"Murray Leinster - The Wailing Asteroid (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

instantly. His jaw dropped. He said, "What the hell?" and went to look at the instruments. He spilled
some of his coffee when he saw their readings.

The tracking dials said that the signals came from a stationary source almost directly overhead. If they
were from a stationary source, no plane was transmitting them. Nor could they be coming from an
artificial satellite. A plane would move at a moderate pace across the sky. A satellite would move faster.
Much faster. This source, according to the instruments, did not move at all.

The staff man listened with a blank expression on his face. There was but one rational explanation,
which he did not credit for an instant. The reasonable answer would have been that somebody,
somewhere, had put a satellite out into an orbit requiring twenty-four hours for a circuit of the earth,
instead of the ninety to one-hundred-twenty-four-minute orbits of the satellites known to sweep around
the world from west to east and pole to pole. But the piping, musical sounds were not the sort of thing
that modern physicists would have contrived to carry information about cosmic-particle frequency,
space temperature, micrometeorites, and the like.

The signals stopped again, and again resumed. The staff man was galvanized into activity. He rushed to
waken other members of the outpost. When he got back, the signals continued for a minute and stopped
altogether. But they were recorded on tape, with the instrument readings that had been made during their
duration. The staff man played the tape back for his companions.

They felt as he did. These were signals from space where man had never been. They had listened to the
first message ever to reach mankind from the illimitable emptiness between the stars and planets. Man
was not alone. Man was no longer isolated. Man...

The staff of the tracking station was very much upset. Most of the men were white-faced by the time the
taped message had been re-played through to its end. They were frightened.

Considering everything, they had every reason to be.

The second pick-up was in Darjeeling, in northern India. The Indian government was then passing
through one of its periods of enthusiastic interest in science. It had set up a satellite-observation post in a
former British cavalry stable on the outskirts of the town. The acting head of the observing staff
happened to hear the second broadcast to reach Earth. It arrived some seventy-nine minutes after the first
reception, and it was picked up by two stations, Kalua and Darjeeling.

The Darjeeling observer was incredulous at what he heard— five repetitions of the same sequence of
flute-like notes. After each pause— when it seemed that the signals had stopped before they actually did
so— the reception was exactly the same as the one before. It was inconceivable that such a succession of
sounds, lasting a full minute, could be exactly repeated by any natural chain of events. Five repetitions
were out of the question. The notes were signals. They were a communication which was repeated to be
sure it was received.

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 The Wailing Asteroid, by Murray Leinster



The third broadcast was heard in Lebanon in addition to Kalua and Darjeeling. Reception in all three
places was simultaneous. A signal from a nearby satellite could not possibly have been picked up so far