The Wailing Asteroid | Page 8

creature for the person he needed to find.
And suddenly he saw a figure running behind the waving foliage. The
relief was almost greater pain than the terror had been. It was a kind
and amount of emotion that an eleven-year-old boy simply could not
know, but Burke experienced it. He gave a great shout, and bounded
forward toward her-- and the dream ended.
He dreamed it three nights running, then it stopped, for a while.
Then, a week later, he had the dream again, repeated in every detail. He
had it a dozen times before he was twelve, and as many more before he
was thirteen. It recurred at random intervals all through his teens, while
he was in college, and after. When he grew up he found out that
recurrent dreams are by no means unusual. But this was very far from a
usual dream.
From time to time, he observed new details in the dream. He knew that
he was dreaming. His actions and his emotions did not vary, but he was
able to survey them-- like the way one can take note of items in a book
one reads while quite absorbed in it. He came to notice the way the
trees sent their roots out over the surface of the ground before dropping
suckers down into it. He noticed a mass of masonry off to the left. He
discovered that a hill in the distance was not a natural hill. He was able
to remember markings on the large, stationary moon in the sky, and to
realize that the smaller one was jagged and irregular in shape. The
dream did not change, but his knowledge of the place of the dream
increased.
As he grew older, he was startled to realize that though the trees, for
example, were not real, they were consistent with reality. The weapon
he held in his hand was especially disturbing. Its grip and barrel were
transparent plastic, and in the barrel there was a sequence of
peculiarly-shaped forms, in and about which wire had been wound. As
a grown man he'd made such shapes in metal, once. He'd tried them out

as magnets in a job for American Tool. But they weren't magnets. They
were something specific and alarming instead. He also came to know
exactly what the mass of masonry was, and it was a sober engineering
feat. No boy of eleven could have imagined it.
And always there were the flutelike musical sounds coming from
behind him, When he was twenty-five he'd memorized them. He'd
heard them-- dreamed them-- hundreds of times. He tried to duplicate
them on a flute and devised a special mute to get exactly the tone
quality he remembered so well. He made a recording to study, but the
study was futile.
In a way, it was unwholesome to be so much obsessed by a dream. In a
way, the dream was magnificently irrelevant to messages transmitted
through millions of miles of emptiness. But the flutelike sounds linked
it-- now-- to reality! He paced up and down in the empty, resonant
building and muttered, "I ought to talk to the space-exploration
people."
Then he laughed. That was ironical. All the crackpots in the world
would be besieging all the authorities who might be concerned with the
sounds from space, impassionedly informing them what Julius Caesar,
or Chief Sitting Bull, or some other departed shade, had told them
about the matter via automatic writing or Ouija boards. Those who did
not claim ghostly authority would explain that they had special talents,
or a marvelous invention, or that they were members of the race which
had sent the messages the satellite-tracking stations received.
No. It would serve no purpose to inform the Academy of Sciences that
he'd been dreaming signals like the ones that now agitated humanity. It
was too absurd. But it was unthinkable for a person of Burke's
temperament to do nothing. So he set to work in exactly the fashion of
one of the crackpots he disliked.
Actually, the job should have been undertaken in ponderous secrecy by
committees from various learned societies, official bureaus, and all the
armed forces. There should have been squabbles about how the task
was to be divided up, bitter arguments about how much money was to

be spent by whom, violent disagreements about
research-and-development contracts. It should have been treated as a
program of research, in which everybody could claim credit for all
achievements and nobody was to blame for blunders.
Burke could not command resources for so ambitious an undertaking.
And he knew that as a private project it was preposterous. But he began
the sort of preliminary labor that an engineer does before he really sets
to work.
He jotted down some items that he didn't have