The Wailing Asteroid

  Chapter 5

  From a sufficient height and a sufficient distance, the rocket'srepeated attacks must have appeared like the strikings and twistings ofa gigantic snake. It left behind it a writhing trail of fumes which wasconvincingly serpentine. It climbed and struck, and climbed and struck,like a monstrous python flinging itself furiously at some invisibleprey. Six, seven, eight times it plunged frenziedly at the minuteegg-shaped ship which scuttled for the heavens. Each time it missed andwrithed about to dart again.

  Then its fuel gave out and for all intents and purposes it ceased toexist. The thick, opaque trail it left behind began to dissipate.The path of vapor scattered. It spread to rags and tatters ofunsubstantiality through which the rocket plummeted downward in thelong fall which is a spent rocket's ending.

  Burke cautiously cut down the drive and awkwardly turned the ship onits side, heading it toward the north. The state of things inside theship was one of intolerable tenseness.

  "I'm a new driver," said Burke, "and that was a tough bit of driving todo." He glanced at the exterior-pressure meter. "There's no air outsideto register. We must be fifty or sixty miles high and maybe stillrising. But we're not leaking air."

  Actually the plastic ship was eighty miles up. The sunlit world beneathit showed white patches of cloud in patterns a meteorologist wouldhave found interesting. Burke could see the valley of the St. LawrenceRiver between the white areas. But the Earth's surface was curiouslyforeshortened. What was beneath seemed utterly flat, and at the edge ofthe world all appeared distorted and unreal.

  Holmes, still pale, asked, "How'd we get away from that rocket?"

  "We accelerated," said Burke. "It was a defensive rocket. It wasdesigned to knock down jet bomb carriers or ballistic missiles whichtravel at a constant speed. Target-seeking missiles can lock ontothe radar echo from a coasting ship, or one going at its highestspeed because their computers predict where their target, travelingat constant speed, can be intercepted. We were never there. We wereaccelerating. Missile-guidance systems can't measure acceleration andallow for it. They shouldn't have to."

  Four of the six television screens showed dark sky with twinklinglights in it. On one there was the dim outline of the sun, reversed toblackness because its light was too great to be registered in a normalfashion. The other screen showed Earth.

  There was a buzzing, and Keller looked at Burke.

  "Rocket?" asked Burke. Keller shook his head. "Radar?" Keller nodded.

  "The DEW line, most likely," said Burke in a worried tone. "I don'tknow whether they've got rockets that can reach us. But I know fighterplanes can't get this high. Maybe they can throw a spread of air-to-airrockets, though.... I don't know their range."

  Sandy said unsteadily, "They shouldn't do this to us! We're notcriminals! At least they should ask us who we are and what we're doing!"

  "They probably did," said Burke, "and we didn't answer. See if you canpick up some voices, Keller."

  Keller twirled dials and set indicators. Voices burst into speech."_Reporting UFO sighted extreme altitude co?rdinates--First rocketexhausted fuel in multiple attacks and fell, sir._" Another voice, verybrisk, "_Thirty-second squadron, scramble! Keep top altitude and getunder it. If it descends within range, blast it!_" Another voice saidcrisply, "_Co?rdinates three-seven Jacob, one-nine Alfred...._"

  Keller turned the voices down to mutters because they were useless.

  Burke said, "Hell! We ought to land somewhere and check over the ship.Keller, can you give me a microphone and a wavelength somebody will belikely to pick up?"

  Keller shrugged and picked up masses of wire. He began to work on anas yet unfinished wiring job. Evidently, the ship was not near enoughto completion to be capable of a call to ground. It had taken off withmany things not finished. Burke, at the controls, found it possible tothink of a number of items that should have been examined exhaustivelybefore the ship left the mould in which it had been made. He worried.

  Pam said in a strange voice, "I thought I might rate as a heroine forstowing away on this voyage, but I didn't think we'd have to dodgerockets and fighter planes to get away!"

  There was no comment.

  "I'm a beginner at navigation," said Burke a little later, more worriedthan before. "I know we have to go out over the north magnetic pole,but how the hell do I find that?"

