Increasingly, though, this particular summer Pete had been using a new signal—cupping a hand behind his ear. It had puzzled Mr. Oberdorffer the first time Pete had used this signal, for he knew that he was talking as loudly as ever, so he had passed the pad and pencil to Pete with a request for explanation, and Pete had written: “Cant here. Marsheys too noysy.”
So Mr. Oberdorffer had obliged by talking more loudly, but it annoyed him somewhat to have to do so. (Not as much, however, as his talking so loudly—even after the interference had ceased, since he had no way of knowing when the Martians stopped heckling—annoyed the occupants of adjacent benches.)
Even when, this particular summer, Pete did not signal for an increase in volume, the conversations were no longer quite as satisfactory as they had once been. All too frequently the expression on Pete’s face showed all too clearly that he was listening to something else instead of or in addition to what Mr. Oberdorffer was telling him. And whenever at such times Mr. Oberdorffer looked about he’d see a Martian or Martians and know that he was being heckled, to Pete’s distraction and therefore indirectly to his own.
Mr. Oberdorffer began to toy with the idea of doing something about the Martians.
But it wasn’t until in mid-August that he definitely decided to do something about them. In mid-August Pete suddenly disappeared from Bughouse Square. For several days running, Mr. Oberdorffer failed to find him there and he started to ask the occupants of other benches—those whom he had seen often enough to recognize as regulars—what had happened to Pete. For a while he got nothing but head shakes or other obvious disclaimers such as shrugs; then a man with a gray beard started to explain something to him so Mr. Oberdorffer said that he was deaf and handed over the pad and pencil. A temporary difficulty arose when the bearded one turned out to be unable to read or write, but between them they found an intermediary who was barely sober enough to listen to gray beard’s story and put it in writing for Mr. Oberdorffer to read. Pete was in jail.
Mr. Oberdorffer hastened to the precinct station and after some difficulty due to the fact that there are many Petes and he didn’t know his best friend’s last name finally learned where Pete was being held and hurried to see him to help if he could.
It turned out that Pete had already been tried and convicted and was past help for thirty days, although he gladly accepted a loan of ten dollars to enable him to buy cigarettes for that period.
However he managed to talk to Pete briefly and to learn, via the pad and pencil route, what had happened.
Shorn of misspellings, Pete’s story was that he had done nothing at all, the police had framed him; besides, he’d been a little drunk or he’d never have tried to shoplift razor blades from a dime store in broad daylight with Martians around. The Martians had enticed him into the store and had promised to act as lookout for him and then had ratted on him and called copper the moment he had his pockets full. It was all the fault of the Martians.
This pathetic story so irked Mrs Oberdorffer that, as of that very moment, he decided definitely to do something about the Martians. That very evening. He was a patient man but he had reached the limit of his patience.
Enroute home, he decided to break along standing habit and eat at a restaurant. If he didn’t have to interrupt his thinking to cook a meal for himself, he’d be off to a quicker start.
In the restaurant he ordered pigs’ knuckles and sauerkraut and, while waiting for it to be brought to him, he started his thinking. But very quietly so as not to disturb other people along the counter.
He marshaled before him everything he’d read about Martians in the popular science magazines, and everything he’d read about electricity, about electronics and about relativity.
The logical answer came to him at the same time as the pigs’ knuckles and sauerkraut. “lt’s got,” he told the waitress, “to be an anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator! That’s the only thing that will get them.” Her answer, if any, went unheard and is unrecorded.
He had to stop thinking while he ate, of course, but he thought loudly the rest of the way home. Once in his own place, he disconnected the signal (which was a flashing red light is lieu of a bell) so no tenant of the building could interrupt him to report a leaking faucet or a recalcitrant refrigerator, and then he started to build an anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator.
“We use this outboard motor for power,” he thought, suiting action to word. “Only the propeller it comes off and gives a generator to make the D.C. at—how many volts?” And when he figured that out, he stepped up the voltage with a transformer and then stepped it sidewise into a spark coil, and went on from there.
Only once did he encounter a serious difficulty. That was when he realized that he would need a vibrating membrane about eight inches in diameter. There was nothing in his workroom that would serve the purpose and since it was by then eight o’clock and all stores were closed he almost gave up for the evening.
But the Salvation Army saved him, when he remembered it. He went out and over to Clark Street, walked up and down until a Salvation Army lassie came along to make the rounds of the taverns. He had to get as high as an offer of thirty dollars to the cause before she would agree to part with her tambourine; it is well she succumbed at that figure for it was all the money he had with him. Besides, if she had not agreed he would have been strongly tempted to grab the tambourine and run with it, and that would in all probability have landed him in jail with Pete. He was a portly man, a slow runner, and short of wind.
But the tambourine, with the jangles removed, turned out to be exactly right for his purpose. Covered with a light sprinkling of magnetized iron filings and placed between the cathode tube and the aluminum saucepan which served as a grid, it would not only filter out the unwanted delta rays but the vibration of the filings (once the outboard motor was started) would provide the required fluctuation in the inductance.
Finally, a full hour after his usual bedtime, Mr. Oberdorffer soldered the last connection and stepped back to look at his masterpiece. He sighed with satisfaction. It was good. It should work.
He made sure that the airshaft window was open as high as it would raise. The subatomic vibrations had to have a way out or they would work only inside the room. But once free they would bounce back from the heaviside layer and, like radio waves, travel all around the world in seconds.
He made sure there was gasoline in the tank of the outboard motor, wound the cord around the spinner, prepared to pull the cord—and then hesitated. There’d been Martians in the room, off and on all evening but there was none present now. And he’d rather wait till one was present again before starting the machine, so he could tell right away whether or not it worked.
He went into the other room and got a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and opened it. Took it back with him into the workroom and sat sipping it and waiting.
Somewhere outside a clock struck, but Mr. Oberdorffer being deaf, did not hear it.
There was a Martian, sitting right atop the anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator itself.
Mr. Oberdorffer put down his beer, reached over and pulled the cord. The motor spun and caught, the machine ran.
Nothing happened to the Martian.
“Take it a few minutes to build up potential,” Mr. Oberdorffer explained, to himself rather than to the Martian.
He sat down again, picked up his beer. Sipped it and watched and waited for the few minutes to pass.