Читать книгу The Radio Beasts - Ralph Milne Farley - Страница 4

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FROM ANOTHER WORLD

One warm evening in July after the chores were done, I was sitting on the kitchen steps of my farmhouse, on Chappiquiddick Island off the coast of Massachusetts, idly glancing through the Boston Post of that morning, when for some reason the following item happened to attract my attention:

MADMAN TERRORIZES G. E. PLANT IN LYNN

LYNN.—A maniac, clad only in a nightgown, broke into the General Electric laboratory in Lynn yesterday evening, and frightened the night operator, who thought he was a ghost.

Patrick Mulcahy, the night operator, was seated in the radio room with the highpowered receiving set in action, when suddenly the intruder appeared before him. As Mulcahy jumped to his feet in surprise, the madman approached him, muttering some unintelligible gibberish, whereupon Mulcahy emptied his automatic at the other, and fled.

The employment manager of the G. E. Company, when interviewed late last evening, stated that Mulcahy was a total abstainer; and bloodstains on the floor confirm Mulcahy’s story.

It is believed that the disturber is an escaped inmate of Danvers, but the asylum authorities deny the loss of any of their patients.

Whoever he is, the man is still at large.

“Such a clumsy fabrication,” thought I. “It is too bad that the Boston Post has fallen so low as to print such an old, old gag.”

Then I laid down the paper, and let my mind wander as it willed. The episode which I had just read had occurred in the radio room of the General Electric Company. Radio! That word suggested to me the greatest radio genius whom I have ever known: Myles Standish Cabot, of Boston.

He had been a classmate, and friend of mine. He had mysteriously disappeared from his laboratory on Beacon Street, and nothing further had been heard of him until one night four years later, when a hollow projectile had dropped from the sky onto my farm, bearing in its interior a holographic account of my friend’s adventure during the preceding four years.

This story I had edited, and it appeared under the title “The Radio Man.” It related how Myles, while experimenting with the wireless transmission of matter, had accidentally projected himself through space to the planet Venus. This accounted for his mysterious disappearance.

He had found the planet inhabited by a race of human-like creatures—called Cupians—with antennae instead of ears, who were living in slavery under the Formians, a gigantic breed of intelligent black ants. Myles Cabot had devised artificial electrical antennae, so as to be able to talk with both races, and had organized the Cupians, and led them to victory over their oppressors, thereby winning an honored position among them, and the hand of their princess, the lovely Lilla.

Strange that a news item about a crazy man in a nightgown should have reminded me of such a staid and proper person as Cabot! It would not have done so, but for the one word “radio.”

Then I dismissed the whole matter from my mind.

The next evening I ran my car over to the point, and rowed across the harbor to the village to get a small shipment of freight which was expected by the late boat.

Meeting the boat is one of the chief summer diversions of us Edgartonions. We line up on each side of the gang plank, and let the arriving summer folk run the gantlet of our scrutiny, and listen (ourselves amused) at their amused comments on the “natives.”

As I stood thus on the evening in question, watching the summer folk walk the plank, I saw among them a strangely familiar face. Could it be? It was none other than my old classmate Myles S. Cabot! In another moment we were shaking hands.

Yet still I was speechless with astonishment. Cabot was the last person in the world that I would have expected to see. I had thought he was on another planet, millions of miles away.

Then came the reaction. If Cabot was still on earth, his story about his adventures on Venus, which I had so recently published to the world, must be nothing but a cleverly concocted lie. The projectile, which had carried the manuscript to my farm, and which I had ingenuously assumed to have been shot from the skies, may merely have been fired over from somewhere on Cape Cod.

The accident of my finding the message had probably not been chance at all, but rather an event planned and intended by Myles Cabot. He had hoaxed me, and I had passed on to the editor and to the unsuspecting general public, a mere faked-up yarn. Think what a position this would place me in, when the editor, who in good faith had accepted my story as a narrative of fact, should discover that Myles was not on Venus at all! Could I ever make any one believe I had been innocent of complicity in this hoax?

I was horrified, and my resentment flared up at my old friend.

“Where have you been all these years since you disappeared from home?” I asked accusingly.

“Why, you know perfectly well,” was his surprised reply, “for you published my account of it.”

“Then what on earth are you doing here?” I countered.

To which he enigmatically answered: “Great are the powers of radio.”

“Were you really on Venus?” I inquired, still incredulous.

“On my word of honor as a gentleman,” said he, solemnly.

