I suppose so.” Chris looked uncertain. “I only hope you’re not over-commercialising the situation, that’s all.”
“That’s hardly possible. The whole business might be worth a packet to both the musical and scientific world before we’re finished. I’d suggest you try and sort out the language yourself, if you can. That printed card was captured on the film, wasn’t it?”
“I think so. Tell you better when I’ve reran it... And I still think she belongs to another planet where, by some strange coincidence, the people look like us.”
“If all the girls look like her,” Dave murmured, “I hope the jet-plane firm I’m working for hurries up and completes its outer space runabout.”
For a moment the subject was changed. Both Bruce and Chris glanced in surprise.
“Outer space runabout?” Chris asked. “What are you talking about?”
Dave hesitated, then shrugged. “They’re extending the International Space Station, and it’s slow work, with the astronauts having to get around in spacesuits on the end of a line. My firm is working with the Americans on developing a small vehicle that they can get about in….” Dave hesitated, looking from one to the other. “Look, fellers, I let that slip without realising it. It’s a top secret. Not a word to anybody.”
“So be it,” Bruce assured him solemnly, raising his hand. Then he glanced at his watch. “Well, doesn’t seem as though there’s anything more to be gained by staying here, so I’ll retire to my lair and see if I can think up something to give this apparatus the required electrical boost.”
Chris nodded, switching off the apparatus. “Right—and the sooner the better. Meantime, Dave, if you want to help me during the next few nights in solving this language, problem I shan’t say no.”
“I’ll be here,” Dave promised, heading for the door. “Meantime, I’ll rerun this film and see if anything dawns on us when it’s run through.”
With one thing and another it was close on midnight when Chris finally left his laboratory hut, and he had little sleep that night for thinking about the amazing girl from nowhere whose name he did not even know. He kept thinking of the strange language he had heard and mentally comparing it with the card she had held up, and which had been clearly captured in the film. Where could she possibly hail from? Surely not from any planet in the solar system? Thus arguing and speculating to himself Chris finally fell asleep.
The next day, pursuing his normal workaday job as a photographer’s assistant, he took good care not to do anything that might cause his employer to complain. Right now he was not sure how much money he was going to need to further his experiments and to be thrown out of work would be catastrophic.... Just the same, there was nothing to prevent him doing a good deal of thinking as he worked, but most of it came to nothing. Many and varied were the attempts he made to explain away the mystery girl’s origin. He covered everything from Atlantis to time-travel and failed to discover anything that fitted.
So, presently, he came back to the main problem that could provide the key to everything—an understanding of the girl’s language. With that mastered everything would become plain sailing...or would it?
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