Read Ebook: One of three by Smith George O George Oliver

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Ebook has 1281 lines and 40682 words, and 26 pages

Bronson was truly beat. Had he stopped to think about it he would have known that something big was in the wind. For he was tapping no telephones. He had accidentally discovered some sort of communication receiving principle and had then devised a transmitter.

His first thought on the following morning was to try the receiver. She was there, all right, and so was a hooting cry of the dissonant pipe-organings.

Bronson shrugged and fired up his transmitting gadget. "Miss Carlson!" he called into the microphone. "Calling Miss Carlson of Thirteen forty-seven Vermont Street. Can you hear me?"

Then he listened.

Her voice paused briefly, took a new tone, but was still covered by the whinings.

"Miss Carlson, this is Ed Bronson. I cannot hear you clearly because of much interference. If you can hear me, make a lilting rill with your voice. This I can distinguish among the many stable-toned notes that are coming in at the time."

The voice rilled up and down several times. Then there was considerable speech which Bronson could not understand.

The upshot of this, however, was a gradual shutting down of the hootings and honkings until the receiver was clear. Then her voice came through again.

"Mr. Bronson. I have requested silence for one minute. Where are you?"

"Thirteen forty-eight Vermont Street, Central City Eleven."

"That is across the street," she said.

"Perhaps," he answered.

"Well, it is," she said. "Unless we're in different Central Cities."

"Central City, New Mexico, eighteen miles from Albuquerque?"

"That's it. But we have little time, really, because we didn't get the clear as soon as we asked for it. They hung over a bit--the commercials, I mean."

"Commercials?" he asked. Dumfounded, he began to wonder. Commercial, in radio parlance, meant any transmitter on the air for commercial purpose and the presupposition that this system of communications must be quite well known.

How then had Ed Bronson, an electronics engineer, managed to live through the commercialization of an entirely new field of communications?

"The commercial laboratories," she said.

"Oh? Then this is a laboratory experiment?"

"More than that--"

Bronson heard with dismay the first thin whistle resume.

He interrupted.

"Miss Carlson," he pleaded quickly, "we're going to be cut off again. Meet me on the corner of Vermont and Thirteenth, please?"

"Yes but--"

That was all. The keening, piping howl came with ear-shattering loudness once more.

Bronson turned off his gear and headed for the corner of Vermont and 13th. Let 'em hoot and howl.

He'd speak to the girl in person!

An hour later, Ed Bronson still stood there, leaning disconsolately against a lamp post in the bright daylight. A ring of cigarette butts surrounded his feet.

Whatever it was it was important and he, Bronson, had the key. All he had to do was to find the door!

Bronson returned home. The trouble--one of them, anyway--was that his amplifier was a high fidelity affair, capable of flat transmission of sounds as far as the human ear could hear.

That made for good music and that's what the amplifier had been built for.

So Bronson went home determined to build a series of sharp filters. First he would curtail the band-width of the amplifier until it peaked around eight hundred cycles per second, near the musical note 'A' one octave above the standard Concert Pitch 'A'.

Then he would build a set of sharply-tuned filters that would cut 'holes' in the remaining spectrum where the tonal interferences came. It would make her speech less natural but far more intelligible.

Bronson needed more evidence before he did anything serious about it.

It was nearing five o'clock in the morning before he finished his job, and started to listen once more.

The girl turned from the window, where the bright sky silhouetted her slender figure.

"How do I know where he is?" she snapped.

"Now look, Virginia," objected one of the men in the room, "there's no point in getting angry. We must know."

"I know you must, Peter," she returned. "I agree. But I don't know. Do you understand that? I don't know!"

Peter Moray shrugged. "Anybody capable of building a space resonator must have enough training to have known about it in the first place."

John Cauldron spoke sharply, "You went out to the corner as suggested?"

"I did. He did not appear. After I returned I watched at regular intervals. No one came. Also I listened carefully as you suggested. He hasn't been calling--hasn't called since about eleven o'clock this morning."

Peter Moray smiled. "Yesterday morning," he corrected.

"Don't be funny. You're the ones that have kept me up all night asking fool questions over and over."

"They're not fool questions, Virginia."

"Any question repeated too often becomes a fool question," she replied.

Cauldron spoke heavily. "We're not cross-examining you, Virginia. Please believe that. We ask and ask and ask because it may be that something might have been said that sounds trivial, but may make large sense."

The girl shrugged. "You're entitled to try," she said. She passed a hand across her face wearily. "You've heard and reheard our conversation as verbatim as I recall it. And it was an experience I will not forget easily."

"Agreed," said Moray, walking to the west window and looking out. "I guess we're all overkeyed."

Cauldron grumbled a bit. "There have been a lot of strange things happening," he said. "This isn't the first."

Virginia smiled wanly but it was Cauldron who spoke next after a short pause. "And at five-thirty in the morning, everything begins to get somewhat distorted from a mental standpoint."

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