“I awoke when the Martian dawn was coming on.  Slumber had given me the last reassurance of identity of body, and I awoke with a delightful sense of health and youth.  I stood at the wide window near my bed and gazed out upon the yet luminous City of Occupation.  The picture was of surprising strangeness and beauty.  Far off, until melting into the encroaching edges of an outer blackness, the City extended its folds and surfaces of light.  The streets were empty, the music of the Chorus Halls stilled.  Here and there, a spirit was moving slowly through the streets, a half-made Martian; a breeze soft and salubrious stirred the thickly leaved trees and the firmament shone with the larger stars, beginning to pale before the rising sun.  As the sun rose higher, the effulgence of the City died away, the light of the same great orb which brings the dawn to you, covered with its rays the white and glorious City, the music seemed again revived, and from the doorways of the houses I could see forms issuing, while far off the Hill of the Phosphori raised its glass domes in the air, where the homogeneous tide of spirit was undergoing differentiation, as we might say, into separate cognizable, discreet beings.  An unspeakable delight filled me.  I felt the power of mind and with it the radiant energy of manhood.”

No more words came.  The message ended.  Not a motion or sound succeeded this wonderful trans-abysmal dispatch.

Well, here, at last, was the long expected, impossible, amazing reality.  When I had deciphered the last word, when I had it borne fully in upon me, the significance of it all, I turned to the one natural effort to answer this Martian communication.  I sent out from the battery of our transmitter the longest wave of magnetic oscillation I could emit.  The message was simple:  “Have received all.  Await more.  Transmission perfect.”

CHAPTER IV.

Again for weeks I watched the station.  My assistants relieved me, and amongst them was now included Miss Dodan.  It was only a few days after the Dodans found me at the register, absorbed in receiving my father’s message, that Miss Dodan called.  She ran toward me at the open door of the station, her face fixed in an anxious expression of half-alarmed expectation.

“Did you really, Mr. Dodd, hear anything?  Is it true that something came from your father.  Oh, tell me, can it be possible?”

I took her clasped hands in my own, looked into her face and told her everything.  She was the first visitor to the station since the day of the marvellous experience.  My assistants had promised secrecy, which I reinforced effectively by doubling their salaries.  I felt I ought not to have revealed this thing to Miss Dodan, and when in the first impulse of confidence everything so unwittingly passed my lips, I took her arm in mine and walked out upon the broad plateau toward the opposite end where our smaller experimenting station had been built.