Resonance
Astounding Science Fiction – July 1945
(1945)*
Eric Frank Russell

He was a queer little guy—funny ideas and funny ... powers. But the weapon he rigged from radio parts, a movie projector, and a most peculiar memory wasn't funny to Japs!

-

	This guy Wakko ought never to have been in Uncle Sam's army because his chest had dropped below his waistline and he wore his right ankle in the front of his neck. Said ankle would wobble every time he spoke one of his weird pieces. Furthermore, he had a nose like unto the smeller of a monkey and he wore contact lenses that made his eyes so glassy you wondered who'd stolen the lily out of his hand. He'd never been anything but a ninety-pound weakling, and it was going to hearten the Japs if ever they caught him—they'd think that Old Whiskers must be getting somewhat desperate to use stuff like that.

	The Japs never did get him. On the contrary, he got two thousands of them. How he did it is the story, but I was there and thus can tell you that he didn't suddenly wax Sergeant Yorkish or remove their plumbing one by one. He got them like the Pied Piper got the rats, only more so, and if I live to be five hundred I shall never see the like again! One look would tell you that there was something mighty queer about this gezeeber; it was so evident that his nickname was too inevitable to need mentioning.

	We met for the first and last time on Hushine, two-bit spot of territory on the left-hand side of the Russell Group going north. Guadalcanal was way over there and with plenty of heat on it. Hushine hadn't much length, a good deal less breadth, and could be divided into three parts. The southern portion held our airfield and general stamping ground; the mid part was No Man's Land and mostly the tatters of much bombarded jungle; the north was lousy with Japs. The place had all the makings of a nice, efficient, twentieth-century charnel house, and any two opponents could no more help meeting sooner or later than could two fleas on the tail of the same dog.

	Wakko squatted on the curve of an upblown root, his feet at the edge of a bomb crater, and a Nambu pistol in his hand. He was studying the weapon with the distasteful interest of an old maid who's found a mouse in the trap. I asked him where he'd got the souvenir, and he turned those glassy eyes upon me, jerked his thumb to indicate some place up north. Those orbs of his sure gave me the hennikins, but I managed to depimple my spine, sat down beside him and joshed him into conversation.

	"I was surveying in the north," he said. His voice was low but vibrant, his diction precise. "So was an enemy officer. I took his gun."

	"How?"

	"I just took it," he said, flatly.

	"Did you kill him?"

	"Certainly not. I merely wished to have his weapon so that I could study it for my own information. Why should I have killed him?"

	"You're in the army!"

	"Ah, yes." He looked faintly troubled, put down the Jap popgun, smoothed an imaginary crease in his leg wear. "Which in some respects is a convenience, but in others is a decided nuisance."

	"Don't tell me," I begged. "Let me do my first twenty years and find it out for myself."

	He fell into a musing silence, pursing thin lips under his great beak of a nose, his lens-covered eyes staring moodily out to sea. The way he brooded reminded me of those enigmatic statues on Easter Island.

	After a while he snapped out of it, picked up the dropped Nambu, juggled it around. Then he nudged the butt of my Garand with his foot.

	"Pellet-blowers," he murmured. "So archaic. So antiquated. How childlike are the devices of the infantile."

	This stung me seeing he'd included the Garand, and I said, very snootily. "Could you think up anything better? And would it make 'em any more dead?"

	"A gross fundamentalist, I perceive." He stared at me as if I were a misplaced Hottentot or something long believed to be extinct The stare was cold, cold. "Something better? Is not the mess sufficient already?"

	"Never mind dodging the issue," I countered. "Could you or could you not invent something better than anything we're using?"

	"I could produce it." He spoke with the air of one who could produce anything from a ten-pound ruby to a purple banana. "There would be no need to invent it."

	"Hope? And why not?"

	"I would only have to remember."

	"Nuts," I said. "You're just plain goofy!"

	Maybe he had an answer to that one too. If so, I didn't get it. At that point a couple of dozen bugbears zoomed into our sky, guys jumped around the ack-ack guns and heavy stuff began to drop. I saw a grounded Corsair fly apart just before I'd made my hole deep enough' to swallow the Empire State. For twelve long minutes shells went up and bombs came down. Shrapnel showered around me, a fallen nosecap sprayed the back of my neck with dirt and something from the cannon of a diving aircraft almost ended my days. When it was over and I'd clambered out, the beak-nosed Wakko was gone.

-

	During the next three weeks we got plenty of action. To the northeast, a bit farther than you could spit, lay a chain of atolls which the yellow-bellies must've packed so full of aircraft that they'd had to stack them like cans of beans. And they sent them across, running a sort of shuttle service. The arrivals came far too frequently for my liking. The entire island shook and shuddered and behaved as if it were liable to turn over and sink, carrying me and all the others back to the Land of Mu a few miles down.

	More rice mashers poured in and we mowed them down and more poured in and we mowed them down and more poured in. One small bunch of foolhardy leathernecks arrived to bolster our side. They joined the fray with bellicose gusts, doing much to nullify the fertile pastimes of the enemy's honorable ancestors. But we had to pay. I buried Rudy and Fats and Old Hambone. Also, I lost the lobe of my left ear.

	Then came a lull. Reckon they must've cabled to Hirohito saying so sorry but estimable Americans stay put and please rush more divine bangers. They'd dropped all they'd got including compunctions. But those who've had experience of squabbles know that a lull is the enemy's way of telling you that he's making ready to break your neck. So we weren't deceived, being of mature years, and dug ourselves deeper in readiness for the worst.

	Many of the august guardians of Asia had picked our territory on which to expire. They were likely to stink a worse than they ever did in life, so we used a small bunch of prisoners to plant them way down where they'd be sanitary. Said prisoners did a good job of it, being energetic, docile, and comporting themselves humbly as becomes a lower grade of creation. Sometimes I almost came to liking them. Our fireside propagandists have got those little yellow guys all wrong. Why, washed in an antiseptic, fitted with better bodies, supplied with brains, and given a decent education, they'd verge on the human.

