Stan looked. He was too used to Dick’s queer contrivances to evince surprize; rather he took a careful inventory of what he saw, so that when he turned again to his friend he had a pretty good idea of the contents of the cabinet. He looked up and began enumerating from memory: “Down in a lower compartment there seems to be an orthodox receiving set with eight oversize tubes. All the wiring is oversize, too, and so are the transformers. Up above the set there are a lot of little control appliances, evidently of your own invention, and the biggest X-ray tube I’ve ever seen, with some sort of a focusing device pointed down into the lower compartment. That’s all. What do you think of little Watson’s powers of observation, Sherlock?”
“You will insist upon attempting to be humorous, won’t you?” rebuked Dick, smiling nevertheless. “Seriously, though, Stan, this is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, and it may mean more to the world than any other radio experimentation has meant so far. Would you like an idea of what it all means before we start work?”
“I would,” from the now sober Stan Ross.
“Well, when you left that night I began turning things over and over in my mind. You quite evidently did not think those eight notes were the result of any human agency, and the idea, though preposterous, fascinated me. Where could such a phenomenon originate, I asked myself, if it had not been the prank of some schoolboy? I thought of the millions of other heavenly bodies in the plane of the Galaxy, many of them thousands of times the size of our Earth, and some undoubtedly inhabited. I thought of Mars, though I knew that there was no more reason to believe it inhabited than any other planet, except that it had been seized upon by the popular fancy because of its proximity to the orbit of the Earth and because of its so-called canals. It was while I was thinking of Mars, however, that my train of thought shot off at a new tangent.”
Dick Jarvis paused, utterly forgetful of his friend’s presence. His eyes shone queerly. As Ross prompted him he began again:
“Why hadn’t we been able to communicate with any of the other planets? Were they so far ahead of us in their development that they had forgotten how to make our foolishly elementary kinds of receiving sets? Was it a mere question of wave lengths? Of distance? Or had our system of radio reception perhaps developed along entirely different lines than theirs? Had they used some principle entirely foreign to the electron theory in their radio work—say some unknown projector ray or light repulsion of the sort which makes the tail of a comet point always away from the sun? It seemed possible, even probable. Then I asked myself what medium of language an exterior planet would use in an attempt at communication, and two things immediately suggested themselves: geometry and music! That latter made me think of you again, so because it was the last thing in my train of thought—you were the last thing, I mean—I decided to call you responsible for the whole works—the receiving set on the bench, which is what you want to hear about, of course. I ought to be ashamed of myself for boring you.”
Stan protested.
“Dick,” he said, rising and grasping his friend by the hand, “I don’t know whether you know it or not, but you’re a genius. I’m proud to know you.”
Dick Jarvis blushed.
“Thanks, Stan,” he said, quietly, and rushed into a hurried discussion of the invention that rested before him, in an attempt to cover his embarrassment. A rare thing, indeed, when in college an athlete deigns to give such praise to one of those who are considered miserable “grinds”, though it is indeed true that the grinds usually end up by doing more for the world. All the more credit, then, to that great connecting link of modern America, the radio, which makes all men kin.