“All right, all right. If that’s the way you feel about it, why wait till we get back? If you think I’m enjoying—”
Somehow that silence of only a fraction of a second on the radio stopped him. “And now a word from our sponsor…”
And half a minute later, with the radio again playing Strauss, Wade Evans was still staring at it in utter bewilderment. Finally he said, “What was that?” Ida Evans looked at him wide-eyed. “You know. I had the funniest feeling that that was talking to us, to me? Like it was telling us to g-go ahead and fight, like we were starting to.”
Mr. Evans laughed a little uncertainly. “Me, too. Like it told us to. And the funny thing is, now I don’t want to.” He walked over and turned the radio off. “Listen, Ida, do we have to fight? After all, this is our second honeymoon. Why not—listen, Ida, do you really want to go night-clubbing this evening?”
“Well—I do want to see Singapore, a little, and this is our only night here, but—it’s early; we don’t have to go out right away.”
I don’t mean of course, that everybody who heard that radio announcement was fighting, physically or verbally, or even thinking about fighting. And of course there were a couple of billion people who didn’t hear it at all because they either didn’t have radio sets or didn’t happen to have them turned on. But almost everybody heard about it. Maybe not all of the African pygmies or all of the Australian bushmen, no, but every intelligent person in a civilized or semicivilized country heard of it sooner or later and generally sooner.
And the point is, if there is a point, that those who were fighting or thinking of fighting and who happened to be within hearing distance of a turned-on radio…
Eight-thirty o’clock continued its way around the world. Mostly in jumps of an even hour from time-zone to time-zone, but not always; some time-zones vary for that system—as Singapore, on the half hour; as Calcutta, seven minutes short of the hour. But by regular or irregular intervals, the phenomenon of the word continued its way from east to west, happening everywhere at eight-thirty o’clock precisely.
Delhi, Teheran, Baghdad, Moscow. The Iron Curtain, in 1954, was stronger, more impenetrable than it had ever been before, so nothing was known at the time of the effect of the broadcast there; later it was learned that the course of events there was quite similar to the course of events in Washington, D. C., Berlin, Paris, London…
Washington. The President was in special conference with several members of the cabinet and the majority and minority leaders of the Senate. The Secretary of Defense was speaking, very quietly: “Gentlemen, I say again that our best, perhaps our only, chance of winning is to get there first. If we don’t, they will. Everything shows that. Those confidential reports of yours, Mr. President, are absolute proof that they intend to attack. We must—”
A discreet tap on the door caused him to stop in mid sentence.
The President said, “That’s Walter—about the broadcast,” and then louder, “Come in.”
The President’s confidential secretary came in. “Everything is ready, Mr. President,” he said. “You said you wished to hear it yourself. These other gentlemen—?”
The President nodded, “We’ll all go,” he said. He stood, and then the others. “How many sets, Walter?”
“Six. We’ve turned them to six different stations; two in this time belt, Washington and New York; two in other parts of this country, Denver and San Francisco; two foreign stations, Paris and Tokyo.”
“Excellent,” said the President. “Shall we go and hear this mysterious broadcast that all Europe and Asia are excited about?”
The Secretary of Defense smiled. “If you wish. But I doubt we’ll hear anything. Getting control of the stations here—” He shrugged.
“Walter,” said the President, “has there been anything further from Europe or Asia?”
“Nothing new, sir. Nothing has happened there since eight-thirty, their time. But confirmations of what did happen then are increasing. Everybody who was listening to any station at eight-thirty heard it. Whether the station was in their time zone or not. For instance, a radio set in London which happened to be turned to Athens, Greece, got the broadcast at eight-thirty, London—that is, Greenwich—time. Local sets in Athens tuned to the same station had heard it at eight-thirty Athens time—two hours earlier.”
The majority leader of the Senate frowned. “That is patently impossible. It would indicate—”
“Exactly,” said the President drily. “Gentlemen, shall we adjourn to the room where the receiving sets have been placed? It lacks five minutes of—eight-thirty.”
They went down the hall to a room hideous with the sound of six receiving sets tuned to six different programs. Three minutes, two minutes, one—Sudden silence for a fraction of a second. From six sets simultaneously the impersonal voice, “And now a word from our sponsor.” The commanding voice gave the one-word command.
Then, again, the six radio sets blared forth their six different programs. No one tried to speak over that sound. They filed back into the conference chamber.
The President looked at the Secretary of Defense. “Well, Rawlins?”
The Secretary’s face was white. “The only thing I can think of that would account for it—” He paused until the President prodded him with another “Well?”
“I’ll grant it sounds incredible, but—a space-ship? Cruising around the world at the even rate of its period of revolution—a little over a thousand miles an hour. Over each point which it passes—which would be at the same hour everywhere—it momentarily blanks out other stations and puts on its own broadcast.”
The Senate’s majority leader snorted. “Why a space ship? There are planes that can travel that fast.”
“Ever hear of radar? With our new installations along the coast anything going over up to a hundred miles high would show. And do you think Europe hasn’t radar too?”
“And would they tell us if they spotted something?”
“England would. France would. And how about all our ships at sea that the thing has already passed over?”
“But a space ship!”
The President held up his hand. “Gentlemen. Let’s not argue until we have the facts. Reports from many sources are even now coming in and being sifted and evaluated. We’ve been getting ready for this for over fifteen hours now and I’ll see what’s known already, if you’ll pardon me.”
He picked up the telephone at his end of the long conference table, spoke into it briefly and then listened for about two minutes before he said, “Thank you,” and replaced the receiver.
Then he looked straight down the middle of the conference table as he spoke. “No radar station noticed anything out of the ordinary, not even a faint or blurred image.” He hesitated. “The broadcast, gentlemen, was heard uniformly in all areas of the Eastern Time Zone which have daylight saving. It was uniformly not heard in areas which do not have daylight saving, where it is now seven-thirty P.M.”
“Impossible,” said the Secretary of Defense.
The President nodded slowly. “Exactly. Yet certain reports from borders of time zones in Europe led us to anticipate it, and it was checked carefully. Radio receivers were placed, in pairs, along the borders of certain zones. For example, a pair of receivers were placed at the city limits of Baltimore, one twelve inches within the city limits, the other twelve inches outside. Two feet apart. They were identical sets, identically tuned to the same station, operated from the same power source. One set received ‘a word from our sponsor’; the other did not. The set-up is being maintained for another hour. But I do not doubt that—” He glanced at his wrist watch. “—forty-five minutes from now, when it will be eight-thirty o’clock in the non-daylight-saving zones, the situation will be reversed; the broadcast will be received by the set outside the daylight saving zone border and not by the similarly tuned set just inside.”