The Wailing Asteroid | Page 6

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