It was a vicious circle that would eventually have bitten itself.
But the waveries bit first.
April 5,1947; that was the night the waveries came.
George and Maisie tried in vain to get a cab and took the subway instead. Oh, yes, the subways were still running then. It took them within a block of the MID Network Building.
It was a madhouse. George, grinning, strolled through the lobby with Maisie on his arm, took the elevator to five, and for no reason at all gave the elevator boy a dollar. He’d never before in his life tipped an elevator operator.
The boy grinned. “Better stay away from the big shots, Mr. Bailey,” he said. “They’re ready to chew off anybody’s ears that looks at ’em cockeyed.”
“Swell,” said George. He left the elevator and headed straight for the office of J. R. McGee, himself. There were strident voices behind the glass door.
“But George,” protested Maisie, “you’ll be fired!”
“ ‘When in the course of human events,’ ” said George. “Oh, well, it’s worth it. I got money saved up.”
“But what are you going to do, George?”
“Stand back away from that door, honey.” Gently, but firmly, he moved her to a safe position.
“But what are you—”
“This,” said George Bailey soberly.
The frantic voices stopped as he opened the glass door a bit. All eyes turned as he stuck his head in through the crack of the door.
“Dit-dit-dit,” he said. “Dit-dit-dit.”
He ducked back and to one side just in time to escape the flying glass, as a paperweight and an inkwell came through the pane.
He grabbed Maisie and ran for the stairs.
“Now we get a drink,” he told her.
The bar across from the Network Building was crowded, but it was a strangely silent crowd. Most of them were bunched around the big cabinet radio at one end of the bar.
“Dit,” said the cabinet radio. “ dit-dah-d’ dah-dit-dahditditdah . . . d’d’dahditddditititdah—”
Somebody fiddled with the dial. Somebody asked, “What band is that?” and somebody said, “Police.” Somebody said, “Try the foreign band,” and somebody did. “This ought to be Buenos Aires,” somebody said. The radio said, “dit-dit-d.ahditititdd.itah”
George squeezed Maisie’s arm.
“Lovely,” he said. Maybe he meant her and maybe not; it didn’t matter at the moment.
Somebody ran fingers through his hair and yelled, “Shut that thing off.” Somebody did. Somebody else turned it back on.
George grinned and led the way to a back booth where he’d spotted Pete Mulvaney sitting alone with a tall bottle in front of him.
George seated Maisie and himself across from Pete Mulvaney. “Hello,” he said gravely.
“Hello,” said Pete, who was head of the technical research staff of the MID.
“A beautiful night, Mulvaney. Did you see the moon riding high in the fleecy clouds like a golden galleon tossed upon silver-crested white-caps in a stormy—”
“Shut up,” said Pete. “I’m thinking.”
“Whisky sours,” said George to the waiter. He turned back to the brooding man across the table. “Think out loud,” he said. “We sit at your feet. But first, how did you escape the looney bin?”
“I’m bounced, fired, discharged.”
“Shake,” said George, “and then explain.”
“I told them what I thought it was, and they said I was crazy.”
“Are you?”
“Yes,” said Mulvaney.
“Good,” said George. “I don’t care what it is, as long as it’s nothing trivial. But what the devil is it?”
“I don’t know. Space, I think. Space is warped.”
“Good old space,” said George Bailey.
“George,” said Maisie, “please shut up. I want to hear this.”
“Space is also finite. You go far enough in any direction, and you get back where you started.” Pete Mulvaney poured himself another drink. “Like an ant crawling around an apple.”
“Make it an orange,” said George.
“All right, an orange. Suppose the first radio waves ever sent out have just made the round trip. In forty-six years.”
“Forty-six years? But I thought radio waves traveled at the speed of light. In forty-six years they could go only forty-six light-years, and that can’t be around the Universe, because there are Galaxies known to be thousands of light-years away, or maybe millions; I don’t know. But more than forty-six, Pete.”
Pete Mulvaney sighed deeply. “We,” he said, “are in the middle of a super-Galaxy that is two million light-years in diameter. That is just one Galaxy, a medium-sized one, they tell us. Yes, it’s more than forty-six light-years around the orange.”
