Penny confirmed the observation and requested to be taken aboard. Although she was not certain of it, she believed that the Eloise III was equipped with a radio telephone which could be used to notify Coast Guards of the floating barge.
Leaving Carl Oaks behind, the girls rowed to the yacht and were helped aboard. Commodore Phillips immediately confirmed that his vessel did have radio-telephone apparatus.
“Come with me,” he directed, leading the girls to the radio room.
The Commodore sat down beside the transmitting apparatus, quickly adjusting a pair of earphones. Snapping on the power switch, he tuned to the wave length of the Coast Guard station. While the girls hovered at his elbow, he talked into the radio telephone, informing the Coast Guard of the floating barge and its position. The message, he explained to Penny and Louise, would be received in “scrambled speech” and automatically transformed into understandable English by means of an electrical device.
“How do you mean?” inquired Louise, deeply puzzled.
“Nearly all ship-to-shore radio telephone conversations are carried on in scrambled speech,” the Commodore replied. “Otherwise, eavesdroppers could tune in on them and learn important facts not intended to be made public.”
“But you spoke ordinary English into the ’phone,” Louise said, still perplexed.
“The speech scrambler is an electric circuit which automatically transposes voice frequencies,” the Commodore resumed. “The words are made unintelligible until unscrambled by a similar device at the receiving station. For instance, if I were to say ‘Mary had a little lamb,’ into this phone, anyone listening in would hear: ‘Noyil hob e ylippey ylond.’ Yet at the receiving post, the message would be unscrambled to its original form.”
“I wish our telephone at home was fixed that way!” Penny declared with a laugh. “Wouldn’t some of the neighbors develop a headache!”
Having been informed that a Coast Guard cutter would proceed at once to the locality, the girls felt relieved of further responsibility. As Commodore Phillips said that he would stand by with his yacht until the cutter reached the scene, they finally decided to return to shore. Once well away from the yacht they raised sail and tacked toward their own dock.