Читать книгу Here and Now - John Russell Fearn - Страница 5
ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
MYSTERY GIRL
Of all the vast army of ‘ham’ television engineers in the year 2020, there could not have been one more devoted to his hobby than Chris Danvers, a photographer’s assistant by trade, but a pioneering scientist at heart. Whenever he had a spare moment he would retire to the large hut he used as a laboratory—which he had bought for a song—and here dabble with his radio-television gadgets as had his predecessors in the ‘ham’ radio field in earlier years. He was one of a new army who believed that by their endeavours they could devise modifications to existent commercial television that would lift it clean out of its present orthodox rut.
After all, what had the 2020 television to offer? High definition colour, yes, and even the beginnings of three-dimensional depth, but pictures were still liable to interference and there were limitations to the range of transmitters. He was young—twenty-four, to be exact—and filled with the fire of an Edison or a Marconi.
So he laboured, and enjoyed every moment of it. Now and again he was joined by two enthusiastic friends—Dave Norton and Bruce Wetherall, the first an amateur astronomer and jet-plane engineer; and the other a physicist both in profession and hobby. Dave and Chris both privately admitted they were not too fond of the somewhat cold-blooded Bruce, but since his suggestions were usually valuable, his temperament was of secondary consideration.
When his two ‘ham’ friends were unable to join him for some reason or other, Chris’s interest in his hobby was such as to impel him to work quite happily alone, as on the night of July 10, 2020, when he had been working on a new-fangled televisor for over a couple of years. It was towards nine-thirty on that dull, sultry evening when he reached the hut, isolated by a half a mile from the nearest habitation and lying a good ten miles outside of London itself. It was not so far, though, that Chris could not cover the distance quickly in his five-year-old sports car.
Wiping his face in the humid heat he hurried across to the door of his ‘laboratory’—as he was pleased to call it—and fumbled for the key in his pocket As he did so he cast a glance towards the dubious sky. It was mainly pale grey with cloud with a heavier banking tinging to violet towards the cast. In fact, everything was set for the recent heat wave to break in a violent thunderstorm, which would be just too bad for television experiments.
The interior of the hut was hot too, holding the warmth of the daytime sun. Chris tugged off his jacket, switched on the small fan and then seated himself at the banks of instruments that it had taken several years and all his spare cash to build up. Here, he remained unshakenly convinced, was the prototype of a television equipment which would span thousands of miles as easily as the professional giants spanned hundreds.
In a matter of ten minutes he had the equipment fully warmed up, and for testing purposes went through the usual routine of contacting his various friends within a hundred miles radius—‘hams’ like himself, young men and women with whom he exchanged brief technical conversation every time he went on the air.
Station KJ down on the South Coast was the most difficult to contact, since a severe thunderstorm was in progress and causing a good deal of interference.
“And from the way things are looking,” KJ said, represented in Chris’s television screen as a darkly intellectual young man with sprays of interference across his face, “the storm is moving rapidly in your direction. If you take my advice you’ll quit wasting juice on any experiments tonight.”
Chris grinned, and the colour-image of his good-humoured face and blond hair was transmitted back to the South Coast. “You’re a fine one to talk!” he exclaimed. “Right in the middle of the storm and telling me what to do! Didn’t you ever hear the famous phrase—‘The Show must go On’?”
With that he changed the wavelength and went op a tour of his other friends in various parts of the country. As far as he could judge, the atmospheric conditions were normal further north, but badly disturbed down south, and likely to become more so with the rapid advance of a thundering trough of low-pressure from the Continent. Anything but ideal conditions: this was the conclusion Chris had arrived at by ten o’clock when his tour of his friends was complete.
He sat back in his chair to think. Now he had made the usual contacts and satisfied himself that everything was working as it should be, it was the time to start making his various modifications and testing them. He sat gazing at the instruments and the temporarily-blanked screen—the tuning wavelength not being focused at the moment on any particular transmitting station—when suddenly a crash of thunder that sounded as though all hell had exploded made him jump in sudden alarm. Even the sizzling flash of lightning that came with the thunder crack failed to act as warning, since it was almost simultaneous. Across the television screen there sprayed a huge carrot of discharge, winking away into twinkling stars.
“That,” Chris muttered, getting to his feet, “was some wallop! Wonder how safe I am stuck out here in a field?”
