A pause. Then the car radio, with night sounds and the calls of nightbirds for background, gave out crisp, distinct fluting noises, like someone playing an arbitrary selection of musical notes on a strange wind instrument.
The effect was plaintive, but Burke stiffened in every muscle at the first of them. The fluting noises were higher and lower in turn. At intervals, they paused as if between groups of signals constituting a word. The enigmatic sounds went on for a full minute. Then they stopped. The voice returned:
“These are the signals from space. What you have heard is apparently a complete message. It is repeated five times and then ceases. An hour and nineteen minutes later it is again repeated five times…”
The voice continued, while Burke remained frozen and motionless in the parked car. Sandy watched him, at first hopefully, and then bewilderedly. The voice said that the signal strength was very great. But the power for artificial-satellite broadcasts is only a fraction of a watt. These signals, considering the minimum distance from which they could come, had at least thousands of kilowatts behind them.
Somewhere out in space, farther than man’s robot rockets had ever gone, huge amounts of electric energy were controlled to send these signals to Earth. Scientists were in disagreement about the possible distance the signals had traveled, whether they were meant solely for Earth or not, and whether they were an attempt to open communication with humanity. But nobody doubted that the signals were artificial. They had been sent by technical means. They could not conceivably be natural phenomena. Directional fixes said absolutely that they did not come from Mars or Jupiter or Saturn. Neptune and Uranus and Pluto were not nearly in the line of the signals’ travel. Of course Venus and Mercury were to sunward of Earth, which ruled them out, since the signals arrived only on the night side of mankind’s world. Nobody could guess, as yet, where they did originate.
Burke sat utterly still, every muscle tense. He was so pale that even in the moonlight Sandy saw it. She was alarmed.
“Joe! What’s the matter?”
“Did you—hear that?” he asked thinly. “The signals?”
“Of course. But what…”
“I recognized them,” said Burke, in a tone that was somehow despairing. “I’ve heard signals like that every so often since I was a kid.” He swallowed. “It was sounds like that, and what went with them, that has been the—trouble with me. I was going to tell you about it—and ask you if you’d marry me anyway.”
He began to tremble a little, which was not at all like the Joe Burke that Sandy knew.
“I don’t quite under—”
“I’m afraid I’ve gone out of my head,” he said unsteadily. “Look, Sandy! I was going to propose to you. Instead, I’m going to take you back to the office. I’m going to play you a recording I made a year ago. I think that when you’ve heard it you’ll decide you wouldn’t want to marry me anyhow.”
Sandy looked at him with astonished eyes.
“You mean those signals from somewhere mean something special to you?”
“Very special,” said Burke. “They raise the question of whether I’ve been crazy, and am suddenly sane, or whether I’ve been sane up to now, and have suddenly gone crazy.”
The radio switched back to dance music. Burke cut it off. He started the car’s motor. He backed, swung around, and headed for the office and construction shed of Burke Development, Inc.
Elsewhere, the profoundest minds of the planet gingerly examined the appalling fact that signals came to Earth from a place where men could not be. A message came from something which was not human. It was a suggestion to make cold chills run up and down any educated spine. But Burke drove tensely, and the road’s surface sped toward the car’s wheels and vanished under them. A warm breeze hummed and thuttered around the windshield. Sandy sat very still.
“The way I’m acting doesn’t make sense, does it?” Burke asked. “Do you feel like you’re riding with a lunatic?”
“No,” she said. “But I never thought that if you ever did get around to asking me to marry you, somebody from outer space would forbid the banns! Can’t you tell me what all this is about?”
“I doubt it very much,” he told her. “Can you tell me what the signals are about?”
She shook her head. He drove through the night. Presently he said, “Aside from my private angle on the matter, there are some queer things about this business. Why should somebody out in space send us a broadcast? It’s not from a planet, they say. If there’s a spaceship on the way here, why warn us? If they want to be friends, they can’t be sure we’ll permit it. If they intend to be enemies, why throw away the advantage of surprise? In either case, it would be foolish to send cryptic messages on ahead. And any message would have to be cryptic.”
The car went whirring along the roadway. Soon twinkling lights appeared among the trees. The small and larger buildings of Burke Development, Inc., came gradually into view. They were dark objects in a large empty space on the very edge of Burke’s home town.
“And why,” he went on, “why send a complex message if they only wanted to say that they were space travelers on the way to Earth?”
The exit from the highway to Burke Development appeared. Burke swung off the surfaced road and into the four-acre space his small and unusual business did not begin to fill up.
“If it were an offer of communication, it should be short and simple. Maybe an arithmetic sequence of dots, to say that they were intelligent beings and would like the sequence carried on if we had brains, too. Then we’d know somebody friendly was coming and wanted to exchange ideas before, if necessary, swapping bombs.”
The car’s headlights swept over the building in which the experimental work of Burke Development was done and on to the small house in which Sandy kept the books and records of the firm, Burke put on the brakes before the office door.
