The Wailing Asteroid, by Murray LeinsterThe Naked Word electronic edition of.... 

THE WAILING ASTEROID 
Copyright, (C), 1960, by Murray Leinster. 

Chapter 1 
THE SIGNALS from space began a little after midnight, local time, an a Friday. 
They were first picked up in the South Pacific, just westward of the 
International Date Line. A satellite-watching station on an island named Kalua 
was the first to receive them, though nobody heard the first four or five 
minutes. But it is certain that the very first message was picked up and 
recorded by the monitor instruments. 
The satellite-tracking unit on Kalua was practically a duplicate of all its 
fellows. There was the station itself with a vertical antenna outside pointing 
at the stars. There were various lateral antennae held two feet aboveground by 
concrete posts. In the instrument room in the building a light burned over a 
desk, three or four monitor lights glowed dimly to indicate that the 
self-recording instruments were properly operating, and there was a 
multiple-channel tape recorder built into the wall. Its twin tape reels turned 
sedately, winding a brown plastic ribbon from one to the other at a moderate 
pace. 
The staff man on duty had gone to the installation's kitchen for a cup of 
coffee. No sound originated in the room, unless one counted the fluttering of a 
piece of weighted-down paper on the desk. Outside, palm trees whispered and 
rustled their long fronds in the southeast trade wind under a sky full of 
glittering stars. Beyond, there was the dull booming of surf upon the barrier 
reef of the island. But the instruments made no sound. Only the tape reels 
moved. 
The signals began abruptly. They came out of a speaker and were instantly 
recorded. They were elfin and brutelike and musical. They were crisp and 
distinct. They did not form a melody, but nearly all the components of melody 
were there. Pure musical notes, each with its own pitch, all of different 
lengths, like quarter-notes and eighth-notes in music. The sounds needed only 
rhythm and arrangement to form a plaintive tune. 
Nothing happened. The sounds continued for something over a minute. They stopped 
long enough to seem to have ended. Then they began again. 
When the staff man came back into the room with a coffee cup in his hand, he 
heard the flutings instantly. His jaw dropped. He said, "What the hell?" and 
went to look at the instruments. He spilled some of his coffee when he saw their 
readings. 
The tracking dials said that the signals came from a stationary source almost 
directly overhead. If they were from a stationary source, no plane was 
transmitting them. Nor could they be coming from an artificial satellite. A 
plane would move at a moderate pace across the sky. A satellite would move 
faster. Much faster. This source, according to the instruments, did not move at 
all. 
The staff man listened with a blank expression on his face. There was but one 
rational explanation, which he did not credit for an instant. The reasonable 
answer would have been that somebody, somewhere, had put a satellite out into an 
orbit requiring twenty-four hours for a circuit of the earth, instead of the 
ninety to one-hundred-twenty-four-minute orbits of the satellites known to sweep 
around the world from west to east and pole to pole. But the piping, musical 
sounds were not the sort of thing that modern physicists would have contrived to 
carry information about cosmic-particle frequency, space temperature, 
micrometeorites, and the like. 
The signals stopped again, and again resumed. The staff man was galvanized into 
activity. He rushed to waken other members of the outpost. When he got back, the 
signals continued for a minute and stopped altogether. But they were recorded on 
tape, with the instrument readings that had been made during their duration. The 
staff man played the tape back for his companions. 
They felt as he did. These were signals from space where man had never been. 
They had listened to the first message ever to reach mankind from the 
illimitable emptiness between the stars and planets. Man was not alone. Man was 
no longer isolated. Man... 
The staff of the tracking station was very much upset. Most of the men were 
white-faced by the time the taped message had been re-played through to its end. 
They were frightened. 
Considering everything, they had every reason to be. 
The second pick-up was in Darjeeling, in northern India. The Indian government 
was then passing through one of its periods of enthusiastic interest in science. 
It had set up a satellite-observation post in a former British cavalry stable on 
the outskirts of the town. The acting head of the observing staff happened to 
hear the second broadcast to reach Earth. It arrived some seventy-nine minutes 
after the first reception, and it was picked up by two stations, Kalua and 
Darjeeling. 
The Darjeeling observer was incredulous at what he heard--five repetitions of 
the same sequence of flute-like notes. After each pause--when it seemed that the 
signals had stopped before they actually did so--the reception was exactly the 
same as the one before. It was inconceivable that such a succession of sounds, 
lasting a full minute, could be exactly repeated by any natural chain of events. 
Five repetitions were out of the question. The notes were signals. They were a 
communication which was repeated to be sure it was received. 
The third broadcast was heard in Lebanon in addition to Kalua and Darjeeling. 
Reception in all three places was simultaneous. A signal from a nearby satellite 
could not possibly have been picked up so far around the Earth's curvature. The 
widening of the area of reception, too, proved that there was no new satellite 
aloft with an orbit period of exactly twenty-four hours, so that it hung 
motionless in the sky relative to Earth. Tracking observations, in fact, showed 
the source of the signals to move westward, as time passed, with the apparent 
motion of a star. No satellite of Earth could possibly exist with such an orbit 
unless it was close enough to show a detectable parallax. This did not. 
A French station picked up the next batch of plaintive sounds. Kalua, 
Darjeeling, and Lebanon still received. By the time the next signal was due, 
Croydon, in England, had its giant radar-telescope trained on the part of the 
sky from which all the tracking stations agreed the signals came. 
Croydon painstakingly made observations during four seventy-nine-minute 
intervals and four five-minute receptions of the fluting noises. It reported 
that there was a source of artificial signals at an extremely great distance, 
position right ascension so-and-so, declination such-and-such. The signals began 
every seventy-nine minutes. They could be heard by any receiving instrument 
capable of handling the microwave frequency involved. The broadcast was 
extremely broadband. It covered more than two octaves and sharp tuning was not 
necessary. A man-made signal would have been confined to as narrow a wave-band 
as possible, to save power for one reason, so it could not be imagined that the 
signal was anything but artificial. Yet no Earth science could have sent a 
transmitter out so far. 
When sunrise arrived at the tracking station on Kalua, it ceased to receive from 
space. On the other hand, tracking stations in the United States, the Antilles, 
and South America began to pick up the cryptic sounds. 
The first released news of the happening was broadcast in the United States. In 
the South Pacific and India and the Near East and Europe, the whole matter 
seemed too improbable for the notification of the public. News pressure in the 
United States, though, is very great. Here the news rated broadcast, and got it. 

That was why Joe Burke did not happen to complete the business for which he'd 
taken Sandy Lund to a suitable, romantic spot. She was his secretary and the 
only permanent employee in the highly individual business he'd begun and 
operated. He'd known her all his life, and it seemed to him that for most of it 
he'd wanted to marry her. But something had happened to him when he was quite a 
small boy--and still happened at intervals--which interposed a mental block. 
He'd always wanted to be romantic with her, but there was a matter of two moons 
in a strange-starred sky, and trees with foliage like none on Earth, and an 
overwhelming emotion. There was no rational explanation for it. There could be 
none. Often he'd told himself that Sandy was real and utterly desirable, and 
this lunatic repetitive experience was at worst insanity and at the least 
delusion. But he'd never been able to do more than stammer when talk between 
them went away from matter-of-fact things. 
Tonight, though, he'd parked his car where a river sparkled in the moonlight. 
There was a scent of pine and arbutus in the air and a faint thread of romantic 
music came from his car's radio. He'd brought Sandy here to propose to her. He 
was doggedly resolved to break the chains a psychological oddity had tied him up 
in. 
He cleared his throat. He'd taken Sandy out to dinner, ostensibly to celebrate 
the completion of a development job for Interiors, Inc. Burke had started Burke 
Development, Inc., some four years out of college when he found he didn't like 
working for other people and could work for himself. Its function was to develop 
designs and processes for companies too small to have research-and-development 
divisions of their own. The latest, now-finished, job was a wall-garden which 
those expensive interior decorators, Interiors, Inc., believed might appeal to 
the very rich. Burke had made it. It was a hydroponic job. A rich man's house 
could have one or more walls which looked like a grassy sward stood on edge, 
with occasional small flowers or even fruits growing from its close-clipped 
surface. Interiors, Inc., would push the idea of a bomb shelter or in an atomic 
submarine where it would cation.{sic} 
It was done. A production-job room-wall had been shipped and the check for it 
banked. Burke had toyed with the idea that growing vegetation like that might be 
useful in a bomb shelter or in an atomic submarine where it would keep the air 
fresh indefinitely. But such ideas were for the future. They had nothing to do 
with now. Now Burke was going to triumph over an obsessive dream. 
"I've got something to say, Sandy," said Burke painfully. 
She did not turn her head. There was moonlight, rippling water, and the tranquil 
noises of the night in springtime. A perfect setting for what Burke had in mind, 
and what Sandy knew about in advance. She waited, her eyes turned away from him 
so he wouldn't see that they were shining a little. 
"I'm something of an idiot," said Burke, clumsily. "It's only fair to tell you 
about it. I'm subject to a psychological gimmick that a girl I--Hm." He coughed. 
"I think I ought to tell you about it." 
"Why?" asked Sandy, still not looking in his direction. 
"Because I want to be fair," said Burke. "I'm a sort of crackpot. You've noticed 
it, of course." 
Sandy considered. 
"No-o-o-o," she said measuredly, "I think you're pretty normal, except--No. I 
think you're all right." 
"Unfortunately," he told her, "I'm not. Ever since I was a kid I've been 
bothered by a delusion, if that's what it is. It doesn't make sense. It 
couldn't. But it made me take up engineering, I think, and..." 
His voice trailed away. 
"And what?" 
"Made an idiot out of me," said Burke. "I was always pretty crazy about you, and 
it seems to me that I took you to a lot of dances and such in high school, but I 
couldn't act romantic. I wanted to, but I couldn't. There was this crazy 
delusion..." 
"I wondered, a little," said Sandy, smiling. 
"I wanted to be romantic about you," he told her urgently, "But this damned 
obsession kept me from it." 
"Are you offering to be a brother to me now?" asked Sandy. 
"No!" said Burke explosively. "I'm fed up with myself. I want to be different. 
Very different. With you!" 
Sandy smiled again. 
"Strangely enough, you interest me," she told him. "Do go on!" 
But he was abruptly tongue-tied. He looked at her, struggling to speak. She 
waited. 
"I w-want to ask you to m-m-marry me," said Burke desperately. "But I have to 
tell you about the other thing first. Maybe you won't want..." 
Her eyes were definitely shining now. There was soft music and rippling water 
and soft wind in the trees. It was definitely the time and place for romance. 
But the music on the car radio cut off abruptly. A harsh voice interrupted: 
"Special Bulletin! Special Bulletin! Messages of unknown origin are reaching 
Earth from outer space! Special Bulletin! Messages from outer space!" 
Burke reached over and turned up the sound. Perhaps he was the only man in the 
world who would have spoiled such a moment to listen to a news broadcast, and 
even he wouldn't have done it for a broadcast on any other subject. He turned 
the sound high. 
"This is a special broadcast from the Academy of Sciences in Washington, D. C." 
boomed the speaker. "Some thirteen hours ago a satellite-tracking station in the 
South Pacific reported picking up signals of unknown origin and great strength, 
using the microwave frequencies also used by artificial satellites now in orbit 
around Earth. The report was verified shortly afterward from India, then Near 
East tracking stations made the same report. European listening posts and radar 
telescopes were on the alert when the sky area from which the signals come rose 
above the horizon. American stations have again verified the report within the 
last few minutes. Artificial signals, plainly not made by men, are now reaching 
Earth every seventy-nine minutes from remotest space. There is as yet no hint of 
what the messages may mean, but that they are an attempt at communication is 
certain. The signals have been recorded on tape, and the sounds which follow are 
those which have been sent to Earth by alien, non-human, intelligent beings no 
one knows how far away." 
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 the 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 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 a while. 
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 emotions 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 an 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, 
At midnight on Sunday, while Burke painstakingly made micrometric examination of 
the triple magnet-core, Harvard Observatory reported that there should be a very 
minor asteroid at the spot in space from which the signals came. 
The coincidental asteroid was known as Schull's object. It was listed as M-387 
in the catalogs. It had been discovered in 1913, was a very minor celestial 
body, had an estimated greatest diameter of less than two miles, and its 
brightness had been noticed to vary, suggesting that it was of irregular shape. 
It was too insignificant to have been kept under constant observation, but the 
signals from space appeared definitely to originate from its position. 
An hour after midnight, Eastern Standard time, Palomar detected the 
infinitesimal speck of light which was Schull's object at exactly the place the 
radar telescopes insisted was the signal source. Satellite-watching stations now 
monitored the cryptic signals around the clock, and radar telescopes began to 
sweep space for possible answers to the space broadcast. There was an 
uncomfortable possibility that the transmitter might not be signaling Earth, 
after all, but a fellow mystery of space--an associate or a sister-ship. 
More data turned up. M.I.T. made examination of the signals themselves. Timed, 
the intervals between notes varied as if keyed by something alive. But 
successive broadcasts were identical to microseconds. The conclusion was that 
the original broadcast had been set up by hand, as it were, but that all were 
now transmitted mechanically--automatically--by a robot transmitter. 
It was Monday morning when Burke completed the last turn of the last winding of 
his three-element pseudo-magnet. There are many things which become something 
else when they change in degree. Electromagnetic radiation may be long radio 
waves or radiant heat or yellow light or ultraviolet or X-rays, or who knows 
what, according to its frequency. It is different things with different 
properties at different wavelengths. Burke believed that his cores and windings 
were something other than magnets because the "flux" they produced was of a 
different intensity. He did not believe it to be magnetism. 
At nine o'clock Monday morning, he was clumsy from pure weariness when he began 
to fit the outer case on the thing he'd worked so long to complete. The 
hand-weapon in his dream undoubtedly flung bullets through a rifled bore 
penetrating the very center of the multiple core. The design of the hand-weapon 
ruled out any possibility of a considerable recoil. It wasn't built to allow the 
hand to take a recoil. So there must be no recoil. On that basis, Burke had made 
what finally amounted to a thick rod some six inches long and two in diameter. 
With the casing in place, it was absolutely solid. There was no play for the 
windings to expand into. He blinked at it. Common sense said he ought to put it 
aside and test it when his mind was not nearly numb from fatigue. 
Then Sandy came into the constructions shed, looking for him. She'd arrived for 
work and seen his car outside the shed. Her expression indicated several things: 
a certain uneasiness, and some embarrassment, and more than a little 
indignation. When she saw him unshaven and wobbly with weariness, she protested. 

"Joe! You've been working since Heaven knows when!" 
"Since I left you," he admitted. "I got interested." 
"You look dreadful!" 
"Maybe I'll look worse after I try out this thing I've made, I'm not sure." 
"When did you eat last?" she demanded. "And when did you sleep?" 
He shrugged tiredly, regarding the thing in his hands. He'd had enough 
experience contriving new things to know that no theory is right until something 
that depends on it has been made and works. He tended to be pessimistic. But 
this time he thought he had it. 
"Is this working night and day a part of your reaction to those signals?" asked 
Sandy unhappily. "If it is--" 
"Let's try it," Burke interrupted. "It's something I worked out from the dream. 
Now I'll find out whether I'm crazy or not--maybe." He drew a deep breath. He 
had a sodden, deep and corrosive doubt of things which didn't make sense, like 
space signals and magnets which weren't magnets because they were capable of 
negative self-induction. "If this shows no sign of working, Sandy..." 
"What?" 
He didn't answer. He went heavily over to the table where he had storage-battery 
current available. He plucked a momentary-contact switch out of a drawer and 
connected it to the wires from the small thing he'd made. Then he hooked on the 
storage battery. 
"Stand back, Sandy," he said tiredly. "We'll see what happens." 
He flipped the momentary-contact switch. There was a crash and a roar. The 
six-inch thing leaped. It grazed Burke's head and drew blood. It flashed across 
the room, a full thirty feet, and then smashed a water-cooler and imbedded 
itself in the brick wall beyond. A tool cabinet tottered and crashed to the 
floor. The storage battery spouted steam, swelled. Burke grabbed Sandy and 
plunged outside with her as the building filled with vaporized battery acid. 
Outside, he put her down and rubbed his nose with his finger. 
"That was a surprise," he said with some animation. "Are you all right?" 
"You--could have been killed!" she said in a whisper. 
"I wasn't," said Burke. "If you're not hurt there's no harm done. It looks like 
the thing worked! Lucky that was only a millisecond contact! Negative 
self-induction... I'll break some 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 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. 
In the United States, then, there was agitation, apprehension, indignation, and 
panic. Perhaps the only place where anything like calmness remained was inside 
and outside the office of Burke Development, Inc., where Burke felt a singular 
relief at this evidence that he wasn't as much of a fool as he feared. 
"Well," he thought. "It looks like there is something or somebody out there. If 
I'd been sure about it earlier--but it probably wasn't time." 
"What does this mean?" asked Sandy. "This horrible spell of around-the-clock 
working! Are you still trying to do something about the space signals?" 
"Listen, Sandy," said Burke. "I've been ashamed of that crazy dream of mine all 
my life. I've thought it was proof there was something wrong with me. I'll still 
have to keep it secret, or nice men in white coats will come and get me. But I'm 
going to do what all enterprising young men are advised to do--dream greatly and 
then try to realize my dream. It's quite impossible and it'll bankrupt me, but I 
think I'm going to have fun." 
He grinned at the two sisters as he led them firmly to Sandy's car. 
"Shoot" he said pleasantly. "You'd better go home now. I'll be leaving in 
minutes, heading for Schenectady first. I need some electric stuff. Then I'll go 
elsewhere. There'll be some shipments arriving, Sandy. Take care of them for me, 
will you?" 
He closed the car door and waved, still grinning. Pam fumed and started the 
motor. Moments later their car trundled down the highway toward town. Sandy 
clenched her fists. 
"What can you do with a man like that?" she demanded. "Why do I bother with 
him?" 
"Shall I answer," asked Pam, "or shall I be discreetly sympathetic? I wouldn't 
want him! But unfortunately, if you do--" 
"I know," said Sandy forlornly. "I know, dammit!" 
Burke was not thinking of either of them then. He opened the office safe, put 
the six-inch object inside, and took out his checkbook. Then he locked up, got 
into his car, and headed away from the plant and the town he'd been brought up 
in. He was unshaven and uncombed and this was an inappropriate time to start out 
on a drive of some hundreds of miles, but it was a pleasing sensation to know 
that a job had turned up that nobody else would even know how to start to work 
on. He drove very cheerfully to a cross-country expressway and turned onto it. 
He settled down at once to drive and to think. 
He drove practically all night. Shortly after sunrise he stopped to buy a razor 
and brush and comb and to make himself presentable. He was the first customer on 
hand when a Schenectady firm specializing in electronic apparatus for seagoing 
ships opened up for business. He ordered certain equipment from a list he'd 
written on an envelope while eating breakfast. 
The morning papers, naturally, were full of the story of the answer to the Earth 
signal sent out to M-387. The morning comedians made jokes about it, and in 
every one of the business offices Burke visited there was some mention of it. He 
listened, but had nothing to say. The oddity of his purchases caused no remark. 
His was a small firm, but a man working in research and development needs 
strange stuff sometimes. He ordered two radar units to be modified in a 
particular fashion, air-circulation pumps of highly specialized design to be 
changed in this respect and that. He had trouble finding the electric generators 
he wanted and had to pay heavily for alterations in them, and even more heavily 
for a promise of delivery in days instead of weeks. He bought a self-contained 
diving suit. 
He was busy for three days, buying things by day, designing by night and finding 
out new things to order. On the second day, United States counter-intelligence 
reported that the Russians were trying to signal M-387 on their own. An American 
satellite picked up the broadcast. The Russians denied it, and continued to try. 
Burke made arrangements for the delivery of aluminum-alloy bars, rods, girders, 
and plates; for plaster of Paris in ton lots; for closed-circuit television 
equipment. Once he called Sandy to give her an order to be filled locally. It 
was lumber, mostly slender strips of lathing, to be on hand when he returned. 
"All kinds of material is turning up," said Sandy. "There've been six deliveries 
this morning. I'm signing receipts for it because I don't know what else to do. 
But won't you please give me copies of the orders you've placed so I can check 
what arrives?" 
"I'll put 'em in the mail--airmail," promised Burke. "But only six deliveries? 
There ought to be dozens! Get after these people on long distance, will you?" 
And he gave her a list of names. 
Burke said suddenly, "I had that dream again last night. Twice in a week. That's 
unusual." 
"No comment," Sandy said. 
She hung up, and Burke was taken aback. But there was hardly any comment she 
could make. Burke himself had no illusion that he would ever come to a place 
where there were two moons in the sky and trees with ribbon-like leaves. And if 
he did--unthinkable as that might be--he could not imagine finding the person 
for whom he felt such agonized anxiety. The dream, recurrent, fantastic, or 
whatnot, simply could not represent a reality of the past, present, or future. 
Such things don't happen. But Burke continued to be moved much more by the 
emotional urge of the repeated experience than by intellectual curiosity about 
his having dreamed repeatedly of signals exactly like those from space, long 
before such signals ever were. 
He made ready to try to do something about those signals. And, all reason to the 
contrary notwithstanding, to him they meant a world with two moons and strange 
vegetation and such emotion as nothing on Earth had ever quite stirred 
up--though he felt pretty deeply about Sandy, at that. So he went intently from 
one supplier of exotic equipment to another, spending what money he had for an 
impossibility. Impossible because Asteroid M-387 was not over two miles through 
at its largest dimension, and therefore could not possibly have an atmosphere 
and certainly not trees, and it could not own even a single moon! 
He spent one day at a small yachting port with a man for whom he'd worked out a 
special process of Fiberglas yacht construction, Through that process, Holmes 
yachts could be owned by people who weren't millionaires, Holmes was a large, 
languid, sunburned individual who built yachts because he liked them. He had 
much respect for Burke, even after Burke asked his help and explained what for. 
But that was the day the Russians launched an unmanned space-probe headed toward 
M-387. That development may have influenced Holmes to do as Burke asked. 
Later on, it transpired that the probe originally had been designed and built as 
a cargo-carrier to take heavy loads to Earth's moon. The Russian space service 
had planned to present the rest of Earth with a fait accompli even more 
startling than the first Sputnik. They had intended to send a fleet of drone 
cargo-rockets to the moon and then assemble them into a colony. Broadcasts would 
triumphantly explain that the Soviet social system was responsible for another 
technical achievement. But to get a man out to M-387 was now so much mare 
important a propaganda device that the cargo-carriers were converted into 
fuel-tankers and the first sent aloft. 
At ten thousand miles up, when the third booster-stage should have given it a 
decisive thrust, one of the probe's rocket engines misfired. The space-probe 
tilted, veered wildly from its course, and went on accelerating splendidly 
toward nowhere. And still the steady, urgent beeping sounds continued to come to 
Earth, with every seventy-nine minutes a broadcast containing one section of 
crackling sounds and a tone of extremest urgency. 
The day after the probe's ineffectual departure, Burke got back to his plant. He 
brought Holmes with him. Together, they looked over the accumulated material for 
Burke's enterprise and began to sort out the truckloads of plaster of Paris, 
masses of punched-sheet aluminum, girders, rods, beams of shining metal, cased 
dynamos, crated pumps, tanks, and elaborately padded objects whose purpose was 
not immediately clear. Sandy was overwhelmed by the job of inventorying, 
indexing, and otherwise making the material available for use as desired. There 
were bales of fluffy white cloth and drums and drums of liquids which insisted 
on leaking, and smelled very badly when they did. But Burke found some items not 
yet on hand, and fretted, so Sandy brought her sister Pam into the office to add 
to the office force. 
Sandy and Pam worked quite as hard in the office as Burke and Holmes in the 
construction shed. They telephoned protests at delays, verified shipments, 
scolded shipping-clerks, argued with transportation-system expediters, wrote 
letters, answered letters, compared invoices with orders, sternly battled with 
negligence and delays of all kinds, and in between kept the books of Burke 
Development, Inc., up to date so that at any instant Burke could find out how 
much money he'd spent and how little remained. The two girls in the office were 
necessary to the operations which at first centered in the construction shed, 
but shortly began to show up outside. 
Four workmen arrived from the Holmes' Yacht shipyard. They looked at blueprints 
and drawings made by Holmes and Burke together, regarded with pained expressions 
the material they were to use, and set to work. This was on the day the second 
Russian space-probe lifted from somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains at 1:10 
A.M., local time. 
The second probe did not veer off its proper line. Its four boosters fired at 
appropriate intervals and it went streaking off toward emptiness almost straight 
away from the sun. It left behind it a thin whining transmission which was not 
at all like the beepings of the asteroid transmitter. 
In two days a framework of struts and laths took form outside the construction 
shed. It looked more like a mock-up of a radio telescope than anything else, but 
it was smaller and had a different shape. It was an improbable-looking bowl. 
Under Holmes' supervision, dozens of sacks of plaster of Paris found their way 
into it, coating it roughly on the outside and very smoothly within. It was then 
lined tenderly with carefully cut sections of fluffy cloth, with bars and beams 
and girders placed between the layers. Then reeking drums of liquid were moved 
to the working-site and their contents saturated the glass-wool. 
The smell was awful, so the workmen knocked off for a day until it diminished. 
But Sandy and Pam continued to expostulate with shippers by long-distance, type 
letters threatening lawsuits if orders were not filled immediately, and once 
found that items Burke indignantly demanded had come in and Holmes had carted 
them off and used them without notifying anybody. That was the day Pam 
threatened to resign. 
"It looks like a pudding," grumbled Pam, after Sandy had mollified her and Burke 
had apologized for having made her fight needlessly with two transport-lines, a 
shipping department, and a vice-president in charge of sales. "And they act like 
it was a baby!" 
"It'll be a ship," said Sandy. "You know what kind." 
"I'll believe it when I see it," said Pam. Then she demanded indignantly, "Has 
Joe looked at you twice since this nonsense started?" 
"No," admitted Sandy. "He works all the time. At night he has a receiver tuned 
to the beepings to make sure he knows if the broadcast changes again. The 
Russians are still trying to make a two-way contact. But the broadcast just 
keeps on, ignoring everybody." Then she said, "Anyhow, Joe's going to feel awful 
if it doesn't work. I've got to be around to pick up the pieces of his vanity 
and put them together again." 
"Huh!" said Pam. "Catch me doing that!" 
At just that moment Holmes came into the office with a finger dripping blood. He 
had been supervising and, at the same time, assisting in the building of an 
additional section of laths and struts and he was annoyed with himself for the 
small injury which interfered with his work. 
Pam did the bandaging. She cooed over him distressedly, and had him grinning 
before the dressing was finished. He went back to work very much pleased with 
himself. 
"I," said Sandy, "wouldn't act like you just did!" 
"Sister, darling," said Pam, "I won't cramp your act. Don't you criticize mine! 
That large wounded character is as attractive as anything I've seen in months." 
"But I feel," said Sandy, "as if I hadn't seen Joe in years!" 
Their viewpoint was strictly feminine and geared to female ideas and 
aspirations. But, in fact, they were probably as satisfied as two girls could 
be. They were on the side lines of interesting happenings which were being 
prepared by interesting men. They were useful enough to the enterprise to belong 
to it without doing anything outstanding enough to amount to rivalry with the 
men. From a girl's standpoint, it wasn't at all bad. 
But neither Burke nor Holmes even faintly guessed at the appraisal of their work 
by Sandy and Pam. To Holmes, the task was fascinating because it was a ship he 
was building. It was not a beautiful object, to be sure. If the lath-and-plaster 
mould were removed, the thing inside it would look rather like an obese small 
whale. There were recesses in its rotund sides in which distinctly eccentric 
apparatus appeared. Its interior was even more curious. And still it was a ship. 
Holmes found deep satisfaction in fitting its interior parts into place. It was 
like, but not the same as, equipping a small vessel with fathometers, radars, 
direction-finders, air-conditioners, stoves, galleys, heads and refrigerators 
without getting it crowded. 
To be sure, no seagoing ship would have sections of hydroponic wall-garden 
installed, nor would an auxiliary schooner normally have six pairs of 
closed-circuit television cameras placed outside for a view in each and every 
direction. This ship had such apparatus. But to Holmes the building of what 
Burke had designed was an extremely attractive task. 
Burke had less fun. He'd set up a huge metal lathe in the construction shed, and 
he labored at carving out of a specially built-up Swedish-iron shaft a series of 
twenty-odd magnet-cores like the triple unit he considered successful. Each of 
the peculiar shapes had to be carved out of the shaft, and all had to remain 
part of the shaft when completed. Then each had to be wound with magnet-wire, 
coated with plastic as it was wound. Then a bronze tube had to be formed over 
all, with no play of any sort anywhere. The task required the workmanship of a 
jeweller and the patience of Job. And Burke had had enough experience with new 
constructions to be acutely doubtful that this would be right when it was done. 
The Russians sent up a third space-probe, aimed at Asteroid M-387. It functioned 
perfectly. Three days later, a fourth. Three days later still, a fifth. Their 
aim with the fifth was not too good. 
The beeping sounds continued to come in from space. The second message remained 
the same but the crackling sounds changed. There was a systematic and consistent 
variation in what they apparently had to say. M.I.T. discovered the 
modification. When its report reached the newspapers, Sandy invaded the 
construction shed to show Burke the news account. Oil-smeared and harassed, he 
stopped work to read it. 
"Hell!" he said querulously. "I should've had somebody watching for this! I 
figured the second broadcast was telling us something that would change as time 
went on. They're telemetering something to us. I'd guess there's an emergency or 
an ultimatum in the works, and this is telling how fast it's coming to a crisis. 
But I'm already working as fast as I can!" 
"Some cases marked `Instruments' came this morning," Sandy told him. "They're 
the solidest shipping cases I ever saw. And the bills for them!" 
"Wire Keller," said Burke. "Tell him they're here and to come along." 
"Who's Keller?" asked Sandy. "And what's his address?" 
Burke blew up unreasonably, and Sandy said "I quit!" In seconds, he had 
apologized and assured Sandy that she was quite right and that he was an idiot. 
Of course she couldn't know who Keller was. Keller was the man who would install 
the instruments in the ship outside. Burke gave her his address. Sandy was not 
appeased. 
Burke ran a grimy hand despairingly through his hair. 
"Sandy," he protested, "bear with me just a little while! In just a few more 
days this thing will be finished, and I'll know whether I'm the prize imbecile 
of history or whether I've actually managed to do something worth while! Bear 
with me like you would with a half-wit or a delinquent child or something. 
Please, Sandy--" 
She turned her back on him and walked out of the shed. But she didn't quit. 
Burke turned back to his work. 
The Russians sent up another probe. It went off course. There were now six 
unmanned Russian probes in emptiness, of which four were lined up reasonably 
well along the route which a manned probe, if one were sent up, should 
ultimately travel. The advance probes formed an ingenious approach to the 
problem of getting a man farther out in space than any man had been before, but 
it was horribly risky. But apparently the Russians could afford to take such 
risks. The Americans couldn't. They had a settled policy of spending a dollar 
instead of a man. It was humanitarian, but it had one drawback. There was a 
tendency to keep on spending dollars and not ever let a man take a chance. 
The Russians had four fuel-carrying drones in line out in space. If a ship could 
grapple them in turn and refuel, it might make the journey to M-387 in eight or 
ten weeks instead of as many months. But it was not easy to imagine such a 
success. And as for getting back... 
The beeping sounds continued to be received by Earth. 
A short man with thin hair arrived at Burke Development, Inc. His name was 
Keller, and his expression was pleasant enough, but he was so sparing of words 
as to seem almost speechless. Sandy watched as he unpacked the instruments in 
the massive shipping cases. The instruments themselves were meaningless to her. 
They had dials, and some had gongs, and one or two had unintelligible things 
printed on paper strips. At least one in the last category was a computer. 
Keller unpacked them reverently and made sure that not a speck of dust 
contaminated any one. When he carried them out to the hull, still concealed by 
the lath-and-plaster exterior mould, he walked with the solemn care of a man 
bearing treasure. 
That day Sandy saw him talking to Burke. Burke spoke, and Keller smiled and 
nodded. Only once did he open his mouth to say something. Then he could not have 
said more than four words, He went happily back to his instruments. 
The next day, Burke made what was intended to be a low-power test of the long 
iron bar he'd machined so painstakingly and wound so carefully before enclosing 
it in the bronze outer case. He'd worked on it for more than two weeks. 
He prepared the test very carefully. The six-inch test model had lain on a 
workbench and had been energized through a momentary-contact switch. The 
full-scale specimen was clamped in a great metal lathe, which in turn was 
shackled with half-inch steel cable to the foundations of the construction shed. 
If the pseudo-magnet flew anywhere this time it would have to break through a 
tremendous restraining force. The switch was discarded. A condenser would 
discharge through the windings via a rectifier. There would be a single damped 
surge of current of infinitesimal duration. 
Holmes passed on the news. He got along very well with Pam these days. At first 
he'd been completely careless of his appearance. Then Pam took measures to 
distract him from total absorption in the construction job, and he responded. 
Nowadays, he tended to work in coveralls and change into more formal attire 
before approaching the office. Sandy came upon him polishing his shoes, once, 
and she told Pam. Pam beamed. 
Now he came lounging into the office and said amiably, "The moment of truth has 
arrived, or will in minutes." 
Sandy looked anxious. Pam said, "Is that an invitation to look on at the kill?" 
"Burke's going to turn juice into the thing he's been winding by hand and 
jittering over. He's worried. He can think of seven thousand reasons why it 
shouldn't work. But if it doesn't, he'll be a pretty sick man." He glanced at 
Sandy. "I think he could do with somebody to hold his hand at the critical 
moment." 
"We'll go," said Sandy. 
Pam got up from her desk. 
"She won't hold his hand," she explained to Holmes, "but she'll be there in case 
there are some pieces to be picked up. Of him." 
They went across the open space to the construction shed. It was a perfectly 
commonplace morning. The very temporary mass of lumber and laths and plaster, 
forming a mould for something unseen inside, was the only unusual thing in 
sight. There were deep truck tracks by the shed. One of the workmen came out of 
the airlock door on the bottom of the mould and lighted a cigarette. 
"No smoking inside," said Holmes. "We're cementing things in place with 
plastic." 
Sandy did not hear. She was first to enter the shed. Burke was moving around the 
object he'd worked so long to make. It now appeared to be simply a piece of 
bronze pipe some fifteen feet long and eight inches in diameter, with closed 
ends. It lay in the bed of an oversized metal lathe, which was anchored in place 
by cables. Burke took a painstaking reading of the resistance of a pair of red 
wires, then of white ones, and then of black rubber ones, which stuck out of one 
end of the pipe. 
"The audience is here," said Holmes. 
Burke nodded. He said almost apologetically, "I'm putting in a minimum of power. 
Maybe nothing will happen, It's pretty silly." 
Sandy's hands twisted one within the other when he turned his back to her. He 
made connections, took a deep breath, and said in a strained voice, "Here goes." 

