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 pinpointed 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 made 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.

He dreamed it three nights running, then it stopped, for awhile.

Then, a week later, he had the dream again, repeated in every detail. He had it a dozen times before he was twelve, and as many more before he was thirteen. It recurred at random intervals all through his teens, while he was in college, and after. When he grew up he found out that recurrent dreams are by no means unusual. But this was very far from a usual dream.

From time to time, he observed new details in the dream. He knew that he was dreaming. His actions and his emotion did not vary, but he was able to survey them--like the way one can take note of items in a book one reads while quite absorbed in it. He came to notice the way the trees sent their roots out over the surface of the ground before dropping suckers down into it. He noticed a mass of masonry off to the left. He discovered that a hill in the distance was not a natural hill. He was able to remember markings on the large, stationary moon in the sky, and to realize that the smaller one was jagged and irregular in shape. The dream did not change, but his knowledge of the place of the dream increased.

As he grew older, he was startled to realize that though the trees, for example, were not real, they were consistent with reality. The weapon he held in his hand was especially disturbing. Its grip and barrel were transparent plastic, and in the barrel there was a sequence of peculiarly-shaped forms, in and about which wire had been wound. As a grown man he’d made such shapes in metal, once. He’d tried them out as magnets in a job for American Tool. But they weren’t magnets. They were something specific and alarming instead. He also came to know exactly what the mass of masonry was, and it was a sober engineering feat. No boy of eleven could have imagined it.

And always there were the flutelike musical sounds coming from behind him. When he was twenty-five he’d memorized them. He’d heard them--dreamed them--hundreds of times. He tried to duplicate them on a flute and devised a special mute to get exactly the tone quality he remembered so well. He made a recording to study, but the study was futile.

In a way, it was unwholesome to be so much obsessed by a dream. In a way, the dream was magnificently irrelevant to messages transmitted through millions of miles of emptiness. But the flutelike sounds linked it--now--to reality! He paced up and down in the empty, resonant building and muttered, “I ought to talk to the space-exploration people.”

Then he laughed. That was ironical. All the crackpots in the world would be besieging all the authorities who might be concerned with the sounds from space, impassionedly informing them what Julius Caesar, or Chief Sitting Bull, or some other departed shade, had told them about the matter via automatic writing or Ouija boards. Those who did not claim ghostly authority would explain that they had special talents, or a marvelous invention, or that they were members of the race which had sent the messages the satellite-tracking stations received.

No. It would serve no purpose to inform the Academy of Sciences that he’d been dreaming signals like the ones that now agitated humanity. It was too absurd. But it was unthinkable for a person of Burke’s temperament to do nothing. So he set to work in exactly the fashion of one of the crackpots he disliked.

Actually, the job should have been undertaken in ponderous secrecy by committees from various learned societies, official bureaus, and all the armed forces. There should have been squabbles about how the task was to be divided up, bitter arguments about how much money was to be spent by whom, violent disagreements about research-and-development contracts. It should have been treated as a program of research, in which everybody could claim credit for all achievements and nobody was to blame for blunders.

Burke could not command resources for so ambitious an undertaking. And he knew that as a private project it was preposterous. But he began the sort of preliminary labor that an engineer does before he really sets to work.

He jotted down some items that he didn’t have to worry about. The wall-garden he’d made for Interiors, Inc., would fit neatly into whatever final result he got--if he got a final result. He had a manufacturing process available for glass-wool and plastics. If he could get hold of an inertia-controlled computer he’d be all set, but he doubted that he could. The crucial item was a memo he’d made from a memory of the dream weapon. It concerned certain oddly-shaped bits of metal, with fine wires wound eccentrically about them, which flew explosively to pieces when a current went through them. That was something to worry about right away.

At three o’clock in the morning, then, Burke routed out the laboratory notes on the small-sized metal-stamping machine he had designed for American Tool. He’d tried to do the job with magnets, but they flew apart. He’d wound up with blank cartridges to provide the sudden, explosive stamping action required, but the notes on the quasi-magnets were complete.

He went through them carefully. An electromagnet does not really attain its full power immediately after the current is turned on. There is an inductive resistance, inherent in a wound magnet, which means that the magnetism builds up gradually. From his memory of the elements in a transparent-plastic hand-weapon barrel, Burke had concluded that it was possible to make a magnet without inductive resistance. He tried it. When the current went on it went to full strength immediately. In fact, it seemed to have a negative-induction effect. But the trouble was that it wasn’t a magnet. It was something else. It wound up as scrap.

Now, very reflectively, he plugged in a metal lathe and carefully turned out a very tiny specimen of the peculiarly-shaped magnetic core. He wound it by hand, very painstakingly. It was a tricky job. It was six o’clock Saturday morning when the specimen was finished. He connected the leads to a storage battery and threw the switch. The small object tore itself to bits, and the core landed fifteen feet from where it had been. Burke beamed.

He wasn’t tired, but he wanted to think things over so he drove to a nearby diner and got coffee and a roll and reflected with satisfaction upon his accomplishment. At the cost of several hours’ work he’d made a thing like a magnet, which wasn’t a magnet, and which destroyed itself when turned on. As he drank his coffee, a radio news period came on. He listened.

