The Mystery of the Blazing Cliffs - M. V. Carey [17]
“Do you really think she is?” said Jupe. “Do you really think we have visitors from outer space?”
Elsie looked away from him. “What else could it be?” she said. She stood up, suddenly brisk, and got a candle and a tin candlestick from one of the cupboards.
“You can take this with you when you go to bed,” she said, handing the candlestick to the boys. Then she went up the stairs carrying a lamp. Mary Sedlack came in and went up, too.
Banales, Detweiler, and Aleman also had rooms in the ranch house, and they came in soon after. Banales showed Konrad and the boys where they were to sleep in a big bunkroom at the front of the house. Konrad declared that he didn’t dare shut his eyes, but he stretched out on a cot and was soon breathing deeply and evenly.
The boys lay in the darkness for a long while after the candle was put out. They listened to the noises made by the old house, and by the people in it. Somewhere nearby someone tossed restlessly in bed. Someone else paced in the darkness.
Jupe awoke in the early hours of the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. His mind kept turning over the events of the previous day. After a time he got up and went to the window. The moon had set, and the ranch was dark and quiet. No one stirred outside. Jupe couldn’t guess the hour, but he thought that dawn must be fairly close.
Impulsively, he put on his clothes and moved softly to the cots where his fellow Investigators slept. A light touch brought each of them awake. A few minutes later, all three boys were creeping down the stairs and out of the house. By the faint light of the stars, Jupe led the others past the workers’ cottages to the parking area near the sheds. There the boys huddled under a tree.
“What gives?” asked Pete.
Jupe frowned and pulled at his lip, as he always did when he was thinking furiously.
“Would it be very difficult for someone to imitate the President’s voice?” he finally asked.
“And would it be hard to get a recording of the Marine Band playing ‘Hail to the Chief’?”
“You think this is a hoax?” asked Bob.
“I don’t know. But it makes me think of a famous radio broadcast that I once read about,” said Jupe. “It was done by Orson Welles, and if it didn’t start out to be a hoax, it sure wound up as one.”
Jupe leaned against the trunk of a tree and cleared his throat, as if he were about to give a lecture.
“Way back in the 1930s,” he said, “before there was any television, Welles went on radio one Hallowe’en night with a dramatization of a science fiction story by H. G. Wells, the English novelist. The story was called War of the Worlds. It was about monsters from Mars who came to invade the earth. At the very beginning of the programme, an announcer came on to say that it was only a radio play, but the rest of the programme sounded just like a series of emergency news broadcasts. Anyone who tuned in late heard bulletins about the strange objects from outer space that had fallen to earth near a little town in New Jersey.
They heard that the strange objects were spaceships, and that terrible creatures with tentacles were emerging from them. Parts of the programme were supposed to be coming from mobile units at the scene, and the radio audience heard sirens and crowd noises.
There were reports of poisonous gases coming from the New Jersey marshes. And there were bulletins on traffic conditions on the major highways as people supposedly fled from the invaders.
“What the broadcasting company didn’t know until the programme was over was that people really were fleeing from the Martians. Thousands of them thought the reports on the radio were real, and they panicked.
“Now suppose that the broadcast we heard today didn’t really come from Washington?
Suppose the voice we heard