	I was watching the stiffs go down into a communal hole when I became aware of Wakko standing by my side. His eyes were gazing blankly into the burial dump and his thoughts were a million miles away.

	"Ho," I said, waking him up. "So you're still alive."

	"Why not?" He turned his eerie optics upon me. "You are!"

	"I've developed a habit: when something comes down I'm the little man who wasn't there."

	"Fortuitous circumstance," he said, ponderously. He swung his foot, kicked a spray of dirt over the belly of a defunct Nipponese.

	"Or have you the faculty of prevision?"

	"Have I the what?"

	"The faculty of prevision."

	"I dunno what that is. But I've some gum if you want a wad."

	"Vulgar muck," he snapped,

-

	A couple of prisoners pushed past us, bearing the body of a deceased jap major. A mortar bomb had blown away most of the major, and he looked anything but bronzed and fit. In fact, he looked lousy. So they tossed his carcass into the pit and went away for another.

	Staring stonily at the cadaver, Wakko said, "How great are the ambitions of the servants in the absence of the masters."

	"Big talk," I chaffed. "These monkeys have proved plenty tough. They're cooking up more trouble right now and I've a queer feeling that when they start we're going to be in bad—unless somebody does something mighty fast."

	"These were the spreaders of manure in the outpost fields of ancient days. In these decadent times shall the crops be theirs?" His thin lips closed bleakly, giving his profile the appearance of a rousing eagle. "Perhaps not even now."

	"We'll see," I said, nettled by his assured air and his enigmatic comments.

	"As for us," he went on, ignoring my skepticism, "there shall be aid. Seven ships are coming. They will be here in about two days."

	"How'd you know? Did Franklyn tell you?"

	"Look for yourself. See their atmospheric streaks." He waved a negligent hand to the east. "Over there."

	I looked. There wasn't anything; nothing but the sea, the sky and the flaming sun. Positively there were no streaks of any sort whatsoever. If this swami hung around me any longer, he'd get away with my pants.

	"Beat it," I said, hoarsely. "My nerves haven't been so good since the day Maisie lugged me to the preacher. Go peddle your thoughts some place else."

	He gave me a look. He must've spent months practicing it before a mirror because it was so downright cold and stony that it made me feel as if someone had clasped my heart with a hand of ice.

	"There is an infinite distance between superstition and knowledge," he orated. "And the knowledge you don't understand is something quite apart from gross superstition."

	"Yes, teacher," I said.

	Turning scornfully, he wandered off, his back view slight and weedy, his pace a loose-jointed slouch. I've never met a guy who could sound like more and look like less. Nor one who could produce such cryptic remarks that, later on, were to raise by back hairs. He was dynamite, when the right time came, but I couldn't foresee that.

-

	Within fifty hours the ships arrived. I timed them. There were seven of them, and my mind was full of Wakko as I watched them come in. There were three large freighters, three destroyers and one sloop, and they were all a bit battered but plenty defiant. Somebody had registered strong objection to their passage but the objection had been overruled. That celestial simian in Tokyo must've been mortified.

	The shuttle service swung into action to emphasize the imperial displeasure. We shot down five Zeros, five Mitsuibishi three engined jobs and one float-plane which roared sluggishly within range of somebody's gun. We lost a barrel of booze, one small case of cinnamon gum, a pet cockatoo and our tempers. The sloop and one of the freighters looked even more shop-soiled than before.

	Came the inevitable lull. A Sherman clanked ashore followed by another and another. A total of six of them rumbled inland leaving great weals in the sand of the beach. These were our first and only supply of armor and they were needed.

	A gob lounged in the bow of a landing craft and addresses to me sundry insulting remarks concerning landbound forces. He was a large party, with a natural sporran on his chest and with wrists like my thighs, so I maintained a dignified silence and let him yammer on.

	Then Wakko popped up as if released from a magic bottle. He nodded at the vessels.

	"See?" he said.

	"I got eyes," I told him, loudly.

	"Then why didn't ya join a man's service?" bawled the gob.

	"They didn't want one," I shouted back. "They were too full up with hairy bums."

	"Dear me!" said Wakko, mildly.

	"Tsk! Ain't he jealous!" jeered the gob. His spade of a hand smote the sporran and his chest rang like an anvil. "Who's the lady friend?"

	"He means you," I informed Wakko.

	"Me?" Wakko's blink wasn't really a blink. It'd describe it better to say that he hooded his eyes. "I would not bandy words with so primitive a type." He turned his narrow back and began to walk away.

	"Listen, Lulu," ordered the gob, "you learn to be polite else poppa smack um hand!"

	Wakko stopped and turned again. He gave the gob a look. Not being on the other end of it, I couldn't tell how it felt, but it sure must have been quite a look. I think that his eyes flamed with it. The flame must've been especially imported from Hades and could sear across twenty yards of space, because it had an effect upon Hairy whose jaw dropped and whose face abruptly lost its pugnacity.

	"O.K., brother," said the gob, nervously, and in a peculiarly dithering voice. He unleaned from the landing craft's side, backed away hastily. "You lay off me and I'll lay off you, see?" He backed faster, tripped over something, fell with a heavy thump, picked himself up and ran. Without a further glance at the still glaring Wakko, he pounded into the bowels of the ship.

-

	"Look," I mouthed, waving a feeble mitt toward the ship. "What made that hoodlum hole up? What made Sammy run, eh? Was it hypnotism or is it just your body odor?"

	Wakko stared fixedly out to sea and didn't answer.

	I put in, impatiently, "Now what does the seer see?

	"More ships. Fifteen of them," he replied, stating it as factually as a count of loaves of bread. "The enemy's, I think. If so, there will be a severe struggle before another week is gone."

	"Tut," I chided, "you should be nonchalant about little things like that. All you've got to do is give {hem the evil eye and say 'Begone' At which they'll scat. If you're half as good as you advertise, you could lead us straight to Tokyo."

	"Why should I meddle in the mass-stupidities of this age?"

	"It's the age you're in, ain't it?" I yelped, throwing away what little is left of my grammar.

	"Do you join a fight because it's in the street in which you happen to be?"

