Walt by Ian Stoba Read Free Book Online Page B

know why, perhaps I felt responsible somehow, but I approached this man. I spoke to him in the calmest words I could muster. I asked him his name, he said he was Walt.
    There, it is done. Walt and I have met.

X
    O ur conversation lasted far longer than it reasonably should have. I finally worked in a question about his interest in the Easybeats. Cryptically, and at great length, he described to me the nature of his ordeal. That information makes up the bulk of the preceding pages of this story.
    I asked him how long he had been hearing the music in his head. As I have said before, I was not prepared for creatures quite as strange as Walt to answer my beacon. At that point I did not tell him that I was, in all likelihood, transmitting the signal that he had heard in his head all this time.
    I took Walt down the street to Red’s Java House for coffee. I hoped that it would be something of a familiar environment for him. Red’s is built out over the water on piers. The drain from the sink goes through a hole in the floor and directly out into the Bay.
    The crowd there is mostly longshoremen and visiting sailors, but a lot of frugal suits from the Financial District come there for the coffee and the cheap hamburgers that taste like vinegar. The walls are covered with posters announcing union meetings and other types of workingmen’s information.
    Walt was in a state of shock. The coffee did not seem to help. I had no idea that he had never tasted coffee before.
    Our conversation finally got around to his plans here. His response was simple: he had none. His response was exactly the same when I asked him about his place to stay. What I did next seemed logical enough at the time, but has never made sense to me since; I invited him to come stay with me.
    After all, he was not really going to be in the way. My roommate had contracted Dengue Fever while traveling across northern Thailand by elephant and, after a period of bed rest in Delhi, had traveled to Salt Lake City to recuperate.
    I did not think at that point to ask how long Walt might be planning on staying with me. As things turned out, it did not really matter.
    After finishing our coffee, we walked up Folsom all the way from the waterfront to get back to my, our, apartment. Walt was terrified by the enormity of the Bay Bridge and the buildings downtown. I had a great deal of difficulty describing the purpose of Alcatraz before it became a tourist attraction. There were, of course, no prisons on Tristan.
    Walt told me that the music in his head was getting louder and louder with every step. Conversation became progressively more difficult. By the time we crossed Fifth Street, I had to shout to make myself heard over the din in Walt’s head. I made a mental note to bring down the power on the transmitter.
    As we walked on in silence I wondered what could possibly have caused my transmission in San Francisco to be picked up in the head of a lobster fisherman half way around the world.
    I finally hit upon a theory. I remembered that certain radio frequencies are subject to a phenomenon known as “wave skip”. When this happens, the radio wave is reflected off of the Earth’s atmosphere and sent back down to the surface of the planet. If the angles all line up just perfectly, the signal can be carried thousands, even tens of thousands, of miles beyond the normal transmitting range of the radio source. This skip is most common with relatively low frequency radio waves. I had opted for a low frequency transmitter because I thought it would be more difficult for the Government to trace. The Government has some draconian ideas about the nature of broadcasting and who should be allowed to be involved in it. I was actually breaking the law by transmitting my innocent message to the stars. Laws, I have found, are by and large foolish inventions.
    I was a bit saddened by the idea of the skipping waves. If the theory was correct, it meant that my signal had not penetrated the