The signals still arrived from space, punctually, seventy-nine minutes apart. At this moment, 6:30 A.M., they were not heard on the Atlantic coast, but the Pacific coast still picked them up and they were heard in Hawaii and again on the South Pacific island of Kalua.

Burke drove back to the plant. He was methodical, now. He reactivated the prototype wall-garden which he’d neglected while building the larger one for Interiors, Inc. The experimental one had been made in four sections so he could try different pumping systems and nutrient solutions. Now he set the pumps to work. The plants looked ragged, but they’d perk up with proper lighting and circulation of the hydroponic liquid.

Then he went into the plant’s small office building and sat down with drawing instruments to modify the design of the magnetic core. At eleven he’d worked out a rough theory and refined the design, with curves and angles all complete. At four the next morning a second, modified magnet-core was formed and polished.

He’d heard the first newscast on Friday night. It was now early Sunday morning, and although he was tired, he was still not sleepy. He worked on doggedly, winding fine magnet wire on a noticeably complicated metal form. Just before sunrise he tested it.

When the current went on the wire windings seemed to swell. He’d held it in a small clamp while he tested it. The clamp overturned and broke the contact with the battery before the winding wire stretched to breaking-point. But it had not torn itself or anything else to bits.

He was suddenly enormously weary and bleary-eyed. To anyone else in the world, the consequence of this second attempt to make what he thought of as a negative-induction magnet would seem an absolute failure. But Burke now knew why the first had failed and what was wrong with the second. The third would work, just as the unfired hand-weapon of his dream would have worked. Now he could justify to himself the association of a recurrent dream with a message from outer space. The dream now had two points of contact with reality. One was the sounds from emptiness, which matched those in the dream. The other was the hand-weapon of the dream, whose essential working part now plainly did something unknown in a normal world.

But it would be impossible to pass on his information to anybody else. Too many crackpots have claimed too many triumphs. His actual, unpredictable technical achievement would have little chance of winning official acceptance. Especially since he would be considered a non-accredited source. Burke had a small business of his own. He had an engineering degree. But he had no background of learned futility to gain a hearing for what he now knew.

“Crackpots of the world, unite!” he muttered to himself.

He dragged himself out-of-doors to a cool, invigorating morning and drove somnolently to the diner he’d patronized before. The coffee he ordered was atrocious, but it waked him. He heard two truck drivers at the counter.

“It’s baloney!” said one of them scornfully. “There ain’t no people out there! We’d’a heard from them before if there was. Them scientists are crazy!”

“Nuts!” said the other earnestly. “One of their idle thoughts would crack your brain wide open, mac! They know what’s up, and they’re scared! If you wanna know, I’m scared too!”

“Of what?”

“Hell! Did you ever drive at night, and have all the stars come in pairs like snake-eyes--like little mean eyes, lookin’ down at you an’ despisin’ you? You’ve seen that, ain’t you? Whoever’s signalin’ could be lookin’ down at us just like the stars do.”

The first man grunted.

“I don’t like it!” said the second man, fretfully. “If it was a man headin’ out to go huntin’ among the stars for somethin’ he wanted, that’s all right. That’s like a man goin’ huntin’ in the woods with a gun. But I don’t like somebody comin’ our way from somewhere else. Maybe he’s huntin’ us!”

The two drivers paid for their coffee and went out. And Burke reflected wryly that the second man had, after all, expressed a universal truth. We humans do not like to be hunted. The passion with which a man-killing wild beast is pursued comes from human vanity. We do not like the idea that any other creature can be better than we are. It is highly probable that if we ever have to face a superior race, we will die of it.

So Burke went back to the plant and began to make yet another of the peculiarly wound magnets-which-were-not-magnets. This was to have three of the odd-shaped cores, formed in line, of a single piece of Swedish iron. As the windings were put on they’d be imbedded in plastic. Over that would go a casing to keep them from expanding or stretching. It ought to be distinctively different from a magnet.

It was an extremely long and utterly tedious job. He knew what he was doing, but he had doubts about the why. As he worked, though, he wrestled out a detailed theory. Discoverers often work like that. It was said that Columbus didn’t know where he was going when he started out, didn’t know where he was when he got there, and didn’t know where he’d been when he got back. The history of the discovery of the triode tube has points of similarity. Burke had begun with a device which destroyed itself when turned on, developed the idea into a device which swelled to uselessness when energized, and now hoped that it would turn out at the third try to be something the textbooks said was impossible.

Outside the construction shed, the world went about its business. While Burke worked on through the Sunday noon hour, a Japanese radar telescope aimed at the night sky and made six successive position-findings on the source of the space signals. When sunset found him laboring doggedly at a metal lathe, Croydon made eight. American radar telescopes had made others. Carefully computed, the observations added up to the discovery of an independent motion of the signal source. It moved against the stars as if it were a solar-system body with an orbit in the asteroid belt some three hundred sixty million miles from the sun--as compared to Earth’s ninety-two million.