I said.
‘Huh! You sounded so excited, I brought my revolver over just in case.’
‘We may need it yet,’ I answered dazedly, my eyes scanning the note he had brought up. It was a reply to my advert. It merely said: ‘I shall be at your house at nine o’clock. Set no traps. Smoof.’
‘Oh Lord!’ I whispered. It was ten past eight. Outside, the street lamps were on. It was very still.
‘What’s all the mystery?’ Harry asked impatiently. In some ways he is a queer fellow. Slow and methodical in his work, yet otherwise reckless – a round peg with a square hole somewhere inside him.
It seemed best to tell him everything if he was to be involved in the affair. I crossed to the apparatus. I had a large cathode ray tube resting in front of the radiogram and connected to a specially doctored image orthicon that was clamped to an extremely clumsy bit of mechanism. This last gadget was merely a long-running clockwork motor that moved my image orthicon slowly in towards the centre of the record, keeping its neck constantly in – touching, in fact – the smooth groove.
‘I’m going to play that disc to you now, Harry – on this.’
‘You got it to work?’ he asked.
‘Yes. It’s a telefile from the police records in some future time.’ I paused for comment, but he made none.
‘How far in the future I don’t know. Perhaps two hundred years … not less. You’ll be able to judge. You’ll see vast technical ability going hand in hand with the death of conscience – the sort of thing a pessimist might predict today. Not that there’s much room on this record for more than guesses, which seems to make it more hauntingly dreadful; and although I’ve got it to work, it doesn’t work well.’
‘Surprised you got it to work at all!’ he said.
‘I don’t know. Supposing Edison got hold of one of our present-day recordings. He’d soon fathom it.’
‘You’re some Edison!’
I dimpled modestly and said: ‘Thank you. Actually it’s quite simple. At least, my part of it is. Up to a point, in fact, the whole thing is easily understandable, if not duplicatable, by modern knowledge.’
‘Up to which point?’ Scepticism in his voice.
‘Harry, we’ve got hold of a television record from the future. It’s certainly more compendious for short documents than a roll of film. The unusual feature in it is a frozen signal. It seems the signal is shot from transmitter into a storage valve circuit; or perhaps the ability lies in the transmitter, in which case duplication will be more difficult – I’ll have it all worked out, if it takes a lifetime. If I’ve got a lifetime …’
‘Go on about the record.’
‘Oh yes. I’ve had to take the turntable pin off the radiogram and install an insulated cog in its place, over which the record just fits. As you can see, two brushes are in permanent contact with the top of the cog; they’re plugged into a transformer off the mains, so that a permanent current of 40 volts is fed into the record as it revolves. Shall I switch on?’
He did not know what was coming and his scientific interest was aroused, so he said – still clinging to disbelief: ‘What sort of a circuit have you got inside the record?’
As I described, I sketched on a bit of paper. ‘Some of the wiring I cannot understand,’ I confessed. ‘The frozen signal feeds to a video amplifier and then splits into restorer circuits – you’ll see if you don’t think them the sweetest little jobs you’ve ever set eyes on! – and the ordinary synchronising separator and horizontal and vertical deflecting circuits (which, by the way, are self-controlled on a fluid-drive principle).
‘Here the two circuits join onto what acts, as far as I can see, as the hind part of an image orthicon. There’s a photocathode to take the light image and a quite ordinary electron lens system which focuses the electrons on to the target, the target being this superfine ‘film’ glass which is our smooth groove. From then on it’s all my own work. As you can see, I’ve broken down one of our image orthicons and fixed it up so that when the turntable turns the fine-mesh screen is touching the smooth groove the whole time.’
‘In other words, you’ve got half the image orthicon in the record and the rest outside?’
‘Exactly. Unfortunately it meant a much smaller fine-mesh screen to get in the groove, so that the signal is chopped. However, you’ll see enough to get a good scare. From there, it’s plain sailing. These are the leads to the cathode ray tube – ’
‘What about your sound circuit?’ he asked.
‘Same as normal – our normal. Grooves run between the video grooves. They’re insulated, of course. Featherweight pickup. Twenty-eight revs per minute. I’ve just had to put a little boost on the amplifier. Shall I switch on?’ My palms were sweating.
Harry stared blankly out of the window and whispered to himself: ‘A television recording!’ Then he said: ‘Seems a funny thing to want to have.’
‘It comes from a funny civilisation,’ I answered.
‘Switch on,’ he said.
The screen came alive with a shot of the police station in which the evidence on the smoof had been gathered. What a station it was, an ugly saucer-shaped metal affair built into and round the asteroid Eros, which had been pressed into a new orbit to swing it as far out as Jupiter and as near in as Mercury. Lord, but it looked dismal – and half-finished. Perhaps, after all, I had not fixed the disc up too well, because we got a flicker of stills, some discontinuous, and most with a shower of ‘noise’ across them, so that you could not help getting the idea that our descendants were slipshod, imagination outriding inclination, invention outpacing execution.
We flicked inside the Eros station. Dirt, peeling walls, and a great bank of instruments a block long, before which a broken-nosed officer slouched. ‘Exterminate der wrongdoer!’ he said, as a voice announced him as High Space-Dick Hagger. He had been in charge of this smoof’s case since –
Grimy sheds that only on this second showing I realised to be dwelling quarters. This time I caught a name too. Bristol. Pronounced Brissol. Or perhaps it was Brussels, after all. Either way – ugh! Just a lot of giant shanties with ugly plumbing, stretching out to a mile-wide desert, after which they began again and spread to the horizon. The desert was a landing-ground for rockets after their long supersonic glide in from space. We saw one come in – and plough straight into the shanties. Explosion. Fire. ‘Dis was smoof work,’ said the terse commentator.
We saw the shanties up again. There was a shot of the inside of somewhere, and then more shanties; they flickered – vanished, and there was a forest there instead. ‘More smoof work. Time-sliding …’
‘Good for them!’ I whispered. Those trees were the first bit of beauty we had seen.
Venus next. A human settlement, half underground, on a mountain range. Clouds, desolation. The commentary was desperately hard to follow, the language sounding like some kind of verbal shorthand. We were evidently having a flashback. Men crawled in the muck of a ravine, erecting more buildings, drilling, blasting, and all the while weighed down with space suits. ‘Foul atmosphere. Carbon doxide n’ bacillae,’ the commentary grunted.
Inside
