Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 8
“If you want to, don’t mind me,” Colin rejoined. “Come on, I’ll lead you up.”
Half in fun, he took her arm and made a pretence of assisting her to climb the stairs. At the bedroom door he kissed her good night again, switched on her light, and then went down to the ground floor. The wireless, he remembered, was in the lounge.
Alongside the normal set he found a shortwave converter; but for a time he contented himself with running over some stations on the long and medium waves, merely to test the selectivity of the set. After a while, finding nothing to interest him in the programmes, he jacked in the converter and set himself to the more delicate task of picking up the short-wave transmissions. Once he became engrossed in this he lost all count of time.
Someone had evidently taken the trouble to calibrate the set, for a framed series of graphs hung on the wall and made it fairly simple to identify the principal broadcasting stations. But it was an exceptionally bad night for short-wave work. There were some atmospherics, but the main drawback was an almost incessant fading which prevented him from obtaining anything but disjointed excerpts from the programmes. He tried station after station with an almost uniform lack of satisfactory results; and at last he fell back on the telegraphy transmissions, which, at any rate, were clear and continuous. He had a fair grip of the Morse code and could follow messages if the speed was not too great. Defeated once or twice, he began to range over the dial in search of something easy.
Suddenly, as he turned the knob, he came upon a strong carrier-wave; and merely out of curiosity he tuned in the transmission. A voice began speaking, a clear, loud signal, free from the fading which had hitherto exasperated him.
“. . . Hello! Hello, London!” said the voice. “Attention! I am calling and testing . . . testing and calling. I shall repeat this message night by night at ten, eleven, and twelve o’clock. Hello! I am testing. I shall repeat this message each night. Attention!”
Then in fairly slow and carefully-transmitted Morse, the transmission continued:
“T e i i l l f i l h t c e t u f d h s o o e n p r y y u g o . . .”
Colin, disgusted by his earlier failures that night, picked up a note-book which was lying on the table beside the set—evidently a rough wireless log—and began to jot down the incomprehensible series of letters, merely for the sake of practice. The man at the transmitter was sending with such deliberation that even Colin, rusty as he was, had no difficulty in following him:
“. . . h n g o f l o v t u g c h a n n o a t n a e h a t i s u w e e t f s t g s c a d . . .” the message continued; and Colin jotted it down, letter by letter, until between three and four hundred characters had been transmitted. Then the Morse broke off, and the clear voice spoke again:
“Hello, London! Before closing down I shall put on a gramophone record.”
In a few seconds “Ramona” came from the loud speaker. Colin listened to it appreciatively. He remembered dancing with Jean to that tune, in the days before she promised to marry him; and the music brought with it all kinds of memories. Jolly little kid she was then. And she’d grown a lot prettier since. Funny to think of her sleeping there, upstairs. Marriage still had its first freshness for Colin.
The record ended with the click of the gramophone brake. Evidently the man at the transmitter didn’t bother much about refinements in his sending. Then the voice spoke again :
“Hello, London! This is HSI-314, calling and testing. I am now closing down for the night. I shall repeat the message at ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, and midnight to-morrow. Hello! This is HSI-314. Good night!”
Almost immediately the faint hiss of the carrier wave died out and the loud-speaker went dead.
Colin switched off the battery of the converter, yawned unaffectedly, and glanced at his watch. It was far later than he had supposed—after midnight. The curious fascination of the short waves had thrown its spell over him and kept him up far longer than he had intended. He glanced from the converter dial to the calibration chart which hung in front of him and noted that, as he had expected, the signal had come in on the amateur wave-band. Then, as he rose from his chair, his eye caught a big square pamphlet on the table near the set: a blue-bound volume with a cover-design of Pegasus galloping across the globe.
“Radio Amateur Call Book Magazine,” Colin read. “H’m! Craigmore seems to have everything on tap,” he added, half in admiration and half in envy. “Wonder who HSI-314 is.”
Glancing rather incuriously over the pages, he came upon a heading “INTERNATIONAL CALL LETTERS”; and running his eye down the list, he found the entry “HSA-HSZ—Siam.” A note at the foot explained that “International amateur prefixes of one or two letters are to be assigned from the above.”
Colin was no short-wave expert. Still, he knew enough to be able to tell if the ether was “alive” or not; and the word “Siam” made him lift his eyebrows slightly. On this particular evening, the Heaviside layer had been in such a condition as to make the set feel “dead” when he moved the dial. The American stations had been almost inaudible, and even the Zeesen short-wave transmitter had been unsatisfactory. Still, a long-distance fluke was always a possibility.
He passed to the following page of the Call Book, which was headed “WHO’S WHO ON THE SHORT WAVES”; and using his dial reading