	"Sure! How can a public fight be a private one?"

	"On which side do you join?"

	"On any side. On both sides. I smack any mush within reach."

	"Mush?" he said.

	"Kisser," I explained. "Pan, clock or face."

	"Imbecility" he pronounced.

	"How can it be?" I tapped him on his narrow chest but didn't look into his eyes. "They all prod at me, see? So I larrup them, see? And when the cops come they beat to death everyone within sight, see? Then they snitch the body of some unconscious peacemaker who's pushed in his beezer where he shouldn't and they beat him awake and charge him with starting a riot. And he gets fined ten bucks or more, which teaches him not to interfere with communal diversions, see?"

	"I don't see" said Wakko, sharply. "Sit down!"

	"Go to blazes," I snapped—and sat down. I sat on my heels, cross-legged, like Buddha. It surprised me.

	"You will count up to two-forty," declared Wakko. "You will do it slowly, deliberately and with regular rhythm. It will take you precisely four minutes at the end of which you v will rise and depart without animosity. Should hostile planes appear before you have finished your recognition of them will set you free immediately."

	I struggled to get up, without avail. I opened my mouth to say, "Why you apology for a knock-kneed rookie," but instead my mouth uttered a lugubrious, "One." I gaped at this and my mouth promptly said, "Two" It was voicing a monotonous, "Thirty-seven," as Wakko passed out of my sight.

	So I got smart. Patiently, I said, "Thirty-eight," and, "Thirty-nine," then triumphantly yelled, "Two-forty". But the two got lost and only the forty came out. Believe it or not, I squatted there like a paralyzed bullfrog until I'd done all my sums. Then I got up on aching legs and walked away. My self-conversation also was Texas style.

	You don't get much chance to stoke up your grudges when your chief worry is to avoid getting punctured while you're still a mighty long way from Dallas, so I had no ire over my compulsory recitation. What I did have, though, was an infernal curiosity about Wakko. Who was this emaciated gimp? What had he got that wasn't government issue? Behind my mind was the stubborn notion that he was a former horoscope artist who'd developed a couple of side lines, but also behind my mind was the knowledge that this theory didn't really explain anything.

	I went to the beach to look up that gob with the idea of persuading him to take down his hair and say right out what Wakko had done to him, but the gob wasn't talking in any cogent manner. Our conversation went something like this:

	Me: "Hi, matlow—remember?"

	Him: "Beat it, willya?"

	Me: "Now, look, don't get sore. I just want a gabfest about that buddy of mine."

	Him: "I don't" He picked up a deck broom, gave it a vicious shove along the planks. "I hope his hair falls out and his ears drop off!"

	"Now don't be that way," I soothed. "All I want to know is exactly what he gave you."

	"He gimme a pain in the guts, see? I get it every time I think of him. I don't wanta see that hex-doctor again any place this side of creation."

	"Yes, but what did he do, and what—?"

	"You ought to know," he interrupted. "You get his number all right—it went up to two-forty."

	I felt myself redden. Giving the broom another violent shove, the gob favored me with a final scowl and went below. That, it seemed, was that—and nothing more was to be learned from this source.

	Later, I had a chew with Youbet over Wakko, opening my soul to him and telling him all, but I could see that he didn't believe one half of it. The only thing to do was to let the subject drop—as far as you can drop anything which persists in popping up with the craziest things.

	That night the samurai came along and suffered for the glory of Nippon and the gratification of Tojo. It was tough while it lasted. They sent a stream of small caliber bullets over our lines followed by a dollop of mortar shells, after which they advanced yelling insults in none too grand English. We popped them off wholesale and, after an anxious couple of hours, they retired into the tattered jungle taking most of their dead with them. Our advance patrols left our lines into which they'd been driven and sneaked back into the fringe of greenery close upon the Jap's heels. In the morning the shuttle service got going again. What with our fresh supplies of guns and shells, plus the armament on the ships still in the bay, we gave them a hotter reception than usual and it made their bombing somewhat sloppy. They concentrated on the ships and the ships concentrated on them and the uproar must've gone quite a way around the world. Our counterblast cost the enemy plenty. They got the sloop and two of the three freighters but the ocean swallowed one blazing plane after another.

	Being rammed well down a foxhole most of the time I couldn't see much of what was going on although I could hear plenty. We were expecting another and more ferocious attack from the north to coincide with the blast at our rear, but the enemy infantry contented themselves with no more than frequent sharpshooting from the bush. All I did see was a bomber catching it in the neck. Behind me came a roar of engines suddenly drowned out by the furious rattle, of a destroyer's multiple pom-poms. The next instant the aircraft lurched wildly over my foxhole, a wing fell off and a Kinsei engine thudded into the ground less than a hundred yards away. The craft then swooped sidewise, smacked into No Man's Land and became a mass of flames. Nobody was going to sort out those guys' ashes to send back to the Holy Shrine.

-

	Things went on this way for another couple of days and I forgot all but the fundamental need to keep in one lump and free from perforations. Except for the three wrecks, the ships got away. Their departure gave us a dismal feeling of isolation as they'd been a link with the world of home.

	Within a couple more days—by which time we didn't know whether it was Thursday or Christmas—our position became really serious. The enemy received strong reinforcements; troops and supplies poured into the northern end of the island, together with some tanks and heavy guns. Our panzer division of six Shermans became outnumbered by at least five to one. There was much sortie work by our remaining aircraft, much rushing to and fro of serious officers, much cleaning up and generally preparing for the holocaust we could all apprehend. Rather ominously, their planes left us alone and our pitiful few roamed the skies unchallenged. It was the calm before the storm; we could imagine them figuring it an awful waste to plant bombs on guys already as good as dead.

	Patrols scavenged for prisoners, crept into the jungle and were beaten back after fierce, sanguinary encounters. There was now little or no sniping on the part of the Japs and their jungle remained a tangle of broken ferns, shrubs, bushes, creepers and shattered tree trunks over which brooded a heavy silence broken only by a temporary uproar when one of our patrols fought its way back. Quietly these patrols slipped into the greenery and just as quietly vanished, only to start some shenanigans before they reappeared.

