The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  Dr. Kingsley sipped at a steaming cup.

  “Not much to tell,” he said. “And a lot of it is off the record stuff. Afraid there isn’t any story . . . yet.”

  Evans laughed shortly. “Don’t be that way, doc,” he said. “You know you’ve got plenty to tell him. Go ahead and spill it. He’ll keep out what you say is off the record.”

  Dr. Kingsley looked questioningly at Gary.

  “Whatever you say is off the record, is off the record,” Gary told him.

  “There’s so much of it,” rumbled the doctor, “that sounds like sheer dream stuff.”

  “Hell,” said Evans, “there always is in everything new. My ships sound like it, too. But the thing will work. I know it will.”

  Doctor Kingsley perched himself on a heavy kitchen chair.

  “It started more than a year ago,” he said. “We were studying the cosmic ray. Elusive thing, those rays. Men have studied them for about five thousand years, and they still don’t know as much about them as you’d think they would. We thought we’d made a big discovery, for our instruments, used on top of the building, showed the rays came in definite patterns. Not only that, but they came in definite patterns at particular times. We developed new equipment and learned more about the pattern. We learned that the pattern occurred only when Pluto had rotated into such a position that this particular portion of the planet was facing the Great Nebula in Andromeda. We learned that the pattern, besides having a certain fixed physical structure, also had a definite time structure, and that the intensity of the bombardment always remained the same. In other words, the pattern never varied as to readings; it occurred at fixed intervals whenever we directly faced the Great Nebula, and the intensity varied very slightly, showing an apparent constant source of energy operating at specific times. In between those times our equipment registered the general haphazard behavior one would expect in cosmic rays.”

  THE DOCTOR rumbled on. “The readings had me down,” he said. “Cosmic rays shouldn’t behave that way. There had never been any instance of their behaving that way before. Of course, this was the first thorough investigation far from the Sun’s interfering magnetic fields. And why should they behave in that manner only when we were broadside to the Great Nebula?

  “My two assistants and I worked and studied and theorized, and it finally boiled down to just one thing. The things we were catching with our instruments weren’t cosmic rays at all. They were something else. Something new. Some strange impulse coming to us from outer space. Almost like a signal. Like something or somebody or God knows what signaling to someone or something stationed here on Pluto. We romanticized a bit. We toyed with the idea of signals coming from another galaxy, for you know the Great Nebula is an exterior galaxy, a mighty star system, some nine hundred million light-years across intergalactic space.”

  “If you’d let me send that back to the Evening Rocket,” said Gary, “we’d make you famous overnight.”

  “But you can’t,” rumbled Dr. Kingsley, “because these are just imaginings. Nothing to support them in the light of factual truth. We still aren’t sure what it’s all about, though we know a great deal more than we did then.

  “The facts we did gather, you see, indicated that whatever we were receiving must be definite signals. Must originate within some sort of intelligence. Some intelligence, you see, that would know just when to send them. But there was the problem of distance. Just suppose for a moment that they were coming from the Great Nebula. It takes light almost a million years to reach us from the Nebula. While it is very possible that the speed of light can be far exceeded, there is little reason to believe, at present, that anything could be so much faster than light that signaling could be practical across such enormous space. Unless the matter of time were mixed up a little, and when you get into that you have a problem that takes more than just a master mind. There was just one thing that would seem a probable answer. That if the signals were being sent from many light-years distant, they were being routed through something else than all that space, through another continuum of space-time, through what you might, for want of a better term, call the fourth dimension.”

  “Doctor,” said Herb, “you got me all balled up.”

  Dr. Kingsley’s chuckle rumbled through the room.

  “It had us that way, too,” he said. “And then we figured that maybe we were getting pure thought. Thought telepathed across the light-years of unimaginable voids. Just what the speed of thought may be, no one knows. It may be instantaneous, or it may be no greater than the speed of light . . . or it may be many times the speed of light. But we do know one thing: that the signals we are receiving are the projection of thought. Whether they come straight through space, or whether they travel through some short cut, through some manipulation of space-time frames, I do not know. Probably I never will know.

  “It took us months to invent that machine you saw in the other room. Briefly, it picks up the signals, translates them from the pure energy of thought into actual thought, into thoughts that we can read. We also developed a means of sending our own thoughts back, of communicating with whatever it was that was trying to talk to Pluto. So far we haven’t been successful in getting an entire message across. However, apparently we have succeeded in advising whoever is sending out the messages that we are trying to answer, for recently the messages have changed, have a note of desperation, frantic commands, almost a pleading quality.”

  He brushed his coat sleeve across his brow.

  “It is all so confusing,” he confessed.

  “But,” asked Herb, “why would anyone send messages to Pluto? Until men came out here, there wasn’t anything here. Nothing with intelligence. Just a barren planet. Without any atmosphere. Too cold for anything to live. The tail end of creation.”

  Dr. Kingsley stared solemnly at Herb.

  “Young man,” he said, “we must never take anything for granted. How are we to say that there never was any intelligence on Pluto? How do we know that a great civilization might not have risen and flourished here aeons ago? How do we know that an expeditionary force from some far-distant star might not have come here and colonized this outer planet many years ago?”

