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.
Our scientists knew how to resonate crystals; but the Martians could resonate the atmosphere. And when they resonated our atmosphere, every Earthman dug them, no matter where he was. That's the way their first signal reached us—a resonant voice sounded clearly everywhere on Earth, speaking in the language of the area in which it was heard. It was all a matter of resonant pitch. A thought has a basic wave, and it can be keyed to any pitch. When you say something, you express a thought by resonating the atmosphere. No matter if you speak English, or German, or Brooklyn—it's all the same thought. Well, when the Martians talked, we, each of us, were our own wave converter, and the vibrations that hit our eardrums came out whatever language we talked.
How did they do it? Well, how do you explain electronic knowledge as advanced as that? You're right, they didn't. They didn't even try. They said we wouldn't get it anyway, so why waste air-time?
A few of our big-domes were incensed, but the Martians let them smoke. They said they'd been watching our rocket efforts, and had figured we were pretty stupid, since everybody in the Solar System (and outside it for that matter) knew you couldn't lick the EMF with rockets. But then we'd started our electronic probing of outer space, and they lifted their mental eyebrows. It, they said, gave them the itch to give us a few pointers.
You can imagine the fuss there was in the Pentagon; and in the Kremlin for that matter. Here was a chance to load up on classified stuff of the highest order, and something called an RMF was the biggest leak the world had ever known.
Well, the Martians deep-froze that kind of idea right away. They weren't going to have any truck with secrets, especially secret weapons. They gave us quite a ribbing about weapons, and there were a lot of red faces on Earth. They were civilized, they said, and even their plows had been beaten into resonators. They had a highly developed moral sense, and the word war appeared in their dictionaries only in the archaic section.
They were going to tell us a lot of things, to be sure, but they were going to elevate us. They were going to make real ladies and gentlemen out of us, like they were. And as a beginning, they said they were going to put on a pageant. They were going to depict life on Mars for us as it was today, in all its glory and perfection, and they were going to do it in the form of a play.
You can picture the Broadway producers perking up their ears at this, and right away they began thinking of the whole thing in the terms of a "production." Naturally, when the Martians said it would be done via world-wide television, the big networks immediately sensed a big deal, and they jumped almost as high as Vulcan.
But the Martians said the broadcast didn't need receivers, but that the sky itself would be the TV screen. This was going to be exactly the opposite of closed-circuit TV. This was wide open—as wide open as Minsky's in the Twenties.