Declare

glanced around the plaster walls of the bare room for an electrical outlet, and saw none. “And figure a way to hook the plug into one of the light sockets.”
    * * *
    At last Hale sat on the floor with the headphones on and several of the book’s endpapers laid out in front of him, and he turned up the set’s rheostat until the valve glowed yellow; then he turned the condenser knob, and the set began oscillating—he could hear the rushing sound in the phones, and when he touched the wire between the grid condenser and the secondary coil he heard a satisfactory thud. For a few seconds he could hear a faint high-speed clicking that would be caused by the sparks in the distributor of some nearby automobile, a problem he had seldom had on the Île St.-Louis, but it soon faded.
    “So far so good,” he said. “Let’s see if Moscow is back on the air yet.”
    He tuned the condenser knob to the 49-meter bandwidth and tapped out KLK KLK KLK DE ETC on the key, then reset the dial to the 39-meter bandwidth for receiving. Even transmitting for only a few seconds had misted his forehead with sweat—the current he was using was not wired in from a neighboring house anymore, and the Abwehr and SS direction-finders were supposedly always noting illicit broadcasts and laying out direction lines on street maps; already if they were quick they might have triangulated this block.
    Abruptly he was getting a strong Morse signal over the phones, and he lunged for the pencil to begin copying.
    ETC ETC ETCETCCCTTTEEE. The dits and dahs were coming so quickly that they were nearly a rattle. He could only lift the pencil from the paper and wait for the signal to slow down.
    “It’s crazy,” he said in a tight voice. “It’s clear, but he’s sending like a lunatic.”
    “That tube is glowing purple,” said Elena softly, pointing.
    Hale glanced at the alternating current valve through sweat-stung eyes—there was a purple glow in the glass, which generally meant ionized air in the vacuum; that would weaken the signal, though, and in fact the signal was coming through with razor clarity—
    —but so rapidly now that it was just a rough buzz, and so painfully loud that he clawed off the headphones and tossed them onto the floor. Even so he could hear the noise clearly.
    It wasn’t musical, but it seemed to be pulsating in a deliberate rhythm—and both Hale and Elena inhaled audibly as they recognized the drop-and-double-beat measure they had patterned their footsteps on last night. Hale’s pulse was twitching the collar of his shirt, and so he could see that the rhythm was in perfect counter-point with his heartbeat, and he guessed that Elena’s heart was pounding in exact synchronization with his, and with the barbaric drumbeat or inorganic chanting that was shaking out of the headphones. His ears popped as if with increased air pressure, and he was irrationally sure that something out of a nightmare had come down from the stars to hang over the house, filling the sky.
    Hale flinched and dropped the pencil, and from the corner of his eye he saw Elena start back too, at the clear impression of attention being paid to them. It knows me , he thought, and now it knows where I am.
    Horizontal beams of light moving across the dark face of the sea like spokes of a vast turning wheel…
    How far in have I got to get, to know what Lawrence knew?
    Elena was gasping, “Turn it off, turn it off,” even as Hale became aware of an uneven gusting of wind at the window and a rattling of the roof shingles outside, and the smell of wood burning.
    Almost reluctantly, almost despairingly, Hale grabbed the alternating current wire and yanked on it, and the set went dead as the wall lamp and pieces of plaster clattered to the floor.
    Both of them were crouched tensely on the floor, staring at the window, but only the evening breeze sighed in over the sill, with no sounds but distant motors and sirens. In the glow from the lamp on the opposite wall, Hale could see wisps of smoke spin away to invisibility in the fresh air.
    At last he let himself relax, slumping backward to rest on his elbows and rock his head back. The night air was chilly in his damp shirt. “Damn me!” he panted. “Where’s that brandy?”
    Elena’s face was sheened with sweat as she got up on her knees to hand it to him. “Maybe,” she said shakily, “that’s why Centre is letting all the networks be rounded up. Cut off a gangrenous limb.” She took the bottle from