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

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.
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 around the Earth's curvature. The
widening of the area of reception, too, proved that there was no new satellite
aloft with an orbit period of exactly twenty-four hours, so that it hung
motionless in the sky relative to Earth. Tracking observations, in fact, showed
the source of the signals to move westward, as time passed, with the apparent
motion of a star. No satellite of Earth could possibly exist with such an orbit
unless it was close enough to show a detectable parallax. This did not.
A French station picked up the next batch of plaintive sounds. Kalua,
Darjeeling, and Lebanon still received. By the time the next signal was due,
Croydon, in England, had its giant radar-telescope trained on the part of the
sky from which all the tracking stations agreed the signals came.
Croydon painstakingly made observations during four seventy-nine-minute
intervals and four five-minute receptions of the fluting noises. It reported
that there was a source of artificial signals at an extremely great distance,