Jack held up his hand for silence as a waiter was approaching our table from behind. He had finally come over to take our orders for drinks. Jack had already been served but our sitting down at his table had finally provoked the barman to send over a not-too-bright waiter to collect our drink order. We waited for him to return with two ales, and then for him to retire back to the bar, far enough away he could not overhear us in the background din. We still talked in low conspiratorial tones. “I worked my way to a position close to the Professor so that I accompany him at times to the three locations he has set up his project. It is being designed to be an underwater torpedo gun that shoots a stream of small but dense projectiles that can rip the bottom from an armored battleship.” “As I feared,” I stated. “His intense study of the various scientific fields suggested a wrestling with underwater drag, and device that can be that effective underwater would have to have new high pressure technology created just for it. But how far has he gotten in perfecting the weapon. I am sure there are many technical problems with producing such a device.” “Indeed there is, in fact several experimental accidents during the testing of different stages have already claimed several lives. The high-pressure pistons and tubes have burst during exhaustive repetitions, causing injuries and even fatalities. The addition of explosive charges had created the fatigue that weakened the casings. “But I have seen no one has followed you here; let us continue our conversation back at my room. I selected it so that I could enter and leave without detection. “I didn’t start our meeting there since I did not know if we should continue with the transfer of the notebook and allowing you to look me up as an acquaintance would not have been safe as far as I knew. I considered that I might have had to chance blowing my cover by hand carrying the notebook to Mycroft myself.” We watched our backs as we traveled to the hotel and I was sure we were not being followed. We changed cabs and doubled back several times. Jack led us up the back way in the service stairs when we arrived at our destination. We plopped ourselves down on the chair and sofa in Jack’s room. “The Professor started out his development with experimental devices to learn of the mechanism of the pistol shrimp projection. He duplicated the function in small mechanical replica apparatus, then attempted to enlarge it in stages. His high-pressure pistons were powerful, but the results were short distance and would not damage steel plates. He had first envisioned its deployment as a possible projection of the prow of a submarine. But the require steam engine to drive the pistons at even the deficient pressure would be too great for that vehicle. His weapon would have to be positioned closer and generate tremendously higher pressure. So his concept of a torpedo to get close enough started to crystallize. He also began several variations of the projecting engine at the same time to attack the separate problems. “You understand he had promised a grand weapon. He had apparently showed the Kaiser a working concept model he had already produced under his own funds. He faked the projected mechanism and actually used small caliber bullets from miniature derringers. Now with backing, he was spending massive amounts of money and tying up several munitions facilities and some shipyard areas to create and perfect a working prototype of his dream. He needed a breakthrough to continue his project as promised to the Kaiser. “He decided the jet stream could eject his projectiles similar to his air gun. But he found that the projectiles that could slam through steel plating on the decks when shot from a surface battery would be damped too fast to have retained enough energy to damage the ship from underwater. “At the same time he was working on the high pressure hydraulic pistons. He came up with the idea of using explosives to impel the hammer piston into it’s carved out anvil seat, instantly creating the high-powered water jet, spraying out the front. His mechanism would blow the piston into a seat on the anvil, and a shoot a projectile just in front of where the jet stream would blow into a narrowing barrel equivalent to a funnel. He again got a tremendous effect from this, but it again rapidly dampened. The resulting devise would not be tied to steam and hydraulic lines back to a boiler. The explosive charge would be contained in a small breach at the back. “The second line of experimentation was the design of the projectile. He just used pure explosives to shoot shapes from underwater cannon. This of course produced little desired results no matter how streamlined he made them. “The Professor was out hunting quail with his shot gun and came upon the thought that if there was only one small pellet utilizing the full charge of the shell, it would create tremendous range and penetrate deeply into a target. Of course trying to hit a quail with a shotgun shell with only one pellet would be ludicrous. However if he could create a short stream of pellets that could be raked across the path of the quail, he could cut it in two.