"Listen, Sandy," said Burke. "I've been ashamed of that crazy dream of mine all my life. I've thought it was proof there was something wrong with me. I'll still have to keep it secret, or nice men in white coats will come and get me. But I'm going to do what all enterprising young men are advised to do—dream greatly and then try to realize my dream. It's quite impossible and it'll bankrupt me, but I think I'm going to have fun."
He grinned at the two sisters as he led them firmly to Sandy's car.
"Shoo!" he said pleasantly. "You'd better go home now. I'll be leaving in minutes, heading for Schenectady first. I need some electric stuff. Then I'll go elsewhere. There'll be some shipments arriving, Sandy. Take care of them for me, will you?"
He closed the car door and waved, still grinning. Pam fumed and started the motor. Moments later their car trundled down the highway toward town. Sandy clenched her fists.
"What can you do with a man like that?" she demanded. "Why do I bother with him?"
"Shall I answer," asked Pam, "or shall I be discreetly sympathetic? I wouldn't want him! But unfortunately, if you do—"
"I know," said Sandy forlornly. "I know, dammit!"
Burke was not thinking of either of them then. He opened the office safe, put the six–inch object inside, and took out his checkbook. Then he locked up, got into his car, and headed away from the plant and the town he'd been brought up in. He was unshaven and uncombed and this was an inappropriate time to start out on a drive of some hundreds of miles, but it was a pleasing sensation to know that a job had turned up that nobody else would even know how to start to work on. He drove very cheerfully to a cross–country expressway and turned onto it. He settled down at once to drive and to think.
He drove practically all night. Shortly after sunrise he stopped to buy a razor and brush and comb and to make himself presentable. He was the first customer on hand when a Schenectady firm specializing in electronic apparatus for seagoing ships opened up for business. He ordered certain equipment from a list he'd written on an envelope while eating breakfast.
The morning papers, naturally, were full of the story of the answer to the Earth signal sent out to M–387. The morning comedians made jokes about it, and in every one of the business offices Burke visited there was some mention of it. He listened, but had nothing to say. The oddity of his purchases caused no remark. His was a small firm, but a man working in research and development needs strange stuff sometimes. He ordered two radar units to be modified in a particular fashion, air–circulation pumps of highly specialized design to be changed in this respect and that. He had trouble finding the electric generators he wanted and had to pay heavily for alterations in them, and even more heavily for a promise of delivery in days instead of weeks. He bought a self–contained diving suit.
He was busy for three days, buying things by day, designing by night and finding out new things to order. On the second day, United States counter–intelligence reported that the Russians were trying to signal M–387 on their own. An American satellite picked up the broadcast. The Russians denied it, and continued to try. Burke made arrangements for the delivery of aluminum–alloy bars, rods, girders, and plates; for plaster of Paris in ton lots; for closed–circuit television equipment. Once he called Sandy to give her an order to be filled locally. It was lumber, mostly slender strips of lathing, to be on hand when he returned.
"All kinds of material is turning up," said Sandy. "There've been six deliveries this morning. I'm signing receipts for it because I don't know what else to do. But won't you please give me copies of the orders you've placed so I can check what arrives?"
"I'll put 'em in the mail—airmail," promised Burke. "But only six deliveries? There ought to be dozens! Get after these people on long distance, will you?" And he gave her a list of names.
Burke said suddenly, "I had that dream again last night. Twice in a week. That's unusual."
"No comment," Sandy said.
She hung up, and Burke was taken aback. But there was hardly any comment she could make. Burke himself had no illusion that he would ever come to a place where there were two moons in the sky and trees with ribbonlike leaves. And if he did—unthinkable as that might be—he could not imagine finding the person for whom he felt such agonized anxiety. The dream, recurrent, fantastic, or whatnot, simply could not represent a reality of the past, present, or future. Such things don't happen. But Burke continued to be moved much more by the emotional urge of the repeated experience than by intellectual curiosity about his having dreamed repeatedly of signals exactly like those from space, long before such signals ever were.
He made ready to try to do something about those signals. And, all reason to the contrary notwithstanding, to him they meant a world with two moons and strange vegetation and such emotion as nothing on Earth had ever quite stirred up—though he felt pretty deeply about Sandy, at that. So he went intently from one supplier of exotic equipment to another, spending what money he had for an impossibility. Impossible because Asteroid M–387 was not over two miles through at its largest dimension, and therefore could not possibly have an atmosphere and certainly not trees, and it could not own even a single moon!
He spent one day at a small yachting port with a man for whom he'd worked out a special process of Fiberglas yacht construction. Through that process, Holmes yachts could be owned by people who weren't millionaires. Holmes was a large, languid, sunburned individual who built yachts because he liked them. He had much respect for Burke, even after Burke asked his help and explained what for.
But that was the day the Russians launched an unmanned space–probe headed toward M–387. That development may have influenced Holmes to do as Burke asked.
Later on, it transpired that the probe originally had been designed and built as a cargo–carrier to take heavy loads to Earth's moon. The Russian space service had planned to present the rest of Earth with a fait accompli even more startling than the first Sputnik. They had intended to send a fleet of drone cargo–rockets to the moon and then assemble them into a colony. Broadcasts would triumphantly explain that the Soviet social system was responsible for another technical achievement. But to get a man out to M–387 was now so much more important a propaganda device that the cargo–carriers were converted into fuel–tankers and the first sent aloft.
At ten thousand miles up, when the third booster–stage should have given it a decisive thrust, one of the probe's rocket engines misfired. The space–probe tilted, veered wildly from its course, and went on accelerating splendidly toward nowhere. And still the steady, urgent beeping sounds continued to come to Earth, with every seventy–nine minutes a broadcast containing one section of crackling sounds and a tone of extremest urgency.
The day after the probe's ineffectual departure, Burke got back to his plant. He brought Holmes with him. Together, they looked over the accumulated material for Burke's enterprise and began to sort out the truckloads of plaster of Paris, masses of punched–sheet aluminum, girders, rods, beams of shining metal, cased dynamos, crated pumps, tanks, and elaborately padded objects whose purpose was not immediately clear. Sandy was overwhelmed by the job of inventorying, indexing, and otherwise making the material available for use as desired. There were bales of fluffy white cloth and drums and drums of liquids which insisted on leaking, and smelled very badly when they did. But Burke found some items not yet on hand, and fretted, so Sandy brought her sister Pam into the office to add to the office force.
Sandy and Pam worked quite as hard in the office as Burke and Holmes in the construction shed. They telephoned protests at delays, verified shipments, scolded shipping–clerks, argued with transportation–system expediters, wrote letters, answered letters, compared invoices with orders, sternly battled with negligence and delays of all kinds, and in between kept the books of Burke Development, Inc., up to date so that at any instant Burke could find out how much money he'd spent and how little remained. The two girls in the office were necessary to the operations which at first centered in the construction shed, but shortly began to show up outside.