  Keller beamed. He dropped his wiring job and went to the imposing bankof electronic instruments. He set one, and then another, and then athird. The action, of course, was similar to that of an airline pilotwhen he tunes in broadcasting stations in different cities. From each,a directional reading can be taken. Where the lines of directioncross, there the transport plane must be. But Keller turned toshortwave transmitters whose transmissions could be picked up in space.Presently, eighty miles high, he wrote a latitude and longitude neatlyon a slip of paper, wrote "North magnetic pole 93?W, 71?N, nearly," andafter that a course.

  "Hm," said Burke. "Thanks."

  Then there was a relative silence inside the ship. Only a faint mutterof voices came from assorted speakers that Keller had first turned onand then turned down, and a small humming sound from a gyro. When theylistened, they could also hear a high sweet musical tone. Burke shiftedthis control here, and that control there, and lifted his hands. Theship moved on steadily. He checked this and that and the other thing.He was pleased. But there were innumerable things to be checked. Holmeswent down the ladder to the other compartment below. There were detailsto be looked into there, too.

  One of the screens portrayed Earth from a height of seventy milesinstead of eighty, now. Others pictured the heavens, with very manystars shining unwinkingly out of blackness. Keller got at his wiresagain and resumed the work of installing a ship-to-ground transmitterand its connection to an exterior-reflecting antenna.

  Sandy watched Burke as he moved about, testing one thing after another.From time to time he glanced at the screens which had to serve in theplace of windows. Once he went back to the control-board and changed anadjustment.

  "We dropped down ten miles," he explained to Sandy. "And I suspectwe're being trailed by jets down below."

  Holmes meticulously inspected all storage places. He'd packed them whenthe ship lay on her side.

  Burke read an instrument and said with satisfaction, "We're running onsunshine!"

  He meant that in empty space certain aluminum plates on the outsideof the hull were picking up heat from the naked sun. The use of thedrive-shaft lowered its temperature. Metallic connection with theoutside plates conducted heat inward from those plates. The drive-shaftwas cold to the touch, but it could drop four hundred degreesFahrenheit before it ceased to operate as a drive. It was gratifyingthat it had cooled so little up to this moment.

  Later Keller tapped Burke on the shoulder and jerked his thumb upward.

  "We go up now?" asked Burke.

  Keller nodded. Burke carefully swung the ship to aim vertically. Theviews of solid Earth slid from previous screens to new ones. The starsand the dark object which was the sun also moved across their screensto vanish and reappear on others. Then Burke touched the drive-control.Once more they had the sensation of being in a rising elevator. And atjust that moment spots appeared on the barren, icy, totally flattenedterrain below.

  They were rocket-trails from target-seeking missiles which had reachedthe area of the north magnetic pole by herculean effort and were aimedat the radar-detected little ship by the heavy planes that carried them.

  From the surface of the Earth, it would have seemed that monstrouscolumns of foaming white appeared and rose with incredible swiftnesstoward the heavens. They reached on, up and up and up, seeming to drawcloser together as they became smaller in the distance, until all eightof them seemed to merge into a single point of infinite whiteness inthe sunshine above the world's blanket of air.

  But nothing happened. Nothing. The ship did not accelerate as fastas the rockets, but it had started first and it kept up longer. Itwent scuttling away to emptiness and the b
ottoms of the towers ofrocket-smoke drifted away and away over the barren landscape allcovered with ice and snow.

  When Earth looked like a huge round ball that did not even seem verynear, with a night side that was like a curious black chasm among thestars, the atmosphere of tension inside the ship diminished. Kellercompleted his wiring of a ship-to-ground transmitter. He stood up,brushed off his hands and beamed.

  The little ship continued on. Its temperature remained constant. Theair in it smelled of growing green stuff. It was moist. It was warm.Keller turned a knob and a tiny, beeping noise could be heard. Dialspointed, precisely.

  "We couldn't go on our true course earlier," Burke told Sandy, "becausewe had to get out beyond the Van Allen bands of cosmic particles inorbit around the world. Pretty deadly stuff, that radiation! In theory,though, all we have to do now is swing onto our proper course andfollow those beepings home. We ought to be in harmless emptiness here.Do you want to call Washington?"

