It was my friend of the Harvard math faculty, the man who had analyzed the measurements of the streamline projectile in which Myles Cabot had shot to earth the account of the first part of his adventures on Venus. Some further adventures Myles had told me in person during his stay on my farm.
“Professor Hammond thinks that he is getting Mars on the air,” the voice continued.
“Yes,” I replied. “I judged as much from what I read in this morning’s paper. But what do you think?”
Kellogg’s reply gave my sluggish mind the second jolt which it had received that day.
“Well,” he said, “in view of the fact that I am one of the few people among your readers who take your radio stories seriously, I think that Hammond is getting Venus. Can you run up here and help me try and convince him?”
And so it was that I took the early boat next morning for Boston, and had lunch with the two professors.
As a result of our conference, a small committee of engineers returned with me to Edgartown that evening for the purpose of trying to repair the wrecked radio set which Myles Cabot had left on my farm.
They utterly failed to comprehend the matter-transmitting apparatus, and so—after the fallen tower had been reerected and the rubbish cleared away—they had devoted their attention to the restoration of the conversational part of the set.
To make a long story short, we finally restored it, with the aid of some old blue prints of Cabot’s which Mrs. Farley, like Swiss Family Robinson’s wife, produced from somewhere. I was the first to try the earphones, and was rewarded by a faint “bzt-bzt” like the song of a north woods blackfly.
In conventional radioese, I repeated the sounds to the Harvard group: