The Second Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  He followed her to the office. He was so physically worn out, he tripped on the office step as he went in.

  “Tell me the news on the signals,” he said. “Still coming in?”

  “Yes.” She looked at him again, worried. “Joe… Sit down. Here. What’s happened?”

  “Nothing except that I’m a genius at second hand. I didn’t intend it that way, and maybe it can be covered up, but I’ve turned out to be sane. So I think, maybe you’d better get another job. Since I’m sane I’ll surely go bankrupt and maybe I’ll end up in jail. But it’s going to be interesting.” His head drooped and he jerked it upright. “This is reaction,” he said distinctly. “I’m tired, I wanted badly to find out whether I was crazy or not. I found out I haven’t been. I’m not so sure I won’t be presently.” He made a stiff gesture and said, “Take the day off, Sandy. I’m going to rest awhile.”

  Then his head fell forward and he was asleep.

  Burke slept for a long time. And this time dreamlessly.

  The thing he made had worked for much less than the tenth of a second, but it came out of his dream, ultimately, and it was linked with whatever sent messages from Asteroid M-387. There was still nothing intelligible about the whole affair. It contained no single rational element. But if there was no rational explanation, there was what now seemed reasonable action that could be taken.

  So he slept, and as usual the world went on its way unheeding. The fluting sounds from the sky remained the top news story of the day. There was no doubt of their artificiality, nor that they came from a small, tumbling, jagged rock which was one of the least of the more than fifteen hundred asteroids of the solar system. It was two hundred and seventy million miles from Earth. The latest computations said that not less than twenty thousand kilowatts of power had been put into the transmitter to produce so strong and loud a signal on Earth. No power-source of that order had been carried out to make the signals. But they were there.

  Astronomers became suddenly important sources of news. They contradicted each other violently. Eminent scientists observed truthfully that Schull’s object, as such, could not sustain life. It could not have an atmosphere, and its gravitational field would not hold even a moderately active microbe on its surface. Therefore any life and any technology now on it must have come from somewhere else. The most eminent scientists said reluctantly that they could not deny the possibility that a spaceship from some other solar system had been wrecked on M-387, and was now sending hopeless pleas for help to the local planetary bodies.

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

  It was working astronomers, so to speak, who took action. They had been bouncing signals off of Earth’s moon, and various artificial satellites, and they’d flicked signals in the direction of Mars and Venus and believed that they got them back. The most probable returned radar signal from Mars had been received by a radar telescope in West Virginia. It had been turned temporarily into a transmitter and some four hundred kilowatts were poured into it to go out in a tight beam. The working astronomers took over that parabolic bowl again. They borrowed, begged, wheedled, and were suspected of stealing necessary equipment to put nearly eight hundred kilowatts into a microwave signal, this time beamed at Asteroid M-387. If intelligent beings received the signal, they might reply. If they did, the working astronomers would figure out what to do next.

  Burke slept in the office of Burke Development, Inc. His features were relaxed and peaceful. Sandy was completely helpless before his tranquil exhaustion. But presently she used the telephone and spoke in a whisper to her younger sister, Pam. In time, Pam came in a cab bringing blankets and a pillow. She and Sandy got Burke to a pallet on the floor with a pillow under his head and a thickness of blanket over him. He slept on, unshaven and oblivious.

  Pam said candidly, “If you can feel romantic about anything like that, Sandy, I’ll still love you, but I’ll join the men in thinking that women are mysterious!”

  She departed in the cab and Sandy took up a vigil over Burke’s slumbering form.

  Pravda announced in its evening edition of Monday that Soviet scientists would send out a giant space-probe, intended to orbit around Venus, to investigate the space-signal source. The probe would carry a man. It would blast off within six weeks, preceded by drone fuel-carriers which would be overtaken by the probe and furnish fuel to it. Pravda threw in a claim that Russians had been first to refuel an aeroplane in flight, and asserted that Soviet physical science would make a space-voyage of two hundred seventy million miles mere ducksoup for their astronaut.

  Editorially, American newspapers mentioned that the Russians had tried similar things before, and that at least three coffins now floated in orbit around Earth, not to mention the one on the moon. But if they tried it… The American newspapers waited for a reaction from Washington.

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

  Sandy watched over Burke. There was nothing to do in the office. She did not read. Near seven the telephone rang, and she frantically muffled its sound. It was Pam, asking what Sandy meant to do about dinner. Sandy explained in an almost inaudible voice. Pam said resignedly, “All right. I’ll come out and bring something. Lucky it’s a warm day. We can sit in your car and eat. If I had to watch Joe sleeping like that and needing a shave as he does, I’d lose my appetite.”

