The Wailing Asteroid

  Chapter 2

  Burke was no less disturbed, but his disturbance was of a differentkind. After he left Sandy at the house where she and her sisterboarded, he headed back to the plant. He wanted to think things out.

  The messages from space, of course, must presage events of overwhelmingimportance. The coming of intelligent aliens to Earth might becomparable to the coming of white men to the American continents.They might bring superior techniques, irresistible weapons, and anassumption of superiority that would bring inevitable conflict with theaborigines of Earth. Judging by the actions of the white race on Earth,if the newcomers were merely explorers it could mean the coming doom ofhumanity's independence. If they were invaders....

  Something like this would be pointed out soon after the news itself.Some people would react with total despair, expecting the strangers toact like men. Some might hope that a superior race would have developeda kindliness and altruism that on Earth are rather rare. But there wasno one at all who would not be apprehensive. Some would panic.

  Burke's reaction was strictly personal. Nobody else in the world wouldhave felt the same appalled, stunned emotion he felt when he heard thesounds from space. Because to him they were familiar sounds.

  He paced up and down in the big, partitionless building in which theactual work of Burke Development, Inc., was done. He'd done somereasonably good work in this place. The prototype of the hydroponicwall for Interiors, Inc., still stood against one wall. It was crude,but he'd made it work and then built a production model which had nowbeen shipped off complete. A little to one side was a prototype of aspecial machine which stamped out small parts for American Tool. Thathad been a tricky assignment! There were plastic and glass-wool andsuch oddments with which he'd done a process-design job for HolmesYachts, and a box of small parts left over from the designing job thatgave one aviation company the only practical small-plane retractablelanding-gear.

  These things had a queer meaning for him now. He'd devised the wantedproducts. He'd developed certain needed processes. But now he began tobe deeply suspicious of his own successes. Each was a new reason foruneasiness.

  He grimly questioned whether his highly peculiar obsession had not beenplanted in him against the time when fluting noises would come fromthat illimitable void beyond Earth's atmosphere.

  He examined, for the thousandth time, his special linkage with thespace noises. In previous soul-searchings he'd pinpointed the time whenthe whole business began. He'd been eleven years old. He could evenwork out something close to an exact date. He was living with his auntand uncle, his own parents being dead. His uncle had made a businesstrip to Europe, alone, and had brought back souvenirs which werefascinating to eleven-year-old Joe Burke. There was a flint knife, anda carved ivory object which his uncle assured him was mammoth ivory. Ithad a deer's head incised into it. There were some fragments of potteryand a dull-surfaced black cube. They appealed to the small boy becausehis uncle said they'd belonged to men who lived when mammoths roamedthe Earth and cave men hunted the now-extinct huge beasts. Cro-Magnons,his uncle said, had owned the objects. He'd bought them from a Frenchpeasant who'd found a cave with pictures on its walls that dated backtwenty thousand years. The French government had taken over the cave,but before reporting it the peasant had thriftily hidden away somesmall treasures to sell for himself. Burke's uncle bought them and, intime, presented them to the local museum. All but the black cube, whichBurke had dropped. It had shattered into a million tissue-thin, shinyplates, which his aunt insisted on sweeping out. He'd tried to keep oneof the plates, but his aunt had found it under his pillow and disposedof it.

  He remembered the matter solely because he'd examined his memories sooften, trying to find something relevant to account for the beginningof his recurrent dream. Somewhere shortly after his uncle's visit hehad had a dream. Like all dreams, it was not complete. It made nosense. 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 moonsin the sky. One was large and motionless. The other was small and movedswiftly across the heavens. From behind him came fluting signals likethe messages that would later come from space. In the dream he wasfull-grown and he saw trees with extraordinary, ribbony leaves like notrees on Earth. They wavered and shivered in a gentle breeze, but heignored them as he did the fluting sounds behind him.

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

  He dreamed it three nights running, then it stopped, for awhile.

  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 beforehe 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 thatrecurrent dreams are by no means unusual. But this was very far from ausual dream.

