The Wailing Asteroid

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  THE WAILING ASTEROID

  by Murray Leinster

  An Avon Original

  AVON BOOK DIVISION

  The Hearst Corporation 959 Eighth Avenue New York 19, New York

  Copyright, 1960, by Murray Leinster. Published by arrangement withthe author. Printed in the U.S.A.

  [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidencethat the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

  * * * * *

  There was no life on the asteroid, but the miles of rock-hewn corridorsthrough which the earth party wandered left no doubt about the purposeof the asteroid.

  It was a mighty fortress, stocked with weapons of destruction beyondman's power to understand.

  And yet there was no life here, nor had there been for untold centuries.

  What race had built this stronghold? What unimaginable power were theydefending against? Why was it abandoned? There was no answer, all wasdead.

  But--not quite all.

  For in a room above the tomb-like fortress a powerful transmitterbeamed its birdlike, fluting sounds toward earth. Near it, on a hugestar-map of the universe, with light-years measured by inches, ten tinyred sparks were moving, crawling inexorably toward the center.

  Moving, at many times the speed of light, with the acquired massof suns ... moving, on a course that would pass through the solarsystem.

  The unknown aliens would not even see our sun explode from the forceof their passing, would not even notice the tiny speck called Earth asit died....

  * * * * *

  Chapter 1

  The signals from space began a little after midnight, local time, on aFriday. They were first picked up in the South Pacific, just westwardof the International Date Line. A satellite-watching station on anisland named Kalua was the first to receive them, though nobody heardthe first four or five minutes. But it is certain that the very firstmessage was picked up and recorded by the monitor instruments.

  The satellite-tracking unit on Kalua was practically a duplicate ofall its fellows. There was the station itself with a vertical antennaoutside pointing at the stars. There were various lateral antennaeheld two feet above ground by concrete posts. In the instrument roomin the building a light burned over a desk, three or four monitorlights glowed dimly to indicate that the self-recording instrumentswere properly operating, and there was a multiple-channel tape recorderbuilt into the wall. Its twin tape reels turned sedately, winding abrown plastic ribbon from one to the other at a moderate pace.

  The staff man on duty had gone to the installation's kitchen for a cupof coffee. No sound originated in the room, unless one counted thefluttering of a piece of weighted-down paper on the desk. Outside,palm trees whispered and rustled their long fronds in the southeasttrade wind under a sky full of glittering stars. Beyond, there wasthe dull booming of surf upon the barrier reef of the island. But theinstruments made no sound. Only the tape reels moved.

  The signals began abruptly. They came out of a speaker and wereinstantly recorded. They were elfin and flutelike and musical. Theywere crisp and distinct. They did not form a melody, but nearly all thecomponents of melody were there. Pure musical notes, each with its ownpitch, all of different lengths, like quarter-notes and eighth-notesin music. The sounds needed only rhythm and arrangement to form aplaintive tune.

  Nothing happened. The sounds continued for something over a minute.They stopped long enough to seem to have ended. Then they began again.

  When the staff man came back into the room with a coffee cup in hishand, he heard the flutings instantly. His jaw dropped. He said, "Whatthe hell?" and went to look at the instruments. He spilled some of hiscoffee when he saw their readings.

  The tracking dials said that the signals came from a stationary sourcealmost directly overhead. If they were from a stationary source,no plane was transmitting them. Nor could they be coming from anartificial satellite. A plane would move at a moderate pace across thesky. A satellite would move faster. Much faster. This source, accordingto the instruments, did not move at all.

  The staff man listened with a blank expression on his face. There wasbut one rational explanation, which he did not credit for an instant.The reasonable answer would have been that somebody, somewhere, had puta satellite out into an orbit requiring twenty-four hours for a circuitof the earth, instead of the ninety to one-hundred-twenty-four-minuteorbits of the satellites known to sweep around the world from westto east and pole to pole. But the piping, musical sounds were notthe sort of thing that modern physicists would have contrived tocarry information about cosmic-particle frequency, space temperature,micrometeorites, and the like.

  The signals stopped again, and again resumed. The staff man wasgalvanized into activity. He rushed to waken other members of theoutpost. When he got back, the signals continued for a minute andstopped altogether. But they were recorded on tape, with the instrumentreadings that had been made during their duration. The staff man playedthe tape back for his companions.

