Radio V-rays

Dick Jarvis and Stan Ross, two young engineering students, lay sprawled in more or less comfortable positions in Dick’s room at college. Stan was tall, tanned, and curly-headed. Dick wore the horn-rimmed glasses, mussed hair and preoccupied look of the habitual student. Yet these two, normally of the two extreme types which avoid each other all through college, had been drawn together in the bonds of true friendship by one thing—radio.

On a long shelf which ran along one side of the room, beneath a window through which projected a lead-in insulator, lay a beautiful superheterodyne receiver. Dick’s father had been liberal with both his verbal and monetary encouragement, and Dick and his friend Stan Ross had built the gleaming mahogany leviathan of the radio-receiving world as a gift for him in token of their appreciation. Stan was talking, in his easy, carefree voice:

“Well, old kid, there’s a DX half-hour starting in three minutes. Unwrap yourself from that soft chair and turn the expense into those little 199’s.”

Dick grinned his acquiescence as he rose and went to the set. “Which aerial shall we use?” he inquired.

“Oh, the outdoor one, I guess. Try it first, anyway, and then we can change to one of the loops if it’s too loud. I’ve never seen that funny one on the end of the bench, before—I’d like to try it.”

Dick was trying to free himself from the grip of a refractory pair of head-phones that had taken a vicious hold upon one ear and a lock of hair.

“That cone-shaped loop is a highly directional affair I built so as to get away from this heavy traffic on San Francisco bay.”

He snapped over a filament-controlling toggle switch set into the long bench, and the beautiful set became instantly alive, transformed from a mechanically perfect but inanimate instrument of wood and wire to a living, glowing thing—a Twentieth Century horn of plenty, taking in at one end invisible and inaudible frequencies of electricity and releasing them as man-controlled music and speech.

Stan Ross plugged in his pair of phones and watched his friend, who was crouched before the superheterodyne, seeking by his trained manipulation of the dials to follow up the faint whistles which the set was pouring into his ears. Three stations four hundred miles to the south in Los Angeles roared in, one after the other, with an intensity sufficient to rattle the sensitive diaphragms of the head-sets. Dick slid his pair forward from his ears, but Stan, a veteran of the days when he and his fellow amateurs had sat long hours into the night with each others’ one kilowatt spark stations tearing into their heads from three-step audio amplifiers, only smiled.

“Pretty good, Dick,” he shouted. “Those stations down south are all piled together on almost the same wave. I didn’t think even the ‘het’ would separate ’em.”

“Sh-h-h!” cautioned Dick. “There’s the Calgary station away up north in Canada. I’m going to try the new loop, now—wait a minute.”

He removed his head-set and turned his attention to the egg-shaped affair previously referred to by Stan, connecting it in place of the outdoor antenna. The affair, Stan noticed, was shaped like half an egg, and rotated on a vertical axis at right angles to the normal horizontal line of an egg. Wire was wound on the parabolic wooden frame in such a fashion that the focus of the electrical parabola thus formed was fixed upon a point far out in space, in whatever direction the horizontal axis of the affair might be pointed.

Dick turned back to the set, now much quieter, and motioned for Stan to turn the loop, slowly. Stan stretched a tentative hand toward the handle on top of the parabola, expecting a fearful shriek in the phones. Nothing of the sort occurred—he gave a slight whistle of amazement.

“Nope,” came the reply; “new kink in shielding I worked out.” Then as Stan stooped and peered into the frame, a puzzled look on his face: “No need of looking for metallic shields, because there aren’t any. Just something I happened to stumble on: reducing everything as much as possible to ground potential.”

“I’ll have to hand it to you, old kid,” he said. “I can supply the practical experience, but you certainly were born with all the brains and genius for both of us.”

He began turning the loop slowly, pausing whenever Dick signified for him to do so, and in such a manner that the focus of the parabola moved in a great circle from the south to the east—counter-clockwise, in other words. First a small station in New Mexico, then El Paso, and finally Chicago and New York swung in, loud enough to be just comfortable in the telephones.

The two young men smiled into each other’s eyes, contentedly, experiencing the joy of a dream come true and appreciating the beautiful creation on the work bench as only one can appreciate modern wireless telegraphy who has followed the art from its coherer stage. Dick snapped off the tubes, and the two removed their head-sets.