“But—”
“But listen to that stuff. Can you read code?”
“Nope, not that fast, anyway.”
“Well, I can. That’s early American ham. Lingo and all. That’s the kind of stuff the air was full of before broadcasting. It’s the lingo, the abbreviations, the barnyard-to-attic chitchat of amateurs with keys, with Marconi coherers or Fessenden barreters—and you can listen for a violin solo pretty soon now. And you know what the first phonograph record ever broadcast was? Handel’s Largo sent out by Fessenden from Brant Rock in 1906. You’ll hear his CQ-CQ any minute now. Bet you a drink.”
“Sure, but what was the dit-dit-dit that started what’s turned into hash since?”
Mulvaney grinned and then his face went blank. He said, “Marconi, George. What was the first powerful signal ever broadcast, and by whom and when?”
“Marconi? Dit-dit-dit? Forty-six years ago?”
“Head of the class. The first transatlantic signal on December 12, 1901. For three hours Marconi’s big station at Poldhu with two-hundred-foot masts sent out an intermittent S . . . dit-dit-dit . . . while Marconi and two assistants at St. Johns in Newfoundland got a kite-borne aerial four hundred feet in the air and finally got the signal. Across the Atlantic, George, with sparks jumping from the big Leyden jars at Poldhu and 20,000-volt juice jumping off the tremendous aerials—”
“Wait a minute, Pete, you’re off the beam. If that was in 1901 and the first broadcast about 1906, it’ll be five years before the Fessenden stuff gets here, on the same route. Even if there’s a forty-six-light-year short cut across space, and even if those signals didn’t get so weak en route that we couldn’t hear them. It’s crazy.”
“I told you I was crazy,” said Mulvaney. “Those signals should be so infinitesimal you couldn’t hear them with the best set on Earth.
Furthermore, they’re all over the band on everything from microwave to ten kilocycles, and equally strong on each. Furthermore, we’ve come five years in two hours, which isn’t possible. I told you I was crazy.”
“But—”
“Listen,” said Pete.
A blurred but unmistakably human voice was coming from the radio, mingling with the cracklings of code. And then music, faint and scratchy and punctuated by dit-dah, but nevertheless music. Handel’s Largo.
Only it suddenly climbed in pitch, as though modulating from key to key, until it became so horribly shrill as to hurt the ear, like an orchestra made up of nothing but piccolos. And kept on going, past the high limit of audibility, until they could hear it no more.
Somebody said, “Shut that thing off.” Somebody did, and this time nobody turned the thing back on.
George and Maisie looked at Pete Mulvaney, and Pete Mulvaney looked back at them.
“But it can’t be,” said Pete Mulvaney. “There must be some other explanation. The more I think of it, now, the more I think I’m wrong.”
He was right: he was wrong.
“Preposterous,” said Mr. Ogilvie. He took off his glasses, frowned fiercely, and put them back on again. He looked through them at the several sheets of copy paper in his hand and tossed them contemptuously to the top of his des
k. They slid to rest against the triangular name plate that read:
B. R. Ogilvie
Editor-in-Chief
“Preposterous,” he said again.
Casey Blair, his star reporter, blew a smoke ring and poked his index finger through it. “Why?” he asked.
“Because . . . why, it’s preposterous!”
Casey Blair said, “It is now three o’clock in the morning. The radio interference has gone on for five hours and has reached the point where not a single current program is getting through. Every major broadcasting station in the world has gone off the air.
“For two reasons. One: It wasn’t doing a bit of good to stay on the air and waste current, no matter what wave length they were on. Two: The communications bureaus o£ their respective governments requested them to get off to aid their campaigns with the direction finders. For five hours now—since the first note of interference—they’ve been working with everything they’ve got. And what have they got?”
“Preposterous,” said the editor.
“Exactly. Greenwich at eleven p.m.—New York time—got a bearing in about the direction of Miami. It shifted northward until at two o’clock the direction was approximately that of Richmond, Virginia. Now, San Francisco at eleven got a bearing in about the direction of Denver; three hours later it shifted southward toward Tucson. Southern hemisphere: bearings from Capetown, South Africa, shifted from approximate direction of Buenos Aires to direction of Montevideo, a thousand miles north. New York had trouble with direction finders; weak indications at eleven were toward Madrid; by two o’clock they could get no bearings at all.” He blew another smoke ring. “Maybe because the loop antennas they use turn only on a horizontal plane.”
