QRM
Originally published The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1957.
There used to be something in the news business known as the summer doldrums. I don’t know what’s become of them. There certainly wasn’t any shortage of news on the night of July 17, 1956. There was a backlog of copy on my desk, waiting to be processed. Nancy Corelli, the operator, had a basketful that I’d already penciled up. It was going off to London as fast as the RTT could handle it, which was only sixty words a minute.
Nancy, a slender pretty brunette who unfortunately happens to be married, was punching away like a demon, cussing a little in Italian, when the operator on the incoming side, across the room, yelled: “London says ZFB, Nan. ZST from 671.”
Maybe I’d better define a few terms, in case you’re not familiar with news agency jargon.
To put first things first, a news agency is an outfit like AP or UP or Reuters or, in my case, World Wide. RTT is radio teletype. At World Wide it’s an ordinary teletype that transmits copy along a land line to Press Wireless, Inc. (Prewi for short), which then beams the impulses across the Atlantic to London, where they come out again as words on a teletype.
ZFB means fading badly and ZST means slips twice—in other words, send all copy twice in succession. This is because atmospherics are getting at the copy, garbling it. If it’s sent twice, the chances are the garbles won’t be in exactly the same places and the story can be deciphered.
So what London was telling us, here in New York, was that our copy had been OK up to number 670 but that they needed repeats on everything after that to help them make it out.
Nancy pulled the tape back about ten numbers to 671 and asked me:
“You want me to go on punching, Sam, or wait till we’re caught up?”
I’m Sam Kent, night editor at World Wide.
“Let it catch up,” I said. “Who knows, we may have a snap.”
AP and UP have bulletins. Reuters and WW have snaps. Same thing.
“In that case I’ll go out to the little girl’s room and powder my nose.”
While Nancy was gone, Bart, the operator on the receiving end of the RTT from London, said:
“It’s starting to break up here, too, Sam.”
Bart made out a message from London just before the RTT was washed out completely. It said:
ZSU LAST RECEIVED 670 RELYING CABLES
ZSU means slips unreadable. I told Nancy when she got back. “Put on a belt,” I said, “and ask Prewi what gives.”
A belt is a length of perforated tape, glued into a circle, which goes through the transmitter and sends on the RTT, over and over, a series of lines that look like this:
QRA QRA DE WFK40 WFK40 VIA PREWI/NY RYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRY QRA QRA DE WFK40 WFK40 VIA PREWI/NY RYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRY
They’re the call letters for the radio frequency assigned to WW by the FCC and when London can read them again they send us a ZOK. Then we take the belt off and start sending copy again.
Nancy hung up the phone, which is a direct line, and told me:
“Prewi doesn’t know what’s wrong. They’re trying to run it down. Anything you want cabled?”
I thought about it. WW was in the throes of one of its economy drives and a story had to be pretty hot to warrant cabling. The last London received was 670. That was the story about Miss Israel refusing to pose with Miss Germany at the Miss Universe contest at Long Beach. “Old antagonisms flared tonight…” was what our west coast stringer had led with. Good stuff.
671 was a rehash of the Clare Boothe Luce arsenic poisoning story. That could wait.
672 was the Dodgers losing again, this time in Cincinnati, and Duke Snider getting into a rhubarb with a fan. The English couldn’t care less, but London sent the scores back on its beam to Bermuda where, for some reason, they’re baseball crazy. The Dodgers could wait, too.
673 was no clues in the Weinberger kidnapping. A negative story, unfortunately. No urgency on that one.
674 was the curtain-raiser on four-year-old Mike Sibole, who was to lose his left eye the next day in an operation. He’d already lost his right eye in a surgical attempt to arrest cancer of the retina. I’d cable that one later if the RTT wasn’t restored.
“Nothing worth cabling now,” I told Nancy. I went back to penciling up some copy, dutifully inserting the u’s and changing the zeds to esses in words like color and authorization, to conform with British English.
Nancy’s phone rang and Prewi told her they were getting QRM on our frequency from an unidentified station and that there was no other frequency available for us at the moment. QRM is interference.
“They’re working on it,” Nancy said.
“OK. Take a break.”
She opened her copy of House and Garden and I started a freshener on the steel strike. The belt went round and round, printing line after line of WFK40’s.