He flipped a switch. 
There was a cracking sound. It was horribly loud. There was a crash. Bricks 
began to fall. The end of the metal-lathe bounced out of a corner. Steel cables 
gave off high-pitched musical notes which went down in tone as the stress on 
them slackened. One end of the lathe was gone--snapped off, broken, flung away 
into a corner. There was a hole in the brick wall, over a foot in diameter. 
The fifteen-foot object was gone. But they heard a high-pitched shrilling noise, 
which faded away into the distance. 
That afternoon the Russians announced that their manned space-probe had taken 
off for Asteroid M-387. Naturally, they delayed the announcement until they were 
satisfied that the launching had gone well. When they made their announcement, 
the probe was fifty thousand miles out, they had received a message from its 
pilot, and they predicted that the probe would land on M-387 in a matter of 
seven weeks. 
In a remote small corner of the afternoon newspapers there was an item saying 
that a meteorite had fallen in a ploughed field some thirty miles from where 
Burke's contrivance broke loose. It made a crater twenty feet across. It could 
not be examined because it was covered with frost. 
Burke had the devil of a time recovering it. But he needed it badly. Especially 
since the Russian probe had gone out from Earth. He explained that it was a 
shipment to his plant, which had fallen out of an aeroplane, but the owner of 
the ploughed field was dubious. Burke had to pay him a thousand dollars to get 
him to believe. 
That night he had his recurrent dream again. The fluting signals were very 
clear. 
Chapter 4 
THE PUBLIC ABRUPTLY ceased to be interested in news of the signals. Rather, it 
suddenly wanted to stop thinking about them. The public was scared. Throughout 
all human history, the most horrifying of all ideas has been the idea of 
something which was as intelligent as a man, but wasn't human. Evil spirits, 
ghosts, devils, werewolves, ghouls--all have roused maddened terror wherever 
they were believed in. Because they were intelligent but not men. 
Now, suddenly, the world seemed to realize that there was a Something out on a 
tiny frozen rock in space. It signaled plaintively to Earth. It had to be 
intelligent to be able to send a signal for two hundred seventy million miles. 
But it was not a man. Therefore it was a monster. Therefore it was horrible. 
Therefore it was deadly and intolerable and scarey, and humans abruptly demanded 
not to hear any more about it. Perhaps they thought that if they didn't think 
about it, it would go away. 
Newspaper circulations dropped. News-magazine sales practically vanished. A 
flood of hysterical letters demanded that the broadcasting networks leave such 
revolting things off the air. And this reaction was not only in America. Violent 
anti-American feeling arose in Europe, which psychologists analyzed as 
resentment caused by the fact that the Americans had answered the first 
broadcast. If they hadn't answered the first, there wouldn't have been a second. 
But also, even more violent anti-Russian feeling rose up, because the Russians 
had started a man off to meddle with the monster who piped so pleadingly. This 
antipathy to space caused a minor political upset in the Kremlin itself, where a 
man with a name ending in ov was degraded to much lower official rank and 
somebody with a name ending in sky took his place. This partly calmed the 
Russian public but had little effect anywhere else. The world was frightened. It 
looked for a victim, or victims for its fear. Once upon a time, witches were 
burned to ease the terrors of ignorance, and plague-spreaders were executed in 
times of pestilence to assure everybody that now the plague would cease since 
somebody had been killed for spreading it. 
Organizations came into being with the official and impassioned purpose of 
seeing that space research ceased immediately. Even more violent organizations 
demanded the punishment of everybody who had ever considered space travel a 
desirable thing. Congress cut some hundreds of millions from a 
guided-missile-space-exploration appropriation as a starter. A poor devil of a 
crackpot in Santa Monica, California, revealed what he said was a spaceship he'd 
built in his back yard to answer the signals from M-387. He intended to charge a 
quarter admission to inspect it, using the money to complete the drive 
apparatus. The thing was built of plywood and could not conceivably lift off the 
ground, but a mob wrecked his house, burned the puerile "spaceship" and would 
have lynched its builder if they'd thought to look in a cellar vegetable closet. 
Other crackpots who were more sensitive to public feelings announced the picking 
up of messages addressed to the distant Something. The messages, said this 
second class of crackpot, were reports from spies who had been landed on Earth 
from flying saucers during the past few decades. They did not explain how they 
were able to translate them. A rush of flying-saucer sightings followed 
inevitably--alleged to be landing-parties from M-387--and in Peoria, Illinois, a 
picnicking party sighted an unidentified flying object shaped like a soup spoon, 
the handle obviously being its tail. Experienced newspapermen anticipated 
reports of the sighting of unidentified flying objects shaped like knives and 
forks as soon as somebody happened to think of it. 
Sandy called a conference on the subject of security. She did not look well, 
nowadays. She worried. Other people thought about the messages from space, but 
Sandy had to think of something more concrete. Six months earlier, the 
construction going on within a plaster of Paris mould would have been laughed 
at, tolerantly, and some hopeful people might have been respectful about it, But 
now it was something utterly intolerable to public opinion. Newspapers who'd 
lost circulation by talking sanely about space travel now got it back by 
denouncing the people who'd answered the first broadcast. And naturally, with 
the whole idea of outer space agitatedly disapproved, everybody connected with 
it was suspected of subversion. 
"A reporter called up today," said Sandy. "He said he'd like to do a feature 
story on Burke Development's new research triumph--the new guided missile that 
flew thirty miles and froze everything around where it landed. I said it fell 
out of an aeroplane and the last completed project was for Interiors, inc. Then 
he said that he'd been talking to one of Mr. Holmes' men and the man said 
something terrific was under way." 
Burke looked uneasy. Holmes said uncomfortably, "There's no law against what 
we're building, but somebody may introduce a bill in Congress any day." 
"That would be reasonable under other circumstances. There's a time for things 
to be discovered. They shouldn't be accomplished too soon. But the time for the 
ship out there is right now!" Burke said. 
Pam raised her eyebrows. "Yes?" 
"Those signals have to be checked up on," explained Burke. "It's necessary now. 
But it could have been bad if our particular enterprise had started, say, two 
years ago. Just think what would have happened if atomic fission had been worked 
out in peacetime ten years before World War Two! Scientific discoveries were 
published then as a matter of course. Everybody'd have known how to make atom 
bombs. Hitler would have had them, and so would Mussolini. How many of us would 
be alive?" 
Sandy interrupted, "The reporter wants to do a feature story on what Burke 
Development is making. I said you were working on a bomb shelter for quantity 
production. He asked if the rocket you shot off through the construction-shed 
wall was part of it. I said there'd been no rocket fired. He didn't believe me." 

"Who would?" asked Holmes. 
"Hmmmmm," said Burke. "Tell him to come look at what we're doing. The ship can 
pass for a bomb shelter. The wall-garden units make sense. I'm going to dig a 
big hole in the morning to test the drive-shaft in. It'll look like I intend to 
bury everything. A bomb shelter should be buried." 
"You mean you'll let him inside?" demanded Sandy. 
"Sure!" said Burke. "All inventors are expected to be idiots. A lot of them are. 
He'll think I'm making an impossibly expensive bomb shelter, much too costly for 
a private family to buy. It will be typical of the inventive mind as reporters 
think of it. Anyhow, everybody's always willing to believe other people fools. 
That'll do the trick!" 
Pam said blandly, "Sandy and I live in a boardinghouse, Joe. You don't ask about 
such things, but an awfully nice man moved in a couple of days ago--right after 
that shaft got away and went flying thirty miles all by itself. The nice man has 
been trying to get acquainted." 
Holmes growled, and looked both startled and angry when he realized it. 
Pam added cheerfully, "Most evenings I've been busy, but I think I'll let him 
take me to the movies. Just so I can make us all out to be idiots," she added. 
"I'll make the hole big enough to be convincing," said Burke. "Sandy, you make 
inquiries for a rigger to lift and move the bomb shelter into its hole when it's 
ready. If we seem about to bury it, nobody should suspect us of ambitions they 
won't like." 
"Why the hole, really?" asked Sandy. 
"To put the shaft in," said Burke. "I've got to get it under control or it won't 
be anything more than a bomb shelter." 
Keller, the instrument man, had listened with cheerful interest and without 
speaking a word. Now he made an indefinite noise and looked inquiringly at 
Burke. Burke said, explanatorily, "The shaft seems to be either on or 
off--either a magnet that doesn't quite magnetize, or something that's hell on 
wheels. It flew thirty miles without enough power supplied to it to make it 
quiver. That power came from somewhere. I think there's a clue in the fact that 
it froze everything around where it landed, in spite of traveling fast enough to 
heat up from air-friction alone. I've got some ideas about it." 
Keller nodded. Then he said urgently, "Broadcast?" 
Burke frowned, and turned to Sandy. "That part of the broadcast from space that 
changes--is it still changing?" 
"Still changing," said Sandy. 
"I didn't think to ask you to keep a check on that. Thanks for thinking of it, 
Sandy. Maybe someday I can make up to you for what you've been going through." 
"I doubt it very much," said Sandy grimly. "I'll call the reporter back." 
She waited for them to leave. When they'd gone, she moved purposefully toward 
the telephone. 
Pam said, "Did you hear that growl when I said I'd go to the movies with 
somebody else? I'm having fun, Sandy!" 
"I'm not," said Sandy. 
"You're too efficient," the younger sister said candidly. "You're indispensable. 
Burke couldn't begin to be able to put this thing through without you. And 
that's the trouble. You should be irresistible instead of essential." 
"Not with Joe," said Sandy bitterly. 
She picked up the telephone to call the newspaper. Pam looked very, very 
reflective. 
There was a large deep pit close by the plaster mould when the reporter came 
next afternoon. A local rigger had come a little earlier and was still there, 
estimating the cost for lifting up the contents of the mould and lowering it 
precisely in place to be buried as a bomb shelter under test should be. It was a 
fortunate coincidence, because the reporter brought two other men who he said 
were civilian defense officials. They had come to comment on the quality of the 
bomb shelter under development. It was not too convincing a statement. 
When they left, Burke was not happy. They knew too much about the materials and 
equipment he'd ordered. One man had let slip the fact that he knew about the 
very expensive computer Burke had bought. It could have no conceivable use in a 
bomb shelter. Both men painstakingly left it to Burke to mention the thirty-mile 
flight of a bronze object which arrived coated with frost of such utter 
frigidity that it appeared to be liquid-air snow instead of water-ice. Burke did 
not mention it. He was excessively uneasy when the reporter's car took them 
away. 
He went into the office. Pam was in the midst of a fit of the giggles. 
"One of them," she explained, "is the nice man who moved into the boardinghouse. 
He wants to take me to the movies. Did you notice that they came when it ought 
to be my lunchtime? He asked when I went to lunch..." 
Holmes came in. He scowled. 
"One of my men says that one of those characters has been buying him drinks and 
asking questions about what we're doing." 
Burke scowled too. 
"We can let your men go home in three days more." 
"I'm going to start loading up," Holmes announced abruptly. "You don't know how 
to stow stuff. You're not a yachtsman." 
"I haven't got the shaft under control yet," said Burke. 
"You'll get it," grunted Holmes. 
He went out. Pam giggled again. 
"He doesn't want me to go to the movies with the nice man from Security," she 
told Burke. "But I think I'd better. I'll let him ply me with popcorn and 
innocently let slip that Sandy and I know you've been warned that bomb shelters 
won't find a mass market unless they sell for less than the price of an extra 
bathroom. But if you want to go broke we don't care." 
"Give me three days more," said Burke harassedly. 
"Well try," said Sandy suddenly. "Pam can fix up a double date with one of her 
friend's friends and well both work on them." 
Burke frowned absorbedly and went out. Sandy looked indignant. He hadn't 
protested. 
Burke got Holmes' four workmen out of the ship and had them help him roll the 
bronze shaft to the pit and let it down onto a cradle of timbers. Now if it 
moved it would have to penetrate solid earth. 
The most trivial of computations showed that when the bronze shaft had flown 
thirty miles, it hadn't done it on the energy of a condenser shorted through its 
coils. The energy had come from somewhere else. Burke had an idea where it was. 
Presently he verified it. The cores and windings he'd adapted from a transparent 
hand-weapon seen in an often-repeated dream--those cores and windings did not 
make electromagnets. They made something for which there was not yet a name. 
When current flows through a standard electromagnet, the poles of its atoms are 
more or less aligned. They tend to point in a single direction. But in this 
arrangement of wires and iron no magnetism resulted, yet, the random motion of 
the atoms in their framework of crystal structure was coordinated. In any object 
above absolute zero all the atoms and their constituent electrons and nuclei 
move constantly in all directions. In such a core as Burke had formed and 
repeated along the shaft's length, they all tried to move in one direction at 
the same time. Simultaneously, a terrific surge of current appeared in the 
coils. A high-speed poleward velocity developed in all the substance of the 
shaft. It was the heat-energy contained in the metal, all turned instantly into 
kinetic energy. And when its heat-energy was transformed to something else, the 
shaft got cold. 
Once this fact was understood, control was easy. A single variable inductance in 
series with the windings handled everything. In a certain sense, the gadget was 
a magnet with negative--minus--self-inductance. When a plus inductance in series 
made the self-inductance zero, neither plus nor minus, the immensely powerful 
device became docile. A small current produced a mild thrust, affecting only 
part of the random heat-motion of atoms and molecules. A stronger current 
produced a greater one. The resemblance to an electromagnet remained. But the 
total inductance must stay close to zero or utterly violent and explosive 
forward thrust would develop, and it was calculable only in thousands of 
gravities. 
Burke had worked for three weeks to make the thing, but he developed a control 
system for it in something under four hours. 
That same night they got the bronze shaft into the ship. It fitted perfectly 
into the place left for it. Burke knew now exactly what he was doing. He set up 
his controls. He was able to produce so minute a thrust that the 
lath-and-plaster mould merely creaked and swayed. But he knew that he could make 
the whole mass surge unstoppably from its place. 
Holmes sent his workmen home. Sandy and Pam went to the movies with two very 
nice men who pumped them deftly of all sorts of erroneous information about 
Burke and Holmes and Keller and what they were about. The nice men did not 
believe that information, but they did believe that Sandy and Pam believed it. 
For themselves, the combination of an object made by Burke which flew thirty 
miles plus the presence of Holmes, who built plastic yachts, and the arrival of 
Keller to adjust instruments of which they had a complete list--these things 
could not be overlooked. But they did feel sorry for two nice and not 
over-bright girls who might be involved in very serious trouble. 
Holmes and Burke installed directional controls, wiring, recording instruments, 
etc. Stores and water and oxygen, for emergency use only, went into the 
lath-and-plaster construction. Holmes took a hammer and chisel and painstakingly 
cracked the mould so that the top half could be lifted off, leaving the bottom 
half exposed to the open air and sky. 
Then the broadcast from space cut off. It had been coming continuously for 
something like five weeks; one sharp, monotonous note every two seconds, with a 
longer, fluting broadcast every seventy-nine minutes. Now a third, new message 
began. It was yet another grouping of the musical tones, with a much longer 
interval of specific crackling sounds. 
Keller had adjusted every instrument and zestfully re-tested them over and over. 
Burke asked him to see if the third space message compared in any way with the 
second. Keller put them through a hook-up of instruments, beaming to himself, 
and the answer began to appear. 
Newspapers burst into new headlines. "Ultimatum from Space" they thundered. 
"Threats from Alien Space Travelers." And as they presented the situation it 
seemed believable that the third message from the void was a threat. 
The first had been a call, requiring an answer. When the answer went out from 
Earth, a second message replaced the call. It contained not only flute tones 
which might be considered to represent words, but cracklings which might be the 
equivalent of numbers. The continuous beepings between repetitions of the second 
message were plainly a directional signal to be followed to the message source. 
In this context, the newspapers furiously asserted that the third message was a 
threat. The first had been merely a summons, the second had been a command to 
repair to the signaling entities, and the third was a stern reiteration of the 
command, reinforced by threats. 
The human race does not take kindly to threats, especially when it feels 
helpless. In the United States, there was such explosive resentment as to 
require spread-eagle oratory by all public figures. The President declared that 
every space missile in store had been fitted with atomic-fusion warheads and 
that any alien spacecraft which appeared in American skies would be shot down 
immediately. Congress reported out of committee a bill for rocket weapons which 
was stalled for six days because every senator and representative wanted to make 
a speech in its favor. It was the largest appropriation bill ever passed by 
Congress, which less than five weeks before had cut two hundred millions out of 
a guided-missile-space-exploration budget. 
And in Europe there was frenzy. 
For Burke and Holmes and Sandy and Pam and the smiling, inarticulate Keller, the 
matter was deadly serious. Fury such as the public felt constituted a witch-hunt 
in itself. Suspicious private persons overwhelmed the FBI and the Space Agency 
with information about characters they were sure were giving military secrets to 
the space travelers on M-387. There were reports of aliens skulking about 
American cities wearing luxuriant whiskers and dark glasses to conceal their 
non-human features. Artists, hermits, and mere amateur beard-growers found it 
wise to shave, and spirit mediums, fortunetellers and, in the South, herb 
doctors reaped harvests by the sale of ominous predictions and infallible advice 
on how to escape annihilation from space. 
And Burke Development, Inc., was building something that neither Civilian 
Defense nor the FBI believed was a bomb shelter. 
The three days Burke had needed passed. A fourth. He and Holmes practically 
abandoned sleep to get everything finished inside the plaster mould. Keller 
happily completed his graphs and took them to Burke. They showed that the 
cracklings, which presumably meant numbers, had been expanded. What they said 
was now told on a new scale. If the numbers had meant months or years, they now 
meant days and hours. If they had meant millions of miles, they now meant 
thousands or hundreds. 
Burke was struggling with these implications when there was a tapping at the 
air-lock, through which all entry and egress from the ship took place. Holmes 
opened the inner door. Sandy and Pam crawled through the lock which lay on its 
side instead of upright. Sandy looked at Burke. 
Pam said amiably, "We figured the job was about finished and we wanted to see 
it. How do you fasten this door?" 
Holmes showed her. The vessel that had been built inside the mould did not seem 
as large as the outside structure promised. It looked queer, too, because 
everything lay on its side. There were two compartments with a ladder between, 
but the ladder lay on the floor. The wall-gardens looked healthy under the 
fluorescent lamps which kept the grass and vegetation flourishing. There were 
instrument dials everywhere. 
Sandy went to Burke's side. 
"We're all but done," said Burke tiredly, "and Keller's just about proved what 
the signals are." 
"Can we go with you?" asked Sandy. 
"Of course not," said Burke. "The first message was a distress call. It had to 
be. Only in a distress call would somebody go into details so any listener would 
know it was important. It called for help and said who needed it, and why, and 
where." 
Pam turned to Holmes. "Can that airlock be opened from outside?" 
It couldn't. Not when it was fastened, as now. 
"Somebody answered that call from Earth," said Burke heavily, "and the second 
message told more about what was wrong. The clickings, we think, are numbers 
that told how long help could be waited for, or something on that order. And 
then there was a beacon signal meant to lead whoever was coming to help to that 
place." 
Keller smiled pleasantly at Pam. He made an electrical connection and zestfully 
checked the result. 
"Now there's a third message," said Burke. "Time's running out for whoever needs 
whatever help is called for. The clickings that seem to be numbers have changed. 
The--what you might call the scale of reportage--is new. They're telling us just 
how long they can wait or just how bad their situation is. They're saying that 
time is running out and they're saying, `Hurry!' " 
There was a thumping sound. Only Sandy and Pam looked unsurprised. Burke stared. 

