The Wailing Asteroid
Chapter 7
In the beginning there was nothing at all, and then things werecreated, and the wonder of created things was very great. When menbecame, they marveled at the richness and the beauty about them, andtheir lives were filled with astonishment at the myriads of things inthe air and on the earth and in the sea. For many centuries they werebusy taking note of all the created things that were. They forgot thatthere was such a condition as emptiness.
But there were six people in a certain solar system who really knewwhat emptiness amounted to. Five of them were in a fortress which wasan asteroid and a mystery. One was in a small, crude object whichfloated steadily out from Earth. This one's name was Nikolai. Therest of it does not matter. He had been born in a small village inthe Urals, and as a little boy he played games with mud and reeds andsticks and dogs and other little boys. As a growing youth he dutifullystuffed his head with things out of books, and some seemed to himrational and marvelous, and some did not make much sense but werebelieved by everybody. And who was he to go against the wise comradeswho ran the government and protected the people from wars and faminesand the schemes of villainous capitalists?
As a young man he was considered promising. If he had been interestedin such matters, he might have had a moderately successful career inpolitics, as politics was practised in his nation. But he liked things.Real things.
When he was a student in the university he kept a canary in hislodgings. He loved it very much. There was a girl, too, about whomhe dreamed splendidly. But there was a need for school teachers inBessarabia, and she went there to teach. She wept when she left him.After that Nikolai studied with something of desperation, trying toforget her because he could not have her.
He thought of such past events as he drifted outward from Earth. Hewas the passenger, he was the crew of the manned space-probe hisgovernment had prepared to go out and investigate strange signalscoming from emptiness. He was a volunteer, of course. It was a greathonor to be accepted, and for a while he'd almost forgotten the girlwho was teaching school in Bessarabia. But that was a long timeago, now. At first he'd liked to remember the take-off, when brisk,matter-of-fact men tucked him in his acceleration-chair and left him,and he lay staring upward in dead silence--save for the ticking of aninsanely emotionless clock--until there was a roar to end all roarsand a shock to crush anything made of flesh and bones, and then aterrible, horrible feeling of weight that kept on and on until he lostconsciousness.
He could remember all this, if he chose. He had a distinct recollectionof coming back to life, and of struggling to send off the signal whichwould say that he had survived the take-off. There were telemeteringdevices which reported what information was desired about the bandsand belts of deadly radiation which surrounded the planet Earth. ButNikolai reported by voice, because that was evidence that he had passedthrough those murderous places unharmed. And his probe went on and onoutward, away from the Earth and the sun.
He received messages from Earth. Tinny voices assured him that hislaunching had gone well. His nation was proud of him. Enormous rewardsawaited him on his return. Meanwhile--The tinny voices instructed himin what he was to say for them to record and broadcast to all the worldin his honor.
He said it, with the Earth a small crescent-shaped bit of brightnessbehind him. He drifted on. The crescent which was Earth grew smallerand smaller as days went by. He took due care of the instruments of hisspace-vehicle. He made sure that the air apparatus behaved properly.He disposed of wastes. From time to time he reported, by voice,information which automatic devices had long since given in greaterdetail and with superior accuracy.
And he thought more and more about the girl--teaching school inBessarabia--and his canary, which had died. Days went by. He wasinformed that it was time for him to make contact with a dronefuel-rocket sent on before him. He watched the instruments which wouldpoint out where it was.
He found it, and with small auxiliary rockets he made careful tinyblastings which guided his vehicle to contact with it. The complexmachinery for refueling took effect. Presently he cast off the emptieddrone, aimed very, very carefully and blasted outward once more. Theshock was worse than that on Earth, and he knew nothing for a long,long time. He was horribly weak when he regained consciousness. Hementioned it in his reports. There was no comment on the fact in thereplies he received from Earth.
He continued to float away from the sun. It became impossible to pickout Earth among the stars. The sun was smaller than he remembered.There was nothing to be seen anywhere but stars and more stars and thedwindling disk of the sun that used to rise and set but now remainedstationary, shrinking.