	It was trying to the nerves this waiting, waiting, waiting. You sit there knowing full well that the other guy is making all the preparations necessary to strew your guts over the landscape, and there's nothing you can do about it except curse the departed ships, curse the heat, and curse the blank indifference of the ocean which is all that lies between you and Maisie.

	We got grim-faced and hard-eyed as zero hour dragged nearer. One patrol on our left flank got into the jungle, enjoyed a furious melee, and came out at half their original strength but with two prisoners. The sullen pair were rushed to headquarters for examination and soon the news got around: the yellow-bellies had been greatly strengthened and were ready to wipe us out by sheer weight of numbers, but the hour set for attack wasn't known or maybe they refused to tell. This news was given to the men so they'd know what to expect and prepare themselves to meet it. But the most significant item was that brought in by our own aircraft and now released for general information, namely, that the enemy's reinforcements had been brought in fifteen ships.

	At once my mind sprang to the prophetic Wakko. What possessed me I don't know but forthwith I went to see Grumpy who happens to be Mister Big on this piece of dirt. He was busy, with a continual stream of grim-faced, thoughtful officers dashing in and out of his den. How I got in to him was a mystery in view of the hectic circumstances, but somebody showed me inside after the fourth officer had tripped over my big feet.

-

	Grumpy gave me with his sharp stare as I stood stiffly to attention, and his voice barked, "Well, sergeant?"

	"This sounds like a lot of malarkey, sir, but I want to report that there's a guy named Wakko breathing our air. I've seen him do things you wouldn't believe, and I figure maybe he could do plenty more if somebody pushed him around." From there on I poured out the story, condensing it and talking fast. All the while Grumpy sat there looking at me as if I were ripe for a mental specialist. "And that's the lot, sir," I finished, anxiously and a little lamely.

	"Humph!" snorted Grumpy. Much to my surprise, he added, "I'll pass up nothing." He rang the bell on his desk. Somebody responded behind my back and Grumpy spoke to him over my squared shoulder. "Detain this sergeant until I require him. Find me a fellow named Wakko. No matter where he is or what he's doing, bring him in—I want him quicker than at once."

	He gave me a wave of dismissal. Saluting, I swung about and got myself conducted to a small, hard room tastefully furnished with one small, hard bench. I squashed my cushions on said bench and kept them flattened for the next two hours. During that time, people continued to rush in and out of Grumpy's office while, far away and at rare intervals, sounded faint pops of desultory small arms fire. Then, just as my spine began to protest at propping up my skeleton, Wakko walked in to my room.

	He fixed me with those uncanny orbs of his and maintained the stare until I began to fidget.

	"So," he enunciated in his low, vibrant voice, "the many must seek the aid of the few."

	"Few what?" I asked, mostly to hear myself talk.

	"Survivors."

	"Oh," I said, blankly. I'd not the faintest notion of what he meant by his mystical gabble.

	"There are a few survivors living on Mount Shasta, in California. You, as an American, ought to know that. Don't you?"

	"No," I admitted, feebly. "Did you tell Grumpy about that?"

	"If by Grumpy you mean Lieutenant-colonel Thompson, there was no need. He is a well-informed individual and had heard of us, though, as he confessed, he'd regarded the matter with a modicum of incredulity." He rubbed his beak of a nose with a long, slender forefinger and still stared at me glassily. "He was, of course, also skeptical of your data and he demanded that I make him lie on the floor with his legs in the air while he counted twenty."

	"Good grief," I muttered.

	Wakko frowned and went on. "When he'd finished counting and had got to his feet, he pointed out that Gautama ... er, America has favored us with hospitality for which we should be in some small way indebted, and that anything I could do to ease the present situation would be gratefully acknowledged as settlement of that debt."

	"Did Grumpy really shoot off that?"

	"Don't you believe me?" he said, his tones sharp.

	"Sure, sure," I hastened to say. I was wondering just who was the nuttiest of all us nuts.

	"It was rather stupid of me," he confessed, "to have quite overlooked the fact that our residence in your country places us under an obligation. I had joined your forces for purposes of convenient investigation in this area, but now it seems that I should do more. However, the matter will be remedied as soon as possible."

	"O.K.," I put in, getting tired of his airiness. "Just wave your hand and say the fateful words and make all those little yellow buggers go up as pale green smoke."

	His eyes glowed and spat fire at me. I couldn't see them because I wasn't so simple as to look straight into them, but I could feel them, somehow.

	"I perceive your thoughts. They are nonsensical. Whatever I have done or am about to do comes from realms long forgotten and from a knowledge that may yet be recovered wholly rather than in part." He paused, and added, spitefully, "Recovered, aye some day when once again this world is civilized."

	"All right, all right," I protested. "Be as civilized as you like and kill * the lot."

	"I shall not kill one," he pronounced, carefully. "We are far beyond senseless slaughter. There are other and equally effective means. You will come with me to assist—it is Lieutenant-colonel Thompson's order."

	Now this, thought I, is the payoff. My big trap had got me in bad. I was doomed to some desperate venture with this crazy coot and my hours were numbered. While Maisie cried out her pretty eyes way back in Dallas, I was going to rot in company with a few yellow-bellies and this Californian swami. Life is short and the end comes suddenly and why didn't I trap my tongue in my teeth?

	Wishing that someone would blow Mount Shasta all over the states, I followed Wakko out.

-

	We made a beeline for the wrecked vessels in the bay, and there, with the help of a dozen bodies, we got all their radio lumber ashore. Walking round and round the pile, Wakko looked the stuff over, occasionally picking up bits and putting them down again. There was a lot of stuff; I'd never suspected that ships carried so much of it.

	The sun was high and hot, and a strong, salty smell came from the sand of the beach. Eventually satisfied, Wakko sent me off with a guy who claimed to be a one-time electrician. We were to find out which of the vessels, if any, possessed generators in working order. While we did this, he was to go and examine one of the Jap prisoners and look around for some other item of equipment which was necessary for the plan he had in mind.