Sandy said firmly, "That's the police, Joe. We've been going to the movies with 
people who want to talk about you. Yesterday one of them confided to us that you 
were dangerous, and since he told us to get away from the office, we did. There 
might be shooting. He tipped us a little while ago." 
Burke swore. There were other thumpings. Louder ones. They were on the airlock 
door. 
"If you try to put us out," said Sandy calmly, "you'll have to open that door 
and they'll try to fight their way in--and then where'll you be?" 
Keller turned from the checking of the last instrument. He looked at the others 
with excited eyes. He waited. 
"I don't know what they can arrest you for," said Sandy, "and maybe they don't 
either, unless it's unauthorized artillery practice. But you can't put us out! 
And you know darn well that unless you do something they'll chop their way in!" 
Burke said, "Dammit, they're not going to stop me from finding out if this thing 
works!" 
He squirmed in a chair which had its base firmly fastened to a wall and began to 
punch buttons. 
"Hold fast!" he said angrily. "At least well see..." 
There were loud snapping sounds. There were creakings. The room stirred. It 
turned in a completely unbelievable fashion. Violent crashings sounded outside. 
Abruptly, a small television screen before Burke acquired an image. It was of 
the outside world reeling wildly. Holmes seized a handhold and grabbed Pam. He 
kept her from falling as a side wall became the floor, and what had been the 
floor became a side wall, with the ceiling another. It seemed that all the 
cosmos changed, though only walls and floors changed places. 
Suddenly everything seemed normal but new. The surface underfoot was covered 
with a rubber mat. The hydroponic wall-garden sections were now vertical. Burke 
sat upright, and something over his head rotated a half-turn and was still. But 
it became coated with frost. 
More crashes. More small television screens acquired images. They showed the 
office of Burke Development, Inc., against a tilted landscape. The landscape 
leveled. Another showed the construction shed. One showed cloud formations, very 
bright and distinct. And two others showed a small, armed, formidable body of 
men instinctively backing away from the outside television lens. 
"So far," said Burke, "it works. Now--" 
There was a sensation as of a rapidly rising elevator. Such a sensation usually 
lasts for part of a second. This kept on. One of the six television screens 
suddenly showed a view of Burke Development from straight overhead. The 
buildings and men and the four-acre enclosure dwindled rapidly. They were very 
tiny indeed and nearly all of the town was in the camera's field of vision when 
a vague whiteness, a cloud, moved in between. 
"The devil!" said Burke. "Now they'll alert fighter planes and rocket 
installations and decide that we're either traitors or aliens in disguise and 
better be shot down. I think we simply have to go on!" 
Keller made gestures, his eyes bright. Burke looked worried. 
"It shouldn't take more than ten minutes to get a Nike aloft and after us. We 
must have been picked up by radar already.... We'll head north. We have to, 
anyhow." 
But he was wrong about the ten minutes. It was fifteen before a rocket came into 
view, pouring out enormous masses of drive-fumes. It flung itself toward the 
ship. 
Chapter 5 
FROM A SUFFICIENT height and a sufficient distance, the rocket's repeated 
attacks must have appeared like the strikings and twistings of a gigantic snake. 
It left behind it a writhing trail of fumes which was convincingly serpentine. 
It climbed and struck, and climbed and struck, like a monstrous python flinging 
itself furiously at some invisible prey. Six, seven, eight times it plunged 
frenziedly at the minute egg-shaped ship which scuttled for the heavens. Each 
time it missed and writhed about to dart again. 
Then its fuel gave out and for all intents and purposes it ceased to exist. The 
thick, opaque trail it left behind began to dissipate. The path of vapor 
scattered. It spread to rags and tatters of unsubstantiality through which the 
rocket plummeted downward in the long fall which is a spent rocket's ending. 
Burke cautiously cut down the drive and awkwardly turned the ship on its side, 
heading it toward the north. The state of things inside the ship was one of 
intolerable tenseness. 
"I'm a new driver," said Burke, "and that was a tough bit of driving to do." He 
glanced at the exterior-pressure meter. "There's no air outside to register. We 
must be fifty or sixty miles high and maybe still rising. But we're not leaking 
air." 
Actually the plastic ship was eighty miles up. The sunlit world beneath it 
showed white patches of cloud in patterns a meteorologist would have found 
interesting. Burke could see the valley of the St. Lawrence River between the 
white areas. But the Earth's surface was curiously foreshortened. What was 
beneath seemed utterly flat, and at the edge of the world all appeared distorted 
and unreal. 
Holmes, still pale, asked, "How'd we get away from that rocket?" 
"We accelerated," said Burke. "It was a defensive rocket. It was designed to 
knock down jet bomb carriers or ballistic missiles which travel at a constant 
speed. Target-seeking missiles can lock onto the radar echo from a coasting 
ship, or one going at its highest speed because their computers predict where 
their target, traveling at constant speed, can be intercepted. We were never 
there. We were accelerating. Missile-guidance systems can't measure acceleration 
and allow for it. They shouldn't have to." 
Four of the six television screens showed dark sky with twinkling lights in it. 
On one there was the dim outline of the sun, reversed to blackness because its 
light was too great to be registered in a normal fashion. The other screen 
showed Earth. 
There was a buzzing, and Keller looked at Burke. 
"Rocket?" asked Burke. Keller shook his head. "Radar?" Keller nodded. 
`The DEW line, most likely," said Burke in a worried tone. "I don't know whether 
they've got rockets that can reach us. But I know fighter planes can't get this 
high. Maybe they can throw a spread of air-to-air rockets, though... I don't 
know their range." 
Sandy said unsteadily, "They shouldn't do this to us! We're not criminals! At 
least they should ask us who we are and what we're doing!" 
"They probably did," said Burke, "and we didn't answer. See if you can pick up 
some voices, Keller." 
Keller twirled dials and set indicators. Voices burst into speech. "Reporting 
UFO sighted extreme altitude coördinates--First rocket exhausted fuel in 
multiple attacks and fell, sir." Another voice, very brisk, "Thirty-second 
squadron, scramble! Keep top altitude and get under it. If it descends within 
range, blast it!" Another voice said crisply, "Coördinates three-seven Jacob, 
one-nine Alfred..." 
Keller turned the voices down to mutters because they were useless. 
Burke said, "Hell! We ought to land somewhere and check over the ship. Keller, 
can you give me a microphone and a wave-length somebody will be likely to pick 
up?" 
Keller shrugged and picked up masses of wire. He began to work on an as yet 
unfinished wiring job. Evidently, the ship was not near enough to completion to 
be capable of a call to ground. It had taken off with many things not finished. 
Burke, at the controls, found it possible to think of a number of items that 
should have been examined exhaustively before the ship left the mould in which 
it had been made. He worried. 
Pam said in a strange voice, "I thought I might rate as a heroine for stowing 
away on this voyage, but I didn't think we'd have to dodge rockets and fighter 
planes to get away!" 
There was no comment. 
"I'm a beginner at navigation," said Burke a little later, more worried than 
before. "I know we have to go out over the north magnetic pole, but how the hell 
do I find that?" 
Keller beamed. He dropped his wiring job and went to the imposing bank of 
electronic instruments. He set one, and then another, and then a third. The 
action, of course, was similar to that of an airline pilot when he tunes in 
broadcasting stations in different cities. From each, a directional reading can 
be taken. Where the lines of direction cross, there the transport plane must be. 
But Keller turned to shortwave transmitters whose transmissions could be picked 
up in space. Presently, eighty miles high, he wrote a latitude and longitude 
neatly on a slip of paper, wrote "North magnetic pole 93°W, 71°N, nearly," and 
after that a course. 
"Hm," said Burke. "Thanks." 
Then there was a relative silence inside the ship. Only a faint mutter of voices 
came from assorted speakers that Keller had first turned on and then turned 
down, and a small humming sound from a gyro. When they listened, they could also 
hear a high sweet musical tone. Burke shifted this control here, and that 
control there, and lifted his hands. The ship moved on steadily. He checked this 
and that and the other thing. He was pleased. But there were innumerable things 
to be checked. Holmes went down the ladder to the other compartment below. There 
were details to be looked into there, too. 
One of the screens portrayed Earth from a height of seventy miles instead of 
eighty, now. Others pictured the heavens, with very many stars shining 
unwinkingly out of blackness. Keller got at his wires again and resumed the work 
of installing a ship-to-ground transmitter and its connection to an 
exterior-reflecting antenna. 
Sandy watched Burke as he moved about, testing one thing after another. From 
time to time he glanced at the screens which had to serve in the place of 
windows. Once he went back to the control-board and changed an adjustment. 
"We dropped down ten miles," he explained to Sandy. "And I suspect we're being 
trailed by jets down below." 
Holmes meticulously inspected all storage places. He'd packed them when the ship 
lay on her side. 
Burke read an instrument and said with satisfaction, "We're running on 
sunshine!" 
He meant that in empty space certain aluminum plates on the outside of the hull 
were picking up heat from the naked sun. The use of the drive-shaft lowered its 
temperature. Metallic connection with the outside plates conducted heat inward 
from those plates. The drive-shaft was cold to the touch, but it could drop four 
hundred degrees Fahrenheit before it ceased to operate as a drive. It was 
gratifying that it had cooled so little up to this moment. 
Later Keller tapped Burke on the shoulder and jerked his thumb upward. 
"We go up now?" asked Burke. 
Keller nodded. Burke carefully swung the ship to aim vertically. The views of 
solid Earth slid from previous screens to new ones. The stars and the dark 
object which was the sun also moved across their screens to vanish and reappear 
on others. Then Burke touched the drive-control. Once more they had the 
sensation of being in a rising elevator. And at just that moment spots appeared 
on the barren, icy, totally flattened terrain below. 
They were rocket-trails from target-seeking missiles which had reached the area 
of the north magnetic pole by herculean effort and were aimed at the 
radar-detected little ship by the heavy planes that carried them. 
From the surface of the Earth, it would have seemed that monstrous columns of 
foaming white appeared and rose with incredible swiftness toward the heavens. 
They reached on, up and up and up, seeming to draw closer together as they 
became smaller in the distance, until all eight of them seemed to merge into a 
single point of infinite whiteness in the sunshine above the world's blanket of 
air. 
But nothing happened. Nothing. The ship did not accelerate as fast as the 
rockets, but it had started first and it kept up longer. It went scuttling away 
to emptiness and the bottoms of the towers of rocket-smoke drifted away and away 
over the barren landscape all covered with ice and snow. 
When Earth looked like a huge round ball that did not even seem very near, with 
a night side that was like a curious black chasm among the stars, the atmosphere 
of tension inside the ship diminished. Keller completed his wiring of a 
ship-to-ground transmitter. He stood up, brushed off his hands and beamed. 
The little ship continued on. Its temperature remained constant. The air in it 
smelled of growing green stuff. It was moist. It was warm. Keller turned a knob 
and a tiny, beeping noise could be heard. Dials pointed, precisely. 
"We couldn't go on our true course earlier," Burke told Sandy, "because we had 
to get out beyond the Van Allen bands of cosmic particles in orbit around the 
world. Pretty deadly stuff, that radiation! In theory, though, all we have to do 
now is swing onto our proper course and follow those beepings home. We ought to 
be in harmless emptiness here. Do you want to call Washington?" 
She stared. 
"We need help to navigate--or astrogate," said Burke. "Call them, Sandy. I'll 
get on the wire when a general answers." 
Sandy went jerkily to the transmitter just connected. She began to speak 
steadily, "Calling Earth! Calling Earth! The spaceship you just shot all those 
rockets at is calling! Calling Earth!" 
It grew monotonous, but eventually a suspicious voice demanded further 
identification. 
It was a peculiar conversation. The five in the small spaceship were considered 
traitors on Earth because they had exercised the traditional right of American 
citizens to go about their own business unhindered. It happened that their 
private purposes ran counter to the emotional state of the public. Hence voices 
berated Sandy and furiously demanded that the ship return immediately. Sandy 
insisted on higher authority and presently an official voice identified itself 
as general so-and-so and sternly commanded that the ship acknowledge and obey 
orders to return to Earth. Burke took the transmitter. 
"My name's Burke," he said mildly. "If you can arrange some sort of code, I'll 
tell you how to find the plans, and I'll give you the instructions you'll need 
to build more ships like this. They can follow us out. I think they should. I 
believe that this is more important than anything else you can think of at the 
moment." 
Silence. Then more sternness. But ultimately the official voice said, "I'll get 
a code expert on this." 
Burke handed the microphone to Sandy. 
"Take over. We've got to arrange a cipher so nobody who listens in can learn 
about official business. We may use a social security number for a key, or the 
name of your maiden aunt's first sweetheart, or something we know and Washington 
can find out but that nobody else can. Hm. Your last year's car-license number 
might be a starter. They can seal up the records on that!" 
Sandy took over the job. What was transmitted to Earth, of course, could be 
picked up anywhere over an entire hemisphere. Somebody would assuredly pass on 
what they overheard to, say, nations the United States would rather have behind 
it than ahead of it in space-travel equipment. Burke's suggestion of a cipher 
and instructions changed his entire status with authority. They'd rather have 
had him come back, but this was second best, and they took it. 
From Burke's standpoint it was the only thing to do. He had no official standing 
to lend weight to his claim that lunatic magnet-cores with insanely complicated 
windings would amount to space-drive units. If he returned, in the nature of 
things there would be a long delay before mere facts could overcome 
theoreticians' convictions. But now he was forty-five thousand miles out from 
Earth. 
He had changed course to home on the beeping signals from M-387, was 
accelerating at one full gravity and had been doing so for forty-five minutes. 
And the small ship already had a velocity of twenty miles per second and was 
still going up. All the rockets that men had made, plus the Russian manned-probe 
drifting outward now, had become as much outdated for space travel as flint 
arrowheads are for war. 
Burke returned to the microphone when Sandy left it to get a pencil and paper. 
"By the way," he said briskly. "We can keep on accelerating indefinitely at one 
gravity. We've got radars. We got them from--" He named the supplier. "Now we 
want advice on how fast we can risk traveling before we'll be going too fast to 
dodge meteors or whatnot that the radar may detect. Get that figured out for us, 
will you?" 
He gave back the instrument to Sandy and returned to his inspection of every 
item of functioning equipment in the ship. He found one or two trivial things to 
be bettered. The small craft went on in a singularly matter-of-fact fashion. If 
it had been a bomb shelter buried in the pit beside the mould in which it was 
built, there would have been very little difference in the feel of things. The 
constant acceleration substituted perfectly for gravity. The six television 
screens, to be sure, pictured incredible things outside, but television screens 
often picture incredible things. The wall-gardens looked green and flourishing. 
The pumps were noiseless. There were no moving parts in the drive. The gyro held 
everything steady. There was no vibration. 
Nobody could remain upset in such an unexciting environment. Presently Pam 
explored the living quarters below. Holmes took his place in the control-chair, 
but found no need to touch anything. 
Some time later Sandy reported, "Joe, they say we must be lying, but if we can 
keep on accelerating, we'd better not hit over four hundred miles a second. They 
say we can then swing end for end and decelerate down to two hundred, and then 
swing once more and build up to four again. But they insist that we ought to 
return to Earth." 
"They don't mention shooting rockets at us, do they?" asked Burke. "I thought 
they wouldn't. Just say thanks and go on working out a code." 
Sandy set to work with pencil and paper. Federal agents would be moving, now, to 
impound all official records that were in any way connected with any of the five 
on the ship. The key to the code would be contained in such records. It would be 
an agglomeration of such items as Burke's grandmother's maiden name, Holmes' 
social-security number, the name of a street Burke had lived on some years 
before, the exact amount of his federal income taxes the previous year, the 
title of a book third from the end on the second shelf of a bookcase in Keller's 
apartment, and such unconsidered items as most people can remember with a little 
effort, but which can only be found out by people who know where to look. These 
people would keep anybody else from looking in the same places. Such a code 
would be clumsy to work with, but it would be unbreakable. 
It took hours to establish it without the mention of a single word included in 
the lengthy key. The ship reached four hundred miles a second, turned about, and 
began to cut down its speed again. 
Pam spoke from beside an electric stove, "Dinner's ready! Come and get it!" 
They dined; Sandy weary, Burke absorbed and inevitably worried, Holmes placid 
and amiable, and Keller beaming and interested in all that went on, which was 
practically nothing. 
They did not see the stars direct, because television cameras were preferable to 
portholes. Earth had become very small, and as it swung ever more nearly into a 
direct line between the ship and the sun, night filled more of its disk until 
only a hairline of sunshine showed at one edge. The microwave receivers ceased 
to mutter. The working astronomers on Earth who'd sent a message to M-387 were 
suddenly relieved of their disgrace and set to work again to equip the West 
Virginia radar telescope for continuous communication with Burke's ship. Other 
technicians began to prepare multiple receptors to pick up the ship's signals 
from hitherto unprecedented distances for human two-way communication. 
And on Earth an official statement went out from high authority. It announced 
that a hurriedly completed American ship was on the way to M-387 to investigate 
the signals from space. It announced that measures long in preparation were now 
in use, and that an invincible fleet of spacecraft would be completed in months, 
whereas they had not been hoped for for another generation. An unexpected 
breakthrough had made it possible to advance the science of space travel by many 
decades, and a fleet to explore all the planets as well as M-387 was already 
under construction. It was almost true that they were. The blueprints of Burke's 
ship had been flown to Washington from the plant, and an enormous number of 
replicas of the egg-shaped vessel were ordered to be begun immediately, even 
before the theory of the drive was understood. 
There was one minor hitch. A legal-minded official protested that Congressional 
appropriations had been for rocket-driven spaceships only, and the money 
appropriated could not be used for other than rockets. An executive order 
settled the matter. Then theorists began to object to the principle of the 
drive. It contradicted well-established scientific beliefs. It could not work. 
It did, but there was violent opposition to the fact. 
Publicly, of course, the shock of such an about-face by the national government 
was extreme. But newspapers flashed new headlines. "U.S. SHIP SPEEDING TO QUERY 
ALIENS!" Lesser heads announced, "Critical Velocity Exceeded! Russian Probe 
Already Passed!" The last was not quite true. The Russian manned probe had 
started out ten days before. Burke hadn't overtaken it yet. 
Broadcasters issued special bulletins, and two networks canceled top evening 
programs to schedule interviews with prominent scientists who'd had nothing 
whatever to do with what Burke had managed to achieve. 
In Europe, obviously, the political effect was stupendous. Russia was reduced to 
impassioned claims that the ship had been built from Russian plans, using 
Russian discoveries, which had been stolen by imperialistic secret agents. And 
the heads of the Russian spy system were disgraced for not having, in fact, 
stolen the plans and discoveries from the Americans. All other operatives 
received threats of what would happen to them if they didn't repair that 
omission. These threats so scared half a dozen operatives that they defected and 
told all they knew, thereby wrecking the Russian spy system for the time being. 
Essentially, however, the recovery of confidence in America was as extravagant 
as the previous unhappy desire to hear no more about space. Burke, Holmes, 
Keller, Sandy and Pam became national heroes and heroines within eighteen hours 
after guided missiles had failed to shoot them down. The only criticism came 
from a highly conservative clergyman who hoped that other young girls would not 
imitate Sandy's and Pam's disregard of convention and maintained that a married 
woman should have gone along to chaperon them. 
The atmosphere in the ship, however, was that of respectability carried to the 
point where things were dull. The lower compartment of the ship, being smaller, 
was inevitably appropriated by Sandy and Pam. They retired when the ship was 
twenty hours out from Earth. Each of them had prepared for stowing away by 
wearing extra garments in layers. 
"Funny," said Pam, yawning as they made ready to turn in, "I thought it was 
going to be exciting. But it's just like a rather full day at the office." 
"Which," said Sandy, "I'm quite used to." 
"I do think you ought to have barged in when they designed the ship, Sandy. 
There's not one mirror in it!" 
In the upper compartment Keller took his place in the control-chair and took a 
trick of duty. It consisted solely of looking at the instruments and listening 
to the beeping noises which came from remoteness every two seconds, and the 
still completely cryptic broadcasts which came every seventy-nine minutes. It 
wasn't exciting. There was nothing to be excited about. But somebody had to be 
on watch. 
On the second day out, Washington was ready to use the new code. The West 
Virginia radar bowl was powered to handle communications again. Sandy 
painstakingly took down the gibberish that came in and decoded it. From then on 
she worked at the coding and transmission of messages and the reception and 
decoding of others. Presently Pam relieved her at the job. Pam tended to be 
bored because Holmes was as much absorbed in the business of keeping anything 
from happening as was Burke. 
The messages were almost entirely requests far, and answers to requests for, 
details about the ship plans. The United States had not yet completed a 
duplicate drive-shaft. Machinists labored to reproduce the cores, which would 
then have to be wound in the complicated fashion the plans described. But it was 
an unhappy experience for the scientific minds assigned to duplicate Burke's 
ship. No woman ever followed a recipe without making some change. Very few 
physicists can duplicate another's apparatus without itching to change it. There 
were six copies of the drive under construction at the same time, at the 
beginning. Four were made by skeptics, who adhered to the original plans with 
strict accuracy. They were sure they'd prove Burke wrong. Two were "improved" in 
the making. The four, when finished, worked beautifully. The two doctored 
versions did not. But still there was fretful discussion of the theory of the 
drive. It seemed flatly to contradict Newton's law that every action has a 
reaction of equal moment and opposite sign--a law at least as firmly founded as 
the law of the conservation of energy. But that had lately been revised into the 
law of the conservation of energy and matter, which now was gospel. Burke's 
theory required the Newtonian law to be restated to read "every action of a 
given force has a reaction of the same force, of the same moment," and so on. 
When the reaction of one force is converted into another force, the results can 
be interesting. In fact, one can have a space-drive. But there was bitter 
resistance to the idea. It was demanded that Burke justify his views in a more 
reasonable way than by mere demonstration that they worked. 
After a time, Burke gave up trying to explain things. And when one and then 
another duplicate drive worked, the argument ceased. But eminent physicists 
still had a resentful feeling that Burke was cheating on them somehow. 
Then for days nothing happened. One of the three men in the ship always stayed 
in the control-chair where he could check the ship's course against the homing 
signals from the asteroid. He might have to correct it by the fraction of a 
hair, or swing ship and put on more drive if the radar should show celestial 
debris in the spaceship's path. Every so many hours the ship had to be swung 
about so that instead of accelerating she decelerated, or instead of 
decelerating gained fresh speed. But that was all. 
On the fifth day there was the flash of a meteor on the radar. On the seventh 
day an object which could have been the second or third unmanned Russian probe 
showed briefly at the very edge of the radar screens. In essence, however, the 
journey was pure tedium. Burke wearied of making sure that his work was good, 
though he congratulated himself that nothing did happen to break the monotony. 
Holmes admitted that he was disappointed. He'd wanted to make the journey 
because he'd sailed in everything but a spaceship. But there was no fun in it. 
Keller alone seemed comfortably absorbed. He prepared daily lists of 
instrument-readings to be sent back to Earth. They would be of enormous 
importance to science-minded people. They were not of interest to Sandy. 
Even when she talked to Burke, it was necessarily impersonal. There could be no 
privacy which was not ostentatious. The two girls used the lower compartment, 
the three men the upper and larger one. For Sandy to talk privately with Burke, 
she'd have had to go to the small bottom section of the ship. Holmes and Pam 
faced the same situation. It was uncomfortable. So they developed a perfectly 
pleasant habit of talking exclusively of things everybody could talk about. It 
did not bother Keller, who would hardly average a dozen words in twenty-four 
hours, but Sandy muttered to herself when she and Pam retired for what was a 
ship-night's rest. 
When they went past the orbit of Mars, agitated instructions came out from 
Earth. The asteroid belts began beyond Mars. Elaborate directions came. The ship 
was tracked by radar telescopes all around the world, direction-finding on its 
transmission. Croydon kept track. American radar bowls picked up the ship's 
voice. South American and Hawaiian and Japanese and Siberian radar telescopes 
determined the ship's position every time a set of code symbols reached Earth 
from the ship. Of course, there were also the beepings and the 
seventy-nine-minute-spaced identical broadcasts from farther out from the sun. 
Somebody got a brilliant idea and authority to try it. An interview for 
broadcast on Earth was sought with somebody on the ship. It was then a hundred 
thirty million miles from Earth, and ninety-two million more from the sun. 
Largely out of boredom Sandy agreed to answer questions. But at the speed of 
light it required eleven minutes to reach her from Earth, and as long for her 
reply to be received. It did not make for liveliness, so she spoke curtly for 
five minutes and stopped. She talked at random about housekeeping in space. 
Without knowing it, she was praised for her domestics in many pulpits the 
following Sunday, and eight hundred ninety-two proposals of marriage piled up in 
mail addressed to her in care of the United States government. Twelve were in 
Russian. 
But nothing really exciting happened aboard the spaceship. It was Burke's guess 
that they could go directly through the asteroid belt along the plane of the 
ecliptic, and not get nearer than ten thousand miles to any bit of shattered 
stone or metal in orbit out there. He was almost right. There was only one 
occasion when his optimism came into doubt. 
It was on the ninth day out from Earth. Experimentally, the ship coasted on 
attained momentum, using no drive. There was, then, no substitute for gravity 
and everyone and everything in the ship was weightless. The power obtainable 
from the sun as heat had dwindled to one-ninth of that at the Earth's distance. 
But what was received could be stored, and was. Meanwhile the ship plunged 
onward at very nearly four hundred miles per second, Burke, Keller, and Holmes 
together labored over a self-contained diving suit which they hoped could be 
used as a space suit in dire emergency and for brief periods. They wanted to get 
the feel of using it with internal pressure and weightlessness as conditions. 
Sandy sat at the transmitter, working at code which by now she heartily loathed. 
Pam sat in the control-chair, watching the instruments. 
There was a buzz. Burke snapped his head around to see the radar screen. A line 
of light appeared on it. It aimed directly at the center of the screen, which 
meant that whatever had been picked up was on a collision course with the ship. 
Burke plunged toward the control-chair to take over. But he'd forgotten the 
condition of no-gravity. He went floating off in mid-air, far wide of the chair. 

He barked orders to Pam, who was least qualified of anybody aboard to meet an 
emergency of this sort. She panicked. She did nothing. Holmes took precious 
seconds to drag himself to the controls by what hand-holds could be had. The 
glowing white line on the radar screen lengthened swiftly. It neared the center. 
It reached the center. Burke and Holmes froze. 
There was a curious flashing change in a vision-screen. An image flashed into 
view. It was a jagged, tortured, irregularly-shaped mass of stone or metal, 
distorted in its representation by the speed at which it passed the television 
lens. It was perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. It could never have been seen 
from Earth. It might circle the sun in its lonely orbit for a hundred million 
years and never be seen again. 
It went away to nothing. It had missed by yards or fathoms, and Burke found 
himself sweating profusely. Holmes was deathly white. Keller very carefully took 
a deep breath, swallowed, and went back to his work on the 
diving-suit-qua-space-suit. Sandy hadn't noticed anything at all. But Pam burst 
into abrupt, belated tears, and Holmes comforted her clumsily. She was bitterly 
ashamed that she'd done nothing to meet the emergency which came while she was 
at the control-board, and which was the only emergency they'd encountered since 
the ship's departure from Earth. 
After that, they put on the drive and used reserve fuel. It was necessary to 
check their speed, anyhow. They were very near the source of the beeping signal 
they'd steered by for so long. The directional receiver pointed to it had long 
since been turned dawn to its lowest possible volume, and still the beepings 
were loud. 
On the eleventh day after their take-off, they sighted Asteroid M-387. They had 
traveled two hundred seventy million miles at an averaged-out speed of very 
close to three hundred miles per second. Despite muting, the beepings from the 
loud-speakers were monstrous noises. 
"Try a call, Holmes," said Burke. "But they ought to know we're here." 
He felt strange. He'd brought the ship to a stop about four or five miles from 
M-387. The asteroid was a mass of dark stuff with white outcroppings at one 
place and another. The ship seemed to edge itself toward it. The floating mass 
of stone and metal had no particular shape. It was longer than it was wide, but 
its form fitted no description. A mountain which had been torn from solidity 
with its roots of stone attached might look like Scull's Object as it turned 
slowly against a background of myriads of unblinking stars. 
There was no change in the beeping that came from the singular thing. It did 
rotate, but so slowly that one had to watch for long minutes to be sure of it. 
There was no outward sign of any reaction to the ship's presence. Holmes took 
the microphone. 
"Hello! Hello!" he said absurdly. "We have come from Earth to find out what you 
want." 
No answer. No change in the beeping calls. The asteroid turned with enormous 
deliberation. 
Sandy said suddenly, "Look there! A stick! No, it's a mast! See, where the patch 
of white is?" 
Burke very, very gingerly drew closer to the monstrous thing which hung in 
space. It was true. There was a mast of some sort sticking up out of white 
stone. The direction-indicators pointed to it. The beeping stopped and a 
broadcast began. It was the standard broadcast Earth heard every seventy-nine 
minutes. 
There was no reply to Holmes' call. There was no indication that the ship's 
arrival had been noted. On Earth the ignoring of human broadcasts to M-387 had 
seemed arrogance, indifference, a superior and menacing contempt for man and all 
his works; somehow, here the effect was different. This irregular mass was a 
fragment of something that once had been much greater. It suddenly ceased to 
seem menacing because it seemed oblivious. It acted blindly, by rote, like some 
mechanism set to operate in a certain way and unable to act in any other. 
It did not seem alive. It had signaled like a robot beacon. Now it felt like 
one. It was one. 
"Look, coming around toward us," said Holmes very quietly. "There's something 
that looks like a tunnel. It's not a crevasse. It was cut." 
Burke nodded. 
"Yes," he said thoughtfully. "I think we'll explore it. But I don't really 
expect we'll find any life here. There's nothing outside to see but a single 
metal mast. We've got some signal lights on our hull. If we're careful--" 
No one objected. The appearance of the asteroid was utterly disappointing. Its 
lifelessness and its obliviousness to their coming and their calls were worse 
than disappointing. There was nothing to be seen but a metal stick from which 
signals went out to nowhere. 
Burke jockeyed the little ship to the tunnel-mouth. It was fully a hundred feet 
in diameter. He turned on the ship's signal lights. Gently, cautiously, he 
worked down the very center of the very large bore. 
It was perfectly straight. They went in for what seemed an indefinite distance. 
Presently the signal lights showed that the wall was smoothed. The bore grew 
smaller still. They went on and on. 
Suddenly Keller grunted. He pointed to one of the six television screens which 
aimed out the length of the tunnel and showed the stars beyond. 
Those stars were being blotted out. Something vast moved slowly and deliberately 
across the shaft they navigated. It closed the opening. Their retreat was 
blocked. The ship was shut in, in the center of a mountain of stone which 
floated perpetually in emptiness. Burke checked the ship's forward motion, 
judging their speed by the side walls shown by the ship's outside lights. 
Very, very slowly, faint illumination appeared outside. In seconds they could 
see that the light came from long tubes of faint bluish light. The light 
changed. It grew stronger. It turned green and then yellowish and then became 
very bright, indeed. 
Then nothing more took place. Nothing whatever. The five inside the ship waited 
more than an hour for some other development, but absolutely nothing happened. 
Chapter 6 
THERE WAS A TINY SHOCK; in a minute, trivial contact of the ship with something 
outside it. Drifting within the now brightly lighted bore, it had touched the 
wall. There was no force to the impact. 
Keller made an interested noise. When eyes turned to him, he pointed to a dial. 
A needle on that dial pointed just past the figure "30." Burke grunted. 
"The devil! We've been waiting for things to happen, and they already have! It's 
our move." 
"According to that needle," agreed Holmes, "somebody has kindly put thirty point 
seven mercury inches of air-pressure around the ship outside. We can walk out 
and breathe, now." 
"If," said Burke, "it's air. It could be something else. I'll have to check it." 