So Nikolai came to know emptiness. There were points of light whichwere stars. They were illimitable distances away. In between wasemptiness. He had no sensation of movement. Save that as days wentby the sun grew smaller, there was no change in anything. All wasemptiness. If his vehicle floated like this for ten thousand times tenthousand years, the stars would appear no nearer. If he got out andran upon nothingness to get back to where he could see Earth again, hewould have to run for centuries, and generations would die and nationsfall before he caught the least glimmer of that thin crescent which washis home.
If he shouted, no man would ever hear, because emptiness does notcarry sound. If he died, there was no earth into which his body couldbe lowered. If he lived, there was nowhere he could stand uprightand breathe clean air and feel solidity beneath his feet. He had adestination, to be sure, but he did not really believe that he wouldever reach it, nor did he imagine he would ever return. Now hedismissed it from his thoughts.
He found that he was feverish, and he mentioned it when the tinnyvoices talked urgently to him. He guessed, without emotion, that he hadnot passed through the deadly radiation-belts around Earth unburned.He had been assured that he would pass through them so swiftly thatthey would be quite harmless. Now he knew that this was a mistake. Hisbody obeyed him only sluggishly. He was dying of deep-seated radiationburns. But he felt nothing.
Voices waked him to insist that he make contact with anotherfuel-drone. He exhausted himself as he dutifully obeyed commands. Hewas clumsy. He was feeble. But he managed a second refueling. And evenas he performed the highly technical operation with seemingly detachedand reluctant hands, he thought of a schoolteacher in Bessarabia.
Before he fired the new fuel which would send him onward at whatwould be more than escape velocity, he almost humorously--yet quitehumorlessly--reviewed his life. He considered that he might have nolater opportunity to do so. There were three things he had done whichno man had done before him. He had loved a certain small canary, andhe remembered it distinctly. He had loved a certain girl, and in hisweakened and dying state he could see her much more clearly than thegrubby interior of the space-probe. And the third thing--
He had to cast about in his mind to remember what it was. His handpoised upon the rocket-firing key, he debated. Ah, yes! The third thingwas that he had learned what emptiness was.
He pressed the firing-key. And the space-probe spouted flames and wenton. Before the fuel was exhausted it had reached a velocity so greatthat it would go on forever through interstellar space. It would neverfall back toward the sun, not even after thousands of years.
* * * * *
The knowledge of emptiness possessed by the five in the asteroid wasdifferent. A totally empty room is intimidating. A vacant house isdepressing. The two-mile-long asteroid, honeycombed with tunnels andcorridors and galleries and rooms, was like a deserted city. Those whohad left it had carefully stripped it of personal possessions, butthey'd left weapons behind, ready to be manned and used. They'd lefta warning device to call them. The recall device was proof that thedanger had not been destroyed and might return. And the plaintive callthrough all the solar system proved that it was returning.
There was irony in the fact that Earth had panicked when it seemedthat intelligent non-human beings signaled from space, and that shrilldisputes for adva
ntage began instantly Burke reported no livingmonsters at the signals' source. The fortress and its call meantmore than the mere existence of aliens. It was proof that there wereentities of space who needed to be fought. It proved the existence offighting ships of space; of deadly war in emptiness; of creatures whocrossed the void between star systems to conquer and to murder anddestroy.
And such creatures were coming.
Burke ground his teeth. Earth had fusion bombs and rockets which couldcarry them for pitifully short distances on the cosmic scale. Thisfortress was incomparably more powerful than all of Earth's armamentput together. A fleet which dared to attack it must feel itselfstronger still. What could Earth do against a fleet which dared attackthis asteroid?
And what could he and Holmes and Keller do against such a fleet, evenwith the fortress, when they did not yet understand a single one of itsweapons?
Burke worked himself to exhaustion, trying to unravel even the simplestprinciples of the fortress' armament. There were globes which were,obviously, the long-range weapons of the garrison. They were stored ina launching-tube at the far back of the compartment. But Keller couldnot unravel the method of their control. There was no written matterin the fortress. None. A totally unknown language and an unfamiliaralphabet would prevent written matter from being useful, ordinarily,but in technical descriptions there are bound to be diagrams. Burkefelt desperately that in even the most meaningless of scripts therewould be diagrams which could be puzzled out. But there was nothing.The builders of the fortress could have been illiterate, for all thesigns of writing that they'd left.