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

  “I know,” said Pam between sympathy and scorn, “I know you like the poor goof, Sandy, but there ought to be some limit to your amorous servitude! There are office hours! You’re supposed to knock off at five. It’s seven-thirty now. And what will being decent to that unshaven Adonis get you? He’ll take you for granted, and go off and marry a nitwit of a blonde who’ll hate you because you’d have been so much better for him. And she’ll get you fired and what then?”

  “Joe won’t marry anybody else,” said Sandy forlornly. “If he could fall for anybody, it’d be me. He told me so. He started to propose to me Friday night.”

  “So?” said Pam, with the superior air of a younger sister. “Did he say enough for you to sue him?”

  “He can’t fall in love with anybody,” said Sandy. “He wants to marry me, but he’s emotionally tangled up with a female he’s had dreams about since he was eleven.”

  “I thought I’d heard everything,” said Pam. “But that—”

  Sandy explained morosely. As she told it, it was not quite the same picture Burke had given her. Her account of the trees in Burke’s recurrent dream was accurate enough, and the two moons in the sky, and the fluting, arbitrary tones from behind him. Pam had heard their duplicates, along with all the broadcast listeners in the United States. But as Sandy told it, the running figure beyond the screen of foliage was not at all the shadowy movement Burke described. Sandy had her own ideas, and they colored her account.

  There was a stirring inside the small office building. Burke had waked. He turned over and blinked, astonished to find himself with blankets over him and a pillow under his head. It was dark
inside the office, too.

  “Joe,” called Pam in the darkness, “Sandy and I have been waiting for you to wake up. You took your time about it! We’ve got some coffee for you.”

  Burke got to his feet and stumbled to the light switch. “Fine!” he said ruefully. “Somebody got blankets for me, too! Nice business, this!”

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

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I worked pretty hard pretty long, and when the thing was finished I passed out. I feel better now. Did you actually say you had some coffee?”

  Sandy passed up a cardboard container.

  “Pam’s compliments,” she said. “We’ve been waiting until you slept off your working binge. We didn’t want to leave you. Booger-men sound likelier than they used to.”

  A voice from the radio broke in.

  “…o’clock news. A signal has been beamed toward the space-broadcast transmitter by the parabolic reflector of the Bradenville radar telescope, acting as a mirror to concentrate the message toward Asteroid M-387. So far there has been no reply. We are keeping a circuit open, and if or when an answer is received we will issue a special bulletin.… The San Francisco Giants announced today that in a three-way trade—”

  Burke had listened to nothing else while the news broadcast dealt with space signals, but other news did not mean very much to him just now. He sipped at the cardboard cup of coffee.

  “I think,” said Pam, “that since you’ve waked up I’ll take my big sister home. You’ll be all right now.”

  “Yes,” said Burke abstractedly. “I’ll be all right now.”

  “Really, Joe, you shouldn’t work day and night without a break!” Sandy said.

  “And you shouldn’t have bothered to stand watch over me,” he answered. “Well, I guess the shed should be clear of battery fumes by now. I’ll go over and see.”

  Burke came back in a few minutes.

  “This thing I made is pretty tough,” he observed. “It smashed into a brick wall, but it was the wall that suffered.” He fingered it thoughtfully. “I had that dream again just now,” he volunteered. “While I was asleep on the floor. Sandy, you know about such things better than I do. How much money have I in the bank? I’m going to build something and it’ll probably cost a lot.”

  Sandy’s hands had clenched when he mentioned the dream. So far, it had done more damage than any dream had a right to do. But it looked as if it were about to do more. She told him his balance in the bank. He nodded.

  “Maybe I can stretch it,” he observed. “I’m going to—”

  The music had stopped inside the office. The voice of an announcer interrupted.

  “Special Bulletin! Special Bulletin! Our signal to space have been answered! Special Bulletin! Here is a direct report from the Bradenton radar telescope which, within the hour, broadcast a message to space!”

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

  “A definite reply to the human signal to Asteroid M-387 has been received. It is cryptic, like the first message from space, but is unmistakably a response to the eight-hundred-kilowatt message beamed toward the source of those world-wide-received strange sounds.…”

  The tinny voice went on.

  CHAPTER 3

  In retrospect, events moved much faster than reason would suggest. The first signal from space had been received on a Friday. At that time—when the first flutings were picked up by a tape recorder on Kalua—the world had settled down to await the logical consequences of its history. It was not a comfortable settling-down, because the consequences were not likely to be pleasant. Earth was beginning to be crowded, and there were whole nations whose populations labored bitterly with no hope of more than subsistence during their lifetime, and left a legacy of equal labor and scarcer food for their descendants. There were hydrogen bombs and good intentions, and politics and a yearning for peace, and practically all individual men felt helpless before a seemingly merciless march of ominous events. At that time, too, nearly everybody worked for somebody else, and a large part of the employed population justified its existence by the length of time spent at its place of employment. Nobody worried about what he did there.