  She stared.

  "We need help to navigate--or astrogate," said Burke. "Call them,Sandy. I'll get on the wire when a general answers."

  Sandy went jerkily to the transmitter just connected. She began tospeak steadily, "Calling Earth! Calling Earth! The spaceship you justshot all those rockets at is calling! Calling Earth!"

  It grew monotonous, but eventually a suspicious voice demanded furtheridentification.

  It was a peculiar conversation. The five in the small spaceship wereconsidered traitors on Earth because they had exercised the traditionalright of American citizens to go about their own business unhindered.It happened that their private purposes ran counter to the emotionalstate of the public. Hence voices berated Sandy and furiously demandedthat the ship return immediately. Sandy insisted on higher authorityand presently an official voice identified itself as general so-and-soand sternly commanded that the ship acknowledge and obey orders toreturn to Earth. Burke took the transmitter.

  "My name's Burke," he said mildly. "If you can arrange some sort ofcode, I'll tell you how to find the plans, and I'll give you theinstructions you'll need to build more ships like this. They can followus out. I think they should. I believe that this is more important thananything else you can think of at the moment."

  Silence. Then more sternness. But ultimately the official voice said,"I'll get a code expert on this."

  Burke handed the microphone to Sandy.

  "Take over. We've got to arrange a cipher so nobody who listens in canlearn about official business. We may use a social security number fora key, or the name of your maiden aunt's first sweetheart, or somethingwe know and Washington can find out but that nobody else can. Hm. Yourlast year's car-license number might be a starter. They can seal up therecords on that!"

  Sandy took over the job. What was transmitted to Earth, of course,could be picked up anywhere over an entire hemisphere. Somebody wouldassuredly pass on what they overheard to, say, nations the UnitedStates would rather have behind it than ahead of it in space-travelequipment. Burke's suggestion of a cipher and instructions changed hisentire status with authority. They'd rather have had him come back, butthis was second best, and they took it.

  From Burke's standpoint it was the only thing to do. He had no officialstanding to lend weight to his claim that lunatic magnet-cores withinsanely complicated windings would amount to space-drive units. If hereturned, in the nature of things there would be a long delay beforemere facts could overcome theoreticians' convictions. But now he wasforty-five thousand miles out from Earth.

  He had changed course to home on the beeping signals from M-387, wasaccelerating at one full gravity and had been doing so for forty-fiveminutes. And the small ship already had a velocity of twenty milesper second and was still going up. All the rockets that men had made,plus the Russian manned-probe drifting outward now, had become as muchoutdated for space travel as flint arrowheads are for war.

  Burke returned to the microphone when Sandy left it to get a pencil andpaper.

  "By the way," he said briskly. "We can keep on acceleratingindefinitely at one gravity. We've got radars. We got them from--"He named the supplier. "Now we want advice on how fast we can risktraveling before we'll be going too fast to dodge meteors or whatnotthat the radar may detect. Get that figured out for us, will you?"

  He gave back the instrument to Sandy and returned to his inspection ofevery item of functioning equipment in the ship. He found one or twotrivial things to be bettered. The small craft went on in a singularlymatter-of-fact fashion. If it had been a bomb shelter buried in thepit beside the mould in which it was built, there would have been verylittle difference in the feel of things. The constant accelerationsubstituted perfectly for gravity. The six television screens, tobe sure, pictured incredible things outside, but television screensoften picture incredible things. The wall-gardens looked green andflourishing. The pumps were noiseless. There were no moving parts inthe drive. The gyro held everything steady. There was no vibration.

  Nobody could remain upset in such an unexciting environment. PresentlyPam explored the living quarters below. Holmes took his place in thecontrol-chair, but found no need to touch anything.

  Some time later Sandy reported, "Joe, they say we must be lying, butif we can keep on accelerating, we'd better not hit over four hundredmiles a second. They say we can then swing end for end and deceleratedown to two hundred, and then swing once more and build up to fouragain. But they insist that we ought to return to Earth."