“Some set!” agreed Stan, the good fellow, sensing the coming of one of the friendly arguments, more or less one-sided, which they frequently indulged in. Sure enough, Dick frowned at him (his method of collecting his thoughts) and began:

“Of course you would disagree,” said Dick. “I’d like you less if you failed to. But honestly, now—you understand the principles on which the set works, you know how all the parts are put together, and you know how to operate it efficiently. On the whole, won’t you have to admit that this seven-tube set seemed far less complicated to you than did the first crystal set you ever made when you were new to the game?”

“Well, yes, I guess I will,” admitted Stan. “As usual, I’m cornered. But just what are you driving at?”

“I’ll come to that in a minute. Now, think of the thousands of people in this country who use radio receiving sets. They can tune them, after a fashion; they hear over long distances, mostly because of luck, and so they think themselves scientific research workers, and speak of their sets, which really do all the work, contemptuously—patronizingly. Yet those same sets, even if they have built them themselves (which is not usually the case) are really miracles to them, if they would only admit it.”

“Right. Now listen to this and then unravel it, little logic. It’s gospel truth, and I’ve always wanted an explanation of it—but I never thought I’d meet anyone who would admit everything to be so simple as you do, so I’ve always kept it under my hat.”

“Before I came to college I had an amateur station in Los Angeles—big spark transmitter and all that. One winter I was listening in at about 1 o’clock in the morning. The stations up here around San Francisco that had been booming in an hour before had all seemed to shut down together, almost as if something had suddenly smothered them, if you get what I mean. The Los Angeles fellows, I suppose, thought that the northern fellows were having some sort of local interference, so they, too, shut down, one by one. 5ZA had been working his spark, down in New Mexico, but he seemed to fade out at about the same time the San Francisco stations did.

“It was odd to hear the air so quiet. I tuned all up and down the scale, hoping for some eastern DX, although it was rather late, but there was not a station on the air. Thinking that perhaps my receiver was not working as it should, I started the rotary gap and drawled out a long CQ on full power, but none of the locals came back to ‘bawl me out’—I was alone on the air. It was eery; I felt as if I were the last inhabitant of a dead world, and the night outside—a sixty mile gale of ice-cold north wind had sprang up from nowhere—didn’t help to lessen the uncomfortable illusion. Suddenly, on about five hundred meters (I remember the setting of those dials as well as if I had them here in my hands now) I heard a low hum, and eight long dashes pealed out, one after the other, each of them one tone higher than the preceding one. The octave in the key of C!

“I admit that I jumped—cold sweat broke out on my forehead, but I glued my fingers to those variometer dials. About a minute later I heard it again—do, re, mi, and on up. It sounded at first like eight rotary gaps tuned to a musical scale, except that the tones were much smoother, almost bell-like, in fact.”

“And you ask me to explain a thing like that after I’ve been talking of miracles?” he scoffed. “Why, it’s childishly simple. Some local fellow was playing a fool trick with eight rotary gaps adjusted to the key of C, or else someone was pioneering with a modulated CW—a broadcasting set.”

“Yeah, Sherlock? Well, I thought of that, too—I’m not as dumb as I look.”

Stan had risen to go. When he was safely outside the door, a position calculated to make his parting shot highly dramatic, he turned and shot back, “Right in the middle of that little performance the light in my radio room went out, and I learned the next day that the power had been off all over the city!”

Weeks passed. Stan, busy with athletics and activities, did not have time to call at his friend’s house for more than a month, and when finally he did, it was only upon receipt of an urgent telephone message. He burst into Dick’s room to find that worthy lying on the floor with his nose deep in an immense volume.

“Oh, Lord! False alarm,” he groaned. “I thought you had electrocuted yourself, or something. What’s the matter?—and what the dickens are you reading?”

“A treatise on X-rays,” he said; “and as for your other questions, nothing is the matter and I haven’t electrocuted myself. I just wanted you to come over and see what you have been responsible for. Look!”

He stepped to the neat work bench and withdrew the black covering cloth from a bulky cabinet.

“If I’m the father of that,” snorted Stan, “I ought to be ashamed of myself. Why, it’s out of date, obsolete—no one builds cabinets three feet high any more. What in heck is it, anyway?”

“It,” said Dick, “is, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted”—he coughed, with a dignified air—“something for which you, only you, and no one but you, are responsible.”