Keller continued to labor valiantly. But there was no clue to theoperation of anything but the transmitter. That was understandablebecause one knew where the message went in, and where it came out forbroadcast. With the apparatus before one, one could deduce how itoperated. But no one could guess how weapons were controlled when hehadn't the least idea of what they did.
On the third night in the asteroid--the third night by ship-time, sincethere was neither day nor night in the great empty corridors of thefortress--Burke dreamed his dream again. It was perfectly familiar,from the trees with their trailing leaves, to the markings on thelarger moon. He felt the anguished anxiety he'd so often known before.He grasped the hand-weapon and knew that he was ready to fight anythingimaginable for the person he feared for. He heard small fluting soundsbehind him, and then he knew that someone ran breathlessly behind theswaying foliage just ahead. He felt such relief and exultation that hisheart seemed about to burst. He gave a great shout and bounded to meether--
He waked in the small ship in the entrance tunnel. All was silent.All was still. The lights in the control-compartment of the ship wereturned to dim. There was no sound anywhere. The opened air-lock doors,both inner and outer, let in a fan-shaped streak of brightness whichlay on the floor.
Burke lay quiet, still wrought up by the vivid emotions of the dream.
He heard a stirring in the compartment below, occupied by Sandy andPam. Someone came very quietly up the ladder-like stairway. Burkeblinked in the semi-darkness. He saw that it was Sandy. She crossed thecompartment to the air-lock. Very quietly, she closed the outer doorand then the inner. She fastened them.
Burke said, sitting up, "Why'd you do that, Sandy?"
She started violently, and turned.
"Pam can't sleep," she said in a low tone. "She says the fortress iscreepy. She feels that there's something hiding in it, something deadlyand frightening. When you leave the air-lock open, she's afraid. So Iclosed it."
"Holmes and Keller are out," said Burke. "Keller's trying to trace downpower-leads from the instrument-room to whatever power-source warms andlights everything. We can't lock him out."
Sandy obediently opened the air-lock doors again. She turned toward theladder leading downward.
"Sandy," said Burke unhappily, "I know I'm acting like a fool."
"You're doing all right," said Sandy. She paused at the top of theladder. "Finding this--" she waved her hand about her--"ought to putyour name in the history books. Of course you'll be much disliked bypeople who intended to invent space travel themselves. But you're doingall right."
"I'm not thinking of that," said Burke. "I'm thinking of you. I wasgoing to ask you to marry me. I didn't. If we live through this, willyou?"
Sandy regarded him carefully in the dim light of the ship's interior,most of which came through the air-lock doors.
"There are some conditions," she said evenly. "I won't play secondfiddle to an imaginary somebody behind a veil of dreamed-of leaves.I don't want to make conditions, Joe. But I couldn't stand yourfeeling that maybe in marrying me you'd give up your chance of findingher--whatever or whoever she is."
"But I wouldn't feel that way!" protested Burke.
"I'd believe you did," said Sandy. "And it would amount to the samething. I think I made a mistake in coming along in the ship, Joe.If I weren't along you might have missed me. You might even--" shegrimaced--"you might even have dreamed about me. But here I am. And Ican't compete with somebody in a dream. I won't even try. I--I can'timagine marrying anybody else, but if I do get married I want to be theonly girl my guy dreams about!"
She turned again to the ladder. Then said abruptly, "You didn't ask whyPam feels creepy, or where. There's a place up on the second gallerywhere there's a door that's still locked. Pam gets the shivers when shegoes by it. I don't. The whole place is creepy, to me."
She went down the ladder. Minutes later Holmes and Keller arrived.
Holmes said curtly, "The machinery in the transmitter-room reached achange-point just now. Those red dots in that plastic plate apparentlystarted the transmitter in the first place. When its calls wereanswered it changed the broadcast, adding a directional signal. Justbefore we started out from Earth the red sparks passed another placeand changed the broadcast again. Now they've passed a third place.We were there when the machinery shifted all around on a signal fromthat thing which hovers close to the red sparks and watches them. Thetransmitter probably blasted out at four or five times its originalvolume. There must have been a hundred thousand kilowatts in it, atleast. It looks serious. Whatever those red sparks represent must beclose."
