dead in space at a point ,vertical to the orbital plane of a life-zone planet. Child of a relatively isolated star tucked into a spot in space almost
directly at the core of the galaxy, the planet lived. From space it was blue. It had water. A probe to the edge of the atmosphere showed the envelope of air to be oxygen-based and breathable. A visual scan from the probe magnified the surface, showed vast land areas and huge oceans and vegetation not unlike that of other life-zone planets. The planet was electronically silent. Plank made sure of that before he sent the probe lower. He was aboard the scout in his mobile form. From eight kilometers high, he magnified the land areas, swept them and saw the constructions. He could not call them buildings. They were figments of a nightmare, a tinker-toy set gone wild: towers and spans and geometric and non-geometric shapes smothered one landmass and scattered into others. He searched for signs of life. No waves, no electronics. He was relaying the scene back to the Pride. There, Hara and Heath were as puzzled as he. «They could have been built by humanoids,» Heath said. «Or anything,» Plank replied. He directed a beam of information from the dark ship's communications bank and traced it. It went directly toward a wildly contoured mass of metals and plastics on the eastern shore of the most densely covered landmass. By sheer accident he, in the scout, was in the direct line of transmission as a burst came from the building receiving the beam from the ship. When analyzed, the burst from the land surface proved to be identical to the transmission from the communications bank. «I think we've found a relay station,» Plank said, trying to hide his disappointment. «I think I'm glad no one is home,» Hara said. Plank went down. Entry was simple, accomplished by flowing into the mechanics of the building. Inside there was a confusing maze. Circuitry and components were everywhere. Mechanical devices whose use he could
not even guess cluttered floor areas. Everything was in disarray, but it was more than mere clutter. He checked for power drains and found a few of the devices to be functioning, or at least they were using power. After some fruitless wandering and retracing of his steps upon confronting dead-end corridors, he found the room containing the communications device, much like the shipboard bank, but larger and more powerful. «Send another blip from the bank,» he radioed up to Heath. As part of the communication device, he heard the message come in and be instantly relayed. He was noting the direction when Hara interrupted. «John, a signal just came in.» He had rigged a visual detector. The receiving circuits of the shipboard communicator were left open constantly. He directed the shipboard communicator to send down the message. It arrived in a very brief blip of energy and was stored on the tapes of the landside machine. With great anticipation, he slowed it, replayed it. It was a meaningless rumble of noise. Nothing about it resembled the form of outgoing messages. Puzzled, he relayed it at different speeds, producing not sounds but electronic impulses. Had the impulses been orderly, the outgoing messages, the computer could have read them, extracted information. As a part of the computer, Plank could have read them. But the impulses were not orderly. They were a confusing random nothingness. Noise. Electronic noise. «I guess,» he said for the benefit of Hara and Heath, «We don't speak the same language.» He made brief exploratory excursions on the planet. He found more of the same incomprehensible mechanical jumble. Two things he recognized.