He opened the door and looked outside. He had not realised, with the laboratory lights on, just how dark it had become. In the normal way, ten o’clock on a July night is still almost daylight, but on this occasion it was midnight dark with sheet lightning rippling between the banked-up clouds. The air was dead still and smelled of sulphuric discharge.
“Very nice!” Chris surveyed the malignant sky. “Very nice indeed! I hope you’re satisfied, messing up my arrangements.”
Annoyed, he slammed the door and returned to his equipment. He still did not know whether to carry on or not. Thunderstorms, as such, did not bother him in the least, but he was not so foolhardy that he could sit complacently in the midst of what promised to be a humdinger, in an isolated hut, surrounded by large quantities of apparatus all designed to conduct electricity.
“Home’s best,” he decided, thinking of the tall aerial mast beside the hut. “One real flash onto that and I may take a short circuit to Kingdom Come....”
He got to his feet amidst another smashing concussion of thunder and reached out to switch off his apparatus—then he paused in surprise. Something was forming on the televisor screen, even though a quick glance at the displays assured him he was not tuned to any particular station, ‘ham’ or professional.
Everything else forgotten, he waited for the hazy scum of colours to form into something definite. They ran and flowed into each other like water paints on a sheet of glass, then very gradually, when they were not disturbed by the joltings of transmitted lightning across the screen, they divided and sub-divided into a gathering pattern. There seemed to be the blurred colour outline of a head and shoulders.
His intention of departure clean forgotten, Chris sat down again and operated the focusing controls, but he failed to get the picture any clearer: it seemed that that would have to come of its own accord. And come it did—three thunderclaps later. From the screen there gazed at the astounded Chris a very bewildered and strikingly good-looking girl of about his own age. Motionless in his chair, Chris stared at her, and he assumed his image was as big a surprise to the girl as hers was to him.
“Hello!” he said, smiling, then winced at a truly appalling crash that made the hut shake with the vibration.
There was no response through the linked radio loudspeaker, nor did the girl’s lips move as though she had spoken. Chris frowned, but he did not trouble there and then to investigate the loss of sound: he was too busy assessing the girl’s features.
Her hair was of a rare copper tint and flawlessly coiffured, whilst her face, in general, was heart-shaped with rather high cheekbones. It was by no means a face entirely feminine and nothing more; there was a tremendous strength of character about it and an individuality about the set of the chin. This, with her azurine eyes, perfectly reproduced in the colour screen, presented to Chris the most delectable picture he had ever seen.
Then, suddenly, he remembered he was a scientist—or trying to be—and not just a student of feminine beauty.
“Can’t you hear me?” he asked in surprise, fiddling with the sound controls until he was certain his voice must be transmitted.
The girl gazed back at him, and it seemed to him that she was watching his lips move and thereby judging that he was talking. She said something back, but the loudspeaker remained dead. Chris frowned, thoroughly exasperated. Here was the most friendly, pretty girl he had ever contacted and he could not even speak to her! It was beyond all reason.
He turned away abruptly and picked up a scratchpad. Upon it he swiftly wrote: ‘I AM STATION MKB, LONDON ENVIRON. WHO ARE YOU?’ Then he held it up for the girl to read. To his surprise she only shook her head in bewilderment.
“Okay, so you’re European,” Chris sighed. “Couldn’t be anywhere else with the range of this instrument….”
He signalled as well as he could for her to also write down a message, and she seemed to grasp what was meant. She turned away from the screen and Chris looked intently at the background that had become revealed now that she had moved away. Most of it was out of focus, the transmitting lens evidently being fixed for her closeness, but what he could see of it there were curiously-patterned walls, apparently watermarked in a ripple fashion, and heavy-ribbed pillars of either stone or metal. Certainly not the kind of background one would expect to find for a ‘ham’ television fiend.
Chris waited. He could just see the girl’s rounded elbow in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen as she evidently wrote something beyond his vision—then abruptly he was dazzled by a blinding flash of lightning which seemed to fill the laboratory with purple fire. Simultaneously the thunder crashed down and made the instruments rattle.
Normally, Chris would probably have been scared by this peak outburst of the storm, but as it happened he had a different worry on his mind. The girl had vanished and the screen was totally blank and grey!
Muttering to himself, Chris operated the controls at desperate speed, but all his efforts failed. He simply could not re-establish communication. At last he relaxed, listening to the rumbling of the thunder and the drumming of rain on the galvanised roof. He got to his feet at length, dragged the door open, then stumbled back a little before the deluge of rain and screaming wind that met him.
