There was a tiny shock; in a minute, trivial contact of the ship with
something outside it. Drifting within the now brightly lighted bore, it
had touched the wall. There was no force to the impact.
Keller made an interested noise. When eyes turned to him, he pointed to
a dial. A needle on that dial pointed just past the figure "30." Burke
grunted.
"The devil! We've been waiting for things to happen, and they already
have! It's our move."
"According to that needle," agreed Holmes, "somebody has kindly put
thirty point seven mercury inches of air-pressure around the ship
outside. We can walk out and breathe, now."
"If," said Burke, "it's air. It could be something else. I'll have to
check it."
He got out the self-contained diving apparatus that had been brought
along to serve as a strictly temporary space suit.
"I'll try a cigarette-lighter. Maybe it will burn naturally. Maybe it
will go out. It could make an explosion. But I doubt that very much."
"We'll hope," said Holmes, "that the lighter burns."
Burke climbed into the diving suit, which had been designed for
amateurs of undersea fishing to use in chilly waters. On Earth it
would have been intolerably heavy, for a man moving about out of the
ocean. But there was no weight here. If M-387 had a gravitational field
at all, which in theory it had to have, it would be on the order of
millionths of the pull of Earth.
Keller sat in the control-chair, watching the instruments and the
outside television screens which showed the bore now reduced to fifty
feet. Somehow the more distant parts of the tunnel looked hazy, as
if there were a slight mist in whatever gas had been released in
it. Sandy watched Burke pull on the helmet and close the face-plate.
She grasped a hand-hold, her knuckles turning white. Pam nestled
comfortably in a corner of the ceiling of the control-room. Holmes
frowned as Burke went into the air-lock and closed the inner door.
His voice came immediately out of a speaker at the control-desk.
"I'm breathing canned air from the suit," he said curtly.
There were scrapings. The outer lock-door made noises. There was what
seemed to be a horribly long wait. Then they heard Burke's voice again.
"I've tried it," he reported. "The lighter burns when it's next to the
slightly opened door. I'm opening wide now."
More noises from the air-lock.
"It still burns. Repeat. The lighter burns all right. The tunnel is
filled with air. I'm going to crack my face-plate and see how it
smells."
Silence, while Sandy went white. But a moment later Burke said crisply,
"It smells all right. It's lifeless and stuffy, but there's nothing in
it with an odor. Hold on--I hear something!"
A long minute, while the little ship floated eerily almost in contact
with the walls about it. It turned slowly. Then there came brisk,
brief fluting noises. They were familiar in kind. But this was a short
message, of some fifteen or twenty seconds length, no more. It ended,
was repeated, ended, was repeated, and went on with an effect of
mechanical and parrot-like repetition.
"It's good air," reported Burke. "I'm breathing normally. But it might
have been stored for ages. It's stale. Do you hear what I do?"
"Yes," said Sandy in a whisper to the control-room. "It's a call. It's
telling us to do something. Come back inside, Joe!"
They heard the outer air-lock door closing and its locking-dogs
engaging. The fluting noises ceased to be audible. The inner door swung
wide. Burke came into the control-room, his helmet face-plate open. He
wriggled out of the diving suit.
"Something picked up the fact that we'd entered. It closed a door
behind us. Then it turned on lights for us. Then it let air into the
entrance-lock. Now it's telling us to do something."
The ship surged, ever so gently. Keller had turned on an infinitesimal
trace of drive. The walls of the bore floated past on the television
screens. There was mist in the air outside. It seemed to clear as the
ship moved.
Keller made a gratified small sound. They could see the end of the
tunnel. There was a platform there. Stairs went to it from the side of
the bore. There was a door with rounded corners in the end wall. That
wall was metal.
Keller carefully turned the ship until the stairway was in proper
position for a landing, if there had been gravitation to make the
stairs usable. Very, very gently, he lowered the ship upon the platform.
There was a singular tugging sensation which ceased, came again,
ceased, and gradually built up to a perfectly normal feeling of weight.