  “It don’t sound reasonable,” said Herb.

  Dr. Kingsley gestured impatiently.

  “Neither do these signals sound reasonable,” he rumbled. “But there they are. I’ve thought about the things you mention. I am damned with an imagination, something no scientist should have. A scientist should just plug along, applying this bit of knowledge to that bit of knowledge to arrive at something new. He should leave the imagination to philosophers. But I’m not that way. I try to imagine what might have happened or what is going to happen. I’ve imagined a mother planet groping out across all space, trying to get in touch with some long-lost colony here on Pluto. I have imagined someone trying to reestablish communication with a people who lived here millions of years ago. But it doesn’t get me anywhere.”

  GARY FILLED and lit his pipe, frowned down at the glowing tobacco. Voices in space again. Voices talking across the void. Saying things to rack the human soul. “Doctor,” he said, “you aren’t the only one who has heard thought from outer space.”

  Dr. Kingsley swung on him, almost belligerently. “Who else?” he demanded.

  “Miss Martin,” said Gary quietly, puffing at his pipe. “You haven’t heard Miss Martin’s story yet. I have a hunch that she can help you out.”

  “How’s that?” rumbled the scientist.

  “Well, you see,” said Gary softly, “she’s just passed through a thousand years of mind training. She’s thought without ceasing for almost ten centuries.”

  Dr. Kingsley’s face drooped in amazement. “But that’s impossible,” he protested.

  Gary shook his head. “Not impossible, at all. Not with suspended animation.”

  Dr. Kingsley opened his mouth to object again, but Gary hurried on. “Doctor,” he asked, “do you remember the historical account of
the Caroline Martin who refused to give an invention to the military board during the Jovian war?”

  “Why, yes,” said Dr. Kingsley, “we scientists have speculated for many years on just what it was she found—”

  He started out of his chair.

  “Caroline Martin,” he shouted.

  He looked at the girl.

  “Your name is Caroline Martin, too,” he whispered huskily.

  Gary nodded. “Doctor,” he said, “this is the woman who refused to give up that secret a thousand years ago.”

  V.

  Dr. Kingsley glanced at his wrist watch.

  “It’s almost time for the signals to begin,” he said. “In another few minutes we will be swinging around to face the Great Nebula. If you looked out you’d see it just over the horizon now.”

  Caroline Martin sat in the chair before the thought machine, the domed helmet settled on her head. All eyes in the room were glued on the tiny light atop the mechanism. When the signals started coming in that light would blink its bright-red eye.

  “Lord, it’s uncanny,” whispered Tommy Evans. He brushed at his face with his hand.

  Gary watched the girl. Sitting there so straight, like a queen with a crown upon her head. Sitting there, waiting—waiting to hear something that spoke across the gulfs that took light many years to span.

  Brain sharpened by a thousand years of thought, a woman who was schooled in hard and simple logic. She had thought of things out in the shell, she said. Had set up problems and had worked them out. What were those things she had thought about? What new mysteries had she solved? She was a young, rather sweet-faced kid, who ought to like a good game of tennis, or a dance—and she’d thought a thousand years.

  Then the light began to blink and Gary saw Caroline lean forward, heard the breath catch in her throat. The pencil that she had poised above the pad dropped from her fingers and rolled onto the floor.

  A heavy silence engulfed the room, broken only by the whistling of the breath in Dr. Kingsley’s nostrils. He whispered to Gary: “She understands . . . she understands!”

  But Gary waved him into silence.

  The red light blinked out and Caroline swung slowly around in the chair. Her eyes were wide and for a moment she seemed unable to give voice to words.

  Then she spoke. “They think they are contacting someone else,” she said. “Some great civilization that must have lived here at one time. The message comes from far away. From even farther than the Great Nebula. The Great Nebula just happens to be in the same direction. They are puzzled that we do not answer. They know someone has been trying to answer. They’re trying to help us to get through. Scientific terms I could not understand. Something to do with warping of space and time, but involving principles that are entirely new. They are impatient. They want something. It seems there is great danger some place. They think that we can help.”

  “Great danger to whom?” asked Dr. Kingsley.

  “I couldn’t understand,” Caroline told him.

  “Can you talk back to them?” asked Gary. “Do you think you can make them understand?”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  “All you have to do is think,” rumbled Dr. Kingsley. “Think clearly. The helmet picks up the thoughts and sends them through the thought projector.”

  Her slim fingers reached out and turned a dial. Tubes came to life and burned into a blue intensity of light. A soaring hum of power filled the tiny room. She was turning the dial slowly, building up the power.

  Gary sucked in his breath and waited.

  The hum became a steady drone and the tubes were filled with a light that hurt one’s eyes.

  “She’s talking to them now,” thought Gary. “She’s talking to them.”

  THE MINUTES seemed eternities, and then the girl reached out and closed the dial. The hum of power receded, shut off and was replaced by a deathly silence.

  “Did they understand?” asked Dr. Kingsley, and even as he spoke the light blinked red again.

