The Great Radio Peril
Astounding – April 1937
(1937)*
Eric Frank Russell

	The long-suffering public had endured it since the 1955 International Radio Convention broke up in disorder, after representatives of eight countries had given a final, defiant twist to their mustaches and walked out. That was four years before, four years of raucous prostitution of the either. Now, the 1959 convention had disrupted in a flood of mutual recriminations. The listener sat in front of his receiver and bewared the wrath to come.

	Within a week seven European countries had doubled the power of their chief transmitters: within another week ten more countries had retaliated. Radio was too useful a weapon of propaganda to have its edge dulled by rivals. The already powerful Deutschlandsender boosted itself to the unheard-of strength of twelve thousand kilowatts. Moscow followed suit. Prague tailed after. Every nation made, up its mind that it was degrading to the national spirit to allow itself to be outshouted by neighbors. Great Britain knocked down its recently completed Voice Of Albion and proceeded to replace it with what was expected to prove the biggest noise ever.

	Stations crammed the air cheek by jowl, bellowing, bawling and treading on each other's corns. Manufacturers of radio receivers worked desperately to provide the public with sets having a guaranteed selectivity of two kilocycles. Some did it; some didn't, and the successful ones were not much better off than those who failed.

	In countries where radio transmission was the favored child of commercial advertisers, price of time on the air became determined by the power of the station used as well as by the period of time taken up. It cost twice as much to extol the virtues of laxatives from WRSA as it did from WBGZ. Where radio was a government-controlled monopoly the public, as usual, had to take what it was given and like it or lump it. Those who just couldn't take it spun the dial and let a foreigner throw it at them. Propaganda was the mainstay of the daily program, each day and every day. Voices sharp and sure, mellifluous or pontifical, dinned into a multitude of aching cars the benefits of this "ity" or that "ism".

	The daily press, or part of it, took due note of the babel. Publications whose policy disagreed with that of local transmissions gave space to hundreds of protesting letters from irate readers. Those whose policy was completely in accord with broadcast hokum found space for such missives in the editorial waste-basket.

	Press interest in international-radio mania died out when a Mrs. Artiglio Spotti suddenly gave birth to a family of six. The little man who served behind a counter, piloted a brewer's dray, or rushed to catch the eight twenty-five to the office every morning, was forced to surrender his views anent radio and take an interest in what the sextuplets were fed upon, how they were given it and who gave it 'em. Left-wing sheets dropped their acidulated comments concerning wireless jabber and indulged in odious comparisons between the lots of those born singly and those who came wholesale.

-

	In June the subject of the moment was food. For some unaccountable reason crops were unsatisfactory. Nature had failed to do her stuff in the manner humans felt they had a right to expect, and the same phenomenon featured over most of the world. Potatoes had flopped; rice crops were fifty per cent below normal; fruit attained luxury prices. China squinted at a quantity of soy beans hardly worth calling by the name. Britain wondered what was happening to its grass and why its hedges were creeping back into earth. Artichoke racketeers in New Jersey looked around for a new medium of iniquity, when artichokes abruptly ceased to be. Italy reaped no cereals, but harvested a crop of lemons the size of gooseberries.

	As the year wore on matters became worse. The United States wheat crop failed dismally and was reported the poorest in history, the price of bread skyrocketed; the cost of living bounced up with it. News leaked out that Elmer C. Schnaksdof, a minor broker, had purchased twelve million bushels of wheat on behalf of the Federal Reserve Board. This was practically three quarters of the quantity on the market. The Chicago Wheat Pit remained open all night, while raving brokers fought for the last barrowload.

	Next day, wheat was not quoted. British bakers put up the price of the four-pound loaf to four shillings and sixpence. The rise in other countries was equal or higher. In ten parts of the world ten armies of unemployed set forth on hunger marches. In a thousand factories the hands downed tools and demanded higher wages.

	Two more months faded from the calendar, and the food problem had assumed the aspect of an international crisis. Famine struck shrewdly at heavily populated and undercivilized districts. A horde of natives from Central China paid their first visit to the sea via the turbulent, yellow waters of the Yangtze, their sightless corpses swollen as they had never been in life.

