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 froth 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 thereissomething 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.
"Shoo!" 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 ribbonlike 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 afait accomplieven 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 more 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 air-lock 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.
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 aSomethingout 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 inovwas degraded to much lower official rank and somebody with a name ending inskytook 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's 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 we'll 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 coördinated. 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 retested 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 air-lock 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 air-lock 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 we'll 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 hand-hold 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.
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 wavelength 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.