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At last Hale sat on the floor with the headphones on and several of the book's endpapers laid out in front of him, and he turned up the set's rheostat until the valve glowed yellow; then he turned the condenser knob, and the set began oscillating-he could hear the rushing sound in the phones, and when he touched the wire between the grid condenser and the secondary coil he heard a satisfactory thud. For a few seconds he could hear a faint high-speed clicking that would be caused by the sparks in the distributor of some nearby automobile, a problem he had seldom had on the ile St.-Louis, but it soon faded.
"So far so good," he said. "Let's see if Moscow is back on the air yet."
He tuned the condenser knob to the 49-meter bandwidth and tapped out KLKKLKKLKDEETC on the key, then reset the dial to the 39-meter bandwidth for receiving. Even transmitting for only a few seconds had misted his forehead with sweat-the current he was using was not wired in from a neighboring house anymore, and the Abwehr and SS direction-finders were supposedly always noting illicit broadcasts and laying out direction lines on street maps; already if they were quick they might have triangulated this block.
Abruptly he was getting a strong Morse signal over the phones, and he lunged for the pencil to begin copying.
ETC ETC ETCETCCCTTTEEE. The dits and dahs were coming so quickly that they were nearly a rattle. He could only lift the pencil from the paper and wait for the signal to slow down.
"It's crazy," he said in a tight voice. "It's clear, but he's sending like a lunatic."
"That tube is glowing purple," said Elena softly, pointing.
Hale glanced at the alternating current valve through sweat-stung eyes-there was a purple glow in the glass, which generally meant ionized air in the vacuum; that would weaken the signal, though, and in fact the signal was coming through with razor clarity-
- but so rapidly now that it was just a rough buzz, and so painfully loud that he clawed off the headphones and tossed them onto the floor. Even so he could hear the noise clearly.
It wasn't musical, but it seemed to be pulsating in a deliberate rhythm-and both Hale and Elena inhaled audibly as they recognized the drop-and-double-beat measure they had patterned their footsteps on last night. Hale's pulse was twitching the collar of his shirt, and so he could see that the rhythm was in perfect counterpoint with his heartbeat, and he guessed that Elena's heart was pounding in exact synchronization with his, and with the barbaric drumbeat or inorganic chanting that was shaking out of the headphones. His ears popped as if with increased air pressure, and he was irrationally sure that something out of a nightmare had come down from the stars to hang over the house, filling the sky.
Hale flinched and dropped the pencil, and from the corner of his eye he saw Elena start back too, at the clear impression of attention being paid to them. It knows me, he thought, and now it knows where I am.
Horizontal beams of light moving across the dark face of the sea like spokes of a vast turning wheel...
How far in have I got to get, to know what Lawrence knew?
Elena was gasping, "Turn it off, turn it off," even as Hale became aware of an uneven gusting of wind at the window and a rattling of the roof shingles outside, and the smell of wood burning.
Almost reluctantly, almost despairingly, Hale grabbed the alternating current wire and yanked on it, and the set went dead as the wall lamp and pieces of plaster clattered to the floor.
Both of them were crouched tensely on the floor, staring at the window, but only the evening breeze sighed in over the sill, with no sounds but distant motors and sirens. In the glow from the lamp on the opposite wall, Hale could see wisps of smoke spin away to invisibility in the fresh air.
At last he let himself relax, slumping backward to rest on his elbows and rock his head back. The night air was chilly in his damp shirt. "Damn me!" he panted. "Where's that brandy?"
Elena's face was sheened with sweat as she got up on her knees to hand it to him. "Maybe," she said shakily, "that's why Centre is letting all the networks be rounded up. Cut off a gangrenous limb." She took the bottle from him after he had gulped several swallows and tipped it up herself. When she lowered it and licked her lips, she said, "We need to consult Claude Cassagnac as soon as it can be arranged-he's the only other member of our network that I know, and he's been in the game since even before the last time Moscow rolled up the networks."
Hale wanted to ask her what she had seen-and heard and smelled, and thought-here; but he found that he couldn't frame the words, and he felt himself blushing to realize that it was self-consciousness, or shame, that was choking his question. And he didn't want to ask himself why he should feel ashamed of what had happened. This had been some electrical phenomenon-static charge in the atmosphere causing interference and unsynchronized duplication of the signal, turbulent air preceding a thunderstorm. Exhaustion had made him impose the familiar rhythms on the random noise, just as it could conjure voices or the ringing of a telephone out of the sound of a filling tub; and only exhaustion could be the reason he was reminded of his boyhood reluctance to tell his year's-end dreams to the priest in the confessional.
But he was shivering, and he couldn't make himself ask Elena about what they had just experienced.
"Really?" he said instead, in a brittle voice. "'The last time'? Easy work for the Abwehr and Gestapo, just wait for Moscow to hand over her spies again."
Elena too seemed to be distracted. " Moscow works in ways that needn't be explained to us."
"Her wonders to perform," agreed Hale in English.
"Marcel," she said in what struck him as an inordinately angry tone, "I have no choice but to report your-flippancy! Can't you-"
"What's that?" he interrupted.
Looking past the radio set, he had noticed a shadowy delta of spots on the floor, fanning out toward the window; and when he walked over on his knees to look at it more closely, he saw that it was hundreds of hair-thin rings scorched into the polished boards. Some of the faint rings could be traced to be a yard across, but most were no bigger than a penny, and some were such tiny black pinpricks that he assumed a magnifying glass would be needed to see that they were actually rings. He swiped at a patch of them with the damp palm of his hand, and they had been so lightly burned in that the blackness rubbed away almost completely.
Elena had stood up and crossed to the window. "It's on the sill too," she said humbly. "Some kind of electrical discharge...?"
"Ball lightning, probably," he agreed almost shrilly, crawling back to where they had left the bottle. It could have been ball lightning, he told himself as he pulled out the cork. It could have been.
"I think we sleep in our clothes tonight," she said, stepping away from the window and tugging the frames shut over the aerial wire and latching them. Clearly she was wishing there were curtains to pull across the view of the darkening sky. Still facing the glass, she said, "I think we should sleep together, with the light on." She exhaled sharply. "Once I would have prayed."
Hale glanced at the faint black soot marks on the palm of his hand-and he thought he understood why Adam and Eve had hidden from Yahweh, in the Garden, for he wouldn't be praying tonight either. I heard Thy voice in the Garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. "Once I would have too," he said. It occurred to him that she probably assumed that because he was British he had been brought up as an Anglican. "I was a Roman Catholic," he said, barely loud enough for her to hear.