  They felt as he did. These were signals from space where man had neverbeen. They had listened to the first message ever to reach mankind fromthe illimitable emptiness between the stars and planets. Man was notalone. Man was no longer isolated. Man....

  The staff of the tracking station was very much upset. Most of themen were white-faced by the time the taped message had been re-playedthrough to its end. They were frightened.

  Considering everything, they had every reason to be.

  The second pick-up was in Darjeeling, in northern India. The Indiangovernment was then passing through one of its periods of enthusiasticinterest in science. It had set up a satellite-observation post in aformer British cavalry stable on the outskirts of the town. The actinghead of the observing staff happened to hear the second broadcast toreach Earth. It arrived some seventy-nine minutes after the firstreception, and it was picked up by two stations, Kalua and Darjeeling.

  The Darjeeling observer was incredulous at what he heard--fiverepetitions of the same sequence of flutelike notes. After eachpause--when it seemed that the signals had stopped before they actuallydid so--the reception was exactly the same as the one before. Itwas inconceivable that such a succession of sounds, lasting a fullminute, could be exactly repeated by any natural chain of events. Fiverepetitions were out of the question. The notes were signals. They werea communication which was repeated to be sure it was received.

  The third broadcast was heard in Lebanon in addition to Kalua andDarjeeling. Reception in all three places was simultaneous. A signalfrom a nearby satellite could not possibly have been picked up so fararound the Earth's curvature. The widening of the area of reception,too, proved that there was no new satellite aloft with an orbit periodof exactly twenty-four hours, so that it hung motionless in the skyrelative to Earth. Tracking observations, in fact, showed the source ofthe signals to move westward, as time passed, with the apparent motionof a star. No satellite of Earth could possibly exist with such anorbit unless it was close enough to show a detectable parallax. Thisdid not.

  A French station picked up the next batch of plaintive sounds. Kalua,Darjeeling, and Lebanon still received. By the time the next signal wasdue, Croydon, in England, had its giant radar-telescope trained on thepart of the sky from which all the tracking stations agreed the signalscame.

  Croydon painstakingly made observations during four seventy-nine-minuteintervals and four five-minute receptions of the flut
ing noises. Itreported that there was a source of artificial signals at an extremelygreat distance, position right ascension so-and-so, declinationsuch-and-such. The signals began every seventy-nine minutes. They couldbe heard by any receiving instrument capable of handling the microwavefrequency involved. The broadcast was extremely broad-band. It coveredmore than two octaves and sharp tuning was not necessary. A man-madesignal would have been confined to as narrow a wave-band as possible,to save power for one reason, so it could not be imagined that thesignal was anything but artificial. Yet no Earth science could havesent a transmitter out so far.

  When sunrise arrived at the tracking station on Kalua, it ceased toreceive from space. On the other hand, tracking stations in the UnitedStates, the Antilles, and South America began to pick up the crypticsounds.

  The first released news of the happening was broadcast in the UnitedStates. In the South Pacific and India and the Near East and Europe,the whole matter seemed too improbable for the notification of thepublic. News pressure in the United States, though, is very great. Herethe news rated broadcast, and got it.

  That was why Joe Burke did not happen to complete the business forwhich he'd taken Sandy Lund to a suitable, romantic spot. She was hissecretary and the only permanent employee in the highly individualbusiness he'd begun and operated. He'd known her all his life, andit seemed to him that for most of it he'd wanted to marry her. Butsomething had happened to him when he was quite a small boy--and stillhappened at intervals--which interposed a mental block. He'd alwayswanted to be romantic with her, but there was a matter of two moonsin a strange-starred sky, and trees with foliage like none on Earth,and an overwhelming emotion. There was no rational explanation for it.There could be none. Often he'd told himself that Sandy was real andutterly desirable, and this lunatic repetitive experience was at worstinsanity and at the least delusion. But he'd never been able to domore than stammer when talk between them went away from matter-of-factthings.

  Tonight, though, he'd parked his car where a river sparkled in themoonlight. There was a scent of pine and arbutus in the air and a faintthread of romantic music came from his car's radio. He'd brought Sandyhere to propose to her. He was doggedly resolved to break the chains apsychological oddity had tied him up in.

