When she spoke--and I half imagined her words were really coming over
the ether--there was a childish lisp in her voice, but still a ring
of confidence and courage. Her words were strange, but I soon grew to
sense their meaning, almost by intuition. Night after night, when I put
on the phones and tuned in on the strange noises of the ether, that
vision came back. It was not long before I could speak that strange
tongue as fluently as I could speak English.
With childish reserve, I told Sam nothing about my wonderful dream,
until one day he heard me chattering in the language I had learned.
He questioned me eagerly; and I shyly told him all about it, and
even supplied material for a grammar of the language. He took a keen
scientific interest in the matter, when he learned that the vision came
only over the radio, and he began to formulate theories of telepathic
suggestion and mind control by ether waves.
The matter was written up by a prominent psychologist to whom he
reported it. The account appeared in a well known scientific magazine,
with comments upon the strange language, which, oddly enough, bore not
the slightest similarity to any known tongue, and appeared rather too
perfect to be credited to the invention of a five-year-old. The writer
mentioned Sam's ideas, that I had established telepathic contact with
another planet, or perhaps with the far-distant past or future; but
theories of mind reading received little welcome in a day when science
was dormant, and even the suggestion that the language, because of its
simplicity, power, and labial beauty, would become the long-sought
international tongue, was soon completely forgotten.
But I did not forget the Green Girl. The conviction grew upon me that
she was a real living entity. To find her became my ruling passion.
Under Sam's tutelage I poured over geographical accounts, searching in
vain for some clue to a hidden nation. But the fact that the language
seemed to have no sister tongue on earth discouraged that. Between my
tenth and fifteenth years Sam and I restlessly scoured the globe in
search of a clue, but a decade before we had given it up.
I turned to dreams of interplanetary travel with a passionate desire
to explore space and venture to other worlds in search of my dream
girl; but the space flier seemed as far in the future as it had done
a hundred years before. To please me, however, Sam helped design and
construct a model of a machine we called the Omnimobile--because it
should be able to travel in all elements.
But, as the years of my early manhood passed, I slowly relinquished all
hope of finding the Green Girl in fact, and resolved to content myself
with her companionship in fancy. It was then, too, that I developed my
inordinate fondness for scientific romances which I devoured insatiably
to feed my dreams. It was only during the first few years that I
could find her only over the radio. As time went by, she became an
inseparable companion of my mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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