The secret of the bridge blueprint forged a new, unspoken bond between Robert and Arthur. The older man never mentioned it again, but his demeanor shifted from one of tolerant charity to something resembling a guarded partnership. He began asking Robert's opinion on more complex projects, not just the mechanics of a joint, but the logic of a structure. Robert, in turn, learned to translate his advanced knowledge into the practical, material-limited language of 1935. It was a delicate dance, and he was constantly aware of the precipice under his feet.
A week after the newspaper article, Arthur came home with a large, heavy box under his arm, a grin playing on his lips. "Picked up a project," he announced to Eleanor, setting the box on the kitchen table with a thud. "Old cathedral radio. Belongs to Mrs. Gable. Her husband passed, and it's been sitting in her attic, silent as a tomb. She said if I can get the dear thing working again, I can keep it."
Eleanor clapped her hands together. "Oh, Arthur! A cathedral radio! We could listen to The Chase and Sanborn Hour!"
Robert looked at the box. From it, Arthur carefully extracted the radio. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, housed in a wooden cabinet styled to resemble a Gothic cathedral arch, with a large, circular speaker grille cloth in the center. But it was also clearly broken—a tangle of dusty vacuum tubes, wax capacitors, and hand-soldered wires that looked as ancient as the pyramids to Robert's eyes.
Arthur spent the evening tinkering with it, replacing a few obviously frayed wires and cleaning the tube sockets. But when he plugged it in, the only response was a faint, ominous hum and a screen of dead static from the speaker.
"Blast," Arthur muttered, scratching his head. "The tubes light up, but no sound. Could be a dozen things. The condenser's probably shot. Or the transformer." He looked defeated. "Might be beyond me."
Robert had been watching from the doorway, a strange fascination taking hold. This wasn't a digital device with integrated circuits and error codes. This was analog. This was electrons moving through physical space, across resistors and through capacitors. It was primitive, but its logic was pure. It was a machine he could understand from first principles.
"Can I… take a look?" he asked softly.
Arthur glanced up, surprised, then waved a hand. "Be my guest. Can't make it any more broken."
That night, after Eleanor had gone to bed, Robert and Arthur sat at the kitchen table with the radio's innards exposed. Arthur had a basic schematic, hand-drawn and smudged. Robert studied it, his mind cross-referencing it with everything he knew about electrical engineering. The problem, he suspected, wasn't a single failed component, but a cascade of degraded parts—a leaky capacitor here, a resistor drifting out of tolerance there.
Working by the warm, golden light of the kerosene lamp, it was a scene that could have been from any point in the last fifty years. But the knowledge Robert applied was not. He used a multimeter Arthur had borrowed from a friend—a clunky, analog device—to trace voltages. He explained the flow of current to Arthur not with complex equations, but with the analogy of water pressure in pipes, which the carpenter understood instantly.
"See, this capacitor is like a leaky bucket in the system," Robert said, pointing to a small, cylindrical component. "It's supposed to hold a charge, but it's draining it away. That's why the signal is so weak by the time it reaches the audio stage."
Arthur peered at it, his brow furrowed in concentration. "So we need a new bucket."
"Exactly."
They didn't have a new capacitor. But Robert, remembering stories of Depression-era ingenuity, had an idea. He found a piece of waxed paper and some tin foil from Eleanor's kitchen. Carefully, he showed Arthur how to roll a makeshift capacitor, layering the waxed paper and foil. It was a temporary, crude fix, but it was a functioning one.
They soldered it in place, the smell of hot rosin filling the kitchen. Arthur's hands were steadier with a soldering iron than Robert would have guessed.
"Alright," Robert said, his voice tight with anticipation. "Plug it in."
Arthur did. The tubes glowed orange. Robert carefully turned the large, knurled tuning knob. For a moment, there was only the same hiss of static. Then, like a ghost emerging from the ether, a voice fought its way through the noise. It was faint, crackling with interference, but unmistakably clear.
"…and so, my friends, let us not speak of despair, but of opportunity. The only thing we have to fear is… fear itself…"
It was Franklin D. Roosevelt's voice, giving one of his Fireside Chats. The timing was a coincidence, but the effect was seismic. The President's calm, resonant voice, discussing the ongoing economic crisis, filled the small kitchen. It was no longer a historical recording. It was a live broadcast. The man was alive, speaking now, his words entering homes across America at this very moment.
Eleanor, drawn by the sound, appeared in the doorway, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide. "You fixed it," she whispered.
Arthur didn't take his eyes off the radio. He stared at it as if it were a miracle, the voice of the President emanating from the box they had just resurrected with wax paper and tin foil. He slowly turned to look at Robert. The last vestiges of wariness in his eyes were gone, replaced by a look of pure, unvarnished awe.
He wasn't just looking at a helpful handyman anymore. He was looking at a man who could bring voices from the air back to life. In the world of 1935, that was as close to magic as anything he had ever seen.
Robert met his gaze, the static from the radio filling the silence between them. He had fixed a broken machine. But in doing so, he had irrevocably broken the careful, anonymous character he had tried to build. He was no longer just a man with strange ideas. He was a man who could perform minor miracles. And he knew, with a chilling certainty, that miracles, no matter how small, never went unnoticed for long.