  From time to time, he observed new details in the dream. He knew thathe was dreaming. His actions and his emotion did not vary, but he wasable to survey them--like the way one can take note of items in abook one reads while quite absorbed in it. He came to notice the waythe trees sent their roots out over the surface of the ground beforedropping suckers down into it. He noticed a mass of masonry off to theleft. 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 thesky, and to realize that the smaller one was jagged and irregular inshape. The dream did not change, but his knowledge of the place of thedream increased.

  As he grew older, he was startled to realize that though the trees, forexample, were not real, they were consistent with reality. The weaponhe held in his hand was especially disturbing. Its grip and barrelwere transparent plastic, and in the barrel there was a sequence ofpeculiarly-shaped forms, in and about which wire had been wound. As agrown man he'd made such shapes in metal, once. He'd tried them out asmagnets in a job for American Tool. But they weren't magnets. They weresomething specific and alarming instead. He also came to know exactlywhat the mass of masonry was, and it was a sober engineering feat. Noboy of eleven could have imagined it.

  And always there were the flutelike musical sounds coming frombehind him. When he was twenty-five he'd memorized them. He'd heardthem--dreamed them--hundreds of times. He tried to duplicate them ona flute and devised a special mute to get exactly the tone quality heremembered so well. He made a recording to study, but the study wasfutile.

  In a way, it was unwholesome to be so much obsessed by a dream. In away, the dream was magnificently irrelevant to messages transmittedthrough millions of miles of emptiness. But the flutelike sounds linkedit--now--to reality! He paced up and down in the empty, resonantbuilding and muttered, "I ought to talk to the space-explorationpeople."

  Then he laughed. That was ironical. All the crackpots in the worldwould be besieging all the authorities who might be concerned with thesounds from space, impassionedly informing them what Julius Caesar, orChief Sitting Bull, or some other departed shade, had told them aboutthe matter via automatic writing or Ouija boards. Those who did notclaim ghostly authority would explain that they had special talents, ora marvelous invention, or that they were members of the race which hadsent the messages the satellite-tracking stations received.

  No. It would serve no purpose to inform the Academy of Sciences thathe'd been dreaming signals like the ones that now agitated humanity.It was too absurd. But it was unthinkable for a person of Burke'stemperament to do nothing. So he set to work in ex
actly the fashion ofone of the crackpots he disliked.

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

  Burke could not command resources for so ambitious an undertaking. Andhe knew that as a private project it was preposterous. But he began thesort of preliminary labor that an engineer does before he really setsto work.

  He jotted down some items that he didn't have to worry about. Thewall-garden he'd made for Interiors, Inc., would fit neatly intowhatever final result he got--if he got a final result. He had amanufacturing process available for glass-wool and plastics. If hecould 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 madefrom a memory of the dream weapon. It concerned certain oddly-shapedbits of metal, with fine wires wound eccentrically about them, whichflew explosively to pieces when a current went through them. That wassomething to worry about right away.

  At three o'clock in the morning, then, Burke routed out the laboratorynotes on the small-sized metal-stamping machine he had designed forAmerican Tool. He'd tried to do the job with magnets, but they flewapart. He'd wound up with blank cartridges to provide the sudden,explosive stamping action required, but the notes on the quasi-magnetswere complete.

  He went through them carefully. An electromagnet does not really attainits full power immediately after the current is turned on. There is aninductive resistance, inherent in a wound magnet, which means that themagnetism builds up gradually. From his memory of the elements in atransparent-plastic hand-weapon barrel, Burke had concluded that it waspossible 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 thatit wasn't a magnet. It was something else. It wound up as scrap.

  Now, very reflectively, he plugged in a metal lathe and carefullyturned out a very tiny specimen of the peculiarly-shaped magneticcore. 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. Thesmall object tore itself to bits, and the core landed fifteen feet fromwhere it had been. Burke beamed.

  He wasn't tired, but he wanted to think things over so he drove to anearby diner and got coffee and a roll and reflected with satisfactionupon his accomplishment. At the cost of several hours' work he'd madea thing like a magnet, which wasn't a magnet, and which destroyeditself when turned on. As he drank his coffee, a radio news period cameon. He listened.

  The signals still arrived from space, punctually, seventy-nine minutesapart. At this moment, 6:30 A.M., they were not heard on theAtlantic coast, but the Pacific coast still picked them up and theywere heard in Hawaii and again on the South Pacific island of Kalua.