So the story was true after all, and I had not been hoaxed. I heaved a sigh of relief.

It was soon arranged that he should return with me to the farm. Forgotten was my freight, as I hurried him to the dory.

As I helped him into the boat, I noticed that his left hand was bandaged, and asked him why.

“It happened night before last,” he answered laconically. “Man shot at me.”

And not another word would he speak until the dory was tied to its stake on the other side of the harbor, and we were chugging along the red road which runs east across Chappiquiddick.

“Now tell me all about it,” I begged. “How did you ever get back to earth, and how did you happen to come down here?”

Myles replied, “This is the way it was: After our conquest of the ant-men, I resumed my experiments with the wireless transmission of matter, which experiments had been so rudely interrupted by my accidentally transmitting myself to the planet Poros—Venus, as you earth-folk call it.

“I not only perfected the device, but also perfected it in such a way that it could be used as an attachment to a certain common sort of high-power hook-up. Now, before I left the earth, I knew that the General Electric Company at Lynn had a hook-up of this kind in a receiving station which was in almost constant operation, and was such a standard installation that there was practically no chance of its not being still in commission. I happened to remember its wave-length. So I adjusted my apparatus in my electrical laboratory on Poros, with two Cupian friends at the levers; and the next thing I knew, I found myself back on earth, lying on the floor of a room, in front of a radio set.

“There was a man seated near by, the first human being whom I had seen in over five earth-years. I rushed to greet him, and to ask him where I was. But probably, in my haste, I spoke to him in the language of Poros. That, and my Cupian toga, must have surprised him, for he fired several shots at me with an automatic, and then turned and bolted through the door. One of his shots nicked my left hand. Luckily, the rest missed me.”

“Then you are the supposed madman of Lynn!” I exclaimed.

“The very same,” he answered.

“Well, well!” said I. “Who would have guessed it? And yet, as I read the story in the Boston Post, it somehow or other made me think of you.”

Myles laughed. “Not very complimentary. They certainly gave me a weird write-up.”

“They certainly did,” I replied. “But tell me, how did you get rid of your nightgown?”

Myles laughed again. “My toga, you mean? I found a suit of overalls, an old hat, and a pair of shoes in a locker, put them on, and made my escape from the building. In one of the pockets there was some small change, which carried me to Boston.

“The reason I happened to be here is because yesterday I ran across an installment of ‘The Radio Man,’ which showed me for the first time that my story had actually reached the earth. I was glad indeed, and determined to look you up at once. So to-day I caught the afternoon boat, and here I am.

“Three days ago I was king on Poros. To-day I am nobody, incognito, and in hiding, on the planet Earth, millions of miles away.” And he shrugged his shoulders.

“But, Myles,” said I, “tell me how you came to leave Venus. You talk as though you just calmly up and left for no reason whatever. Why didn’t you bring the Princess Lilla with you? The last that I knew, according to that manuscript which you shot from the skies, you and she had been married in state, and Cupia had settled down to an era of peace, freedom, and prosperity.”

Myles smiled wanly. “You would hardly guess that my silver planet has since then run crimson with blood, so as to rival even her red brother, Mars.”

“How did it ever happen?” I asked.

“You must remember that Prince Yuri of Cupia, the traitorous friend of the oppressor ants, was still unaccounted for at the close of the War of Liberation. Also that there remained alive on our continent, crowded behind a new pale it is true, but chafing under defeat, and eager for revanche, a still numerous nation of ants, headed by a newly-hatched queen, who was but putty in the hands of veteran Formian statesmen. What better combination of match and powder-magazine could be imagined, to threaten the peace of a planet!”

Myles had just completed this long harangue, when we turned into the gate of the farm; and I was soon introducing him to Mrs. Farley and the rest of the household. You can imagine how thrilled they were to meet, in the flesh, the author and hero of those adventures on the planet Venus, which they had read and reread so many times, and how eager they were to hear more.

“Did the match reach the powder?” asked Mrs. Farley anxiously. “Did Prince Yuri get his revenge?”

“Listen,” Cabot replied, “and I will tell you all about it.”

So, far into the night we sat, while our guest roughly sketched the events which had occurred since he shot the manuscript of his previous adventures earthward. The details, he filled in for us from time to time during his stay at our farm. I took copious notes; and, now that he is gone, I have—with his permission—written up the story in as nearly as possible his own words, and herein give it to the world.