FROM ANOTHER WORLD
One warm evening in July after the chores were done, I was sitting on the kitchen steps of my farmhouse, on Chappiquiddick Island off the coast of Massachusetts, idly glancing through theBoston Post of that morning, when for some reason the following item happened to attract my attention:
MADMAN TERRORIZES G. E. PLANT IN LYNN
LYNN.—A maniac, clad only in a nightgown, broke into the General Electric laboratory in Lynn yesterday evening, and frightened the night operator, who thought he was a ghost.
Patrick Mulcahy, the night operator, was seated in the radio room with the highpowered receiving set in action, when suddenly the intruder appeared before him. As Mulcahy jumped to his feet in surprise, the madman approached him, muttering some unintelligible gibberish, whereupon Mulcahy emptied his automatic at the other, and fled.
The employment manager of the G. E. Company, when interviewed late last evening, stated that Mulcahy was a total abstainer; and bloodstains on the floor confirm Mulcahy’s story.
It is believed that the disturber is an escaped inmate of Danvers, but the asylum authorities deny the loss of any of their patients.
Whoever he is, the man is still at large.
“Such a clumsy fabrication,” thought I. “It is too bad that theBoston Post has fallen so low as to print such an old, old gag.”
Then I laid down the paper, and let my mind wander as it willed. The episode which I had just read had occurred in theradio room of the General Electric Company. Radio! That word suggested to me the greatest radio genius whom I have ever known: Myles Standish Cabot, of Boston.
He had been a classmate, and friend of mine. He had mysteriously disappeared from his laboratory on Beacon Street, and nothing further had been heard of him until one night four years later, when a hollow projectile had dropped from the sky onto my farm, bearing in its interior a holographic account of my friend’s adventure during the preceding four years.
This story I had edited, and it appeared under the title “The Radio Man.” It related how Myles, while experimenting with the wireless transmission of matter, had accidentally projected himself through space to the planet Venus. This accounted for his mysterious disappearance.
He had found the planet inhabited by a race of human-like creatures—called Cupians—with antennae instead of ears, who were living in slavery under the Formians, a gigantic breed of intelligent black ants. Myles Cabot had devised artificial electrical antennae, so as to be able to talk with both races, and had organized the Cupians, and led them to victory over their oppressors, thereby winning an honored position among them, and the hand of their princess, the lovely Lilla.
Strange that a news item about a crazy man in a nightgow