“It’s a long story, Stan. You probably remember the trick story that you told me a few weeks ago, at the end of which you left abruptly, so that I might not, with the powers of pure logic, destroy what you seemed to believe a miracle?”

“I remember, all right, only I didn’t say it was a miracle, and the story was not a trick story—I told you it was gospel truth, and I wasn’t kidding.”

“Uh-huh,” agreed Dick. “Well, be that as it may, your dramatic exit left me with an unsolved puzzle in my head, as you no doubt intended that it should, and knowing me as you do, old egg-beater, you certainly must know what the result of such a condition upon me would naturally be.”

“My gawsh!” Stan exclaimed; “you don’t mean to say you’ve doped out about those musical notes, do you? If you have, I’ll surely hand it to—”

“In that case, I’m sorry to confess that I haven’t. But look in the cabinet.”

Stan looked. He was too used to Dick’s queer contrivances to evince surprize; rather he took a careful inventory of what he saw, so that when he turned again to his friend he had a pretty good idea of the contents of the cabinet. He looked up and began enumerating from memory: “Down in a lower compartment there seems to be an orthodox receiving set with eight oversize tubes. All the wiring is oversize, too, and so are the transformers. Up above the set there are a lot of little control appliances, evidently of your own invention, and the biggest X-ray tube I’ve ever seen, with some sort of a focusing device pointed down into the lower compartment. That’s all. What do you think of little Watson’s powers of observation, Sherlock?”

“You will insist upon attempting to be humorous, won’t you?” rebuked Dick, smiling nevertheless. “Seriously, though, Stan, this is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, and it may mean more to the world than any other radio experimentation has meant so far. Would you like an idea of what it all means before we start work?”

“Well, when you left that night I began turning things over and over in my mind. You quite evidently did not think those eight notes were the result of any human agency, and the idea, though preposterous, fascinated me. Where could such a phenomenon originate, I asked myself, if it had not been the prank of some schoolboy? I thought of the millions of other heavenly bodies in the plane of the Galaxy, many of them thousands of times the size of our Earth, and some undoubtedly inhabited. I thought of Mars, though I knew that there was no more reason to believe it inhabited than any other planet, except that it had been seized upon by the popular fancy because of its proximity to the orbit of the Earth and because of its so-called canals. It was while I was thinking of Mars, however, that my train of thought shot off at a new tangent.”

Dick Jarvis paused, utterly forgetful of his friend’s presence. His eyes shone queerly. As Ross prompted him he began again:

“Why hadn’t we been able to communicate with any of the other planets? Were they so far ahead of us in their development that they had forgotten how to make our foolishly elementary kinds of receiving sets? Was it a mere question of wave lengths? Of distance? Or had our system of radio reception perhaps developed along entirely different lines than theirs? Had they used some principle entirely foreign to the electron theory in their radio work—say some unknown projector ray or light repulsion of the sort which makes the tail of a comet point always away from the sun? It seemed possible, even probable. Then I asked myself what medium of language an exterior planet would use in an attempt at communication, and two things immediately suggested themselves: geometry and music! That latter made me think of you again, so because it was the last thing in my train of thought—you were the last thing, I mean—I decided to call you responsible for the whole works—the receiving set on the bench, which is what you want to hear about, of course. I ought to be ashamed of myself for boring you.”

“Dick,” he said, rising and grasping his friend by the hand, “I don’t know whether you know it or not, but you’re a genius. I’m proud to know you.”

“Thanks, Stan,” he said, quietly, and rushed into a hurried discussion of the invention that rested before him, in an attempt to cover his embarrassment. A rare thing, indeed, when in college an athlete deigns to give such praise to one of those who are considered miserable “grinds”, though it is indeed true that the grinds usually end up by doing more for the world. All the more credit, then, to that great connecting link of modern America, the radio, which makes all men kin.

“You see, Stanley,” Dick continued, “that idea of Martian ray propulsion sort of got me, and I kept asking myself if we didn’t have something similar to it here on Earth. There seemed to be something in the back of my head which said we did—a sort of mind-picture of just what I was seeking, yet although I was on the verge of it several times I couldn’t seem to quite visualize the thing. Finally I woke up one night with the answer, and the name of the thing on my lips—it was a common X-ray tube. I got up out of bed and started work, and for a month, steadily, I’ve worked every available minute that I could spare from my studies.”

