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The Wailing Asteroid, by Murray LeinsterThe Naked Word electronic edition of....

THE WAILING ASTEROID
Copyright, (C), 1960, by Murray Leinster.



Chapter 1
THE SIGNALS from space began a little after midnight, local time, an a Friday.
They were first picked up in the South Pacific, just westward of the
International Date Line. A satellite-watching station on an island named Kalua
was the first to receive them, though nobody heard the first four or five
minutes. But it is certain that the very first message was picked up and
recorded by the monitor instruments.
The satellite-tracking unit on Kalua was practically a duplicate of all its
fellows. There was the station itself with a vertical antenna outside pointing
at the stars. There were various lateral antennae held two feet aboveground by
concrete posts. In the instrument room in the building a light burned over a
desk, three or four monitor lights glowed dimly to indicate that the
self-recording instruments were properly operating, and there was a
multiple-channel tape recorder built into the wall. Its twin tape reels turned
sedately, winding a brown plastic ribbon from one to the other at a moderate
pace.
The staff man on duty had gone to the installation's kitchen for a cup of
coffee. No sound originated in the room, unless one counted the fluttering of a
piece of weighted-down paper on the desk. Outside, palm trees whispered and
rustled their long fronds in the southeast trade wind under a sky full of
glittering stars. Beyond, there was the dull booming of surf upon the barrier
reef of the island. But the instruments made no sound. Only the tape reels
moved.
The signals began abruptly. They came out of a speaker and were instantly
recorded. They were elfin and brutelike and musical. They were crisp and
distinct. They did not form a melody, but nearly all the components of melody
were there. Pure musical notes, each with its own pitch, all of different
lengths, like quarter-notes and eighth-notes in music. The sounds needed only
rhythm and arrangement to form a plaintive tune.
Nothing happened. The sounds continued for something over a minute. They stopped
long enough to seem to have ended. Then they began again.
When the staff man came back into the room with a coffee cup in his hand, he
heard the flutings 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