Then the belt stopped. Sometimes it will do that. The glue holding the two ends of the tape comes loose and the little posts in the transmitter hit a blank on the tape instead of the perforations and the machine stops. Nancy put down her magazine and took out the loop to examine it.
It seemed to be all right and she was about to put it back when the RTT started clicking.
“That’s funny,” Nancy said. “I’m not sending.”
Copy was appearing on the roll of paper in the teletype. It was odd because ours is a sending-only circuit. London’s traffic to us came in on the receiving-only machines at Bart’s side of the room.
“Maybe Prewi put a test belt on,” I said. They could do that, to check circuit trouble.
“That’s no test belt. Look at it.” It certainly wasn’t. It was in the form of a news story but its form was the only thing about it that made sense.
It said:
IVST, RARN, 803 YAVI (URP)-MIYALLO NEEN PRAX, FUTURE REGENT OF RARN, WAS BORN WITHOUT VARIANCE TODAY, AS FORETOLD IN THE ANNALS OF ADUMBRATION. THERE WAS GENERAL REJOICING. DURGO HAK PRAX, THE PRESENT REGENT, COMMENTED: “GOOD. NOW I CAN PREPARE FOR ELDER STEWARDSHIP.”
“Madonna!” said Nancy.
“Urp,” I said, looking over her shoulder. “What the hell is Urp?”
“Maybe it should be UP. I’ll ask Prewi if they’ve got our wires crossed with United’s.”
“UP doesn’t use Press Wireless,” I said. “Besides, what kind of dateline is that? UP has stringers in some of the damnedest places, but who ever heard of Ivst, Rarn?”
“What’s 803 Yavi?”
“What it is I can’t imagine, but where it is, is where the date would be, just before the logo. If that is a logo—Urp.”
“You sound like you’ve got gas. I’ll get Prewi on it anyway.” She picked up her phone.
“No, wait. Another one’s coming. Let’s see what it says.”
This is what it said:
ESTEDDIS, O.D.K., 803 YAVI (URP)-ESTEDDIS SHREDDED VISITING BLASHTI 647 TO 5 TODAY IN A VARIANCE-FILLED THRILLER AT GLERE OVAL AND MOVED TO THE CHALLENGE STAGE OF THE TERTIARY GRIADS.
“Urp.” Nancy said it this time.
“And 803 Yavi. That much is consistent. But where the hell is Esteddis?”
“In O.D.K., obviously. Is that one of the Canadian provinces, like P.E.I.?”
“No. And what they’re talking about isn’t ice hockey, either.”
“Here comes another one.”
We watched it. Bart wandered over from the incoming side, took a look and said, “What the hell? Who’s sending?”
“The RTT’s haunted,” Nancy told him. “We’re getting a ghost station.”
“Somebody’s kidding around,” Bart said. “Some wise guy at Prewi.”
“I don’t think so. They don’t kid like that.”
The latest story was the shortest so far:
BLECH, 803 YAVI (URP)-A WAVE OF SELLING SWEPT THE WODIBLE MARKET TODAY BEFORE A VARIANCE WAS TRACED AND A RETROACTIVITY RULING NULLIFIED LOSSES.
“It’s a market report,” Bart said. “They trade in wodibles. But where’s Blech?”
“Exactly,” Nancy said. “And what are wodibles? You’re a big help. Sam, remember that story we had from Ohio a couple of weeks ago? About the astronomer who was getting radio signals from Venus? Maybe that’s what this is.”
“Nuts,” I said. “I think Bart’s right. Somebody at Prewi’s horsing around. Call ’em up. We’ve got copy to move.”
She picked up the phone, then put it back in its cradle while she watched the newest item print itself on the machine:
HEAR!
LICH, VASZ, 803 YAVI (URP)—J J J J J J J
“It’s a snap,” Nancy said. “Only they call it a hear. It must be pretty big—the operator’s so excited he forgot to hit the figure key for the bells.”
The bell on the teletype is the upper-case J.
“Something big on Venus, eh?” I said to Nancy. “Like maybe the sun coming out?”
“Why not Venus? Lich, Vasz, certainly isn’t in Massachusetts.”
Whoever was sending found the bell key, finally, and rang it a few times, then went on with the item:
…THE MURANDER WORKS AT ONCH EXPLODED WITH A VENUS-SHAKING ROAR TODAY…
“It is Venus!” Nancy shrieked.
