All this time, behind them, the bell had kept up its insistent tocsin. With a quick movement Jack “threw” a “knife-blade” switch. Instantly the resonant drone of a dynamo filled the small sun-heated shack. Bending forward. Jack depressed the sending key.
Flash! C-r-a-s-h!
A wriggling snake of blue flame leaped, like a live thing, between the polished sparking points.
Alternately pressing and releasing his key. Jack sent an answer to the message. With nimble fingers he directed the powerful electric impulses, which were winging into space from the lofty aerials stretched between their masts above the shed.
While he did this with one hand, with the other he deftly adjusted the bright metal head band with its twin receivers that fitted over each ear. This accomplished, he drew toward him a pencil and a pad of paper.
“L-I! L-I! L-I!”
Crackling and squealing the powerful spark volleyed across the gap, and rushing into the aerials went flashing hundreds of miles through the ether.
Then came a pause. Tom, his hand on Jack’s shoulder, leaned eagerly forward and over him, watching for the first words of the message from space to be written on the pad.
All at once Jack began to write. His fingers flew fast in response to the flood of dots and dashes that came beating against his ear drums, transmitted by the sensitive diaphragms of the receivers.
To an untrained ear the soft tappings would have sounded as vague and undefined as the footsteps of a fly on a sheet of sensitive matter. But to Jack, the whisperings winging their way in three hundred meter waves through space were as clear as a story read aloud.