One was a waterfall cascading out of a tall tower into a lake. The other was unquestionably an acceleration chamber for atomic particles. Of all the forms it was the most recognizable. Long, heavily shielded, it stretched a vast distance across a flat plain. He was recording on visual. He was taking samples. The metals were much like the metals aboard the two ships, the tougher alloy used for the ship's hulls being the main construction material of the towers and buildings. Once he tried to enter one of the electronic devices, this one occupying a building roughly the size of an Earth football stadium. For a while, until he extricated himself, he feared for his sanity. The circuitry had no rhyme or reason. It began nowhere and led nowhere and performed no function he could imagine. Again he was struck by the tinker-toy image, this one an electronic tinker-toy assembled by a talented idiot. He emerged a bit frayed at the edges and, having had enough, boarded the mobile form and rejoined the others on the Pride. There, untiring, he busied himself with the one signal that had come into the receiver. Hours later, after Hara and Heath had slept, he told them, «I think it must have been random noise.» «What now?» Hara asked. «We start sending messages to the relay station down below and follow the relays.» Heath was looking at a visual chart of the incoming message. «Plank,» he said, «you want to try something purely on a guess?» «I'm open to suggestions,» Plank said. «How about running this thing through a speaker as just plain old sound.» «Why not?» Plank asked, although he considered the idea rather inane. He rigged the system, translated the electronic impulses into sound waves. When he activated the tape there was a long-drawn-out rumble on the speakers. It was meaningless. Plank shrugged. «So much for man's first communication from an intelligent alien,» he said. «Wait,» Hara said. «Play it again.» Again the long-drawn-out rumble. «Speed it up,» Hara said. The sound was unmistakable. Man's first communication from an intelligent alien was a huge, satisfied burp. CHAPTER TWELVE «Join up with Plank and see the galaxy,» Hara said, with a lightness she did not feel. Once again they were star-roving. This time the process was somewhat more complicated. First, it was necessary to allow the communications
bank to send a signal to the relay station. Then it was a game of intelligent guess and chance to put the Pride and her dark companion ship in the direct path of the narrow beam from the relay station on the core planet. Both ships were used because the equipment needed was aboard the dark globe, and the Pride offered comfort to Hara and Heath. Operations were no problem. Plank could extend his control over both ships with no difficulty. The problem was in calculating each new blink. Although the beamed message generally was in a straight line, it was bent by the huge fields of stars and often, following a new message. Plank missed the beam entirely and had to search for it, sometimes having to return to the last known point. As days went by, it became evident that the new path was leading back in the general direction of Earth, and Plank began to fear that they were already there in the solar system. However, the path began to diverge, aiming toward a point in the Orion Arm more toward galactic center than Earth's sun. There had been no further communication incoming, and Plank began to think that the one reception was a fluke, a bit of space noise or interference. Since he was capable of being in more than one place at one time, and since the more he worked his brain the more it seemed to be able to handle, he was spending some of the time working with Heath and Hara to install manual controls on the Pride. Although Plank saw no great advantage, it gave the other two something to do and made them feel like more than mere passengers. Parts were cannibalized from the dark ship and from redundant systems aboard the Pride. When the makeshift manuals were in place. Plank acted as overseer as Heath directed the Pride into a blink. The new systems worked. Installing the manuals had served another good purpose. Heath, in spite of his abrasive personality, was a good drive engineer. He was now familiar with the complexities of the Pride to a degree second only to the more intimate insights of Plank himself. Back on Earth, Heath would be able to construct duplicate generators. Actually, the drive aboard the Pride was basically a blink generator, with some delicate refinements. Most of the advances were represented by the minute circuitry made possible by the atomic flow technique. Neither Plank nor Heath had command of that. It seemed to be automatic in the repair sequences, and the manner of its accomplishment was a mystery. However, the lack of the ability to flow the atomic material was not a severe handicap. The only sacrifice in building a generator by Earth techniques would be in size, and since power was unlimited with a blink generator in use, size was not the paramount consideration. Heath was now convinced that the blink drive had worked all along. He had evidence. He had seen it work with his own eyes and he'd recorded it on the instruments of the shuttle ship. The drive had worked, sending the ship out and bringing it back, and only alien interference had prevented man from developing a drive that would have opened the galaxy to him. There was much speculation as the two ships blinked out toward the Orion Arm, and there were a few tentative conclusions. One, there seemed to be a relatively small number of them. During Plank's own travels before he'd found his way back to the solar system by tracking the signals of Heath's blinks, he had minutely examined a sizable portion of the Orion Arm. Then, while following the signal beam to the core of the galaxy, they had covered another considerable area. They were now in a part of space that was new to them, and after blinking thousands of light-years, they had still had no encounter with them. Of course, the galaxy was an enormous place and the likelihood of a chance encounter was small, even if the aliens numbered in the billions