  He cleared his throat. He'd taken Sandy out to dinner, ostensibly tocelebrate the completion of a development job for Interiors, Inc. Burkehad started Burke Development, Inc., some four years out of collegewhen he found he didn't like working for other people and could workfor himself. Its function was to develop designs and processes forcompanies too small to have research-and-development divisions of theirown. The latest, now-finished, job was a wall-garden which thoseexpensive interior decorators, Interiors, Inc., believed might appealto the very rich. Burke had made it. It was a hydroponic job. A richman's house could have one or more walls which looked like a grassysward stood on edge, with occasional small flowers or even fruitsgrowing from its close-clipped surface.[A]

  [Footnote A: Transcriber's Note: The following sentence has been deleted at this point: "Interiors, Inc., would push the idea of a a bomb shelter or in an atomic submarine where it would cation." This is a possible printer error. A later edition of this work also has this sentence deleted.

  It was done. A production-job room-wall had been shipped and the checkfor it banked. Burke had toyed with the idea that growing vegetationlike that might be useful in a bomb shelter or in an atomic submarinewhere it would keep the air fresh indefinitely. But such ideas were forthe future. They had nothing to do with now. Now Burke was going totriumph over an obsessive dream.

  "I've got something to say, Sandy," said Burke painfully.

  She did not turn her head. There was moonlight, rippling water, and thetranquil noises of the night in springtime. A perfect setting for whatBurke had in mind, and what Sandy knew about in advance. She waited,her eyes turned away from him so he wouldn't see that they were shininga little.

  "I'm something of an idiot," said Burke, clumsily. "It's only fair totell you about it. I'm subject to a psychological gimmick that a girlI--Hm." He coughed. "I think I ought to tell you about it."

  "Why?" asked Sandy, still not looking in his direction.

  "Because I want to be fair," said Burke. "I'm a sort of crackpot.You've noticed it, of course."

  Sandy considered.

  "No-o-o-o," she said measuredly. "I think you're pretty normal,except--No. I think you're all right."

  "Unfortunately," he told her, "I'm not. Ever since I was a kid I'vebeen bothered by a delusion, if that's what it is. It doesn't makesense. It couldn't. But it made me take up engineering, I think,and ..."

  His voice trailed away.

  "And what?"

  "Made an idiot out of me," said Burke. "I was always pretty crazy aboutyou, and it seems to me that I took you to a lot of dances and such inhigh school, but I couldn't act romantic. I wanted to, but I couldn't.There was this crazy delusion...."

  "I wondered, a little," said Sandy, smiling.

  "I _wanted_ to be romantic about you," he told her urgently. "But thisdamned obsession kept me from it."

  "Are you offering to be a brother to me now?" asked Sandy.

  "No!" said Burke explosively. "I'm fed up with myself. I want to bedifferent. Very different. With you!"

  Sandy smiled again.

  "Strangely enough, you interest me," she told him. "Do go on!"

  But he was abruptly tongue-tied. He looked at her, struggling to speak.She waited.

  "I w-want to ask you to m-m-marry me," said Burke desperately. "But Ihave to tell you about the other thing first. Maybe you won't want...."

  Her eyes were definitely shining now. There was soft music and ripplingwater and soft wind in the trees. It was definitely the time and placefor romance.

  But the music on the car radio cut off abruptly. A harsh voiceinterrupted:

  "_Special Bulletin! Special Bulletin! Messages of unknown origin arereaching Earth from outer space! Special Bulletin! Messages from outerspace!_"

  Burke reached over and turned up the sound. Perhaps he was the only manin the world who would have spoiled such a moment to listen to a newsbroadcast, and even he wouldn't have done it for a broadcast on anyother subject. He turned the sound high.

  "_This is a special broadcast from the Academy of Sciences inWashington, D. C._" boomed the speaker. "_Some thirteen hours ago asatellite-tracking station in the South Pacific reported picking upsignals of unknown origin and great strength, using the microwavefrequencies also used by artificial satellites now in orbit aroundEarth. The report was verified shortly afterward from India, then NearEast tracking stations made the same report. European listening postsand radar telescopes were on the alert when the sky area from whichthe signals come rose above the horizon. American stations have againverified the report within the last few minutes. Artificial signals,plainly not made by men, are now reaching Earth every seventy-nineminutes from remotest space. There is as yet no hint of what themessages may mean, but that they are an attempt at communication iscertain. The signals have been recorded on tape, and the sounds whichfollow are those which have been sent to Earth by alien, non-human,intelligent beings no one knows how far away._"

  A pause. Then the car radio, with night sounds and the calls ofnightbirds for background, gave out crisp, distinct fluting noises,like someone playing an arbitrary selection of musical notes on astrange wind instrument.

