Nevertheless, my apparatus was at last completed and I was ready for the test. The next day my work was to be inspected by a committee of ant scientists, so with trembling fingers I adjusted the controls and bade Toron speak to me.
The result was—silence!
7
a hunting trip
My radio set was a failure! I could not hear Toron, and he could not hear me. All my labor of four months in the laboratories of Mooni had gone to waste.
Perhaps the Porovian scientists were right, and the earth scientists were wrong, and insects did not communicate by radio waves after all. Yet I was unwilling to give up.
So I begged Toron to talk in as many different ways as he could, and at last was rewarded by a slight squeak in my earphones. Then I myself tried, talking now loud, now soft, now high, now low, until at last, when I yelled at a particularly high pitch, Toron reported that he too had heard. The earth scientists were vindicated! Communication was established!
The sounds had been received and sent at the very shortest wave length within the powers of my apparatus, so I now determined to reduce that wave length still further.
Late into the night I worked frantically; and Toron, catching some of my contagious enthusiasm, worked with me.
At first I experimented with various sizes and shapes of coil antennae, but I was confronted with weak signals of short wave length. Any change in my apparatus which reduced my wave length also reduced my receptivity; and any change which increased my receptivity likewise increased my wave length. So I was between the devil and the deep sea. Finally I tried condenser antennae without plates; two rods. And then we were rewarded by speech, clear, distinct and unmistakable.
We ceased our work, exhausted. But before turning in for the night, Toron taught me how to say in Porovian language the following sentence: “The planet Minos sends to the planet Poros, and informs Poros that Minos was right. Communication between Porovians is electrical.”