“If you were on the wireless, you must have sent messages for Schwarzschild,” Travers said eagerly. “Did you ever send a message to Einstein? They’ve got the letter Einstein sent to him after he wrote him his theory, but if Schwarzschild sent him some kind of message, too, that would be great. It would make my paper.”

“You said that no message can escape a black hole?” I said. “But they could escape a collapsing star. Is that not so?”

“Okay,” Travers said impatiently, and made his fingers into a semicircle again. “Suppose you have a fixed observer over here.” He pulled his curved hand back and held the forefinger of his other hand up to represent the fixed observer. “And you have somebody in the star. Say when the star starts to collapse, the person in it shines a light at the fixed observer. If the star hasn’t reached the Schwarzschild radius, the fixed observer will be able to see the light, but it will take longer to reach him because the gravity of the black hole is pulling on the light, so it will seem as if time on the star has slowed down, and the wavelengths will have been lengthened, so the light will be redder. Of course that’s just a thought problem. There couldn’t really be anybody in a collapsing star to send the messages.”

“We sent messages,” I said. “I wrote my mother asking her to knit me a pair of gloves.”

There is still something wrong with the wireless. We have received only one message in two weeks. It said, “Russian opposition collapsing,” and there was so much static we could not make out the rest of it. We have taken the wireless apart twice. The first time we found a loose wire, but the second time we could not find anything. If Hans were here, he would be able to find the trouble immediately.

“I have a theory about the wireless,” Müller says. He has had ten theories in as many days: The magnet of the Russians is pulling our signals in to it; the northern lights, which have been shifting uneasily on the horizon, make a curtain the wireless signals cannot get through; the Russian opposition is not collapsing at all. They are drawing us deeper and deeper into a trap.