  "They don't mention shooting rockets at us, do they?" asked Burke. "Ithought they wouldn't. Just say thanks and go on working out a code."

  Sandy set to work with pencil and paper. Federal agents would bemoving, now, to impound all official records that were in any wayconnected with any of the five on the ship. The key to the code wouldbe contained in such records. It would be an agglomeration of suchitems as Burke's grandmother's maiden name, Holmes' social-securitynumber, the name of a street Burke had lived on some years before,the exact amount of his federal income taxes the previous year, thetitle of a book third from the end on the second shelf of a bookcasein Keller's apartment, and such unconsidered items as most people canremember with a little effort, but which can only be found out bypeople who know where to look. These people would keep anybody elsefrom looking in the same places. Such a code would be clumsy to workwith, but it would be unbreakable.

  It took hours to establish it without the mention of a single wordincluded in the lengthy key. The ship reached four hundred miles asecond, turned about, and began to cut down its speed again.

  Pam spoke from beside an electric stove, "Dinner's ready! Come and getit!"

  They dined; Sandy weary, Burke absorbed and inevitably worried, Holmesplacid and amiable, and Keller beaming and interested in all that wenton, which was practically nothing.

  They did not see the stars direct, because television cameras werepreferable to portholes. Earth had become very small, and as it swungever more nearly into a direct line between the ship and the sun,night filled more of its disk until only a hairline of sunshine showedat one edge. The microwave receivers ceased to mutter. The workingastronomers on Earth who'd sent a message to M-387 were suddenlyrelieved of their disgrace and set to work again to equip the WestVirginia radar telescope for continuous communication with Burke'sship. Other technicians began to prepare multiple receptors to pickup the ship's signals from hitherto unprecedented distances for humantwo-way communication.

  And on Earth an official statement went out from high authority. Itannounced that a hurriedly completed American ship was on the way toM-387 to investigate the signals from space. It announced that measureslong in preparation were now in use, and that an invincible fleet ofspacecraft would be completed in months, whereas they had not beenhoped for for another generation. An unexpected breakthrough had madeit possible to advance the science of space travel by many decades,and a fleet to explore all the planets as well as M-387 was alreadyunder construction. It was almost true that they were. The blueprintsof Burke's s
hip had been flown to Washington from the plant, and anenormous number of replicas of the egg-shaped vessel were ordered to bebegun immediately, even before the theory of the drive was understood.

  There was one minor hitch. A legal-minded official protested thatCongressional appropriations had been for rocket-driven spaceshipsonly, and the money appropriated could not be used for other thanrockets. An executive order settled the matter. Then theorists began toobject to the principle of the drive. It contradicted well-establishedscientific beliefs. It could not work.

  It did, but there was violent opposition to the fact.

  Publicly, of course, the shock of such an about-face by the nationalgovernment was extreme. But newspapers flashed new headlines. "U.S.SHIP SPEEDING TO QUERY ALIENS!" Lesser heads announced, "_CriticalVelocity Exceeded! Russian Probe Already Passed!_" The last was notquite true. The Russian manned probe had started out ten days before.Burke hadn't overtaken it yet.

  Broadcasters issued special bulletins, and two networks canceled topevening programs to schedule interviews with prominent scientists who'dhad nothing whatever to do with what Burke had managed to achieve.

  In Europe, obviously, the political effect was stupendous. Russiawas reduced to impassioned claims that the ship had been built fromRussian plans, using Russian discoveries, which had been stolenby imperialistic secret agents. And the heads of the Russian spysystem were disgraced for not having, in fact, stolen the plans anddiscoveries from the Americans. All other operatives received threatsof what would happen to them if they didn't repair that omission. Thesethreats so scared half a dozen operatives that they defected and toldall they knew, thereby wrecking the Russian spy system for the timebeing.

  Essentially, however, the recovery of confidence in America was asextravagant as the previous unhappy desire to hear no more aboutspace. Burke, Holmes, Keller, Sandy and Pam became national heroes andheroines within eighteen hours after guided missiles had failed toshoot them down. The only criticism came from a highly conservativeclergyman who hoped that other young girls would not imitate Sandy'sand Pam's disregard of convention and maintained that a married womanshould have gone along to chaperon them.