	Transmitters of the world blared more blatantly than ever. Thundering voices exhorted, cajoled or browbeat the helpless populace, offering a million reasons, a million cures. Technocracy blamed capitalism, capitalism blamed communism; communism passed the buck to the Yellow Peril. Atheists asserted it was the natural result of two thousand years of Christianity; Christians attributed it to general unbelief.

	Churches, chapels and tin tabernacles became packed to their doors, as frenzied congregations battered at the gates of heaven with storms of unceasing petitions. In the Far East a multitude of prayer wheels whirled out their endless O mine padme hum! Every street corner had its prophet predicting death, desolation and the end of all things. As the year entered into its prime the Four Horsemen flung themselves into saddles and spurred through the woods and the dales.

-

	In Liverpool the Hop Sing Tong gathered together the pathetic remnants of its funds, hired a boat and sailed for China. Its members had been quite worthy citizens, but they felt that if one is to starve to death one must hasten to secure burial in the land of his fathers. Ten days after Chinatown had emptied, a great procession wound snakelike out of Liverpool's slums, crawled along the euphemistically-named Park Lane, and slithered to the center of the city. Here it recoiled before a cordon of police.

	The head dissolved into component individuals. The windows of a tool merchant's shop were smashed; growling men grabbed giant spanners, pick helves and rods of steel. The head reformed itself—fanged this time. It struck ferociously, scattering police like chaff before a wind. Unhampered, the snake writhed forward and encircled a great department store.

	Police mustered inside the store behind locked and barricaded doors. The mob moved back to gain momentum, set itself for the rush, then crashed head-long into the shop, carrying doors, barricades and police buoyed up like flotsam on the crest of a roaring wave. Scenes of absolute confusion followed.

	On the second floor, in the lingerie department, a frantic, half-stripped constable viciously batoned a dummy that fell upon him from a stand. In the food department, in the basement, twenty of his fellows fought tooth and nail for dear life. Clad in a commandeered fifty-guinea fur coat, the beefy wife of an unemployed butcher's assistant felled a police sergeant with a sixteen-pound leg of roast pork. Brandishing the joint in one enormous fist, her face purple, she cut a swath through the howling mob, spattering with fat and cracking every countenance that thrust itself into her path.

	The 8th Battalion Mersey Rifles marched out of headquarters with tin hats and fixed bayonets. They reached the store half an hour too late and found it an empty shell standing in littered streets. The 8th Battalion Mersey Rifles made one capture. This was a furtive gentleman who sidled past them hugging a loosely wrapped parcel to his breast. He turned and ran like a hare when suddenly the parcel chimed and struck six. A lanky corporal outpaced him and the clock was added to two other souvenirs; banners inscribed "We Want Food" and "Prepare to Meet Thy God."

	In Glasgow a number of startled Glaswegians witnessed the Battle of Springburn, a bloodthirsty fracas madder than any since the heyday of the Knobbly Boys and Gashouse Gang. Sheffield made good use of its own razors, cut and carved its way to hidden stores of food and did it with fine indiscrimination.

	The Red Belt of Paris tightened about its middle; plate glass worth millions of francs dissolved to splinters under the pressure of hunger.

	Berlin, Madrid, Athens, Rome, Lisbon, Cairo and every other place big enough to have a taxi by its station became the scene of wildest tumult, as citizens sought nourishment. One after another, governments became tired of seeing policemen tossed around and declared martial law.

	Disciplinary declarations were good enough for the purpose of maintaining order, but they compelled no grass to grow. It didn't matter a tinker's cuss whether the declaration was signed by a plain mister or enunciated sonorously by a right honorable, not one bush produced an extra nut in consequence. Armed troops dragooned the populace in the streets; radio bossed them in their homes. The effect had been made to square with the rule of four—but the cause remained.

-

	Newspapers had forgotten the sextuplets and returned to the subject of eats. Fifty of the more high-brow sheets ran special articles purporting to show, in a scientific manner, how diet influenced evolution. The hungry world was told in pedantic phrases that wheat eaters had it all over rice eaters. One British paper was suppressed under the Incitement To Disaffection Act, when it quoted from the unpopular philosopher Revair: "Life is simply one great belly—who strikes at the belly strikes at life."