“Absurd,” said Mr. Ogilvie.
Casey said, “I liked ‘preposterous’ better, Mr. Ogilvie. It’s not absurd; I’m scared stiff. Those lines converge on about the constellation Leo, if you take them as straight lines instead of curving them around the surface. I did it with a little globe and a star map.” He leaned forward and tapped a forefinger on the top copy page. “Stations directly under that point in the sky get no bearings at all. Stations on, as it were, the perimeter of the Earth get strong bearings in the horizontal plane.”
“But the Heaviside layer, Blair—isn’t that supposed to stop all radio waves—bounce ’em back, or something?”
“Uh-huh. It does. But maybe it leaks. Maybe some waves got through. It isn’t a solid wall.”
“But—”
“I know; it’s preposterous. But there it is. Only there’s an hour before press time and you ought to turn the observatories on it and get it more accurately. Get them to extend those bearing lines. I did it by rule of thumb. Further, I didn’t have the data for checking planet positions. Leo’s on the ecliptic; a planet could be in line between here and there. Like Mars, maybe.”
Mr. Ogilvie’s eyes brightened, then clouded again.
He said, “We’ll be the laughingstock of the world, Blair, if we’re wrong.”
“And if I’m right?”
Ogilvie picked up the phone and snapped an order that sent every rewrite man into his office for orders.
April 6th headline of the New York Morning Messenger, final (5 a.m.) edition:
RADIO INTERFERENCE COMES FROM SPACE: ORIGINATES IN LEO, SAY SCIENTISTS
May Be Attempt at Communication by Beings Outside Solar System!
All Broadcasting Suspended
RKO and Radio Corporation stocks, having closed the previous day at 10 1/4 and 11 1/2 respectively, opened at 9 3/4 and 9 1/2 and dropped sharply. By noon they were off four and five points respectively, when a moderate buying rally brought each of them back a fraction over two points.
Public action was mixed; people who had no radios rushed out to buy them, and there was a boom market in portable and table-top receivers. Those who had radios listened as long as their curiosity enabled them to stand it, and then turned them off. Extraterrestrial or not, the programs were a horrible hash.
Oh, there were flashes—times when, for several seconds at a time, a listener could recognize the voices of Will Rogers or Geraldine Farrar or could catch a scrap of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight. But things worth hearing—even for seconds at a time—were rare. Mostly it was a jumble of soap opera, advertising, and off-key snatches of what had once been music. It was utterly indiscriminate and utterly unbearable for any length of time.
But curiosity is a powerful motive. There was a brief boom in radio sets that morning.
There were other booms, less explicable, less capable of analysis. Reminiscent of the Wells-Welles Martian scare was a sudden upswing in the sale of shotguns and sidearms. Bibles sold as readily as books on astronomy—and books on astronomy sold like hot cakes. One section of the country showed a sudden interest in lightning rods—builders were deluged with orders for immediate demonstration.
For some reason which has never been clearly ascertained, there was a run on fishhooks in Mobile, Alabama; every hardware and sporting-goods store in that city was sold out of them before noon.
The public libraries had a run on books on astrology and books on Mars. Yes, on Mars—despite the fact that Mars was at the moment on the other side of the Sun and that every newspaper article on the subject stressed the fact that no planet was between Earth and the constellation Leo.
And not a radio station on Earth was on the air that morning.
Newspapers were passed from hand to hand because the presses couldn’t keep up with the demand. No news on the radio—and something big was happening. People waited, in mobs, outside the newspaper offices for each new edition to appear. Circulation managers went quietly mad.
People gathered in curious little knots about the broadcasting studios. MID Network doors were locked, although there was a doorman on duty to admit technicians, who were trying to find an answer to the unprecedented difficulty. Some, who had been on duty the previous day, had now spent twenty-four hours without sleep.
George Bailey woke at noon, with only a slight headache. He turned on his radio and turned it off again quickly.