  Burke drove back to the plant. He was methodical, now. He reactivatedthe prototype wall-garden which he'd neglected while building thelarger one for Interiors, Inc. The experimental one had been made infour sections so he could try different pumping systems and nutrientsolutions. Now he set the pumps to work. The plants looked ragged, butthey'd perk up with proper lighting and circulation of the hydroponicliquid.

  Then he went into the plant's small office building and sat down withdrawing instruments to modify the design of the magnetic core. Ateleven he'd worked out a rough theory and refined the design, withcurves and angles all complete. At four the next morning a second,modified magnet-core was formed and polished.

  He'd heard the first newscast on Friday night. It was now early Sundaymorning, and although he was tired, he was still not sleepy. He workedon doggedly, winding fine magnet wire on a noticeably complicated metalform. Just before sunrise he tested it.

  When the current went on the wire windings seemed to swell. He'd heldit in a small clamp while he tested it. The clamp overturned and brokethe contact with the battery before the winding wire stretched tobreaking-point. But it had not torn itself or anything else to bits.

  He was suddenly enormously weary and bleary-eyed. To anyone else in theworld, the consequence of this second attempt to make what he thoughtof as a negative-induction magnet would seem an absolute failure.But Burke now knew why the first had failed and what was wrong withthe second. The third would work, just as the unfired hand-weaponof his dream would have worked. Now he could justify to himself theassociation of a recurrent dream with a message from outer space. Thedream now had two points of contact with reality. One was the soundsfrom emptiness, which matched those in the dream. The other was thehand-weapon of the dream, whose essential working part now plainly didsomething unknown in a normal world.

  But it would be impossible to pass on his information to anybodyelse. Too many crackpots have claimed too many triumphs. His actual,unpredictable technical achievement would have little chance ofwinning official acceptance. Especially since he would be considered anon-accredited source. Burke had a small business of his own. He hadan engineering degree. But he had no background of learned futility togain a hearing for what he now knew.

  "Crackpots of the world, unite!" he muttered to himself.

  He dragged himself out-of-doors to a cool, invigorating morning anddrove somnolently to the diner he'd patronized before. The coffee heordered was atrocious, but it waked him. He heard two truck drivers atthe counter.

  "It's baloney!" said one of them scornfully. "There ain't no people outthere! We'd'a heard from them before if there was. Them scientists arecrazy!"

  "Nuts!" said the other earnestly. "One of their idle thoughts wouldcrack your brain wide open, mac! They know what's up, and they'rescared! If you wanna know, I'm scared too!"

  "Of what?"

  "Hell! Did you ever drive at night, and have all the stars come inpairs like snake-eyes--like little mean eyes, lookin' down at you an'despisin' you? You've seen that, ain't you? Whoever's signalin' couldbe lookin' down at us just like the stars do."

  The first man grunted.

  "I don't like it!" said the second man, fretfully. "If it was a manheadin' out to go huntin' among the stars for somethin' he wanted,that's all right. That's like a man goin' huntin' in the woods witha gun. But I don't like somebody comin' our way from somewhere else.Maybe he's huntin' us!"

  The two drivers paid for their coffee and went out. And Burke reflectedwryly that the second man had, after all, expressed a universaltruth. We humans do not like to be hunted. The passion with which aman-killing wild beast is pursued comes from human vanity. We do notlike the idea that any other creature can be better than we are. It ishighly probable that if we ever have to face a superior race, we willdie of it.

  So Burke went back to the plant and began to make yet another of thepeculiarly wound magnets-which-were-not-magnets. This was to havethree of the odd-shaped cores, formed in line, of a single pieceof Swedish iron. As the windings were put on they'd be imbedded inplastic. Over that would go a casing to keep them from expanding orstretching. It ought to be distinctively different from a magnet.

  It was an extremely long and utterly tedious job. He knew what hewas doing, but he had doubts about the why. As he worked, though, hewrestled out a detailed theory. Discoverers often work like that. Itwas said that Columbus didn't know where he was going when he startedout, didn't know where he was when he got there, and didn't know wherehe'd been when he got back. The history of the discovery of the triodetube has points of similarity. Burke had begun with a device whichdestroyed itself when turned on, developed the idea into a device whichswelled to uselessness when energized, and now hoped that it would turnout at the third try to be something the textbooks said wa
s impossible.

