Mr. Artesian Pitts, the well-known imaginative historian:  “I have long held the belief that Saturn is inhabited by a type of being possessing a cylinder-like body composed of an unresisting pulp, a high dome-shaped head filled with gas, and long tentacles, bristling with electricity, through which all sensations are emitted and received.  These tentacles would act as an ideal telephonic apparatus, so that there is every likelihood of Mr. Dottle’s having actually received a message from Saturn.  I take ‘Gurroo’ to be Saturnian for ‘Hello.’”

Signor Tromboni, the pioneer of wireless telephony:  “We are making arrangements to test Mr. Dottle’s interesting theory, and for this purpose are erecting a special installation on the top of Mt.  Kilimanjaro, which is several thousand feet higher than Lavender Hill.  At our own stations we have frequently noticed mysterious ringings, which we have hitherto ascribed to carelessness on the part of operators; but Mr. Dottle’s letter opens up a new world of possibilities. The Daily Mandate is to be congratulated on the prominence it has given to the subject, which has already had the effect of sending Tromboni shares up several points.”

Mr. G. Shawburn:  “It is an insult to Creation to assume that ours is the only populated planet.  Of course Saturn is inhabited, but, unlike our own world, by people of intelligence.  In the matter of mental advancement Saturn can make rings round the earth.  All the same I don’t for one moment suppose that Mr. Dottle knows what he’s talking about.”

The POSTMASTER-GENERAL:  “Nothing is known in the Department under my control of telephone calls having been received from Saturn or the neighbourhood.  I do not propose for the present to take any steps in the matter.”

The LORD MAYOR:  “Saturn is a long way off.”

III.

(Extract from leading article.)

“...  Again we ask, ‘What is the Government doing?’ For several days now our columns have been ringing with the world-wide acclamation of this stupendous discovery, beside the potentialities of which the wildest efforts of imaginative literature are reduced to pallid and uninspired commonplaces.  Even so cautious a scientist as Sir Potiphar Shucks has declared that the idea of Saturn being inhabited is one that ’should not lightly be set aside,’ and has announced his conviction that under favourable conditions communication with that planet should in the near future become ‘an accomplished fact.’  Other eminent leaders of thought and action, including Signor Tromboni, are even more enthusiastic in their reception of the great theory first given to the world by Mr. Diogenes Dottle in a letter to The Daily Mandate.  But the POSTMASTER-GENERAL is content to treat the question with the airy scepticism and obstructive complacency that have rendered the London Telephone service a byword of inefficiency, and refuses even to make a grant in aid of the work of investigation.