“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; Pm 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 `presposterous’ 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.”