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“Haven’t you been listening? It wouldn’t sell: his style’s out of the ark.”

She shook her head pityingly at his smile.

“Don’t ape dead authors’ styles,” she pleaded, “you can’t be that desperate.”

Miranda had always been her husband’s sternest critic. She had a better degree than his — from the days when creative writing was not a proper university subject. They’d met as English teachers but Martin couldn’t take the hassle of the blackboard jungle. He couldn’t help disliking children.

“I’m not desperate,” he lied. “Take a hypothetical case: what if I found a new work by a dead author who still sells. How would I handle it?”

“Are you thinking of the lost Shakespeare sonnet they wrote about in The Observer?”

“No, I have in mind a popular author who died in the past fifty years.”

“Like Dylan Thomas?” Miranda smiled grimly. Recently, she’d given a lecture on the incidence of alcoholism amongst authors. She disapproved of wasted talent.

“Remind me: when did he die?” Martin asked.

“In November 1953. Why do you need to know?”

Martin ignored the question.

“Which popular authors died in 1980?” he demanded.

“Barbara Pym is the only one I know of off-hand. What’s this about, Martin?”

“I think I’ve found a way to make a lot of money. Could you jot down the death dates of some authors whose unpublished work would sell?”

“I suppose I could,” she replied. “I need a break from this house. I’ll go to the library and look up Dickens and Trollope ...”

“No, stick to post-1950. While you’re out, I’ll check the Yellow Pages: I need a technician — the radio’s on the blink.”

As he left the room, she sighed in the way she did to mark his receipt of yet another rejection slip. While he sat in the hall, flicking through the directory, it occurred to Martin that he’d not asked Miranda if she’d hallucinated after drinking school coffee. It was too late: Miranda banged the back door behind her.

A man in Clifton advised Martin to put the Sony in a Jiffy bag and bring it to his workshop. The technician’s business was run from a lock-up garage, a chapel of rest for dead computers.

“The name’s Jim, I fix most things,” the man smiled, “but there’s little I can do with a phase-locked loop radio like your Sony. Expensive bit of kit, that Sony.”

“From palmier days,” Martin explained. “I need to know the exact frequency it’s set to.”

“That I can do,” Jim assured him.

In minutes, his test equipment gave a figure which Martin wrote down.

“That’ll be half an hour at forty quid — no VAT for cash,” Jim said.

Martin suppressed his horror and paid up.

Miranda hadn’t returned. Martin made himself a large mug of strong coffee, waited for it to take effect then went confidently to his workroom. On the word processor screen, Ben expressed his thanks for the frequency details but said he also needed Snow’s. Dutifully, Martin reset his receiver and spent an hour bringing the late author up to date on the demise of socialism in Eastern Europe. Hoping that he was fit to drive, he returned to Jim’s workshop clutching the Sony.

The second frequency measurement cost only a fiver. Jim was curious to know what was going on but Martin laid a finger beside his nose and told him he was conducting an experiment.

“I was in radio research once ...” Jim began — but Martin hurried out.

Once more dosed with coffee, he climbed to the attic.

Ben was boyishly enthusiastic. Martin was told to fetch a calculator and key in the difference between his and Snow’s frequency: 6.8Hz.

Wow,infra  that really is special, Ben wrote. Next we find if the relationship is linear. Chuck must think up some guy who died a while back. He’s got a photographic memory — useful in the afterlife. You calculate this third guy’s frequency, set a transmitter to it and link your receiver output to the transmitter’s input. We’ll need a return path: another transceiver. I’ll act as relay and say when to scan. With luck we’ll hit him first time. When he comes in loud and clear, I’ll put his signal out in machine code. OK?

Martin shook his head. Machine code? Wasn’t that something to do with how computers passed information to each other? Ben must assume he worked in a computer lab with limitless resources. Martin typed in an apologetic explanation and asked for Snow to think up a more practical scheme, one suitable for a man who had dropped Maths at school in favour of Sociology. The result was a screenful of supernatural abuse.

Chuck says you’ve to get a grip on yourself, Ben wrote. This is the greatest breakthrough in history and you whine about a few minor technical details. Up to now the only ghosts the living got to meet were tortured souls in limbo — no use at all. He also says that something must have gone very wrong with education in England if a man who claims to be a writer has little more than a five-year old’s knowledge of the sciences. You can’t ignore fifty per cent of the sum of human experience merely because you dropped Math at school. He says that in his day only the most pathetically arrogant bigots failed to recognise the importance of science to humanity. This is a serious scientific experiment not a time to relax over pen and ink. By training he is a scientist but by vocation, a writer like you. He moves between the two cultures — and now between the living and the dead. Neither is an unmoveable pole: there is a continuum which the living refuse to acknowledge. You have the means and opportunity to explore and explain these continua. You disappoint us, man.

Martin re-read the admonition in wonder. Was this, perhaps, his conscience speaking — a kind of drug-induced Jiminy Cricket?

When Miranda returned from the library, she was unsympathetic. The Corridor must be sent off before Easter, she reminded him.

“Research is all very well, but you don’t know when to stop. Be practical.”

Martin retired to the attic and sulked.