It was a slow and dull job. I didn’t have to worry about which solenoid lead went to which strand—Arthur could sort them out. But all the same it took an hour, pretty near, and I was getting hungry by the time I got the last connection taped. I shifted the typewriter so that both Arthur and I could see it, rolled in a sheet of paper and hooked the cable to Arthur’s receptors.
Nothing happened.
“Oh,” I said. “Excuse me, Arthur. I forgot to plug it in.”
I found a wall socket. The typewriter began to hum and then it started to rattle and type:
DURA AUK UKOO RQK MWS AQB
It stopped.
“Come on, Arthur,” I ordered impatiently. “Sort them out, will you?”
Laboriously it typed:
!!!
Then, for a time, there was a clacking and thumping as he typed random letters, peeping out of the suitcase to see what he had typed, until the sheet I had put in was used up.