Prologue

Summary

Of course it would have been more natural for his boy to have helped him on the roof, but the boy's cousin would do fine. He was eleven, and big for eleven, so the two of them should be able to hoist up the home-made antenna structure without any difficulty.

He had been working on his ham rig for several years now, soldering the basic parts of the transmitter together while living in a tiny little one bedroom apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, an abode he and his wife had been fortunate to rent, and a rather pleasant spot to live with the two kids (one a newborn) during the final days of the war. He had acquired his amateur radio license the previous fall. The hard part had been that Morse code test, in which you had to correctly interpret at least thirteen words per minute and, as easy as that may sound, he had struggled to do it. Learning the code itself wasn't all that difficult; after all it was just combinations of dots and dashes—or as the cognoscenti called them, dits and dahs. But unravelling those dts and dahs he heard in the headphones at a rate of five or six per second, and then having to scribble down on paper the corresponding letters had been a struggle.

He had also taught his boy the code, and he knew one day that kid would surely get his own license and they'd both be on the air communicating with hams around the world.