The Wailing Asteroid. Murray Leinster

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      Burke sat utterly still, every muscle tense. He was so pale that even in the moonlight Sandy saw it. She was alarmed.

      “Joe! What’s the matter?”

      “Did you—hear that?” he asked thinly. “The signals?”

      “Of course. But what…”

      “I recognized them,” said Burke, in a tone that was somehow despairing. “I’ve heard signals like that every so often since I was a kid.” He swallowed. “It was sounds like that, and what went with them, that has been the—trouble with me. I was going to tell you about it—and ask you if you’d marry me anyway.”

      He began to tremble a little, which was not at all like the Joe Burke that Sandy knew.

      “I don’t quite under—”

      “I’m afraid I’ve gone out of my head,” he said unsteadily. “Look, Sandy! I was going to propose to you. Instead, I’m going to take you back to the office. I’m going to play you a recording I made a year ago. I think that when you’ve heard it you’ll decide you wouldn’t want to marry me anyhow.”

      Sandy looked at him with astonished eyes.

      “You mean those signals from somewhere mean something special to you?”

      “Very special,” said Burke. “They raise the question of whether I’ve been crazy, and am suddenly sane, or whether I’ve been sane up to now, and have suddenly gone crazy.” The radio switched back to dance music. Burke cut it off. He started the car’s motor. He backed, swung around, and headed for the office and construction shed of Burke Development, Inc.

      Elsewhere, the profoundest minds of the planet gingerly examined the appalling fact that signals came to Earth from a place where men could not be. A message came from something which was not human. It was a suggestion to make cold chills run up and down any educated spine. But Burke drove tensely, and the road’s surface sped toward the car’s wheels and vanished under them. A warm breeze hummed and thuttered around the windshield. Sandy sat very still.

      “The way I’m acting doesn’t make sense, does it?” Burke asked. “Do you feel like you’re riding with a lunatic?”

      “No,” she said. “But I never thought that if you ever did get around to asking me to marry you, somebody from outer space would forbid the banns! Can’t you tell me what all this is about?”

      “I doubt it very much,” he told her. “Can you tell me what the signals are about?”

      She shook her head. He drove through the night. Presently he said, “Aside from my private angle on the matter, there are some queer things about this business. Why should somebody out in space send us a broadcast? It’s not from a planet, they say. If there’s a spaceship on the way here, why warn us? If they want to be friends, they can’t be sure we’ll permit it. If they intend to be enemies, why throw away the advantage of surprise? In either case, it would be foolish to send cryptic messages on ahead. And any message would have to be cryptic.”

      The car went whirring along the roadway. Soon twinkling lights appeared among the trees. The small and larger buildings of Burke Development, Inc., came gradually into view. They were dark objects in a large empty space on the very edge of Burke’s home town.

      “And why,” he went on, “why send a complex message if they only wanted to say that they were space travelers on the way to Earth?”

      The exit from the highway to Burke Development appeared. Burke swung off the surfaced road and into the four-acre space his small and unusual business did not begin to fill up.

      “If it were an offer of communication, it should be short and simple. Maybe an arithmetic sequence of dots, to say that they were intelligent beings and would like the sequence carried on if we had brains, too. Then we’d know somebody friendly was coming and wanted to exchange ideas before, if necessary, swapping bombs.”

      The car’s headlights swept over the building in which the experimental work of Burke Development was done and on to the small house in which Sandy kept the books and records of the firm. Burke put on the brakes before the office door.

      “Just to see if my head is working right,” he said, “I raise a question about those signals. One doesn’t send a long message to emptiness, repeated, in the hope that someone may be around to catch it. One calls, and sends a long message only when the call is answered. The call says who’s wanted and who’s calling, but nothing more. This isn’t that sort of thing.”

      He got out of the car and opened the door on her side, then unlocked the office door and went in. He switched on the lights inside. For a moment, Sandy did not move. Then she slowly got out of the car and entered the office which was so completely familiar. Burke bent over the office safe, turning the tumbler-wheel to open it. He said over his shoulder, “That special bulletin will be repeated on all the news broadcasts. You’ve got a little radio here. Turn it on, will you?”

      Again slowly, Sandy crossed the office and turned on the miniature radio on her desk. It warmed up and began to make noises. She dimmed it until it was barely audible. Burke stood up with a reel of brown tape. He put it on the office recorder, usually used for the dictation of the day’s lab log.

      “I have a dream sometimes,” said Burke. “A recurrent dream. I’ve had it every so often since I was eleven. I’ve tried to believe it was simply a freak, but sometimes I’ve suspected I was a telepath, getting some garbled message from somewhere unguessable. That has to be wrong. And again I’ve suspected that—well—that I might not be completely human. That I was planted here on Earth, somehow, not knowing it, to be of use to—something not of Earth. And that’s crazy. So I’ve been pretty leery of being romantic about anybody. Tonight I’d managed to persuade myself all those wild imaginings were absurd. And then the signals came.” He paused and said unsteadily, “I made this tape a year ago. I was trying to convince myself that it was nonsense. Listen. Remember, I made this a year ago!”

      The reels began to spin on the recorder’s face. Burke’s voice came out of the speaker, “These are the sounds of the dream,” it said, and stopped.

      There was a moment of silence, while the twin reels spun silently. Then sounds came from the recorder. They were musical notes, reproduced from the tape. Sandy stared blankly. Disconnected, arbitrary flutelike sounds came out into the office of Burke Development, Inc. It was quite correct to call them elfin. They could be described as plaintive. They were not a melody, but a melody could have been made from them by rearrangement. They were very remarkably like the sounds from space. It was impossible to doubt that they were the same code, the same language, the same vocabulary of tones and durations.

      Burke listened with a peculiarly tense expression on his face. When the recording ended, he looked at Sandy.

      Sandy was disturbed. “They’re alike. But Joe, how did it happen?”

      “I’ll tell you later,” he said grimly. “The important thing is, am I crazy or not?”

      The desk radio muttered. It was an hourly news broadcast. Burke turned it up and a voice boomed:

      “…one o’clock news. Messages have been received from space in the century’s most stupendous news event! Full details will follow a word from our sponsor.”

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