The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (101 page)

“Stand back, Sandy,” he said tiredly. “We’ll see what happens.”

He flipped the momentary-contact switch. There was a crash and a roar. The six-inch thing leaped. It grazed Burke’s head and drew blood. It flashed across the room, a full thirty feet, and then smashed a water-cooler and imbedded itself in the brick wall beyond. A tool cabinet tottered and crashed to the floor. The storage battery spouted steam, swelled. Burke grabbed Sandy and plunged outside with her as the building filled with vaporized battery acid.

Outside, he put her down and rubbed his nose with his finger.

“That was a surprise,” he said with some animation. “Are you all right?”

“You—could have been killed!” she said in a whisper.

“I wasn’t,” said Burke. “If you’re not hurt there’s no harm done. It looks like the thing worked! Lucky that was only a millisecond contact! Negative self-induction… I’ll break some windows and come to the office.”

He did break windows, from the outside, so air could flow through the building and clear away the battery-acid steam. Sandy watched him anxiously.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll come quietly.”

He followed her to the office. He was so physically worn out, he tripped on the office step as he went in.

“Tell me the news on the signals,” he said. “Still coming in?”

“Yes.” She looked at him again, worried. “Joe… Sit down. Here. What’s happened?”

“Nothing except that I’m a genius at second hand. I didn’t intend it that way, and maybe it can be covered up, but I’ve turned out to be sane. So I think, maybe you’d better get another job. Since I’m sane I’ll surely go bankrupt and maybe I’ll end up in jail. But it’s going to be interesting.” His head drooped and he jerked it upright. “This is reaction,” he said distinctly. “I’m tired, I wanted badly to find out whether I was crazy or not. I found out I haven’t been. I’m not so sure I won’t be presently.” He made a stiff gesture and said, “Take the day off, Sandy. I’m going to rest awhile.”

Then his head fell forward and he was asleep.

Burke slept for a long time. And this time dreamlessly.

The thing he made had worked for much less than the tenth of a second, but it came out of his dream, ultimately, and it was linked with whatever sent messages from Asteroid M-387. There was still nothing intelligible about the whole affair. It contained no single rational element. But if there was no rational explanation, there was what now seemed reasonable action that could be taken.

So he slept, and as usual the world went on its way unheeding. The fluting sounds from the sky remained the top news story of the day. There was no doubt of their artificiality, nor that they came from a small, tumbling, jagged rock which was one of the least of the more than fifteen hundred asteroids of the solar system. It was two hundred and seventy million miles from Earth. The latest computations said that not less than twenty thousand kilowatts of power had been put into the transmitter to produce so strong and loud a signal on Earth. No power-source of that order had been carried out to make the signals. But they were there.

Astronomers became suddenly important sources of news. They contradicted each other violently. Eminent scientists observed truthfully that Schull’s object, as such, could not sustain life. It could not have an atmosphere, and its gravitational field would not hold even a moderately active microbe on its surface. Therefore any life and any technology now on it must have come from somewhere else. The most eminent scientists said reluctantly that they could not deny the possibility that a spaceship from some other solar system had been wrecked on M-387, and was now sending hopeless pleas for help to the local planetary bodies.

Others observed briskly that anything which smashed into an asteroid would vaporize, if it hit hard enough, or bounce away if it did not. So there was no evidence for a spaceship. There was only evidence for a transmitter. There was no explanation for that. It could be mentioned, said these skeptics, that there were other sources of radiation in space. There was the Jansky radiation from the Milky Way, and radiations from clouds of ionized material in emptiness, and radio stars were well known. A radio asteroid was something new, but—

It was working astronomers, so to speak, who took action. They had been bouncing signals off of Earth’s moon, and various artificial satellites, and they’d flicked signals in the direction of Mars and Venus and believed that they got them back. The most probable returned radar signal from Mars had been received by a radar telescope in West Virginia. It had been turned temporarily into a transmitter and some four hundred kilowatts were poured into it to go out in a tight beam. The working astronomers took over that parabolic bowl again. They borrowed, begged, wheedled, and were suspected of stealing necessary equipment to put nearly eight hundred kilowatts into a microwave signal, this time beamed at Asteroid M-387. If intelligent beings received the signal, they might reply. If they did, the working astronomers would figure out what to do next.

