The Wailing Asteroid

The Wailing Asteroid
by Murray Leinster
1960 copyright expired

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