Cosmic striptease

By E. K. JARVIS
A picture is worth a thousand words—especially if they're Martian words and nobody can understand them. So Mars put on a spectacular for Earth, using the skies as a TV screen. This proved the superiority of their science. But their morals—Wow!
The Atlas didn't make it—it blew up. And so did the Thor. The Vulcan wasn't much better; it just went pfftt . None of them got anywhere near outer space—the real outer space. Oh, yes, they went up hundreds of miles, even thousands. The Vulcan went nearly five thousand. But they were still in the Electro-Magnetic Field. Nobody really understood the EMF. Einstein had hit on it with his final theory, before he died. He said gravity and magnetism were just manifestations of something else, some single thing that held the very secret of matter.
It was suspected that the Vulcan had reached the limits of the EMF, but nobody was sure. You can't be very sure about a thing that just goes pfftt , and then isn't there any more. Not there at all! That's what radar said, and telescopes, and theodolites, and every other detection apparatus conceivable. Not until the Jason went up where no rocket had ever gone were they sure. Sure that man would never leave the confines of his EMF—at least until he solved the problem of the nature of the EMF. And that seemed the problem of the nature of matter itself. You'll have to admit, that's a difficult problem to tackle.
Yes, they tackled it. Theories were a dime a dozen. But just what the EMF really was, nobody could say even mathematically. Instead of wasting money on rockets that went pfftt , they began to investigate space with rays, frequencies, radiations, echoes, electronic things the man in the street just didn't understand. What he did understand, however, was the answer that came back from space, as a result of all this electronic probing.
Mars picked us up, and answered!
We thought we had quite a bit of electronic science. But we turned out to be babes in the woods. The Martians knew more about rays and waves and frequencies and vibrations than the Yanks knew about buying baseball players. They had a real cool signal. They called it the Resonating Magnetic Field. You know what a resonating field is, don't you? It's like a great big drum—you hit it right, and it'll vibrate with the biggest boom you ever heard. It resonates.