“But—”
“Shh. 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, but unmistakably a violin. Playing Handel’s Largo.
Only suddenly it climbed in pitch as though modulating from key to key until it became so horribly shrill that it hurt the ear. And kept on going past the high limit of audibility until they could hear it no more.
Somebody said, “Shut that God damn thing off.”
Somebody did, and this time nobody turned it back on.
Pete said, “I didn’t really believe it myself. And there’s another thing against it, George. Those signals affect TV too, and radio waves are the wrong length to do that.” He shook his head slowly. “There must be some other explanation, George. The more I think about 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 desk. They slid to rest against the triangular name plate that read:
B. R. OGILVIE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
“Preposterous,” he said again.
Casey Blair, his best reporter, blew a smoke ring and poked his index finger through it.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because—why, it’s utterly preposterous.”
Casey Blair said, “It is now three o’clock in the morning. The interference has gone on for five hours and not a single program is getting through on either TV or radio. Every major broadcasting and telecasting station in the world has gone off the air—for two reasons. One, they were just wasting current. Two, the communications bureaus of their respective governments requested them to get off to aid their campaigns with the direction finders. For five hours now, since the start of the interference, they’ve been working with everything they’ve got. And what have they found out?”
“It’s preposterous!” said the editor.
“Perfectly, but it’s true. Greenwich at 11 P.M. New York time; I’m translating all these times into 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. 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 direction of Buenos Aires to that of Montevideo, a thousand miles north. New York at eleven had weak indications toward Madrid; but by two o’clock they could get no bearings at all.” He blew another smoke ring. “Maybe because the loop antennae they use turn only on a horizontal plane?”
“Absurd.”
Casey said, “I like ‘preposterous’ better, Mr. Ogilvie. Preposterous it is, but it’s not absurd. I’m scared stiff. Those lines—and all other bearings I’ve heard about—run in the same direction if you take them as straight lines running as tangents off the Earth instead of curving them around the surface. I did it with a little globe and a star map. They converge on the constellation Leo.”
He leaned forward and tapped a forefinger on the top page of the story he’d just turned in.
“Stations that are directly under Leo in the sky get no bearings at all. Stations on what would be the perimeter of Earth relative to that point get the strongest bearings. Listen, have an astronomer check those figures if you want before you run the story, but get it done damn quick—unless you want to read about it in the other newspapers first.”
“But the Heaviside layer, Casey—isn’t that supposed to stop all radio waves and bounce them back?”
“Sure, it does. But maybe it leaks. Or maybe signals can get through it from the outside even though they can’t get out from the inside. It isn’t a solid wall.”
“But—”
“I know, it’s preposterous. But there it is. And there’s only an hour before press time. You’d better send this story through fast and have it set up while you’re having somebody check my facts and directions. Besides, there’s something else you’ll want to check.”
“What?”
“I didn’t have the data for checking the positions of the planets. Leo’s on the ecliptic; a planet could be in line between here and there. Mars, maybe.”
Mr. Ogilvie’s eyes brightened, then clouded again. He said, “We’ll be the laughingstock of the world, Blair, if you’re wrong.”
“And if I’m right?”
The editor picked up the phone and snapped an order.
* * * *
April 6th headline of the New York Morning Messenger, final (6 A.M.) edition:
RADIO INTERFERENCE COMES FROM SPACE, ORIGINATES IN LEO
May Be Attempt at Communication by Beings Outside Solar System
All television and radio broadcasting suspended.
* * * *
Radio and television stocks opened several points off the previous day and then dropped sharply until noon, when a moderate buying rally brought them a few points back.
Public reaction was mixed; people who had no radios rushed out to buy them and there was a boom, especially in portable and tabletop receivers. On the other hand, no TV sets were sold at all. With telecasting suspended there were no pictures on their screens, even blurred ones. Their audio circuits, when turned on, brought in the same jumble as radio receivers. Which, as Pete Mulvaney had pointed out to George Bailey, was impossible; radio waves cannot activate the audio circuits of TV sets. But these did, if they were radio waves.
In radio sets they seemed to be radio waves, but horribly hashed. No one could listen to them very long. Oh, there were flashes—times when, for several consecutive seconds, one could recognize the voice of Will Rogers or Geraldine Farrar or catch flashes of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight or the Pearl Harbor excitement. (Remember Pearl Harbor?) But things even remotely worth hearing were rare. Mostly it was a meaningless mixture 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 for a few days.
There were other booms, less explicable, less capable of analysis. Reminiscent of the Orson Welles Martian scare of 1938 was a sudden upswing in the sale of shotguns and sidearms. Bibles sold as fast as books on astronomy—and books on astronomy sold like hotcakes. One section of the country showed a sudden interest in lightning rods; builders were flooded with orders for immediate installation.
For some reason which has never been clearly ascertained, there was a run on fishhooks in Mobile, Alabama; every hardware and sporting goods store sold out of them within hours.
The public libraries and bookstores had a run on books on astrology and books on Mars. Yes, on Mars—despite the fact that Mars was at that 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.
Something strange was happening—and no news of developments available except through the newspapers. People waited in mobs outside newspaper buildings for each new edition to appear. Circulation