	Twenty minutes after we'd come away from the third vessel Wakko got back to the beach. Only one ship, we told him, had undamaged generators, this being the freighter stranded in the shallows within easy reach. This news afforded him much gratification. He'd dug up more guys from somewhere, three of them being signal men, while the other three were electrical engineers. The latter were on board the freighter to check over the generators and run power lines ashore. The rest of us got down to the job of moving all the radio lumber to the hut at the head of the beach.

	There, Wakko appointed me as overseer on the task of erecting tall poles at spots designated by him. We got busy on the job, putting plenty of beef into it, while Wakko and the signal guys dived into the hut and started on whatever cockeyed notion Wakko had thought up. Those poles were erected in record time and I dragged Wakko out to demand what next. He went back into the hut, came out with a reel of heavy wire and a pile of insulators. In crisp, incisive tones he told us just how he wanted the stuff fixed. I don't know anything about radio, but one of my handymen who claimed to be educated said that what we were shoving up was a directional aerial with a splayed beam aimed northward.

	"You going to kill them with boogie," I inquired.

	"I'm too busy for small talk." Wakko shot back into the hut and slammed the door.

	Well, we got the aerial fixed in double quick time, with a nice length of feed-line extending to the hut. We'd been working like mad since arriving at the beach and time had flown fast. The sun was sinking slowly, and the island was still quiet, expectant, tense. There had been no further sign of Wakko; whatever he was doing, he was buried in it. Getting curious, I shoved open the door of his hut and eased myself inside.

	A carpet of bits and pieces lay all over the floor. One of the signal guys was percolating some coffee in a coffee pot, the other two had their jackets off, sleeves rolled up and a soldering iron in one hand. Both had slightly dazed expressions on their pans.

	To one side, the lean and hawkish Wakko was bending over a large sheet of drawing paper on which he'd penciled a large, complicated and obviously haywire sketch which resembled a surrealist version of snakes and ladders; it was full of squares, double lines, arrows, numbers, spirals, wiggly bits, and several circles with zigzag lines across them.

	"Now," he said, ignoring me, "we'll require that four-mike condenser across this inductance, and we'll put this other inductance in series with it. We'll earth that last one and tap it at the third turn from the earthy end."

	"Yep," quote one of the guys, feebly. "Sure!" He did things with his iron, plunging it into a mess of apparatus, making a puff of smoke, a sound like someone frying an egg and a smell suggesting that said egg was being fried a year too late.

	Wakko had a look at the result, turned back to his sketch and came out with another string of the same gabble.

	"Now, using that tap to create on auto transformer we can take this other lead to the signal grid of the first power amplifier via—"

	"Oh, heck!" I said.

	"Shut up!" He glared at me, got on with his double talk. It was a hodgepodge of capacitances and master oscillators and bleeder resistors and similar cuss words from the Shastan language. I couldn't make out how those signal racketeers could understand him unless he'd miraculously inoculated them with the patois in five minutes flat. Anyway, they kept doing things with accompanying smoke, noises and stinks, and he kept checking up that they were doing them properly and to his complete satisfaction. "This resistor hooks on there!" He pointed into the middle of the mess and a guy obediently stabbed his iron at the point indicated.

	Sitting on a box, I hooked one leg over the other and watched. There were radio tubes and bits of wire and coiled copper snaked all around. The apparatus on which these nitwits were working was only partly completed, but big, imposing, and patently the product of an insane brain.

	Lines from the distant generators ran into its base and, from that point you could go gaga trying to trace them. At one end of this contraption stood a neat box which I recognized as the force's portable talkie; I could see the lens of its projector glistening behind the flap. All that was wanted, in my estimation, was an aspidistra, two bird cages and a cuckoo clock to finish the thing off.

	It was little short of nightfall when they finished struggling with this junkpile, by which time I'd taken over the role of coffee dispenser and was brewing the fourth successive bucketful. The apparatus now filled half the hut and the signal guys looked ready to fill their graves. We all stood around and looked at what we'd perpetrated—and there just wasn't a word for it. There was no sound inside that hut and no noise outside of it. The whole world was hushed and waiting for the blow-up.

	At this point Grumpy suddenly paraded in with two officers. He looked at the Goldbergian gadget, flinched, and said, "Well, is it ready? Will it work? What does it do?"

	"It is not ready," answered Wakko. "Nor will it be ready until I get that film. And until the film arrives there's no way in which I can determine whether this layout will do what it is designed to do."

	"Then get it man, get it," snapped Grumpy, testily. He turned to one of his officers. "Go to the photographic section, Mr. Mead, and see what is holding up this film. Chase it along without further delay." As the officer beat if, he went up to the apparatus and gloomed over it.

	I'd a lot of respect for the old fogey just then. He was one of those bold tomatoes who don't let their doubts strangle their imagination. He knew the surprise-value of unorthodoxy and was willing to back a longshot. He was a good guy.

	Snooping around the dingbat, Grumpy opened his mouth to say something and must've swallowed the sun for, as it does in these parts, darkness fell with a silent bang. Imperturbably, Wakko switched on some lights. Grumpy opened his mouth again and immediately hell broke loose. The whole mid-part of the Island erupted with deafening violence that shook the southern end and set our hut quivering and quaking in every wall. Zero hour had arrived.

	The unbridled fury of that cannonade had to be heard to be believed. It lit up the northern sky with a series of pink and white flashes that followed each other swiftly enough almost to merge into a continual glow which wavered and shimmered against the sable backdrop of night. The whole thing was a compost of light and sound; of flickers and glares and sudden blazings plus crumps, whines, shrieks and the infernal bursting of heavy shells.

-

	Grumpy went out so fast he was just a waft of wind through the door. He yelped something as he vamoosed and one officer stayed behind while the other hotfooted after him. While the distant uproar gradually built itself toward crescendo, the officer stared at us and wc stared helplessly back at him. If his mind was working along the same lines as mine, he was thinking that his number was up unless Wakko miraculously produced.