	In the United States, at Springfield. Mass., a silent, determined mob fought like fiends and overcame a detachment of the national guard. The encounter was bloody in the extreme; the mob was not to be denied and had its way despite tear gas, vomit vapor, machine guns and other instruments of correction. It wrecked the great N.B.C. transmitter, then made for the stores.

	News of this particular incident dribbled slowly around the world, and set in motion a rumor that radio was to blame for the failure of crops. Professor Howard Blakoe. physicist at the University of Delhi, heard the rumor and marveled that the connection had not been perceived long before. He decided that the time was ripe to put forth a stronger effort to tell what he had been trying to tell for weeks. He wrote a long, technical article, passed it to his literary agent, who, to his astonishment, found it accepted by the Times of India.

	The staid and highly conservative Times had no views of its own about the matter, retaining a purely academic interest in a subject that had the virtue of persistent topicality. So the article was printed. It was also syndicated and reappeared in twenty other publications. To Blakoe's disappointment, it did not excite the world-wide interest he had expected. After all, a score of papers touched only the fringe of the reading public. He had the small satisfaction of receiving a few encouraging letters from fellow scientists, one or two of whom announced their intention of seeking evidence to confirm his theories.

	In his article Blakoe made reference to Jungman's experiment, in which that noted research worker had shown that capillary action could be hampered, and even prevented, by the influence of powerful radio waves ranging between twenty and four hundred meters in length.

	It was Blakoe's theory that when they reached a certain concentration radio broadcasts caused electrolysis of the surface molecules of plant liquids, thus breaking surface tension and hampering, or preventing, capillary action. He pointed out that plant life depended upon capillary action for the free flow of natural juices, and that animal life was dependent upon plant life. He concluded with a warning and a suggestion that were both ignored: destruction of plant life would result in the elimination of humanity, unless the world reduced the power of its broadcasts to below the danger point.

	One scientist read Blakoe's article and waxed sarcastic. He wrote to say that he was living within five miles of the great Toulon transmitter, but his capillaries were still working O. K., thank you. Fourteen junkers of various nationalities forwarded missives telling Blakoe that they saw through his little stunt, and that India was not going to persuade everybody to drop out of the ether and leave it clear for her. Blakoe perused all his mail, came to the conclusion that the way of the reformer is hard, and decided to leave the matter in the hands of his few supporters.

-

	Another month trickled into the bottom glass held by Old Man Time; news of the world featured riots and upheavals daily. The S.S.Aoraki arrived at Hull from Samoa, bearing a cargo of copra. Former workers at a local soap factory informed the uneducated that copra was dried coconut flesh. Hungry people did not need to be told more. The Aoraki was raided and her cargo dispersed with lightning speed, while her police guards gave an aquatic display diving from the dock.

	During the same week half the world tumbled to the fact that manufacturers of cattle food held large stocks of locust beans. Not a bean was obtainable by the following Saturday. In every country works and factories closed down, as employees found it necessary to seek and take by force those things wages could not buy.

	Congress sat in Washington and considered a proposal for another radio convention. Two hundred lobbyists, representing American stations, used all their power and influence to see that nothing was done. Outside the White House a simple citizen tried to distribute copies of Blakoe's article and was flung into the gutter by a cop.

	The British Parliament assembled at Westminster to consider a radio proposal emanating from Washington. Seventeen representatives made speeches defending the broadcasting rights of the fighting forces, the clergy, the theatrical world, the department of propaganda, and the Union Jack. One holder of a radio permit, seated in the gallery, showered a handful of leaflets on the floor of the house. The leaflets were reprints of Blakoe's article. The vulgar objector was hustled outside the sacred precincts.

	Britain's parliamentary discussion ended in a decision to double the power of the new Voice Of Albion; Congress' deliberations resulted in the dispatch of a stern note to Soviet Russia.