  In the richer nations, everybody wanted all the rewards earned for them by generations gone by, but nobody was concerned about leaving his children better off. An increasingly smaller number of people were willing to take responsibility for keeping things going. There’d been a time when half of Earth fought valiantly to make the world safe for democracy. Now, in the richer nations, most men seemed to believe that the world had been made safe for a four-card flush, which was the hand they’d been dealt and which nobody tried to better.

  Then the signals came from space. They called for a showdown, and very few people were prepared for it. Eminent men were called on to take command and arrange suitable measures. They immediately acted as eminent men so often do; they took action to retain their eminence. Their first instinct was caution. When a man is important enough, it does not matter if he never does anything. It is only required of him that he do nothing wrong. Eminent figures all over the world prepared to do nothing wrong. They were not so concerned to do anything right.

  Burke, however, was not important enough to mind making a mistake or two. And there were other non-famous people to whom the extra-terrestrial sounds suggested action instead of precautions. Mostly they were engineers with no reputations to lose. They’d scrabbled together makeshift equipment, ignored official channels, and in four days—Friday to Monday—they had eight hundred kilowatts ready to fling out toward emptiness, in response to the signal from M-387.

  The transmission they’d sent out was five minutes long. It began with a re-transmission of part of the message Earth had received. This plainly identified the signal from Earth as a response to the cryptic flutings. Then there were hummings. One dot, two dots, three, and so on. These hummings assured whoever or whatever was out yonder that the inhabitants of Earth could count. Then it was demonstrated that two dots plus two dots were known to equal four dots, and that four and four added up to eight. The inhabitants of Earth could add. There followed the doubtless interesting news that two and two and two and two was eight. Humanity could multiply.

  Arithmetic, in fact, filled up three minutes of the eight-hundred-kilowatt beam-signal. Then a hearty human voice—the president of a great university—said warmly:

  “Greetings from Earth! We hope for splendid things from this opening of communication with another race whose technical achievements fill us with admiration.”

  More flutings repeated that the Earth signal was intended for whoever or whatever used flutelike sounds for signaling purposes, and the message came to an end with an arch comment from the university president: “We hope you’ll answer!”

  When this elaborate hodge-podge had been flung out to immensity, the prominent persons who’d devised it shook hands with each other. They were confident that if intelligent beings did exist where the mournful musical notes came from, interplanetary or interstellar communication could be said to have begun. The engineers who’d sweated together the equipment simply hoped their signal would reach its target.

  It did. It went out just after the end of a reception of a five-minute broadcast from M-387. Seventy-nine minutes should have passed before any other sound from M-387. But an answer came much more quickly than that. In thirty-four minutes, five and three-tenth seconds, a new signal came from beyond the sky. It came in a rush. It came from the transmitter out in orbit far beyond Mars. It came with the same volume.

  It started with an entirely new grouping of the piping tones. There was a specific crispness in their transmission, as if a different individual handled the transmitter-keys. The flutings went on for three minutes, then
were replaced by entirely new sounds. These were sharp, distinct, crackling noises. A last sequence of the opening flutings, and the message ended abruptly. But silence did not follow. Instead, a steady, sonorous, rhythmic series of beeping noises began and kept on interminably. They were remarkably like the directional signals of an airway beacon. When the news broadcasts of the United States reported the matter, the beeping sounds were still coming in.

  And they continued to come in for seventy-nine minutes. Then they broke off and the new transmission was repeated. The original message was no longer sent. Robot transmitter or no robot transmitter, the first message had been transmitted at regular intervals for something like seventy-six hours and then, instantly on receipt of the beginning of an answer, a new broadcast took its place.

  The reaction had been immediate. The distance between M-387 and Earth could be computed exactly. The time needed for the Earth signal to arrive was known exactly. And the instant—the very instant—the first sound from Earth reached M-387, the second message had begun. There was no pause to receive all the Earth greeting, or even part of it. The reaction was immediate and automatic.

  Automatic. That was the significant thing. The new message was already prepared when the Earth signal arrived. It was set up to be transmitted on receipt of the earliest possible proof that it would be received. The effect of this rapid response was one of tremendous urgency—or absolute arrogance. The implication was that what Earth had to say was unimportant. The Earth signal had not been listened to. Instead, Earth was told something. Something crisp and arbitrary. Maybe there could be amiable chit-chat later on, but Earth must listen first! The beepings could not be anything but a guide, a directional indicator, to be followed to M-387. The message, now changed, might amount to an offer of friendship, but it also could be a command. If it were a command, the implications were horrifying.

  At the moment of first release, the news had only a limited effect. Most of Europe was asleep and much of Asia had not waked up yet. But the United States was up and stirring. The news went to every corner of the nation with the speed of light. Radio stations stopped all other transmissions to announce the frightening event. It is of record that four television stations on the North American continent actually broke into filmed commercials to announce that M-387 had made a response to the signal from Earth. Never before in history had a paid advertisement been thrust aside for news.