  The atmosphere in the ship, however, was that of respectability carriedto the point where things were dull. The lower compartment of the ship,being smaller, was inevitably appropriated by Sandy and Pam. Theyretired when the ship was twenty hours out from Earth. Each of them hadprepared for stowing away by wearing extra garments in layers.

  "Funny," said Pam, yawning as they made ready to turn in, "I thought itwas going to be exciting. But it's just like a rather full day at theoffice."

  "Which," said Sandy, "I'm quite used to."

  "I do think you ought to have barged in when they designed the ship,Sandy. There's not one mirror in it!"

  In the upper compartment Keller took his place in the control-chair andtook a trick of duty. It consisted solely of looking at the instrumentsand listening to the beeping noises which came from remoteness everytwo seconds, and the still completely cryptic broadcasts which cameevery seventy-nine minutes. It wasn't exciting. There was nothing to beexcited about. But somebody had to be on watch.

  On the second day out, Washington was ready to use the new code. TheWest Virginia radar bowl was powered to handle communications again.Sandy painstakingly took down the gibberish that came in and decodedit. From then on she worked at the coding and transmission of messagesand the reception and decoding of others. Presently Pam relieved her atthe job. Pam tended to be bored because Holmes was as much absorbed inthe business of keeping anything from happening as was Burke.

  The messages were almost entirely requests for, and answers to requestsfor, details about the ship plans. The United States had not yetcompleted a duplicate drive-shaft. Machinists labored to reproducethe cores, which would then have to be wound in the complicatedfashion the plans described. But it was an unhappy experience for thescientific minds assigned to duplicate Burke's ship. No woman everfollowed a recipe without making some change. Very few physicists canduplicate another's apparatus without itching to change it. There weresix copies of the drive under construction at the same time, at thebeginning. Four were made by skeptics, who adhered to the originalplans with strict accuracy. They were sure they'd prove Burke wrong.Two were "improved" in the making. The four, when finished, workedbeautifully. The two doctored versions did not. But still there wasfretful discussion of the theory of the drive. It seemed flatly tocontradict Newton's law that every action has a reaction of equalmoment and opposite sign--a law at least as firmly founded as the lawof the conservation of energy. But that had lately been revised intothe law of the conservation of energy and matter, which now was gospel.Burke's theory required the Newtonian law to be restated to read "everyaction of a given force has a reaction of the same force, of the samemoment," and so on. When the reaction of one force is converted intoanother force, the results can be interesting. In fact, one can havea space-drive. But there was bitter resistance to the idea. It wasdemanded that Burke justify his views in a more reasonable way than bymere demonstration that they worked.

  After a time, Burke gave up trying to explain things. And when one andthen another duplicate drive worked, the argument ceased. But eminentphysicists still had a resentful feeling that Burke was cheating onthem somehow.

  Then for days nothing happened. One of the three men in the ship alwaysstayed in the control-chair where he could check the ship's courseagainst the homing signals from the asteroid. He might have to correctit by the fraction of a hair, or swing ship and put on more driveif the radar should show celestial debris in the spaceship's path.Every so many hours the ship had to be swung about so that instead ofaccelerating she decelerated, or instead of decelerating gained freshspeed. But that was all.

  On the fifth day there was the flash of a meteor on the radar. Onthe seventh day an object which could have been the second or thirdunmanned Russian probe showed briefly at the very edge of the radarscreens. In essence, however, the journey was pure tedium. Burkewearied of making sure that his work was good, though he congratulatedhimself that nothing did happen to break the monotony. Holmes admittedthat he was disappointed. He'd wanted to make the journey because he'dsailed in everything but a spaceship. But there was no fun in it.Keller alone seemed comfortably absorbed. He prepared daily lists ofinstrument-readings to be sent back to Earth. They would be of enormousimportance to science-minded people. They were not of interest to Sandy.