Keller nodded in agreement, frowning, then he and Holmes wearilyprepared to turn in. But Burke was upset. He knew he wouldn't be ableto sleep.
"Pam gets the creeps when she passes a certain locked door up on thesecond gallery. I never noticed it, but I'm going to get that dooropen. We got to look into every compartment of this thing! There'sbound to be something informative somewhere! Close the air-lock behindme so Pam can sleep."
He went out. Behind him, Holmes looked at Keller.
"Funny!" he said drily. "We're all scared. I feel uneasy all the time,without knowing why. But if he's as scared as I am, why doesn't heworry about going places alone?"
The same question occurred to Burke. The atmosphere of the brightlylighted halls was ominous and secretive. A man alone in a vast emptybuilding would feel queer even in broad daylight with sunshine andother humans to be seen out of any window. But in this monstrouscomplex of tunnels and rooms carved out of solid stone, withuncountable millions of miles of pure emptiness without, the feelingof loneliness was incredible. He reflected wryly that a dog would be acomforting companion to have on such a journey as his.
He went down the long gallery with doors on either side. Past theroom with the piled metal ingots. Past the door through which one sawhundreds of ten-foot metal globes. Up a ramp. Past the rooms wheresomething like bunks must once have stood against the walls. A longway along this corridor. Emptiness, emptiness, emptiness. Innumerableechoings of his footsteps on the stone.
Three times he stopped at doors that had swung shut, but none was fullyclosed. All yielded readily. Then he came to the door Sandy had spokenabout. He worked the handle repeatedly. It was firmly shut. He kickedthe door and with a loud click it swung open.
There were lights inside this room, as everywhere else they hadexplored.
But it was nearly impossible to see any distance. This wasan extremely long room, and it contained racks of metal which reachedfrom floor to ceiling. Each rack was a series of shallow metal troughs,and in each trough there was a row of crumbly black metal cubes, verysystematically arranged. Each side was about three inches square, andthey were dull black, not glistening at all. They filled the rackscompletely. There were narrow aisles between the rows of racks, throughwhich Burke could make his way easily enough, but which a more portlyman might have found inconvenient.
He stared at a trough, and was stunned. He picked up one of thecubes, and immediately recognized the object in his hand. It was adull-black, smudgy cube exactly like the one his uncle had brought backfrom the Cro-Magnon cave in France. He knew that if he dropped thisobject--found two hundred seventy million miles from the other one--itwould split into thousands of tissue-thin, shiny pieces.
He did drop it. Deliberately. And it shattered into layers which laylike films of mica on the floor.
For no clearly understandable reason, Burke found that his fleshcrawled. He had to force himself to stay in this room with so manythousands of the enigmatic cubes. There had been a cube of this kindon Earth. The one he'd known as a child had belonged to a Cro-Magnontribesman ten thousand, twenty thousand, how many years ago? And itcould only have come from this asteroid. Which meant--
Presently he made his way back to the spaceship. He carried one ofthe cubes, rather gingerly. He meant to show it to Sandy. But theimplications were startling.
Members of the garrison of this fortress, thousands of years gone by,had visited Earth. One of them, doubtless, had carried that othercube. Why? When the garrison abandoned the asteroid they left thesecubes behind. They left behind intricate machinery to call them back.They left squat machines and ten-foot globes which must be weapons.They left nothing that would be useful in the place to which they hadremoved. But they'd left these cubes, hundreds of thousands of them.
The cube, then, could be anything. It could be impersonal, likeequipment for the fortress that would be useless elsewhere. Thefortress' equipment was designed to deal out death. Were the cubes?No. Burke had owned one without damage. When that cube split intoglistening, tissue-thin plates, no one was injured. To be sure, therewas his dream. But the cube wasn't a weapon. Whatever else it might be,it was not dangerous.