  The effect was plaintive, but Burke stiffened in every muscle at thefirst of them. The fluting noises were higher and lower in turn. Atintervals, they paused as if between groups of signals constitutinga word. The enigmatic sounds went on for a full minute. Then theystopped. The voice returned:

  "_These are the signals from space. What you have heard is apparentlya complete message. It is repeated five times and then ceases. An hourand nineteen minutes later it is again repeated five times...._"

  The voice continued, while Burke remained frozen and motionless inthe parked c
ar. Sandy watched him, at first hopefully, and thenbewilderedly. The voice said that the signal strength was very great.But the power for artificial-satellite broadcasts is only a fraction ofa watt. These signals, considering the minimum distance from which theycould come, had at least thousands of kilowatts behind them.

  Somewhere out in space, farther than man's robot rockets had ever gone,huge amounts of electric energy were controlled to send these signalsto Earth. Scientists were in disagreement about the possible distancethe signals had traveled, whether they were meant solely for Earthor not, and whether they were an attempt to open communication withhumanity. But nobody doubted that the signals were artificial. They hadbeen sent by technical means. They could not conceivably be naturalphenomena. Directional fixes said absolutely that they did not comefrom Mars or Jupiter or Saturn. Neptune and Uranus and Pluto were notnearly in the line of the signals' travel. Of course Venus and Mercurywere to sunward of Earth, which ruled them out, since the signalsarrived only on the night side of mankind's world. Nobody could guess,as yet, where they did originate.

  Burke sat utterly still, every muscle tense. He was so pale that evenin 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." Heswallowed. "It was sounds like that, and what went with them, that hasbeen the--trouble with me. I was going to tell you about it--and askyou if you'd marry me anyway."

  He began to tremble a little, which was not at all like the Joe Burkethat 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 youback to the office. I'm going to play you a recording I made a yearago. I think that when you've heard it you'll decide you wouldn't wantto 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'vebeen 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 startedthe car's motor. He backed, swung around, and headed for the office andconstruction shed of Burke Development, Inc.

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

  "The way I'm acting doesn't make sense, does it?" Burke asked. "Do youfeel like you're riding with a lunatic?"

  "No," she said. "But I never thought that if you ever did get aroundto asking me to marry you, somebody from outer space would forbid thebanns! Can't you tell me what all this is about?"

  "I doubt it very much," he told her. "Can you tell me what the signalsare about?"

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

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

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

  The exit from the highway to Burke Development appeared. Burke swungoff the surfaced road and into the four-acre space his small andunusual 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 intelligentbeings and would like the sequence carried on if we had brains, too.Then we'd know somebody friendly was coming and wanted to exchangeideas before, if necessary, swapping bombs."

  The car's headlights swept over the building in which the experimentalwork of Burke Development was done and on to the small house in whichSandy kept the books and records of the firm. Burke put on the brakesbefore the office door.

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

  He got out of the car and opened the door on her side, then unlockedthe office door and went in. He switched on the lights inside. For amoment, Sandy did not move. Then she slowly got out of the car andentered the office which was so completely familiar. Burke bent overthe office safe, turning the tumbler-wheel to open it. He said overhis shoulder, "That special bulletin will be repeated on all the newsbroadcasts. You've got a little radio here. Turn it on, will you?"

  Again slowly, Sandy crossed the office and turned on the miniatureradio on her desk. It warmed up and began to make noises. She dimmed ituntil 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 ofthe day's lab log.

  "I have a dream sometimes," said Burke. "A recurrent dream. I've had itevery so often since I was eleven. I've tried to believe it was simplya freak, but sometimes I've suspected I was a telepath, getting somegarbled message from somewhere unguessable. That has to be wrong. Andagain 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 useto--something not of Earth. And that's crazy. So I've been pretty leeryof being romantic about anybody. Tonight I'd managed to persuade myselfall those wild imaginings were absurd. And then the signals came." Hepaused and said unsteadily, "I made this tape a year ago. I was tryingto convince myself that it was nonsense. Listen. Remember, I made thisa year ago!"

