The Wailing Asteroid | Page 2

Darjeeling.
The Darjeeling observer was incredulous at what he heard-- five
repetitions of the same sequence of flute-like notes. After each pause--
when it seemed that the signals had stopped before they actually did
so-- the reception was exactly the same as the one before. It was
inconceivable that such a succession of sounds, lasting a full minute,
could be exactly repeated by any natural chain of events. Five
repetitions were out of the question. The notes were signals. They were
a communication which was repeated to be sure it was received.
The third broadcast was heard in Lebanon in addition to Kalua and
Darjeeling. Reception in all three places was simultaneous. A signal
from a nearby satellite could not possibly have been picked up so far
around the Earth's curvature. The widening of the area of reception, too,
proved that there was no new satellite aloft with an orbit period of
exactly twenty-four hours, so that it hung motionless in the sky relative

to Earth. Tracking observations, in fact, showed the source of the
signals to move westward, as time passed, with the apparent motion of
a star. No satellite of Earth could possibly exist with such an orbit
unless it was close enough to show a detectable parallax. This did not.
A French station picked up the next batch of plaintive sounds. Kalua,
Darjeeling, and Lebanon still received. By the time the next signal was
due, Croydon, in England, had its giant radar-telescope trained on the
part of the sky from which all the tracking stations agreed the signals
came.
Croydon painstakingly made observations during four
seventy-nine-minute intervals and four five-minute receptions of the
fluting noises. It reported that there was a source of artificial signals at
an extremely great distance, position right ascension so-and-so,
declination such-and-such. The signals began every seventy-nine
minutes. They could be heard by any receiving instrument capable of
handling the microwave frequency involved. The broadcast was
extremely broadband. It covered more than two octaves and sharp
tuning was not necessary. A man-made signal would have been
confined to as narrow a wave-band as possible, to save power for one
reason, so it could not be imagined that the signal was anything but
artificial. Yet no Earth science could have sent a transmitter out so far.
When sunrise arrived at the tracking station on Kalua, it ceased to
receive from space. On the other hand, tracking stations in the United
States, the Antilles, and South America began to pick up the cryptic
sounds.
The first released news of the happening was broadcast in the United
States. In the South Pacific and India and the Near East and Europe, the
whole matter seemed too improbable for the notification of the public.
News pressure in the United States, though, is very great. Here the
news rated broadcast, and got it.
That was why Joe Burke did not happen to complete the business for
which he'd taken Sandy Lund to a suitable, romantic spot. She was his
secretary and the only permanent employee in the highly individual

business he'd begun and operated. He'd known her all his life, and it
seemed to him that for most of it he'd wanted to marry her. But
something had happened to him when he was quite a small boy-- and
still happened at intervals-- which interposed a mental block. He'd
always wanted to be romantic with her, but there was a matter of two
moons in a strange-starred sky, and trees with foliage like none on
Earth, and an overwhelming emotion. There was no rational
explanation for it. There could be none. Often he'd told himself that
Sandy was real and utterly desirable, and this lunatic repetitive
experience was at worst insanity and at the least delusion. But he'd
never been able to do more than stammer when talk between them went
away from matter-of-fact things.
Tonight, though, he'd parked his car where a river sparkled in the
moonlight. There was a scent of pine and arbutus in the air and a faint
thread of romantic music came from his car's radio. He'd brought Sandy
here to propose to her. He was doggedly resolved to break the chains a
psychological oddity had tied him up in.
He cleared his throat. He'd taken Sandy out to dinner, ostensibly to
celebrate the completion of a development job for Interiors, Inc. Burke
had started Burke Development, Inc., some four years out of college
when he found he didn't like working for other people and could work
for himself. Its function was to develop designs and processes for
companies too small to have research-and-development divisions of
their own. The latest, now-finished, job was a wall-garden which those
expensive interior decorators, Interiors, Inc., believed might appeal to
the very rich. Burke had made it. It was a