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

it might be, it was not dangerous.

He went into the spaceship and for no reason whatever firmly locked both air-lock doors. Holmes and Keller were asleep. There was no sound from the lower compartment occupied by Sandy and Pam.

Burke put the black object on the control-desk. The single cube on Earth had been meaningless. The museum which joyfully accepted Cro-Magnon artifacts from his uncle had dismissed it as of no importance. It was fit only to be given to an eleven-year-old boy. But a roomful of such cubes couldn't be without meaning!

He dismissed this newest mystery with an almost violent effort of his will. It was a mystery. Yet there was no intention to have the fortress seem a mystery to whoever answered its call to space. He could guess that the signals were notification of some emergency which needed to be met. The automatic apparatus of the ship-lock was set to aid those who came in response to the call. But everything presupposed that those who came would know why they came.

Burke didn't. The thing must be simple, an explanation not yet thought of. But there was nowhere to start to think about it! His recurrent dream? No. That was as mysterious as the rest.

Burke was very, very lonely and depressed. He could look for no help in solving the mystery. Earth was now past the point of conjunction with M-387, and moved nearly a million miles a day along its orbit, with nearly half of them away from the fortress. At the most hopeful estimate, it would be three months or later before an emergency space fleet of replicas of his own ship could lift off from Earth for here.

And Burke was reasonably sure that the red sparks would have reached the center of the disk in much less time than that. If it were in some fashion like a radar, making a map of the surroundings of the asteroid, the observer's place would be in the middle. In that event, whatever the red sparks represented would reach the fortress before more ships came out from Earth.

He sat with his chin on his chest, wearily debating the impossibility of meeting a situation in which all humanity might well be involved. His achievement of space travel provided no sense of triumph, and the discovery of the abandoned fortress produced no elation. Not when a desperate emergency requiring a non-existent garrison to report for duty was so probable. Burke sat in the control-chair and could find no encouragement in any of his thoughts....

He heard a trumpet-call and was on his feet, buckling familiar equipment about him. There were other figures all around in this bunkroom, similarly equipping themselves. Some grumbled. There was a rush for the doorway and he found himself one of a line of trotting figures which swung sharply out the door and went swiftly down one of the high-ceilinged corridors. The faces he saw were hardbitten and resentful. They moved, but out of habit, not choice. There were other lines of men in motion. Some rushed in the same direction. Others ran stolidly into branching corridors and were lost to sight. Up a ramp, with the pounding of innumerable feet filling his ears with echoed sound. Suddenly there were fewer men before him. Some had darted through a doorway to the right. More vanished. He was at the head of his line. He turned into the doorway next beyond, and saw a squat and menacing object there. He swung up its side and seated himself. He dropped a helmet over his head and saw empty space with millions of unwinking stars beyond it. He waited. He was not Burke. He was someone else who happened to be the pointer, the aimer, of the weapon he sat astride. This might be a drill, but it could be action.

A voice spoke inside his helmet. The words were utterly strange, but he understood them. He tested the give of this lever and the response of that. He spoke crisply, militarily, in words that somehow meant this—a word missing—was ready for action at its highest rate of fire.

Again he waited, his eyes examining the emptiness he saw from within his helmet. A star winked. He snatched at a lever and centered it, snapping sharp, bitten-off words. The voice in his helmet said, "Flam!" He jerked the firing-lever and all space was blotted out for seconds by flaming light. Then the light faded and far, far away among the stars something burned horribly, spouting fire. It blew up.

Yet again he waited. He doggedly watched the stars, because the Enemy had some way to prevent detection by regular instruments, and only the barest flicker of one among myriad light-specks could reveal the presence of an Enemy craft.

A long time later the voice in his helmet spoke again, and he relaxed, and lifted the helmet. He nodded to the others of the crew of this weapon. Then a trumpet blew again, and he dismounted leisurely from the saddle of the ungainly thing he'd fired, and he and his companions waited while long lines of men filed stolidly past the doorway. They were on the way back to the bunk-rooms. They did not look well-fed. His turn came. His crew filed out into the corridor, now filled with men moving in a bored but disciplined fashion. He heard somebody say that it was an Enemy scout, trying some new device to get close to the fortress. Eight weapons had fired on it at the same instant, his among them. Whatever the new device was, the Enemy had found it didn't work. But he knew that it needn't have been a real Enemy, but just a drill. Nobody knew when supposed action was real. There was much suspicion that there was no real action. There was always the possibility of real action, though. Of course. The Enemy had been the Enemy for thousands of years. A century or ten or a hundred of quietude would not mean the Enemy had given up....

Then Burke found himself staring at the quietly glowing monitor-lights of his own ship's control-board. He was himself again. He remembered opening his eyes. He'd dozed, and he'd dreamed, and now he was awake. And he knew with absolute certainty that what he'd dreamed came from the black cube he'd brought back from the previously locked-up room. But there was a difference between this dream and the one he'd had for so many years. He could not name the difference, but he knew it. This was not an emotion-packed, illusory experience which would haunt him forever. This was an experience like the most vivid of books. It was something he would remember, but he would need to think about it if he were to remember it fully.