He went into the spaceship and for no reason whatever firmly lockedboth air-lock doors. Holmes and Keller were asleep. There was no soundfrom the lower compartment occupied by Sandy and Pam.
Burke put the black object on the control-desk. The single cubeon Earth had been meaningless. The museum which joyfully acceptedCro-Magnon artifacts from his uncle had dismissed it as of noimportance. It was fit only to be given to an eleven-year-old boy. Buta roomful of such cubes couldn't be without meaning!
He dismissed this newest mystery with an almost violent effort of hiswill. It was a mystery. Yet there was no intention to have the fortressseem a mystery to whoever answered its call to space. He could guessthat the signals were notification of some emergency which needed to bemet. The automatic apparatus of the ship-lock was set to aid those whocame in response to the call. But everything presupposed that those whocame would know why they came.
Burke didn't. The thing must be simple, an explanation not yet thoughtof. But there was nowhere to start to think about it! His recurrentdream? No. That was as mysterious as the rest.
Burke was very, very lonely and depressed. He could look for no helpin solving the mystery. Earth was now past the point of conjunctionwith M-387, and moved nearly a million miles a day along its orbit,with nearly half of them away from the fortress. At the most hopefulestimate, it would be three months or later before an emergency spacefleet of replicas of his own ship could lift off from Earth for here.
And Burke was reasonably sure that the red sparks would have reachedthe center of the disk in much less time than that. If it were in somefashion like a radar, making a map of the surroundings of the asteroid,the observer's place would be in the middle. In that event, whateverthe red sparks represented would reach the fortress before more shipscame out from Earth.
He sat with his chin on his chest, wearily debating the impossibilityof meeting a situation in which all humanity might well be involved.His achievement of space travel provided no sense of triumph, and thediscovery of the abandoned fortress produced no elation. Not when adesperate emergency requiring a non-existent garrison to report forduty was so probable. Burke sat in the control-chair and could find noencouragement in any of his thoughts....
* * * * *
_He heard a trumpet-call and was on his feet, buckling familiarequipment about him. There were other figures all around in thisbunkroom, similarly equipping themselves. Some grumbled. There was arush for the doorway and he found himself one of a line of trottingfigures which swung sharply out the door and went swiftly down one ofthe high-ceilinged corridors. The faces he saw were hardbitten andresentful. They moved, but out of habit, not choice. There were otherlines of men in motion. Some rushed in the same direction. Others ranstolidly into branching corridors and were lost to sight. Up a ramp,with the pounding of innumerable feet filling his ears with echoedsound. Suddenly there were fewer men before him. Some had dartedthrough a doorway to the right. More vanished. He was at the head ofhis line. He turned into the doorway next beyond, and saw a squat andmenacing object there. He swung up its side and seated himself. Hedropped a helmet over his head and saw empty space with millions ofunwinking stars beyond it. He waited. He was not Burke. He was someoneelse who happened to be the pointer, the aimer, of the weapon he satastride. This might be a drill, but it could be action._
_A voice spoke inside his helmet. The words were utterly strange, buthe understood them. He tested the give of this lever and the responseof that. He spoke crisply, militarily, in words that somehow meantthis--a word missing--was ready for action at its highest rate of fire._
_Again he waited, his eyes examining the emptiness he saw from withinhis helmet. A star winked. He snatched at a lever and centered it,snapping sharp, bitten-off words. The voice in his helmet said, "Flam!"He jerked the firing-lever and all space was blotted out for seconds byflaming light. Then the light faded and far, far away among the starssomething burned horribly, spouting fire. It blew up._
_Yet again he waited. He doggedly watched the stars, because the Enemyhad some way to prevent detection by regular instruments, and onlythe barest flicker of one among myriad light-specks could reveal thepresence of an Enemy craft._
_A long time later the voice in his helmet spoke again, and he relaxed,and lifted the helmet. He nodded to the others of the crew of thisweapon. Then a trumpet blew again, and he dismounted leisurely fromthe saddle of the ungainly thing he'd fired, and he and his companionswaited while long lines of men filed stolidly past the doorway. Theywere on the way back to the bunk-rooms. They did not look well-fed.His turn came. His crew filed out into the corridor, now filled withmen moving in a bored but disciplined fashion. He heard somebody saythat it was an Enemy scout, trying some new device to get close to thefortress. Eight weapons had fired on it at the same instant, his amongthem. Whatever the new device was, the Enemy had found it didn't work.But he knew that it needn't have been a real Enemy, but just a drill.Nobody knew when supposed action was real. There was much suspicionthat there was no real action. There was always the possibility of realaction, though. Of course. The Enemy had been the Enemy for thousandsof years. A century or ten or a hundred of quietude would not mean theEnemy had given up...._
* * * * *
Then Burke found himself staring at the quietly glowing monitor-lightsof his own ship's control-board. He was himself again. He rememberedopening his eyes. He'd dozed, and he'd dreamed, and now he was awake.And he knew with absolute certainty that what he'd dreamed came fromthe black cube he'd brought back from the previously locked-up room.But there was a difference between this dream and the one he'd
had forso many years. He could not name the difference, but he knew it. Thiswas not an emotion-packed, illusory experience which would haunt himforever. This was an experience like the most vivid of books. It wassomething he would remember, but he would need to think about it if hewere to remember it fully.