Bending against it he staggered outside and waited for a flash of lightning. One came, less intense than the previous ones, and by its transient lavender glare he saw that his tall experimental aerial mast had been wrecked, its slender girders hanging down forlornly and the delicate, specially devised antennae twisted into so much wreckage.
“Why tonight of all nights?” he demanded fiercely, and strode back into the laboratory. With savage movements he switched off the equipment and then reached for his jacket. There was just nothing more he could do tonight with the aerial shattered. The only hope was that he could re-establish contact the following evening.
So on the next evening he was back again—around seven o’clock this time, it being one of his early nights away from his normal work. This time the weather was calm and summery again, which gave him the needed opportunity to re-erect the aerial mast and painstakingly rewire the antennae. It took him two hours all told, then he was ready once again to try and establish the contact of the previous evening.
Only it was not quite so simple as that. He had for the moment forgotten that the reception had been no ordinary one. He had not been tuned to any particular station, cither amateur or professional, and yet he had received the vision without the sound. But whereabouts on the dial? For the life of him he could not now remember, and of course he had turned the dials in all directions since then in a vain endeavour to re-establish contact.
“Only one way,” he muttered as he thought the matter out. “Go right round the dial very slowly until I get a reaction—”
A banging on the laboratory door broke his meditations. He glanced towards it.
“Come in, whoever you are. No charge!”
It was tubby David Norton who entered, wearing as usual a sports jacket far too tight for him and faded grey flannel trousers. Considering he had a highly-paid job as a jet-plane engineer, his sartorial offerings were atrocious.
“Hello there, mastermind….” He closed the door and then ambled forward, genial as ever, his thinning fair hair looking—as it always did—as though a brush and comb were needed. “Mmm, not too talkative tonight, Mr. Marconi. Anything wrong?”
“Eh?” Chris glanced at him vaguely. “No—nothing’s wrong. At least not seriously.”
Dave drew up a chair, reversed it, then sat so his elbows rested on the back.
“What is it? Girl friend trouble?”
“Come to think of it, yes,” Chris grinned.
“What! Why, I always thought you were one of those fellows who doesn’t even know what a girl is.”
“Times change, Dave, and with them people.”
Dave frowned. “Stop being profound, Chris, and tell me what’s wrong. I didn’t wander all this way tonight just to hear you imitate Confucius. Too damned hot, anyway. Are we doing some television wandering, or not?”
The vague look came back to Chris’s face. “That depends on a number of things, Dave. Remember the storm last night?”
“Remember it! The news says it was one of the most violent storms in the last 100 years. What’s that got to do with it?”
“At the height of it I picked up an unexpected transmission—a beautiful girl in full colour. Better than any film star I’ve ever seen. Only there wasn’t any sound.”
Dave grinned. “Probably you were struck by lightning and didn’t know it. Girl indeed! Didn’t you read or hear the news today? Practically all the television stations, the pros I mean, had to shut down because of the electrical upset— What kind of a story are you trying to hand me, Chris?”
“A true one. I’m sure I didn’t dream it, nor was I struck by lightning as you so brightly suggest. There was no sound, as I tell you, but this girl didn’t recognise English even when it was right before her eyes—” Chris moved urgently. “Come to think of it, the note I wrote should still be here. That will prove whether I imagined the whole thing or not.”
He searched the bench quickly, finally brought the note to light, and handed it over. Dave read it through.
“‘I am Station MKB, London Environ. Who are you?’ Well, didn’t she give some clue?”
“No. That’s the infuriating part of it. I could see she could not understand this card, but she turned aside to write something. Then my aerial was struck by lightning and that was the finish.”
The rather incredulous smile began to fade from Dave’s face. At length he was frowning.
“But, Chris, this is more than queer. If she were one of the announcers for the European stations she’d know English as well as half a dozen other languages. No girl employed by a television company is such a mug that she doesn’t know English when she sees it.”
“I don’t think it was a professional television company. I got the reception on a blank section of the tuning dial—blank as far as stations are concerned, anyhow. On the other hand, the background from where the girl was transmitting looked like a ballroom or something. Ham transmission fiends don’t usually have swell places to play around in.”
“Mmm. Well, what’s the trouble? Can’t you try again?”
“I don’t know where it was on the dial. I was just thinking, I’ll have to go round it slowly and try again.”
“Okay—plenty of time. Let’s get started....”
