The Second Science Fiction MEGAPACK®. Robert Silverberg
down the studio, huh? There ought to be some excitement.”
* * * *
April 5, 1977; that was the night the waveries came.
It had started like an ordinary evening. It wasn’t one, now. George and Maisie waited for a cab, but none came, so they took the subway instead. Oh yes, the subways were still running in those days. It took them within a block of the MID Network Building.
The building was a madhouse. George, grinning, strolled through the lobby with Maisie on his arm, took the elevator to the fifth floor and, for no reason at all, gave the elevator boy a dollar. He’d never before in his life tipped an elevator operator.
The boy thanked him.
“Better stay away from the big shots, Mr. Bailey,” he said. “They’re ready to chew the ears off anybody who even looks at ’em.”
“Wonderful,” said George.
From the elevator he headed straight for the office of J. R. McGee himself. There were strident voices behind the glass door. George reached for the knob and Maisie tried to stop him.
“But George,” she whispered, “you’ll be fired!”
“There comes a time,” said George. “Stand back away from the door, honey.”
Gently but firmly he moved her to a safe position.
“But George, what are you—?”
“Watch,” he said.
The frantic voices stopped as he opened the door a foot. All eyes turned toward him as he stuck his head around the corner of the doorway into the room.
“Dit-dit-dit,” he said. “Dit-dit-dit.”
He ducked back and to the side just in time to escape the flying glass as a paperweight and an inkwell came through the pane of the door. He grabbed Maisie and ran for the stairs.
“Now we get a drink,” he told her.
* * * *
The bar across the street from the network building was crowded, but it was a strangely silent crowd. In deference to the fact that most of its customers were radio people, it didn’t have a TV set, but there was a big cabinet radio and most of the people were bunched around it.
“Dit,” said the radio. “Dit-dah-d’dah-dit-danditdah dit—”
“Isn’t it beautiful?” George whispered to Maisie.
Somebody fiddled with the dial.
A man asked, “What band is that?” and somebody said, “Police.”
Another man said, “Try the foreign band,” and somebody did.
“This ought to be Buenos Aires,” the first man said.
“Dit-d’dah-dit—” said the radio.
The second man ran fingers through his hair and said, “Shut that damn thing off.”
The first man did so. The third man turned it back on.
George grinned and led the way to a back booth where he’d spotted Pete Mulvaney sitting alone with a bottle in front of him. He and Maisie sat across from Pete.
“Hello,” he said gravely.
“Hell,” said Pete, who was head of the technical research staff of MID.
“A beautiful night, Mulvaney,” George said. “Did you see the moon riding the fleecy clouds like a golden galleon tossed upon silver-crested whitecaps in a stormy—”
“Shut up,” said Pete. “I’m thinking.”
“Whisky sours,” George told the waiter. He turned back to the man across the table. “Think out loud, so we can hear. But first, how did you escape the booby hatch across the street?”
“I’m bounced, fired, discharged.”
“Shake hands. And then explain. Did you say dit-dit-dit to them?”
Pete looked at him with sudden admiration. “Did you?”
“I’ve a witness. What did you do?”
“Told ’em what I thought it was, and they think I’m crazy.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” said George. “Then we want to hear—” He snapped his fingers. “What about TV?”
“Same thing. Same sound on audio, and the pictures flicker and dim with every dot or dash. Just a blur by now.”
“Wonderful. And now tell me what’s wrong. I don’t care what it is, as long as it’s nothing trivial, but I want to know.”
“I think it’s space. Space is warped.”
“Good old space,” George Bailey said.
“George,” said Maisie, “please shut up. I want to hear this.”
“Space,” said Pete, “is also finite.” He poured himself another drink. “You go far enough in any direction and get back where you started. Like an ant crawling around an apple.”
“Make it an orange,” George said.
“All right, an orange. Now suppose the first radio waves ever sent out have just made the round trip. In seventy-six years.”
“Seventy-six years? But I thought radio waves traveled at nearly the same speed as light. If that’s right, then in seventy-six years they could go only seventy-six light-years, and that can’t be around the universe because there are galaxies known to be millions or maybe billions of light-years away. I don’t remember the figures, Pete, but our own galaxy alone is a hell of a lot bigger than seventy-six light-years.”
Pete Mulvaney sighed. “That’s why I say space must be warped. There’s a short-cut somewhere.”
“That short a short-cut? Couldn’t be.”
“But George, listen to that stuff that’s coming in. Can you read code?”
“Not any more. Not that fast, anyway.”
“Well, I can,” Pete said. “That’s early American ham. Lingo and all. That’s the kind of stuff the air was full of before regular broadcasting. It’s the lingo, the abbreviations, the barnyard to attic chitchat of amateurs with keys, with Marconi coherers or Fessenden barreters—and you can listen for a violin solo pretty soon now. I’ll tell you what it’ll be.”
“What?”
“Handel’s Largo. The first phonograph record ever broadcast. Sent out by Fessenden from Brant Rock in late 1906. You’ll hear his CQ-CQ any minute now. Bet you a drink.”
“Okay, but what was the dit-dit-dit that started this?”
Mulvaney grinned. “Marconi, George. What was the most powerful signal ever broadcast and by whom and when?”
“Marconi? Dit-dit-dit? Seventy-six years ago?”
“Head of the class. The first transatlantic signal on December 12, 1901. For three hours, Marconi’s big station at Poldhu, with two-hundred-foot masts, sent out an intermittent S, dit-dit-dit, while Marconi and two assistants at St. Johns in Newfoundland got a kite-born aerial four hundred feet in the air and finally got the signal. Across the Atlantic, George, with sparks jumping from the big Leyden jars at Poldhu and 20,000-volt juice jumping off the tremendous aerials—”
“Wait a minute, Pete, you’re off the beam. If that was in 1901 and the first broadcast was about 1906 it’ll be five years before the Fessenden stuff gets here on the same route. Even if there’s a seventy-six light-year short-cut across space and even if those signals didn’t get so weak en route that we couldn’t hear them—it’s crazy.”