It was some moments before my amazement permitted me to respond to this extraordinary salutation, then—my mind still too bewildered properly to grasp the situation—I mumbled something in English about my great astonishment at hearing a language of Earth spoken from a distant world.
The sound of my voice seemed to cause the Martian some surprise, but immediately his voice issued again in clear tones from the instrument.
"I greeted you in what I supposed was your native tongue," he said in perfect English. "Although now we have but one composite language here, over a thousand years ago we spoke in many languages, as the people of your planet do at the present time.
"For more than six hundred years we have been able to observe the progress of your planet," he went on, "through an instrument by which light-waves are projected and received, and have found it to be identical with ours of almost fifteen hundred years ago. By the placards in the streets of your cities and towns, we discovered that you also spoke in many tongues, and although the progress was necessarily slow, our astronomers were, by this means, able to learn the principal languages of Earth.
"Anxiously we have watched and waited for the discovery of an instrument that would respond to our projected light-waves and reveal to you the inhabitants of your neighboring planet. At last this momentous time has arrived. I congratulate you upon bringing it about."
As he spoke, his voice, coming from the diaphragm of my instrument, sounded as distinct as if he were in the room, and his image, depicted life-size, made it hard to believe that he was more than a few feet away. That my informant was, in reality, millions of miles away, my mind absolutely refused to grasp.
A thousand questions to put to my Martian acquaintance rushed into my mind, but alas, in supposing that I could not come in contact with Mars on account of cloud obscurity, I had lost much of the precious time, and now the waning light on my instrument warned me that the planet would, in a few moments, pass out of range. We therefore hastily bade each other adieu, promising to continue our conversation on the morrow, as though we had parted at a street corner. The light now faded completely, and the instrument, that a few moments previously had been animated with such an exuberance of life and mystery, now stood before me wrapped in profound darkness and silence.
How impossible, how inconceivable it all seemed! How the outside world would scoff if I attempted to explain or publish my discovery! I felt that the time had not yet come to take anyone into my confidence, and I determined still to keep all a secret. I was then unaware, however, that the more I learned of Mars and its people the more closely I would guard my knowledge.
Pacing excitedly up and down my laboratory, I spent most of the night in reviewing what I had heard, and speculating the rare knowledge that the morrow would bring. The secrets of another world would be unfolded to me, and the scientific achievements of a people over a thousand years in advance of us would be mine. What glorious possibilities this disclosed! What a brilliant future as a scientist such knowledge would assure me! And in the exuberance of my spirits I little thought that the possession of this knowledge would come to mean naught to me; for I had yet to learn that man cannot share the riches of another world without also becoming a partner in its sorrows and its passions.