Dave glanced over the apparatus, which by this time was thoroughly warmed up, and switched on. Somewhat bored, he went through the routine receptions of the normal television stations and then continued with his various amateur friends. From each one he gathered enough to know that none of them had picked up the mystery girl the night before, and certainly none of them had been responsible for the transmission. By ten o’clock the wearying checkup was over—with only a complete blank to show for it.
“This,” Dave said, busy making coffee, “is one of the queerest things I’ve struck—”
Hammering on the laboratory door interrupted him, He went over and drew back the catch which he had slipped over whilst the ‘tour’ of the stations had been made. It was no surprise when Bruce Wetherall, the physicist, came in.
“Just the man we need,” Dave greeted him. “There’s a problem afoot and maybe your massive brain can solve it.”
Wetherall, as impeccable in his dress as Dave was slovenly, shrugged.
“If I can help, all right. I had a bit of spare time, Chris, so I came to see how things are going,” he explained. “Any nearer with your long-range modifications?”
“Not yet. It takes time.”
“True; but not too long, I hope. There are definite commercial possibilities in ultra-long-range transmitters, and I want to be in on the ground floor.”
Dave nodded moodily, but said no more. Bruce looked vaguely surprised as he perched on the nearby stool. He was a tall, ascetic man, several years older than the other two, with thin features and a perpetual eye to the main chance.
“At the moment,” Dave said, waddling across with three cups of coffee on a tray, “our television genius is absorbed in a mystery. And I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s the biggest puzzle I’ve struck for some time.”
“Oh?” Bruce took one of the coffee cups. “Am I supposed to know anything about it?”
“You soon can do,” Dave said, and gave the details whilst Chris contented himself with sombre, confirmatory nods. Bruce listened with the cold detachment of a professional physicist, looking as though he were waiting for something concrete on which to pass judgment.
“Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” Chris asked ruefully when the story had been told.
“If anybody else but you had been involved, Chris, I’d say just that. But you’re not that kind of a chap. I’m prepared to believe that it happened all right.”
“Many thanks,” Chris murmured dryly, sipping his coffee.
“How far,” Bruce asked, “does this present apparatus of yours reach?”
“About a hundred miles. That means France mainly to the south, and up to maybe Manchester or Leeds in the north. East and west we have the ocean, so that’s out. This girl must have been within that radius somewhere.”
“Not necessarily,” Bruce said, surprisingly, and Chris and Dave looked at him sharply.
“I mean,” he explained, putting his coffee cup on the bench, “that there are such things as freak receptions, both in television and radio. Sometimes during intense solar activity a television transmission from thousands of miles away is picked up—and radio transmission too. Last night there was not so much solar activity as electrical disturbance caused by the storm. It possibly helped you to accidentally pick something up, and since it was far away it was not in any known place on your receiver dial.”
“Then it would be a ‘ham’. As Dave has pointed out, all the professional television announcers know English as well as other languages.”
“All right, then, a ‘ham’,” Bruce conceded. “Any station, even a very weak one, can sometimes get an electrical boost which carries the signal thousands of miles instead of hundreds. Certainly I see no reason to make such a profound mystery out of the thing.”
“The mystery is that a ‘ham’ should have palatial surroundings,” Chris mused. “Gets me, does that. Anyhow, there’s one way to check up. I can always get the Amateur Receivers’ Association to find out which station it was sending that transmission at that time. Frankly, boys,” Chris added with an uncomfortable smile, “I’d like to know more about that girl.”
“Shame on you as a research scientist!” Dave said sternly. “How is long-range television to prosper if you go cuckoo over a girl and forget your investigations?”
“No girl’s worth it,” Bruce said flatly. “Concentrate on the commercial side: that’s what matters.”
Chris did not answer for a moment. Another side of the matter seemed to have occurred to him, and presently he put it into words.
“If it came from thousands of miles away the storm would not have any effect on it—only on my receiver. And it isn’t the receiver that gets the boost; it’s the transmitter. Solar activity could do it, yes, because that involves the whole world—but an electrical storm is only a local affair…. I’m none too satisfied with your theory, Bruce.”
He shrugged. “That’s too bad. It’s the only one I’ve got—and I still maintain that a mystery girl who can’t read English is no excuse for holding up our experiments. Get on with your modifications, man, and forget her!”
Chris shook his head. “It’s not as simple as that. What I will do, though, is contact the Association right away.”