He sat stiffly still, going over and over this new memory, until heheard someone moving about in the compartment below.
"Sandy?"
"Yes," said Sandy downstairs. "What is it?"
"I opened the door that bothered Pam," said Burke. Suddenly theimplications of what had just occurred began to hit him. This was theclue he'd needed. Now he knew--many things. "I found out what thefortress is for. I suspect I know what the signals were intended to do."
Silence for a moment. Then Sandy's voice. "I'm coming right up."
In minutes she ascended the stairs.
"What is it, Joe?"
He waved his hand, with some grimness, at the small black object on thecontrol-desk.
"I found this and some thousands of others behind that creepy door.I suspect that it accounts for the absence of signs and symbols. Itcontains information. I got it. You get it by dozing near one of thesethings. I did. I dreamed."
Sandy looked at him anxiously.
"No," he told her. "No twin moons or waving foliage. I dreamed I was amember of the garrison. I went through a training drill. I know how tooperate those big machines on the second level of the corridor, now.They're weapons. I know how to use them."
Sandy's uneasiness visibly increased.
"These black cubes are--lesson-givers. They're subliminal instructors.Pam is more sensitive to such stuff than the rest of us. It didn'taffect me until I dozed. Then I found myself instructed by goingthrough an experience in the form of a dream. These cubes containrecords of experiences. You have those experiences. You dream them. Youlearn."
Then he said abruptly, "I understand my recurrent dream now, I think.When I was eleven years old I had a cube like this. Don't ask me how itgot into a Cro-Magnon cave! But I had it. One day it dropped and splitinto a million leaves of shiny stuff. One got away under my bed, closeup under my pillow. When I slept I dreamed about a place with two moonsand strange trees and--all the rest."
Sandy said, groping, "Do you mean it was magnetized in somefashion, and when you slept you were affected by it so you dreamedsomething--predetermined?"
"Exactly," said Burke grimly. "The predetermined thing in thisparticular cube is the way to operate those machines Holmes said wereweapons." Then he said more grimly, "I think we're going to have toaccept the idea that this cube is an instruction device to teach thegarrison without their having to learn to read or write or think.They'd have only to dream."
Sandy looked from him to the small black cube.
"Then we can find out--"
"I've found it out," said Burke. "I guessed before, but now I know.There is an Enemy this fortress was built to fight. There is a warthat's lasted for thousands of years. The Enemy has spaceships andstrange weapons and is absolutely implacable. It has to be found. Andthe signals from space were calls to the garrison of this fortressto come back and fight it. But there isn't any garrison any more.We answered instead. The Enemy comes from hundreds or thousands oflight-years away, and he tries desperately to smash the defenses ofthis fortress and others, and when he succeeds there will be massacreand atrocity and death to celebrate his victory. He's on the way now.And when he comes--" Burke's voice grew harsh. "When he comes he won'tstop with trying to smash this place. The people of Earth are theEnemy's enemies, too. Because the garrison was a garrison of men!"