He sat stiffly still, going over and over this new memory, until he heard someone moving about in the compartment below.

"Sandy?"

"Yes," said Sandy downstairs. "What is it?"

"I opened the door that bothered Pam," said Burke. Suddenly the implications of what had just occurred began to hit him. This was the clue he'd needed. Now he knew—many things. "I found out what the fortress is for. I suspect I know what the signals were intended to do."

Silence for a moment. Then Sandy's voice. "I'm coming right up."

In minutes she ascended the stairs.

"What is it, Joe?"

He waved his hand, with some grimness, at the small black object on the control-desk.

"I found this and some thousands of others behind that creepy door. I suspect that it accounts for the absence of signs and symbols. It contains information. I got it. You get it by dozing near one of these things. I did. I dreamed."

Sandy looked at him anxiously.

"No," he told her. "No twin moons or waving foliage. I dreamed I was a member of the garrison. I went through a training drill. I know how to operate those big machines on the second level of the corridor, now. They're weapons. I know how to use them."

Sandy's uneasiness visibly increased.

"These black cubes are—lesson-givers. They're subliminal instructors. Pam is more sensitive to such stuff than the rest of us. It didn't affect me until I dozed. Then I found myself instructed by going through an experience in the form of a dream. These cubes contain records of experiences. You have those experiences. You dream them. You learn."

Then he said abruptly, "I understand my recurrent dream now, I think. When I was eleven years old I had a cube like this. Don't ask me how it got into a Cro-Magnon cave! But I had it. One day it dropped and split into a million leaves of shiny stuff. One got away under my bed, close up under my pillow. When I slept I dreamed about a place with two moons and strange trees and—all the rest."

Sandy said, groping, "Do you mean it was magnetized in some fashion, and when you slept you were affected by it so you dreamed something—predetermined?"

"Exactly," said Burke grimly. "The predetermined thing in this particular cube is the way to operate those machines Holmes said were weapons." Then he said more grimly, "I think we're going to have to accept the idea that this cube is an instruction device to teach the garrison without their having to learn to read or write or think. They'd have only to dream."

Sandy looked from him to the small black cube.

"Then we can find out—"

"I've found it out," said Burke. "I guessed before, but now I know. There is an Enemy this fortress was built to fight. There is a war that's lasted for thousands of years. The Enemy has spaceships and strange weapons and is absolutely implacable. It has to be found. And the signals from space were calls to the garrison of this fortress to come back and fight it. But there isn't any garrison any more. We answered instead. The Enemy comes from hundreds or thousands of light-years away, and he tries desperately to smash the defenses of this fortress and others, and when he succeeds there will be massacre and atrocity and death to celebrate his victory. He's on the way now. And when he comes—" Burke's voice grew harsh. "When he comes he won't stop with trying to smash this place. The people of Earth are the Enemy's enemies, too. Because the garrison was a garrison of men!"

Chapter 8

"I don't believe it," said Holmes flatly.

Burke shrugged. He found that he was tense all over, so he took some pains to appear wholly calm.

"It isn't reasonable!" insisted Holmes. "It doesn't make sense!"

"The question," observed Burke, "isn't whether it makes sense, but whether it's fact. According to the last word from Earth, they're still insisting that the ship's drive is against all reason. But we're here. And speaking of reason, would the average person look at this place and say blandly, 'Ah, yes! A fortress in space. To be sure!' Would they? Is this place reasonable?"

Holmes grinned.

"I'll go along with you there," he agreed. "It isn't. But you say its garrison was men. Look here! Have you seen a place before where men lived without writings in its public places? They tell me the ancient Egyptians wrote their names on the Sphinx and the Pyramids. Nowadays they're scrawled in phone booths and on benches. It's the instinct of men to autograph their surroundings. But there's not a line of written matter in this place! That's not like men!"

"Again," said Burke, "the question isn't of normality, but of fact."

"Then I'll try it," said Holmes skeptically. "How does it work?"

"I don't know. But put a cube about a yard from your head, and doze off. I think you'll have an odd dream. I did. I think the information you'll get in your dream will check with what you find around you. Some of it you won't have known before, but you'll find it's true."

"This," said Holmes, "I will have to see. Which cube do I try it with, or do I use all of them?"

"There's apparently no way to tell what any of them contains," said Burke. "I went back to the storeroom and brought a dozen of them. Take any one and put the others some distance away—maybe outside the ship. I'm going to talk to Keller. He'll make a lot of use of this discovery."

Holmes picked up a cube.

"I'll try it," he said cheerfully. "I go to sleep, perchance to dream. Right! See you later."

Burke moved toward the ship's air-lock.

"Pam and I have some housekeeping to do," Sandy said.

Burke nodded abstractedly. He left the ship and headed along the mile-long corridor with the turn at the end, a second level and another turn, and then the flight of steps to the instrument-room. As he walked, the sound of his footsteps echoed and reëchoed.

Behind him, Holmes set a cube in a suitable position and