Quickly he tuned in the wavelength required, and the genial face of the Amateur Receivers’ Association announcer presently appeared on the screen. This organisation existed solely for the use of television ‘hams’, operating a twenty-four hour service and manned by professional statisticians who were also television maniacs. Their self-inflicted, non-profit making objective was solely to log all known amateur transmissions and make linkups where necessary.
“Hello there,” Chris acknowledged with a friendly salute. “Information required, if you please. Station MBK, London Environ, speaking.”
“Glad to help,” the announcer responded. “What’s the trouble?”
“An unexpected reception at the height of last night’s storm. Can you trace for me where the following transmission came from? A girl with copper-coloured hair and unusually good looks came on my screen without sound at approximately ten o’clock last night when the storm was at its zenith. She did not understand a card written in English which I held up for her to read.”
A puzzled look came over the Amateur Announcer’s face.
“And what was she dressed in? Any idea?”
“A shell pink dress with elbow-length sleeves. It wasn’t evening dress, come to think of it. No jewellery that I noticed. Her background was of a sort of neutral watermark pattern, and there were ribbed pillars. It almost looked like some kind of palace. That’s all I can tell you. My aerial was destroyed temporarily by lightning and I lost contact.... Think you can do anything for me?”
“I’ll try. We have all the details of last night’s transmissions by the ‘hams’ in all parts of the world, and the pros too, come to that. I’ll signal you back in about twenty minutes.”
With that, Chris switched off and relaxed.
“Doesn’t sound too hopeful, does he?” Dave asked at last, to which Chris was forced to give a grudging assent.
“He’ll find something,” Bruce decided. “If any amateur or professional station sent out that transmission, the Association will know all about it. And come to think of it, it may have been a film which was transmitted, hence the ornate background.”
“Then why did the girl study my note and then start to write one for herself?” Chris asked pointedly. “She wouldn’t do that in a film. And another thing—assuming the storm caused me to receive that image over thousands of miles, what kind of electric jiggery pokery was it that caused my image to show up on her televisor? It was a both-way performance, remember.”
Silence, with suggestions and ideas at absolute zero. Not even the inventive Bruce with his analytical mind seemed capable of thinking any further. So for the moment there was nothing to do but keep an eye on the clock and hope the Association might have something to offer.
It was thirty minutes later before the Association came through again, and it was almost immediately obvious from the expression on the announcer’s face that he had nothing of importance to relate.
“Sorry, MBK,” he said, shaking his head. “We’ve no trace of any such transmission from anywhere in the world. In fact, fifty percent of the television stations, ‘ham’ and professional, were off the air last night due to the heavy storms. What you saw I don’t know, but it’s pretty obvious that nobody else saw it. More water with it next time, eh?”
“Very funny,” Chris responded sourly. “Thanks, all the same.” With that he switched off and glanced at Dave and Bruce. The latter said, with studied calm:
“That man is a moron with sub-zero intelligence. He ought to know that no ‘ham’ sees things that don’t exist. Dammit, he has enough struggle seeing the things that do. You saw something all right, Chris, though whether it was of profound importance or not I can’t say. One thing is obvious, though: that fathead at the Association obviously thinks it was a delusion and therefore will forget all about it. All the better, just in case we finally satisfy ourselves that the vision was important, after all.”
Dave grinned. “Good old Bruce! Always look to the future!”
“And to the financial possibilities thereof….” Bruce hunched forward on his stool and added seriously: “Just suppose, for instance, that you contacted Mars by accident? Or even Venus? That the storm track happened to bring in a television wave from outer space!”
Chris hesitated, obviously startled, but Dave as an amateur astronomer remained unmoved.
“All due respect, Bruce, but it’s bunk,” he said politely. “I don’t know enough about television signal strengths to say whether or not this apparatus could pick up a transmission over forty to sixty million miles of space, but I do know that the Martians or Venusians, granting their unlikely existence, would hardly take the form of a beautiful girl of Earth, and dressed in the conventional way too. No, I could better believe the transmission came from fabled Atlantis or somewhere.”
“That’s a possibility, I suppose,” Chris reflected, and Bruce turned himself to fresh speculations.
“For my part,” Dave said after a long interval, “I suggest one more turn round the dial and see if the chance of yesterday happens to repeat itself. Have another go at it.”
Chris nodded and switched on the power, but though he searched with toothcomb thoroughness for the next hour there was no trace whatever of the mystery transmission. Finally he gave a grim glance and snapped off the controls.
