The Waveries Read online

  The Waveries

  Fredric Brown

  Energy beings from outer space invaded Earth’s atmosphere making electricity and radio impossible. Is it humanity’s bane or blessing?

  The Waveries

  by Fredric Brown

  Definitions from the school-abridged Webster-Hamlin Dictionary 1998 edition:

  wavery (WA-ver-i) n. a vader (slang)

  vader (VA-der) n. inorgan of the class Radio

  inorgan (in-OR-gan) n. noncorporeal ens, vader

  radio (RA-di-o) n. 1. class of inorgans 2. etheric frequency between light and electricity 3. (obsolete) method of communication used up to 1977

  The opening guns of invasion were not at all loud, although they were heard by millions of people. George Bailey was one of the millions. I choose George Bailey because he was the only one who came within a googol of light-years of guessing what they were.

  George Bailey was drunk and under the circumstances one can’t blame him for being so. He was listening to radio advertisements of the most nauseous kind. Not because he wanted to listen to them, I hardly need say, but because he’d been told to listen to them by his boss, J. R. McGee of the MID network.

  George Bailey wrote advertising for the radio. The only thing he hated worse than advertising was radio. And here on his own time he was listening to fulsome and disgusting commercials on a rival network.

  “Bailey,” J. R. McGee had said, “you should be more familiar with what others are doing. Particularly, you should be informed about those of our own accounts who use several networks. I strongly suggest…”

  One doesn’t quarrel with an employer’s strong suggestions and keep a five hundred dollar a week job.

  But one can drink whisky sours while listening. George Bailey did.

  Also, between commercials, he was playing gin rummy with Maisie Hetterman, a cute little redheaded typist from the studio. It was Maisie’s apartment and Maisie’s radio (George himself, on principle, owned neither a radio nor a TV set) but George had brought the liquor.

  “—only the very finest tobaccos,” said the radio, “go dit-dit-dit nation’s favorite cigarette—”

  George glanced at the radio. “Marconi,” he said.

  He meant Morse, naturally, but the whisky sours had muddled him a bit so his first guess was more nearly right than anyone else’s. It was Marconi, in a way. In a very peculiar way.

  “Marconi?” asked Maisie.

  George, who hated to talk against a radio, leaned over and switched it off.

  “I meant Morse,” he said. “Morse, as in Boy Scouts or the Signal Corps. I used to be a Boy Scout once.”

  “You’ve sure changed,” Maisie said.

  George sighed. “Somebody’s going to catch hell, broadcasting code on that wave length.”

  “What did it mean?”

  “Mean? Oh, you mean what did it mean. Uh—S, the letter S. Dit-dit-dit is S. SOS is did-dit-dit dah-dah-dah dit-dit-dit.”

  “O is dah-dah-dah?”

  George grinned. “Say that again, Maisie. I like it. And I think you are dah-dah-dah too.”

  “George, maybe it’s really an SOS message. Turn it back on.”

  George turned it back on. The tobacco ad was still going. “—gentlemen of the most dit-dit-dit-ing taste prefer the finer taste of dit-dit-dit-arettes. In the new package that keeps them dit-dit-dit and ultra fresh—”

  “It’s not SOS. It’s just S’s.”

  “Like a teakettle or—say, George, maybe it’s just some advertising gag.”

  George shook his head. “Not when it can blank out the name of the product. Just a minute till I—”

  He reached over and turned the dial of the radio a bit to the right and then a bit to the left, and an incredulous look came into his face. He turned the dial to the extreme left, as far as it would go. There wasn’t any station there, not even the hum of a carrier wave. But:

  “Dit-dit-dit,” said the radio, “dit-dit-dit.”

  He turned the dial to the extreme right. “Dit-dit-dit.” George switched it off and stared at Maisie without seeing her, which was hard to do.

  “Something wrong, George?”

  “I hope so,” said George Bailey. “I certainly hope so.” He started to reach for another drink and changed his mind. He had a sudden hunch that something big was happening and he wanted to sober up to appreciate it. He didn’t have the faintest idea how big it was. “George, what do you mean?”

  “I don’t know what I mean. But Maisie, let’s take a run 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. Somebody asked, “What band is that?” and somebody said, “Police.” Somebody said, “Try the foreign band,” and somebody did. “This ought to be Buenos Aires,” somebody said. “Dit-d’dah-dit—” said the radio.

  Somebody ran fingers through his hair and said, “Shut that damn thing off.” Somebody else 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 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.”

  “I told you it was,” Pete said gloomily. “Why, those signals after traveling that far would be so infinitesimal that for practical purposes they wouldn’t exist. Furthermore they’re all over the band on everything from microwave on up and equally strong on each. And, as you point out, we’ve already come almost five years in two hours, which isn’t possible. I told you it was crazy.”

  “But—”

  “Ssshh. Listen,” said Pete.

  A blurred, but unmistakably human voice was coming from the radio, mingling with the cracklings of code. And then music, faint and scratchy, but unmistakably a violin. Playing Handel’s Largo.