	Come to ponder about it now, I realize that it was my own subconscious desperation that got me rooting for the Californian character in the first place. Yes, that's what had driven me to Grumpy—fear mixed with idiotic hope. In any other circumstances I wouldn't have bet a bad dime on a nuthead like Wakko for, despite all his sales talk and demonstrations, I really had no faith in him as a superman. But the grim knowledge that the jig was almost up had impelled me to clutch at him like a drowning man clutching at a lump of lead.

	Wakko was the least concerned of the lot of us. Lounging easily against a bench, he listened to the mighty roar of the northward bellowings. The Nipponese evidently had landed some heavy caliber stuff because big ones started to crump uncomfortably near to us, and one item went overhead with a tearing moan like that of a railroad locomotive crossing a trestle bridge. It didn't burst, though. It was a dud. Wakko heard it pass over without blinking and without shifting his expectant stare from the door.

	"If they're too long, they'll be too late," he remarked, as though it were of little consequence anyway.

	Before anyone could think up a morale-raising crack, the door whipped open and a dirty, breathless party shot in. He had a can under his arm and an unhappy expression under his hat.

	Slapping the can into Wakko's eager fingers, he said, "There y'are. Gotta get back," and with no further ado he was gone.

	Tearing the lid off the can, Wakko lifted out a six-feet length of cine-film. It was a continuous piece, its ends being lapped together so that it would run repeatedly for as long as it was driven. He held a section up to the light, examined it carefully. I could see that it was blank except for the sound track which bore a most peculiar wiggly line that repeated itself all the way around the strip. Those wigglers reminded me greatly of the cartooned sound track in Disney's "Fantasia."

	"This," said Wakko, addressing the officer, "is the response curve of the nervous system of the average Japanese. All Japanese are somewhat the same, responding within the limits of this curve. The potent curves, or wave forms, for racially different nervous systems would, of course, also be different to a greater or less degree according to the race." He cleared his throat, looked like a college professor lecturing with bland disregard of dynamite under his chair. "The response curves of average Caucasians or Polynesians would therefore be different—but this particular curve effectively covers the Japanese. Don't ask me how I know. You must accept that I do know."

	"Go on," urged the officer.

	"If you've ever shivered upon hearing a knife squeak on a plate, you'll know what can be done by the merest fraction of your own particular curve." Dexterously, he fitted the film into the various sprogs of the projector, his fingers moving neatly and with urgency. "Well, this is the whole lot. It won't function as audible sound, but it's the impulse necessary to gain the required effect and boost it to the limit." He finished with the film, started to switch things and tune others. A shell whistled high over the hut, thumped and exploded well to the rear.

	"Hurry up," pressed the officer.

	"Yes, for Pete's sake," I said.

	"Now I translate this visual wave form in terrors of varying voltages, impress them on the grid of this tube here, and thus convert the original curve to an audio-frequency modulation of a suitable carrier wave. The amplification will be the maximum possible with the materials available and the output may or may not be sufficient—that remains to be seen. But, with luck, we'll make their nervous systems twang like the strings of a harp." Giving us a glassy-eyed glance to make sure that he had our undivided attention, he slammed down the master switch. "There."

-

	It would have been nice to read the minds of the onlookers as that switch went down. Judging by their expressions, the officer expected a demonstration of fireworks, one of the signal guys anticipated an organ recital and the other two hoped for the ghost of Napoleon. All that did happen was that the film started to run at top speed although no flickering beam sprang from the lens of the projector, something deep in the middle of the apparatus emitted a noise like that of a disturbed beehive, and the various tubes lit up brightly. At the same time, a prolonged hiss sounded not in my ears, but somewhere within my brain. One of the signal guys must also have registered that hiss for he asked Wakko about it. He responded with a lot of hooey about the knife-squeak being the equivalent of the bass note and of stuff that made dogs howl although most humans couldn't hear it. He added some abstruse stuff about sub-harmonies and staggered multiplications which was just a dollop of abracadabra to me.

	Meanwhile the tubes stayed lit and the eerie hiss stayed put. This performance went on for a minute, or maybe even two minutes, while Wakko stood by his apparatus and listened with the first touch of anxiety I'd seen on his lean face. Then, suddenly, the volume of the barrage dropped about eighty percent.

	"Success," snapped Wakko. His beak of a nose quivered with satisfaction. "The beam is working."

	I couldn't see that. One only had to listen to hear the bombardment still going on even though its uproar had been reduced by four-fifths. But I didn't argue—there's no pay-dirt in an argument with that yogi. Taking our cue from him, we hung around and waited while the apparatus continued to do whatever it was doing, and the guns in the north maintained their reduced whoopings. After a quarter of an hour, those guns gave up also. The resulting quietness was ghastly.

	"The battle is ours," informed Wakko. "They'll be mopping up now."

	"Hey," I put in. "How come all those guns didn't stop at once?"

	"The enemy's artillery did stop," he said. "You forget that part of the bombardment was ours. And our guns carried on until the necessity had gone. Then they ceased fire and, doubtlessly, the infantry went forward." He turned to the officer, who appeared thoughtful, subdued. "I'll keep the beam in operation, sir, until Lieutenant Colonel Thompson asks me to close it down. Would you get him to send me a runner when he's ready?"

	"Sure." The officer went out. He was like a guy who's just seen the Indian rope trick but still believed that it couldn't be done.

-

	I beat it too, leaving Wakko in the hut with his dumfounded signal men. The sky was a star-spangled drape now devoid of gun flashes and the glowings of bomb bursts. From the north came a faint, elusive murmur as of things still happening but with a minimum of noise. The strange hiss in my brain persisted. From the sluggishly lapping sea came a faint, warm breeze and a tang of salt.

	What with one thing and another, including a brief sleep, it was six in the morning before I found out what had happened in the north. Most of my buddies were up there through the night and I couldn't find anyone until, just after dawn, I met Youbet. He was tired and dirty, but had the air of a man who'd put his pants on a gopher and seen it win the Kentucky Derby.