“Gone but not forgotten, I’m afraid,” he said. “Believe it or not, boys, I feel like somebody who has glimpsed El Dorado, and I’ll go on trying to find it again if it takes all my life. I refuse to believe it could only happen once in a lifetime.”
Dave and Bruce got to their feet, both of them yawning somewhat with boredom.
“From here on, Chris, it’s your pigeon,” Bruce said. “If you recapture the lovely lady let us know. Personally I don’t think that fluke will ever happen again.”
“Not even in a thunderstorm?” Chris asked, reaching for his jacket.
“Well, now….” Bruce mused and pursed his lips. “I suppose that, given the identical electrical conditions, you might be successful in repeating the effect. Too much to say right now. Hope for the best, eh?”
“And if there isn’t a thunderstorm within a reasonable time whilst the summer lasts I’ll try and conjure up similar electrical effects for myself,” Chris decided. “Darn me if I won’t!”
* * * *
For several weeks afterwards, whilst Britain at least enjoyed clear skies and soft breezes, Chris fumed at the lack of climatic outburst and could only proceed with normal television experiments until there might arrive a night such as had formerly proved so eventful.
Towards the end of August he got his wish. At work during the day he had noticed the sultry gathering of storm clouds as late afternoon came, and by seven o’clock when he had gained the hut laboratory there were all the signs of a beauty coming up to the accompaniment of distant rolls of thunder.
As he had expected, he was not alone in his laboratory for long, before fat and perspiring Dave arrived on his motorcycle; and then the impeccably cool Bruce in his sports car. Having both read the signs of the sky they meant taking advantage of the elements if it were at all possible.
“No guarantee, of course, that this storm will be as electrically fruitful as the last one,” Chris said as he switched on the power and checked the instruments with a nervous intensity. “We may not get anything at all except a shattered aerial.”
“Cheerful, isn’t he?” Bruce murmured. “You ought to earth that aerial and save damage....”
“Can’t be done. Once it’s earthed, reception intensity drops by half. Besides—”
Chris paused and glanced up briefly as a brilliant lightning flash made itself evident against the two windows. After an interval of a few seconds the thunder rolled heavily, growling thickly into the distance.
“There’s one thing I’ll say,” Dave remarked, perching his gross body on the nearby stool. “If this glorious wench is only going to appear during thunderstorms, her appearances will be mighty infrequent after September.”
Chris was not even listening. His attention was all for his instruments as he operated the tuning dial carefully. Upon the screen appeared the occasional sprays of energy as the lightning affected it, and one after the other the usual amateur and professional television channels flashed through on their predetermined wavelengths. Then, as the lightning was becoming more frequent, Chris moved the tuning dial into that blank area, somewhere in the midst of which lay the unknown station. By fractional degrees he kept moving it, hoping to land on the ideal spot.
Dave started to say something, but thunder drowned him out Not that it mattered anyway, for at this moment something was happening to the screen. It was flowing and ebbing with little rivers of colour. It looked like glass with melting oil paints upon it. In the speaker there was a sizzling of powerful static, underlined now and again by the greater electrical stab of lightning.
“I believe…I’m on to it.” Chris sounded as though he were half afraid to breathe. “That’s how it began the last time—a lot of flowing of colours which gradually took on shape, and then—”
He stopped talking, for little by little the colours were doing just as he had hoped they would, smearing into each other in the most amazing fashion, until at length they had the definite outline of a head and shoulders. As on that other night, Chris quickly altered the focusing controls, then Dave and Bruce gazed in transfixed admiration at the good-looking girl with the auburn hair who was gazing at them from the screen.
“Satisfied?” Chris demanded, with a quick glance of triumph over his shoulder. Then: “Dave—grab the camcorder over there on the bench and switch it on! Focus it on the screen! We want a recording of everything for later study…especially if the girl speaks to us.”
Dave obeyed with alacrity.
“Can you hear me?” Chris asked deliberately. “Nod if you can….”
As on the previous occasion the girl with the azurine eyes seemed to be watching his mouth. Either she did not understand or else no sound was coming through to her, for she turned aside and picked up a card on which was written a message. In amazement the three men stared at it as she held it in full view.
“What kind of a language is that?” Dave asked blankly, when a shattering explosion of thunder had died away.
He could be forgiven his incredulity, for here was a written language totally unlike anything ever seen before, even in the ancient times. It was not symbolic or hieroglyphic, but a mass of queer, semi-mathematical signs and occasionally a single diagonal stroke.
