It was Monday morning when Burke completed the last turn of the last winding of his three–element pseudo–magnet. There are many things which become something else when they change in degree. Electromagnetic radiation may be long radio waves or radiant heat or yellow light or ultraviolet or X–rays, or who knows what, according to its frequency. It is different things with different properties at different wavelengths. Burke believed that his cores and windings were something other than magnets because the "flux" they produced was of a different intensity. He did not believe it to be magnetism.
At nine o'clock Monday morning, he was clumsy from pure, weariness when he began to fit the outer case on the thing he'd worked so long to complete. The hand–weapon in his dream undoubtedly flung bullets through a rifled bore penetrating the very center of the multiple core. The design of the hand–weapon ruled out any possibility of a considerable recoil. It wasn't built to allow the hand to take a recoil. So there must be no recoil. On that basis, Burke had made what finally amounted to a thick rod some six inches long and two in diameter. With the casing in place, it was absolutely solid. There was no play for the windings to expand into. He blinked at it. Common sense said he ought to put it aside and test it when his mind was not nearly numb from fatigue.
Then Sandy came into the constructions shed, looking for him. She'd arrived for work and seen his car outside the shed. Her expression indicated several things: a certain uneasiness, and some embarrassment, and more than a little indignation. When she saw him unshaven and wobbly with weariness, she protested.
"Joe! You've been working since Heaven knows when!"
"Since I left you," he admitted. "I got interested."
"You look dreadful!"
"Maybe I'll look worse after I try out this thing I've made. I'm not sure."
"When did you eat last?" she demanded. "And when did you sleep?"
He shrugged tiredly, regarding the thing in his hands. He'd had enough experience contriving new things to know that no theory is right until something that depends on it has been made and works. He tended to be pessimistic. But this time he thought he had it.
"Is this working night and day a part of your reaction to those signals?" asked Sandy unhappily. "If it is—"
"Let's try it," Burke interrupted. "It's something I worked out from the dream. Now I'll find out whether I'm crazy or not—maybe." He drew a deep breath. He had a sudden, deep and corrosive doubt of things which didn't make sense, like space signals and magnets which weren't magnets because they were capable of negative self–induction. "If this shows no sign of working, Sandy…."
"What?"
He didn't answer. He went heavily over to the table where he had storage–battery current available. He plucked a momentary–contact switch out of a drawer and connected it to the wires from the small thing he'd made. Then he hooked on the storage battery.
"Stand back, Sandy," he said tiredly. "We'll see what happens."
He flipped the momentary–contact switch. There was a crash and a roar. The six–inch thing leaped. It grazed Burke's head and drew blood. It flashed across the room, a full thirty feet, and then smashed a water–cooler and imbedded itself in the brick wall beyond. A tool cabinet tottered and crashed to the floor. The storage battery spouted steam, swelled. Burke grabbed Sandy and plunged outside with her as the building filled with vaporized battery acid.
Outside, he put her down and rubbed his nose with his finger.
"That was a surprise," he said with some animation. "Are you all right?"
"You—could have been killed!" she said in a whisper.
"I wasn't," said Burke. "If you're not hurt there's no harm done. It looks like the thing worked! Lucky that was only a millisecond contact! Negative self–induction…. I'll break some windows and come to the office."
He did break windows, from the outside, so air could flow through the building and clear away the battery–acid steam. Sandy watched him anxiously.
"Okay," he said. "I'll come quietly."
He followed her to the office. He was so physically worn out, he tripped on the office step as he went in.
"Tell me the news on the signals," he said. "Still coming in?"
"Yes." She looked at him again, worried. "Joe … Sit down. Here. What's happened?"
"Nothing except that I'm a genius at second hand. I didn't intend it that way, and maybe it can be covered up, but I've turned out to be sane. So I think, maybe you'd better get another job. Since I'm sane I'll surely go bankrupt and maybe I'll end up in jail. But it's going to be interesting." His head drooped and he jerked it upright. "This is reaction," he said distinctly. "I'm tired. I wanted badly to find out whether I was crazy or not. I found out I haven't been. I'm not so sure I won't be presently." He made a stiff gesture and said, "Take the day off, Sandy. I'm going to rest awhile."
Then his head fell forward and he was asleep.
Burke slept for a long time. And this time dreamlessly.
The thing he made had worked for much less than the tenth of a second, but it came out of his dream, ultimately, and it was linked with whatever sent messages from Asteroid M–387. There was still nothing intelligible about the whole affair. It contained no single rational element. But if there was no rational explanation, there was what now seemed reasonable action that could be taken.
So he slept, and as usual the world went on its way unheeding. The fluting sounds from the sky remained the top news story of the day. There was no doubt of their artificiality, nor that they came from a small, tumbling, jagged rock which was one of the least of the more than fifteen hundred asteroids of the solar system. It was two hundred and seventy million miles from Earth. The latest computations said that not less than twenty thousand kilowatts of power had been put into the transmitter to produce so strong and loud a signal on Earth. No power–source of that order had been carried out to make the signals. But they were there.
Astronomers became suddenly important sources of news. They contradicted each other violently. Eminent scientists observed truthfully that Schull's object, as such, could not sustain life. It could not have an atmosphere, and its gravitational field would not hold even a moderately active microbe on its surface. Therefore any life and any technology now on it must have come from somewhere else. The most eminent scientists said reluctantly that they could not deny the possibility that a spaceship from some other solar system had been wrecked on M–387, and was now sending hopeless pleas for help to the local planetary bodies.
Others observed briskly that anything which smashed into an asteroid would vaporize, if it hit hard enough, or bounce away if it did not. So there was no evidence for a spaceship. There was only evidence for a transmitter. There was no explanation for that. It could be mentioned, said these skeptics, that there were other sources of radiation in space. There was the Jansky radiation from the Milky Way, and radiations from clouds of ionized material in emptiness, and radio stars were well known. A radio asteroid was something new, but—
It was working astronomers, so to speak, who took action. They had been bouncing signals off of Earth's moon, and various artificial satellites, and they'd flicked signals in the direction of Mars and Venus and believed that they got them back. The most probable returned radar signal from Mars had been received by a radar telescope in West Virginia. It had been turned temporarily into a transmitter and some four hundred kilowatts were poured into it to go out in a tight beam. The working astronomers took over that parabolic bowl again. They borrowed, begged, wheedled, and were suspected of stealing necessary equipment to put nearly eight hundred kilowatts into a microwave signal, this time beamed at Asteroid M–387. If intelligent beings received the signal, they might reply. If they did, the working astronomers would figure out what to do next.