	"Brother," he told me, "it was like nothing you could dream up, you bet! The yellow-bellies were presenting us with a big package of concentrated hell, and right in the middle of it their guns gave up. Big guns, small guns, popguns and bows and arrows, they all gave up together." He stuck a cigarette into his dirty, brown pan, lit it. "So we waited for the attack while our own guns continued to burp. The attack didn't come. Eventually, we got the order to go forward and we sneaked into the jungle with our bellies full of butterflies, you bet!" He squirted some smoke. "You know how one feels."

	"Y'betcha!" I assured him.

	He gave me a suspicious look, but went on, "There was no mad bull rush. We crept through the bush wary for mines, booby traps and snipers. All the time, I had a queer, high-pitched singing in my ears and made up my mind to take a shot of bromide if I was still alive in the morning. I was still thinking about the singing and the bromide when I came face to face with half a dozen Japs." He paused, spat into the sand. "They were doing a dance."

	"Huh"?

	"They were jitterbugging," he asserted. "Like this." He got up, violently shook his arms and legs, made his whole body quiver. "Just like that, only worse. They were hep-cats, you bet! Four of them had dropped their guns; the other two were still clinging grimly to theirs but were waving them around like conductor's batons—they couldn't control their jerking muscles to take aim or fire. As I watched they kept falling down, getting up clumsily and shakily, then continuing to flail around." Taking another drag at his cigarette, he gazed reflectively at its glowing end. "The queerest thing about it was that they weren't in any pain. You could tell from their grim expressions that they weren't suffering in a physical sense and that they were doing their best to control themselves, but the heebies had the better of them. Each one of them had a vicious attack of St. Vitus' dance and it was utterly beyond control."

	"Did you bring them in?"

	"You bet. And it was a job. They were docile enough to try and do what they were told but, brother, what a time they had doing it. You couldn't make them march. They hopped and skipped along, jerking about like marionettes on strings and falling over their own feet every ten yards. The sweat poured off them with their own crazy exertions. They stank in my nostrils and that singing shrilled in my ears—and still does right now. But I got them boxed away and went back for more."

	"Were they all that way?" I asked.

	"All those still living were," he answered. "Our barrage had wiped out a fair number of them. We'd only one fifth of their fire power but we'd been five times more accurate. There were plenty of stiffs lying around and the survivors were doing a saraband over the bodies. We found cooks and generals and gun crews all bouncing around like nohow. It was the same all the way through to the northern promontory where even the crews of Jap ships were in a rut just offshore." He yawned, stretched his arms. "If this is war, it's wacky. I'm going to get myself some shut-eye."

	"You've had quite a party," I commented.

	"You bet!" he said. And, with that, he went.

	But he couldn't have got much shut-eye because within another hour the shuttle service poured over thirsting for revenge. The hiss in my brain was gone, and I reckon the beam had cut off, or maybe it didn't go sky-high and the planes were flying above it. Whatever the reason, they came over and zoomed around unaffected by anything except our antiaircraft fire.

	There was a devil of a number of planes, far, far more than any armada they'd favored us with before. They concentrated first on our battered airfield, blew to bits those of our fighters still grounded, lost several of their own kites in the process. Those of our machines which had become air-borne in time, waded in against terrific odds. Nothing fazed the enemy, for they started methodically to blast the whole southern end of the island, their bombs showering down like over-ripe fruit.

	Nice though it would have been, I wasn't holing-up in this holocaust. Tearing along with frequent pauses to fling myself flat, I made for the hut and Wakko. If he knew of some way in which to elevate and sweep his beam, he'd need all the help he. could get. Between us, if we moved fast, we might make a spectacular clean-up of these aerial invaders.

-

	Our guns were handing out plenty and their shells made gray puffballs all over the sky. The Japs whizzed recklessly between the smoky blooms, sometimes diving straight through them. Their loads screamed down with a spine-tingling sound that isn't so good to hear. Not only were original guns banging at them, but also the weapons on the broken ships in the bay plus a number of serviceable guns captured from the enemy that night. The whole performance was fast and nasty, complete with earth-gouts, ground quakes aerial explosions, heat, and assorted smells of warm sand, burned cordite, rotting vegetation, dry seaweed and sweat.

	My legs passed each other as they'd never done, shrapnel spattered around me, a shell exploded far to my right. I cursed the A.A. defense and its slow fuses. A high shriek came at me out of the sky, I went prone, tried to dig my way through to South Africa. The bomb landed, went off with the mighty whoop of an exploding cosmos and the ground under me shook like jello. A great cascade of dirt stung me as I was up again and running.

	Then I saw the hut and its adjoining antenna. Outside of the hut, and at the head of the white beach, Wakko stood staring pensively across the bay just as if all the surrounding excitement was taking place in another world. I yelled at him, but my breath was short and he didn't hear me.

	Then a tremendous load came down and I groveled abjectly in the earth. The stuff landed. There must've been three dozen of them, and most of them big. Two of the three wounded ships promptly disintegrated in tremendous bursts of flame, the fury of their disruption causing the remaining vessel to rock violently as it continued to fire. Great shafts of water sprang out of the bay, and equally great columns of driven sand reared themselves frantically from the beach. The hut went up in one mighty vomit of radio parts, dirt and bamboo splinters. The poles of the antenna flew apart.

	Marveling at my own escape, I sprinted forward, found Wakko lying in the silver sand. Some of the silver had turned a bright crimson. His middle was all churned up, but he was still living though unconscious. Making him as comfortable as I could, I beat it and found stretcher-bearers.

	He stirred weakly as we carried him away, spoke to me in a low, laboring voice. "Help is coming, I think. I was watching the air trails over the horizon. A great battle is ending far out in the ocean and twenty ships are heading this way." He paused, tried to cough, but couldn't. "They are almost certain to be ours, and they ought to be here by tomorrow night."

	The bearers took him from sight into our underground sick bay. I didn't get another chance to look him up until an hour later. The Jap aircraft had now gone, our men and their prisoners were busily burying the dead, unearthing mines, removing booby traps and collecting un-exploded ammunition.

	The guard wouldn't let me in until Grumpy arrived and took me in with him. Wakko was lying in a cot. They'd removed his contact lenses, which made his eyes look sunken, tired. He was white and obviously hadn't long to go. His lean face, deep-set optics and beak of a nose gave him the appearance of a crippled eagle.

