Here and Now. John Russell Fearn
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“the storm is moving rapidly in your direction. If you take my advice you’ll quit wasting juice on any experiments tonight.”
Chris grinned, and the colour-image of his good-humoured face and blond hair was transmitted back to the South Coast. “You’re a fine one to talk!” he exclaimed. “Right in the middle of the storm and telling me what to do! Didn’t you ever hear the famous phrase—‘The Show must go On’?”
With that he changed the wavelength and went op a tour of his other friends in various parts of the country. As far as he could judge, the atmospheric conditions were normal further north, but badly disturbed down south, and likely to become more so with the rapid advance of a thundering trough of low-pressure from the Continent. Anything but ideal conditions: this was the conclusion Chris had arrived at by ten o’clock when his tour of his friends was complete.
He sat back in his chair to think. Now he had made the usual contacts and satisfied himself that everything was working as it should be, it was the time to start making his various modifications and testing them. He sat gazing at the instruments and the temporarily-blanked screen—the tuning wavelength not being focused at the moment on any particular transmitting station—when suddenly a crash of thunder that sounded as though all hell had exploded made him jump in sudden alarm. Even the sizzling flash of lightning that came with the thunder crack failed to act as warning, since it was almost simultaneous. Across the television screen there sprayed a huge carrot of discharge, winking away into twinkling stars.
“That,” Chris muttered, getting to his feet, “was some wallop! Wonder how safe I am stuck out here in a field?”
He opened the door and looked outside. He had not realised, with the laboratory lights on, just how dark it had become. In the normal way, ten o’clock on a July night is still almost daylight, but on this occasion it was midnight dark with sheet lightning rippling between the banked-up clouds. The air was dead still and smelled of sulphuric discharge.
“Very nice!” Chris surveyed the malignant sky. “Very nice indeed! I hope you’re satisfied, messing up my arrangements.”
Annoyed, he slammed the door and returned to his equipment. He still did not know whether to carry on or not. Thunderstorms, as such, did not bother him in the least, but he was not so foolhardy that he could sit complacently in the midst of what promised to be a humdinger, in an isolated hut, surrounded by large quantities of apparatus all designed to conduct electricity.
“Home’s best,” he decided, thinking of the tall aerial mast beside the hut. “One real flash onto that and I may take a short circuit to Kingdom Come....”
He got to his feet amidst another smashing concussion of thunder and reached out to switch off his apparatus—then he paused in surprise. Something was forming on the televisor screen, even though a quick glance at the displays assured him he was not tuned to any particular station, ‘ham’ or professional.
Everything else forgotten, he waited for the hazy scum of colours to form into something definite. They ran and flowed into each other like water paints on a sheet of glass, then very gradually, when they were not disturbed by the joltings of transmitted lightning across the screen, they divided and sub-divided into a gathering pattern. There seemed to be the blurred colour outline of a head and shoulders.
His intention of departure clean forgotten, Chris sat down again and operated the focusing controls, but he failed to get the picture any clearer: it seemed that that would have to come of its own accord. And come it did—three thunderclaps later. From the screen there gazed at the astounded Chris a very bewildered and strikingly good-looking girl of about his own age. Motionless in his chair, Chris stared at her, and he assumed his image was as big a surprise to the girl as hers was to him.
“Hello!” he said, smiling, then winced at a truly appalling crash that made the hut shake with the vibration.
There was no response through the linked radio loudspeaker, nor did the girl’s lips move as though she had spoken. Chris frowned, but he did not trouble there and then to investigate the loss of sound: he was too busy assessing the girl’s features.
Her hair was of a rare copper tint and flawlessly coiffured, whilst her face, in general, was heart-shaped with rather high cheekbones. It was by no means a face entirely feminine and nothing more; there was a tremendous strength of character about it and an individuality about the set of the chin. This, with her azurine eyes, perfectly reproduced in the colour screen, presented to Chris the most delectable picture he had ever seen.
Then, suddenly, he remembered he was a scientist—or trying to be—and not just a student of feminine beauty.
“Can’t you hear me?” he asked in surprise, fiddling with the sound controls until he was certain his voice must be transmitted.
The girl gazed back at him, and it seemed to him that she was watching his lips move and thereby judging that he was talking. She said something back, but the loudspeaker remained dead. Chris frowned, thoroughly exasperated. Here was the most friendly, pretty girl he had ever contacted and he could not even speak to her! It was beyond all reason.
He turned away abruptly and picked up a scratchpad. Upon it he swiftly wrote: ‘I AM STATION MKB, LONDON ENVIRON. WHO ARE YOU?’ Then he held it up for the girl to read. To his surprise she only shook her head in bewilderment.
“Okay, so you’re European,” Chris sighed. “Couldn’t be anywhere else with the range of this instrument….”
He signalled as well as he could for her to also write down a message, and she seemed to grasp what was meant. She turned away from the screen and Chris looked intently at the background that had become revealed now that she had moved away. Most of it was out of focus, the transmitting lens evidently being fixed for her closeness, but what he could see of it there were curiously-patterned walls, apparently watermarked in a ripple fashion, and heavy-ribbed pillars of either stone or metal. Certainly not the kind of background one would expect to find for a ‘ham’ television fiend.
Chris waited. He could just see the girl’s rounded elbow in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen as she evidently wrote something beyond his vision—then abruptly he was dazzled by a blinding flash of lightning which seemed to fill the laboratory with purple fire. Simultaneously the thunder crashed down and made the instruments rattle.
Normally, Chris would probably have been scared by this peak outburst of the storm, but as it happened he had a different worry on his mind. The girl had vanished and the screen was totally blank and grey!
Muttering to himself, Chris operated the controls at desperate speed, but all his efforts failed. He simply could not re-establish communication. At last he relaxed, listening to the rumbling of the thunder and the drumming of rain on the galvanised roof. He got to his feet at length, dragged the door open, then stumbled back a little before the deluge of rain and screaming wind that met him.
Bending against it he staggered outside and waited for a flash of lightning. One came, less intense than the previous ones, and by its transient lavender glare he saw that his tall experimental aerial mast had been wrecked, its slender girders hanging down forlornly and the delicate, specially devised antennae twisted into so much wreckage.
“Why tonight of all nights?” he demanded fiercely, and strode back into the laboratory. With savage movements he switched off the equipment and then reached for his jacket. There was just nothing more he could do tonight with the aerial shattered. The only hope was that he could re-establish contact the following evening.
So on the next evening he was back again—around seven o’clock this time, it being one of his early nights away from his normal work. This time the weather was calm and summery again, which gave him the needed opportunity to re-erect the aerial mast and painstakingly rewire the antennae. It took him two hours all told, then he was ready once again to try and establish the contact of the previous evening.
Only it was not quite so simple as that. He had for the moment forgotten that the reception had been no ordinary one. He had not been tuned to any particular station, cither amateur or professional, and yet he had received the vision without the sound.