appalling. The Joint Chiefs of Staff take it very seriously,
in any case. They--"

"I got cold shivers," said Sergeant Bellews with irony. "I'm all wrought
up. Huh! The big brass gets the yellin' yollups every so often anyhow.
Listen to them, and nothin' happens except it's top priority top secret
extra crash emergency! What do you want to know about Betsy?"

There was a sudden squealing sound from the communicator on which all
the extra recording devices were focussed. Betsy's screen lighted up.
Peculiarly curved patterns appeared on it. They shifted and changed.
Noises came from her speaker. They were completely unearthly. Now they
were shrill past belief, and then they were chopped into very small bits
of sound, and again they were deepest bass, when each separate note
seemed to last for seconds.

"You might," said Lecky calmly, "tell us from where your Betsy gets the
signal she reports in this fashion."

There were whirrings as recorders trained upon Betsy captured every
flickering of her screen and every peeping noise or deep-toned rumble.
The screen-pattern changed with the sound, but it was not linked to it.
It was a completely abnormal reception. It was uncanny. It was somehow
horrible because so completely remote from any sort of human
communication in the year 1972.

The three scientists watched with worried eyes. A communicator, even
with a Mahon unit in it, could not originate a pattern like this! And
this was not conceivably a distortion of anything transmitted in any
normal manner in the United States of America, or the Union of Compubs,
or any of the precariously surviving small nations not associated with
either colossus.

"This is a repeat broadcast!" said one of the three men suddenly. It was
Howell, the heavy-set man. "I remember it. I saw it projected--like
this, and then unscrambled. I think it's the one where the social
system's described--so we can have practice at trying to understand.
Remember?"

* * * * *

Lecky said, as if the matter had been thrashed out often before:

"I do not believe what it says, Howell! You know that I do not believe
it! I will not accept the theory that this broadcast comes from the
future!"

The broadcast stopped. It stopped dead. Betsy's screen went blank. Her
wildly fluctuating standby light slowed gradually to a nearly normal
rate of flicker.

"That's not a theory," said Howell dourly. "It's a statement in the
broadcast