The Wailing Asteroid by Murray Leinster (best affordable ebook reader .txt) 📗

"We're all but done," said Burke tiredly, "and Keller's just about proved what the signals are."

"Can we go with you?" asked Sandy.

"Of course not," said Burke. "The first message was a distress call. It had to be. Only in a distress call would somebody go into details so any listener would know it was important. It called for help and said who needed it, and why, and where."

Pam turned to Holmes. "Can that air-lock be opened from outside?"

It couldn't. Not when it was fastened, as now.

"Somebody answered that call from Earth," said Burke heavily, "and the second message told more about what was wrong. The clickings, we think, are numbers that told how long help could be waited for, or something on that order. And then there was a beacon signal meant to lead whoever was coming to help to that place."

Keller smiled pleasantly at Pam. He made an electrical connection and zestfully checked the result.

"Now there's a third message," said Burke. "Time's running out for whoever needs whatever help is called for. The clickings that seem to be numbers have changed. The—what you might call the scale of reportage—is new. They're telling us just how long they can wait or just how bad their situation is. They're saying that time is running out and they're saying, 'Hurry!'"

There was a thumping sound. Only Sandy and Pam looked unsurprised. Burke stared.

Sandy said firmly, "That's the police, Joe. We've been going to the movies with people who want to talk about you. Yesterday one of them confided to us that you were dangerous, and since he told us to get away from the office, we did. There might be shooting. He tipped us a little while ago."

Burke swore. There were other thumpings. Louder ones. They were on the air-lock door.

"If you try to put us out," said Sandy calmly, "you'll have to open that door and they'll try to fight their way in—and then where'll you be?"

Keller turned from the checking of the last instrument He looked at the others with excited eyes. He waited.

"I don't know what they can arrest you for," said Sandy, "and maybe they don't either, unless it's unauthorized artillery practice. But you can't put us out! And you know darn well that unless you do something they'll chop their way in!"

Burke said, "Dammit, they're not going to stop me from finding out if this thing works!"

He squirmed in a chair which had its base firmly fastened to a wall and began to punch buttons.

"Hold fast!" he said angrily. "At least we'll see...."

There were loud snapping sounds. There were creakings. The room stirred. It turned in a completely unbelievable fashion. Violent crashings sounded outside. Abruptly, a small television screen before Burke acquired an image. It was of the outside world reeling wildly. Holmes seized a hand-hold and grabbed Pam. He kept her from falling as a side wall became the floor, and what had been the floor became a side wall, with the ceiling another. It seemed that all the cosmos changed, though only walls and floors changed places.

Suddenly everything seemed normal but new. The surface underfoot was covered with a rubber mat. The hydroponic wall-garden sections were now vertical. Burke sat upright, and something over his head rotated a half-turn and was still. But it became coated with frost.

More crashes. More small television screens acquired images. They showed the office of Burke Development, Inc., against a tilted landscape. The landscape leveled. Another showed the construction shed. One showed cloud formations, very bright and distinct. And two others showed a small, armed, formidable body of men instinctively backing away from the outside television lens.

"So far," said Burke, "it works. Now—"

There was a sensation as of a rapidly rising elevator. Such a sensation usually lasts for part of a second. This kept on. One of the six television screens suddenly showed a view of Burke Development from straight overhead. The buildings and men and the four-acre enclosure dwindled rapidly. They were very tiny indeed and nearly all of the town was in the camera's field of vision when a vague whiteness, a cloud, moved in between.

"The devil!" said Burke. "Now they'll alert fighter planes and rocket installations and decide that we're either traitors or aliens in disguise and better be shot down. I think we simply have to go on!"

Keller made gestures, his eyes bright. Burke looked worried.

"It shouldn't take more than ten minutes to get a Nike aloft and after us. We must have been picked up by radar already.... We'll head north. We have to, anyhow."

But he was wrong about the ten minutes. It was fifteen before a rocket came into view, pouring out enormous masses of drive-fumes. It flung itself toward the ship.

From a sufficient height and a sufficient distance, the rocket's repeated attacks must have appeared like the strikings and twistings of a gigantic snake. It left behind it a writhing trail of fumes which was convincingly serpentine. It climbed and struck, and climbed and struck, like a monstrous python flinging itself furiously at some invisible prey. Six, seven, eight times it plunged frenziedly at the minute egg-shaped ship which scuttled for the heavens. Each time it missed and writhed about to dart again.

Then its fuel gave out and for all intents and purposes it ceased to exist. The thick, opaque trail it left behind began to dissipate. The path of vapor scattered. It spread to rags and tatters of unsubstantiality through which the rocket plummeted downward in the long fall which is a spent rocket's ending.

Burke cautiously cut down the drive and awkwardly turned the ship on its side, heading it toward the north. The state of things inside the ship was one of intolerable tenseness.

"I'm a new driver," said Burke, "and that was a tough bit of driving to do." He glanced at the exterior-pressure meter. "There's no air outside to register. We must be fifty or sixty miles high and maybe still rising. But we're not leaking air."

Actually the plastic ship was eighty miles up. The sunlit world beneath it showed white patches of cloud in patterns a meteorologist would have found interesting. Burke could see the valley of the St. Lawrence River between the white areas. But the Earth's surface was curiously foreshortened. What was beneath seemed utterly flat, and at the edge of the world all appeared distorted and unreal.