They stood upon the floor of the control-room with every physical
sensation they'd felt during one-gravity acceleration on the way out
here, and which they'd have felt if the ship were aground on Earth.
"Artificial gravity! Whoever made this knew something!" Burke said.
Pam swallowed and spoke with an apparent attempt at nonchalance.
"Now what do we do?"
"We--look for the people," said Sandy in a queer tone.
"There's nobody here, Sandy!" Burke said irritably. "Can't you see?
There can't be anybody here! They'd have signaled us what to do
if there had been! This is machinery working. We do something and
it operates. But then it waits for us to do something else. It's
like--like a self-service elevator!"
"We didn't come here for an elevator ride," said Sandy.
"I came to find out what's here," said Burke, "and why it's signaling
to Earth. Holmes, you stay here with the girls and I'll take a look
outside."
"I'd like to mention," said Holmes drily, "that we haven't a weapon on
this ship. When they shot rockets at us back on Earth, we didn't have
even a pea-shooter to shoot back with. We haven't now. I think the
girls are as safe exploring as they are here. And besides, we'll all
feel better if we're together."
"I'm going!" said Sandy defiantly.
Burke hesitated, then shrugged. He unlatched the devices which kept
both doors to the air-lock from being open at the same time. It was
not a completely cautious thing to do, but caution was impractical.
The ship was imprisoned. It was incapable of defense. There was simply
nothing sensible about precautions that couldn't prevent anything.
Burke threw open the outer lock door. One by one, the five of them
climbed down to the platform so plainly designed for a ship of space--a
small one--to land upon. Nothing happened. Their surroundings were
completely uninformative. This landing-platform might have been built
by any race on Earth or anywhere else, provided only that it used
stairs.
"Here goes," said Burke.
He went to the door with rounded corners. There was something like a
handle at one side, about waist-high. He put his hand to it, tugged
and twisted, and the door gave. It was not rusty, but it badly needed
lubrication. Burke pulled it wide and stared unbelievingly beyond.
Before him there stretched a corridor which was not less than twenty
feet high and just as wide. The long, glowing tubes of light that
illuminated the ship-tunnel were here, too, fixed in the ceiling. The
corridor reached away, straight and unbroken, until its end seemed a
mere point in the distance. It looked about a full mile long. There
were doorways in both its side walls, and they dwindled in the distance
with a monotonous regularity until they, too, were mere vertical
specks. One could not speak of the length of this corridor in feet or
yards. It was a mile.
It was incredible. It was overwhelming. And it was empty. It shone in
the glare of the light tubes which made a river of brilliance overhead.
It seemed preposterous that so vast a construction should have no
living thing in it. But it was absolutely vacant.
They stared down its length for long seconds. Then Burke seemed to
shake himself.
"Here's the parlor. Let's walk in, even if there's no welcoming
committee."
His voice echoed. It rolled and reverberated and then diminished very
slowly to nothing.
Burke strode forward with Sandy close to him. Pam stared blankly, and
instinctively moved up to Holmes. Once they were through the door, the
sensation was not that of adventure in a remote part of space, but of
being in some strange and impossible monument on Earth. The feeling of
weight, if not completely normal, was so near it as not to be noticed.
They could have been in some previously unknown structure made by men,
at home.
This corridor, though, was not built. It was excavated. Some process
had been used which did not fracture the stone to be removed. The
surface of the rock about them was smooth. In places it glittered.
The doorways had been cut out, not constructed. They were of a size
which made them seem designed for the use of men. The compartments to
which they gave admission were similarly matter-of-fact. They were
windowless, of course, but their strangeness lay in the fact that they
were empty, as if to insist that all this ingenuity and labor had been
abandoned thousands of years before. Yet from somewhere in the asteroid
a call still went out urgently, filling the solar system with plaintive
fluting sounds, begging whoever heard to come and do something which
was direly necessary.
