As long back as I can remember, we had successfully preserved the family's seclusion from the living world. Wherever we happened to be, in town or country, we had protected our privacy with shuttered windows, and massive iron gates that were secured both day and night with heavy chains. Numerous signs of "Private" and "No Trespassing Allowed" dotted our grounds like grave markers. And then, quite suddenly, our lives became incredibly transformed. A series of weird events brought us out of our privacy and seclusion--brought us plenty of excitement and trouble and even horror. But that was not to be wondered at, with Henry, my elder brother, suddenly developing a mania for research in scientific matters, especially the science of heavenly bodies and the phenomena of radio. He did not pretend to be a scholar, although he had cultivated scholarly habits most of his life. Inexplicably, this mania had seized him late in life; a sort of bursting out of the abnormal repression which held us all in thrall, no doubt as the result of our long seclusion from the outside world and following the drab and barren routine of our lives with such punctilious rigidity. Ample means had enabled him to completely outfit an observatory, with a powerful telescope, at our summer residence. Here he would spend hours gazing into the abyss of space. He saw things up there the trained, professional astronomer never saw, or ever hoped to see--colliding suns, formation of temporary stars, the rejuvenescence of dying worlds, and gaseous explosions in the Milky Way. One of his pet theories was that the planet Mars was inhabited by a race of people like ourselves, and that their men of science had long been trying to establish radio communication with the earth. The static on our radio set which annoyed me intensely, would galvanize Henry with delight and hope, and his eyes would glisten almost frenziedly behind their horn-rimmed spectacles. "Those are distinctly electro-magnetic waves," he would say, "that come from some point far off in space, and they are not due to any terrestrial disturbance like thunderstorms, local or distant." There was no opening, no escape, from Henry once he got started on the galactic radio waves as differing from the cosmic rays and from the phenomenon of cosmic radiation. "I'm telling you, Livingston," he once declared in an excited, high-pitched voice, "that man has only begun his conquest of time and space. There are no limitations to human achievement. The world is on the threshold of things unheard of, undreamed of. I have no doubt that we will soon be able to establish radio communication with Mars, and with my leisure, money and the required taste for science, I feel that I am admirably fitted to make it come true." And from that day he was changed, secretive. He refused to tell me what he had discovered. Again and again I begged him to explain and always it was the same vague answer, the same shake of the head, and tightened lips.