"It's pretty obvious," I said. "They have the bombs. They've had them
for quite some time. They must have a lot of other weapons,
too--more ... advanced. They're trying to tell us their history with
the equations. First they depended on natural sources of energy, plants
and animals; then they developed artificial energy sources and built up
a technology; finally they discovered nuclear energy."
"How long do you think they've had the bombs?"
"Hard to tell. A generation ... a century. What difference does it
make? They have them. They probably thought, at first, that they
could learn to live with them ... but imagine what it must be like to
have those weapons at your fingertips ... for a century. Forever. Now
they're so scared of them that they're beaming their whole history
out into space, looking for someone to tell them how to live with the
bombs, how to avoid using them."
"You could be wrong," Rizzo said. "They could be boasting about their
arsenal."
"Why? For what reason? No ... the way they keep repeating those last
equations. They're pleading for help."
Rizzo turned to the oscilloscope. It was flickering again.
"Think it's the same thing?"
"No doubt. You're taping it anyway, aren't you?"
"Yeah, sure. Automatically."
Suddenly, in mid-flight, the signal winked off. The pulsations didn't
simply smooth out into a steady line, as they had before. The screen
simply went dead.
"That's funny," Rizzo said, puzzled. He checked the oscilloscope.
"Nothing wrong here. Something must've happened to the telescope."
Suddenly I knew what had happened. "Take the spectrometer off and turn
on the image-amplifier," I told him.
I knew what we would see. I knew why the oscilloscope beam had suddenly
gone off scale. And the knowledge was making me sick.
Rizzo removed the spectrometer set-up and flicked the switch that
energized the image-amplifier's viewscreen.
"Holy God!"
The dome was flooded with light. The star had exploded.
"They had the bombs all right," I heard myself saying. "And they
couldn't prevent themselves from using them. And they had a lot more,
too. Enough to push their star past its natural limits."
Rizzo's face was etched in the harsh light.
"I've gotta get out of here," he muttered, looking all around the
cramped dome. "I've gotta get back to my wife and find someplace where
it's safe...."
"Someplace?" I asked, staring at the screen. "Where?"