…AND FIRST REPORTS SAID 43 YERVI WHO HAD BEEN CONDUCTING SECRET LOCHASA RESEARCH WERE FEARED KILLED. THE EXPLOSION CAME WITHOUT WARNING AT THE VARIANCE-PRONE INSTALLATION NEAR LICH.
“You see! You see!” Nancy was bouncing in her chair. “It is Venus! I told you!”
“Or else somebody with a powerful imagination,” I said. “Get Prewi on the phone and see who’s doing it.”
“OK, skeptical Sam. OK.” She talked to somebody at the other end, then announced: “Nobody’s doing it.”
“Of course somebody is. Tell them to look at their monitor.”
She spoke to Prewi again, then said: “They don’t have a monitor on.”
“Isn’t that just fine? Well, will you ask them to be so kind as to put one on, if it’s not too goddam much trouble? Madonna!”
Nancy giggled and relayed my message, censoring it.
Meanwhile our friend Urp, the phantom usurper of our RTT, was carrying on in fine fettle, switching from dateline to dateline like an alien Walter Winchell.
URDI-UM-FEEB 803 YAVI (URP)-THE 44 NAMES OF ORCHANA-TU WERE RECITED IN SOLEMN GORTEMIS TODAY BY 44 YOF FROM KLEMP. 44,000 VARIANCE-FREE NOVANTIA IN TRADITIONAL SKON CROWDED THE OOS.
“I just had a horrible thought,” I said. “Is this stuff all going to London?”
“I guess so,” Nancy said. “If it’s coming out here I don’t see why they wouldn’t be getting it, too.”
“Oh, great! They’ll think we’re drunk.”
KRON, 803 YAVI (URP)-A DISSUE TO CONTINUE FUNDS FOR BI-LINGUAL DIFFUSION MET OPPOSITION FROM THE ECONOMY BLOC IN THE LOWER GORB TODAY. SNEEM, A YOUNGER FROM ERST, K.V.R., DECLARED THAT THE COST OF MAINTAINING THE AUTOMATIC TRANSLATOR WAS BOTH PROHIBITIVE AND A COMPLETE WASTE.
HE FOR ONE FOUND IT DISTASTEFUL TO BE SUBJECTED TO WHAT HE CALLED “THAT BARBAROUS GUTTURALITY, ENGLISH” EVERY TIME HIS TUNER DRIFTED.
SNEEM SAID HE APPRECIATED THE SCHOLARLY ASPECTS OF STUDYING THE CHIEF LANGUAGE OF THE ONE OTHER KNOWN INHABITED PLANET IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM BUT ASKED WHY SCHOLARSHIP WAS NOT LIMITED TO SCHOLARS INSTEAD OF BEING INFLICTED ON THE ENTIRE POPULATION.
SPEAKER DITCHIE INTERRUPTED TO SAY THERE WERE SECURITY REASONS FOR THE DIFFUSION WITH WHICH SNEEM MIGHT NOT BE FAMILIAR. SNEEM THEN MOVED FOR A CLOSED HEARING.
“NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE,” SNEEM COMMENTED.
“So that’s why their stuff is in English,” I said.
“Getting less skeptical, aren’t you?” Nancy said. “They’re having a hot appropriations debate in their Congress, just like we do. Only they call it the Gorb.”
“I admit the homey details enhance its credibility,” I said. “Their automatic translator would seem to be more powerful than they know. And Earth’s signals must be pretty strong, if they’ve learned English.”
“Don’t forget that astronomer in Ohio. He got Venus, too.”
“He’s a radio astronomer. There’s a difference. And he only got signals, not messages.”
“Of course not. He probably didn’t have a teletype.”
“Hm,” I said. It sounded logical.
“I wonder about those security reasons they shut that fellow Sneem up with,” Nancy said, rereading the dispatch from Kron, which presumably was the capital city. “Sounds ominous.”
“Let’s not get too dramatic, Nancy.”
“No? Where do you stop?”
A machine behind us began to chatter and produced a cable from London:
40248 EXTRAFFIC WFK40 GOOD SIGNAL BUT CONSIDERABLE QRM EXUNIDENTIFIED STATION LAST RECEIVED 670 RELYING CABLES
“They’re getting it, too,” Nancy said.
