The Wailing Asteroid by Murray Leinster (short novels to read TXT) 📖

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'll 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 sun 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 birdsong, 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 Sanda. 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 curving 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