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"An atomic war would be trivial by comparison. But it happened millions and millions of years ago. We women want to know about things that are happening now!" Soames opened his mouth to speak. But he didn't. The flickering, wavering, silver-plated wave-guide tube of the radar suddenly steadied. It ceased to hunt restlessly among all places overhead for a tiny object headed for Earth.
Presently he brought out his five-watt projector. There was deepest darkness hereabouts. Trees and shrubbery were merely blacker than their surroundings. But there was reason for suspicion. Neither in the house of Nedda's girl friend, nor in the nearer house between, was there a single lighted window. Hoddan adjusted the wave-guide and pressed the stud of his instrument.
Sally told Joe that in the very middle where there was a shed with a domelike roof which wasn't metal there was a wave-guide radar that could spot a plane within three feet vertically, and horizontally at a distance of thirty miles, with greater distances in proportion. There were guns down in pits so their muzzles wouldn't interfere with the radar.
There was one man awake, on stand-by watch. A radio glowed beside him a short-wave unit, tuned to the frequency used by all the bases of all the nations on Antarctica English, French, Belgian, Danish, Russian. The stand-by man yawned. There was nothing to do. "There's no story in my work," said Soames politely. "I work with this wave-guide radar. It's set to explore the sky instead of the horizon.
He pointed it carefully into the nearer garden. A man grunted in a surprised tone. There was a stirring. A man swore startledly. The words seemed inappropriate to a citizen merely breathing the evening air. Hoddan frowned. The note from Nedda seemed to have been a forgery. To make sure, he readjusted the wave-guide to project a thin but fan-shaped beam. He aimed again.
It wasn't likely she ever would be. Hoddan scowled. Inside of an hour he'd made a hand-sized, five-watt, wave-guide projector of waves of eccentric form. In the beam of that projector, air became ionized. Air became a high-resistance conductor comparable to nichrome wire, when and where the projector sent its microwaves.
All manner of foreign voices came startledly out of the inter-base radio speaker, asking what could it be? A Russian voice snapped suspiciously that the Americans should be queried. And the wave-guide radar followed a large object which had come out of nowhere at all. The sheer impossibility of the thing was only part of the problem it presented. The radar followed it.
He told them, giving them the tape from the wave-guide radar and speaking with strict precision of every event up to the moment of his arrival at Gissell Bay with the children and their artifacts. He did not mention telepathy or time-travel because they seemed so impossible.
Ten seconds eight six four " Now the wave-guide radar had gone back to normal operation. Its silver-plated square tube flickered and quivered and spun quickly in this direction and that, searching all the sky. There was a booming sound. It was infinitely low-pitched. It was long-continued. It was so low in frequency that it seemed more a vibration of the air than a sound. It died away.
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