He got out the self-contained diving apparatus that had been brought along to 
serve as a strictly temporary space suit. 
"I'll try a cigarette-lighter. Maybe it will burn naturally. Maybe it will go 
out. It could make an explosion. But I doubt that very much." 
"We'll hope," said Holmes, "that the lighter burns." 
Burke climbed into the diving suit, which had been designed for amateurs of 
undersea fishing to use in chilly waters. On Earth it would have been 
intolerably heavy, for a man moving about out of the ocean. But there was no 
weight here. If M-387 had a gravitational field at all, which in theory it had 
to have, it would be on the order of millionths of the pull of Earth. 
Keller sat in the control-chair, watching the instruments and the outside 
television screens which showed the bore now reduced to fifty feet. Somehow the 
more distant parts of the tunnel looked hazy, as if there were a slight mist in 
whatever gas had been released in it. Sandy watched Burke pull on the helmet and 
close the face-plate. She grasped a hand-hold, her knuckles turning white. Pam 
nestled comfortably in a corner of the ceiling of the control-room. Holmes 
frowned as Burke went into the air-lock and closed the inner door. 
His voice came immediately out of a speaker at the control-desk. 
"I'm breathing canned air from the suit," he said curtly. 
There were scrapings. The outer lock-door made noises. There was what seemed to 
be a horribly long wait. Then they heard Burke's voice again. 
"I've tried it," he reported. "The lighter burns when it's next to the slightly 
opened door. I'm opening wide now." 
More noises from the air-lock. 
"It still burns. Repeat. The lighter burns all right. The tunnel is filled with 
air. I'm going to crack my face-plate and see how it smells." 
Silence, while Sandy went white. But a moment later Burke said crisply, "It 
smells all right. It's lifeless and stuffy, but there's nothing in it with an 
odor. Hold on--I hear something!" 
A long minute, while the little ship floated eerily almost in contact with the 
walls about it. It turned slowly. Then there came brisk, brief fluting noises. 
They were familiar in kind. But this was a short message, of some fifteen or 
twenty seconds length, no more. It ended, was repeated, ended, was repeated, and 
went on with an effect of mechanical and parrot-like repetition. 
"It's good air," reported Burke. "I'm breathing normally. But it might have been 
stored for ages. It's stale. Do you hear what I do?" 
"Yes," said Sandy in a whisper to the control-room. "It's a call. It's telling 
us to do something. Come back inside, Joe!" 
They heard the outer air-lock door closing and its locking-dogs engaging. The 
fluting noises ceased to be audible. The inner door swung wide. Burke came into 
the control-room, his helmet face-plate open. He wriggled out of the diving 
suit. 
"Something picked up the fact that we'd entered. It closed a door behind us. 
Then it turned on lights for us. Then it let air into the entrance lock. Now 
it's telling us to do something." 
The ship surged, ever so gently. Keller had turned on an infinitesimal trace of 
drive. The walls of the bore floated past on the television screens. There was 
mist in the air outside. It seemed to clear as the ship moved. 
Keller made a gratified small sound. They could see the end of the tunnel. There 
was a platform there. Stairs went to it from the side of the bore. There was a 
door with rounded corners in the end wall. That wall was metal. 
Keller carefully turned the ship until the stairway was in proper position for a 
landing, if there had been gravitation to make the stairs usable. Very, very 
gently, he lowered the ship upon the platform. 
There was a singular tugging sensation which ceased, came again, ceased, and 
gradually built up to a perfectly normal feeling of weight. They stood upon the 
floor of the control-room with every physical sensation they'd felt during 
one-gravity acceleration on the way out here, and which they'd have felt if the 
ship were aground on Earth. 
"Artificial gravity! Whoever made this knew something!" Burke said. 
Pam swallowed and spoke with an apparent attempt at nonchalance. 
"Now what do we do?" 
"We--look for the people," said Sandy in a queer tone. 
"There's nobody here, Sandy!" Burke said irritably. "Can't you see? There can't 
be anybody here! They'd have signaled us what to do if there had been! This is 
machinery working. We do something and it operates. But then it waits for us to 
do something else. It's like--like a self-service elevator!" 
"We didn't come here for an elevator ride," said Sandy. 
"I came to find out what's here," said Burke, "and why it's signaling to Earth. 
Holmes, you stay here with the girls and I'll take a look outside." 
"I'd like to mention," said Holmes drily, "that we haven't a weapon on this 
ship. When they shot rockets at us back on Earth, we didn't have even a 
pea-shooter to shoot back with. We haven't now. I think the girls are as safe 
exploring as they are here. And besides, we'll all feel better if we're 
together." 
"I'm going!" said Sandy defiantly. 
Burke hesitated, then shrugged. He unlatched the devices which kept both doors 
to the air-lock from being open at the same time. It was not a completely 
cautious thing to do, but caution was impractical. The ship was imprisoned. It 
was incapable of defense. There was simply nothing sensible about precautions 
that couldn't prevent anything. 
Burke threw open the outer lock door. One by one, the five of them climbed down 
to the platform so plainly designed for a ship of space--a small one--to land 
upon. Nothing happened. Their surroundings were completely uninformative. This 
landing-platform might have been built by any race on Earth or anywhere else, 
provided only that it used stairs. 
"Here goes," said Burke. 
He went to the door with rounded corners. There was something like a handle at 
one side, about waist-high. He put his hand to it, tugged and twisted, and the 
door gave. It was not rusty, but it badly needed lubrication. Burke pulled it 
wide and stared unbelievingly beyond. 
Before him there stretched a corridor which was not less than twenty feet high 
and just as wide. The long, glowing tubes of light that illuminated the 
ship-tunnel were here, too, fixed in the ceiling. The corridor reached away, 
straight and unbroken, until its end seemed a mere point in the distance. It 
looked about a full mile long. There were doorways in both its side walls, and 
they dwindled in the distance with a monotonous regularity until they, too, were 
mere vertical specks. One could not speak of the length of this corridor in feet 
or yards. It was a mile. 
It was incredible. It was overwhelming. And it was empty. It shone in the glare 
of the light tubes which made a river of brilliance overhead. It seemed 
preposterous that so vast a construction should have no living thing in it. But 
it was absolutely vacant. 
They stared down its length for long seconds. Then Burke seemed to shake 
himself. 
"Here's the parlor. Let's walk in, even if there's no welcoming committee;" 
His voice echoed. It rolled and reverberated and then diminished very slowly to 
nothing. 
Burke strode forward with Sandy close to him. Pam stared blankly, and 
instinctively moved up to Holmes. Once they were through the door, the sensation 
was not that of adventure in a remote part of space, but of being in some 
strange and impossible monument on Earth. The feeling of weight, if not 
completely normal, was so near it as not to be noticed. They could have been in 
some previously unknown structure made by men, at home. 
This corridor, though, was not built. It was excavated. Some process had been 
used which did not fracture the stone to be removed. The surface of the rock 
about them was smooth. In places it glittered. The doorways had been cut out, 
not constructed. They were of a size which made them seem designed for the use 
of men. The compartments to which they gave admission were similarly 
matter-of-fact. They were windowless, of course, but their strangeness lay in 
the fact that they were empty, as if to insist that all this ingenuity and labor 
had been abandoned thousands of years before. Yet from somewhere in the asteroid 
a call still went out urgently, filling the solar system with plaintive fluting 
sounds, begging whoever heard to come and do something which was direly 
necessary. 
A long, long way down the gallery there were two specks. A quarter-mile from the 
entrance, they saw that one of the rooms contained a pile of metal ingots, 
neatly stacked and bound in place by still-glistening wire. At half a mile they 
came upon the things in the gallery itself. One was plainly a table with a 
single leg, made of metal. It was unrusted, but showed signs of use. The other 
was an object with a hollow top. In the hollow there were twisted, shriveled 
shreds of something unguessable. 
"If men had built this," said Burke, and again his voice echoed and rolled, 
"that hollow thing would be a stool with a vanished cushion, and the table would 
be a desk." 
Sandy said thoughtfully, "If men had built this, there'd be signs somewhere 
marking things. At least there'd be some sort of numbers on these doorways!" 
Burke said nothing. They went on. 
The gallery branched. A metal door closed off the divergent branch. Burke tugged 
at an apparent handle. It did not yield. They continued along the straight, open 
way. 
They came to a larger-than-usual opening in the side wall. Inside it there were 
rows and rows and rows of metal spheres some ten feet in diameter. There must 
have been hundreds of them. Beside the door there was a tiny shelf, with a 
tinier box fastened to it. A long way farther, they came to what had appeared to 
be the end of this corridor. But it did not end. It slanted upward and turned 
and they found themselves in the same corridor on a different level, headed back 
in the direction from which they had come. Their footsteps echoed hollowly in 
the still-enormous emptiness. There were other closed doors. Burke tried some. 
Holmes tried others. They did not open. Keller moved raptly, gazing at this and 
that. 
Everything was strange, but not strange enough to be frightening. One could have 
believed this place the work of men, except that this was beyond the ability of 
men to make. There must be miles of vacant rooms carved out of solid rock. They 
came upon some hundreds of yards of doorways, and in every room on which they 
opened, there were metal frames about the walls. Holmes said suddenly, "If men 
had built this place, those could be bunks." 
They came to another place where there was dust, and a group of six huge rooms 
communicating not only with the corridor but with each other. They found hollow 
metal things like cook pans. They found a hollow small object which could have 
been a drinking vessel. It was broken. It was of a size suitable for men. 
"If men built this," said Holmes again, "these could be mess-halls. But I agree 
with Sandy that there should be 
signs." 
Yet another closed door. It resisted their efforts to open it, just like the 
others. Keller put out his hand and thoughtfully touched the stone beside it. He 
looked astonished. 
"What?" asked Burke. He touched the stone as Keller had. It was bitterly, 
bitterly cold. "The air's warm and the stone's cold! What's this?" 
Keller wetted the tip of his finger and rubbed it on the rocky side wall. 
Instantly, frost appeared. But the air remained warm. 
The gallery turned again, and again rose. The third-level passageway was 
shorter; barely half a mile in length. Here they passed door after door, all 
open, with each compartment containing a huge and somehow malevolent shape of 
metal. And beside each doorway there was a little shelf with a small box 
fastened to it. 
"These," said Holmes, "could be guns, if there were any way for them to shoot 
anything. Just by the look of them I'd say they were weapons." 
Burke said abruptly, "Keller, the stone being freezing cold while the air's warm 
means that this place has been heated up lately. Heat's been poured into it. 
Within hours!" 
Keller considered. Then he shook his head. 
"Not heat. Warmed air." 
Burke went scowling onward. He followed, actually, the only route that was open. 
Other ways were cut off by doors which refused to open. Sandy, beside him, noted 
the floor. It was stone like the walls and ceiling. But it was worn. There were 
slight inequalities in it, beginning a foot or so from the walls. Sandy 
envisioned thousands of feet moving about these resonant corridors for hundreds 
or thousands of years in order to wear away the solid stone in this fashion. She 
felt age about her--incredible age reaching back to time past imagining, while 
the occupants of this hollow world swarmed about its interior. Doing what? 
Burke considered other things. There were the ten-foot metal spheres, ranged by 
hundreds in what might be a magazine below. There were the squat and ugly metal 
monsters which seemed definitely menacing to somebody or something. There were 
the metal frameworks like bunks. There was no rust, here, which could be 
accounted for if Keller happened to be right and warmed air had been released 
lately in corridors which before--for ten thousand years or more--had contained 
only the vacuum of space. And there were those rooms which could be mess-halls. 
These items were subject matter for thought. But if what they hinted at was 
true, there must be other specialized compartments elsewhere. There must be 
storerooms for food for those who managed the guns--if they were guns--and the 
spheres, and lived in the bunk-rooms and ate in the mess-halls. There'd be 
storerooms for equipment and supplies of all sorts. And again, if Keller were 
right about the air, there must be enormous pressure-tanks which had held the 
asteroid's atmosphere under high pressure for millennia, only to warm it and 
release it within the hour so that those who came by ship could use it. 
An old phrase occurred to Burke. "A mystery wrapped in an enigma." It applied to 
these discoveries. Plainly the release of air had been done without the command 
of any living creature. There could be none here! As plainly, the signals from 
space had been begun without the interposition of life. The transmitter which 
still senselessly flung its message to Earth was a robot. The operation of the 
ship-lock, the warming of air, the lighting of the ship-lock and the 
corridors--all had been accomplished by machinery, obeying orders given to the 
transmitter first by some unguessable stimulus. 
But why? Other mysteries aside, there had plainly been meticulous preparation 
for the welcoming of a ship from space. No, not welcoming. Acceptance of a ship 
from space. Somebody had been expected to respond to those plaintive fluting 
noises which went wailing through the solar system. Who were those waited-for 
visitors expected to be? What were they expected to do? For that matter, what 
was the purpose of the asteroid itself? What had it been built for? At some time 
or another it must have contained thousands of inhabitants. What were they here 
for? What became of them? And when the asteroid was left--abandoned--what 
conceivable situation was to trigger the transmitter to send out urgent calls, 
and then a directional guiding-signal the instant the call was answered? When 
Burke's ship came, the asteroid accepted it without question and carried out 
mechanical operations to make it possible for that ship's crew to roam at will 
through it. What activated this mechanism of so many eons ago? 
The five newly-arrived humans, three men and two girls, trudged along the 
echoing gallery cut out of the asteroid's heart. Murmurous sounds accompanied 
them. Once they came to a place where a whispering-gallery effect existed. They 
heard their footsteps repeated loudly as if the asteroid inhabitants were 
approaching invisibly, but no one came. 
"I don't like this!" Pam said uneasily. 
Then her own voice mocked her, and she realized what it was, and giggled 
nervously. That also was repeated, and sounded like something which seemed to 
sneer at them. It was unpleasant. 
They came to the end of the gallery. There was a stair leading upward. There was 
nowhere else to go, so Burke started up, Sandy close behind him, and Holmes and 
Pam behind them. Keller brought up the rear. They climbed, and small noises 
began to be audible. 
They were fluting sounds. They grew louder as the party from Earth went up and 
up. They reached a landing, and here also there was a metal door with rounded 
corners. Through it and from beyond it came the piping notes that Burke had 
heard in his dream some hundreds of times and that lately had come to Earth from 
emptiness. The sounds seemed to pause and to begin again, and once more to 
pause. It was not possible to tell whether they came from one source, speaking 
pathetically, or from two sources in conversation. 
Sandy went utterly white and her eyes fixed upon Burke. He was nearly as pale, 
himself. He stopped. Here and now there was no trace of ribbony-leaved trees or 
the smell of green things, but only air which was stuffy and lifeless as if it 
had been confined for centuries. And there was no sunset sky with two moons in 
it, but only carved and seamless stone Yet there were the familiar fluting 
sounds.... 
Burke put his hand to the curiously-shaped handle of the door. It yielded. The 
door opened inward. Burke went in, his throat absurdly dry. Sandy followed him. 
And again there was disappointment. Because there was no living creature here. 
The room was perhaps thirty feet long and as wide. There were many 
vision-screens in it, and some of them showed the stars outside with a precision 
of detail no earthly television could provide. The sun glowed as a small disk a 
third of its proper diameter. It was dimmer, too. The Milky Way showed clearly. 
And there were very many screens which showed utterly clear views of the surface 
of the asteroid, all broken, chaotic, riven rock and massy, un-oxydized metal. 
But there was no life. There were not even symbols of life. There were only 
machines. They noticed a large transparent disk some ten feet across. Specks of 
light glowed within its substance. Off at one side an angular metal arm held a 
small object very close to the disk's surface, a third of the way from its edge. 
It did not touch the disk, but under it and in the disk there was a little group 
of bright-red specks which quivered and wavered. They were placed in a strict 
mathematical arrangement which very, very slowly changed so that it would be 
hours before it had completed a rotation and had exactly the same appearance 
again. 
The flutings came from a tall metal cone on the floor. Another machine nearby 
held a round plate out toward the cone. "There's nobody here," said Sandy in a 
strange voice. "What'll we do now, Joe?" 
"This must be the transmitter," he murmured. "The sound-record for the 
broadcasts must be in here, somehow. It's possible that this plate is a sort of 
microphone--" 
Keller, beaming, pointed to a round spot which quivered with an eerie 
luminescence. It glowed more brightly and dimmed according to the flutings. 
Burke said "The devil!" and the round spot flickered up very brightly for an 
instant. 
"Yes," said Burke. "It's a mike. It's quite likely--" the round spot flared up 
and dimmed with the modulations of his voice--"it's quite likely that what I say 
goes into the broadcast to Earth." 
The cone ceased to emit fluting noises. Burke said very steadily--and the spot 
flickered violently with the sounds--"I think I am transmitting to Earth. If so, 
this is Joe Burke. I announce the arrival of my ship at Asteroid M-387. The 
asteroid has been hollowed out and fitted with an air-lock which admitted our 
ship. It is a--a--" 
He hesitated, and Holmes said curtly, "It's a fortress." 
"Yes," said Burke heavily. "It's a fortress. There are weapons we haven't had 
time to examine. There are barracks for a garrison of thousands. But there is no 
one here. It has been deserted, but not abandoned, because the transmitter was 
set up to send out a call when some occasion arose. It seems to have arisen. 
There is a big plate here which may be a star map, with a scale on which 
light-years may be represented by inches. I don't know. There are certain 
bright-red specks on it. They are moving. There is a machine to watch those 
specks. Apparently it actuated the transmitter to make it call to all the solar 
system." 
Keller suddenly put his finger to his lips. Burke nodded and said curtly, "I'll 
report further." 
Keller flipped aver an odd switch with something of a flourish--after which he 
looked embarrassed. The transmitter went dead. 
"He's right," said Holmes. "Back home they knave we're here, I suspect, and 
you've told enough to give them fits. I think we'd better be careful what we say 
in the clear." 
Burke nodded again. "There'll be calls from Earth shortly and we can decide 
whether or not to use code then. Keller, can you trace the leads to this 
transmitter and find the receiver that picked up that West Virginia beam-signal 
and changed the first broadcast to the second? It should be as sensitive as this 
transmitter is powerful." 
Keller nodded confidently. 
"It'll take thirty-some minutes for that report of mine to reach Earth and an 
answer to get back," observed Burke, "if everything works perfectly and the 
proper side of Earth is turned this way. I think we can be sure there's nobody 
but us in the fortress." 
His sensations were peculiar. It was exciting to have found a fortress in space, 
of course. It was the sort of thing that might have satisfied a really dedicated 
scientist completely. Burke realized the importance of the discovery, but it was 
an impersonal accomplishment. It did not mean, to Burke, that he'd carried out 
the purpose behind his coming here. This fortress was linked to a dream about a 
world with two moons in its sky and someone or something running breathlessly 
behind unearthly swaying foliage. But this place was not the place of that 
dream, nor did it fulfill it. Mystery remained, and frustration, and Burke was 
left in the state of mind of a savage who has found a treasure which means much 
to civilized men, but doesn't make him any happier because he doesn't want what 
civilized men can give him. 
He grimaced and spoke without elation. 
"Let's go back to the ship and get a code message ready for Earth." 
He led the way out of this room of many motionless but operating machines. The 
incredibly perfect vision-screen images still portrayed the cosmos outside with 
all the stars and the sun itself moving slowly across their plates. They saw 
sunshine and starlight shining on the broken, chaotic outer surface of the 
asteroid. Wavering, curiously writhing red specks on the ten-foot disk continued 
their crawling motion. Keller fairly glowed with enthusiasm as he began to 
investigate this apparatus. 
They all went back to the ship, except for Keller. They retraced their way along 
the long and brilliantly lighted galleries. They descended ramps and went along 
more brilliantly lighted corridors. Then they came to the branch which had been 
blocked off by a door that would not open. It was open now. They could see along 
the new section for a long, long way. They passed places where other doors had 
been closed, but now were open. What they could see inside them was almost 
exclusively a repetition of what they saw outside of them. They passed the place 
where hundreds of ten-foot metal spheres waited for an unknown use. They passed 
the table with a single leg, and the compartment with many metal ingots stored 
in it. 
Finally, they came to the door with rounded corners, went through it, and there 
was their ship with its air-lock doors open, waiting in the brightly lighted 
tunnel. 
They went in, and the feeling was of complete anticlimax. They knew, of course, 
that they had made a discovery beside which all archaeological discoveries on 
Earth were trivial. They had come upon operating machines which must be old 
beyond imagining, unrusted because preserved in emptiness, and infinitely 
superior to anything that men had ever made. They had come upon a mystery to 
tantalize every brain on Earth. The consequences of their coming to this place 
would remake all of Earth's future. But they were singularly un-elated. 
"I'll make up a sort of report," said Burke heavily, "of what we saw as we 
arrived, and our landing, and that sort of thing. We'll get it in code and ready 
for transmission. We can use the asteroid's transmitter." 
Holmes scowled at the floor of the little ship. 
"You'll make a report, too," said Burke. "You realized that this is a fortress. 
There can't be any doubt. It was built and put here to fight something. It 
wasn't built for fun. But I wonder who it was meant to do battle with, and why 
it was left by its garrison, and why they set up a transmitter to broadcast when 
something happened! Maybe it was to call the garrison back if they were ever 
needed, But thousands of years--You make a report on that!" 
Holmes nodded. 
"You might add," said Pam, shivering a little, "that it's a terribly creepy 
place." 
"What I don't understand," said Sandy, "is why nothing's labelled. Nothing's 
marked. Whoever built it must have known how to write, in some fashion. A 
civilized race has to have written records to stay civilized! But I haven't seen 
a symbol or a pointer or even a color used to give information." 
She got out the papers on which she would code the reports as Burke and Holmes 
turned them over for transmission. She began to write out, carefully, the 
elaborate key to the coding. Almost reluctantly, Pam prepared to do the same 
with Holmes' narrative of what he'd seen. 
But if enthusiasm was tempered in the ship, there was no such reserve in the 
United States. Burke's voice had cut into one of the space broadcasts which 
arrived every seventy-nine minutes. There had been the usual cryptic, plaintive 
piping noises, repeating for the thousandth time their meaningless message. Then 
a human voice said almost inaudibly, 
". . .'ll we do now, Joe?" It was heard over an entire hemisphere, where 
satellite-tracking stations and radar telescopes listened to and recorded every 
broadcast from space. 
It was a stupendous happening. Then Burke's voice came through the flutings. 
"This must be the transmitter. The sound-record for the broadcasts must be in 
here, somehow. It's quite possible that this plate is a sort of microphone..." A 
few seconds later he was heard to say, "The devil!" And later still he addressed 
himself directly to his listeners on Earth. 
He'd spoken the words eighteen and a fraction minutes before they arrived, 
though they traveled at the speed of light. Broadcast and ecstatically reported 
in the United States, they touched off a popular reaction as widespread as that 
triggered by the beginning of the signals themselves. Broadcasters abandoned all 
other subject matter. Announcers with lovely diction stated the facts and then 
expanded them into gibbering nonsense. Man had reached M-387. Man had spoken to 
Earth across two hundred seventy million miles of emptiness. Man had taken 
possession of a fortress in space. Man now had an outpost, a steppingstone 
toward the stars. Man had achieved.... Man had risen.... Man now took the first 
step toward his manifest destiny, which was to occupy and possess all the 
thousands of thousands of planets all the way to the galaxy's rim. 
But this was in the United States. Elsewhere, rejoicing was much less, 
especially after a prominent American politician was reported to have said that 
America's leadership of Earth was not likely ever to be challenged again. A 
number of the smaller nations immediately protested in the United Nations. That 
august body was forced to put upon its agenda a full-scale discussion of U.S. 
space developments. Middle European nations charged that the purpose of America 
was to monopolize not only the practical means of traveling to other members of 
the solar system, but all natural and technical resources obtained by such 
journeyings. With a singular unanimity, the nations at the edge of the Russian 
bloc demanded that there should be equality of information on Earth. No nation 
should hold back scientific information. In fact, there was bitter denunciation 
of the use of code by the humans now on M-387. It was demanded that they answer 
in the clear all scientific inquiries made by any government--in the clear so 
everybody could eavesdrop. 
In effect, the United States rejoiced in and boasted of the achievements of some 
of its citizens who, after escaping attack by American guided missiles, had 
found a steppingstone toward the stars. But the rest of the world jealously 
demanded that the United States reap no benefit from the fact. International 
tension, in fact, rose to a new high. 
And Burke and the others laboriously gathered this bit of information and 
discovered the lack of that. They found incredible devices whose purpose or 
workings they could not understand. They found every possible evidence of a 
civilization beside which that of Earth was intolerably backward. But the 
civilization had abandoned the asteroid. 
By the second day the mass of indigestible information had become alarming. They 
could marvel, but they could not understand. And not to understand was 
intolerable. They could comprehend that there was a device with red sparks in it 
which had made another device send a fluting, plaintive call to all the solar 
system. Nothing else was understandable. The purpose of the call remained a 
mystery. 
But the communicators hummed with messages from Earth. It seemed that every 
radar telescope upon the planet had been furnished with a transmitter and that 
every one bombarded the asteroid with a tight beam carrying arguments, offers, 
expostulations and threats. 
"This ought to be funny," said Burke dourly. "But it isn't. All we know is that 
we've found a fortress which was built to defend a civilization about which we 
know nothing except that it isn't in the solar system. We know an alarm went 
off, to call the fortress' garrison back to duty, but the garrison didn't come. 
We did. We've some evidence that a fighting fleet or something similar is headed 
this way and that it intends to smash this fortress and may include Earth. You'd 
think that that sort of news would calm them down, on Earth!" 
The microwave receiver was so jammed with messages that there was no 
communication at all. None could be understood when all arrived at once. Burke 
had to send a message to Earth in code, specifying a new and secret wavelength, 
before it became possible to have a two-way contact with Earth. But the messages 
continued to came out, every one clamoring for something else of benefit to 
itself alone. 
Chapter 7 
IN THE BEGINNING there was nothing at all, and then things were created, and the 
wonder of created things was very great. When men became, they marveled at the 
richness and the beauty about them, and their lives were filled with 
astonishment at the myriads of things in the air and on the earth and in the 
sea. For many centuries they were busy taking note of all the created things 
that were. They forgot that there was such a condition as emptiness. 
But there were six people in a certain solar system who really knew what 
emptiness amounted to. Five of them were in a fortress which was an asteroid and 
a mystery. One was in a small, crude object which floated steadily out from 
Earth. This one's name was Nikolai. The rest of it does not matter. He had been 
born in a small village in the Urals, and as a little boy he played games with 
mud and reeds and sticks and dogs and other little boys. As a growing youth he 
dutifully stuffed his head with things out of books, and some seemed to him 
rational and marvelous, and some did not make much sense but were believed by 
everybody. And who was he to go against the wise comrades who ran the government 
and protected the people from wars and famines and the schemes of villainous 
capitalists? 
As a young man he was considered promising. If he had been interested in such 
matters, he might have had a moderately successful career in politics, as 
politics was practised in his nation. But he liked things. Real things. 
When he was a student in the university he kept a canary in his lodgings. He 
loved it very much. There was a girl, too, about whom he dreamed splendidly. But 
there was a need for school teachers in Bessarabia, and she went there to teach. 
She wept when she left him. After that Nikolai studied with something of 
desperation, trying to forget her because he could not have her. 
He thought of such past events as he drifted outward from Earth. He was the 
passenger, he was the crew of the manned space-probe his government had prepared 
to go out and investigate strange signals coming from emptiness. He was a 
volunteer, of course. It was a great honor to be accepted, and for a while he'd 
almost forgotten the girl who was teaching school in Bessarabia. But that was a 
long time ago, now. At first he'd liked to remember the take-off, when brisk, 
matter-of-fact men tucked him in his acceleration-chair and left him, and he lay 
staring upward in dead silence--save far the ticking of an insanely emotionless 
clock--until there was a roar to end all roars and a shock to crush anything 
made of flesh and bones, and then a terrible, horrible feeling of weight that 
kept on and on until he lost consciousness. 
He could remember all this, if he chose. He had a distinct recollection of 
coming back to life, and of struggling to send off the signal which would say 
that he had survived the take-off. There were telemetering devices which 
reported what information was desired about the bands and belts of deadly 
radiation which surrounded the planet Earth. But Nikolai reported by voice, 
because that was evidence that he had passed through those murderous places 
unharmed. And his probe went on and on outward, away from the Earth and the sun. 

