The Wailing Asteroid. Murray Leinster

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СКАЧАТЬ small treasures to sell for himself. Burke’s uncle bought them and, in time, presented them to the local museum. All but the black cube, which Burke had dropped. It had shattered into a million tissue-thin, shiny plates, which his aunt insisted on sweeping out. He’d tried to keep one of the plates, but his aunt had found it under his pillow and disposed of it.

      He remembered the matter solely because he’d examined his memories so often, trying to find something relevant to account for the beginning of his recurrent dream. Somewhere shortly after his uncle’s visit he had had a dream. Like all dreams, it was not complete. It made no sense. But it wasn’t a normal dream for an eleven-year-old boy.

      He was in a place where the sun had just set, but there were two moons in the sky. One was large and motionless. The other was small and moved swiftly across the heavens. From behind him came fluting signals like the messages that would later come from space. In the dream he was full-grown and he saw trees with extraordinary, ribbony leaves like no trees on Earth. They wavered and shivered in a gentle breeze, but he ignored them as he did the fluting sounds behind him.

      He was searching desperately for someone. A child knows terror for himself, but not for anybody else. But Burke, then aged eleven, dreamed that he was in an agony of fear for someone else. To breathe was torment. He held a weapon ready in his hand. He was prepared to do battle with any imaginable creature for the person he needed to find. And suddenly he saw a figure running behind the waving foliage. The relief was almost greater pain than the terror had been. It was a kind and amount of emotion that an eleven-year-old boy simply could not know, but Burke experienced it. He gave a great shout, and bounded forward toward her—and the dream ended.

      He dreamed it three nights running, then it stopped, for a while.

      Then, a week later, he had the dream again, repeated in every detail. He had it a dozen times before he was twelve, and as many more before he was thirteen. It recurred at random intervals all through his teens, while he was in college, and after. When he grew up he found out that recurrent dreams are by no means unusual. But this was very far from a usual dream.

      From time to time, he observed new details in the dream. He knew that he was dreaming. His actions and his emotions did not vary, but he was able to survey them—like the way one can take note of items in a book one reads while quite absorbed in it. He came to notice the way the trees sent their roots out over the surface of the ground before dropping suckers down into it. He noticed a mass of masonry off to the left. He discovered that a hill in the distance was not a natural hill. He was able to remember markings on the large, stationary moon in the sky, and to realize that the smaller one was jagged and irregular in shape. The dream did not change, but his knowledge of the place of the dream increased.

      As he grew older, he was startled to realize that though the trees, for example, were not real, they were consistent with reality. The weapon he held in his hand was especially disturbing. Its grip and barrel were transparent plastic, and in the barrel there was a sequence of peculiarly-shaped forms, in and about which wire had been wound. As a grown man he’d made such shapes in metal, once. He’d tried them out as magnets in a job for American Tool. But they weren’t magnets. They were something specific and alarming instead. He also came to know exactly what the mass of masonry was, and it was a sober engineering feat. No boy of eleven could have imagined it.

      And always there were the flutelike musical sounds coming from behind him. When he was twenty-five he’d memorized them. He’d heard them—dreamed them—hundreds of times. He tried to duplicate them on a flute and devised a special mute to get exactly the tone quality he remembered so well. He made a recording to study, but the study was futile.

      In a way, it was unwholesome to be so much obsessed by a dream. In a way, the dream was magnificently irrelevant to messages transmitted through millions of miles of emptiness. But the flutelike sounds linked it—now—to reality! He paced up and down in the empty, resonant building and muttered, “I ought to talk to the space-exploration people.”

      Then he laughed. That was ironical. All the crackpots in the world would be besieging all the authorities who might be concerned with the sounds from space, impassionedly informing them what Julius Caesar, or Chief Sitting Bull, or some other departed shade, had told them about the matter via automatic writing or Ouija boards. Those who did not claim ghostly authority would explain that they had special talents, or a marvelous invention, or that they were members of the race which had sent the messages the satellite-tracking stations received.

      No. It would serve no purpose to inform the Academy of Sciences that he’d been dreaming signals like the ones that now agitated humanity. It was too absurd. But it was unthinkable for a person of Burke’s temperament to do nothing. So he set to work in exactly the fashion of one of the crackpots he disliked.

      Actually, the job should have been undertaken in ponderous secrecy by committees from various learned societies, official bureaus, and all the armed forces. There should have been squabbles about how the task was to be divided up, bitter arguments about how much money was to be spent by whom, violent disagreements about research-and-development contracts. It should have been treated as a program of research, in which everybody could claim credit for all achievements and nobody was to blame for blunders.

      Burke could not command resources for so ambitious an undertaking. And he knew that as a private project it was preposterous. But he began the sort of preliminary labor that an engineer does before he really sets to work.

      He jotted down some items that he didn’t have to worry about. The wall-garden he’d made for Interiors, Inc., would fit neatly into whatever final result he got—if he got a final result. He had a manufacturing process available for glass-wool and plastics. If he could get hold of an inertia-controlled computer he’d be all set, but he doubted that he could. The crucial item was a memo he’d made from a memory of the dream weapon. It concerned certain oddly-shaped bits of metal, with fine wires wound eccentrically about them, which flew explosively to pieces when a current went through them. That was something to worry about right away.

      At three o’clock in the morning, then, Burke routed out the laboratory notes on the small-sized metal-stamping machine he had designed for American Tool. He’d tried to do the job with magnets, but they flew apart. He’d wound up with blank cartridges to provide the sudden, explosive stamping action required, but the notes on the quasi-magnets were complete.

      He went through them carefully. An electromagnet does not really attain its full power immediately after the current is turned on. There is an inductive resistance, inherent in a wound magnet, which means that the magnetism builds up gradually. From his memory of the elements in a transparent-plastic hand-weapon barrel, Burke had concluded that it was possible to make a magnet without inductive resistance. He tried it. When the current went on it went to full strength immediately. In fact, it seemed to have a negative-induction effect. But the trouble was that it wasn’t a magnet. It was something else. It wound up as scrap.

      Now, very reflectively, he plugged in a metal lathe and carefully turned out a very tiny specimen of the peculiarly-shaped magnetic core. He wound it by hand, very painstakingly. It was a tricky job. It was six o’clock Saturday morning when the specimen was finished. He connected the leads to a storage battery and threw the switch. The small object tore itself to bits, and the core landed fifteen feet from where it had been. Burke beamed.

      He wasn’t tired, but he wanted to think things over so he drove to a nearby diner and got coffee and a roll and reflected with satisfaction upon his accomplishment. At the cost of several hours’ work he’d made a thing like a magnet, which wasn’t a magnet, and which destroyed itself when turned on. As he drank his coffee, a radio news period came on. He listened.

      The signals still arrived from space, punctually, seventy-nine minutes apart. At this moment, 6:30 A.M., they were not heard on the Atlantic coast, but СКАЧАТЬ