“But—” Stan broke in, impulsively, “why didn’t you let me help you? I would have been only too glad—”

“I know you would have been, Stan. You’re good about those things. But you will have done more than your share if this thing works, tonight, by just having been here. I may need you for a witness, some day. Now, where was I? Oh, yes—the ray.

“Of course an X-ray tube operates in accordance with the electron theory, but it shoots the electrons off—it doesn’t throw them out as an electromagnetic field of force, which is probably the fashion in which our earthly radio waves are propagated. In other words, although I was still using the electrons in my work, I had an entirely new type of receiving set, and one which, although it might not actually hear messages from another planet, would perhaps be the stepping stone on which some future inventor might build success. So I started.

“In the cabinet on the bench there are, as you noticed, two divisions. One contains an oversize receiving set, with some appliances of my own attached to it, and the other the ray projecting and focusing device. The whole thing is wired with copper tubing, for the simple reason that in my earlier experiments the current developed was sufficient to fuse ordinary wire. The tubes are about the size of fifty watt transmitting tubes, and vary in construction, the one directly beneath the projector, which corresponds to the detector, having five electrodes made of radium-coated quartz. I am not sure that I could explain all of the action, but the radium seems to give off some new emanation that I have never seen before, under the stimulus of the rays from the projector. Do you follow me?”

“The projector? It’s just an unusually large tube similar to an X-ray tube, which I have constructed to withstand extremely high voltages. It produces a tremendous flow of force, which I have named the V-Ray, and which by means of the leaden shield I can direct upon any portion of the net below. Now I believe that with the ray forcing a stream of electrons, or perhaps it would be more correct to say energy, into the tubes, the set will be sensitive to radio waves of a type unknown here on Earth. What the results will be, I do not know. I have never tried the set in its completed form before tonight—I’m just playing a hunch. Ready to go?”

Stan Ross signified his assent, and the two approached the monster on the long work bench. Stan felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. Dick attached to the input terminal of the set a long outdoor antenna, which, including the inductances which it contained every fifty feet, contained more than five miles of wire. There were no filaments in the tubes, hence the only batteries needed were some high-voltage blocks, some five hundred volts, altogether. At the extreme right of the panel were two output terminals, across which Dick had temporarily hooked a milliammeter, not knowing whether the output of the set would be auditory, visual, or what. He turned the 110 volts of the lighting system into the step-up transformer connected to the projector tube; the lights blinked, dimmed, and the huge V-Ray tube came to life, glowing greenly. The hum from the transformer seemed to drone a warning, in its ominous sixty-cycle growl—occasionally its safety gap broke down and a viciously snapping tongue of violet flame crashed between the terminals and added its weird glare to the green glow that filled the room.

Dick, looking monstrous in heavy leaden surplice, goggles and gloves, grasped the projector controls and swept the tubes below with the ray. Peering over his shoulder Stan watched the vacuum tubes begin to glow as the V-rays bombarded, with billions of electrons, their radium-coated elements. First a point at the base of each tube became incandescent, grew, and finally resolved itself into a ruddy ball of fire and rolled to the top of the plates, where it exploded and spread over the quartz surfaces as an opal luminescence, turning them into swirling blazes of color— lavender, gold, red. Stan drew back, dizzied and half-hypnotized by the swirling spectra. The tubes seemed alive. Alive! The word drummed through his befogged brain.

The milliammeter quivered slightly, responding to atmospherics, presumably, for there were no stations operating at the time on the wave length to which the set was tuned.

“In one minute,” he said, “the largest broadcasting station in San Francisco will come on.”

The room became deathly quiet save for the hum of the transformer and the ticking of the watch which Stan held in his hand, as the seconds marched their way into eternity. Then—a spurt of flame, and the milliammeter fell to the floor, not alone burned out, but burned almost in half.

The two men stared at each other through their leaden goggles. Stan groped for the telephone on the bench and rang up the broadcasting station.

“Hello, hello,” the voice at the other end of the wire answered excitedly, before he had a chance to speak. “The first of a hundred ’phone calls to ask why we’re late? No program tonight—all our tubes blew out at once—generator, too—almost as if something suddenly doubled the load on ’em....”