Holmes, still pale, asked, "How'd we get away from that rocket?"

"We accelerated," said Burke. "It was a defensive rocket. It was designed to knock down jet bomb carriers or ballistic missiles which travel at a constant speed. Target-seeking missiles can lock onto the radar echo from a coasting ship, or one going at its highest speed because their computers predict where their target, traveling at constant speed, can be intercepted. We were never there. We were accelerating. Missile-guidance systems can't measure acceleration and allow for it. They shouldn't have to."

Four of the six television screens showed dark sky with twinkling lights in it. On one there was the dim outline of the sun, reversed to blackness because its light was too great to be registered in a normal fashion. The other screen showed Earth.

There was a buzzing, and Keller looked at Burke.

"Rocket?" asked Burke. Keller shook his head. "Radar?" Keller nodded.

"The DEW line, most likely," said Burke in a worried tone. "I don't know whether they've got rockets that can reach us. But I know fighter planes can't get this high. Maybe they can throw a spread of air-to-air rockets, though.... I don't know their range."

Sandy said unsteadily, "They shouldn't do this to us! We're not criminals! At least they should ask us who we are and what we're doing!"

"They probably did," said Burke, "and we didn't answer. See if you can pick up some voices, Keller."

Keller twirled dials and set indicators. Voices burst into speech. "Reporting UFO sighted extreme altitude coördinates—First rocket exhausted fuel in multiple attacks and fell, sir." Another voice, very brisk, "Thirty-second squadron, scramble! Keep top altitude and get under it. If it descends within range, blast it!" Another voice said crisply, "Coördinates three-seven Jacob, one-nine Alfred...."

Keller turned the voices down to mutters because they were useless.

Burke said, "Hell! We ought to land somewhere and check over the ship. Keller, can you give me a microphone and a wavelength somebody will be likely to pick up?"

Keller shrugged and picked up masses of wire. He began to work on an as yet unfinished wiring job. Evidently, the ship was not near enough to completion to be capable of a call to ground. It had taken off with many things not finished. Burke, at the controls, found it possible to think of a number of items that should have been examined exhaustively before the ship left the mould in which it had been made. He worried.

Pam said in a strange voice, "I thought I might rate as a heroine for stowing away on this voyage, but I didn't think we'd have to dodge rockets and fighter planes to get away!"

There was no comment.

"I'm a beginner at navigation," said Burke a little later, more worried than before. "I know we have to go out over the north magnetic pole, but how the hell do I find that?"

Keller beamed. He dropped his wiring job and went to the imposing bank of electronic instruments. He set one, and then another, and then a third. The action, of course, was similar to that of an airline pilot when he tunes in broadcasting stations in different cities. From each, a directional reading can be taken. Where the lines of direction cross, there the transport plane must be. But Keller turned to shortwave transmitters whose transmissions could be picked up in space. Presently, eighty miles high, he wrote a latitude and longitude neatly on a slip of paper, wrote "North magnetic pole 93°W, 71°N, nearly," and after that a course.

"Hm," said Burke. "Thanks."

Then there was a relative silence inside the ship. Only a faint mutter of voices came from assorted speakers that Keller had first turned on and then turned down, and a small humming sound from a gyro. When they listened, they could also hear a high sweet musical tone. Burke shifted this control here, and that control there, and lifted his hands. The ship moved on steadily. He checked this and that and the other thing. He was pleased. But there were innumerable things to be checked. Holmes went down the ladder to the other compartment below. There were details to be looked into there, too.

One of the screens portrayed Earth from a height of seventy miles instead of eighty, now. Others pictured the heavens, with very many stars shining unwinkingly out of blackness. Keller got at his wires again and resumed the work of installing a ship-to-ground transmitter and its connection to an exterior-reflecting antenna.

Sandy watched Burke as he moved about, testing one thing after another. From time to time he glanced at the screens which had to serve in the place of windows. Once he went back to the control-board and changed an adjustment.

"We dropped down ten miles," he explained to Sandy. "And I suspect we're being trailed by jets down below."

Holmes meticulously inspected all storage places. He'd packed them when the ship lay on her side.

Burke read an instrument and said with satisfaction, "We're running on sunshine!"

He meant that in empty space certain aluminum plates on the outside of the hull were picking up heat from the naked sun. The use of the drive-shaft lowered its temperature. Metallic connection with the outside plates conducted heat inward from those plates. The drive-shaft was cold to the touch, but it could drop four hundred degrees Fahrenheit before it ceased to operate as a drive. It was gratifying that it had cooled so little up to this moment.

Later Keller tapped Burke on the shoulder and jerked his thumb upward.

"We go up now?" asked Burke.

Keller nodded. Burke carefully swung the ship to aim vertically. The views of solid Earth slid from previous screens to new ones. The stars and the dark object which was the sun also moved across their screens to vanish and reappear on others. Then Burke touched the drive-control. Once more they had the sensation of being in a rising elevator. And at just that moment spots appeared on the barren, icy, totally flattened terrain below.

They were rocket-trails from target-seeking missiles which had reached the area of the north magnetic pole by herculean effort and were aimed at the radar-detected little ship by the heavy planes that carried them.

From the surface of the Earth, it would have seemed that monstrous columns of foaming white appeared and rose with incredible swiftness toward the heavens. They reached on, up and up and up, seeming to draw closer together as they became smaller in the distance, until all eight of them seemed to merge into a single point