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

going to propose to you. Instead, I'm going to take you back to the office. I'm
going to play you a recording I made a year ago. I think that when you've heard
it you'll decide you wouldn't want to marry me anyhow."
Sandy looked at him with astonished eyes.
"You mean those signals from somewhere mean something special to you?"
"Very special," said Burke. "They raise the question of whether I've been crazy,
and am suddenly sane, or whether I've been sane up to now, and have suddenly
gone crazy."
The radio switched back to dance music. Burke cut it off. He started the car's
motor. He backed, swung around, and headed for the office and construction shed
of Burke Development, Inc.
Elsewhere, the profoundest minds of the planet gingerly examined the appalling
fact that signals came to Earth from a place where men could not be. A message
came from something which was not human. It was a suggestion to make cold chills
run up and down any educated spine. But Burke drove tensely, and the road's
surface sped toward the car's wheels and vanished under them. A warm breeze
hummed and thuttered around the windshield. Sandy sat very still.
"The way I'm acting doesn't make sense, does it?" Burke asked. "Do you feel like
you're riding with a lunatic?"
"No," she said. "But I never thought that if you ever did get around to asking
me to marry you, somebody from outer space would forbid the banns! Can't you
tell me what all this is about?"
"I doubt it very much," he told her. "Can you tell me what the signals are
about?"
She shook her head. He drove through the night. Presently he said, "Aside from
my private angle on the matter, there are some queer things about this business.
Why should somebody out in space send us a broadcast? It's not from a planet,
they say. If there's a spaceship on the way here, why warn us? If they want to
be friends, they can't be sure we'll permit it. If they intend to be enemies,
why throw away the advantage of surprise? In either case, it would be foolish to
send cryptic messages on ahead. And any message would have to be cryptic."
The car went whirring along the roadway. Soon twinkling lights appeared among
the trees. The small and larger buildings of Burke Development, Inc., came
gradually into view. They were dark objects in a large empty space on the very
edge of Burke's home town.
"And why," he went on, "why send a complex message if they only wanted to say
that they were space travelers on the way to Earth?"
The exit from the highway to Burke Development appeared. Burke swung off the
surfaced road and into the four-acre space his small and unusual business did
not begin to fill up.
"If it were an offer of communication, it should be short and simple. Maybe an
arithmetic sequence of dots, to say that they were intelligent beings and would
like the sequence carried on if we had brains, too. Then we'd know somebody
friendly was coming and wanted to exchange ideas before, if necessary, swapping
bombs."
The car's headlights swept over the building in which the experimental work of
Burke Development was done and on to the small house in which Sandy kept the
books and records of the firm, Burke put on the brakes before the office door.
"Just to see if my head is working right," he said, "I raise a question about
those signals. One doesn't send a long message to emptiness, repeated, in the