“That’s true, of course. However, if these people wanted contact with mankind in general, they could certainly establish it without any difficulty. It has always seemed to me that their maintaining contact in this fashion was evidence that they did not want their presence generally known; so that if experts began taking their transmitter apart, for example, or sending literature and machinery out to them in an effort to show our state of civilization, they would simply leave.”
“That seems a little far-fetched.”
“Perhaps; but can you offer a better suggestion why they don’t land one of these things in a city? They’re paying tremendous prices for darned small quantities of tobacco — and a corner drug store could stock them for years at their rate of consumption.
“Don’t get me wrong, son; I certainly appreciate the importance of all this, and want very much to find out all I can about these things and their machines; but I want the investigating done by people whom I can trust to be careful not to upset the apple cart. I wish the whole family were seven or eight years older; we’d have a good research team right here. For the moment, though, you and I — principally you — are going to have to do the investigating, while Rog and Edie do the scouting. I expect they’ll sneak over to watch us, of course; Roger’s curiosity is starting to keep him awake nights, and he has the makings of a man of action. I’m wondering whether we don’t find his tracks or Edie’s on the way back — he might have persuaded her to go to town for him. There’s nothing more to be done here, unless you want to look this communicator over more closely; we might as well head back, and find out how enterprising the younger generation is.”
“There’s no hurry, Dad. I’d like to look this thing over for a while. It has some of the earmarks of a short wave transmitter, but there are a lot of things I’d like to get straight.”
“Me, too. I’ve learned a good deal about radios in the last twenty years, but it’s a bit beyond me. Of course, I’ve never dared take off more than the outer casing; there are parts too deeply stowed to be visible, which might be highly informative if we could see them.”
“Exactly what I was thinking. There should be some way to look into it — we ought to dig up one of those dentist’s mirrors.”
“You don’t catch me sticking anything made of metal into a gadget that almost certainly uses astronomical voltages.”
“Well — I suppose not. We could turn it off first, if we were sure which position of that switch were off. We don’t really know whether you’re calling them with a short transmission when you move it, or whether you’re breaking a continuous one. If they use it for homing, it would be the latter; but we can’t be sure.”
“Even if we were, turning it off wouldn’t be enough. Condensers can hold a nasty bite for a long time.”