chatter.
Gary sprang to his feet.
“Now what?” he almost shouted.
The chattering ceased and the machine settled into the click-clack of its
message.
Gary hurried forward. The other two pressed close behind, looking over his
shoulder.
NELSON, ABOARD SPACE PUP, NEARING PLUTO. KINGSLEY REPORTS RECEIVING STRANGE
MESSAGES FROM SOMEWHERE OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM. UNABLE, OR UNWILLING, TO
GUESS AT SOURCE. REFUSES TO GIVE CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH MESSAGES WERE
RECEIVED OR CONTEXT OF THEM, IF IN FACT HE KNOWS CONTEXT. URGENT THAT YOU
GET STATEMENT FROM HIM SOONEST. REGARDS. EVENING ROCKET.
The machine’s stuttering came to an end.’
The three stared at one another.
“Messages,” said Herb. “Messages out of space.”
Gary shook his head. He stole a swift glance at the girl and her face
seemed pale. Perhaps she was remembering.
Chapter Four
TRAIL’S END, Pluto’s single community, cowering at the foot of a towering
black mountain, seemed deserted. There was no stir of life about the
buildings that huddled between the spacefield and the mountain. The
spiraling tower of the radio station climbed dizzily spaceward and beside
it squatted the tiny radio shack. Behind it stood the fueling station and
the hangar, while half a mile away loomed the larger building that housed
the laboratories of the Solar Science commission.
Caroline moved closer to Gary.
“It seems so lonely,” she whispered. “I don’t like loneliness now…
after…”
Gary stirred uneasily, scraping the heavy boots of his spacesuit over the
pitted rock. “It’s always lonely enough,” he said. “I wonder where they
are.”
As he spoke the lock of the radio shack opened and a space-suited figure
strode across the field to meet them.
His voice crackled in their helmet phones. “You must be Nelson,” it said.
“I’m Ted Smith, operator here. Kingsley told me to bring you up to the
house right away.”
“Fine,” said Gary. “Glad to be here. I suppose Evans is still around.”
“He is,” said Smith. “He’s up at the house now. His ship is in the hangar.
Personally, I figure he’s planning to take off and let the SCC do what they
can about it.”
Smith fell in step with them. “It’s good to see new faces,” he declared,
“especially a woman. We don’t have women visitors very often.”
“I’m sorry,” said Gary. “I forgot.”
He introduced Caroline and Herb to Smith as they plodded past the radio
shack and started for the laboratory.
“It gets God-lonesome out here,” said Smith. “This is a hellish place, if I
do say so myself. No wind. No moon. No nothing. Very little difference
between day and night because there’s never any clouds to cover the stars
and even in the daytime the Sun is little better than a star.”
His tongue, loosened by visitors to talk to, rambled on. “A fellow gets
kind of queer out here,” he told them.
“It’s enough to make anyone get queer. I think the doctor is half crazy
from staying here too long. He thinks he’s getting messages from some place
far away. Acts mysterious about it.”
“You think he just imagines it?” asked Herb.
“I’m not saying one way or the other,” declared Smith, “but I ask you…
where would you get the messages from? Think of the power it would take
just to send a message from Alpha Centauri. And that isn’t so very far
away. Not so far as stars go. Right next door, you might say.”
“Evans is going to fly there and back,” Herb reminded him.
“Evans is space-nuts,” said Smith. “With all the solar system to fool
around in, he has to go gallivanting off to the stars. He hasn’t got a
chance. I told him so, but he laughed at me. I’m sorry for him. He’s a nice
young fellow.”
They mounted the steps, hewn out of living stone, which led to the main
airlock of the laboratory building. Smith pressed a button and they waited.
“I suppose you’ll want Andy to go over your ship,”
Smith suggested.
“Sure,” said Gary. “Tell him to take good care of it.”
“Andy is the fueling-station man,” the radio operator explained. “But he
hasn’t much to do now. Most of the ships use geosectors. There’s only a few
old tubs, one or two a year, that need any fuel. Used to be a good
business, but not any more.”