“More I see of this the more I think communication with Mars may be right,” Bruce Wetherall muttered. “I’ll gamble no linguist on earth could disentangle that.”
“Notice the background?” Chris asked quickly. “It’s exactly the same as before. Sort of waterfall pattern and two pillars.”
Bruce and Dave nodded, too overwhelmed to say much. Then as the girl at last lowered her written message and gave a look of inquiry, Bruce made an irritated movement.
“Surely there’s some way in which we can get sound through. It’s too exasperating to be muted like this.”
Chris worked again on his apparatus and meanwhile Dave nodded and smiled to the picture in the screen. To his satisfaction the girl smiled back—laughed even—to reveal regular white teeth.
“She’s no Martian,” Bruce mused, studying her intently. “In every particular she’s earthly. Two ears, two eyes, the head and face. Everything about her spells E-A-R-T-H. And she’d put many a film and television star in the shade when it comes to looks—”
“The fault seems to be at her end,” Chris interrupted. “My receiver is in perfect order, so I just don’t understand what’s wrong.”
He turned back to the screen and tried by motions to convey to the girl that her sound transmission was haywire. She watched his actions with a pretty, thoughtful intelligence, then she looked at something below her and out of screen view. Her long, slender fingers reached forward and began to operate something vigorously.
Tensely, Chris, Dave and Bruce waited—and they nearly came to the verge of whooping with joy when all of a sudden the hiss of power through the speaker was swamped by a voice.... And what a voice! It had the tinkle of fairy bells, a curious other-world quality which was incredibly fascinating. Here was a voice such as no woman in the world had ever been known to possess before.
“That,” Bruce said in a kind of silent ecstasy, “is a voice in a million.”
“So’s the girl who owns it,” Dave added.
Evidently their remarks had reached the girl, for she suddenly stopped talking and frowned instead. Then she gave a shrug of her shoulders and talked again.
“Make anything of it?” Chris asked, listening intently. “Sounds to me as though it has an Oriental flavour.”
Bruce shook his head. “I’ve been in the Orient a good deal and I never heard a voice like that. Wonder if she can sing?”
Chris looked at her image and asked deliberately: “Can you sing?”
She gazed vaguely, obviously not understanding, so for her benefit he pantomimed the action of a singer, opening and shutting his mouth and putting his hand on his chest. The act seemed to amuse the unknown girl more than somewhat, for she burst into laughter. Chris gave her a reproving look, which quickly melted into one of profound admiration as she started singing in her incomprehensible language. The words did not matter in the least: it was her astounding range that counted. Without the least apparent physical effort she sailed up into and even beyond seven octaves, her final note being so high and pure as to slowly merge beyond audible range.
“Wow!” Dave exclaimed, his eyes bright. “If ever there was a girl worth a fortune this is she. Ask her if—”
He broke off, gazing in consternation as the scene suddenly began to smear, revolve, and then fade. In spite of everything he could do with the controls, Chris failed and the screen was finally blank, with a silent speaker. Puzzled, he sat gazing at the apparatus.
“What caused it?” Dave demanded, switching off the camcorder. “Just when things were getting interesting too!”
Chris glanced at him. “Probably the aerial’s gone west again as it did last time. Hop out and take a look, will you?”
Dave nodded, and laying the camcorder back on the bench, he crossed to the laboratory door and wrenched it open. It was raining heavily, but the thunder and lightning was not particularly severe. The flashes were sufficient to enable him to see that the aerial was quite undamaged, which information he brought back.
“Then there’s no reason for the fade,” Chris muttered. “Or is there?”
“Just one,” Bruce responded, thinking. “Probably as the storm recedes the electrical build-up which makes this strange transmission-reception possible loses its efficiency. On the first occasion lightning shattered the aerial and put a stop to everything: this time the storm has moved too far away to be useful electrically any longer.”
“Uh-huh,” Chris acknowledged. “I suppose that would fit the case. Since we obviously can’t wait for a convenient storm every time we want to establish contact, what’s the answer? It’s right up your street, Bruce, as a physicist. I understand radio and television, but electrical bridges and flukes are way outside my province.”
Bruce reflected. “I’ll probably dope out something—but it’ll take a bit of time, Meanwhile, we’re no nearer where the transmission is coming from.”
“Must be an amateur somewhere which the Association missed,” Chris decided. “Best thing I can do is contact them again and see if we—”
“Hold it!” Bruce knocked down his hand sharply as he reached out to the switches. “That would be about the most crazy thing you could do. If we handle this situation properly there may be a fortune in it. That girl has a voice that would make the world’s greatest prima donna sound like an amateur. On top of that she looks a pretty guileless girl and we could probably get her to do whatever we wanted and cash in on it.”