He shaved and showered, went out and drank a light breakfast, and was himself again. He bought early editions of the afternoon papers, read them, and grinned. His hunch had been right; whatever was wrong with radio, it was nothing trivial.
But what was. wrong?
The later editions of the evening papers had it.
EARTH INVADED, SAYS SCIENTIST
Thirty-six line type was the biggest they had; they used it. Not a home-edition copy of a newspaper was delivered that evening. Newsboys starting on their routes were practically mobbed. They sold papers instead of delivering them; the smart ones got a quarter apiece for them. The foolish ones who didn’t want to sell, because the papers had been bought for their routes, lost them anyway; people grabbed them.
The later home editions and the finals changed the heading only slightly—from a typographical viewpoint.
But it was a big change, just the same:
EARTH INVADED, SAY SCIENTISTS
Funny what moving an S from the ending of a verb to the ending of a noun can do.
Carnegie Hall shattered precedents that evening with a lecture given at midnight. An unscheduled and unadvertised lecture. Professor Helmetz had stepped off the train at eleven-thirty, and a mob of reporters had been waiting for him. Helmetz, of Harvard, had been the scientist—singular—who had made the first headlines.
Harvey Ambers, Director of the Board of Carnegie Hall, had pushed his way through the mob. He arrived minus glasses, hat, and breath, but got hold of Helmetz’s arm and hung on until he could talk again. “We want you to talk at Carnegie, Professor,” he shouted into Helmetz’s ear. “Thousand bucks for a lecture on the ’vaders!”
“Certainly. Tomorrow afternoon?”
“Now! I’ve a cab waiting. Come on.”
“But . . . but . . .”
“We’ll get you an audience. Hurry!” He turned to the mob. “Le
t us through! You can’t hear the professor here. Come to Carnegie and he’ll talk to you. Spread the word.”
The word spread so well that Carnegie Hall was jammed by midnight, when the professor began to speak. By twelve-thirty, they’d rigged a loud-speaker system so the people outside could hear. By one o’clock in the morning the streets were jammed for blocks around.
There wasn’t a sponsor on Earth with a million dollars to his name who wouldn’t have given a million dollars to sponsor the broadcasting of that lecture—but it was not broadcast on the radio.
The line was busy.
“Questions?” asked Professor Helmetz.
A reporter in the front row made it first. “Professor,” he asked, “have all direction-finding stations on Earth confirmed your statement as to the change this afternoon?”
“Yes, absolutely. At about noon, the directional indications began to grow weaker. At 2:47 o’clock, New York time, they ceased completely. Until then, the radio waves emanated from the sky, constantly changing direction with reference to the Earth’s surface, but constant with reference to the point in the constellation Leo.”
“What star in Leo?”
“No star. Merely a point in the sky coinciding exactly with the position of no visible star on the most minute charts. At 2:47 o’clock all direction finders went dead, but the signals persisted. They came from all sides equally. The invaders were here. There is no other conclusion to be drawn. Earth is now surrounded, completely blanketed, by radio waves which have no point of origin, which travel ceaselessly around the Earth in all directions, changing shape at will—which at the moment seems to be in imitation of the Earth-origin signals that attracted their attention, that brought them here.”
“From nowhere? From just a point in space?”
“Why not, sir? They are creatures of ether, not of matter. Ether permeates space uniformly. They were, until they were attracted here, at a point in space not greater than twenty-three light-years away. Our first indication of their arrival—rather, the arrival of the first ones, if you want to put it that way—came with a repetition of Marconi’s S-S-S transatlantic broadcast of forty-six years ago. Apparently that was the first Earth broadcast of sufficient power to send signals that they could perceive at that distance. They started for Earth then, presumably. It took twenty-three years for those waves to reach them and twenty-three years for them to reach us. The first to arrive had formed themselves, imitatively, to duplicate the shape, as it were, of the signals that attracted them. Later arrivals were in the form of other waves that they had met, or passed, or absorbed, on their way to Earth. There are now fragments of programs broadcast as recently as a few days ago . . . uh . . . wandering about the ether. Undoubtedly, also, there are fragments of the very last programs to be broadcast, but they have not yet been identified.”
Enemies In Space Page 6
