Tracked by Wireless

Geoffrey Falconer removed the wireless telephone receivers from his ears, and sat back in his wooden chair, staring straight before him, utterly puzzled.

“Eighteen-and-a-half minutes past seven!” he muttered to himself, glancing up at the big round clock above the long bench upon which a number of complicated-looking wireless instruments were set out.

In front of him were half-a-dozen square mahogany boxes with tops of ebonite and circles of brass studs, with white circular dials and black knobs and a panel of ebonite with four big electric globes for wireless transmission. Across the table ran many red, white, and green wires from a perfect maze of brass terminal screws, while in one oblong box there burned brightly seven little tube-shaped electric glow-lamps, the valves of the latest instrument which amplified the most feeble signals coming in from space from every part of the western world. It was the newest wireless device for the reception of weak signals and he himself had made an improvement upon it, a new microphone amplifier which was at present his own secret.

“Eighteen-and-a-half minutes past seven!” he repeated. “Always at the same moment that strange signal is repeated three times. And not Morse—certainly not in the Morse code. It’s a most mysterious note,” he went on, speaking to himself. “Others must surely hear it—or else my amplifier is so ultra-sensitive that I alone am able to listen.”