  The reels began to spin on the recorder's face. Burke's voice came outof the speaker, "_These are the sounds of the dream_," it said, andstopped.

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

  Burke listened with a peculiarly tense expression on his face. When therecording 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 Icrazy or not?"

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

  "_... one o'clock news. Messages have been received from space in thecentury's most stupendous news event! Full details will follow a wordfrom our sponsor._"

  There followed an ardent description of the social advantage, personalsatisfaction and business advancement
that must instantly follow theuse of a particular intestinal regulator. The commercial ended.

  "_From deepest space_," boomed the announcer's voice, "_comes amystery! There is intelligent life in the void. It has communicatedwith us. Today--_"

  Because of the necessity to give the later details of a cafe-societydivorce case, a torch murder and a graft scandal in a large city'smunicipal budget, the signals from space could not be fully treated inthe five-minute hourly news program. But fifteen seconds were sparedfor a sample of the cryptic sounds from emptiness. Burke listened tothem with a grim expression.

  "I think," he said measuredly, "that I am sane. I have heard thosenoises before tonight. I know them--I'll take you home, Sandy."

  He ushered her out of the office and into his car.

  "It's funny," he said as he drove back toward the highway. "This isprobably the beginning of the most important event in human history.We've received a message from an intelligent race that can apparentlytravel through space. There's no way in the world to guess what it willbring about. It could be that we're going to learn sciences to makeold Earth a paradise. Or it could mean that we'll be wiped out and asuperior race will take over. Funny, isn't it?"

  Sandy said unsteadily, "No. Not funny."

  "I mean," said Burke, "when something really significant happens,which probably will determine Earth's whole future, all I worry aboutis myself--that I'm crazy, or a telepath, or something. But that'sconvincingly human!"

  "What do you think I worry about?" asked Sandy.

  "Oh ..." Burke hesitated, then said uncomfortably, "I was going topropose to you, and I didn't."

  "That's right," said Sandy. "You didn't."

  Burke drove for long minutes, frowning.

  "And I won't," he said flatly, after a time, "until I know it's allright to do so. I've no explanation for what's kept me from proposingto you up to now, but apparently it's not nonsense. I _did_ anticipatethe sounds that came in tonight from space and--I've always known thosesounds didn't belong on Earth."

  Then, driving doggedly through a warm and moonlit night, he toldher exactly why the fluting sounds were familiar to him; how they'daffected his life up to now. He'd mentally rehearsed the story,anyhow, and it was reasonably well arranged. But told as fact, it waspreposterous.

  She listened in complete silence. He finished the tale with his carparked before the boardinghouse in which Sandy lived with her sisterPam, they being all that was left of a family. If she hadn't knownBurke all her life, of course, Sandy would have dismissed him andhis story together. But she did know him. It did explain why he felttongue-tied when he wished to be romantic, and even why he recorded aweird sequence of notes on a tape recorder. His actions were reasonablereactions to an unreasonable, repeated experience. His doubts andhesitations showed a sound mind trying to deal with the inexplicable.And now that the signals from space had come, it was understandablethat he should react as if they were a personal matter for hisattention.

  She had a disheartening mental picture of a place where strange treeswaved long and ribbonlike leaves under an improbable sky. Still ...

  "Y--yes," she said slowly when he'd finished his uneasy account. "Idon't understand, but I can see how you feel. I--I guess I'd feel thesame way if I were a man and what you've experienced happened to me."She hesitated. "Maybe there will be an explanation now, since thosesignals have come. They do match the ones you recorded from your dream.They're the ones you know about."

  "I can't believe it," said Burke miserably, "and I can't dismiss it. Ican't do anything until I find out why I know that somewhere there's aplace with two moons and queer trees...."

  He did not mention the part of his experience Sandy was most interestedin--the person for whom he felt such anguished fear and suchoverwhelming joy when she was found. She didn't mention it either.

  "You go on home, Joe," she said quietly. "Get a good night's sleep.Tomorrow we'll hear more about it and maybe it will all clear up.Anyhow--whatever turns out, I--I'm glad you did intend to ask me tomarry you. I intended to say yes."