  Outside the construction shed, the world went about its business.While Burke worked on through the Sunday noon hour, a Japaneseradar telescope aimed at the night sky and made six successiveposition-findings on the source of the space signals. When sunset foundhim laboring doggedly at a metal lathe, Croydon made eight. Americanradar telescopes had made others. Carefully computed, the observationsadded up to the discovery of an independent motion of the signalsource. It moved against the stars as if it were a solar-system bodywith an orbit in the asteroid belt some three hundred sixty millionmiles from the sun--as compared to Earth's ninety-two million.

  At midnight on Sunday, while Burke painstakingly made micrometricexamination of the triple magnet-core, Harvard Observatory reportedthat there should be a very minor asteroid at the spot in space fromwhich the signals came.

  The coincidental asteroid was known as Schull's object. It was listedas M-387 in the catalogs. It had been discovered in 1913, was a veryminor celestial body, had an estimated greatest diameter of less thantwo miles, and its brightness had been noticed to vary, suggestingthat it was of irregular shape. It was too insignificant to have beenkept under constant observation, but the signals from space appeareddefinitely to originate from its position.

  An hour after midnight, Eastern Standard time, Palomar detected theinfinitesimal speck of light which was Schull's object at exactlythe place the radar telescopes insisted was the signal source.Satellite-watching stations now monitored the cryptic signals aroundthe clock, and radar telescopes began to sweep space for possibleanswers to the space broadcast. There was an uncomfortable possibilitythat the transmitter might not be signaling Earth, after all, but afellow mystery of space--an associate or a sister-ship.

  More data turned up. M.I.T. made examination of the signalsthemselves. Timed, the intervals between notes varied as if keyedby something alive. But successive broadcasts were identical tomicroseconds. The conclusion was that the original broadcast hadbeen set up by hand, as it were, but that all were now transmittedmechanically--automatically--by a robot transmitter.

  It was Monday morning when Burke completed the last turn of the lastwinding of his three-element pseudo-magnet. There are many things whichbecome something else when they change in degree. Electromagneticradiation may be long radio waves or radiant heat or yellow light orultraviolet or X-rays, or who knows what, according to its frequency.It is different things with different properties at differentwavelengths. Burke believed that his cores and windings were somethingother than magnets because the "flux" they produced was of a differentintensity. He did not believe it to be magnetism.

  At nine o'clock Monday morning, he was clumsy from pure, wearinesswhen he began to fit the outer case on the thing he'd worked so longto complete. The hand-weapon in his dream undoubtedly flung bulletsthrough a rifled bore penetrating the very center of the multiplecore. The design of the hand-weapon ruled out any possibility of aconsiderable recoil. It wasn't built to allow the hand to take arecoil. So there must be no recoil. On that basis, Burke had madewhat finally amounted to a thick rod some six inches long and two indiameter. With the casing in place, it was absolutely solid. There wasno play for the windings to expand into. He blinked at it. Common sensesaid he ought to put it aside and test it when his mind was not nearlynumb from fatigue.

  Then Sandy came into the constructions shed, looking for him. She'darrived for work and seen his car outside the shed. Her expressionindicated several things: a certain uneasiness, and some embarrassment,and more than a little indignation. When she saw him unshaven andwobbly with weariness, she protested.

  "Joe! You've been working since Heaven knows when!"

  "Since I left you," he admitted. "I got interested."

  "You look dreadful!"

  "Maybe I'll look worse after I try out this thing I've made. I'm notsure."

  "When did you eat last?" she demanded. "And when did you sleep?"

  He shrugged tiredly, regarding the thing in his hands. He'd had enoughexperience contriving new things to know that no theory is right untilsomething that depends on it has been made and works. He tended to bepessimistic. But this time he thought he had it.

  "Is this working night and day a part of your reaction to thosesignals?" asked Sandy unhappily. "If it is--"

  "Let's try it," Burke interrupted. "It's something I worked out fromthe dream. Now I'll find out whether I'm crazy or not--maybe." He drewa deep breath. He had a sudden, deep and corrosive doubt of thingswhich didn't make sense, like space signals and magnets which weren'tmagnets because they were capable of negative self-induction. "If thisshows no sign of working, Sandy...."

