"Yes. And now," he said, "I think you should all hear this—"
He twisted the dial. There was a moment of howling; then came a voice, clear, crisp, enthusiastic, "—four minutes of playing time remaining, folks, and the Rocketeers have the ball. But it won't do them any good. Even if they do score the result will be the same. They can't overcome that tremendous Wrangler lead, 33-6—"
Thunder and lightning; madness and confusion! The control room became as noisy as a well-populated tomb, and out of the terrible silence came the faint, thin voice of the skipper demanding, "What—what does this mean?"
Biggs boomed pleasantly, "It means, Captain, that you've lost your bets. You'll remember that all our wagers were based on the result of this year's game—which you are now listening to.
"It is unfortunate that human memories are so brief. Otherwise some of you gentlemen might have recognized the astonishing similarity of the broadcast we've just listened to with that of last year's game! Which it was!"
Cap Hanson groaned, "Last year's game! But that's impossible! You couldn't—"
"I couldn't," agreed Biggs pleasantly, "but my new invention could. You see, I discovered in the course of my experiments that uranium has some definite peculiarities. It, being highly radioactive itself, has the strange property of being able to delay, almost indefinitely, the passage of electrical impulses traveling through it.
"Thus, under certain circumstances—in this case, Sparks, the fact that it was activated in the ultra-short wave field—it can be used as a 'time-speech-trap' to recapture sound waves released into the ether long ago.
"When Earth's scientists have further investigated this phenomenon I predict some amazing results. Possibly in the near future we may be able to 'listen' once again to the voices of our ancestors 'way back in the Elizabethan Age, the Machine Age, or the American Business Age. But meanwhile—" He grinned amiably. "Meanwhile, you have just heard a broadcast of last year's Rocketeer-Wrangler football game. This year's is just concluding!"