“They’re getting something. But if they can read it they’re being pretty phlegmatic about it.”
“That’s only Traffic. The Second Coming wouldn’t excite them. Anything you want cabled?”
“No, thanks. We’ll ride it out a while longer. It can’t last forever.”
“No? Here they come again.”
ALIENS OUT
KRON, 803 YAVI (URP)-PREPARATIONS FOR NULLIFICATION OF THE EARTH MENACE RECEIVED A SETBACK TODAY WITH THE EXPLOSION OF THE MURANDER WORKS AT ONCH. ELDERS SAID THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORKS ITSELF, THOUGH SERIOUS, AND THE PRESUMED LOSS OF A SUPPLY OF LOCHASA WERE LESS DISTRESSING THAN THE REPORTED DEATH OF THE 43 YERVI.
CONCENTRATION OF SCARCE YERVI IN ONE WORKS CAME UNDER RENEWED CRITICISM IN THE UPPER GORB AND ELDER BLANG IMMEDIATELY PROPOSED A DISSUE TO LIMIT THEIR NUMBER AT ANY CRITICAL FACILITY TO SIX. HE POINTED OUT THAT THE EARTH NULLIFICATION PROGRAM REQUIRED
BUST BUST BUST
KILL KILL KILL
ATTENTION ALL DIFFUSERS KILL KRON ITEM ON PREPARATIONS FOR NULLIFICATION. A KILL IS MANDATORY
URP/ESTEDDIS
Bells accompanying the kill rang for a full half minute.
“Oh-oh,” Nancy said. “Some Urp forgot to throw the switch. There’ll be hell to pay in their head office.” I knew what she meant. The item had been distinctly slugged “Aliens Out” and should never have been put on the beam. It must have been like AP’s “NYC Out,” which means the AP, having picked up an item from one New York paper, throws a switch on the teletype circuit so the item doesn’t go out to competing papers.
Presumably URP’s radiocasts in English were for home consumption only, to indoctrinate the Venusians. It’s always useful to know your enemy’s language. The “Aliens Out” slug probably was no more than a precaution; there had been no hint in URP’s account of the appropriations fight in the Lower Gorb that the Venusians knew their radiocasts were piercing their cloud blanket and reaching Earth.
Nor was there any hint that the average Venusian—the man in the street in Kron, or Esteddis, or Urdi-um-Feeb—though exposed to the barbarous gutturalities of English, knew there was such a thing as an Earth menace or that the Youngers and Elders in his Gorb were secretly planning an interplanetary invasion.
All at once I was thoroughly convinced it was no joke. It was too authentically complicated to be the work of some character fooling around with a teletype.
All the evidence pointed to the likelihood that the leaders of an alien race were out to give Earth the business because we had newly become a menace.
I could imagine why they might think so—our atomics, our rockets, our artificial satellites were all leading to space flight, and before long our neighboring planets would be within range of our not-always-benevolent science.
“What do they mean by Earth nullification?” Nancy asked. “What’s lochasa?”
I made the gesture of drawing my finger across my throat.
“You mean Venus is going to attack Earth?”
“It’s an informed guess,” I said. “All I know is what I read on their wire. The question is, what do we do about it? You believe it and I believe it, finally, but would anybody else?”
“Like the FBI, for instance?”
“Or the CIA. God knows it’s no miserable little flying saucer sighting. We’ve got it in writing. And quadruplicate at that. Better save all four RTT copies—and the carbon paper. Has Prewi got a monitor on yet? They’d be another witness.”
Nancy picked up her phone to Press Wireless and I made my decision. I dialed Operator on my desk phone and asked for the Central Intelligence Agency.
* * * *
They had a man in the office four minutes after I hung up. He had been working in the building for years—I recognized him as Jonesie, one of our more literate night elevator operators. I don’t know why he’d been planted there unless the CIA figured any building so full of international press services and foreign correspondents might also contain a spy.
Jonesie—the name was highly inappropriate now as I watched him go to work—looked at the Urp copy, took notes from Nancy, Bart and me, talked to Prewi on the phone, checked back with Washington and then stared at the now-silent RTT.