	The Mayor of New York looked along Broadway and saw it strewn, not with ticker tape and torn telephone books, but with buttons, belts and pieces of ripped clothing. The Sheriff of Cheyenne County, Wyoming, was shot as he defended the last sack of flour in a bakery. Japan severed relations with Argentina after a Rosario newspaper had printed a photograph of a half-eaten baby, captioned as an example of what was taking place in Yokohama. Forty-four millionaires departed for the South Sea Islands, when news leaked out that Polynesia was the only portion of Earth unaffected by the canker. The love story of Hiné Moa became a snigger-provoking anecdote for stag parties. Civilization lost all refinement.

	The very severity of this world-wide affliction brought about its own end. It contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Half-starved or wholly starved people could no longer purchase radio receivers, while those who had them could not afford to run them. Radio manufacturers the world over experienced an unprecedented drop in sales, which filled them with alarm. Nations that derived revenue from use of wireless sets found their income shrinking rapidly toward the vanishing point.

-

	The astute editor of the Little Rock, Arkansas, Daily Searchlight had long blamed radio competition for the paucity of advertisements in his columns, and he decided that now was the time to do something about it. He commenced by giving front-page prominence to Blakoe's thesis, and supported it with an acidulated editorial which, in essence, was a violent attack upon radio transmissions.

	A large number of contemporaries followed the lead of the Little Rock sheet, and Blakoe's half-forgotten theory came before a bigger public. Sudden press antipathy to radio was not due to real faith in Blakoe's notions, or to any desire to support the Arkansas editor, but to falling circulation as the public saved their pennies for things more necessary than newsprint.

	The Little Rock paper's next scoop took the form of a letter from the Bose Institute at Calcutta. Dr. T. Runga Rao was pleased to inform the editor of the Daily Searchlight that the institute had been endeavoring to find evidence in support of Professor Blakoe and had met with some success. Measuring of plant exhalations had shown that the output of plant breath was forty per cent greater than that of twelve months before and. what was much more important, the output was exceeding the intake. Samples of subtropical vegetation, imported from Palmerston, Cook Islands, had thrown off more gas and become shriveled and stunted when reset near to the huge antenna of Calcutta Station. The Bose Institute was satisfied that radio was causing partial electrolysis of vegetable juices.

	Almost by the same post the Daily Searchlight received a letter from Dr. E. H. Jawaharlal, astrophysicist at Kodaikanal Observatory. Jawaharlal said that he had been corresponding with Dr. Runga Rao, and he thought the editor might be interested in a couple of graphs. The graphs showed variations in solar radiation over the broadcast bands during the previous ten years, and the incidence of crops for the same period. When studied side by side the graphs showed clearly and unmistakably the remarkable reaction of vegetation to the appearance of sunspots and their accompanying magnetic storms.

	Although it was somewhat out of his usual line, Jawaharlal thought his evidence pointed directly to the fact that free electrical energy was to plant life exactly as some poisons are to human beings, stimulating and beneficial up to a certain dosage, deadly above it.

	Serge Jevsky, a Polish farmer plowing his furrows in Wyoming, knew nothing about the technical aspects of the matter, but wrote the Daily Searchlight that he supported Blakoe, Rao and Jawaharlal to the last man, dime and ditch. He pointed out that for the past two years he had illuminated his farmhouse by utilizing free power picked up by his concrete-based steel hay barn from mighty WHFS, a mile away. It was his considered opinion as a United States' citizen, and a farmer, that power sufficient to light a home was enough to kill a carrot. And what sort of a country was this, anyway, when a feller's wheat got electrocuted every time some fat capitalist sprayed the air with a tooth-paste ad?

-

	To what extent the great American public followed the academic discussions of Indian scientists will never be known, but Jevsky's cry from the heart met with immediate response. The Daily Searchlight printed a round twenty confirmatory letters from agricultural gentlemen who were not afraid to call a spade a ruddy shovel. The editorial told readers that these letters were merely a selection from two thousand received that week. Other papers followed suit.

	The Grand Dragon, arrived suddenly in Birmingham, sent round the message of the Fiery Cross and mobilized overnight the Alabama Legion of the Ku Klux Klan. It was the first time they had got together in fifteen years, and they made up for lost moments. They swept through the streets of Birmingham like the hordes of Jenghiz Khan, picked up N.B.C.'s "Sweet Singer of the South" and sprinkled it around the outskirts of the city. With a thunder of hoofs they crashed into Tuskegee, played with dynamite and bounced its little relay station against the glowering clouds.

