"You touch people to call their attention. If you touch them too hard,
it isn't a touch but a blow, and you can knock them down. That's what
I'm giving this thing. It has the quality of a signal the spot can't
ignore, and the force of a blow. It should have the psychological
effect of thousands of bells of intolerable volume--only worse. But
we've got to keep on with the stimulus. And we mustn't repeat, or it
might be able to get used to the pattern."
"I'll talk to it in French," said Ellen. "But it doesn't seem to me
that a walkie-talkie could be too strong for--"
"It's hooked to the car's power system," Borden told her. "Jerry set it
up and connected it just before he began to recite poetry. There are
several kilowatts of radiation going to the thing now, and all of it is
attention-holding radiation."
When night fell and the use of a sun-mirror was patently impossible,
Borden moved on the highway toward what had been the white spot. The
walkie-talkie sent on its waves ahead.
Ellen recited, "_La fourmi et la cigale_" from second-year French.
Borden was more or less ready to take on from there with what he
remembered of Shakespeare.
They reached the end of the desert and all about them there was
the moist ground of the oasis which once had been the center of a
civilization. Presently they moved into the deserted, emptied buildings
of a city.