“Just to see if my head is working right,” he said, “I raise a question about those signals. One doesn’t send a long message to emptiness, repeated, in the hope that someone may be around to catch it. One calls, and sends a long message only when the call is answered. The call says who’s wanted and who’s calling, but nothing more. This isn’t that sort of thing.”
He got out of the car and opened the door on her side, then unlocked the office door and went in. He switched on the lights inside. For a moment, Sandy did not move. Then she slowly got out of the car and entered the once which was so completely familiar. Burke bent over the office safe, turning the tumbler-wheel to open it. He said over his shoulder, “That special bulletin will be repeated on all the news broadcasts. You’ve got a little radio here. Turn it on, will you?”
Again slowly, Sandy crossed the office and turned on the miniature radio on her desk. It warmed up and began to make noises. She dimmed it until it was barely audible. Burke stood up with a reel of brown tape. He put it on the office recorder, usually used for the dictation of the day’s lab log.
“I have a dream sometimes,” said Burke, “A recurrent dream. I’ve had it every so often since I was eleven. I’ve tried to believe it was simply a freak, but sometimes I’ve suspected I was a telepath, getting some garbled message from somewhere unguessable. That has to be wrong. And again I’ve suspected that—well—that I might not be completely human. That I was planted here on Earth, somehow, not knowing it, to be of use to—something not of Earth. And that’s crazy. So I’ve been pretty leery of being romantic about anybody. Tonight I’d managed to persuade myself all those wild imaginings were absurd. And then the signals came.” He paused and said unsteadily, “I made this tape a year ago. I was trying to convince myself that it was nonsense. Listen. Remember, I made this a year ago!”
The reels began to spin on the recorder’s face. Burke’s voice came out of the speaker, “These are the sounds of the dream,” it said, and stopped.
There was a moment of silence, while the twin reels spun silently. Then sounds came from the recorder. They were musical notes, reproduced from th
e tape. Sandy stared blankly. Disconnected, arbitrary flutelike sounds came out into the office of Burke Development, Inc. It was quite correct to call them elfin. They could be described as plaintive. They were not a melody, but a melody could have been made from them by rearrangement. They were very remarkably like the sounds from space. It was impossible to doubt that they were the same code, the same language, the same vocabulary of tones and durations.
Burke listened with a peculiarly tense expression on his face. When the recording ended, he looked at Sandy.
Sandy was disturbed. “They’re alike. But Joe, how did it happen?”
“I’ll tell you later,” he said grimly. “The important thing is, am I crazy or not?”
The desk radio muttered. It was an hourly news broadcast. Burke turned it up and a voice boomed:
“…one o’clock news. Messages have been received from space in the century’s most stupendous news event! Full details will follow a word from our sponsor.”
There followed an ardent description of the social advantage, personal satisfaction and business advancement that must instantly follow the use of a particular intestinal regulator. The commercial ended.
“From deepest space,” boomed the announcer’s voice, “comes a mystery! There is intelligent life in the void. It has communicated with us. Today—”
Because of the necessity to give the later details of a cafe-society divorce case, a torch murder and a graft scandal in a large city’s municipal budget, the signals from space could not be fully treated in the five-minute hourly news program. But fifteen seconds were spared for a sample of the cryptic sounds from emptiness. Burke listened to them with a grim expression.
“I think,” he said measuredly, “that I am sane. I have heard those noises before tonight. I know them—I’ll take you home, Sandy.”
He ushered her out of the office and into his car.
“It’s funny,” he said as he drove back toward the highway. “This is probably the beginning of the most important event in human history. We’ve received a message from an intelligent race that can apparently travel through space. There’s no way in the world to guess what it will bring about. It could be that we’re going to learn sciences to make old Earth a paradise. Or it could mean that we’ll be wiped out and a superior race will take over. Funny, isn’t it?”
Sandy said unsteadily, “No. Not funny.”
“I mean,” said Burke, “when something really significant happens, which probably will determine Earth’s whole future, all I worry about is myself—that I’m crazy, or a telepath, or something. But that’s convincingly human!”
“What do you think I worry about?” asked Sandy.
“Oh…” Burke hesitated, then said uncomfortably, “I was going to propose to you, and I didn’t.”
“That’s right,” said Sandy. “You didn’t.”
Burke drove for long minutes, frowning.
“And I won’t,” he said flatly, after a time, “until I know it’s all right to do so. I’ve no explanation for what’s kept me from proposing to you up to now, but apparently it’s not nonsense. I did anticipate the sounds that came in tonight from space and—I’ve always known those sounds didn’t belong on Earth.”
Then, driving doggedly through a warm and moonlit night, he told her exactly why the fluting sounds were familiar to him; how they’d affected his life up to now. He’d mentally rehearsed the story, anyhow, and it was reasonably well arranged. But told as fact, it was preposterous.
She listened in complete silence. He finished the tale with his car parked before the boardinghouse in which Sandy lived with her sister Pam, they being all that was left of a family. If she hadn’t known Burke all her life, of course, Sandy would have dismissed him and his story together. But she did know him. It did explain why he felt tongue-tied when he wished to be romantic, and even why he recorded a weird sequence of notes on a tape recorder. His actions were reasonable reactions to an unreasonable, repeated experience. His doubts and hesitations showed a sound mind trying to deal with the inexplicable. And now that the signals from space had come, it was understandable that he should react as if they were a personal matter for his attention.
