“Shh!” Audrey whispers back. “Just watch.”
The nervous lady composes herself and starts again:
“A, B, C, D, E…”
This time it tilts at O. Then U. After five minutes the blackboard is displaying the sequence YOURLOVEBRIDETYPEKILL. Then, as the alphabet loops round two more times, the table stays quite still.
“We have ‘YOUR LOVE BRIDE TYPE KILL,’ ” the secretary says, speaking directly to the table. “Is that message correct?”
The master of ceremonies nods at the nervous woman, who recommences calling out the letters. Again, the table tilts at Y, then O, then U, and spells out the same sequence as before-until it gets to the E of ‘BRIDE’: this it replaces with a G; then the E comes, followed by S, the tilts continuing until the blackboard bears the more intelligible phrase YOURLOVEBRIDGESTHEGAP.
“ ‘YOUR LOVE BRIDGES THE GAP’ is what we’ve got now,” calls the secretary. “Is that what you meant? Perhaps you could give one tilt for yes, or two for no.”
The table tilts once. The secretary asks:
“With whom are we conversing now? Is it still Tilly?”
Two tilts provide a negative response. On the master of ceremony’s cue, the nervous lady embarks on another set of alphabetic recitations, which coax from the table the word SCIENTIST.
“What type of scientist are you?” the man who asked the question about atoms calls out.
ALL, answers the table. CHEMISTSPHYSICISTS.
The blackboard’s pretty full now. Casting an inquisitive glance at the secretary, who nods at him that she’s got it all down, the transcriber picks the duster up and wipes it clean. As the letters of the alphabet are paraded by aloud again and again, a new sequence is written out on it:
FINEAETHERIALMATTERVIBRATES.
The top half of the board is wiped again as the message continues:
WEHAVEINSTRUMENTSPICKUPVIBRATIONS…
The tilting and transcribing take a long time, but all the people in the hall are rapt by it. The very voice in which the alphabet’s letters are called out seems electrified by the possibility that it will, at any point, prompt a new tilt.
… SYNTHESISENEWMASS, the table continues.
“Who makes these instruments?” the atom-man calls back.
INVENTORS, the table answers. ENGINEERSSS.
The alphabet runs round three more times, each time stopping at S. In the gap between each nervously enunciated letter, Serge can hear his heart beating. He can feel it too: it’s fast, making his chest throb against his shirt. As it does, he grows aware once more of the object hidden in his inner jacket pocket: the ammeter. He looks around the halclass="underline" everyone else, Audrey included, has their eyes glued to the table and the blackboard. Slipping his hand beneath the lapel and pushing the jacket’s breast out, he eases the instrument up until its face is visible to him. The needle’s at zero. He’s about to let the thing fall back into the pocket once more when it leaps right up to twenty and hangs there, suspended, for three or four seconds before dropping, just as suddenly, back to zero.
“A, B, C…” the nervous lady’s voice intones. As it pauses on N, the needle again leaps to twenty. Serge looks up, and realises that the table’s tilted forwards. As it straightens, he looks back down and sees the needle drop, again, to zero.
“A, B, C…” the letters start again. Once more, the needle leaps as they are stopped, at T, by a new table-tilt; once more it falls back as the table’s upper surface straightens and the lady’s voice restarts. Serge looks around the hall again, scrutinising each member of the audience intensely. While their heads are all pointed the same way, one of their bodies’ postures stands out. It’s the man in the fedora a few yards in front of him: his shoulders are tensed in a different way from all the others. His elbow’s different too: it’s twitching just before each table-tilt, each needle-jump. Running his eye along the forearm, to the point where the hand disappears into its own jacket, Serge sees why: the fingers are manipulating something secreted within this just like the ammeter’s secreted in his own.
“Wireless control!” he says, almost inaudibly.
“What?” Audrey asks him.
“Nothing,” he whispers back. He knows immediately how they’re doing it: he read about it in The Broadcaster a month ago. A small transmitter sends a signal to an even smaller receiver that, in turn, activates a mechanism in the object to be acted on: the technique has been used in music halls to play pianos without pianists, or make model airships fly around above the stalls and dock unaided in their moorings on the stage. The article’s author speculated that it could be developed to make guns fire remotely, or have sirens sound, or even to command an entire warship, bypassing the need for sailors. The table’s still tilting, spelling out the sequence DECAYEDSUNLIGHTRECONSTITUTED…
“Is the sunlight bright, or dark?” the atom-man is asking.
LOVERAYSNOCOLOUR, the table’s answering. ANDWHEN…
Serge’s pulse is still racing, but now it’s with fury. He wonders if he should jump up and denounce the sham. How many people in the room are in on it? The secretary? The transcriber? Atom-man? He looks at Ralph’s parents, then Paul’s: they’re hanging on the table’s every tilt, the blackboard’s every slowly transcribed word. So is Audrey; so is everyone apart from him. The isolation makes his heart beat even faster, so fast that he starts to worry that he’ll have a heart attack and die: he spends the next ten minutes, while the letters flow, halt and restart, trying to calm himself down. He talks to himself internally, telling himself that “pass over” would be the correct spiritualist terminology for “die,” which sends a nervous laugh up from his chest into his throat which he then has to stifle. By the time he’s coaxed both mind and body back to a safe state, the table’s stopped tilting and the session is being wrapped up by the master of ceremonies, who, after thanking all “collaborators” in the séance, helps Miss Dobai from her chair and supports her as she falteringly walks across the stage and disappears through the side-door from which she first entered.
Outside, Audrey is buoyant:
“Did you feel the weight come off you?” she asks, skipping back down Hoxton Street.
“I did, in fact,” Serge answers, honestly.
“I felt mine going straight to Michael,” she says. “I could tell he wasn’t far away when Tilly was talking with Ralph.”
“Can I come with you again next week?” Serge asks.
“Of course you can!” she answers. She kisses him on both cheeks, then buries her face in his neck and sniffs it lovingly.
He spends the week making a remote controller. It’s not difficult: he mounts a small ignition coil on a baseboard, adds an accumulator, two antennae, a switch and a telegraph key. He estimates the amount of power that Fedora’s controller has, and gives himself more. As a result, the mechanism’s too big to fit in his jacket pocket: after a little experimentation, he manages to bind it to the inside lining in such a way that the fingers of his right hand can manipulate the key without him needing to see it. The next Thursday, he and Audrey ride the bus along Clerkenwell Road again. He stands two feet from her, sideways-turned and slightly stiff.
About half of the audience from last week have returned; the rest are new. Paul’s parents are here; Ralph’s aren’t, though.
“You’d think they’d come back, after what happened last time,” Serge says.
“I thought I’d want to after Michael spoke to me,” Audrey tells him. “But you don’t need to communicate with them all the time, any more than when they were alive. Just knowing someone’s fine is enough-that, and the odd ‘hello’ now and then…”