The Wailing Asteroid | Page 7

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 was no one at all who would not be apprehensive. Some would
panic.
Burke's reaction was strictly personal. Nobody else in the world would
have felt the same appalled, stunned emotion he felt when he heard the
sounds from space. Because to him they were familiar sounds.
He paced up and down in the big, partitionless building in which the
actual work of Burke Development, Inc., was done. He'd done some
reasonably good work in this place. The prototype of the hydroponic
wall for Interiors, Inc., still stood against one wall. It was crude, but
he'd made it work and then built a production model which had now
been shipped off complete. A little to one side was a prototype of a
special machine which stamped out small parts for American Tool.
That had been a tricky assignment! There were plastic and glass-wool
and such oddments with which he'd done a process-design job for
Holmes Yachts, and a box of small parts left over from the designing
job that gave one aviation company the only practical small-plane
retractable landing-gear.
These things had a queer meaning for him now. He'd devised the
wanted products. He'd developed certain needed processes. But now he
began to be deeply suspicious of his own successes. Each was a new
reason for uneasiness.
He grimly questioned whether his highly peculiar obsession had not
been planted in him against the time when fluting noises would come
from that illimitable void beyond Earth's atmosphere.

He examined, for the thousandth time, his special linkage with the
space noises. In previous soul-searchings he'd pin-pointed the time
when the whole business began. He'd been eleven years old. He could
even work out something close to an exact date. He was living with his
aunt and uncle, his own parents being dead. His uncle had made a
business trip to Europe, alone, and had brought back souvenirs which
were fascinating to eleven-year-old Joe Burke. There was a flint knife,
and a carved ivory object which his uncle assured him was mammoth
ivory. It had a deer's head incised into it. There were some fragments of
pottery and a dull-surfaced black cube. They appealed to the small boy
because his uncle said they'd belonged to men who lived when
mammoths roamed the Earth and cave men hunted the now-extinct
huge beasts. Cro-Magnons, his uncle said, had owned the objects. He'd
bought them from a French peasant who'd found a cave with pictures
on its walls that dated back twenty thousand years. The French
government had taken over the cave, but before reporting it the peasant
had thriftily hidden away some small treasures to sell for himself.
Burke's uncle bought them and, in time, presented them to the local
museum. All but the black cube, which Burke had dropped. It had
shattered into a million tissue-thin, shiny plates, which his aunt insisted
on sweeping out. He'd tried to keep one of the plates, but his aunt had
found it under his pillow and disposed of it.
He remembered the matter solely because he'd examined his memories
so often, trying to find something relevant to account for the beginning
of his recurrent dream. Somewhere shortly after his uncle's visit he had
had a dream. Like all dreams, it was not complete. It made no sense.
But it wasn't a normal dream for an eleven-year-old boy.
He was in a place where the sun had just set, but there were two moons
in the sky. One was large and motionless. The other was small and
moved swiftly across the heavens. From behind him came fluting
signals like the messages that would later come from space. In the
dream he was full-grown and he saw trees with extraordinary, ribbony
leaves like no trees on Earth. They wavered and shivered in a gentle
breeze, but he ignored them as he did the fluting sounds behind him.

He was searching desperately for someone. A child knows terror for
himself, but not for anybody else. But Burke, then aged eleven,
dreamed that he was in an agony of fear for someone else. To breathe
was torment. He held a weapon ready in his hand. He was prepared to
do battle with any imaginable