“Was that Kron item they killed the last one you received?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Nancy said, still a bit awed by the transformation of Jonesie, humble elevator operator, into Jones, secret agent. “It’s as if they got panicky and pulled the switch to cut everybody out.”
Then she jumped as the RTT started up again.
We waited tensely to see what it would say. But all we got were foxes:
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER A LAZY DOG’S BACK 1234567890 PW SENDING
It was Press Wireless running a test belt.
Presently Nancy’s phone rang and Prewi told her she was back on the air to London.
She shrugged and sorted through her old tape to number 671.
“Well,” she asked me, “shall I put it in?”
I shrugged and turned to Jones. He shrugged too, but said decisively, “Go ahead. I’d say we’ve got all we can hope for here.”
Nancy put the tape in the transmitter and ordinary old U.S. copy began flowing again:
W671
ARSENIC ONE (EXKENT)
NEW YORK, JULY 17 (WW)-A PAINT INDUSTRY SPOKESMAN AND A GOVERNMENT CHEMIST DIFFERED TODAY ON WHETHER IT WAS POSSIBLE FOR AMBASSADOR CLARE BOOTHE LUCE TO HAVE BEEN POISONED BY ARSENIC PARTICLES FLAKING OFF PAINT ON HER BEDROOM CEILING IN ROME AND INTO HER MORNING COFFEE.…
A few minutes later we got a cable from London saying:
40402 EXTRAFFIC WFK40 QRM ENDED ZOK ZSO CEASE CABLES
“Blasé bunch,” I said. “Not a word about Urp. Or,” I turned to Jones, “about whether your opposite number is investigating from that end.”
Jones chose to be dense. “I beg your pardon?” he said.
“MI5,” I said. “British Intelligence. They must be looking into it, too.”
“Must they?” he said. He gathered papers together, leaving us one of the four copies of the Urp stories and giving me a receipt for the rest.
He was just as noncommittal with Nancy when she asked if the CIA knew of any other communications from Venus, or whether there’d been any previous suspicion of an interplanetary invasion.
Jones merely smiled and said, “Good night. Thank you for your cooperation. I’m afraid I won’t be seeing you in the elevator anymore.” And he was gone.
Bart’s and Nancy’s relief operators came in. Nancy paused at the door on her way to the subway.
“Jonesie—I mean Jones—didn’t swear us to secrecy,” she said. “Isn’t that funny?”
He hadn’t, come to think of it. “I guess he was being realistic,” I said. “Anyway, who’d believe us?”
“I guess that’s right. I’m beginning to doubt it already. Madonna! Good night, Sam.”
“Good night, Nan. Pleasant dreams.”
* * * *
Charlie Price, the overnight editor, came in to relieve me at 1 A.M. He had on the gloomy face he wore whenever the Dodgers lost.
“Baseball’s all cleaned up,” I told him, avoiding particulars so as not to rub it in. “Nothing’s hanging, but you might keep an eye on the steel strike. There could be a leak about a settlement.”
“The air OK?” Charlie asked, meaning were we running ZOK to London.
“Oh, some QRM washed us out for an hour or two but we’re restored now. Some other station got mixed up on our frequency and we were getting their copy for a while. Prewi straightened it out.” I nodded knowingly.
I didn’t feel like going all through it with Charlie.
“Same thing happened to me a couple of years ago,” he said. “France Presse copy started coming in on our machine. Couldn’t make head or tail out of it. All in French.”
“This wasn’t quite the same thing,” I said. “I left a memo for the dayside under the basket. You’ll see it.”
He shrugged.
“I’ll look at it later. As long as the air’s OK again.”
“It’s OK. Good night, Charlie.”
I wondered how he’d react to the memo. “Everything’s OK, I guess.”
I hope it is.
That was six months ago. The CIA hasn’t said a word to me since that night. There’s been nothing from London, either, even in WW’s confidential correspondence, to hint that Britain’s MI5 is unduly alarmed. I guess things are under control.
Even so, I take an acuter interest in the state of our military preparedness now. I’m an obsessive reader of everything I can find about progress in guided missiles and high-altitude rockets and I’m an advocate of bigger and better artificial satellites, preferably armed to the teeth.
And when I drive home at night I look up into the sky quite often.
But of course if you were to ask me I’d never admit I was looking for a ship full of yervi bringing lochasa from Onch.
Madonna!