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

Sandy, beside him, noted the floor. It was stone like the walls and ceiling. But it was worn. There were slight inequalities in it, beginning a foot or so from the walls. Sandy envisioned thousands of feet moving about these resonant corridors for hundreds or thousands of years in order to wear away the solid stone in this fashion. She felt age about her—incredible age reaching back to time past imagining, while the occupants of this hollow world swarmed about its interior. Doing what?

Burke considered other things. There were the ten-foot metal spheres, ranged by hundreds in what might be a magazine below. There were the squat and ugly metal monsters which seemed definitely menacing to somebody or something. There were the metal frameworks like bunks. There was no rust, here, which could be accounted for if Keller happened to be right and warmed air had been released lately in corridors which before—for ten thousand years or more—had contained only the vacuum of space. And there were those rooms which could be mess-halls.

These items were subject matter for thought. But if what they hinted at was true, there must be other specialized compartments elsewhere. There must be storerooms for food for those who managed the guns—if they were guns—and the spheres, and lived in the bunk-rooms and ate in the mess-halls. There'd be storerooms for equipment and supplies of all sorts. And again, if Keller were right about the air, there must be enormous pressure-tanks which had held the asteroid's atmosphere under high pressure for millennia, only to warm it and release it within the hour so that those who came by ship could use it.

An old phrase occurred to Burke. "A mystery wrapped in an enigma." It applied to these discoveries. Plainly the release of air had been done without the command of any living creature. There could be none here! As plainly, the signals from space had been begun without the interposition of life. The transmitter which still senselessly flung its message to Earth was a robot. The operation of the ship-lock, the warming of air, the lighting of the ship-lock and the corridors—all had been accomplished by machinery, obeying orders given to the transmitter first by some unguessable stimulus.

But why? Other mysteries aside, there had plainly been meticulous preparation for the welcoming of a ship from space. No, not welcoming. Acceptance of a ship from space. Somebody had been expected to respond to those plaintive fluting noises which went wailing through the solar system. Who were those waited-for visitors expected to be? What were they expected to do? For that matter, what was the purpose of the asteroid itself? What had it been built for? At some time or another it must have contained thousands of inhabitants. What were they here for? What became of them? And when the asteroid was left—abandoned—what conceivable situation was to trigger the transmitter to send out urgent calls, and then a directional guiding-signal the instant the call was answered? When Burke's ship came, the asteroid accepted it without question and carried out mechanical operations to make it possible for that ship's crew to roam at will through it. What activated this mechanism of so many eons ago?

The five newly-arrived humans, three men and two girls, trudged along the echoing gallery cut out of the asteroid's heart. Murmurous sounds accompanied them. Once they came to a place where a whispering-gallery effect existed. They heard their footsteps repeated loudly as if the asteroid inhabitants were approaching invisibly, but no one came.

"I don't like this!" Pam said uneasily.

Then her own voice mocked her, and she realized what it was, and giggled nervously. That also was repeated, and sounded like something which seemed to sneer at them. It was unpleasant.

They came to the end of the gallery. There was a stair leading upward. There was nowhere else to go, so Burke started up, Sandy close behind him, and Holmes and Pam behind them. Keller brought up the rear. They climbed, and small noises began to be audible.

They were fluting sounds. They grew louder as the party from Earth went up and up. They reached a landing, and here also there was a metal door with rounded corners. Through it and from beyond it came the piping notes that Burke had heard in his dream some hundreds of times and that lately had come to Earth from emptiness. The sounds seemed to pause and to begin again, and once more to pause. It was not possible to tell whether they came from one source, speaking pathetically, or from two sources in conversation.

Sandy went utterly white and her eyes fixed upon Burke. He was nearly as pale, himself. He stopped. Here and now there was no trace of ribbony-leaved trees or the smell of green things, but only air which was stuffy and lifeless as if it had been confined for centuries. And there was no sunset sky with two moons in it, but only carved and seamless stone. Yet there were the familiar fluting sounds....

Burke put his hand to the curiously-shaped handle of the door. It yielded. The door opened inward. Burke went in, his throat absurdly dry. Sandy followed him.

And again there was disappointment. Because there was no living creature here. The room was perhaps thirty feet long and as wide. There were many vision-screens in it, and some of them showed the stars outside with a precision of detail no earthly television could provide. The sun glowed as a small disk a third of its proper diameter. It was dimmer, too. The Milky Way showed clearly. And there were very many screens which showed utterly clear views of the surface of the asteroid, all broken, chaotic, riven rock and massy, unoxydized metal.

But there was no life. There were not even symbols of life. There were only machines. They noticed a large transparent disk some ten feet across. Specks of light glowed within its substance. Off at one side an angular metal arm held a small object very close to the disk's surface, a third of the way from its edge. It did not touch the disk, but under it and in the disk there was a little group of bright-red specks which quivered and wavered. They were placed in a strict mathematical arrangement which very, very slowly changed so that it would be hours before it had completed a rotation and had exactly the same appearance again.

The flutings came from a tall metal cone on the floor. Another machine nearby held a round plate out toward the cone. "There's nobody here," said Sandy in a strange voice. "What'll we do now, Joe?"