  Kingsley’s hand closed around Gary’s arm and his harsh whisper rasped in Gary’s ear. “Instantaneous!” he said. “Instantaneous signals! They got her message and they’re answering. That means the signals are routed through some extra-dimension.”

  Swiftly the red light blinked. Caroline crouched forward in the chair, her body tensed with what she heard.

  The light blinked off and the girl reached up and tore off the helmet.

  “It can’t be right,” she sobbed. “It can’t be right.”

  Gary sprang forward, put an arm around her shoulders.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Those messages,” she cried. “They come from the very edge of all the universe . . . from the farthest rim of exploding space!”

  Dr. Kingsley leaped to his feet.

  Tommy Evans and Herb Harper remained in their chairs, apparently incapable of movement.

  “They are like the voices I heard before,” she said. “But different, somehow. More kindly . . . but terrifying even so. These things are so far away. So very far away. Galaxies and galaxies away.”

  She drew a deep breath.

  “They are baffled,” she went on. “They do not seem to understand who we are. They think they are talking to someone else. To a people they talked to here on Pluto thousands of years ago . . . maybe millions of years ago.” Gary looked at Kingsley and the scientist stared back. Gary shook his head in bewilderment and Kingsley rumbled in his throat.

  “At first,” Caroline whispered, “they referred to us by some term that had affection in it . . . actual affection, as if there were blood ties between them and the things they were trying to talk to here. The things that must have disappeared centuries ago.”

  “Longer ago than that,” rumbled Kingsley. “That the thought bombardment is directed at this spot would indicate the beings they are trying to reach had established some sort of center, possibly a city, on this site. There are no indications of former occupancy. If anyone ever was here, every sign of them has been swept away. And here there is no wind, no weather, almost no change. A billion years ago—”

  “But who are they?” asked Gary. “These ones you were talking to. Did they tell you that?”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t exactly understand. As near as I could get it, they called themselves the Cosmic Engineers. That’s a very poor translation. Not sufficient at all. There is a lot more to it.”

  She paused as if to marshal a definition. “As if they were self-appointed guardians of the entire universe,” she explained. “Champions of all things that live within its space-time frame. And something is threatening the universe. Some mighty force out beyond the universe . . . out where there’s neither time nor space.

  “They want our help,” she said.

  “But how can we help them?” asked Herb.

  “I don’t know. They tried to tell me, but the thoughts they used were too abstract. I couldn’t understand entirely. A few clues here and there. They’ll have to reduce it to simpler terms.”

  “We couldn’t even get there to help them,” said Gary.

  “Maybe,” suggested Tommy Evans, “we don’t need to go there. Maybe we can do something here to help them.”

  The red light was winking again. Caroline saw it and reached for the helmet, put it on her head. The light clicked out and her hand went out and moved a dial. Again the tubes lighted, and the room trembled with the surge of power.

  Dr. Kingsley was mumbling. “The edge of space. But that’s impossible!”

  Gary laughed silently at him. “Getting jittery, doctor?”

  The power was building up. The room throbbed with it and the blue tubes threw dancing shadows on the wall.

  GARY FELT the cold wind from space flicking at his face again. Felt the short hairs rising at the base of his skull.

  Jittery? Who in hell wouldn’t get jittery at a thing like this? A message from the rim of space! From that remote area where Time and Space still surge
d outward into that no man’s land of nothingness—into that place where there was no Time or Space, where nothing had happened yet, where nothing had happened ever. He tried to imagine what would be there. Many years ago some old philosopher had said that the only two conceptions of which man was capable were time and space, and from these two conceptions he built the entire universe. If this were so, how could one imagine a place where neither time nor space existed? If space ended, what was the stuff beyond that wasn’t space?

  Caroline was closing the dial again. The blue lights dimmed, the hum of power ebbed off and stopped. And once again the red light atop the thought machine was blinking rapidly.

  He watched the girl closely. Saw her body tense and then relax. Saw her bend forward, intent upon the messages that were swirling through the helmet.

  Kingsley’s face was puckered with lines of wonderment. He still stood beside his chair, a great bear of a man, with his hamlike hands opening and closing, hanging loosely at his sides.

  Those messages were instantaneous. That meant one of two things; that thought itself was instantaneous or that the messages were routed through a space-time frame which shortened the distance, that, through some manipulation of the continuum, the edge of space might be only a few feet or a few miles distant. That, starting now, one might walk there in just a little while.

  Caroline was taking off her helmet, slowly pivoting around in her chair. They all looked at her questioningly, but not a word was spoken.

  “I understand a little better now,” she said. “They are friends of ours . . . those Engineers.”

  “Friends of ours?” asked Gary.

  “Friends of everything within the universe,” said Caroline. “Trying to protect the universe. Calling for volunteers to help them save it from some great danger . . . from that outside force.”

  She smiled at the circle of questioning faces.

  “They want us to come out to the edge of the universe,” she said, and there was a tiny quaver of excitement in her voice.

  Herb’s chair clattered to the floor as he leaped to his feet. “They want us—” he started to shout and then stopped and the room swam in heavy silence.