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 super-heterodyne 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 super-heterodyne, 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.
