Colson smiled slowly.
“I’m afraid I shall not oblige you. I know that you have been listening-in — I know also that you have been baffled. I shall continue to operate in your or any other market, and I give you full liberty to go to the person who is my informant, and who will be just as glad to tell you as he is to tell me, everything he knows.”
Hildreth took up his hat with an ugly smile. “That is your last word?” Colson nodded.
“My very last.” The two men walked to the door, and turned.
“It is not mine,” said Hildreth, and there was no mistaking the ominous note in his tone.
They stood at the window watching the two men until they had gone out of sight, and then Tim turned to his host.
“What does he want really?” he asked.
Mr. Colson roused himself from his reverie with a start.
“What does he want? I will show you. The cause of all our burglaries, the cause of this visit. Come with me.”
They turned into the passage, and as the professor stopped before the door labelled “Planetoid 127,”
Tim’s heart began to beat a little faster. Colson opened the door with two keys and ushered him into the strangest room which Tim had ever seen.
A confused picture of instruments, of wires that spun across the room like the web of a spider, of strange little machines which seemed to be endowed with perpetual motion — for they worked all the time — these were his first impressions.
The room was lined with grey felt, except on one side, where there was a strip of fibrous panelling. Towards this the professor went. Pushing aside a panel, he disclosed the circular door of a safe and, reaching in his hand, took out a small red-covered book.
“This is what the burglars want!” he said exultantly. “The Code! The Code of the Stars!”
Chapter III
Tim Lensman could only stare at the professor.
“I don’t understand you, Mr. Colson,” he said, puzzled. “You mean that book is a code…an ordinary commercial code?”
Colson shook his head.
“No, my boy,” he said quietly; “that is something more than a code, it is a vocabulary — a vocabulary of six thousand words, the simplest and the most comprehensive language that humanity has ever known! That is why they are so infinitely more clever than we,” he mused. “I have not yet learned the process by which this language was evolved, but it is certain that it is their universal tongue.”
He turned with a smile to the bewildered boy.
“You speak English, probably French; you may have a smattering of German and Spanish and Italian. And when you have named these languages, you probably imagine that you have exhausted all that matter, and that the highest expression of human speech is bound up in one or the other, or perhaps all, of these tongues. Yet there is a tribe on the Upper Congo which has a vocabulary of four thousand words with which to voice its hopes, its sufferings and its joys. And in those four thousand words lies the sum of their poetry, history, and science! If we were as intelligent as we think we are, we should adopt the language of the Upper Congolese as the universal speech.”
Tim’s head was swimming: codes, languages, Upper Congolese and the mysterious “they.”…Surely there must be something in Dawes’ ominous hints, and this old man must be sick of overmuch learning. As though he realised what was passing through the boy’s mind, Colson shook his head.
“No, I am not mad,” he said, as he locked the book away in the safe and put the key in his pocket, “unless this is a symptom of my dementia.”
He waved his hand to the wire-laden room, and presently Tim, as in a dream, heard his companion explaining the functions of the various instruments with which the room was littered. For the most part it was Greek to him, for the professor had reached that stage of mechanical knowledge where he outstripped his pupil’s understanding. It was as though a professor of higher mathematics had strolled into the algebra class and lectured upon ultimate factors. Now and again he recognized some formula, or caught a mental glimpse of the other’s meaning, but for the main part the old man was talking in a language he did not comprehend.
“I’m afraid you’re going a little beyond me, sir,” he said, with a smile, and the old man nodded.
“Yes, there is much for you to learn,” he said; “and it must be learnt!”
He paused before a large glass case, which contained what looked to Tim to be a tiny model of a reciprocating engine, except that dozens of little pistons thrust out from unexpected cylinders, and all seemed to be working independent of the others, producing no central and general result.
“What is that, sir?”
Colson smoothed his chin thoughtfully.
“I’m trying to bring the description within the scope of your understanding,” he said. “It would not be inexact to describe this as a ‘strainer of sound.’ Yet neither would it be exact.”
He touched a switch and a dozen coloured lights gleamed and died amidst the whirling machinery. The hum which Tim had heard was broken into staccato dots and dashes of sound. He turned the switch again and the monotonous hum was resumed.
“Let us go back to the library,” said the professor abruptly.
He came out of the room last, turned out the lights and double-locked the door, before he took his companion’s arm and led him back to the library they had recently vacated.
“Do you realise, Lensman,” he said as he closed the door, “that there are in this world sounds which never reach the human brain? The lower animals, more sensitive to vibratory waves, can hear noises which are never registered upon the human ear. The wireless expert listened in at the approach of Mars to the earth, hoping to secure a message of some kind. But what did he expect? A similar clatter to that which he could pick up from some passing steamer. And, suppose somebody was signalling — not from Mars, because there is no analogy to human life on that planet, but from some — some other world, big or little — is it not possible that the sound may be of such a character that not only the ear, even when assisted by the most powerful of microphones, cannot detect, but which no instrument man has devised can translate to an audible key?”
“Do you suggest, sir, that signals of that nature are coming through from outer space?” asked Tim in surprise. And Mr. Colson inclined his head.
“Undoubtedly. There are at least three worlds signalling to us,” said the science master. “Sometimes the operators make some mechanical blunder, and there is an accidental emission of sound which is picked up on this earth and is credited to Mars. One of the most definite of the three comes from a system which is probably thousands of light-years away. In other words, from a planet that is part of a system beyond our ken. The most powerful telescope cannot even detect the sun around which this planet whirls! Another, and fainter, signal comes from an undetected planet beyond the orbit of Neptune.”
“But life could not exist beyond the orbit of Neptune?” suggested Tim.
“Not life as we understand it,” said the professor. “I admit that these signals are faint and unintelligible. But the third planet—”
“Is it your Planetoid 127?”