The space lock swung open and the three stepped inside. Smith remained by
the doorway.
“I have to go back to the shack,” he said. “I’ll see you again before you
leave.”
The lock hissed shut behind them and the inner screw began to turn. It
swung open and they stepped into a small room that was lined with
spacesuits hanging on the wall.
A man was standing in the center of the room. A big man, with broad
shoulders and hands like hams. His unruly shock of hair was jet-black and
his voice boomed jovially at them.
“Glad to see all of you,” be said and laughed, a deep, thunderous laugh
that seemed to shake the room.
Gary swung back the helmet of his suit and thrust out a gloved hand.
“You are Dr. Kingsley?” he asked.
“That’s who I am,” boomed the mighty voice. “And who are these folks with
you?”
Gary introduced them.
“I didn’t know there was a lady in the party,” said the doctor.
“There wasn’t,” said Herb. “Not until just recently.”
“Mean to tell me they’ve taken to hitch-hiking out in space?”
Gary laughed. “Even better than that, doctor,” he said. “There’s a little
story about Miss Martin you’ll enjoy.”
“Come on,” he roared at them. “Get out of your duds. I got some coffee
brewing. And you’ll want to meet Tommy Evans. He’s that young fool who
thinks he’s going to fly four light-years out to old A.C.”
And at just that moment Tommy Evans burst into the room.
“Doc,” he shouted, “that damn machine of yours is at it again.”
Dr. Kingsley turned and lumbered out, shouting back at them.
“Come along. Never mind the suits.”
They ran behind him as he lumbered along. Through what obviously were the
laboratory’s living quarters, through a tiny kitchen that smelled of
boiling coffee, into a workroom bare of everything except a machine that
stood in one corner. A red light atop the machine was blinking rapidly.
“Whatever you say is off the record, is off the record,” Gary told him.
“There’s so much of it,” rumbled the doctor, “that sounds like sheer dream
stuff.”
“Hell,” said Evans, “there always is in everything new. My ships sound like
it, too. But the thing will work. I know it will.”
Kingsley perched himself on a heavy kitchen chair.
“It started more than a year ago,” be said. “We were studying the cosmics.
Elusive things, those rays. Men have studied them for about five thousand
years and they still don’t know as much about them as you think they would
after all that time. We thought at first that we’d made a really astounding
discovery, for our instruments, used on top of the building, showed that
the rays came in definite patterns. Not only that, but they came in
definite patterns at particular times. We developed new equipment and
learned more about the pattern. We learned that it occurred only when Pluto
had rotated into such a position that this particular portion of the planet
was facing the Great Nebula in Andromeda. We learned that the pattern,
besides having a certain fixed physical structure, also had a definite time
structure, and that the intensity of the bombardment always remained the
same. In other words, the pattern never varied as to readings; it occurred
at fixed intervals whenever we directly faced the Great Nebula, and the
intensity varied very slightly, showing an apparent constant source of
energy operating at specific times. In between those times our equipment
registered the general haphazard behavior one would expect in cosmic rays.”
The doctor rumbled on: “The readings had me down. Cosmic simply shouldn’t
behave that way. There never had been any instance of their behaving that
way at any time before. Of course, this was the first thorough
investigation far from the Sun’s interfering magnetic fields. But why
should they behave in that manner only when we were broadside to the Great
Nebula?
“My two assistants and I worked and studied and theorized and it finally
came down to just one thing. The things we were catching with our
instruments weren’t cosmic rays at all. They were something else. Something
new. Some strange impulse coming to us from outer space. Almost like a
signal. Like something or someone or God-knows-what was signaling to
someone or something stationed here on Pluto. We romanticized a bit. We
toyed with the idea of signals coming from another galaxy, for you know the
Great Nebula is an exterior galaxy, a mighty star system, some nine hundred
million light years across intergalactic space.
“But that was just imagining. There was nothing to support it in the light