Mr. Pauling laughed. “Don’t you know that the electricity will run off in the water, Son?” he asked. “Water’s a conductor of electricity and even the cables have to be heavily insulated in order to carry the current.”
“Well, this is different,” insisted Tom. “The electricity doesn’t run through the water, it’s just the radio or electromagnetic waves and they follow the wire and don’t get lost.”
“Who put all that nonsense into your head?” demanded Mr. Pauling. “Radio is a wonderful science, I’ll admit, but that’s a little too fishy.”
“Well, General Squiers did it—across the Potomac and used it during the war,” declared Tom, “so it must be so. It was in that same article that told about the resonance coils.”
“It’s quite true, Pauling,” Mr. Henderson assured him. “It does sound ridiculous, I’ll admit, but radio and the modern theory of electrons is upsetting all our old-fashioned ideas and Squiers proved conclusively that radio waves will follow a bare copper wire under water. They’ll even go around corners or turns with it—not only under water, but under ground. It was one of those lucky discoveries that helped win the war, too. If General Squiers hadn’t discovered it we would have been in a pretty fix. There was not one-thousandth enough insulated wire on hand and we needed hundreds of times more than all the factories together could supply. There was plenty of wire, but not enough machines for insulating it. We were right up against it when Squiers got his hunch and found it worked. And just as Tom says, no one except those with the instruments at the ends of the line can pick up the messages—a big advantage over wireless or ordinary telegraph or telephone messages.”
“All right,” laughed Mr. Pauling, “I give in. Another miracle added to the long list of radio magic. I’ll believe almost anything now. Go ahead, Tom, you’re the radio boss, you know. Get your wired wireless ready and we’ll soon see how it works.”
The submarine was now submerged, but with the periscope out, and each minute the Cay was becoming plainer and plainer.
“If those chaps are there, won’t they hear our screws and clear out?” Mr. Henderson asked. “I suppose they’ll have a detector on their boat or ashore.”
“I don’t see how we can avoid that,” declared Mr. Pauling. “It’s one of the chances we’ll have to take. I wish——”
“No, they won’t hear!” interrupted Rawlins. “I’d been worrying over that myself, but luck’s with us again to-day. There’s a tramp steamer over yonder—heading the same way we are and with her screw thrashing the water like a dying whale. These laddies we’re after ’ll never be able to pick up the sound of our little wheel. I’m going to edge over towards the tramp a bit so as to make it still safer.”