  Even when she talked to Burke, it was necessarily impersonal. Therecould be no privacy which was not ostentatious. The two girls used thelower compartment, the three men the upper and larger one. For Sandyto talk privately with Burke, she'd have had to go to the small bottomsection of the ship. Holmes and Pam faced the same situation. It wasuncomfortable. So they developed a perfectly pleasant habit of talkingexclusively of things everybody could talk about. It did not botherKeller, who would hardly average a dozen words in twenty-four hours,but Sandy muttered to herself when she and Pam retired for what was aship-night's rest.

  When they went past the orbit of Mars, agitated instructions came outfrom Earth. The asteroid belts began beyond Mars. Elaborate directionscame. The ship was tracked by radar telescopes all around the world,direction-finding on its transmission. Croydon kept track. Americanradar bowls picked up the ship's voice. South American and Hawaiian andJapanese and Siberian radar telescopes determined the ship's positionevery time a set of code symbols reached Earth from the ship. Ofcourse, there were also the beepings and the seventy-nine-minute-spacedidentical broadcasts from farther out from the sun.

  Somebody got a brilliant idea and authority to try it. An interview forbroadcast on Earth was sought with somebody on the ship. It was then ahundred thirty million miles from Earth, and ninety-two million morefrom the sun. Largely out of boredom Sandy agreed to answer questions.But at the speed of light it required eleven minutes to reach herfrom Earth, and as long for her reply to be received. It did not makefor liveliness, so she spo
ke curtly for five minutes and stopped. Shetalked at random about housekeeping in space. Without knowing it, shewas praised for her domesticity in many pulpits the following Sunday,and eight hundred ninety-two proposals of marriage piled up in mailaddressed to her in care of the United States government. Twelve werein Russian.

  But nothing really exciting happened aboard the spaceship. It wasBurke's guess that they could go directly through the asteroid beltalong the plane of the ecliptic, and not get nearer than ten thousandmiles to any bit of shattered stone or metal in orbit out there. He wasalmost right. There was only one occasion when his optimism came intodoubt.

  It was on the ninth day out from Earth. Experimentally, the shipcoasted on attained momentum, using no drive. There was, then, nosubstitute for gravity and everyone and everything in the ship wasweightless. The power obtainable from the sun as heat had dwindledto one-ninth of that at the Earth's distance. But what was receivedcould be stored, and was. Meanwhile the ship plunged onward at verynearly four hundred miles per second. Burke, Keller, and Holmestogether labored over a self-contained diving suit which they hopedcould be used as a space suit in dire emergency and for brief periods.They wanted to get the feel of using it with internal pressure andweightlessness as conditions. Sandy sat at the transmitter, working atcode which by now she heartily loathed. Pam sat in the control-chair,watching the instruments.

  There was a buzz. Burke snapped his head around to see the radarscreen. A line of light appeared on it. It aimed directly at the centerof the screen, which meant that whatever had been picked up was on acollision course with the ship. Burke plunged toward the control-chairto take over. But he'd forgotten the condition of no-gravity. He wentfloating off in mid-air, far wide of the chair.

  He barked orders to Pam, who was least qualified of anybody aboardto meet an emergency of this sort. She panicked. She did nothing.Holmes took precious seconds to drag himself to the controls by whathand-holds could be had. The glowing white line on the radar screenlengthened swiftly. It neared the center. It reached the center. Burkeand Holmes froze.

  There was a curious flashing change in a vision-screen. An imageflashed into view. It was a jagged, tortured, irregularly-shaped massof stone or metal, distorted in its representation by the speed atwhich it passed the television lens. It was perhaps a hundred yards indiameter. It could never have been seen from Earth. It might circle thesun in its lonely orbit for a hundred million years and never be seenagain.

  It went away to nothing. It had missed by yards or fathoms, and Burkefound himself sweating profusely. Holmes was deathly white. Keller verycarefully took a deep breath, swallowed, and went back to his work onthe diving-suit-qua-space-suit. Sandy hadn't noticed anything at all.But Pam burst into abrupt, belated tears, and Holmes comforted herclumsily. She was bitterly ashamed that she'd done nothing to meet theemergency which came while she was at the control-board, and which wasthe only emergency they'd encountered since the ship's departure fromEarth.