	Taking hold of Wakko's thin hand, Grumpy spoke in his usual harsh voice, said things that made me blow my nose. He smeared Wakko with plenty of lard and Wakko took it all without uttering a word. But when Grumpy had gone, he opened his mouth and his Adam's apple wobbled. His voice was so low and weak that I could scarcely hear it. I put my ear nearer.

	"Don't let them put me in a hole in the earth." The way he looked at me suggested that this was as much of an order as a request. "Give me back to the Great Enemy." He sighed, quieted, then added, "Let me sink to the Lost Ones, where with them I may drink of aina wai-ola a Kane ... the living waters ... of Kane." He closed his eyes.

	"Listen," I urged, my mouth close to his ear. "What d'you mean? Who's the Great Enemy? Where's this place you call Kane?"

	He was silent a long, long time. Finally his lips moved and he murmured, briefly, "Bury me at sea." The next moment I knew that he had gone.

	I covered him up. He'd been a weird specimen, without any doubt. All his double-talk had me completely fuddled; his references to the masters and the spreaders of manure in outpost fields of ancient days, and the Great Enemy, and this place called Kane, and things that didn't have to be invented but only remembered. Was this Great Enemy the eternal ocean and, if so, why? I wouldn't know. But he was a good guy in his own strange, oblique way and I was going to miss him a great deal.

-

	Although Wakko had gone, and all his gadgets too, we weren't yet quite finished with him. He got in yet one more good crack. It came about when Grumpy summoned me to tell what little I knew about Wakko's cockeyed apparatus. Grumpy had organized a frantic search for data about this but without any luck. The wholesale bombing hadn't cost many lives, but it had made an awful mess of property stores and equipment. The signal guys and the potent diagram had gone up with the hut. The original curve had gone west and the film reproduction with it. Wakko's bloodless nerve-buster had returned to the mystic past from which he had exhumed it.

	So I stood and perforce waited outside Grumpy's holed and creaking office while he finished a discussion with the senior medical officer. The door was ajar, I couldn't help getting an earful of the conversation.

	The latter was saying, "Well, colonel, you to your views and I to mine. But natural causes always appeal to me more than explanations which ... ah ... can be classified as occult."

	"This man was no occultist," growled Grumpy.

	"But, my dear colonel, you cannot deny facts. It is a fact that the Japs have been stuck in these islands some months longer than our own men. It is a fact that they've had to subsist on a quite inadequate diet peculiarly poor in nerve-foods. Also that they've been subjected almost continually to more stringent forms of regimentation, bombed, raided, shot at, and finally shelled with remarkable accuracy. Above all is the fact that their typical psychological make-up is extremely brittle, causing them to be brave and even fanatical until they crack—and when the crack comes, it is swift and complete."

	"Plausible but unconvincing," said Grumpy, stubbornly.

	"If you know as much as I do about mass reactions you'd be more easily persuaded," riposted the medical officer. "Mob hysteria is a study in itself. Some religious revivals have been sweet samples of it. Remember that Martian broadcast by Orson Welles? I say that some of these Japs got shell-shocked and some others cracked and that both of these had their effect on their overstrained fellows with the result that the crack-up spread. Their muscular agitation is clear evidence of starved nerves. The fact that they collapsed soon after this so-called transmitter got working is, in my opinion, pure coincidence. The loss of the apparatus is of no consequence and it is a waste of mental energy to trouble our minds about it."

	"Have it your own way," Grumpy rumbled. "I choose to differ. Maybe it's only a bee in my bonnet and maybe not, but I feel that this man Wakko had got something." His horny hand whammed down on the desk. "And I want to know what he'd got!" There was silence for a moment, then he went on, "Your explanation doesn't cover other phenomena. For instance, I happen to know that this Wakko was a mesmerist of no mean order. He tried some on me, and it worked. I've since discovered that he was also something of a prophet."

	"Prophecy," sniffed the doc. I could imagine him waving a deprecatory hand. "I've come across prophets before now. They are experts in the art of concocting broad ambiguities. Let one prophet give me one plain, clear and precise forecast in simple, straightforward language and, if it comes off, I'll change my opinions."

-

	At that point I'd had enough. I knocked, marched in, saluted. Old Grumpy glowered at me under his bushy brows.

	"You sent for me, sir?'"

	"Yes, I did."

	"Before anything else, sir, I'd like to say that Wakko gave me a message for you."

	"Indeed? What is it?"

	I hurried up because the doc was gathering some papers into a bag and making ready to leave.

	"He said to tell you that twenty ships are coming and should he here by nightfall tomorrow."

	"Radar could tell us that," remarked the doc, closing his bag. "The radar installation was blown to pieces more than a week ago," said Grumpy. I enjoyed the nasty edge he put on his voice. "Scouting aircraft could also tell us—only there aren't any aircraft."

	"Humph!" contributed the doc. He added something under his breath—it sounded to me like, "Lemurians, silly, pfaugh!"—then he snatched his bag and went out.

	We didn't forget each other, the doc and me. Wakko's long, skinny, tarpaulin-wrapped form sank through green and sunlit waters toward that place he called Kane, and when it had disappeared in the darker depths I leaned on the battleship's rail and looked around. There were two cruisers in the bay. Anchored just outside, off the southern headland, were five transports, two aircraft carriers, nine destroyers and a big tanker. They'd arrived last night, half an hour before darkness closed in. They made a nice, neat total of twenty vessels.

	Somewhere just over the horizon another force was battering the Jap air base. The warm breeze brought with it the dull mutter of distant guns. Fighter-bombers and torpedo-bombers rolled along the deck of the nearest carrier, boosted their engines, took off and shrank to dots in the general direction of the far-off battle. The enemy's shuttle service was in process of compulsory liquidation, and things looked good.

	"Twenty ships—last night," recited a small voice in my mind.

	Leaving the rail, I walked along the deck, met our chief medical officer and bestowed on him the officially required adulation. He responded like an automaton. He didn't say anything and I didn't say anything—but he gave me a funny stare.

The End