He cleared his throat. He’d taken Sandy out to dinner, ostensibly to celebrate the completion of a development job for Interiors, Inc. Burke had started Burke Development, Inc., some four years out of college when he found he didn’t like working for other people and could work for himself. Its function was to develop designs and processes for companies too small to have research-and-development divisions of their own. The latest, now-finished, job was a wall-garden which those expensive interior decorators, Interiors, Inc., believed might appeal to the very rich. Burke had made it. It was a hydroponic job. A rich man’s house could have one or more walls which looked like a grassy sward standing on edge, with occasional small flowers or even fruits growing from its close-clipped surface.
It was done. A production-job room-wall had been shipped and the check for it banked. Burke had toyed with the idea that growing vegetation like that might be useful in a bomb shelter or in an atomic submarine where it would keep the air fresh indefinitely. But such ideas were for the future. They had nothing to do with now. Now Burke was going to triumph over an obsessive dream.
“I’ve got something to say, Sandy,” said Burke painfully.
She did not turn her head. There was moonlight, rippling water, and the tranquil noises of the night in springtime. A perfect setting for what Burke had in mind, and what Sandy knew about in advance. She waited, her eyes turned away from him so he wouldn’t see that they were shining a little.
“I’m something of an idiot,” said Burke, clumsily. “It’s only fair to tell you about it. I’m subject to a psychological gimmick that a girl I— Hm.” He coughed. “I think I ought to tell you about it.”
“Why?” asked Sandy, still not looking in his direction.
“Because I want to be fair,” said Burke. “I’m a sort of crackpot. You’ve noticed it, of course.”
Sandy considered.
“No-o-o-o,” she said measuredly. “I think you’re pretty normal, except— No. I think you’re all right.”
“Unfortunately,” he told her, “I’m not. Ever since I was a kid I’ve been bothered by a delusion, if that’s what it is. It doesn’t make sense. It couldn’t. But it made me take up engineering, I think, and…”
His voice trailed away.
“And what?”
“Made an idiot out of me,” said Burke. “I was always pretty crazy about you, and it seems to me that I took you to a lot of dances and such in high school, but I couldn’t act romantic. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. There was this crazy delusion.
“I wondered, a little,” said Sandy, smiling.
“I wanted to be romantic about you,” he told her urgently. “But this damned obsession kept me from it.”
“Are you offering to be a brother to me now?” asked Sandy.
“No!” said Burke explosively. “I’m fed up with myself. I want to be different. Very different. With you!”
Sandy smiled again.
“Strangely enough, you interest me,” she told him. “Do go on!”
But he was abruptly tongue-tied. He looked at her, struggling to speak. She waited.
“I w-want to ask you to m-m-marry me,” said Burke desperately. “But I have to tell you about the other thing first. Maybe you won’t want…”
Her eyes were definitely shining now. There was soft music and rippling water and soft wind in the trees. It was definitely the time and place for romance.
But the music on the car radio cut off abruptly. A harsh voice interrupted:
“Special Bulletin! Special Bulletin! Messages of unknown origin are reaching Earth from outer space! Special Bulletin! Messages from outer space!”
Burke reached over and turned up the sound. Perhaps he was the only man in the world who would have spoiled such a moment to listen to a news broadcast, and even he wouldn’t have done it for a broadcast on any other subject. He turned the sound high.
“This is a special broadcast from the Academy of Sciences in Washington, D. C.” boomed the speaker. “Some thirteen hours ago a satellite-tracking station in the South Pacific reported picking up signals of unknown origin and great strength, using the microwave frequencies also used by artificial satellites now in orbit around Earth. The report was verified shortly afterward from India, then Near East tracking stations made the same report. European listening posts and radar telescopes were on the alert when the sky area from which the signals come rose above the horizon. American stations have again verified the report within the last few minutes. Artificial signals, plainly not made by men, are now reaching Earth every seventy-nine minutes from remotest space. There is as yet no hint of what the messages may mean, but that they are an attempt at communication is certain. The signals have been recorded on tape, and the sounds which follow are those which have been sent to Earth by alien, non-human, intelligent beings no one knows how far away.”
A pause; Then the car radio, with night sounds and the calls of nightbirds for background, gave out crisp, distinct fluting noises, like someone playing an arbitrary selection of musical notes on a strange wind instrument.
The effect was plaintive, but Burke stiffened in every muscle at the first of them. The fluting noises were higher and lower in turn. At intervals, they paused as if between groups of signals constituting a word. The enigmatic sounds went on for a full minute. Then they stopped. The voice returned:
“These are the signals from space. What you have heard is apparently a complete message. It is repeated five times and then ceases. An hour and nineteen minutes later it is again repeated five times…”
The voice continued, while Burke remained frozen and motionless in the parked car. Sandy watched him, at first hopefully, and then bewilderedly. The voice said that the signal strength was very great. But the power for artificial-satellite broadcasts is only a fraction of a watt. These signals, considering the minimum distance from which they could come, had at least thousands of kilowatts behind them.
Somewhere out in space, farther than man’s robot rockets had ever gone, huge amounts of electric energy were controlled to send these signals to Earth. Scientists were in disagreement about the possible distance the signals had traveled, whether they were meant solely for Earth or not, and whether they were an attempt to open communication with humanity. But nobody doubted that the signals were artificial. They had been sent by technical means. They could not conceivably be natural phenomena. Directional fixes said absolutely that they did not come from Mars or Jupiter or Saturn. Neptune and Uranus and Pluto were not nearly in the line of the signals’ travel. Of course Venus and Mercury were to sunward of Earth, which ruled them out, since the signals arrived only on the night side of mankind’s world. Nobody could guess, as yet, where they did originate.
Burke sat utterly still, every muscle tense. He was so pale that even in the moonlight Sandy saw it. She was alarmed.
“Joe! What’s the matter?”
“Did you—hear that?” he asked thinly. “The signals?”
“Of course. But what…”
“I recognized them,” said Burke, in a tone that was somehow despairing. “I’ve heard signals like that every so often since I was a kid.” He swallowed. “It was sounds like that, and what went with them, that has been the—trouble with me. I was going to tell you about it—and ask you if you’d marry me anyway.”
He began to tremble a little, which was not at all like the Joe Burke that Sandy knew.
“I don’t quite under—”
“I’m