	Next day the Ku Klux Klan put over a special tri-State demonstration. Under the personal leadership of the Supreme Kleagle, an army of forty thousand swept like bats out of hell through Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, demolishing every radio station, professional or amateur. Hooded figures in billowing gowns, fronted with the sign of the knobbed X, outpaced sweating detachments of United States cavalry, landed a shattering side kick on the nearest transmitter and vanished like wraiths into the safe sanctuary of agricultural areas.

	Newspapers noted a sudden resuscitation of the ancient Molly Maguires in the mid-West. Perspiring farmers, masked, wearing Irish bonnets obtained from heaven alone knows where, passed their jackknives through copper wires, used tubes as targets for their shotguns. Official Washington ran round in circles when eight special investigators got back their pants by parcel post, collect.

	As antiradio sentiment gathered strength, every nation ran true to form in the manner of its reaction. Sturdy independents of Ireland and Spain emulated America, took the law into their own hands and pushed over transmitters with enthusiasm permitting no argument.

	The British Government ignored a petition signed by seven million suffering taxpayers, who "humbly prayed" that it "might please" the government to curtail the activity of radio. Neither did the British Government worry itself unduly when a deputation from the Federation of Radio Receiver Manufacturers said that the radio industry would cease to exist within three months unless something was done to induce people to buy their products.

	Bankers remembered they had very large sums invested in the radio, agriculture and foodstuffs industries. It was foolish to permit one interest to strangle another. A deputation of financial bigwigs waited upon the stubborn ones at Westminster, and pointed out that though Britannia may rule a few odd waves here and there, "Old Man Gold" bosses everything else. Responsible politicians saw the point without difficulty; they were not going to be bulldozed by a moronic electorate, but were quite prepared to accede to the just demands of sound and sane finance.

	The Voice Of Albion closed down forthwith; sixteen lesser stations closed with it; the remaining eight had their power reduced by half. Twelve thousand amateurs came under a ban, prohibiting their transmitters using power in excess of one hundred watts.

-

	October arrived, and with it news from the United States that plant life was reviving and winter citrous crops showing signs of coming up to normal. That settled the few doubters still left. By governmental decree Soviet Russia reduced its radio power to one tenth that of yore. A grand total of fifty-two transmitters in Japan and Germany went up like sparked gasometers, when drilled and uniformed antiradio organizations in both countries struck simultaneously. Every nation in the world had taken, or was about to take, action to wipe out the airy menace—some voluntarily, some under the threat of violence.

	Spring of '60 saw a world born anew. Stunted plants again commenced to climb skyward, prematurely aged trees took on fresh youth. Every religion and denomination thereof knew that its own prayers alone had been answered, and offered more prayers of gratitude. Decimated flocks of birds settled and built nests with reasonable hope of rearing the families to come. City sparrows felt the influence of prosperity just around the corner, perched in the roof gutters, fluffed their tummies and nagged at lean cats below.

	The year crawled along. All creatures waxed fat upon the earth and the fullness thereof. Blakoe and the editor of the Daily Searchlight were soon forgotten by a stomach-filled world. The Hop Sing Tong opened many new branches outside the Land of the Lotus; the halfhearted remnants of the Ku Klux Klan turned their attention to plowing.

	News of the day revealed a world buried in its characteristically peaceful slumbers. Fourteen gangsters in the United States were plugged in one week; a South American republic had its regular Saturday afternoon revolution; the dictator of another celebrated his fatherhood for the seventy-second time. Britain blessed and launched an unsinkable battleship; Germany launched, without blessing, a submarine powerful enough to sink it. Another French Cabinet was formed to save the franc; Japan demanded an abject apology from China, or what was left of it; a Soviet scientist dumfounded biological circles by successfully crossing a dog with a goat.

	An obscure author tore up his thirtieth rejection, started afresh and wrote a story telling how Martians resembling pink spiders wiped out the world with a giant transmitter directing its beam through interplanetary space. The story was kicked out—without regrets. The world had had quite enough of radio.

The End