victoria. I took a taxi, and
having ascertained the address from the telephone book, I made
for the Oxygen Tube Supply Company in Oxford Street.

As I alighted on the pavement at my destination, two youths
emerged from the door of the establishment carrying an iron
cylinder, which, with some trouble, they hoisted into a waiting
motor-car. An elderly man was at their heels scolding and
directing in a creaky, sardonic voice. He turned towards me.