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One night when Ralph Bastin had been speaking to him about the Anti-Christ he had said: "Here is a curious thing, George! "Ralph would have shown me the sign, I know," Bullen mused, "but that at the very moment we were talking together, there came that scare of fire in the stereo room, and we both rushed away.
Tom explained that the music had merely been picked up by the mike on his workbench, then fed into the adjoining apartment and amplified over a speaker there. Chow grinned, snapping his fingers to the catchy melody. "Comes out even louder'n it does from the radio!" "Yes, but the sound quality's not so good," Tom said. "You'd notice the difference with real stereo."
A split second later the volume swelled as the same music echoed back to them from the two-room apartment adjoining the lab, where Tom ate and slept when engaged in some round-the-clock experiment. Chow was startled by the blare. "You got a stereo hookup here, boss?" he inquired. "Not exactly."
Some of the men at the bar turned away from the stereo screen to look at the newcomer. They eyed the crisp, clean uniform narrowly, and then turned silently back to the play on the screen. The husky bartender placed the small glass of dark liquid in front of Tom. "Twenty credits," he announced in a hoarse voice. "Twenty!" exclaimed Tom. "Don't give me that rocket wash! It's five credits a shot."
Finally he had been forced to abandon the search when he saw a stereo newscast reporting that the missing cadet, Tom Corbett, had been traced to Skid Row. He decided that it was time to leave Mars and went to the huge main spaceport, hoping to get aboard a ship bound for Earth.
Most of it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the thing had amused himself by making a grotesque scheme of advertisement stereo on the back page. The matter he printed was emotional; the news organisation had not as yet found its way back. I learned nothing fresh except that already in one week the examination of the Martian mechanisms had yielded astonishing results.
In face, he was curiously like his brother Joe, whose appearance is familiar to every one who takes an interest in first-class cricket. The resemblance was even more marked on the cricket field. Mike had Joe's batting style to the last detail. He was a pocket edition of his century-making brother. "Hullo," he said, "sorry I'm late." This was mere stereo.
"Some like 'em, most don't," Jake said. "They won't hurt you. Look see that? Old Martian ruins. Built by some race a million years ago. Only half a dozen on Mars." It was only a clump of weathered stone buildings in the light from the tractor, and Feldman had seen better in the stereo shots.
But of all that we said and did then I must tell in a later chapter. . . . It is easy to see the New Paper had been set up overnight, and then large pieces of the stereo plates replaced subsequently. I do not know enough of the old methods of printing to know precisely what happened. The thing gives one an impression of large pieces of type having been cut away and replaced by fresh blocks.
And the horse, because he cannot swear, drops dead. So you see my reason for regretting the decay of this excellent and most wholesome practice.... "However, I must be getting on. Just now I am travelling about London paying cabmen their legal fares. Sometimes one picks up a new variant, though much of it is merely stereo."
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