She had a disheartening mental picture of a place where strange trees waved long and ribbonlike leaves under an improbable sky. Still…
“Y-yes,” she said slowly when he’d finished his uneasy account. “I don’t understand, but I can see how you feel. I—I guess I’d feel the same way if I were a man and what you’ve experienced happened to me.” She hesitated. “Maybe there will be an explanation now, since those signals have come. They do match the ones you recorded from your dream. They’re the ones you know about.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Burke miserably, “and I can’t dismiss it. I can’t do anything until I find out why I know that somewhere there’s a place with two moons and queer trees…”
He did not mention the part of his experience Sandy was most interested in—the person for whom he felt such anguished fear and such overwhelming joy when she was found. She didn’t mention it either.
“You go on home, Joe,” she said quietly. “Get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we’ll hear more about it and maybe it will all clear up. Anyhow—whatever turns out, I—I’m glad you did intend to ask me to marry you. I intended to say yes.”
CHAPTER 2
Burke was no less disturbed, but his disturbance was of a different kind. After he left Sandy at the house where she and her sister boarded, he headed back to the plant. He wanted to think things out.
The messages from space, of course, must presage events of overwhelming importance. The coming of intelligent aliens to Earth might be comparable to the coming of white men to the American continents. They might bring superior techniques, irresistible weapons, and an assumption of superiority that would bring inevitable conflict with the aborigines of Earth. Judging by the actions of the white race on Earth, if the newcomers were merely explorers it could mean the coming doom of humanity’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 to act like men. Some might hope that a superior race would have developed a kindliness and altruism that on Earth are rather rare. But there was no one at all who would not be apprehensive. Some would panic.
Burke’s reaction was strictly personal. Nobody else in the world would have felt the same appalled, stunned emotion he felt when he heard the sounds from space. Because to him they were familiar sounds.
He paced up and down in the big, partitionless building in which the actual work of Burke Development, Inc., was done. He’d done some reasonably good work in this place. The prototype of the hydroponic wall 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 now been shipped off complete. A little to one side was a prototype of a special machine which stamped out small parts for American Tool. That had been a tricky assignment! There were plastic and glass-wool and such oddments with which he’d done a process-design job for Holmes Yachts, and a box of small parts left over from the designing job that gave one aviation company the only practical small-plane retractable landing-gear.
These things had a queer meaning for him now. He’d devised the wanted products. He’d developed certain needed processes. But now he began to be deeply suspicious of his own successes. Each was a new reason for uneasiness.
He grimly questioned whether his highly peculiar obsession had not been planted in him against the time when fluting noises would come from that illimitable void beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
He examined, for the thousandth time, his special linkage with the space noises. In previous soul-searchings he’d pin-pointed the time when the whole business began. He’d been eleven years old. He could even work out something close to an exact date. He was living with his aunt and uncle, his own parents being dead. His uncle had m
ade a business trip to Europe, alone, and had brought back souvenirs which were fascinating to eleven-year-old Joe Burke. There was a flint knife, and a carved ivory object which his uncle assured him was mammoth ivory. It had a deer’s head incised into it. There were some fragments of pottery and a dull-surfaced black cube. They appealed to the small boy because his uncle said they’d belonged to men who lived when mammoths roamed the 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 French peasant who’d found a cave with pictures on its walls that dated back twenty thousand years. The French government had taken over the cave, but before reporting it the peasant had thriftily hidden away some small treasures to sell for himself. Burke’s uncle bought them and, in time, presented them to the local museum. All but the black cube, which Burke had dropped. It had shattered into a million tissue-thin, shiny plates, which his aunt insisted on sweeping out. He’d tried to keep one of the plates, but his aunt had found it under his pillow and disposed of it.
He remembered the matter solely because he’d examined his memories so often, trying to find something relevant to account for the beginning of his recurrent dream. Somewhere shortly after his uncle’s visit he had had a dream. Like all dreams, it was not complete. It made no sense. 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 moons in the sky. One was large and motionless. The other was small and moved swiftly across the heavens. From behind him came fluting signals like the messages that would later come from space. In the dream he was full-grown and he saw trees with extraordinary, ribbony leaves like no trees on Earth. They wavered and shivered in a gentle breeze, but he ignored them as he did the fluting sounds behind him.
He was searching desperately for someone. A child knows terror for himself, but not for anybody else. But Burke, then aged eleven, dreamed that he was in an agony of fear for someone else. To breathe was torment. He held a weapon ready in his hand. He was prepared to do battle with any imaginable creature for the person he needed to find. And suddenly he saw a figure running behind the waving foliage. The relief was almost greater pain than the terror had been. It was a kind and amount of emotion that an eleven-year-old boy simply could not know, but Burke experienced it. He gave a great shout, and bounded forward toward her—and the dream ended.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 73