Burke slept in the office of Burke Development, Inc. His features were relaxed and peaceful. Sandy was completely helpless before his tranquil exhaustion. But presently she used the telephone and spoke in a whisper to her younger sister, Pam. In time, Pam came in a cab bringing blankets and a pillow. She and Sandy got Burke to a pallet on the floor with a pillow under his head and a thickness of blanket over him. He slept on, unshaven and oblivious.

Pam said candidly, “If you can feel romantic about anything like that, Sandy, I’ll still love you, but I’ll join the men in thinking that women are mysterious!”

She departed in the cab and Sandy took up a vigil over Burke’s slumbering form.

Pravda announced in its evening edition of Monday that Soviet scientists would send out a giant space-probe, intended to orbit around Venus, to investigate the space-signal source. The probe would carry a man. It would blast off within six weeks, preceded by drone fuel-carriers which would be overtaken by the probe and furnish fuel to it. Pravda threw in a claim that Russians had been first to refuel an aeroplane in flight, and asserted that Soviet physical science would make a space-voyage of two hundred seventy million miles mere ducksoup for their astronaut.

Editorially, American newspapers mentioned that the Russians had tried similar things before, and that at least three coffins now floated in orbit around Earth, not to mention the one on the moon. But if they tried it… The American newspapers waited for a reaction from Washington.

It came. The most eminent of civilian scientists announced proudly that the United States would proceed to the design and testing of multi-stage rockets capable of landing a party on Mars when Earth and Mars were in proper relative position. This having been accomplished, a rocket would then take off from Mars for Asteroid M-387 to investigate the radio transmissions from that peculiar mass of tumbling rock. It was blandly estimated that the Americans might take off for Mars in eighteen months.

Sandy watched over Burke. There was nothing to do in the office. She did not read. Near seven the telephone rang, and she frantically muffled its sound. It was Pam, asking what Sandy meant to do about dinner. Sandy explained in an almost inaudible voice. Pam said resignedly, “All right. I’ll come out and bring something. Lucky it’s a warm day. We can sit in your car and eat. If I had to watch Joe sleeping like that and needing a shave as he does, I’d lose my appetite.”

She hung up. When she arrived, Burke was still asleep. Sandy went outside. Pam had brought hero sandwiches and coffee. They sat on the steps of the office and ate.

“I know,” said Pam between sympathy and scorn, “I know you like the poor goof, Sandy, but there ought to be some limit to your amorous servitude! There are office hours! You’re supposed to knock off at five. It’s seven-thirty now. And what will being decent to that unshaven Adonis get you? He’ll take you for granted, and go off and marry a nitwit of a blonde who’ll hate you because you’d have been so much better for him. And she’ll get you fired and what then?”

“Joe won’t marry anybody else,” said Sandy forlornly. “If he could fall for anybody, it’d be me. He told me so. He started to propose to me Friday night.”

“So?” said Pam, with the superior air of a younger sister. “Did he say enough for you to sue him?”

“He can’t fall in love with anybody,” said Sandy. “He wants to marry me, but he’s emotionally tangled up with a female he’s had dreams about since he was eleven.”

“I thought I’d heard everything,” said Pam. “But that—”

Sandy explained morosely. As she told it, it was not quite the same picture Burke had given her. Her account of the trees in Burke’s recurrent dream was accurate enough, and the two moons in the sky, and the fluting, arbitrary tones from behind him. Pam had heard their duplicates, along with all the broadcast listeners in the United States. But as Sandy told it, the running figure beyond the screen of foliage was not at all the shadowy movement Burke described. Sandy had her own ideas, and they colored her account.