A long, long way down the gallery there were two specks. A quarter-mile
from the entrance, they saw that one of the rooms contained a pile of
metal ingots, neatly stacked and bound in place by still-glistening
wire. At half a mile they came upon the things in the gallery itself.
One was plainly a table with a single leg, made of metal. It was
unrusted, but showed signs of use. The other was an object with a
hollow top. In the hollow there were twisted, shriveled shreds of
something unguessable.
"If men had built this," said Burke, and again his voice echoed and
rolled, "that hollow thing would be a stool with a vanished cushion,
and the table would be a desk."
Sandy said thoughtfully, "If men had built this, there'd be signs
somewhere marking things. At least there'd be some sort of numbers on
these doorways!"
Burke said nothing. They went on.
The gallery branched. A metal door closed off the divergent branch.
Burke tugged at an apparent handle. It did not yield. They continued
along the straight, open way.
They came to a larger-than-usual opening in the side wall. Inside it
there were rows and rows and rows of metal spheres some ten feet in
diameter. There must have been hundreds of them. Beside the door there
was a tiny shelf, with a tinier box fastened to it. A long way farther,
they came to what had appeared to be the end of this corridor. But it
did not end. It slanted upward and turned and they found themselves in
the same corridor on a different level, headed back in the direction
from which they had come. Their footsteps echoed hollowly in the
still-enormous emptiness. There were other closed doors. Burke tried
some. Holmes tried others. They did not open. Keller moved raptly,
gazing at this and that.
Everything was strange, but not strange enough to be frightening. One
could have believed this place the work of men, except that this
was beyond the ability of men to make. There must be miles of vacant
rooms carved out of solid rock. They came upon some hundreds of yards
of doorways, and in every room on which they opened, there were metal
frames about the walls. Holmes said suddenly, "If men had built this
place, those could be bunks."
They came to another place where there was dust, and a group of six
huge rooms communicating not only with the corridor but with each
other. They found hollow metal things like cook pans. They found a
hollow small object which could have been a drinking vessel. It was
broken. It was of a size suitable for men.
"If men built this," said Holmes again, "these could be mess-halls. But
I agree with Sandy that there should be signs."
Yet another closed door. It resisted their efforts to open it, just
like the others. Keller put out his hand and thoughtfully touched the
stone beside it. He looked astonished.
"What?" asked Burke. He touched the stone as Keller had. It was
bitterly, bitterly cold. "The air's warm and the stone's cold! What's
this?"
Keller wetted the tip of his finger and rubbed it on the rocky side
wall. Instantly, frost appeared. But the air remained warm.
The gallery turned again, and again rose. The third-level passageway
was shorter; barely half a mile in length. Here they passed door after
door, all open, with each compartment containing a huge and somehow
malevolent shape of metal. And beside each doorway there was a little
shelf with a small box fastened to it.
"These," said Holmes, "could be guns, if there were any way for them to
shoot anything. Just by the look of them I'd say they were weapons."
Burke said abruptly, "Keller, the stone being freezing cold while the
air's warm means that this place has been heated up lately. Heat's been
poured into it. Within hours!"
Keller considered. Then he shook his head.
"Not heat. Warmed air."
Burke went scowling onward. He followed, actually, the only route
that was open. Other ways were cut off by doors which refused to
open. 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 nodded.
"You might add," said Pam, shivering a little, "that it's a terribly
creepy place."
"What I don't understand," said Sandy, "is why nothing's labelled.
Nothing's marked. Whoever built it must have known how to write, in
some fashion. A civilized race has to have written records to stay
civilized! But I haven't seen a symbol or a pointer or even a color
used to give information."
She got out the papers on which she would code the reports as Burke
and Holmes turned them over for transmission. She began to write out,
carefully, the elaborate key to the coding. Almost reluctantly, Pam
prepared to do the same with Holmes' narrative of what he'd seen.