The voice ceased as the connection clicked off. Two other broadcasting stations came on simultaneously, as the loud-speaker attached to the set which Dick had placed in operation testified. He looked up to receive Stan’s news and, little surprized, turned again to the tuning tube of the V-ray receiver, quickly tuning to the wave-length of the two stations now on the air, while Stan, aware at last of what he was doing, placed a heavy ammeter across the output terminals. The needle on the ammeter dial hesitated for the smallest fraction of a second, then jumped to its maximum position. An instant later the instrument fell to the floor, a smoking ruin.

“No need to telephone those stations,” Dick said, his voice shaking. “They’ll be burned out, too.”

“And we’re doing it!” whispered Stan. “My God, Dick!—the man said it was as though someone suddenly doubled the load on their generators. That means wireless transmission of power!”

“And now,” he announced, “we’ll go up to a wave-length of one million meters and see what happens to a set of head-phones.”

Turning to the set he worked busily for some minutes, adjusting various devices and concentrating the projector ray upon the detector tube directly below it. Stan, too excited now to think of electrocution, stripped off the clumsy gloves and with his bare hands connected two pairs of receivers to the terminals where the two meters had been. With something very like a prayer they placed the telephones over their ears, and Dick adjusted controls until a low, musical hum became audible.

Suddenly it seemed to Stan as if thousands of conversations were taking place inside his head. He heard no voices, yet within his brain he was aware of the coming and going of myriad thoughts and ideas not his own. He turned to Dick and started to speak, then realized that it was unnecessary. Dick’s mind and his were in perfect tune; they could read each others’ thoughts.

“It means that we are listening in on interplanetary thought transmissions. I believed that other heavenly bodies conversed by means of geometry or music. I was wrong. I should have known that they would be far enough advanced to use telepathy—radio telepathy.”

“Probably they are. Mars is closest to us in the solar system. The Music of the Spheres!”

As the two men listened it seemed that they were actually hearing voices, that the thoughts which the set was pouring into their heads were human voices whispering into their ears. There were conversations of all sorts: plans, plots, love confidences—all that one would expect to hear if he cut in on all the telephone conversations taking place at one time in a big city. For each change of a hundredth part of a wave-length which Dick made with the dials a new flood poured in: discussions of inventions unknown to Earthmen, which might advance them a hundred thousand years—secrets which would revolutionize Earth’s every art. And all within the power of two men to disclose!

Of a sudden, growing gradually louder and louder and louder until it dominated all the minor whispers, rose one voice above the others, in the booming tones of a leader of his kind. “Aie! Aie! This is Marlars, chief and war lord over this red planet, which is the lord of all the red planets. I tell of the council to be held even now upon this, the lord of red planets—the council which, according to the legends of our people, has always been held after each hundredth occurrence of the vernal equinox of that small place called Earth by its inhabitants. Press your thought cones to your foreheads in the customary manner, and stay unmoved for one space of time, when I will call you to me. For I am Marlars, lord of this red planet which is the lord of all the red planets.”

Dick Jarvis and Stan Ross removed their head-phones and placed them against their foreheads as if mesmerized, and obeying the commands of a stronger will. The hum of the big transformer rose till it became a whine—or was it a shrieking wail? The head-phones, which seemed to be burning into their foreheads, seemed to be changing shape in their very hands. The two felt a tremendous force exerting itself on them—pulling —pulling....

A week or so later Mrs. Sharpe, the landlady of the house in which Dick Jarvis had lived, was terrifiedly answering the questions of two detectives, one sent from the local police station, another from Dick’s father.

“S’help me,” she was entreating, “that’s the truth and nothin’ else. I come upstairs, just like what I said, to make the beds, and found a big black box on the table the boys had built beneath the window, with some big lamps inside, a-burnin’ and a-snappin’. One of ’em were so big.”

“I turned off the ’lectricity—the boys was always runnin’ up big ’lectricity bills on me—but when they didn’t come back, and didn’t come back, I begun to get scared and fiery mad at ’em at the same time, what with the window busted, and all. I figured they had most likely skipped out to beat me out of the rent, but at the same time I was scared somethin’ had happened to ’em. I sold all their stuff to the junkman before Mr. Jarvis got here to claim it, but I’m within my rights, an’ I know it. I don’t know no more, s’help me.”

The two detectives walked together, very slowly, to report. It was a strange case.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RADIO V-RAYS ***

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