  Only suddenly it climbed in pitch as though modulating from key to key until it became so horribly shrill that it hurt the ear. And kept on going past the high limit of audibility until they could hear it no more.

  Somebody said, “Shut that God damn thing off.” Somebody did, and this time nobody turned it back on.

  Pete said, “I didn’t really believe it myself. And there’s another thing against it, George. Those signals affect TV too, and radio waves are the wrong length to do that.”

  He shook his head slowly. “There must be some other explanation, George. The more I think about it now the more I think I’m wrong.”

  He was right: he was wrong.

  “Preposterous,” said Mr. Ogilvie. He took off his glasses, frowned fiercely, and put them back on again. He looked through them at the several sheets of copy paper in his hand and tossed them contemptuously to the top of his desk. They slid to rest against the triangular name plate that read:

  B. R. Ogilvie

  Editor-in-Chief

  “Preposterous,” he said again.

  Casey Blair, his best reporter, blew a smoke ring and poked his index finger through it. “Why?” he asked.

  “Because—why, it’s utterly preposterous.”

  Casey Blair said, “It is now three o’clock in the morning. The interference has gone on for five hours and not a single program is getting through on either TV or radio. Every major broadcasting and telecasting station in the world has gone off the air.

  “For two reasons. One, they were just wasting current. Two, the communications bureaus of their respective governments requested them to get off to aid their campaigns with the direction finders. For five hours now, since the start of the interference, they’ve been working with everything they’ve got. And what have they found out?”

  “It’s preposterous!” said the editor.

  “Perfectly, but it’s true. Greenwich at 11 P.M. New York time; Pm translating all these times into New York time—got a bearing in about the direction of Miami. It shifted northward until at two o’clock the direction was approximately that of Richmond, Virginia. San Francisco at eleven got a bearing in about the direction of Denver; three hours later it shifted southward toward Tucson. Southern hemisphere: bearings from Capetown, South Africa, shifted from direction of Buenos Aires to that of Montevideo, a thousand miles north.

  “New York at eleven had weak indications toward Madrid; but by two o’clock they could get no bearings at all.” He blew another smoke ring. “Maybe because the loop antennae they use turn only on a horizontal plane?”

  “Absurd.”

  Casey said, “I like `presposterous’ better. Mr. Ogilvie. Preposterous it is, but it’s not absurd. I’m scared stiff. Those lines—and all other bearings I’ve heard about run in the same direction if you take them as straight lines running as tangents off the Earth instead of curving them around the surface. I did it with a little globe and a star map. They converge on the constellation Leo.”

  He leaned forward and tapped a forefinger on the top page of the story he’d just turned in. “Stations that are directly under Leo in the sky get no bearings at all. Stations on what would be the perimeter of Earth relative to that point get the strongest bearings. Listen, have an astronomer check those figures if you want before you run the story, but get it done damn quick—unless you want to read about it in the other newspapers first.”

  “But the heaviside layer, Casey—isn’t that supposed to stop all radio waves and bounce them back.”

  “Sure, it does. But maybe it leaks. Or maybe signals can get through it from the outside even though they can’t get out from the inside. It isn’t a solid wall.”

  “But—”

  “I know, it’s preposterous. But there it is. And there’s on
ly an hour before press time. You’d better send this story through fast and, have it set up while you’re having somebody check my facts and directions. Besides, there’s something else you’ll want to check.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t have the data for checking the positions of the planets. Leo’s on the ecliptic; a planet could be in line between here and there. Mars, maybe.”

  Mr. Ogilvie’s eyes brightened, then clouded again. He said, “We’ll be the laughingstock of the world, Blair, if you’re wrong.”

  “And if I’m right?”

  The editor picked up the phone and snapped an order.

  April 6th headline of the New York Morning Messenger, final (6 A.M.) edition:

  RADIO INTERFERENCE COMES FROM SPACE, ORIGINATES IN LEO

  May Be Attempt at Communication by Beings Outside Solar System

  All television and radio broadcasting was suspended.

  Radio and television stocks opened several points off the previous day and then dropped sharply until noon when a moderate buying rally brought them a few points back.

  Public reaction was mixed; people who had no radios rushed out to buy them and there was a boom, especially in portable and tabletop receivers. On the other hand, no TV sets were sold at all. With telecasting suspended there were no pictures on their screens, even blurred ones. Their audio circuits, when turned on, brought in the same jumble as radio receivers. Which, as Pete Mulvaney had pointed out to George Bailey, was impossible; radio waves cannot activate the audio circuits of TV sets. But these did, if they were radio waves.

  In radio sets they seemed to be radio waves, but horribly hashed. No one could listen to them very long. Oh, there were flashes—times when, for several consecutive seconds, one could recognize the voice of Will Rogers or Geraldine Farrar or catch flashes of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight or the Pearl Harbor excitement. (Remember Pearl Harbor?) But things even remotely worth hearing were rare. Mostly it was a meaningless mixture of soap opera, advertising and off-key snatches of what had once been music. It was utterly indiscriminate, and utterly unbearable for any length of time.