“C. Q.”; or, In the Wireless House
it was the one she had on. Hardly; she would n’t be so foolish, with all those “detective-stewardesses” aboard. Still— Suddenly he stopped eating. Out of the utter silence of the aerial sea, a silence as dead as that around the frozen pole, a silence opaque in its density, across, as it seemed, millions of miles and eons of time, came to his waiting ear-drums the faintest pk—pk—pk, like—if it was like anything—the pluck of a kitten’s claw in the nap of a carpet in a room across the hall—the ghost of an inaudible signal, like one from a spirit world.
“CQ—CQ—CQ—ZZ—ZZ—ZZ.”
Poldhu was calling.
“All stations—all stations—all stations!”
Three thousand miles away, a man in his shirt-sleeves, in a shanty on a Cornwall cliff, a man in an eye-shade, smoking a pipe under a green electric bulb, with a pile of yellow sheets on the table in front of him, was pressing a rubber key with his forefinger and breaking a current of electricity that shot across the black waves through the night at 186,000 miles per second—seven and a half times around the world in a single tick of the five-shilling alarm-60