He received messages from Earth. Tinny voices assured him that his launching had 
gone well. His nation was proud of him. Enormous rewards awaited him on his 
return. Meanwhile--The tinny voices instructed him in what he was to say for 
them to record and broadcast to all the world in his honor. 
He said it, with the Earth a small crescent-shaped bit of brightness behind him. 
He drifted on. The crescent which was Earth grew smaller and smaller as days 
went by. He took due care of the instruments of his space-vehicle. He made sure 
that the air apparatus behaved properly. He disposed of wastes. From time to 
time he reported, by voice, information which automatic devices had long since 
given in greater detail and with superior accuracy. 
And he thought more and more about the girl--teaching school in Bessarabia--and 
his canary, which had died. Days went by. He was informed that it was time for 
him to make contact with a drone fuel-rocket sent on before him. He watched the 
instruments which would point out where it was. 
He found it, and with small auxiliary rockets he made careful tiny blastings 
which guided his vehicle to contact with it. The complex machinery for refueling 
took effect. Presently he cast off the emptied drone, aimed very, very carefully 
and blasted outward once more. The shock was worse than that on Earth, and he 
knew nothing for a long, long time. He was horribly weak when he regained 
consciousness. He mentioned it in his reports. There was no comment on the fact 
in the replies he received from Earth. 
He continued to float away from the sun. It became impossible to pick out Earth 
among the stars. The sun was smaller than he remembered. There was nothing to be 
seen anywhere but stars and more stars and the dwindling disk of the sun that 
used to rise and set but now remained stationary, shrinking. 
So Nikolai came to know emptiness. There were points of light which were stars. 
They were illimitable distances away. In between was emptiness. He had no 
sensation of movement. Save that as days went by the sun grew smaller, there was 
no change in anything. All was emptiness. If his vehicle floated like this for 
ten thousand times ten thousand years, the stars would appear no nearer. If he 
got out and ran upon nothingness to get back to where he could see Earth again, 
he would have to run for centuries, and generations would die and nations fall 
before he caught the least glimmer of that thin crescent which was his home. 
If he shouted, no man would ever hear, because emptiness does not carry sound. 
If he died, there was no earth into which his body could be lowered. If he 
lived, there was nowhere he could stand upright and breathe clean air and feel 
solidity beneath his feet. He had a destination, to be sure, but he did not 
really believe that he would ever reach it, nor did he imagine he would ever 
return. Now he dismissed it from his thoughts. 
He found that he was feverish, and he mentioned it when the tinny voices talked 
urgently to him. He guessed, without emotion, that he had not passed through the 
deadly radiation-belts around Earth unburned. He had been assured that he would 
pass through them so swiftly that they would be quite harmless. Now he knew that 
this was a mistake. His body obeyed him only sluggishly. He was dying of 
deep-seated radiation burns. But he felt nothing. 
Voices waked him to insist that he make contact with another fuel-drone. He 
exhausted himself as he dutifully obeyed commands. He was clumsy. He was feeble. 
But he managed a second refueling. And even as he performed the highly technical 
operation with seemingly detached and reluctant hands, he thought of a 
schoolteacher in Bessarabia. 
Before he fired the new fuel which would send him onward at what would be more 
than escape velocity, he almost humorously--yet quite humorlessly--reviewed his 
life. He considered that he might have no later opportunity to do so. There were 
three things he had done which no man had done before him. He had loved a 
certain small canary, and he remembered it distinctly. He had loved a certain 
girl, and in his weakened and dying state he could see her much more clearly 
than the grubby interior of the space-probe. And the third thing-- 
He had to cast about in his mind to remember what it was. His hand poised upon 
the rocket-firing key, he debated. Ah, yes! The third thing was that he had 
learned what emptiness was. 
He pressed the firing-key. And the space-probe spouted flames and went on. 
Before the fuel was exhausted it had reached a velocity so great that it would 
go on forever through interstellar space. It would never fall back toward the 
sun, not even after thousands of years. 

The knowledge of emptiness possessed by the five in the asteroid was different. 
A totally empty room is intimidating. A vacant house is depressing. The 
two-mile-long asteroid, honeycombed with tunnels and corridors and galleries and 
rooms, was like a deserted city. Those who had left it had carefully stripped it 
of personal possessions, but they'd left weapons behind, ready to be manned and 
used. They'd left a warning device to call them. The recall device was proof 
that the danger had not been destroyed and might return. And the plaintive call 
through all the solar system proved that it was returning. 
There was irony in the fact that Earth had panicked when it seemed that 
intelligent non-human beings signaled from space, and that shrill disputes for 
advantage began instantly Burke reported no living monsters at the signals' 
source. The fortress and its call meant more than the mere existence of aliens. 
It was proof that there were entities of space who needed to be fought. It 
proved the existence of fighting ships of space; of deadly war in emptiness; of 
creatures who crossed the void between star systems to conquer and to murder and 
destroy. 
And such creatures were coming. 
Burke ground his teeth. Earth had fusion bombs and rockets which could carry 
them for pitifully short distances on the cosmic scale. This fortress was 
incomparably more powerful than all of Earth's armament put together. A fleet 
which dared to attack it must feel itself stronger still. What could Earth do 
against a fleet which dared attack this asteroid? 
And what could he and Holmes and Keller do against such a fleet, even with the 
fortress, when they did not yet understand a single one of its weapons? 
Burke worked himself to exhaustion, trying to unravel even the simplest 
principles of the fortress' armament. There were globes which were, obviously, 
the long-range weapons of the garrison. They were stored in a launching-tube at 
the far back of the compartment. But Keller could not unravel the method of 
their control. There was no written matter in the fortress. None. A totally 
unknown language and an unfamiliar alphabet would prevent written matter from 
being useful, ordinarily, but in technical descriptions there are bound to be 
diagrams. Burke felt desperately that in even the most meaningless of scripts 
there would be diagrams which could be puzzled out. But there was nothing. The 
builders of the fortress could have been illiterate, for all the signs of 
writing that they'd left. 
Keller continued to labor valiantly. But there was no clue to the operation of 
anything but the transmitter. That was understandable because one knew where the 
message went in, and where it came out for broadcast. With the apparatus before 
one, one could deduce how it operated. But no one could guess how weapons were 
controlled when he hadn't the least idea of what they did. 
On the third night in the asteroid--the third night by ship-time, since there 
was neither day nor night in the great empty corridors of the fortress--Burke 
dreamed his dream again. It was perfectly familiar, from the trees with their 
trailing leaves, to the markings on the larger moon. He felt the anguished 
anxiety he'd so often known before. He grasped the hand-weapon and knew that he 
was ready to fight anything imaginable for the person he feared for. He heard 
small fluting sounds behind him, and then he knew that someone ran breathlessly 
behind the swaying foliage just ahead. He felt such relief and exultation that 
his heart seemed about to burst. He gave a great shout and bounded to meet her-- 

He waked in the small ship in the entrance tunnel. All was silent. All was 
still. The lights in the control-compartment of the ship were turned to dim. 
There was no sound anywhere. The opened air-lock doors, both inner and outer, 
let in a fan-shaped streak of brightness which lay on the floor. 
Burke lay quiet, still wrought up by the vivid emotions of the dream. 
He heard a stirring in the compartment below, occupied by Sandy and Pam. Someone 
came very quietly up the ladder-like stairway. Burke blinked in the 
semi-darkness. He saw that it was Sandy. She crossed the compartment to the 
air-lock. Very quietly, she closed the outer door and then the inner. She 
fastened them. 
Burke said, sitting up, "Why'd you do that, Sandy?" 
She started violently, and turned. 
"Pam can't sleep," she said in a low tone. "She says the fortress is creepy. She 
feels that there's something hiding in it, something deadly and frightening. 
When you leave the air-lock open, she's afraid. So I closed it." 
"Holmes and Keller are out," said Burke. "Keller's trying to trace down 
power-leads from the instrument-room to whatever power-source warms and lights 
everything. We can't lock him out." 
Sandy obediently opened the air-lock doors again. She turned toward the ladder 
leading downward. 
"Sandy," said Burke unhappily, "I know I'm acting like a fool." 
"You're doing all right," said Sandy. She paused at the top of the ladder. 
"Finding this--" she waved her hand about her--"ought to put your name in the 
history books. Of course you'll be much disliked by people who intended to 
invent space travel themselves. But you're doing all right." 
"I'm not thinking of that," said Burke. "I'm thinking of you. I was going to ask 
you to marry me. I didn't. If we live through this, will you?" 
Sandy regarded him carefully in the dim light of the ship's interior, most of 
which came through the air-lock doors. 
"There are some conditions," she said evenly. "I won't play second fiddle to an 
imaginary somebody behind a veil of dreamed-of leaves. I don't want to make 
conditions, Joe. But I couldn't stand your feeling that maybe in marrying me 
you'd give up your chance of finding her--whatever or whoever she is." 
"But I wouldn't feel that way!" protested Burke. 
"I'd believe you did," said Sandy. "And it would amount to the same thing. I 
think I made a mistake in coming along in the ship, Joe. If I weren't along you 
might have missed me. You might even--" she grimaced--"you might even have 
dreamed about me. But here I am. And I can't compete with somebody in a dream. I 
won't even try. I--I can't imagine marrying anybody else, but if I do get 
married I want to be the only girl my guy dreams about!" 
She turned again to the ladder. Then said abruptly, "You didn't ask why Pam 
feels creepy, or where. There's a place up on the second gallery where there's a 
door that's still locked. Pam gets the shivers when she goes by it. I don't. The 
whole place is creepy, to me." 
She went down the ladder. Minutes later Holmes and Keller arrived. 
Holmes said curtly, "The machinery in the transmitter-room reached a 
change-point just now. Those red dots in that plastic plate apparently started 
the transmitter in the first place. When its calls were answered it changed the 
broadcast, adding a directional signal. Just before we started out from Earth 
the red sparks passed another place and changed the broadcast again. Now they've 
passed a third place. We were there when the machinery shifted all around on a 
signal from that thing which hovers close to the red sparks and watches them. 
The transmitter probably blasted out at four or five times its original volume. 
There must have been a hundred thousand kilowatts in it, at least. It looks 
serious Whatever those red sparks represent must be close." 
Keller nodded in agreement, frowning, then he and Holmes wearily prepared to 
turn in. But Burke was upset. He knew he wouldn't be able to sleep. 
"Pam gets the creeps when she passes a certain locked door up on the second 
gallery. I never noticed it, but I'm going to get that door open. We got to look 
into every compartment of this thing! There's bound to be something informative 
somewhere! Close the air-lock behind me so Pam can sleep." 
He went out. Behind him, Holmes looked at Keller. 
"Funny!" he said drily. "We're all scared. I feel uneasy all the time, without 
knowing why. But if he's as scared as I am, why doesn't he worry about going 
places alone?" 
The same question occurred to Burke. The atmosphere of the brightly lighted 
halls was ominous and secretive. A man alone in a vast empty building would feel 
queer even in broad daylight with sunshine and other humans to be seen out of 
any window. But in this monstrous complex of tunnels and rooms carved out of 
solid stone, with uncountable millions of miles of pure emptiness without, the 
feeling of loneliness was incredible. He reflected wryly that a dog would be a 
comforting companion to have on such a journey as his. 
He went down the long gallery with doors on either side. Past the room with the 
piled metal ingots. Past the door through which one saw hundreds of ten-foot 
metal globes. Up a ramp. Past the rooms where something like bunks must once 
have stood against the walls. A long way along this corridor. Emptiness, 
emptiness, emptiness. Innumerable echoings of his footsteps on the stone. 
Three times he stopped at doors that had swung shut, but none was fully closed. 
All yielded readily. Then he came to the door Sandy had spoken about. He worked 
the handle repeatedly. It was firmly shut. He kicked the door and with a loud 
click it swung open. 
There were lights inside this room, as everywhere else they had explored. But it 
was nearly impossible to see any distance. This was an extremely long room, and 
it contained racks of metal which reached from floor to ceiling. Each rack was a 
series of shallow metal troughs, and in each trough there was a row of crumbly 
black metal cubes, very systematically arranged. Each side was about three 
inches square, and they were dull black, not glistening at all. They filled the 
racks completely. There were narrow aisles between the rows of racks, through 
which Burke could make his way easily enough, but which a more portly man might 
have found inconvenient. 
He stared at a trough, and was stunned. He picked up one of the cubes, and 
immediately recognized the object in his hand. It was a dull-black, smudgy cube 
exactly like the one his uncle had brought back from the Cro-Magnon cave in 
France. He knew that if he dropped this object--found two hundred seventy 
million miles from the other one--it would split into thousands of tissue-thin, 
shiny places. 
He did drop it. Deliberately. And it shattered into layers which lay like films 
of mica on the floor. 
For no clearly understandable reason, Burke found that his flesh crawled. He had 
to force himself to stay in this room with so many thousands of the enigmatic 
cubes. There had been a cube of this kind on Earth. The one he'd known as a 
child had belonged to a Cro-Magnon tribesman ten thousand, twenty thousand, how 
many years ago? And it could only have come from this asteroid. Which meant-- 
Presently he made his way back to the spaceship. He carried one of the cubes, 
rather gingerly. He meant to show it to Sandy. But the implications were 
startling. 
Members of the garrison of this fortress, thousands of years gone by, had 
visited Earth. One of them, doubtless, had carried that other cube. Why? When 
the garrison abandoned the asteroid they left these cubes behind. They left 
behind intricate machinery to call them back. They left squat machines and 
ten-foot globes which must be weapons. They left nothing that would be useful in 
the place to which they had removed. But they'd left these cubes, hundreds of 
thousands of them. 
The cube, then, could be anything. It could be impersonal, like equipment for 
the fortress that would be useless elsewhere. The fortress' equipment was 
designed to deal out death. Were the cubes? No. Burke had owned one without 
damage. When that cube split into glistening, tissue-thin plates, no one was 
injured. To be sure, there was his dream. But the cube wasn't a weapon. Whatever 
else it might be, it was not dangerous. 
He went into the spaceship and for no reason whatever firmly locked both 
air-lock doors. Holmes and Keller were asleep. There was no sound from the lower 
compartment occupied by Sandy and Pam. 
Burke put the black object on the control-desk. The single cube on Earth had 
been meaningless. The museum which joyfully accepted Cro-Magnon artifacts from 
his uncle had dismissed it as of no importance. It was fit only to be given to 
an eleven-year-old boy. But a roomful of such cubes couldn't be without meaning! 

He dismissed this newest mystery with an almost violent effort of his will. It 
was a mystery. Yet there was no intention to have the fortress seem a mystery to 
whoever answered its call to space. He could guess that the signals were 
notification of some emergency which needed to be met. The automatic apparatus 
of the ship-lock was set to aid those who came in response to the call. But 
everything presupposed that those who came would know why they came. 
Burke didn't. The thing must be simple, an explanation not yet thought of. But 
there was nowhere to start to think about it! His recurrent dream? No. That was 
as mysterious as the rest. 
Burke was very, very lonely and depressed. He could look for no help in solving 
the mystery. Earth was mow past the point of conjunction with M-387, and moved 
nearly a million miles a day along its orbit, with nearly half of them away from 
the fortress. At the most hopeful estimate, it would be three months or later 
before an emergency space fleet of replicas of his own ship could lift off from 
Earth for here. 
And Burke was reasonably sure that the red sparks would have reached the center 
of the disk in much less time than that. [If it were in some fashion like a 
radar, making a map of the surroundings of the asteroid, the observer's place 
would be in the middle.] In that event, whatever the red sparks represented 
would reach the fortress before more ships came out from Earth. 
He sat with his chin on his chest, wearily debating the impossibility of meeting 
a situation in which all humanity might well be involved. His achievement of 
space travel provided no sense of triumph, and the discovery of the abandoned 
fortress produced no elation. Not when a desperate emergency requiring a 
nonexistent garrison to report for duty was so probable. Burke sat in the 
control-chair and could find no encouragement in any of his thoughts.... 

He heard a trumpet-call and was on his feet, buckling familiar equipment about 
him. There were other figures all around in this bunk-room, similarly equipping 
themselves. Some grumbled. There was a rush for the doorway and he found himself 
one of a line of trotting figures which swung sharply out the door and went 
swiftly down one of the high-ceilinged corridors. The faces he saw were 
hard-bitten and resentful. They moved, but out of habit, not choice. There were 
other lines of men in motion. Some rushed in the same direction. Others ran 
stolidly into branching corridors and were lost to sight. Up a ramp, with the 
pounding of innumerable feet filling his ears with echoed sound. Suddenly there 
were fewer men before him. Some had darted through a doorway to the right. More 
vanished. He was at the head of his line. He turned into the doorway next 
beyond, and saw a squat and menacing object there. He swung up its side and 
seated himself. He dropped a helmet over his head and saw empty space with 
millions of unwinking stars beyond it. He waited. He was not Burke. He was 
someone else who happened to be the pointer, the aimer, of the weapon he sat 
astride. This might be a drill, but it could be action. 
A voice spoke inside his helmet. The words were utterly strange, but he 
understood them. He tested the give of this lever and the response of that. He 
spoke crisply, militarily, in words that somehow meant this--a word missing--was 
ready for action at its highest rate of fire. 
Again he waited, his eyes examining the emptiness he saw from within his helmet. 
A star winked. He snatched at a lever and centered it, snapping sharp, 
bitten-off words. The voice in his helmet said, "Flam!" He jerked the 
firing-lever and all space was blotted out for seconds by flaming light. Then 
the light faded and far, far away among the stars something burned horribly, 
spouting fire. It blew up. 
Yet again he waited. He doggedly watched the stars, because the Enemy had some 
way to prevent detection by regular instruments, and only the barest flicker of 
one among myriad light-specks could reveal the presence of an Enemy craft. 
A long time later the voice in his helmet spoke again, and he relaxed, and 
lifted the helmet. He nodded to the others of the crew of this weapon. Then a 
trumpet blew again, and he dismounted leisurely from the saddle of the ungainly 
thing he'd fired, and he and his companions waited while long lines of men filed 
stolidly past the doorway; They were on the way back to the bunk-rooms. They did 
not look well-fed. His turn came. His crew pled out into the corridor, now 
filled with men moving in a bored but disciplined fashion. He heard somebody say 
that it was an Enemy scout, trying some new device to get close to the fortress. 
Eight weapons had fired on it at the same instant, his among them. Whatever the 
new device was, the Enemy had found it didn't work. But he knew that it needn't 
have been a real Enemy, but just a drill. Nobody knew when supposed action was 
real. There was much suspicion that there was no real action. There was always 
the possibility of real action, though. Of course. The Enemy had been the Enemy 
for thousands of years. A century or ten or a hundred of quietude would not mean 
the Enemy had given up.... 

Then Burke found himself staring at the quietly glowing monitor-lights of his 
own ship's control-board. He was himself again. He remembered opening his eyes. 
He'd dozed, and he'd dreamed, and now he was awake. And he knew with absolute 
certainty that what he'd dreamed came from the black cube he'd brought back from 
the previously locked-up room. But there was a difference between this dream and 
the one he'd had for so many years. He could not name the difference, but he 
knew it. This was not an emotion-packed, illusory experience which would haunt 
him forever. This was an experience like the most vivid of books. It was 
something he would remember, but he would need to think about it if he were to 
remember it fully. 
He sat stiffly still, going over and over this new memory, until he heard 
someone moving about, in the compartment below. 
"Sandy?" 
"Yes," said Sandy downstairs. "What is it?" 
"I opened the door that bothered Pam," said Burke. Suddenly the implications of 
what had just occurred began to hit him. This was the clue he'd needed. Now he 
knew--many things. "I found out what the fortress is for. I suspect I know what 
the signals were intended to do." 
Silence for a moment. Then Sandy's voice. "I'm coming right up." 
In minutes she ascended the stairs. 
"What is it, Joe?" 
He waved his hand, with some grimness, at the small black object on the 
control-desk. 
"I found this and some thousands of others behind that creepy door. I suspect 
that it accounts for the absence of signs and symbols. It contains information. 
I got it. You get it by dozing near one of these things. I did. I dreamed." 
Sandy looked at him anxiously. 
"No," he told her. "No twin moons or waving foliage. I dreamed I was a member of 
the garrison. I went through a training drill. I know how to operate those big 
machines on the second level of the corridor, now. They're weapons. I know how 
to use them." 
Sandy's uneasiness visibly increased. 
"These black cubes are--lesson-givers. They're subliminal instructors. Pam is 
more sensitive to such stuff than the rest of us. It didn't affect me until I 
dozed. Then I found myself instructed by going through an experience in the form 
of a dream. These cubes contain records of experiences. You have those 
experiences. You dream them. You learn." 
Then he said abruptly, "I understand my recurrent dream now, I think. When I was 
eleven years old I had a cube like this. Don't ask me how it got into a 
Cro-Magnon cave! But I had it. One day it dropped and split into a million 
leaves of shiny stuff. One got away under my bed, close up under my pillow. When 
I slept I dreamed about a place with two moons and strange trees and--all the 
rest." 
Sandy said, groping, "Do you mean it was magnetized in some fashion, and when 
you slept you were affected by it so you dreamed something--predetermined?" 
"Exactly," said Burke grimly. "The predetermined thing in this particular cube 
is the way to operate those machines Holmes said were weapons." Then he said 
more grimly; "I think we're going to have to accept the idea that this cube is 
an instruction device to teach the garrison without their having to learn to 
read or write or think. They'd have only to dream." 
Sandy looked from him to the small black cube. 
"Then we can find out--" 
"I've found it out," said Burke. "I guessed before, but now I know. There is an 
Enemy this fortress was built to fight. There is a war that's lasted for 
thousands of years. The Enemy has spaceships and strange weapons and is 
absolutely implacable. It has to be found. And the signals from space were calls 
to the garrison of this fortress to come back and fight it. But there isn't any 
garrison any more. We answered instead. The Enemy comes from hundreds or 
thousands of light-years away, and he tries desperately to smash the defenses of 
this fortress and others, and when he succeeds there will be massacre and 
atrocity and death to celebrate his victory. He's on the way now. And when he 
comes--" Burke's voice grew harsh. "When he comes he won't stop with trying to 
smash this place. The people of Earth are the Enemy's enemies, too. Because the 
garrison was a garrison of men!" 
Chapter 8 
"I DON'T BELIEVE IT," said Holmes flatly. 
Burke shrugged. He found that he was tense all over, so he took some pains to 
appear wholly calm. 
"It isn't reasonable!" insisted Holmes. "It doesn't make sense!" 
"The question," observed Burke, "isn't whether it makes sense, but whether it's 
fact. According to the last word from Earth, they're still insisting that the 
ship's drive is against all reason. But we're here. And speaking of reason, 
would the average person look at this place and say blandly, 'Ah, yes! A 
fortress in space. To be sure!' Would they? Is this place reasonable?" 
Holmes grinned. 
"I'll go along with you there," he agreed. "It isn't. But you say its garrison 
was men. Look here! Have you seen a place before where men lived without 
writings in its public places? They tell me the ancient Egyptians wrote their 
names on the Sphinx and the Pyramids. Nowadays they're scrawled in phone booths 
and on benches. It's the instinct of men to autograph their surroundings. But 
there's not a line of written matter in this place! That's not like men!" 
"Again," said Burke, "the question isn't of normality, but of fact." 
"Then I'll try it," said Holmes skeptically. "How does it work?" 
"I don't know. But put a cube about a yard from your head, and doze off. I think 
you'll have an odd dream. I did. I think the information you'll get in your 
dream will check with what you find around you. Some of it you won't have known 
before, but you'll find it's true." 
"This," said Holmes, "I will have to see. Which cube do I try it with, or do I 
use all of them?" 
"There's apparently no way to tell what any of them contains," said Burke. "I 
went back to the storeroom and brought a dozen of them. Take any one and put the 
others some distance away--maybe outside the ship. I'm going to talk to Keller. 
He'll make a lot of use of this discovery." 
Holmes picked up a cube. 
"Ill try it," he said cheerfully. "I go to sleep, perchance to dream. Right! See 
you later." 
Burke moved toward the ship's air-lock. 
"Pam and I have some housekeeping to do," Sandy said. 
Burke nodded abstractedly. He left the ship and headed along the mile long 
corridor with the turn at the end, a second level and another turn, and then the 
flight of steps to the instrument-room. As he walked, the sound of his footsteps 
echoed and reechoed. 
Behind him, Holmes set a cube in a suitable position and curled up on one of the 
side-wall bunks in the upper compartment of the spaceship. 
`"We'll go downstairs," said Sandy. 
Pam parted her lips to speak, and did not. They disappeared down the stair to 
the lower room. Then Sandy came back and picked up the extra cubes. 
"Joe said to move them," she explained. 
She disappeared again. Holmes settled himself comfortably. He was one of those 
fortunate people who are able to relax at will. Actually, in his work he 
normally did his thinking while on his feet, moving about his yacht-building 
plant or else sailing one of his own boats. He simply was not a sit-down 
thinker. Sitting, he could doze at almost any time he pleased, and for a 
yachtsman it was a useful ability. He could go for days on snatched catnaps when 
necessary. Conversely he could catnap practically at will. 
He yawned once or twice and settled down confidently. In five minutes or less... 

He wriggled down into an opening barely large enough to admit his body. The top 
clamped and sealed overhead. He fitted his feet into their proper stirrup-like 
holders and fixed his hands on the controls. There was violent acceleration and 
he shot away and ahead. Behind him the jagged shape of the fortress loomed. He 
swung his tiny ship. He drove fiercely for the tiny rings of red glow which 
centered themselves in the sighting-screen before him. He drove and drove, while 
the fortress dwindled to a dot and then vanished. 
On either side of his ship a ten-foot steel globe clung. He checked them over, 
tense with the realization that he must very soon be within the practical 
timing-range of the new Enemy solid missiles. He made minute adjustments in the 
settings of the globes. 
He released them together. They went swinging madly away at the end of a 
hair-thin wire which would sustain the tons of stress that centrifugal force 
gave the spheres. They spiraled toward darkness with its background of 
innumerable stars. The Enemy would be puzzled, this time! They'd developed 
missile-weapons with computing sights. In their last attack, five hundred years 
before, the Enemy had been defeated by the self-driving globes that had an 
utterly incredible acceleration. It was reported from the Cathor sector that in 
this current attack they had missile-weapons with a muzzle-velocity of hundreds 
of miles per second, which could actually anticipate a globe with a 
hundred-sixty-gravity drive. They could fire a solid shot to meet it and knock 
it down, because of some incredible computer-system which was able to calculate 
a globe's trajectory and meet it in space. They were smart, the Enemy! 
The two globes went spinning toward the Enemy. Linked together, they spun round 
and round and no conceivable computer could calculate the path of either one so 
a projectile could hit. They did not travel in a straight line, as a trajectory 
in space should be. Whirling as they did around a common center of gravity, with 
the plane of their circling at a sharp angle to their line of fight, it was not 
possible to range them for gunfire. Their progress was in a series of curves, 
each at a different distance, which no mere calculator could solve without 
direction. A radar could not pick up the data a computer would need. One or the 
other globe might be hit, but it was far from likely. 
The pilot of the one-man ship saw the blue-white flame of a hit. He flung his 
ship about and sped back toward the fortress. The Enemy would beat this trick, 
in time. Four thousand years before they'd almost won, when they invaded the Old 
Nation. They were getting bolder now. There was a time when a sound beating sent 
them back beyond the Coalsack to lick their wounds for two thousand years or 
better. Lately they came more often. There'd been a raid in force only five 
hundred years back, and only fifteen before that... 

Holmes, obviously, had the odd dream Burke had prophesied. But Burke was up in 
the instrument-room by then. Keller gazed absorbedly at a vision-plate. It 
showed a section of the exterior surface of the asteroid--harsh, naked rock, 
with pitiless sunlight showing the grain and structure of the rock-crystals. 
Where there was shadow, the blackness was absolute. As Burke entered, Keller 
turned a knob. The image changed to a picture of a compartment inside the 
fortress. It was a part of the maze of rooms and galleries that none of the 
newcomers had visited. Panels and bus-bars and things which were plainly 
switches covered its walls. It was a power-distribution center. Keller turned 
the knob back, and the view of the outside of the asteroid returned. 
Keller turned and blinked at Burke, and then said happily, "Look!" 
He went to another vision-screen with an image of another part of the outer 
surface. He turned that knob, and the image dissolved into another. This was a 
gigantic room, lighted like more familiar places. In its center there was an 
enormous, gigantic machine. There were domes of metal, with great rods of 
silvery stuff reaching across emptiness between them. There were stairs by which 
one could climb to this part and that. Judging by the steps and the size of the 
light-tubes, the machine was the size of a four-storey house. And on the floor 
there were smaller machines, all motionless and all cryptic. 
Keller said with conviction, "Power!" 
Burke stared. Keller recovered the original view and went to still other plates. 
In succession, as he turned the knobs, Burke saw compartment after compartment. 
There was one quite as huge as the one containing the power-generating machine. 
It contained hemispheres bolted ten feet above the floor on many columns. There 
was a network of bus-bars, it seemed, overlying everything, and there were 
smaller devices on the floor below it. 
"Gravity!" said Keller with conviction. 
"Good enough," said Burke. "We've found something too, which may be useful with 
those machines. If we can--" 
Keller held up his hand and went to one special screen. When he changed the 
image, the new one was totally unlike any of the others. This was a close-up. It 
showed a clumsy, strictly improvised and definitely cobbled metal case against a 
wall. It had been made by inept hands. It was remarkable to see such indifferent 
workmanship here. But the really remarkable thing was that the face of the box 
contained an inscription, burned into the metal as if by a torch. The symbols 
had no meaning to Burke, of course. But this was an inscription in a written 
language. 
Keller rubbed his hands, beaming. 
"It could be a message for somebody who'd come later," said Burke. "It's hard to 
think of it being anything else. But it wasn't placed for us to find. It should 
have been set up beside the ship-lock we were expected to come in by and did 
come in by." 
"We'll see," said Keller zestfully. "Come on!" 
Burke followed him. Keller seemed somehow to know the way. They went all the way 
back to the ship-lock, passed it, and then Keller dived off to the right, down 
an unsuspected ramp. There were galleries running in every direction here, 
crossing each other and opening upon an indefinite number of what must have been 
storerooms. Presently Keller pointed. 
There was the case against the wall. It faced a wide corridor. It did not belong 
here. It was totally unlike any other artifact they had seen, because it seemed 
to have been made totally without skill. Yet there was an inscription--and the 
making of written records had appeared to be a skill the former occupants of the 
asteroid had not possessed. Keller very zestfully essayed to open it. He failed. 