  After that, they put on the drive and used reserve fuel. It wasnecessary to check their speed, anyhow. They were very near the sourceof the beeping signal they'd steered by for so long. The directionalreceiver pointed to it had long since been turned down to its lowestpossible volume, and still the beepings were loud.

  On the eleventh day after their take-off, they sighted Asteroid M-387.They had traveled two hundred seventy million miles at an averaged-outspeed of very close to three hundred miles per second. Despite muting,the beepings from the loud-speakers were monstrous noises.

  "Try a call, Holmes," said Burke. "But they ought to know we're here."

  He felt strange. He'd brought the ship to a stop about four or fivemiles from M-387. The asteroid was a mass of dark stuff with whiteoutcroppings at one place and another. The ship seemed to edge itselftoward it. The floating mass of stone and metal had no particularshape. It was longer than it was wide, but its form fitted nodescription. A mountain which had been torn from solidity with itsroots of stone attached might look like Schull's Object as it turnedslowly against a background of myriads of unblinking stars.

  There was no change in the beeping that came from the singular thing.It did rotate, but so slowly that one had to watch for long minutes tobe sure of it. There was no outward sign of any reaction to the ship'spresence. Holmes took the microphone.

  "Hello! Hello!" he said absurdly. "We have come from Earth to find outwhat you want."

  No answer. No change in the beeping calls. The asteroid turned withenormous deliberation.

  Sandy said suddenly, "Look there! A stick! No, it's a mast! See, wherethe patch of white is?"

  Burke very, very gingerly drew closer to the monstrous thing which hungin space. It was true. There was a mast of some sort sticking up outof white stone. The direction-indicators pointed to it. The beepingstopped and a broadcast began. It was the standard broadcast Earthheard every seventy-nine minutes.

  There was no reply to Holmes' call. There was no indication thatthe ship's arrival had been noted. On Earth the ignoring of humanbroadcasts to M-387 had seemed arrogance, indifference, a superior andmenacing contempt for man and all his works; somehow, here the effectwas different. This irregular mass was a fragment of something thatonce had been much greater. It suddenly ceased to seem menacing becauseit seemed oblivious. It acted blindly, by rote, like some mechanism setto operate in a certain way and unable to act in any other.

  It did not seem alive. It had signaled like a robot beacon. Now it feltlike one. It was one.

  "Look, coming around toward us," said Holmes very quietly. "There'ssomething that looks like a tunnel. It's not a crevasse. It was cut."

  Burke nodded.

  "Yes," he said thoughtfully. "I think we'll explore it. But I don'treally expect we'll find any life here. There's nothing outside to seebut a single metal mast. We've got some signal lights on our hull. Ifwe're careful--"

  No one objected. The appearance of the asteroid was utterlydisappointing. Its lifelessness and its obliviousness to their comingand their calls were worse than disappointing. There was nothing to beseen but a metal stick from which signals went out to nowhere.

  Burke jockeyed the little ship to the tunnel-mouth. It was fully ahundred feet in diameter. He turned on the ship's signal lights.Gently, cautiously, he worked down the very center of the very largebore.

  It was perfectly straight. They went in for what seemed an indefinitedistance. Presently the signal lights showed that the wall wassmoothed. The bore grew smaller still. They went on and on.

  Suddenly Keller grunted. He pointed to one of the six televisionscreens which aimed out the length of the tunnel and showed the starsbeyond.

  Those stars were being blotted out. Something vast moved slowly anddeliberately across the shaft they navigated. It closed the opening.Their retreat was blocked. The ship was shut in, in the center of amountain of stone which floated perpetually in emptiness. Burke checkedthe ship's forward motion, judging their speed by the side walls shownby the ship's outside lights.

  Very, very slowly, faint illumination appeared outside. In secondsthey could see that the light came from long tubes of faint bluishlight. The light changed. It grew stronger. It turned green and thenyellowish and then became very bright, indeed.

  Then nothing more took place. Nothing whatever. The five insidethe ship waited more than an hour for some other development, butabsolutely nothing happened.