There was a stirring inside the small office building. Burke had waked. He turned over and blinked, astonished to find himself with blankets over him and a pillow under his head. It was dark inside the office, too.

“Joe,” called Pam in the darkness, “Sandy and I have been waiting for you to wake up. You took your time about it! We’ve got some coffee for you.”

Burke got to his feet and stumbled to the light switch. “Fine!” he said ruefully. “Somebody got blankets for me, too! Nice business, this!”

They heard him moving about. He folded the blankets that had been laid on the floor for him. He moved across the room and turned on Sandy’s desk radio. It hummed, preliminary to playing. He came to the door.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I worked pretty hard pretty long, and when the thing was finished I passed out. I feel better now. Did you actually say you had some coffee?”

Sandy passed up a cardboard container.

“Pam’s compliments,” she said. “We’ve been waiting until you slept off your working binge. We didn’t want to leave you. Booger-men sound likelier than they used to.”

A voice from the radio broke in.

“…o’clock news. A signal has been beamed toward the space-broadcast transmitter by the parabolic reflector of the Bradenville radar telescope, acting as a mirror to concentrate the message toward Asteroid M-387. So far there has been no reply. We are keeping a circuit open, and if or when an answer is received we will issue a special bulletin.… The San Francisco Giants announced today that in a three-way trade—”

Burke had listened to nothing else while the news broadcast dealt with space signals, but other news did not mean very much to him just now. He sipped at the cardboard cup of coffee.

“I think,” said Pam, “that since you’ve waked up I’ll take my big sister home. You’ll be all right now.”

“Yes,” said Burke abstractedly. “I’ll be all right now.”

“Really, Joe, you shouldn’t work day and night without a break!” Sandy said.

“And you shouldn’t have bothered to stand watch over me,” he answered. “Well, I guess the shed should be clear of battery fumes by now. I’ll go over and see.”

Burke came back in a few minutes.

“This thing I made is pretty tough,” he observed. “It smashed into a brick wall, but it was the wall that suffered.” He fingered it thoughtfully. “I had that dream again just now,” he volunteered. “While I was asleep on the floor. Sandy, you know about such things better than I do. How much money have I in the bank? I’m going to build something and it’ll probably cost a lot.”

Sandy’s hands had clenched when he mentioned the dream. So far, it had done more damage than any dream had a right to do. But it looked as if it were about to do more. She told him his balance in the bank. He nodded.

“Maybe I can stretch it,” he observed. “I’m going to—”

The music had stopped inside the office. The voice of an announcer interrupted.

“Special Bulletin! Special Bulletin! Our signal to space have been answered! Special Bulletin! Here is a direct report from the Bradenton radar telescope which, within the hour, broadcast a message to space!”

A tinny, agitated voice came from the radio, punctuated by those tiny beeping sounds that say that a telephone talk is being recorded.

“A definite reply to the human signal to Asteroid M-387 has been received. It is cryptic, like the first message from space, but is unmistakably a response to the eight-hundred-kilowatt message beamed toward the source of those world-wide-received strange sounds.…”

The tinny voice went on.

CHAPTER 3

In retrospect, events moved much faster than reason would suggest. The first signal from space had been received on a Friday. At that time—when the first flutings were picked up by a tape recorder on Kalua—the world had settled down to await the logical consequences of its history. It was not a comfortable settling-down, because the consequences were not likely to be pleasant. Earth was beginning to be crowded, and there were whole nations whose populations labored bitterly with no hope of more than subsistence during their lifetime, and left a legacy of equal labor and scarcer food for their descendants. There were hydrogen bombs and good intentions, and politics and a yearning for peace, and practically all individual men felt helpless before a seemingly merciless march of ominous events. At that time, too, nearly everybody worked for somebody else, and a large part of the employed population justified its existence by the length of time spent at its place of employment. Nobody worried about what he did there.