Burke said, "We'll have to use tools to get it open." 
"Somebody made it," said Keller, "just before the garrison went away. They made 
it here!" 
"Quite likely," agreed Burke. "We'll get at it presently. Now listen, Keller! I 
came along because a message might be useful. I think Holmes has found out 
something, though what it may be I can't guess. Come along with me. There've 
been developments and I want to hold a council of war. And I think I do mean 
war!" 
He led the way back toward the ship. When they arrived, Holmes was awake and 
growling because of Burke's absence. 
"You win," he told Burke. "I had a dream, and it wasn't a dream. I know 
something about those metal globes. They've got drives in them, and they can 
accelerate to a hundred and sixty gees, and I don't think I'll ride one." 
Wryly, he told Burke what he'd experienced. 
"I'm not too much surprised," said Burke. "I've managed two cube-experiences 
myself. I figure that these cubes trained men to operate things, without 
training their brains in anything else. They'd make illiterates into skilled men 
in a particular line, so anybody could do the work a highly trained man would 
otherwise be needed for. In one of my two cube-dreams I was a gun-pointer on one 
of those machines up on the third level. In the second cube-dream I was a 
rocket-pilot." 
"No rockets in my cube," protested Holmes. 
"Different period," said Burke. "Maybe, anyhow. In my dream we were using 
rockets to fight with, and the war was close. The enemy had taken some planets 
off Kandu--wherever that is!--and the situation was bad. We went out of here in 
rockets and fought all over the sky. But then there were supplies coming from 
home, and fresh fighting men turning up." He stopped abruptly. "How'd they come? 
I don't know. But I know they didn't come in spaceships. They just came, and 
they were new men and we veterans patronized them. The devil! Holmes, you say 
the globes have a hundred-sixty-gee drive! Nobody'd use rockets if drives like 
that were known!" 
"To stay in the party," Sandy said suddenly, with something like defiance, "I 
tried a cube, too. And I was a sort of supply-officer. I had the experience of 
being responsible for supply and being short of everything and improvising this 
and that and the other to keep things up to fighting standard. It wasn't easy. 
The men grumbled, and we lacked everything. There was no fighting in my time, 
and there hadn't been for centuries. But we knew the Enemy hadn't given up and 
we had to be ready, generation after generation, even when nothing happened. And 
we knew that any minute the Enemy might throw something unexpected, some new 
weapon, at us." 
"History-cubes," said Keller interestedly. "Different periods. Right?" 
"Dammit, yes!" said Burke. "We've got accounts of past times and finished 
battles, but we need to know who's coming and what to do about it! Maybe the 
rocket-dream was earliest in time. But how could a race with nothing better than 
rockets ever get here? And how could they supply the building of a place like 
this?" 
There was no answer. Facts ought to fit together. When they don't, they are 
useless. 
"We've got snatches of information," said Burke. "But we don't know who built 
this fort, or why, except that there was a war that lasted thousands of years, 
with pauses for centuries between battles." He waved a hand irritably. "The 
Enemy tries to think up new weapons. They do. They try them. So far, they've 
been countered. But we're not prepared to fight a new weapon. Maybe the fort is 
set to battle old ones, but we don't know how to use it even for that! We've got 
to--" 
"I think--" began Keller. 
"I'd give plenty for a service manual on the probably useless weapons we do 
have," said Burke angrily. "Incidentally, Keller just found what may be an 
explanation of how and why this place was abandoned." 
Keller said suddenly, "Where would service manuals be?" 
He moved, almost running, toward the air-lock. Burke started to swear, and 
stopped. 
"A service-and-repair manual," he snapped, "would be near the equipment it 
described. How many little shelves with boxes on them have we seen? They're just 
the right size to hold cubes! And where are they? Next to those fighting 
machines next to the door of the room where the ten-foot globes are! There's a 
shelf of them in the instrument-room! Let's find out how to fight with this 
misbegotten shell of a space-fort! There'll be no help coming to us, but if the 
Enemy's held off for thousands of years while this civilization fell apart, we 
might as well try to hold it together for a few minutes or seconds longer! Let's 
go get some real instruction-cubes!" 
Keller was already gone. The others followed. Once they saw Keller in the far, 
far distance, hastening toward the instrument-room. Behind him, after almost 
running down the long corridor, Burke swung into the room where hundreds of 
ten-foot metal globes waited for the fortress to be re-manned and to go into 
action again. Inside the door he found the remembered shelf, with two small 
boxes fastened to it. He pulled down one box and opened it. There was a black 
cube inside it. He thrust it upon Holmes. 
"Here!" he said feverishly. "Find out how those globes work! Find out what's in 
them, how they drive!" 
He ran. To the end of the corridor and up the ramp and past the supposed 
bunk-rooms and mess-halls. Up to the level where the ugly metal machines stood, 
each in its separate cubicle. There were little shelves inside each door. Each 
shelf contained a single box. Burke took one, two, and then stopped short. 
"They'll be practically alike," he muttered. "No need." 
He put one back. And then he felt almost insanely angry. One would need at least 
to be able to doze, to make use of the detailed, vivid, and utterly convincing 
material contained in the black cubes. And how could any man doze or sleep for 
the purpose of learning such desperately needed data? He'd need almost not to 
want the information to be able to sleep to get it! 
Sandy and Pam overtook him as he stood in harried frustration with a black cube 
in his hands. 
"Listen to me, Joe," said Sandy. "We've all taken chances, but if you get 
recurrent dreams from every cube you doze near--" 
"When that happened to me," snapped Burke, "I was eleven years old and had one 
moment only. And that dream wasn't affected by the others in the cubes that came 
after it. And anyhow, no matter what happens to Holmes and me, we have to get 
these things ready for use! I don't know what we'll use them against. I don't 
know whether they'll be any use at all. But I've got to try to use them, so I've 
got to try to find out how!" 
Sandy opened her mouth to speak again. 
"I'm going off to fret myself to sleep," added Burke. "Holmes will be trying it 
too. And Keller." 
"I don't think it's necessary," said Sandy. 
"Why?" 
"You found a sort of library of cubes. How useful would they be if one had to 
doze off to read them? How handy would a manual about repairing a weapon be, if 
somebody had to take a nap to get instructions? It wouldn't make sense!" 
"Go on!" said Burke impatiently. 
"Why not look in the library?" asked Sandy. "As a quartermaster officer, I think 
I knew that there was a reading-device for the cubes, like a projector for 
microfilm. It might have been taken away, but also--" 
"Come along!" snapped Burke. "If that's so, it's everything! And it ought to be 
so!" 
They hastened to the vast, low-ceilinged room which was filled with racks of 
black cubes. They were stacked in their places. At the far corner they found a 
desk and a cabinet. In the cabinet they found two objects like metal skull-caps, 
with clamps atop them. A cube would fit between the clamps. Burke feverishly sat 
a cube in position and put the skull-cap on his head. His expression was 
strange. After an instant he took it off and reversed the cube. He put it on. 
His face cleared. He lifted it off. 
"I had it on backwards the first time," he said curtly. "This is better than 
dreaming the stuff. This lets you examine things in detail. You know you're 
receiving something. You don't think you're actually experiencing. We'll get 
this other reading-machine to Keller, so he can understand the equipment in the 
instrument-room. Holmes will have to wait." 
Sandy said, "I can use him. Doesn't it occur to you, Joe, that we've only partly 
explored the top half of the fortress? We've only looked at what's between us 
and the instrument-room. There are all the stores--there were stores! And the 
generators down below. I can lead the way there now!" 
"What do you know about the weapons?" demanded Burke. 
"Nothing," said Sandy. "But I know something about the morale of the garrison. 
When grumbling began, discipline tightened up. And that worked for the men, but 
the women--" 
"Women!" said Pam incredulously. 
"They were an experiment," Sandy told her, "to see if they would content men on 
duty in an outpost. It'd been going on for only a few hundred years. It didn't 
seem to work too well. They wanted supplies that weren't exactly military, and 
at the time the cube I used was made, there was trouble getting even military 
things!" 
Burke said impatiently, "I'll get one of these things to Keller. That's the most 
important thing. Tell Holmes not to try to sleep. Take him down to look over the 
supplies, if there are any. I'd guess that the garrison took most of them along. 
I doubt there's much left that we could use." 
He made his way out of the cube-library and vanished. 
Pam said uncomfortably, "Joe dreamed about a woman and is no good to you, in 
consequence. If there were women in this garrison, using the cubes might make 
anybody--" 
Sandy tensed her lips. 
"I don't think Joe is thinking about his old dream. Something deadly's on the 
way here. His mind's on that. I suspect all three of the men are concentrating 
on it. They're in no mood for romance." 
"Don't you think I've noticed?" Pam said gloomily. "But I'm coming with you when 
you show him the storerooms!" 
The "him" was obviously Holmes, whose attention had been so much taken up by the 
problems the fortress presented that Pam felt pushed much farther on the side 
lines than she liked. It was one thing to be present to watch and help and cheer 
on a man who planned to do something remarkable. But it was less satisfying when 
he became so absorbed that he didn't notice being watched, and couldn't be 
helped, and didn't need to be cheered on. Pam was disgruntled. 
Then, for a considerable number of hours, absurdly trivial activities seemed to 
occupy all the people in the asteroid. Burke and Keller sat in the thirty by 
thirty-foot instrument-room, each wearing a small metal half-cap with a black 
cube held atop it between a pair of clamps. Their expressions were absorbed and 
intent, while they seemed attired for a children's halloween party. Now and 
again one of them exchanged one cube for another. About them there was a 
multiplicity of television screens, each screen presenting a picture of 
infinitely perfect quality. Every square foot of the outside of the asteroid 
could be seen on one or another of the screens. Then, besides, there were banks 
of screens which showed every square degree of the sky, with every star of every 
magnitude represented so that one could use a magnifying glass upon the screen 
to discover finer detail. 
Once, during the hours when Burke and Keller were sitting quite still, Keller 
reached over and threw a switch. Nothing happened. Everything went on exactly as 
it had done before. He shook his head. And much later he went to one of the 
star-image screens. He moved an inconspicuous knob in a special fashion, and the 
star-image expanded and expanded until what had been a second of arc or less 
filled all the screen's surface. The effect of an incredibly powerful telescope 
was obtained by the movement of one control. Keller restored the knob to its 
original place and the image returned to its former scale. These were the only 
actions which took place in the instrument-room. 
In the lower part of the asteroid, not much more occurred. The entrance to the 
power and storage areas was not hidden. It simply had not been entered. Sandy 
and Holmes and Pam went gingerly down a corridor with doors on either side, and 
then down a ramp, and then into huge caverns filled with monstrous metal things. 
There was no sign of any motion anywhere, but gigantic power-leads led from the 
machines to massive switchboards, whose switches were thrown by relays operated 
from somewhere else. 
Then there were other caverns which must have contained many varieties of 
stores. There were great cases, broken open and emptied. There were bins with 
only dust at their bottoms. There were shelves containing things which might 
have been textiles, but which crumbled at a touch. Some thousands of years in an 
absolute vacuum would have evaporated any substance giving any degree of 
flexibility. These objects were useless. There was a great room with a singular 
hundred-foot-high machine in it, but there was no vibration or sound to indicate 
that it was in operation. This, Sandy said decisively, was the 
artificial-gravity generator. She did not know how it worked. It would have been 
indiscreet to experiment. 
She led the way through relatively small corridors to areas in which there were 
very many small compartments. These had been for foodstuffs. But they were 
empty. They had been emptied when the asteroid was abandoned. 
Then they came to the crudely fashioned case with the cryptic symbols on its 
front. 
"This is the thing Joe mentioned," said Sandy. "They had writing. They'd have 
to, to be civilized. But this is the only writing we've seen. Why'd they write 
it?" 
"To tell somebody something they'd miss, otherwise," Pam said. 
"Who'd come down here? Why not put it at the ship-lock where people could be 
expected to come?" 
Holmes grunted. "Asking questions like that gets nowhere. It's like asking how 
the garrison was supplied. There's no answer. Or how it left." 
Sandy said in a surprised voice, as if saying something she hadn't realized she 
knew. "There were service ships. They serviced the television eyes on the 
outside, and they drilled at launching missiles, and so on. They were modified 
fighting ships, made over after ships didn't fight any more." 
She hesitated, then went on. 
"It's odd that I didn't think of telling Joe this! Some of the food supply came 
from Earth at the time my cube was made. As a quartermaster officer, I was 
authorized to allow hunting on Earth in case of need. So the service-ships went 
to Earth and came back with mammoths tied to the outside of their hulls. They 
had to be re-hydrated, though. Frozen though they were, they dried out in the 
long trip through vacuum from Earth." 
Then she shivered a little. 
Pam looked at her strangely. Holmes raised his eyebrows. He'd had one experience 
of training-cubes. Sandy'd had quite another. Holmes felt that instinctive 
slight resentment a man feels when he lacks a position of authority in the 
presence of a woman. 
"In my time--in the cube's time--there was even a hunting camp on Earth. 
Otherwise there simply wouldn't be enough to eat! Women were clamoring to be 
sent to Earth to help with the food supply. To be sent to hunt for food was a 
reward for exemplary service." 
"Which is interesting," observed Holmes, "but irrelevant. How was the asteroid 
normally supplied? How did the garrison leave? Where did it come from? Where did 
it go? Maybe the answer's in this box. If it is," he added, "it'll be in the 
same language as the inscription, and we can't read it." 
Archaeologists on Earth would have been enraptured by any part of the fortress, 
but anything which promised to explain as much as Holmes had guessed the case 
could, would be a treasure past any price. 
But the five people in the asteroid had much more immediate and much more urgent 
problems to think of. They went on a little farther and came to a storeroom 
which had been filled with something, but now held only the remains of 
packing-cases. They looked ready to crumble if touched. 
"There used to be weapons stored here," Sandy said. "Hand-weapons. Not for the 
defense of the fortress, but for the--discipline police. For the men who kept 
the others obedient to orders." 
"I'd be glad to have one operating pea-shooter," said Holmes. 
Pam wrinkled her nose suddenly. She'd noticed something. 
"I think--" she began, "I think--" 
Holmes kicked at a shape which once was probably a case of wood or something 
similar. It collapsed into impalpable dust. It had dried out to absolute 
desiccation. It was stripped of every molecule which could be extracted by a 
total vacuum in thousands of years. It was brittle past imagining. 
The collapse did not end with the object kicked. It spread. One case bulged as 
the support of another failed. The bulged case disintegrated. Its particles 
pressed on another. The dissolution spread fanwise until nothing remained but a 
carpeting of infinitely fine brown stuff. In one place, however, solid objects 
remained under the covering. 
Holmes waded through the powder to the solid things. He brought them up. A case 
of hand-weapons had collapsed, but the weapons themselves kept their shape. They 
had transparent plastic barrels with curiously formed metal parts inside them. 
"These might be looked into," said Holmes. 
He stuffed his pockets. The hand-weapons had barrels and handgrips and triggers. 
They were made to shoot, somehow. 
"I think--" began Pam again. 
"Don't," growled Holmes. "Maybe Sandy remembers when this place was different, 
but I've had enough of it as it is. Let's go back to the ship and some fresh 
air." 
"But that's what--" 
Holmes turned away. Like the rest, he'd accepted great age, mentally, as a part 
of the nature of the fortress. But the collapse of emptied shipping-cases 
because they were touched was a shock. Where such decay existed, one could not 
hope to find anything useful for a modern emergency. He vanished. 
Pam was indignant. She turned to Sandy. 
"I wanted to say that I smelled fresh air," she protested. "And he acts like 
that!" 
Sandy was not listening. She frowned. 
"He could lose his way down here," she said shortly. "We'd better keep him in 
sight. I remember the way from my dream," 
They followed Holmes, who did make his way back to the upper levels and 
ultimately to the ship without guidance. But Pam was intensely indignant. 
"We could have gotten lost down there!" she said angrily when they were back in 
familiar territory. "And he wouldn't have cared! And I did smell fresh air! Not 
very fresh, but fresher than the aged and dried-out stuff we're breathing now!" 
"You couldn't," said Sandy practically. "There simply couldn't be any, except in 
the ship where the hydroponic wall-gardens keep it fresh." 
"But I did!" insisted Pam. 
Sandy shrugged. They went into the ship, which Holmes had already reached and 
where he sat gloomily beside a black cube. He would have to sleep to get 
anything from it. There were only two of the freakish-seeming metal caps which 
made the cubes intelligible to a man awake, and Burke and Keller were using 
them. Holmes felt offended. 
Sandy looked at a clock and began to prepare a meal. Pam, brooding, helped her. 
Burke and Keller came back to the ship together. Keller looked pale. Burke 
seemed utterly grim. 
"There's some stuff to be coded and sent back to Earth," he told Sandy. 
"Keller's got it written out. We know how to work the instruments up above, now. 
My brain's reeling a little, but I think I'll stay sane. Keller takes it in 
stride. And we know the trick the Enemy has." 
Sandy put out plates for five. 
"What is it?" 
"Gravity," said Burke, evenly. "Artificial gravity. We don't know how to make 
it, but the people who built this fortress did, and the Enemy does. So they've 
made artificial-gravity fields to give their ships the seeming mass of suns, and 
they've set them in close omits around each other. They'll come spinning into 
this solar system. What will happen when objects with the mass of 
suns--artificial or otherwise--come riding through between our sun and its 
planets? There'll be tidal stresses to crack the planets and let out their 
internal fires. There'll be no stability left in the sun. Maybe it'll be a 
low-grade nova when they've gone, surrounded by trash that once was worlds. 
Anyhow there'll be no humans left! And then the Enemy will go driving on toward 
the other solar systems that the builders of this fortress own. They can't 
conquer anything with a weapon like that, but they can surely destroy!" 
Keller nodded distressedly. He gave Pam a number of sheets of paper, filled with 
his neat handwriting. 
He said sorrowfully, "For Earth. In code." 
Sandy served the meal she had prepared. 
"It's a matter of days," said Burke curtly. "Not weeks. Just days." 
He picked up a fork and began his meal. 
"So," he said after a moment, with a sort of unnatural calm, "we've got to get 
the thing licked fast. Up in the instrument-room there are some 
theory-cubes--lectures on theories with which the operators of the room were 
probably required to be familiar. They were intended to figure out what the 
Enemy might come up with, so it could at least he reported before the fortress 
was destroyed. The trick of sun-gravity fields was suggested as possible, but it 
seemed preposterously difficult. Apparently, it was. It took the Enemy some 
thousands of years to get it. But they've got it, all right!" 
"How do you know?" demanded Holmes. 
"The disk with the red sparks in it," said Burke, "is a detector of 
gravity-fields. It sees by gravity, which is not radiation. Keller's sending 
instructions back to Earth telling how to make such detectors." 
He busied himself with his food once more. After a moment he spoke again, 
"We're going to try to get some help," he observed. "At least we'll try to find 
out if there's any help to be had. I think there's a chance. There was a 
civilization which built this fortress. Something happened to it. Perhaps it 
simply collapsed, like Rome and Greece and Egypt and Babylonia back on Earth. 
But on Earth when an old civilization died a new, young one rose in its place. 
If the one that built this fort collapsed, maybe a new one has risen in its 
stead. If so, it will need to defend itself against the Enemy just like the old 
culture did. It might prefer to do its fighting here, instead of in its own 
land. I think we may be able to contact it." 
"How'll you look for them?" 
Burke shrugged. 
"I've some faint hope of a few directions in that sealed-up metal case with the 
inscription on it. I'm going to take some tools and break into it. It's a 
gamble, but there's nothing to lose." 
He ate briskly, with a good appetite. Sandy was very silent. 
Pam said abruptly, "We saw that case. And I smelled fresh air there. Not pure 
air like here in the ship, but not dead air like the air everywhere else." 
"Near a power generator, Pam, there'd be some ozone," Holmes said patiently. "It 
makes a lot of difference." 
"It wasn't ozone," said Pam firmly. "It was fresh air. Not canned air. Fresh!" 
Holmes looked at Burke. 
"Did you or Keller find out how the air's refreshed here? Did anybody throw a 
switch for air apparatus?" 
Keller said mildly, "Apparatus, no. Air exchange, yes. I threw switches also for 
communication with base. Also emergency communication. Also dire emergency. 
Nothing happened." 
"You see, Pam?" said Holmes. "It was ozone that made the air smell fresh." 
Sandy was wholly silent until the meal was over. Then Holmes went moodily off 
with Keller, to use the cube-reading devices in the instrument-room and try to 
find, against all apparent probability, some clue or some communication which 
would enable something useful to be done. Holmes was trying hard to believe that 
things were not as bad as Burke announced, and not nearly so desperate that they 
had to try to find the descendants of a long-vanished civilization for a chance 
to offer resistance to the Enemy. 
Keller said confidentially, just before they reached the instrument-room, 
"Burke's an optimist." 
And at that moment, back in the little plastic spaceship, Burke was saying to 
Sandy, "You can come along if you like. There are a couple of things to be 
looked into. And if you want to come, Pam--" 
But Pam touched the papers Keller had given her and said reservedly, "I'll code 
and send this stuff. Go ahead, Sandy." 
Sandy rose. She followed Burke out of the ship. She was acutely aware that this 
was the first time since they had entered the ship that she and Burke could 
speak to each other when nobody could overhear. They'd spoken twice when the 
others were presumably asleep. But this was the first time they'd been alone. 
When they'd passed through the door with the rounded corners, they were 
completely isolated. Overhead, brilliant light-tubes reached a full mile down 
the gallery in one direction, and half as far in the other. The vast corridor 
contained nothing to make a sound but themselves. 
"It's this way," said Burke. 
Sandy knew the way as well as he did, or better, but she accepted his direction. 
Their footsteps echoed and reechoed, so that they were accompanied by countless 
reflections of heel-clicks along with the normal rustling and whispering sounds 
of walking. 
They went a full quarter-mile from the ship-lock door, and came to a very large 
arched opening which gave entrance to a corridor slanting downward. 
"Supplies came up this ramp," said Sandy. 
It was a statement which should have been startling, but Burke nodded. 
Sandy went on, carefully, "That cube about a supply-officer's duties was pretty 
explicit. Things were getting difficult." 
Burke did not seem to hear. They went on and on. They came to the place where 
Keller had turned aside. Burke silently indicated the turning. They moved along 
this other gallery. 
"Joe," said Sandy pleadingly. "Is it really so bad?" 
"Strictly speaking, I don't see a chance. But that's just the way it looks now. 
There must be something that can be done. The trick is to find it. Meantime, why 
panic?" 
"You--act queer," protested Sandy. 
"I feel queer," he said. "I know various ways to approach problems. None of them 
apply to this one. You see, it isn't really our problem. We're innocent 
bystanders, without information about the situation that apparently will kill us 
and everybody back on Earth. If we knew more about the situation, we might find 
some part of it that could be tackled, changed. There may be something in this 
case--perhaps a message left by the garrison for the people who sent them here. 
I can't see why it'd be placed here, though." 
He slowed, looking down one cross-gallery after another. 
"Here it is." 
They'd come to the clumsily-made case with the inscription on it. It was placed 
against the wall of a corridor, facing the length of another gallery which came 
from the side at this point. A little distance down the other passage, the line 
of doors was broken by an archway which gave upon a hewed-out compartment. The 
opening was wide enough to show a fragment of a metal floor. There was no sign 
of any contents. Other compartments nearby were empty. The placing of the 
inscribed box was inexplicable. But the inscription was sharply clear. 
"Maybe," suggested Sandy forlornly, "it says something like `Explosives! 
Danger!' " 
"Not likely," said Burke. 
He'd examined the box before. He'd brought along a tool suited to the job of 
opening it. He set to work, then stopped. 
"Sandy," he said abruptly, "I think the gravity-generator's a couple of 
corridors in that direction. Will you look and see if there are any tools there 
that might be better than this? Just look for a place where tools might be 
stored. If you find something, call me." 
She went obediently down the lighted, excavated corridor, She reached the vast 
cavern. Here there were myriad tube-lights glowing in the ceiling--and the 
gravity machine. It was gigantic. It was six storeys high and completely 
mysterious. 
She looked with careful intentness for a place where tools might have been kept 
by the machine's attendants. 
She saw movement out of the corner of her eye, but when she turned there was 
nothing. There could be no movement in the fortress unless by machinery or one 
of the five humans who'd come so recently. The asteroid had been airless for ten 
thousand years. It was unthinkable that anything alive, even a microbe, could 
have survived. So Sandy did not think of a living thing as having made the 
movement. But movement there had been. 
She stared. There were totally motionless machines all about. None of them 
showed any sign of stirring. Sandy swallowed the ache in her throat and it 
returned instantly. She moved, to look where the movement had been. She glanced 
at each machine in turn. One might have made some automatic adjustment. She'd 
tell Burke. 
She passed a fifteen-foot-high assembly of insulators and bright metal, 
connected overhead to other cryptic things by heavy silvery bars. She passed a 
cylinder with dials in its sides. 
She saw movement again. In a different place. She spun around to look. 
Something half the height of a man, with bird-legs and feet and swollen plumage 
and a head with an oversized beak which was pure caricature--something alive and 
frightened fled from her. It waddled in ridiculous, panicky haste. It flapped 
useless stumps of wings. It fled in terrified silence. It vanished. 
The first thing that occurred to Sandy was that Burke wouldn't believe her if 
she told him. 
Chapter 9 
BURKE FOUND HER, rooted to the spot. He had a small metal box in his hand. He 
didn't notice her pallor nor that she trembled. 
"I may have something," he said with careful calm. "The case had this in it. 
There's a black cube in the box. The case seems to have been made to hold and 
call attention to this cube. I'll take it up to the instrument-room and use a 
reader on it." 
He led the way. Sandy followed, her throat dry. She knew, of course, that he was 
under almost intolerable emotional strain. He'd brought her along to be with her 
for a few moments, but he was so tense that he could think of nothing personal 
to say. Now it was not possible for him to talk of anything at all. 
Yet Sandy realized that even under the stress that pressed upon him, he'd asked 
her to go look for tools in the gravity-machine room because she'd spoken of 
possible danger in the opening of the case. He'd gotten her away while he opened 
it. 
When they reached the ship-lock he said briefly, "I want to hurry, Sandy. Wait 
for me in the ship?" 
She nodded, and went to the small spacecraft which had brought them all from 
Earth. 
When she saw Pam, inside, she said shakily, "Is--anybody else here?" 
"No," said Pam. "Why?" 
Sandy sat down and shivered. 
"I think," she said through chattering teeth, "I think I'm going to have 
hysterics. L-listen, Pam! I--I saw something alive! It was like a bird this high 
and big as a--There aren't any birds like that! There can't be anything alive 
here but us! But I saw it! And it saw me and ran away!" 
Pam stared and asked questions, at first soothing ones. But presently she was 
saying indignantly, "I do believe it! That's near the place where I smelled 
fresh air!" 
Of course, fresh air in the asteroid, two hundred and seventy million miles from 
Earth, was as impossible as what Sandy had seen. 
Holmes came in presently, depressed and tired. He'd been filling his mind with 
the contents of black cubes. He knew how cooking was done in the kitchens of the 
fortress, some eons since. He knew how to prepare for inspection of the asteroid 
by a high-ranking officer. He was fully conversant with the bugle-calls once 
used in the fortress in the place of a public-address loud-speaker system. But 
he'd found no hint of how the fortress received its supplies, nor how the air 
was freshened, nor how reinforcements of men used to reach the asteroid. He was 
discouraged and vexed and weary. 
"Sandy," said Pam challengingly, "saw a live bird, bigger than a goose, in the 
gravity-machine room." 
Holmes shrugged. 
"Keller's fidgeting," he observed, "because he thinks he's seen movements in the 
vision-plates that show different inside views of this thing. But he isn't sure 
that he's seen anything move. Maybe we're all going out of our minds." 
"Then Joe's closest," said Pam darkly. "He worries about Sandy!" 
"And very reasonably," said Holmes tiredly. "Pam, this business of figuring that 
there's something deadly on the way and nothing to do about it--it's got me 
down!" 
He slumped in a chair. Pam frowned at him. Sandy sat perfectly still, her hands 
clenched. 
Burke came back twenty minutes later. His expression was studiedly calm. 
"I've found out where the garrison went," he said matter-of-factly. "I'm afraid 
we can't get any help from them. Or anybody else." 
Sandy looked at him mutely, He was completely self-controlled, and he did not 
look like a man resolutely refusing to despair, but Sandy knew him. To her it 
seemed that his eyes had sunk a little in his head. 
"Apparently there's nobody left on the world the garrison came from," said Burke 
in the tone of someone saying perfectly commonplace things, "so they didn't go 
back there and there's no use in our trying to make a contact with that world. 
This was an outpost fortress, you know. It was reached from somewhere far away, 
and carved out and armed to fight an enemy that didn't attack it for itself, but 
to get at the world or worlds that made it." 
He continued with immoderate calm, "I believe the home world of that 
civilization has two moons in its sky and something off at the horizon that 
looks like a hill, but isn't." 
"But--" 
"The garrison left," explained Burke, "because it was abandoned. It was left 
behind to stand off the Enemy, and the civilization it belonged to moved away. 
It was left without supplies, without equipment, without hope. It was left 
behind even without training to face abandonment, because its members had been 
trained by black cubes and only knew how to do their own highly special jobs by 
rote. They were just ordinary soldiers, like the Roman detachments left behind 
when the legions marched south from Hadrian's Wall and sailed for Gaul. So when 
there was nothing left for them to do but leave their post or starve--because 
they couldn't follow the civilization that had abandoned them--they left. The 
cube in the box was a message they set up for their former rulers and 
fellow-citizens if they ever returned. It's not a pretty message!" 
Sandy swallowed. 
"Where'd they go? What happened to them?" 
`They went to Earth," said Burke tonelessly. "By twos and fives and dozens, in 
the service ships that came out with meat, and took back passengers. The service 
ships had been assigned to bring out what meat the hunting-parties could kill. 
They took back men who were fighters and ready to face mammoths or sabre tooth 
tigers or anything else. Just the same, they left a transmitter to call them 
back if the Enemy over came again. But it didn't come in their lifetimes, and 
their descendants forgot. But the transmitter remembered. It called to them. 
And--we were the ones to answer!" 
Sandy hesitated a moment. 
"But if the garrison went to Earth," she said dubiously, "what became of them? 
There aren't any traces--" 
"We're traces," said Burke. "They were our ancestors of ten or twenty thousand 
years ago. They couldn't build a civilization. They were fighting men! Could the 
Romans left behind at Hadrian's Wall keep up the culture of Rome? Of course not! 
The garrison went to Earth and turned savage, and their children's children's 
children built up a new civilization. And for here and for now, we're it. We've 
got to face the Enemy and drive him back." 
He stopped, and said in a tone that was almost completely steady and held no 
hint of despair, "It's going to be quite a job. But it's an emergency. We've got 
to manage it somehow." 
There was also an emergency on Earth, not simplified as in space by having 
somebody like Burke accept the burden of meeting it. The emergency stemmed from 
the fact that despite the best efforts of the air arm of the United States, 
Burke and the others had gotten out to space. They'd reached the asteroid M-387. 
Naturally. The United States thereupon took credit for this most creditable 
achievement. Inevitably. And it was instantly and frantically denounced for 
suspected space-imperialism, space-monopoly, and intended space-exploitation. 
But when Keller's painstaking instructions for the building of gravity-field 
detectors reached Earth, these suspicions seemed less plausible. The United 
States passed on the instructions. The basic principle was so new that nobody 
could claim it, but it was so simple that many men felt a wholesome shame that 
they had not thought of it before. Nobody could question a natural law which was 
so obvious once it was stated. And the building of the device required next to 
no time at all. 
Within days then, where the asteroid had a single ten-foot instrument, the 
United States had a ten-foot, a thirty-foot and a sixty-foot gravity-field 
detector available to qualified researchers. The new instruments gave data such 
as no astronomer had ever hoped for before. The thirty-foot disk, tuned for 
short range, pictured every gravitational field in the solar system. A 
previously unguessed-at Saturnian moon, hidden in the outer ring, turned up. All 
the asteroids could be located at one instant. The mystery of the inadequate 
mass of Pluto was solved within hours of turning on the thirty-foot device. 
When the sixty-foot instrument went on, scaled to take in half a hundred 
light-years of space, the solar system was a dot on it. But four dark stars, one 
with planets, and twenty-odd planetary systems were mapped within a day. On that 
same day, though, a query went back to Keller. What, said the query, was the 
meaning of certain crawling, bright-red specks in mathematically exact 
relationship to each other, which were visibly in motion and much closer to 
Earth than Alpha Centaurus? Alpha Centaurus had always been considered the 
closest of all stars to Earth. Under magnification the bright-red sparks wove 
and interwove their paths as if about a common center of gravity. If such a 
thing were not impossible, it would be guessed that they were suns so close 
together as to revolve about one another within hours. Even more preposterously, 
they moved through space at a rate which was a multiple of the speed of light. 
Thirty light-speeds, of course, could not be. And the direction of their motion 
seemed to be directly toward the glowings which represented the solar system 
containing Earth. All this was plainly absurd. But what was the cause of this 
erroneous report from the new device? 
Keller wrote out very neatly, "The instrument here shows the same phenomenon. 
Its appearance much farther away triggered the transmitter here to send the 
first signals to Earth. Data suggests red dots represent artificial 
gravity-fields Wrong enough to warp space and produce new spatial constants 
including higher speed for light, hence possible higher speed for spacecraft 
carrying artificial gravity generators. Request evaluation this possibility." 
Pam coded it and sent it to Earth. And presently, on Earth, astronomers looked 
at each other helplessly. Because Keller had stated the only possible 
explanation. Objects like real sums, if so close together, would tear each other 
to bits and fuse in flaming novas. Moreover, the pattern of motion of the 
red-spark-producing objects could not have come into being of itself. It was 
artificial. There was a group of Things in motion toward Earth's solar system. 
They would arrive within so many days. They were millions of miles apart, but 
their gravity-fields were so strong that they orbited each other within hours. 
If they had gravity-fields, they had mass, which could be as artificial as their 
gravity. And, whirling about each other in the maddest of dances, ten suns 
passing through the human solar system could leave nothing but debris behind 
them. 
Oddly enough, the ships that made those gravity-fields might be so small as to 
be beyond the power of a telescope to detect at a few thousand miles. The 
destruction of all the solar planets and the sun itself might be accomplished by 
motes. They would not need to use power for destruction. Gravitation is not 
expended any more than magnetism, when something is attracted by it. The 
artificial gravity-fields would only need to be built up. They had been. Once 
created, they could exist forever without need for added power, just as the san 
and planets do not expend power for their mutual attraction, and as the Earth 
parts with no energy to keep its moon a captive. 
The newspapers did not publish this news. But, very quietly, every civilized 
government on Earth got instructions for the making of a gravity-field detector. 
Most had them built. And then for the first time in human history there was an 
actual and desperately honest attempt to pool all human knowledge and all human 
resources for a common human end. For once, no eminent figure assumed the 
undignified pose involved in standing on one's dignity. For once, the public 
remained unworried and undisturbed while the heads of states aged visibly. 
Naturally some of the people in the secret frantically demanded that the five in 
the fortress solve the problem all the science of Earth could not even attack. 
Incredible lists of required information items went out to Burke and Keller and 
Holmes. Keller read the lists calmly and tried to answer the questions that 
seemed to make sense. Holmes doggedly spent all his time experiencing cubes in 
the hope that by sheer accident he might come upon something useful. Pam, 
scowling, coded and decoded without pause. And Sandy looked anxiously at Burke. 
"I'm going to ask you to do something for me," she said. "When we went down to 
the Lower Levels, I thought I saw something moving. Something alive." 
"Nerves," said Burke. "There couldn't be anything alive in this place. Not after 
so many years without air." 
"I know," acknowledged Sandy. "I know it's ridiculous. But Pam's felt creepy, 
too, as if there were something deadly somewhere in the rooms we've never been 
in." 
Burke moved his head impatiently. "Well?" 
"Holmes found some hand-weapons," said Sandy. "They don't work, of course. Will 
you fix one for Pam and one for me so that they do?" She paused and added, "Of 
course it doesn't matter whether we're frightened or not, considering. It 
doesn't even matter whether there is something alive. It doesn't matter if we're 
killed. But it would be pleasant not to feel defenseless," 
Burke shrugged. "I'll fix them." 
She put three of the transparent-barreled weapons before him and said, "I'm 
going up to the instrument-room and help Pam with her coding." 
She went out. Burke took the three hand-weapons and looked at them without 
interest. But in a technician of any sort there is always some response to a 
technical problem. A trivial thing like a hand-weapon out of order could hold 
Burke's attention simply because it did not refer to the coming disaster. 
He loosened the hand-grip plates and looked at the completely simple devices 
inside the weapons. There was a tiny battery, of course. In thousands of years 
its electrolyte had evaporated. Burke replaced it from the water stores of the 
ship. He did the same to the other two weapons. Then, curious, he stepped out of 
the ship's air-lock and aimed at the ship-lock wall. He pressed the trigger. 
There was a snapping sound and a fragment of rock fell. He tried the others. 
They fired something, It was not a bullet. The barrels of the weapons, on 
inspection, were not hollow. They were solid. The weapons fired a thrust, a 
push, an immaterial blow which was concentrated on a tiny spot. They punched, 
with nothing solid to do the punching. 
"Probably punch a hale right through a man," said Burke, reflectively. 
He took the three weapons and went toward the instrument-room. On the way, his 
mind went automatically back to the coming destruction. It was completely 
arbitrary. The Enemy had no reason to destroy the human race in this solar 
system. Men, here, had lost all recollection of their origin and assuredly all 
memory of enmities known before memory began. If any tradition remained of the 
fortress, even, it would be hidden in tales of a Golden Age before Pandora was, 
or of an Age of Innocence when all things came without effort. Those stories 
wore changed out of all semblance to their foundations, of course, as 
ever-more-ignorant and ever-more-unsophisticated generations retold them. 
Perhaps the Golden Age was a garbled memory of a time when machines performed 
tasks for men--before the machines wore out and could not be replaced without 
other machines to make them. Perhaps the slow development of tools, with which 
men did things that machines formerly did for them, blurred the accounts of 
times when men did not need to use tools. Even the everywhere-present traditions 
of a long, long journey in a boat--the flood legends--might be the last trace of 
grand-sires' yarns about a journey to Earth. It would have been modified by 
successive generations who could not imagine a journey through emptiness, and 
therefore devised a flood as a more scientific and reasonable explanation for 
myths plainly overlaid with fantasy and superstition. 
Burke went into the instrument room as Sandy was asking, "But how did they? We 
haven't found any ship-lock except the one we came in by! And if a ship can't 
travel faster than light without wrapping artificial mass about itself..." 
Holmes had taken off his helmet. He said doggedly, "There's nothing about ships 
in the cubes. Anyhow, the nearest other sun is four light-years away. Nobody'd 
try to carry all the food a whole colony would need from as far away as that! If 
they'd used ships for supply, there'd have been hydroponic gardens all over the 
place to ease the load the ships had to carry! There was some other way to get 
stuff here!" 
"Whatever it was, it didn't bring meat from Earth. That was hauled out, fastened 
to the outside of service-boats." 
"Another thing," Holmes said. "There were thousands of people in the garrison, 
here. How did the air get renewed? Nobody's found any mention of air-purifying 
apparatus in the cubes. There's been no sign of any! An emergency air-supply, 
yes. It was let loose when we came into the ship-lock. But there's no regular 
provision for purifying the air and putting oxygen into it and breaking down the 
CO2!" 
"Won't anyone believe I smelled fresh air yesterday?" Pam asked plaintively. 
No one commented. It could not be believed. Burke handed Sandy one of the 
weapons. He gave Pam a second. 
"They work very much like the ship-drive, which was developed from them. A 
battery in the handle energizes them so they use the heat they contain to make a 
lethal punch without a kick-back. They'll get pretty cold after a dozen or so 
shots." 
He sat down and Holmes went on almost angrily, "The garrison had to get food 
here. It didn't come in ships. They had to purify the air. They've nothing to do 
it with! How did they manage?" 
Keller smiled faintly. He pointed to a control on the wall. 
"If that worked, we could ask. It is supposed to be communication with base. It 
is turned on. Nothing happens." 
"Do you know what I'm thinking?" demanded Holmes. "I'm thinking of a 
matter-transmitter! It's been pointed out before that we'll never reach the 
stars in spaceships limited to one light-speed. What good would be voyages that 
lasted ten, twenty, or fifty years each way? But if there could be 
matter-transmitters--" 
Keller said gently, "Transmitters, no. Transposers, yes." 
It was a familiar enough distinction. To break down an object into electric 
charges and reconstitute it at some distant place would be a self-defeating 
operation. It could have no actual value. To transmit a hundred and fifty pounds 
of electric energy--the weight of a man converted into current--would require 
the mightiest of bus-bars for a conductor, and months of time if it was not to 
burn out from overload. The actual transmission of mass as electric energy would 
be absurd. But if an object could simply be transposed from one place to 
another; if it could be translated from place to place; if it could undergo 
substitution of surroundings... That would be a different matter! Transposition 
would be instantaneous. Translation would require no time. Substitution of 
position--a man who was here this instant would be there the next--would have no 
temporal aspect. Such a development would make anything possible. A ship might 
undertake a voyage to last a century. If a matter-transposer were a part of it, 
it could be supplied with fuel and air and foodstuffs on its voyage. Its crew 
could be relieved and exchanged whenever it was desired. And when it made a 
planet-fall a hundred years and more from home, why, home would still be just 
around the transposer. With matter-transposition an interstellar civilization 
could arise and thrive, even though limited to the speed of light for its ships. 
But a culture spread over hundreds of light-years would be unthinkable without 
something permitting instant communication between its parts. 
"All right!" said Holmes doggedly. "Call them transposers! This fortress had to 
be supplied. We've found no sign that ships were used to supply it. It needed to 
have its air renewed and refreshed. We've found no sign of anything but 
emergency stores of air in case some unknown air-supply system failed. What's 
the matter with looking for a matter-transposer?" 
Burke said, "In a way, a telephone system transposes sound-waves from one place 
to another. Sound-waves aren't carried along wires. They're here, and then 
suddenly they're there. But there has to be a sending and receiving station at 
each end. When the fortress here was `cut off' from home it could be that its 
supply-system broke down." 
"Its air-system didn't," said Holmes. "It hadn't used up its emergency 
air-supply. We're breathing it!" 
"Anyhow we could try to find even a broken-down transposer," said Sandy. 
"You try," said Burke. "Keller's been looking for something for me in the cubes. 
I'll stay here and help him look." 
Sandy examined the weapon he'd given her. 
"Pam says she's smelled fresh air, down below where there can't be any. Mr. 
Keller thought he saw movements in the inside vision-plates, where there can't 
be any. I still believe I saw something alive in the gravity-machine room, where 
such a thing is impossible. We're going to look, Pam and I." 
Holmes lumbered to his feet. 
"I'll come, too. And I'll guarantee to defend you against anything that has 
survived the ten thousand years or so that this place was without air. My head's 
tired, after all those cubes." 
He led the way. Burke watched as the two girls followed him and closed the door 
behind them. 
"What have you found, Keller?" 
"A cube about globes," said Keller. "Very interesting." 
"Nothing on communication with base?" 
Keller shook his head. 
Burke said evenly, "I figured out three chances for us--all slim ones. The first 
was to find the garrison when the radio summons didn't and get it or its 
descendants to help. I found the garrison--on Earth. No help there. The second 
chance was finding the civilization that had built this fortress. It looks like 
it's collapsed. There's been time for a new civilization to get started, but 
it's run away. The third chance is the slimmest of all. It's hooking together 
something to fight with." 
Keller reached out over the array of cubes that had been experienced by Holmes 
and himself while using the helmets from the cube-library. One cube had been set 
aside. Keller put it in place on the extra helmet and handed it to Burke. 
"Try it," said Keller. 
Burke put the helmet on his head. 