"This must be the transmitter," he murmured. "The sound-record for the broadcasts must be in here, somehow. It's possible that this plate is a sort of microphone—"

Keller, beaming, pointed to a round spot which quivered with an eerie luminescence. It glowed more brightly and dimmed according to the flutings. Burke said "The devil!" and the round spot flickered up very brightly for an instant.

"Yes," said Burke. "It's a mike. It's quite likely—" the round spot flared up and dimmed with the modulations of his voice—"it's quite likely that what I say goes into the broadcast to Earth."

The cone ceased to emit fluting noises. Burke said very steadily—and the spot flickered violently with the sounds—"I think I am transmitting to Earth. If so, this is Joe Burke. I announce the arrival of my ship at Asteroid M-387. The asteroid has been hollowed out and fitted with an air-lock which admitted our ship. It is a—a—"

He hesitated, and Holmes said curtly, "It's a fortress."

"Yes," said Burke heavily. "It's a fortress. There are weapons we haven't had time to examine. There are barracks for a garrison of thousands. But there is no one here. It has been deserted, but not abandoned, because the transmitter was set up to send out a call when some occasion arose. It seems to have arisen. There is a big plate here which may be a star map, with a scale on which light-years may be represented by inches. I don't know. There are certain bright-red specks on it. They are moving. There is a machine to watch those specks. Apparently it actuated the transmitter to make it call to all the solar system."

Keller suddenly put his finger to his lips. Burke nodded and said curtly, "I'll report further."

Keller flipped over an odd switch with something of a flourish—after which he looked embarrassed. The transmitter went dead.

"He's right," said Holmes. "Back home they know we're here, I suspect, and you've told enough to give them fits. I think we'd better be careful what we say in the clear."

Burke nodded again. "There'll be calls from Earth shortly and we can decide whether or not to use code then. Keller, can you trace the leads to this transmitter and find the receiver that picked up that West Virginia beam-signal and changed the first broadcast to the second? It should be as sensitive as this transmitter is powerful."

Keller nodded confidently.

"It'll take thirty-some minutes for that report of mine to reach Earth and an answer to get back," observed Burke, "if everything works perfectly and the proper side of Earth is turned this way. I think we can be sure there's nobody but us in the fortress."

His sensations were peculiar. It was exciting to have found a fortress in space, of course. It was the sort of thing that might have satisfied a really dedicated scientist completely. Burke realized the importance of the discovery, but it was an impersonal accomplishment. It did not mean, to Burke, that he'd carried out the purpose behind his coming here. This fortress was linked to a dream about a world with two moons in its sky and someone or something running breathlessly behind unearthly swaying foliage. But this place was not the place of that dream, nor did it fulfill it. Mystery remained, and frustration, and Burke was left in the state of mind of a savage who has found a treasure which means much to civilized men, but doesn't make him any happier because he doesn't want what civilized men can give him.

He grimaced and spoke without elation.

"Let's go back to the ship and get a code message ready for Earth."

He led the way out of this room of many motionless but operating machines. The incredibly perfect vision-screen images still portrayed the cosmos outside with all the stars and the sun itself moving slowly across their plates. They saw sunshine and starlight shining on the broken, chaotic outer surface of the asteroid. Wavering, curiously writhing red specks on the ten-foot disk continued their crawling motion. Keller fairly glowed with enthusiasm as he began to investigate this apparatus.

They all went back to the ship, except for Keller. They retraced their way along the long and brilliantly lighted galleries. They descended ramps and went along more brilliantly lighted corridors. Then they came to the branch which had been blocked off by a door that would not open. It was open now. They could see along the new section for a long, long way. They passed places where other doors had been closed, but now were open. What they could see inside them was almost exclusively a repetition of what they saw outside of them. They passed the place where hundreds of ten-foot metal spheres waited for an unknown use. They passed the table with a single leg, and the compartment with many metal ingots stored in it.

Finally, they came to the door with rounded corners, went through it, and there was their ship with its air-lock doors open, waiting in the brightly lighted tunnel.

They went in, and the feeling was of complete anticlimax. They knew, of course, that they had made a discovery beside which all archæological discoveries on Earth were trivial. They had come upon operating machines which must be old beyond imagining, unrusted because preserved in emptiness, and infinitely superior to anything that men had ever made. They had come upon a mystery to tantalize every brain on Earth. The consequences of their coming to this place would re-make all of Earth's future. But they were singularly unelated.

"I'll make up a sort of report," said Burke heavily, "of what we saw as we arrived, and our landing, and that sort of thing. We'll get it in code and ready for transmission. We can use the asteroid's transmitter."

Holmes scowled at the floor of the little ship.

"You'll make a report, too," said Burke. "You realized that this is a fortress. There can't be any doubt. It was built and put here to fight something. It wasn't built for fun. But I wonder who it was meant to do battle with, and why it was left by its garrison, and why they set up a transmitter to broadcast when something happened! Maybe it was to call the garrison back if they were ever needed. But thousands of years—You make a report on that!"

Holmes