What is Rosie's old childhood friend, the inventor Mashl doing at the moment, you might well ask. We have left Rosie just as she becomes actively engaged in political life. Nothing wrong with that, of course...but Mashl will not be taking the same road, not even if Rosie used all her powers of persuasion.
He stands by the window and blinks into the winter sun. He has a mirror in his room, in which he sometimes catches his own face. He tries to avoid the angles at which this could occur - he doesn't like seeing himself, since he doesn't consider himself in the least good-looking. He prefers to gaze out of the window, eyes half-closed, enjoying the warm sunlight that caresses his face regardless of his ugliness.

Now his phone rings. He looks round. The telephone is lying in the shadows of the room on the striped carpet.
The telephone rings again.
The space in the room between Mashl and his telephone somehow narrows, and the sharp aggressive noise has upset his mood of calm intimacy. He grimaces as if the phone has betrayed him. He makes a grab at the receiver to silence it.
"Hallo."
Silence. There was only the honk of a motor-horn outside in the street.
Mashl listens to the sounds of the receiver. Just as he once listened to the conch shell he bought on holiday in Yugoslavia. Yes, the conch - that was why he remembered it! - Mashl is hearing exactly the same sounds. The quiet breaking of waves on sand between his toes, the murmur of the heavy swell in the distance ... a flock of gulls in the sky....he listens...
"Hallo," he says quietly after a while.
Sometime his telephone stopped working properly - the old analogue system acting up - and then he could hear a radio, perhaps, playing in the receiver, even if very faintly, but despite this he could make out words. Once he had wanted to make a call and found the telephone broken again, but instead of cursing Telecom as usual, he had listened to that quiet radio, which he had not ordered, and which yet had the charm of something unexpected, even mysterious. They were playing music, a beautiful Beethoven Symphony. He had been annoyed at not being able to make his call, but after listening to the music for a while he closed his eyes and let his head fall back. He smiled. It was like a revelation. He kept his eyes closed and listened with humbleness and passion - his original wish was to call his girlfriend who had left him a few days earlier.

Nonetheless, his receiver had never before given out the sounds of the sea.

At first he thought it might simply be an unusual broadcast by a radio station that had once again found a nest in his receiver, uninvited, like a cuckoo egg. But it was too long to be a broadcast. It struck him that it was Him, once again trying to make contact. He who had been discovered by the international scientific team. He whose blurred photograph from a laser camera had recently been appearing again and again on the front pages of the daily newspapers.
"Here I am," he whispered, "I'm searching for You. I want to see You. I want to speak with You. I want to love You."
He seemed to hear a weak voice in the murmur of the sea. He pressed the receiver tightly to his ear and stretched his eyes as if they could help him to hear better. But the voice faded away in the shrieking of the gulls.
After a moment, however, the voice emerged again when the cry of the gulls had receded. Mashl made out several words.
"I'm... weak... I can't ... lose connection... I need contact....you know....when they photographed me but didn't hear me.... it's hard to maintain the connection....it's easier via the Internet....they blocked my access....I forgot my password....IRC....no one believes my e-mails ....you will..."
Mashl went on listening for a while, but the voice had gone. Then the sea too faded, gradually turning into the kind of crackling and buzzing that was not unknown to Mashl in his relations with his telephone. When it had finally turned into the very familiar dead hum, he sighed.
Then the dialling tone came back. He held the receiver to his ear just a little longer.
His heart beat in the rhythm of the dialling tone, slow and heavy.
He smiled blissfully.