Dave looked vaguely uncomfortable as he mopped his chins. As for Chris, his look was plainly belligerent.
“Is that the best angle you can think up? Commercialise the girl straight away? I don’t want any of it. I’m interested in her for herself, to say nothing of the mystery which surrounds her.”
Bruce grinned. “Be simple if you want, feller, but my mind is on the financial angle. If we can only get this girl sorted out properly and find a way to have her here in the flesh there are no limits to what might be done…. Indeed, it may not be necessary for her to be personally contacted. She can be filmed in sound, as you’ve done already.”
The observation brought Chris quickly to his feet again. He went over to the bench and picked up the camcorder. Then he crossed to the television and presently all three men settled in silence to watch the recording. They listened to their own voices, and then that of the girl—and once again, as the point of her singing was reached they listened enthralled.
“Definitely that voice has got to be sold to the highest bidder,” Bruce decided as Chris switched off. “That’s going to be my stake in this from here on, and for that reason alone I’ll strain every scientific ability I’ve got to make a constant communication possible. As for the source of her transmission and her weird language, I leave that to you two geniuses.... Incidentally, you don’t still suspect Mars or Venus, do you?”
Chris spread his hands. “I don’t know what to think. But if it takes every penny I’ve got I’ll get the best linguists in the world to try and determine where this language hails from.”
“And give everything away?” Bruce asked curtly. “You can be very dim at times, Chris.”
“What else do you suggest?”
“Solving it between us, of course. When you find a gold mine you don’t immediately go to work telling everybody where it is! There are great possibilities here, but we’ve got to keep them to ourselves. Agreed?”
“Mmm, I suppose so.” Chris looked uncertain. “I only hope you’re not over-commercialising the situation, that’s all.”
“That’s hardly possible. The whole business might be worth a packet to both the musical and scientific world before we’re finished. I’d suggest you try and sort out the language yourself, if you can. That printed card was captured on the film, wasn’t it?”
“I think so. Tell you better when I’ve reran it... And I still think she belongs to another planet where, by some strange coincidence, the people look like us.”
“If all the girls look like her,” Dave murmured, “I hope the jet-plane firm I’m working for hurries up and completes its outer space runabout.”
For a moment the subject was changed. Both Bruce and Chris glanced in surprise.
“Outer space runabout?” Chris asked. “What are you talking about?”
Dave hesitated, then shrugged. “They’re extending the International Space Station, and it’s slow work, with the astronauts having to get around in spacesuits on the end of a line. My firm is working with the Americans on developing a small vehicle that they can get about in….” Dave hesitated, looking from one to the other. “Look, fellers, I let that slip without realising it. It’s a top secret. Not a word to anybody.”
“So be it,” Bruce assured him solemnly, raising his hand. Then he glanced at his watch. “Well, doesn’t seem as though there’s anything more to be gained by staying here, so I’ll retire to my lair and see if I can think up something to give this apparatus the required electrical boost.”
Chris nodded, switching off the apparatus. “Right—and the sooner the better. Meantime, Dave, if you want to help me during the next few nights in solving this language, problem I shan’t say no.”
“I’ll be here,” Dave promised, heading for the door. “Meantime, I’ll rerun this film and see if anything dawns on us when it’s run through.”
With one thing and another it was close on midnight when Chris finally left his laboratory hut, and he had little sleep that night for thinking about the amazing girl from nowhere whose name he did not even know. He kept thinking of the strange language he had heard and mentally comparing it with the card she had held up, and which had been clearly captured in the film. Where could she possibly hail from? Surely not from any planet in the solar system? Thus arguing and speculating to himself Chris finally fell asleep.
The next day, pursuing his normal workaday job as a photographer’s assistant, he took good care not to do anything that might cause his employer to complain. Right now he was not sure how much money he was going to need to further his experiments and to be thrown out of work would be catastrophic.... Just the same, there was nothing to prevent him doing a good deal of thinking as he worked, but most of it came to nothing. Many and varied were the attempts he made to explain away the mystery girl’s origin. He covered everything from Atlantis to time-travel and failed to discover anything that fitted.
So, presently, he came back to the main problem that could provide the key to everything—an understanding of the girl’s language. With that mastered everything would become plain sailing...or would it?