He was in this same instrument-room, but he wore a uniform and he sat at an 
instrument-board. He knew that there were drone service-boats perhaps ten 
thousand miles out, perhaps a hundred. They'd been fitted out to make a mock 
attack on the fortress. Counter-tactics men devised them. There was reason for 
worry. Three times, now, drones pretending to be Enemy ships had dodged past the 
screen of globes set out to prevent just such an evasion. Once, one of the 
drones had gloatingly touched the stone of the fortress' outer surface. This was 
triumph for the counter-tactics crew, but it was proof that an Enemy ship could 
have wiped out the fortress and all its garrison a hundred times over. 
Burke sweated. There was a speck with a yellow ring about it. It was a globe, 
poised and ready to dart in any conceivable direction if an Enemy 
detection-device ranged it. The globes did not go seeking an Enemy. They placed 
themselves where they would be sought. They set themselves up as targets. But 
when a radar-pulse touched them, they flung themselves at its source, their 
reflex chooser-circuits pouring incredible power into a beam of the same 
characteristics as the radar-touch. That beam, of course, paralyzed or burned 
out the Enemy device necessarily tuned to it. And the globes plunged at the 
thing which had found them. They accelerated at a hundred and sixty gravities 
and mere high explosive would be wasted if they carried it. Nothing could stand 
their impact. Nothing! 
But in drills three drones had dodged them. The counter-tactics men understood 
the drones, of course, as it was hoped the Enemy did not. But it should not be 
possible to get to the fortress! If the fortress was vulnerable, so was the 
Empire. If the Empire was vulnerable, the Enemy would wreck its worlds, blast 
its cities, exterminate its population and only foulness would remain in the 
Galaxy. 
On the monitor-board a light flashed. A line of green light darted across the 
screen. It was the path of a globe hurtling toward something that had touched it 
with a radar-frequency signal. The acceleration of the globe was breathtaking. 
It seemed to explode toward its target. 
But this globe hit nothing. It went on and on.... A second globe sprang. It also 
struck nothing. It went away to illimitable emptiness. Its path exactly crossed 
that of the first. A third and fourth and fifth.... Each one flung itself 
ferociously at the source of some trickle of radiation. Their trails crossed at 
exactly the same spot. But there was nothing there.... 
Burke suddenly flung up a row of switches, inactivating the remaining globes 
under his control. Five had flung themselves away, darting at something which 
radiated but did not exist. Something which was not solid. Which was not a drone 
ship impersonating an Enemy. They'd attacked an illusion.... 
At the control-board, Burke clenched his fist and struck angrily at the flat 
surface before him. An illusion! Of course! 
Cunningly, he made adjustments. He had five globes left. He chose one and 
changed the setting of its reflex chooser-circuit. It would ignore radar 
frequencies now. It would pick up only stray radiation--induction frequencies 
from a drone ship with its drive on. 
The globe's light flashed. A train of green fire appeared. A burst of flame. A 
hit! The drone was destroyed. He swiftly changed the setting of the reflex 
circuits of the rest. Two! Three! Three drones blasted in twice as many seconds. 

He mopped his forehead. This was only a drill, but when the Enemy came it would 
be the solution of such problems that would determine the survival of the 
fortress and the destruction of the Enemy. 
He reported his success crisply. 

Burke took off the helmet. 
Keller said mildly, "What did he do?" 
Burke considered. 
"The drone, faking to be an enemy, had dumped something out into space. Metal 
powder, perhaps. It made a cloud in emptiness. Then the drone drew off and threw 
a radar-beam on the cloud of metal particles. The beam bounced in all 
directions. When a globe picked it up, it shot for the phony metal-powder 
target. It went right through and off into space. Other globes fell for the same 
trick. When they were all gone, the drones could have come right up to the 
fort." 
He was almost interested. He'd felt, at least, the sweating earnestness of an 
unknown member of this garrison, dead some thousands of years, as he tried to 
make a good showing in a battle drill. 
"So he changed the reflex circuits," Burke added. "He stopped his globes from 
homing on radar frequencies. He made them home on frequencies that wouldn't 
bounce." Then he said in surprise, "But they didn't hit, at that! The drones 
blew up before the globes got to them! They were exploding from the burning-out 
of all their equipment before the globes got there!" 
Keller nodded. He said sorrowfully, "So clever, our ancestors. But not clever 
enough!" 
"Of our chances," said Burke, "or what I think are chances, the least promising 
seems to be the idea of trying to hook something together to fight with." He 
considered, and then smiled very faintly. "You saw movements you couldn't 
identify in the vision-plates? Sandy says she saw something alive. I wonder if 
something besides us answered the space-call and got info the fortress by a 
different way, and has been hiding out, afraid of us." 
Keller shook his head. 
"I don't believe it either," admitted Burke. "It seems crazy. But it might be 
true. It might. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel for solutions to our 
problem." 
Keller shook his head again. Burke shrugged and went out of the instrument-room. 
He went down the stairs and the first long corridor, and past the long rows of 
emplacements in which were set the hunkering metal monsters he'd cube-dreamed of 
using, but which would be of no conceivable use against speeding, whirling, 
artificial-gravity fields with the pull and the mass of suns. 
He reached the last long gallery on which the ship-lock opened. He saw the broad 
white ribbon of many strands of light, reaching away seemingly without limit. 
And he saw a tiny figure running toward him. It was Sandy. She staggered as she 
ran. She had already run past endurance, but she kept desperately on, Burke 
broke into a run himself. 
When he met her, she gasped, "Pam! She--vanished--down below! We were--looking, 
and Pam cried out. We ran to her. Gone! And we--heard noises! Noises! Holmes is 
searching now. She--screamed, Joe!" 
Burke swung her behind him. 
"Tell Keller," he commanded harshly. "You've got that hand-weapon? Hold on to 
it! Bring Keller! We'll all search! Hurry!" 
He broke into a dead run. 
It might have seemed ironic that he should rush to help Sandy's sister in 
whatever disaster had befallen her when they were facing the end of the whole 
solar system. In cold blood, it couldn't be considered to matter. But Burke ran. 

