Prokop of course did not. “This. For some time … about six months or something of the sort … the European wireless stations have been horribly annoyed. Something is interfering with their conversations, you know. Really. And as it happens … always on Tuesdays and Fridays at half-past ten in the evening. What did you say?”
Prokop had said nothing, but only rubbed his forehead.
“Well, on Tuesdays and Fridays. They call it disturbed conversations. Something begins to crackle in the telegraphists’ ears, and there we are; it’s enough to send the fellows off their heads. Sad, eh?” Mr. Carson removed his spectacles and began to clean them with extreme care. “To begin with … to begin with they thought it was magnetic storms or something of the sort. But when they found that its office hours were always Tuesday and Friday … to cut the story short, Marconi S.F. Transradio, and various Ministries of Posts and Marine, Commerce, the Interior and I don’t know what, have agreed to pay twenty thousand pounds sterling to the smart fellow who can find out the cause of it.” Mr. Carson replaced his spectacles and smiled broadly. “They think that there is some illegal station in existence which amuses itself by interfering with conversations on Tuesdays and Fridays. Rubbish! A secret station which uses up twenty kilowatts for a joke! Fi!” And Mr. Carson spat contemptuously.
“On Tuesdays and Fridays,” said Prokop, “that is, regularly. …”
“Extraordinary, eh?” leered Mr. Carson. “I’ve got it written down: on Tuesday on such and such a date at ten thirty-five and so many seconds a disturbance at all stations from Reval onwards, and so on. And a certain amount of your Krakatit explodes at the same instant ‘by itself,’ as you are good enough to express it. Eh? What? The same the next Friday at ten twenty-nine and a few seconds; a disturbance and an explosion. The next Tuesday at ten thirty-five explosion and disturbance. And so on. As an exception, not in accordance with the programme as it were, a disturbance on Monday at ten twenty-nine minutes, thirty seconds. Ditto explosion. Comes on the second. Eight times in eight cases. A joke, eh? What do you think about it?”
“I d—don’t know,” mumbled Prokop.
“There’s one thing,” said Mr. Carson after reflecting for a long time. “Mr. Thomas was working with us. He has no knowledge, but he has got hold of something. Mr. Thomas had a high frequency generator installed in his laboratory and shut the door in front of our noses. A rotter. It’s the first time I’ve heard of high frequency machines being used in ordinary chemistry, eh? What’s your idea?”
“Well … naturally,” said Prokop doubtfully, with an uneasy glance at his own brand-new generator in the corner.
Mr. Carson did not fail to notice this. “H’m,” he said. “You’ve the same sort of toy, eh? A pretty little transformer. What did it cost you?”
Prokop grew sullen, but Mr. Carson began to glow. “I think,” he said with growing expansiveness, “that it would be a magnificent thing if one could produce in some substance … let’s say with the help of high power currents … certain vibrations, set it in violent motion, loosen its interior structure so that one only had just to tap it, from a distance … with some waves or other … by an explosion, oscillations, or the devil knows what, and it would fly to pieces—what? Bang! From a distance! What do you say to that?”
Prokop said nothing, and Mr. Carson, pulling at his cigar in delight, feasted his eyes on him.
“I’m not an electrician, you know,” he began after a moment; “it was explained to me by an expert, but I’ll be damned if I understood it. The fellow was all over me with electrons, ions, elementary quanta and I don’t know what; and, to finish up with, this professorial luminary stated that, to make a long story short, the thing was impossible. My friend, you’ve made a howler! You’ve done something which according to the greatest authorities is impossible. …
“I tried to explain it myself,” he continued, “but not like that. Let us suppose that someone takes it into his head to … to make an unstable compound … from a certain lead salt. The salt in question does not behave as it should; it refuses to combine, eh? Then this chemist of ours tests everything possible … like a madman; and then remembers, let us say, that in the January number of the Chemist there was something about the said phlegmatic salt being a first-class coherer … a detector of electric waves. He gets an inspiration. An idiotic and sublime inspiration—that perhaps by the use of electric waves he can bring that cursed salt into a better frame of mind, eh? A man gets his finest inspirations through being stupid. So he gets hold of some comic transformer and sets to work; what he did is at present his secret, but in the end … he will achieve the synthesis he wants. He’ll achieve it. Or at least, the oscillation will do it. Man, I shall have to go down on all fours and start learning physics in my old age; I’m talking rubbish, eh?”
Prokop muttered something completely unintelligible.
“That doesn’t matter,” said Mr. Carson calmly. “As long as it holds together. I’m dull and I imagine that it has some sort of electromagnetic structure. If this structure is disturbed, then … it disintegrates, eh? Luckily about ten thousand regular wireless stations and several hundred illegal ones preserve in our atmosphere the sort of electromagnetic climate, the sort of—eh—eh—oscillatory bath which suits this structure. And so it holds together. …”
Mr. Carson reflected for a moment. “And now,” he began again, “imagine that some devil has a means by which he can thoroughly disturb electric waves. Obliterate them or something of the sort. Imagine that—God knows why—he does this regularly on Tuesdays and Fridays at half-past ten o’clock at night. At that minute and second all wireless communication is interrupted all over the world;
