"Well, we went on perfecting the vocabulary," Kenzie said. "You know. Fining it down. Had the little beggars practically standing on their heads at times with our wave." He grinned at the memory and seemed to shake off some of his lethargy.
"You shoulda been here the night Pringle had them marching in formation." His face fell again.
"We kept on improving the gadget," he said with hangdog attitude. "We still hadn't made direct communication, you understand. Nothing like 'How do you do, Mrs. Ant? This is Kenzie MacKenzie, human, talking.'" Then he sneered at his memory.
"With our microwave we could make them do things. But hell, you can make them run out of the ground by pouring water down their hole. That's not communication! We couldn't seem to contact them direct—make them know we were communicating."
"But you still—" the Chief said. He had visions of every home using a gadget to broadcast "keep away" signals to ant pests.
"Our gadget was still crude at that point," Kenzie interrupted. "We fined it down, more and more. That's when we began to pick up the star static."
"Star static?" the Chief faltered.
"He wouldn't know about that," Pringle said, and I could detect contempt in his voice, even if the Chief didn't.
"Sure he would," Kenzie corrected. "Everybody knows about the fifty or so stars that send out continuous radio signals, and how we've been trying for years to unscramble them."
"Why certainly," the Chief said, so positively I knew he hadn't heard of it before.