did, he would walk home with them and possibly acquire an ice-cream cone on the way. With luck he might wangle another comic.

He heard his father's voice. Talking to Professor Wardle, who was spending the week-end with them.

"There's the set-up," said his father inside the laboratory. "Absurd, perhaps, but this Jansky radiation bothers me. I've found out one rather startling thing about it."

"My dear fellow," Professor Wardle said drily, "if you publish anything about the Jansky radiation the newspapers will accuse you of communicating with Mars!"

Tommy knew by his father's tone that he was grinning.

"I've not thought of anything so conservative. Everybody knows that the Jansky Radiation comes from the direction of the Milky Way and from beyond the Solar System. It makes a hissing noise in a sensitive short-wave receiver. No modulation has ever been detected. But no explanation's been offered either."[1]

Professor Wardle moved, inside the laboratory.

"What's the startling fact you've discovered?" he asked.

"It's got a point source," Tommy Driscoll's father said, and Tommy could tell he was still grinning. "It comes from one spot. There's a second-order effect in our atmosphere which has masked it up to now. I can prove it."

Tommy chewed on a grass stem. As the son of a professor of physics, he was disillusioned about scientists. They were not like the scientists of the comic books, who were mostly mad geniuses with plans to make themselves Emperors of Earth and had to be foiled by Captain McGee or the Star Rover. Tommy knew pessimistically that scientists just talk long words. Like his father, now. But Professor Wardle seemed startled.

"A point source! But confound it, man! That would mean it's artificial! Not natural! That it was a signal from beyond the stars! What else could it mean?"

"I'd like to know myself," said Tommy's father ruefully. "I've checked for interruptions like dots and dashes, and for modulations like our radio. I've made sure it isn't frequency modulated. The only thing left is television."

"Therefore the television screen," said Professor Wardle. "I see. You're trying to analyze it with a scanning system. Hm.... Possible. But if it is a signal from another Solar System—"

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