He panted when he plunged dawn the ramp to the lower portions of the asteroid. 
He reached the huge cavern in which the motionless power-generator towered 
storeys high toward a light-laced ceiling. 
"Holmes!" he shouted, and ran on. "Holmes!" 
He'd been no farther than this, before, but he went on into tunnels with only 
double lines of light-tubes overhead, and he shouted and heard his own voice 
reverberating in a manner which seemed pure mockery. But as he ran be continued 
to shout. 
And presently Holmes shouted in return. There was a process of untangling 
innumerable echoes, and ultimately they met. Holmes was deathly white. He 
carried something unbelievable in his hands. 
"Here!" he growled. "I found this. I cornered it, I killed it! What is it? Did 
things like this catch Pam?" 
Only a man beside himself could have asked such a question. Holmes carried the 
corpse of a bird with mottled curly feathers. He'd wrung its neck. He suddenly 
flung it aside. 
"Where's Pam?" he demanded fiercely. "What the hell's happened to her? I'll kill 
anything in creation that's tried to hurt her!" 
Burke snapped questions. Inane ones. Where had Pam been last? Where were Holmes 
and Sandy when they missed her? When she cried out? 
Holmes tried to show him. But this part of the asteroid was a maze of corridors 
with uncountable doorways opening into innumerable compartments. Some of these 
compartments were not wholly empty, but neither Burke nor Holmes bothered to 
examine machine-parts or stacks of cases that would crumble to dust at a touch. 
They searched like crazy men, calling to Pam. 
Keller and Sandy arrived. They'd passed the corpse of the bird Holmes had 
killed, and Keller was strangely white-faced. Sandy panted, "Did you find her? 
Have you found any sign?" 
But she knew the answer. They hadn't found Pam. Holmes was haggard, desperate, 
filled with a murderous fury against whatever unnameable thing had taken Pam 
away. 
"Here!" snapped Burke. "Let's get some system into this! Here's the case with 
the message-cube. It's our marker. We start from here! I'll follow this cross 
corridor and the next one. You three take the next three corridors going 
parallel. One each! Look in every doorway. When we reach the next cross-corridor 
we'll compare notes and make another marker." 
He went along the way he'd chosen, looking in every door. Cryptic masses of 
metal in one compartment. A heap of dust in another. Empty. Empty. A pile of 
metal furniture. Another empty. Still another. 
Holmes appeared, his hands clenching and unclenching. Sandy turned up, 
struggling for self-control. 
"Where's Keller?" 
"I heard him call out," said Sandy breathlessly. "I thought he'd found something 
and I hurried--" 
He did not come. They shouted. They searched. Keller had disappeared. They found 
the mark they'd started from and retraced their steps. Burke heard Holmes swear 
startledly, but there were so many echoes he could not catch words. 
Sandy met Burke. Holmes did not. He did not answer shouts. He was gone. 
"We stay together," said Burke in an icy voice. "We've both got hand-weapons. 
Keep yours ready to fire. I've got mine. Whatever out of hell is loose in this 
place, we'll kill it or it will kill us, and then--" 
He did not finish. They stayed close together, with Burke in the lead. 
"We'll look in each doorway," he insisted. "Keep that pistol ready. Don't shoot 
the others if you see them, but shoot anything else!" 
"Y-yes," said Sandy, She swallowed. 
It was nerve-racking. Burke regarded each doorway as a possible ambush. He 
investigated each one first, making sure that the compartment inside it was 
wholly empty. There was one extra-large archway to an extra-large compartment, 
halfway between their starting point and the next cross-corridor. It was 
obviously empty, though there was a large metal plate on the floor. But it was 
lighted. Nothing could lurk in there. 
Burke inspected the compartment beyond, and the one beyond that. 
He thought he heard Sandy gasp. He whirled, gun ready. 
Sandy was gone. 
Chapter 10 
THE STAR SOL was as bright as Sirius, but no brighter because it was nearly half 
a light-year away and of course could not compare in intrinsic brightness with 
that farther giant sun. The Milky Way glowed coldly. All the stars shone without 
any wavering in their light, from the brightest to the faintest tinted dot. The 
universe was round. There were stars above and below and before and behind and 
to the right and left. There was nothing which was solid, and nothing which was 
opaque. There were only infinitely remote, unwinking motes of light, but there 
were thousands of millions of them. Every where there were infinitesimal 
shinings of red and blue and yellow and green; of all the colors that could be 
imagined. Yet all the starlight from all the cosmos added up to no more than 
darkness. The whitest of objects would not shine except faintly, dimly, feebly. 
There was no warmth. This was deep space, frigid beyond imagining; desolate 
beyond thinking; empty. It was nothingness spread out in the light of many 
stars. 
In such cold and darkness it would seem that nothing could be, and there was 
nothing to be seen. But now and again a pattern of stars quivered a little. It 
contracted a trace and then returned to its original appearance. The disturbance 
of the star-patterns moved, as a disturbance, in vast curved courses. They were 
like isolated ripplings in space. 
There seemed no cause for these ripplings. But there were powerful gravitational 
fields in the void, so powerful as to warp space and bend the starlight passing 
through them. These gravity-fields moved with an incredible speed. There were 
ten of them, circling in a complex pattern which was spread out as an invisible 
unit which moved faster than the light their space-twisting violence distorted. 
They seemed absolutely undetectable, because even such minute light-ripplings as 
they made were left behind them. The ten ships which created these monstrous 
force-fields were unbelievably small. They were no larger than cargo ships on 
the oceans of one planet in the solar system toward which they sped. They were 
less than dust particles in infinity. They would travel for only a few more 
days, now, and then would flash through the solar system which was their target. 
They should reach its outermost planet--four light-hours away--and within eight 
minutes more swing mockingly past and through the inner worlds and the sun. They 
would cross the plane of the ecliptic at nearly a right angle, and they should 
leave the planets and the yellow star Sol in flaming self-destruction behind 
them. Then they would flee onward, faster than the chaos they created could 
follow. 
The living creatures on the world to be destroyed would have no warning. One 
instant everything would be as it had always been. The next, the ground would 
rise and froth out flames, and more than two thousand million human beings would 
hardly know that anything had occurred before they were destroyed. 
There was no purpose to be served by notifying the world that it was to die. The 
rulers of the nations had decided that it was kinder to let men and women look 
at each other and rejoice, thinking they had all their lives before them. It was 
kinder that children should be let play valorously, and babies wail and 
instantly be tended. It was better for humanity to move unknowing under blue and 
sunshine-filled skies than that they should gaze despairingly up at white 
clouds, or in still deeper horror at the shining night stars from which 
devastation would presently come. 
In the one place where there was foreknowledge, no attention at all was paid to 
the coming doom. Burke went raging about brightly lighted corridors, shouting 
horrible things. He cried out to Sandy to answer him, and defied whatever might 
have seized her to dare to face him. He challenged the cold stone walls. He 
raged up and down the gallery in which she had vanished, and feverishly explored 
beyond it, and returned to the place where she had disappeared, and pounded on 
solid rock to see if there could be some secret doorway through which she had 
been abducted. It seemed that his heart must stop for pure anguish. He knew such 
an agony of frustration as he had never known before. 
Presently method developed in his searching. Whatever had happened, it must have 
been close to the tall archway with the large metal plate in its floor and the 
brilliant lights overhead. Sandy could not have been more than twenty feet from 
him when she was seized. When he heard her gasp, he was at this spot. Exactly 
this spot. He'd whirled, and she was gone. She could not have been farther than 
the door beyond the archway, or else the one facing it. He went into the most 
probable one. It was a perfectly commonplace storage-room. He'd seen hundreds of 
them. It was empty. He examined it with a desperate intentness. His hands shook. 
His whole body was taut. He moved jerkily. 
Nothing. He crossed the corridor and examined the room opposite. There was a bit 
of dust in one corner. He bent stay and fingered it. Nothing. He came out, and 
there was the tall archway, brightly lighted. The other compartments had no 
light-tubes. Being for storage only, they would not need to be lighted except to 
be filled and emptied of whatever they should contain. But the archway was very 
brilliantly lighted. 
He went into it, his hand-weapon shaking with the tension in him. There was the 
metal plate on the floor. It was huge--yards in extent. He began a circuit of 
the walls. Halfway around, he realized that the walls were masonry. Not native 
rock, like every other place in the fortress. This wall had been made! He stared 
about. On the opposite wall there was a small thing with a handle on it, to be 
moved up or down. It was a round metal disk with a handle, set in in masonry. 
He flung himself across the room to examine it. He was filled with terror for 
Sandy, which would turn into more-than-murderous fury if he found her harmed. 
The metal floor-plate lay between. He stepped obliviously on the plate... 
The universe dissolved around him. The brightly lit masonry wall became vague 
and misty. Simultaneously quite other things appeared mistily, then solidified. 
He was abruptly in the open air, with a collapsed and ruined structure about and 
behind him. This was not emptiness, but the surface of a world. Over his head 
there was a sunset sky. Before him there was grass, and beyond that a horizon, 
and to his left there was collapsed stonework and far off ahead there was a hill 
which he knew was not a natural hill at all. There was a moon in the sky, a 
half-moon with markings that he remembered. There were trees, too, and they were 
trees with long, ribbony leaves such as never grew on Earth. 
He stood frozen for long instants, and a second, smaller moon came up rapidly 
over the horizon and traveled swiftly across the sky. It was jagged and 
irregular in shape. 
Then flutings came from somewhere to his rear. They were utterly familiar 
sounds. They had distinctive pitch, which varied from one to another, and they 
were of different durations like half-notes and quarter-notes in music. And they 
had a plaintive quality which could have been termed elfin. 
All this was so completely known to him that it should have been shocking, but 
he was in such an agony of fear for Sandy that he could not react to it. His 
terror for her was breath-stopping. He held his weapon ready in his hand. He 
tried to call her name, but he could not speak. 
The long, ribbony leaves of the trees waved to and fro in a gentle breeze. And 
then Burke saw a figure running behind the swaying foliage. He knew who it was. 
The relief was almost greater pain than his terror had been. It was such an 
emotion as Burke had experienced only feebly, even in his recurrent dream. He 
gave a great shout and bounded forward to meet Sandy, crying out again as he 
ran. 
Then he had his arms about her, and she clung to him with that remarkable 
ability women have to adapt themselves to circumstances they've been hoping for, 
even when they come unexpectedly. He kissed her feverishly, panting incoherent 
things about the fear he'd felt, holding her fast. 
Presently somebody tugged at his elbow. It was Holmes. He said drily, "I know 
how you feel, Burke. I acted the same way just now, But there are things to be 
looked into. It'll be dark soon and we don't know how long night lasts here. 
Have you a match?" 
Pam regarded the two of them with a peculiar glint of humor in her eyes. Keller 
was there too, still shaken by an experience which for him had no emotional 
catharsis attached. 
Burke partly released Sandy and fumbled for his cigarette lighter. He felt 
singularly foolish, but Sandy showed no trace of embarrassment. 
"There was a matter-transposer," she said, "and we found it, and we all came 
through it." 
Keller said awkwardly, "I turned on the communicator to base. It must have been 
a matter-transposer. I thought, in the instrument-room, that it was only a 
communicator." 
Holmes moved away. He came back bearing broken sticks, which were limbs fallen 
from untended trees. He piled them and went back for more. In minutes he had a 
tiny fire and a big pile of branches to keep it up, but he went back for still 
more. 
"It works both ways," observed Sandy. "Or something does! There must be another 
metal plate here to go to the fortress. That huge, crazy bird I saw in the 
gravity-generator room must have come from here. He probably stepped on the 
plate because it was brightly lighted and--" 
"You've got your pistol?" demanded Burke. 
The sunset sky was darkening. The larger, seemingly stationary moon floated 
ever-so-slightly nearer to the zenith. The small and jagged moon had gone on out 
of sight. 
"I have," said Sandy. "Pam gave hers to Holmes. But that's all right. There 
won't be savages. Over there, beyond the trees, there's a metal railing, 
impossibly old and corroded. But no savage would leave metal alone. I don't 
think there's anybody here but us." 
Burke stared at something far away that looked like a hill. 
"There's a building, or the ruins of one. No lights. No smoke. Savages would 
occupy it. We're alone, all right! I wonder where? We could be anywhere within a 
hundred or five hundred light-years from Earth." 
"Then," said Sandy comfortably, "we should be safe from the Enemy." 
"No," said Burke. "If the Enemy has an unbeatable weapon, destroying one solar 
system won't be enough. They'd smash every one that humanity ever used. Which 
includes this one. They'll be here eventually. Not at once, but later. They'll 
come!" 
He looked at the small fire. There were curious, familiar fragrances in the air. 
Over to the west the san sank in a completely orthodox glory of red and gold. 
The larger moon swam serenely in the sky. 
"I'm afraid," said Pam, "that we won't eat tonight unless we can get back to the 
fortress and the ship. I guess we're farther from our dinners than most people 
ever get. Did you say five hundred light-years?" 
"Ask Keller," grunted Burke. "I've got to think." 
Far off in the new night there was something like a bird-song, though it might 
come from anything at all. Much nearer there were peculiarly maternal clucking 
noises. They sounded as if they might come from a bird with a caricature of a 
bill and stumpy, useless wings. There was a baying noise, very far away indeed, 
and Burke remembered that the ancestry of dogs on Earth was as much a mystery as 
the first appearance of mankind. There were no wild ancestors of either race. 
Perhaps there had been dogs with the garrison of the fortress, which might be 
five hundred light-years away, in one sense, but could not be more than a few 
yards, in another. 
Holmes squatted by the fire and built it up to brightness. Keller came back to 
the circle of flickering light. His forehead was creased. 
"The constellations," he said unhappily. "They're gone!" 
"Which would mean," Burke told him absently, "that we're more than forty 
light-years from home. They'd all be changed at that distance." 
Holmes seated himself beside Pam. They had reached an obvious understanding. 
Burke's eyes wandered in their direction. Holmes began to speak in a low tone, 
and Pam smiled at him. Burke jerked his head to stare at Sandy. 
"I think I forgot something. Should I ask you again to marry me? Or do I take it 
for granted that you will?--if we live through this?" He didn't wait for her 
answer. "Things have changed, Sandy," he said gruffly. "Mostly me. I've gotten 
rid of an obsession and acquired a fixation--on you." 
"There," said Sandy warmly, "there speaks my Joseph! Yes, I'll marry you. And we 
will live through this! You'll figure something out, Joe. I don't know how, but 
you will!" 
"Yes-s-s," said Burke slowly. "Somehow I feel that I've got something tucked 
away in my head that should apply. I need to get it out and look it over. I 
don't know what it is or where it came from, but I've got something..." 
He stared into the fire, Sandy nestled confidently against him. She put her hand 
in his. The wind blew warm and softly through the trees. Presently Holmes 
replenished the fire. 
Burke looked up with a start as Sandy said, "I've thought of something, Joe! Do 
you remember that dream of yours? I know what it was!" 
"What?" 
"It came from a black cube," said Sandy, "which was a cube that somebody from 
the garrison took to Earth. And what kind of cube would they take? They wouldn't 
take drill-instruction cubes! They wouldn't take cubes telling them how to 
service the weapons or operate the globes or whatever else the fortress has! Do 
you know what they'd take?" 
He shook his head. 
"Novels," said Sandy. "Fiction stories. Adventure tales. To--experience on long 
winter evenings or even asleep by a campfire. They were fighting men, Joe, those 
ancestors of ours. They wouldn't care about science, but they'd like a good, 
lusty love story or a mystery or whatever was the equivalent of a Western twenty 
thousand years ago. You got hold of a page in a love story, Joe!" 
"Probably," he growled. "But if I ever dream it again I'll know who's behind 
those waving branches. You." Then, surprised, he said, "There were flutings when 
I came through the matter-transposer. They've stopped." 
"They sounded when I came through, too. And when Pam and Holmes and Keller came. 
Do you know what I think they are?" Sandy smiled up at him. " `You have arrived 
on the planet Sandu. Surface-travel facilities to the left, banking service and 
baggage to the right, tourist accommodations and information straight ahead: We 
may never know, Joe, but it could be that!" 
He made an inarticulate sound and stared at the fire again. She fell silent. 
Soon Keller was dozing. Holmes strode away and came back dragging leafy 
branches. He made a crude lean-to for Pam, to reflect back the warmth of the 
fire upon her. She curled up, smiled at him, and went confidently to sleep. A 
long time later Sandy found herself yawning. She slipped her fingers from 
Burke's hand and settled down beside Pam. 
Burke seemed not to notice. He was busy. He thought very carefully, running 
through the information he'd received from the black cubes. He carefully 
refrained from thinking of the desperate necessity for a solution to the problem 
of the Enemy. If it was to be solved, it would be by a mind working without 
strain, just as a word that eludes the memory is best recalled when one no 
longer struggles to remember it. 
Twice during the darkness Holmes regarded the blackness about them with 
suspicion, his hand on the small weapon Pam had passed to him. But nothing 
happened. There were sounds like bird calls, and songs like those of insects, 
and wind in the trees. But there was nothing else. 
When gray first showed in the east, Burke shook himself. The jagged small moon 
rose hurriedly and floated across the sky. 
"Holmes," said Burke reflectively. "I think I've got what we want. You know how 
artificial gravity's made, what the circuit is like." 
To anybody but Holmes and Keller, the comment would have seemed idiotic. It 
would have seemed insane even to them, not too long before. But Holmes nodded. 
"Yes. Of course. Why?" 
`There's a chooser-circuit in the globes," said Burke carefully, "that picks up 
radiation from an Enemy ship, and multiplies it enormously and beams it back. 
The circuit that made the radiation to begin with has to be resonant to it, as 
the globe burns it out while dashing down its own beam." 
"Naturally," said Holmes. "What about it?" 
"The point is," said Burke, "that one could treat a suddenly increasing 
gravity-field as radiation. Not a stationary one, of course. But one that 
increased, fast. Like the gravity-fields of the Enemy ships, moving faster than 
light toward 
our sun." 
"Hmmmm," said Holmes. "Yes. That could be done. But hitting something that's 
traveling faster than light--" 
"They're traveling in a straight line," said Burke, "except for orbiting around 
each other every few hours. There's no faster-than-light angular velocity; just 
straight-line velocity. And with the artificial mass they've got, they couldn't 
conceivably dodge. If we got some globes tricked up to throw a beam of 
gravity-field back at the Enemy ships, there might be resonance, and there's a 
chance that one might hit, too." 
Holmes considered. 
"It might take half an hour to change the circuit," he observed. "Maybe less. 
There'd be no way in the world to test them. But they might work. We'd want a 
lot of them on the job, though, to give the idea a fair chance." 
Burke stood up, creaking a little from long immobility. 
"Let's hunt for the way back to the fortress," he said. "There is a way. At 
least two crazy birds were marching around in the fortress' corridors." 
Holmes nodded again. They began a search. Matter transposed from the 
fortress--specifically, the five of them--came out in a nearly three-walled 
alcove in the side of what had once been a magnificent building. Now it was 
filled with the trunks and stalks of trees and vines which grew out of every 
window-opening. There were other, similar alcoves, as if other 
matter-transposers to other outposts or other worlds had been centered here. 
They were looking for one that a plump, ridiculous bird might blunder into among 
the broken stones. 
They found a metal plate partly arched-over by fallen stones in the very next 
alcove. They hauled at the tumbled rock. Presently the way was clear. 
"Come along!" called Burke. "We've got a job to do! You girls want to fix 
breakfast and we want to get to work. We've a few hundred light-years to cross 
before we can have our coffee." 
Somehow he felt no doubt whatever. The five of them walked onto the corroded 
metal plate together, and the sky faded and ghosts of tube-lights appeared and 
became brilliant, and they stepped off the plate into a corridor one section 
removed from the sending-transposer which had translated them all, successively, 
to wherever they had been. 
And everything proceeded matter-of-factly. The three men went to the room where 
metal globes by hundreds waited for the defenders of the fortress to make use of 
them. They were completely practical, those globes. There were even small 
footholds sunk into their moving sides so a man could climb to their tops and 
inspect or change the apparatus within. 
On the way, Burke explained to Keller. The globes were designed to be targets, 
and targets they would remain. They'd be set out in the path of the coming Enemy 
ships, which could not vary their courses. Their circuits would be changed to 
treat the suddenly increasing gravitational fields as radiation, so that they 
would first project back a monstrous field of the same energy, and then dive 
down it to presumed collision with the ships. There was a distinct possibility 
that if enough globes could be gotten out in space, that at the least they might 
hit one enemy ship and so wreck the closely orbited grouping. From that 
reasonable first possibility, the chances grew slimmer, but the results to be 
hoped for increased. 
Keller nodded, brightly. He'd used the reading helmets more than anybody else. 
He understood. Moreover, his mind was trained to work in just this field. 
When they reached the room of the many spheres he gestured for Burke and Holmes 
to wait. He climbed the footholds of one globe, deftly removed its top, and 
looked inside. The conductors were three-inch bars of pure silver. He reached in 
and did this and that. He climbed down and motioned for Burke and Holmes to 
look. 
It took them long seconds to realize what he'd done. But with his knowledge of 
what could be done, once he was told what was needed, he'd made exactly three 
new contacts and the globe was transformed to Burke's new specifications. 
Instead of days required to modify the circuits, the three of them had a hundred 
of the huge round weapons changed over within an hour. Then Keller went up to 
the instrument-room and painstakingly studied the launching system. He began the 
launchings while Holmes and Burke completed the change-over task. They joined 
him in the instrument-room when the last of the metal spheres rose a foot from 
the stony floor of the magazine and went lurching unsteadily over to the breech 
of the launching-tube they hadn't noticed before. 
"Three hundred," said Keller in a pleased tone, later. "All going out at full 
acceleration to meet the Enemy. And there are six observer-globes in the lot." 
"Observers," said Burke grimly. "That's right. We can't observe anything because 
the information would come back at the speed of light. But if we lose, the Enemy 
will arrive before we can know we've lost." 
Keller shook his head reproachfully. 
"Oh, no! Oh, no! I just understood. There are transposers of electric energy, 
too. Very tiny. In the observers." 
Burke stared. But it was only logical. If matter could be transposed instead of 
transmitted between distant places, assuredly miniature energy-transposers were 
not impossible. The energy would no more travel than transposed matter would 
move. It would be transposed. The fortress would see what the observer-globes 
saw, at the instant they saw it, no matter what the distance! 
Keller glanced at the ten-foot disk with its many small lights and the writhing 
bright-red sparks which were the Enemy gravity-ships. There was something like a 
scale of distances understood, now. The red sparks had been not far from the 
disk's edge when the first space call went out to Earth. They were nearer the 
center when the spaceship arrived here. They were very, very near the center 
now. 
"Five days," said Burke in a hard voice. "Where will the globes meet them?" 
"They're using full acceleration," Keller reminded him gently. "One hundred 
sixty gravities." 
"A mile a second acceleration," said Burke. Somehow he was not astonished. "In 
an hour, thirty-six hundred miles per second. In ten hours, thirty-six thousand 
miles per second. If they hit at that speed, they'd smash a moon! They'll cover 
half a billion miles in ten hours--but that's not enough! It's only a fifth of 
the way to Pluto! They won't be halfway to Uranus!" 
"They'll have fifty-six hours," said Keller. The need to communicate clearly 
made him almost articulate. "Not on the plane of the ecliptic. Their course is 
along the line of the sun's axis. Meeting, seven times Pluto's distance. Twenty 
billion miles. Two days and a half. If they miss we'll know." 
Holmes growled, "If they miss, what then?" 
"I stay here," said Keller, mildly. "I won't outlive everybody. I'd be lonely." 
Then he gave a quick, embarrassed smile. "Breakfast must be ready. We can do 
nothing but wait." 
But waiting was not easy. 
On the first day there came a flood of messages from Earth. Why had they cut off 
communication? Answer! Answer! Answer! What could be done about the Enemy ships? 
What could be done to save lives? If a few spaceships could be completed and 
take off before the solar system shattered, would the asteroid be shattered too? 
Could a few dozen survivors of Earth hope to make their way to the asteroid and 
survive there? Should the coming doom be revealed to the world? 
The last question showed that the authorities of Earth were rattled. It was not 
a matter for Burke or Keller or Holmes to decide. They transmitted, in careful 
code, an exact description of the sending of the globes to try to intercept the 
Enemy gravity-ships. But it was not possible for people with no experiential 
knowledge of artificial gravity to believe that anything so massive as a sun 
could be destroyed by hurling a mere ten-foot missile at it! 
Then there came a sudden revulsion of feeling on Earth. The truth was too 
horrible to believe, so it was resolved not to believe it. And therefore 
prominent persons broke into public print, denouncing Burke for having predicted 
the end of the world from his safe refuge in Asteroid M-387. They explained 
elaborately how he must be not only wrong but maliciously wrong. 
But those denunciations were the first knowledge the public had possessed of the 
thing denounced. Some people instantly panicked because some people infallibly 
believe the worst, at all times. Some shared the indignation of the eminent 
characters who denounced Burke. Some were bewildered and many unstable persons 
vehemently urged everybody to do this or that in order to be saved. 
Get-rich-artists sold tickets in non-existent spacecraft they claimed had 
secrecy been built in anticipation of the disaster. They would accept only paper 
currency in small bills. What value paper money would have after the destruction 
of Earth was not explained, but people paid it. Astronomers swore quite 
truthfully that no telescope gave any sign of the alleged sun-sized masses en 
route to destroy Earth. Government officials heroically lied in their throats to 
reassure the populace because, after all, one didn't want the half-civilized 
part of educated nations to run mad during Earth's probable last few days. 
And Burke and the others looked at the images sent back by the observer-globes 
traveling with the rest. The cosmos looked to the observer-globes just about the 
way it did from the fortress. There were innumerable specks of light of 
enumerable tints and colors. There was darkness. There was cold. And there was 
emptiness. The globe-fleet drove on away from the sun and from that flat plane 
near which all the planets revolve. Every second the spheres' pace increased by 
one mile per second. Ten hours after Keller released them, they had covered five 
hundred eighty-eight thousand thousand miles and the sun still showed as a 
perceptible disk. Twenty hours out, the globes had traveled two billion six 
hundred million miles and the sun was the brightest star the observers could 
note. Thirty hours out, and the squadron of ten-foot globes had traveled five 
billion eight hundred thirty-odd million miles and the sun was no longer an 
outstanding figure in the universe. 
Holmes looked fine-drawn, now, and Pam was fidgety. Keller appeared to be wholly 
normal. And Sandy was conspicuously calm. 
"I'll be glad when this is over," she said at dinner in the ship in the 
lock-tunnel. "I don't think any of you realize what this fortress and the 
matter-transposer and the planet it took us to--I don't believe any of you 
realize what such things can mean to people." 
Burke waited. She smiled at him and said briskly, "There's a vacant planet for 
people to move to. People occupied it once. They can do it again. Once it had a 
terrific civilization. This fortress was just one of its outposts. There were 
plenty of other forts and other planets, and the people had sciences away ahead 
of ours. And all those worlds, tamed and ready, are waiting right now for us to 
come and use them." 
Holmes said, "Yes? What happened to the people who lived on them?" 
"If you ask me," said Sandy confidentially, "I think they went the way of Greece 
and Rome. I think they got so civilized that they got soft. They built forts 
instead of fighting fleets. They stopped thinking of conquests and begrudged 
even thinking of defenses, though they had to, after a fashion. But they thought 
of things like the Rhine forts of the Romans, and Hadrian's Wall. Like the Great 
Wall of China, and the Maginot Line in France. When men build forts and don't 
build fighting fleets, they're on the way down." 
Burke said nothing. Holmes waited for more. 
"It's my belief," said Sandy, "that many, many centuries ago the people who 
built this fort sent a spaceship off somewhere with a matter-transposer on 
board. They replaced its crew while it traveled on and on, and they gave it 
supplies, and refreshed its air, and finally it arrived somewhere at the other 
side of the Galaxy. And then the people here set up a matter-transposer and they 
all moved through it to the new, peaceful, lovely world they'd found. All except 
the garrison that was left behind. The Enemy would never find them there! And I 
think they smashed the matter-transposer that might have let the Enemy follow 
them--or the garrison of this fort, for that matter! And I think that away 
beyond the Milky Way there are the descendants of those people. They're soft, 
and pretty, and useless, and they've likely let their knowledge die, and there 
probably aren't very many of them left. And I think it's good riddance!" 
Pam said, "If we beat the Enemy there'll be no excuse for wars on Earth. 
There'll be worlds enough to take all the surplus population anybody can 
imagine. There'll be riches for everybody. Joe, what do you think the human race 
will do for you if, on top of finding new worlds for everybody, you cap it by 
defeating the Enemy with the globes?" 
"I think," said Burke, "that most people will dislike me very much. I'll be in 
the history books, but I'll be in small print. People who can realize they're 
obligated will resent it, and those who can't will think I got famous in a 
disreputable fashion. In fact, if we go back to Earth, I'll probably have to 
fight to keep from going bankrupt. If I manage to get enough money for a living, 
it'll be by having somebody ghostwrite a book for me about our journey here." 
Keller interrupted mildly, "It's nearly time. We should watch." 
Holmes stood up jerkily. Pam and Sandy rose almost reluctantly. 
They went out of the ship and through the metal door with rounded corners. They 
went along the long corridor with the seeming river of light-tubes in its 
ceiling. They passed the doorway of the great room which had held the globes. It 
looked singularly empty, now. 
On the next level they passed the mess-halls and bunk-rooms, and an the third 
the batteries of grisly weapons which could hurl enormous charges of electricity 
at a chosen target, if the target could be ranged. They went on up into the 
instrument-room by the final flight of stairs. 
They settled down there. That is, they did not leave. But far too much depended 
on the next hour or less for anybody to be truly still in either mind or body. 
Holmes paced jerkily back and forth, his eyes on the vision-screens that now 
relayed what the observer-globes with the globe-fleet saw. 
For a long time they gazed at the emptiness of deepest space. The picture was of 
an all-encompassing wall of tiny flecks of light. They did not move. They did 
not change. They did not waver. The observer-globes reported from nothingness, 
and they reported nothing. 
Except one item. There were fewer red specks of light and more blue ones. There 
were some which were distinctly violet. The globes had attained a velocity so 
close to the speed of light that no available added power could have pushed them 
the last fraction of one per cent faster. But they had no monstrous mass-fields 
to change the constants of space and let them travel more swiftly. The Enemy 
ships did. But there was no sign of them. There could be none except on such a 
detector as the instrument-room had in its ten-foot transparent disk. 
Time passed, and passed. And passed. Finally, Burke broke the silence. 
"Of course the globes don't have to make direct hits. We hope! If they multiply 
the gravity-field that hits them and shoot it back hard enough, it ought to burn 
out the gravity-generators in the ships." 
There was no answer. Pam watched the screens and bit nervously at her nails. 
Seconds went by. Minutes. Tens of minutes.... 
"I fear," said Keller with some difficulty, "that something is wrong. Perhaps I 
erred in adjusting the globes--" 
If he had made a mistake, of course, the globe-fleet would be useless. It 
wouldn't stop the Enemy. It wouldn't do anything, and in a very short time the 
sun and all its planets would erupt with insensate violence, and all the solar 
system would shatter itself to burning bits--and the Enemy fleet would be 
speeding away faster than exploding matter could possibly follow it. 
Then, without warning, a tiny bluish line streaked across one of the screens. A 
second. A third-fourth-fifth-twentieth-fiftieth--The screens came alive with 
flashing streaks of blue-green light. 
Then something blew. A sphere of violet light appeared on one of the screens. 
Instantly, it was followed by others with such rapidity that it was impossible 
to tell which followed which. But there were ten of them. 
The silence in the instrument-room was absolute. Burke tried vainly to imagine 
what had actually happened. The Enemy fleet had been traveling at thirty times 
the speed of light, which was only possible because of its artificial mass which 
changed the properties of space to permit it. And then the generators and 
maintainers of that artificial mass blew out. The ships stopped--so suddenly, so 
instantly, so absolutely that a millionth part of a second would have been a 
thousand times longer than the needed interval. 
The energy of that enormous speed had to be dissipated. The ships exploded as 
nothing had ever exploded before. Even a super-nova would not detonate with such 
violence. The substance of the Enemy ships destroyed itself not merely by 
degenerating to raw atoms, but by the atoms destroying themselves. And not 
merely did the atoms fly apart, but the neutrons and protons and electrons of 
which they were composed ceased to exist. Nothing was left but pure 
energy--violet light. And it vanished. 
Then there was nothing at all. What was left of the globe-fleet went hurtling 
uselessly onward through space. It would go on and on and on. It would reach the 
edge of the galaxy and go on, and perhaps in thousands of millions of years some 
one or two or a dozen of the surviving spheres might penetrate some star-cloud 
millions of millions of light-years away. 
In a pleased voice, Keller said, "I think everything is all right now." 
And Sandy went all to pieces. She clung to Burke, weeping uncontrollably, 
holding herself close to him while she sobbed. 
On Earth, of course, there was no such eccentric jubilation. It was observed 
that crawling red sparks in the gravity-field detectors winked out. As hours and 
days went by, it was noticed that the solar system continued to exist, and that 
people stayed alive. It became evident that some part of the terror some people 
had felt was baseless. And naturally there was much resentment against Burke 
because he had caused so many people so much agitation. 
Within two weeks a fleet of small plastic ships hurtled upward from the vicinity 
of Earth's north magnetic pole and presently steadied on course toward the 
fortress asteroid. Burke was informed severely that he should prepare to receive 
the scientists they carried. He would be expected to cooperate fully in their 
investigations. 
He grinned when Pam handed him the written sheet. 
"It's outrageous!" snapped Sandy. "It's ridiculous! They ought to get down on 
their knees to you, Joe, to thank you for what you've done!" 
Burke shook his head. 
"I don't think I'd like that. Neither would you. We'd make out, Sandy. There'll 
be a colony started on that world the matter-transposer links us to. It ought be 
fun living there. What say?" 
Sandy grumbled. But she looked at him with soft eyes. 
"I'd rather be mixed up with--what you might call pioneers," said Burke, "than 
people with reputations to defend and announced theories that are going to turn 
out to be all wrong. The research in this fortress and on that planet will make 
some red faces, on Earth. And there's another thing." 
"What?" asked Sandy. 
"This war we've inherited without doing anything to deserve it," said Burke. "In 
fact, the Enemy. We haven't the least idea what they're like or anything at all 
about them except that they go off somewhere and spend a few thousand years 
cooking up something lethal to throw at us. They tired out our ancestors. If 
they'd only known it, they won the war by default. Our ancestors moved away to 
let the Enemy have its own way about this part of the galaxy, anyhow. And 
judging by past performances, the Enemy will just stew somewhere until they 
think of something more dangerous than artificial sun-masses riding through our 
solar systems." 
"Well?" she demanded. "What's to be done about that?" 
"With the right sort of people around," said Burke meditatively, "we could do a 
little contriving of our own. And we could get a ship ready and think about 
looking them up and pinning their ears back in their own bailiwick, instead of 
waiting for them to take pot-shots at us." 
Sandy nodded gravely. She was a woman. She hadn't the faintest idea of ever 
letting Burke take off into space again if she could help it--unless, perhaps, 
for one occasion when she would show herself off in a veil and a train, 
gloating. 
But it had taken the Enemy a very long time to concoct this last method of 
attack. When the time came to take the offensive against them, at least a few 
centuries would have passed. Five or six, anyhow. So Sandy did not protest 
against an idea that wouldn't result in action for some hundreds of years. 
Argument about Burke's share in such an enterprise could wait. 
So Sandy kissed him.