The Wailing Asteroid. Murray LeinsterЧитать онлайн книгу.
windows and come to the office.”
He did break windows, from the outside, so air could flow through the building and clear away the battery-acid steam. Sandy watched him anxiously.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll come quietly.”
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 airplane in flight, and asserted that Soviet physical science would make a space-voyage of two hundred seventy million miles mere duck-soup 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