While he was building he made my office his headquarters and was often in my study and afterward I returned the compliment by visiting him in his new “lab,” as he calls it—a quite large room at the rear of his home, a quiet, restful room in a quiet, restful house of the Spanish-American farm type—or we rode together in the Santa Monica Mountains in the cool air of early morning. Jason is experimenting with some new principle of radio concerning which the less I say the better it will be for my reputation, since I know nothing whatsoever about it and am likely never to. Perhaps I am too old, perhaps I am too dumb, perhaps I am just not interested—I prefer to ascribe my abysmal and persistent ignorance of all things pertaining to radio to the last state; that of disinterestedness; it salves my pride. I do know this, however, because Jason has told me, that the idea he is playing with suggests an entirely new and unsuspected—well, let us call it wave. He says the idea was suggested to him by the vagaries of static and in groping around in search of some device to eliminate this he discovered in the ether an undercurrent that operated according to no previously known scientific laws. At his Tarzana home he has erected a station and a few miles away, at the back of my ranch, another. Between these stations we talk to one another through some strange, ethereal medium that seems to pass through all other waves and all other stations, unsuspected and entirely harmless—so harmless is it that it has not the slightest effect upon Jason’s regular set, standing in the same room and receiving over the same aerial. But this, which is not very interesting to any one except Jason, is all by the way of getting to the beginning of the amazing narrative of the adventures of Tanar of Pellucidar. Jason and I were sitting in his “lab” one evening discussing, as we often did, innumerable subjects, from “cabbages to kings,” and coming back, as Jason usually did, to the Gridley wave, which is what we have named it. Much of the time Jason kept on his ear phones, than which there is no greater discourager of conversation. But this does not irk me as much as most of the conversations one has to listen to through life. I like long silences and my own thoughts. Presently, Jason removed the headpiece. “It is enough to drive a fellow to drink!” he exclaimed. “What?” I asked. “I am getting that same stuff again,” he said. “I can hear voices, very faintly, but, unmistakably, human voices. They, are speaking a language unknown to man. It is maddening.” “Mars, perhaps,” I suggested, “or Venus.” He knitted his brows and then suddenly smiled one of his quick smiles. “Or Pellucidar.” I shrugged.