Among these was that much ridiculed but devoted coterie who had clung tenaciously to the idea that communication could be established with Mars. The hope that had been growing for a hundred years had never been permitted to die, but had been transmitted from teacher to pupil with ever-growing enthusiasm, while the people scoffed as, a hundred years before, we are told, they scoffed at the experimenters with flying machines, as they chose to call them.
About 1940 had come the first reward of long years of toil and hope, following the perfection of an instrument which accurately indicated the direction and distance of the focus of any radioactivity with which it might be attuned. For several years prior to this all the more highly sensitive receiving instruments had recorded a series of three dots and three dashes which began at precise intervals of twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes and continued for approximately fifteen minutes. The new instrument indicated conclusively that these signals, if they were signals, originated always at the same distance from the Earth and in the same direction as the point in the universe occupied by the planet Mars.
It was five years later before a sending apparatus was evolved that bade fair to transmit its waves from Earth to Mars. At first their own message was repeated—three dots and three dashes. Although the usual interval of time had not elapsed since we had received their daily signal, ours was immediately answered. Then we sent a message consisting of five dots and two dashes, alternating. Immediately they replied with five dots and two dashes and we knew beyond peradventure of a doubt that we were in communication with the Red Planet, but it required twenty-two years of unremitting effort, with the most brilliant intellects of two worlds concentrated upon it, to evolve and perfect an intelligible system of intercommunication between the two planets.
Today, this , there was published broadcast to the world the first message from Mars. It was dated Helium, Barsoom, and merely extended greetings to a sister world and wished us well. But it was the beginning.
The Blue Room of The Harding was, I presume, but typical of every other gathering place in the civilized world. Men and women were eating, drinking, laughing, singing and talking. The flier was racing through the air at an altitude of little over a thousand feet. Its engines, motivated wirelessly from power plants thousands of miles distant, drove it noiselessly and swiftly along its overnight pathway between Chicago and Paris.
I had of course crossed many times, but this instance was unique because of the epoch-making occasion which the passengers were celebrating, and so I sat at the table longer than usual, watching my fellow diners, with, I imagine, a slightly indulgent smile upon my lips, since—I mention it in no spirit of egotism—it had been my high privilege to assist in the consummation of a hundred years of effort that had borne fruit that day. I looked around at my fellow diners and then back to my table companion.
He was a fine looking chap, lean and bronzed—one need not have noted the Air Corps overseas service uniform, the Admiral’s stars and anchors or the wound stripes to have guessed that he was a fighting man; he looked it, every inch of him, and there were a full seventy-two inches.
We talked a little—about the great victory and the message from Mars, of course, and though he often smiled I noticed an occasional shadow of sadness in his eyes and once, after a particularly mad outburst of pandemonium on the part of the celebrators, he shook his head, remarking: “Poor devils!” and then: “It is just as well—let them enjoy life while they may. I envy them their ignorance.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He flushed a little and then smiled. “Was I speaking aloud?” he asked.
I repeated what he had said and he looked steadily at me for a long minute before he spoke again. “Oh, what’s the use!” he exclaimed, almost petulantly; “you wouldn’t understand and of course you wouldn’t believe. I do not understand it myself; but I have to believe because I know—I know from personal observation. God! if you could have seen what I have seen.”
“Tell me,” I begged; but he shook his head dubiously.
“Do you realize that there is no such thing as Time?” he asked suddenly—“That man has invented Time to suit the limitations of his finite mind, just as he has named another thing, that he can neither explain nor understand, Space?”
“I have heard of such a theory,” I replied; “but I neither believe nor disbelieve—I simply do not know.”
I thought I had him started and so I waited as I have read in fiction stories is the proper way to entice a strange narrative from its possessor. He was looking beyond me and I imagined that the expression of his eyes denoted that he was witnessing again the thrilling scenes of the past. I must have been wrong, though—in fact I was quite sure of it when he next spoke.
“If that girl isn’t careful,” he said, “the thing will upset and give her a nasty fall—she is much too near the edge.”
I turned to see a richly dressed and much dishevelled young lady busily dancing on a tabletop while her friends and the surrounding diners cheered her lustily.
My companion arose. “I have enjoyed your company immensely,” he said, “and I hope to meet you again. I am going to look for a place to sleep