But if enthusiasm was tempered in the ship, there was no such reserve
in the United States. Burke's voice had cut into one of the space
broadcasts which arrived every seventy-nine minutes. There had been the
usual cryptic, plaintive piping noises, repeating for the thousandth
time their meaningless message. Then a human voice said almost
inaudibly, "_... 'll we do now, Joe?_" It was heard over an entire
hemisphere, where satellite-tracking stations and radar telescopes
listened to and recorded every broadcast from space.
It was a stupendous happening. Then Burke's voice came through the
flutings. "_This must be the transmitter. The sound-record for the
broadcasts must be in here, somehow. It's quite possible that this
plate is a sort of microphone...._" A few seconds later he was heard to
say, "_The devil!_" And later still he addressed himself directly to
his listeners on Earth.
He'd spoken the words eighteen and a fraction minutes before they
arrived, though they traveled at the speed of light. Broadcast and
ecstatically reported in the United States, they touched off a popular
reaction as widespread as that triggered by the beginning of the
signals themselves. Broadcasters abandoned all other subject matter.
Announcers with lovely diction stated the facts and then expanded
them into gibbering nonsense. Man had reached M-387. Man had spoken
to Earth across two hundred seventy million miles of emptiness. Man
had taken possession of a fortress in space. Man now had an outpost, a
stepping-stone toward the stars. Man had achieved.... Man had risen....
Man now took the first step toward his manifest destiny, which was to
occupy and possess all the thousands of thousands of planets all the
way to the galaxy's rim.
But this was in the United States. Elsewhere, rejoicing was much less,
especially after a prominent American politician was reported to have
said that America's leadership of Earth was not likely ever to be
challenged again. A number of the smaller nations immediately protested
in the United Nations. That august body was forced to put upon its
agenda a full-scale discussion of U.S. space developments. Middle
European nations charged that the purpose of America was to monopolize
not only the practical means of traveling to other members of the
solar system, but all natural and technical resources obtained by such
journeyings. With a singular unanimity, the nations at the edge of the
Russian bloc demanded that there should be equality of information on
Earth. No nation should hold back scientific information. In fact,
there was bitter denunciation of the use of code by the humans now on
M-387. It was demanded that they answer in the clear all scientific
inquiries made by any government--in the clear so everybody could
eavesdrop.
In effect, the United States rejoiced in and boasted of the
achievements of some of its citizens who, after escaping attack by
American guided missiles, had found a stepping-stone toward the stars.
But the rest of the world jealously demanded that the United States
reap no benefit from the fact. International tension, in fact, rose to
a new high.
And Burke and the others laboriously gathered this bit of information
and discovered the lack of that. They found incredible devices whose
purpose or workings they could not understand. They found every
possible evidence of a civilization beside which that of Earth was
intolerably backward. But the civilization had abandoned the asteroid.
By the second day the mass of indigestible information had become
alarming. They could marvel, but they could not understand. And not
to understand was intolerable. They could comprehend that there was
a device with red sparks in it which had made another device send a
fluting, plaintive call to all the solar system. Nothing else was
understandable. The purpose of the call remained a mystery.
But the communicators hummed with messages from Earth. It seemed
that every radar telescope upon the planet had been furnished with a
transmitter and that every one bombarded the asteroid with a tight beam
carrying arguments, offers, expostulations and threats.
"This ought to be funny," said Burke dourly. "But it isn't. All we know
is that we've found a fortress which was built to defend a civilization
about which we know nothing except that it isn't in the solar system.
We know an alarm went off, to call the fortress' garrison back to
duty, but the garrison didn't come. We did. We've some evidence that
a fighting fleet or something similar is headed this way and that it
intends to smash this fortress and may include Earth. You'd think that
that sort of news would calm them down, on Earth!"
The microwave receiver was so jammed with messages that there was no
communication at all. None could be understood when all arrived at
once. Burke had to send a message to Earth in code, specifying a new
and secret wavelength, before it became possible to have a two-way
contact with Earth. But the messages continued to come out, every one
clamoring for something else of benefit to itself alone.