  "What?"

  He didn't answer. He went heavily over to the table where he hadstorage-battery current available. He plucked a momentary-contactswitch out of a drawer and connected it to the wires from the smallthing he'd made. Then he hooked on the storage battery.

  "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 awater-cooler and imbedded itself in the brick wall beyond. A toolcabinet tottered and crashed to the floor. The storage battery spoutedsteam, swelled. Burke grabbed Sandy and plunged outside with her as thebuilding 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. Itlooks like the thing worked! Lucky that was only a millisecond contact!Negative self-induction.... I'll break some windows and come to theoffice."

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

  "Okay," he said. "I'll come quietly."

  He followed her to the office. He was so physically worn out, hetripped 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 itthat way, and maybe it can be covered up, but I've turned out to besane. So I think, maybe you'd better get another job. Since I'm saneI'll surely go bankrupt and maybe I'll end up in jail. But it's goingto be interesting." His head drooped and he jerked it upright. "This isreaction," he said distinctly. "I'm tired. I wanted badly to find outwhether I was crazy or not. I found out I haven't been. I'm not so sureI won't be presently." He made a stiff gesture and said, "Take the dayoff, 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 withwhatever sent messages from Asteroid M-387. There was still nothingintelligible about the whole affair. It contained no single rationalelement. But if there was no rational explanation, there was what nowseemed reasonable action that could be taken.

  So he slept, and as usual the world went on its way unheeding. Thefluting sounds from the sky remained the top news story of the day.There was no doubt of their artificiality, nor that they came from asmall, tumbling, jagged rock which was one of the least of the morethan fifteen hundred asteroids of the solar system. It was two hundredand seventy million miles from Earth. The latest computations said thatnot less than twenty thousand kilowatts of power had been put intothe transmitter to produce so strong and loud a signal on Earth. Nopower-source of that order had been carried out to make the signals.But they were there.

  Astronomers became suddenly important sources of news. Theycontradicted each other violently. Eminen
t scientists observedtruthfully that Schull's object, as such, could not sustain life. Itcould not have an atmosphere, and its gravitational field would nothold even a moderately active microbe on its surface. Therefore anylife and any technology now on it must have come from somewhere else.The most eminent scientists said reluctantly that they could not denythe possibility that a spaceship from some other solar system had beenwrecked on M-387, and was now sending hopeless pleas for help to thelocal planetary bodies.

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

  It was working astronomers, so to speak, who took action. They hadbeen bouncing signals off of Earth's moon, and various artificialsatellites, and they'd flicked signals in the direction of Mars andVenus and believed that they got them back. The most probable returnedradar signal from Mars had been received by a radar telescope in WestVirginia. It had been turned temporarily into a transmitter and somefour hundred kilowatts were poured into it to go out in a tight beam.The working astronomers took over that parabolic bowl again. Theyborrowed, begged, wheedled, and were suspected of stealing necessaryequipment to put nearly eight hundred kilowatts into a microwavesignal, this time beamed at Asteroid M-387. If intelligent beingsreceived the signal, they might reply. If they did, the workingastronomers would figure out what to do next.

  Burke slept in the office of Burke Development, Inc. His features wererelaxed and peaceful. Sandy was completely helpless before his tranquilexhaustion. But presently she used the telephone and spoke in a whisperto her younger sister, Pam. In time, Pam came in a cab bringingblankets and a pillow. She and Sandy got Burke to a pallet on the floorwith a pillow under his head and a thickness of blanket over him. Heslept 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 thatwomen are mysterious!"

  She departed in the cab and Sandy took up a vigil over Burke'sslumbering form.

  _Pravda_ announced in its evening edition of Monday that Sovietscientists would send out a giant space-probe, intended to orbitaround Venus, to investigate the space-signal source. The probe wouldcarry a man. It would blast off within six weeks, preceded by dronefuel-carriers which would be overtaken by the probe and furnish fuel toit. _Pravda_ threw in a claim that Russians had been first to refuel anaeroplane in flight, and asserted that Soviet physical science wouldmake a space-voyage of two hundred seventy million miles mere ducksoupfor their astronaut.

