Two Youths Listened in on Interplanetary Radio, and
Strange Was the Disaster That Befell Them

RADIO V-RAYS

By Jan Dirk


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.”

“Oh, that one? Ouch!”

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.

“No body capacity?” he asked.

“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.”

Stan smiled, and put out his hand.

“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!” said Dick, the student.

“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:

“This set is appallingly stupid and simple, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t!” snapped back Stan. “It’s complicated as the devil.”

The fray was on.

“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.”

“All done?” Stan inquired solicitously.

“All done,” said Dick, wonderingly.

“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.”

“I’m listening,” said Dick.

“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.”

Dick was laughing.

“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!”

The door slammed.

                 *       *       *       *       *

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?”

Dick rose and laid the volume carefully on the table.

“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.”

“How come? I’ll bite.”

“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?”

“I would,” from the now sober Stan Ross.

“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.”

Stan protested.

“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.”

Dick Jarvis blushed.

“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?”

“I’m trailing,” said Stan. “Now tell me about the projector.”

“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.

Dick adjusted the first tube.

“Equivalent to inductance,” he muttered. “I tune the set with it.”

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.

Stan looked at his watch.

“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.

The two men looked at each other, their eyes bulging.

“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_!”

Dick stood rigid, then a faint smile touched his lips, as of tension
relieved.

“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.

“Do you feel what I do, or am I going crazy?” Stan asked.

“Yes. It’s true.”

“What does it mean? I can’t understand.”

“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.”

“These voices that do not seem to be real voices--are they from Mars?”

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

All this without a word having been spoken....

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.”

She gestured with her hands.

“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.


[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the March 1925 issue of
Weird Tales magazine.]