  Editorially, American newspapers mentioned that the Russians had triedsimilar things before, and that at least three coffins now floatedin orbit around Earth, not to mention the one on the moon. But ifthey tried it.... The American newspapers waited for a reaction fromWashington.

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

  Sandy watched over Burke. There was nothing to do in the office. Shedid not read. Near seven the telephone rang, and she franticallymuffled its sound. It was Pam, asking what Sandy meant to do aboutdinner. Sandy explained in an almost inaudible voice. Pam saidresignedly, "All right. I'll come out and bring something. Luckyit's a warm day. We can sit in your car and eat. If I had to watchJoe sleeping like that and needing a shave as he does, I'd lose myappetite."

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

  "I know," said Pam between sympathy and scorn, "I know you like thepoor goof, Sandy, but there ought to be some limit to your amorousservitude! There are office hours! You're supposed to knock off atfive. It's seven-thirty now. And what will being decent to thatunshaven Adonis get you? He'll take you for granted, and go off andmarry a nitwit of a blonde who'll hate you because you'd have been somuch better for him. And she'll get you fired and what then?"

  "Joe won't marry anybody else," said Sandy forlornly. "If he could fallfor anybody, it'd be me. He told me so. He started to propose to meFriday night."

  "So?" said Pam, with the superior air of a younger sister. "Did he sayenough for you to sue him?"

  "He can't fall in love with anybody," said Sandy. "He wants to marryme, but he's emotionally tangled up with a female he's had dreams aboutsince 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 samepicture Burke had given her. Her account of the trees in Burke'srecurrent dream was accurate enough, and the two moons in the sky,and the fluting, arbitrary tones from behind him. Pam had heard theirduplicates, along with all the broadcast listeners in the UnitedStates. But as Sandy told it, the running figure beyond the screen offoliage was not at all the shadowy movement Burke described. Sandy hadher 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 blanketsover 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 foryou to wake up. You took your time about it! We've got some coffee foryou."

  Burke got to his feet and stumbled to the light switch.

  "Fine!" he said ruefully. "Somebody got blankets for me, too! Nicebusiness, this!"

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

  "I'm sorry," he apologized. "I worked pretty hard pretty long, andwhen the thing was finished I passed out. I feel better now. Did youactually say you had some coffee?"

  Sandy passed up a cardboard container.

  "Pam's compliments," she said. "We've been waiting until you slept offyour working binge. We didn't want to leave you. Booger-men soundlikelier than they used to."

  A voice from the radio broke in.

  " _... o'clock news. A signal has been beamed toward the space-broadcasttransmitter by the parabolic reflector of the Bradenville radartelescope, acting as a mirror to concentrate the message towardAsteroid M-387. So far there has been no reply. We are keeping acircuit open, and if or when an answer is received we will issue aspecial bulletin.... The San Francisco Giants announced today that in athree-way trade--_"

  Burke had listened to nothing else while the news broadcast dealt withspace 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 bigsister 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!" Sandysaid.

  "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'llgo over and see."

  Burke came back in a few minutes.

  "This thing I made is pretty tough," he observed. "It smashed intoa brick wall, but it was the wall that suffered." He fingered itthoughtfully. "I had that dream again just now," he volunteered. "WhileI was asleep on the floor. Sandy, you
know about such things betterthan I do. How much money have I in the bank? I'm going to buildsomething and it'll probably cost a lot."

  Sandy's hands had clenched when he mentioned the dream. So far, it haddone more damage than any dream had a right to do. But it looked asif it were about to do more. She told him his balance in the bank. Henodded.

  "Maybe I can stretch it," he observed. "I'm going to--"

  The music had stopped inside the office. The voice of an announcerinterrupted.

  "_Special Bulletin! Special Bulletin! Our signals to space have beenanswered! Special Bulletin! Here is a direct report from the Bradentonradar telescope which, within the hour, broadcast a message to space!_"

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

  "_A definite reply to the human signal to Asteroid M-387 has beenreceived. It is cryptic, like the first message from space, but isunmistakably a response to the eight-hundred-kilowatt message beamedtoward the source of those world-wide-received strange sounds...._"

  The tinny voice went on.