Burke drove for long minutes, frowning.
“And I won’t,” he said flatly, after a time, “until I know it’s all right to do so. I’ve no explanation for what’s kept me from proposing to you up to now, but apparently it’s not nonsense. I did anticipate the sounds that came in tonight from space and—I’ve always known those sounds didn’t belong on Earth.”
Then, driving doggedly through a warm and moonlit night, he told her exactly why the fluting sounds were familiar to him; how they’d affected his life up to now. He’d mentally rehearsed the story, anyhow, and it was reasonably well arranged. But told as fact, it was preposterous.
She listened in complete silence. He finished the tale with his car parked before the boardinghouse in which Sandy lived with her sister Pam, they being all that was left of a family. If she hadn’t known Burke all her life, of course, Sandy would have dismissed him and his story together. But she did know him. It did explain why he felt tongue-tied when he wished to be romantic, and even why he recorded a weird sequence of notes on a tape recorder. His actions were reasonable reactions to an unreasonable, repeated experience. His doubts and hesitations showed a sound mind trying to deal with the inexplicable. And now that the signals from space had come, it was understandable that he should react as if they were a personal matter for his attention.
She had a disheartening mental picture of a place where strange trees waved long and ribbonlike leaves under an improbable sky. Still…
“Y-yes,” she said slowly when he’d finished his uneasy account. “I don’t understand, but I can see how you feel. I—I guess I’d feel the same way if I were a man and what you’ve experienced happened to me.” She hesitated. “Maybe there will be an explanation now, since those signals have come. They do match the ones you recorded from your dream. They’re the ones you know about.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Burke miserably, “and I can’t dismiss it. I can’t do anything until I find out why I know that somewhere there’s a place with two moons and queer trees…”
He did not mention the part of his experience Sandy was most interested in—the person for whom he felt such anguished fear and such overwhelming joy when she was found. She didn’t mention it either.
“You go on home, Joe,” she said quietly. “Get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we’ll hear more about it and maybe it will all clear up. Anyhow—whatever turns out, I—I’m glad you did intend to ask me to marry you. I intended to say yes.”
Chapter 2
Burke was no less disturbed, but his disturbance was of a different kind. After he left Sandy at the house where she and her sister boarded, he headed back to the plant. He wanted to think things out.
The messages from space, of course, must presage events of overwhelming importance. The coming of intelligent aliens to Earth might be comparable to the coming of white men to the American continents. They might bring superior techniques, irresistible weapons, and an assumption of superiority that would bring inevitable conflict with the aborigines of Earth. Judging by the actions of the white race on Earth, if the newcomers were merely explorers it could mean the coming doom of humanity’s independence. If they were invaders…
Something like this would be pointed out soon after the news itself. Some people would react with total despair, expecting the strangers to act like men. Some might hope that a superior race would have developed a kindliness and altruism that on Earth are rather rare. But there was no one at all who would not be apprehensive. Some would panic.
Burke’s reaction was strictly personal. Nobody else in the world would have felt the same appalled, stunned emotion he felt when he heard the sounds from space. Because to him they were familiar sounds.
He paced up and down in the big, partitionless building in which the actual work of Burke Development, Inc., was done. He’d done some reasonably good work in this place. The prototype of the hydroponic wall for Interiors, Inc., still stood against one wall. It was crude, but he’d made it work and then built a production model which had now been shipped off complete. A little to one side was a prototype of a special machine which stamped out small parts for American Tool. That had been a tricky assignment! There were plastic and glass-wool and such oddments with which he’d done a process-design job for Holmes Yachts, and a box of small parts left over from the designing job that gave one aviation company the only practical small-plane retractable landing-gear.
These things had a queer meaning for him now. He’d devised the wanted products. He’d developed certain needed processes. But now he began to be deeply suspicious of his own successes. Each was a new reason for uneasiness.
He grimly questioned whether his highly peculiar obsession had not been planted in him against the time when fluting noises would come from that illimitable void beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
He examined, for the thousandth time, his special linkage with the space noises. In previous soul-searchings he’d pinpointed the time when the whole business began. He’d been eleven years old. He could even work out something close to an exact date. He was living with his aunt and uncle, his own parents being dead. His uncle had made a business trip to Europe, alone, and had brought back souvenirs which were fascinating to eleven-year-old Joe Burke. There was a flint knife, and a carved ivory object which his uncle assured him was mammoth ivory. It had a deer’s head incised into it. There were some fragments of pottery and a dull-surfaced black cube. They appealed to the small boy because his uncle said they’d belonged to men who lived when mammoths roamed the Earth and cave men hunted the now-extinct huge beasts. Cro-Magnons, his uncle said, had owned the objects. He’d bought them from a French peasant who’d found a cave with pictures on its walls that dated back twenty thousand years. The French government had taken over the cave, but before reporting it the peasant had thriftily hidden away some small treasures to sell for himself. Burke’s uncle bought them and, in time, presented them to the local museum. All but the black cube, which Burke had dropped. It had shattered into a million tissue-thin, shiny plates, which his aunt insisted on sweeping out. He’d tried to keep one of the plates, but his aunt had found it under his pillow and disposed of it.
He remembered the matter solely because he’d examined his memories so often, trying to find something relevant to account for the beginning of his recurrent dream. Somewhere shortly after his uncle’s visit he had had a dream. Like all dreams, it was not complete. It made no sense. But it wasn’t a normal dream for an eleven-year-old boy.
He was in a place where the sun had just set, but there were two moons in the sky. One was large and motionless. The other was small and moved swiftly across the heavens. From behind him came fluting signals like the messages that would later come from space. In the dream he was full-grown and he saw trees with extraordinary, ribbony leaves like no trees on Earth. They wavered and shivered in a gentle breeze, but he ignored them as he did the fluting sounds behind him.
He was searching desperately for someone. A child knows terror for himself, but not for anybody else. But Burke, then aged eleven, dreamed that he was in an agony of fear for someone else. To breathe was torment. He held a weapon ready in his hand. He was prepared to do battle with any imaginable creature for the person he needed to find. And suddenly he saw a figure running behind the waving foliage. The relief was almost greater pain than the terror had been. It was a kind and amount of emotion that an eleven-year-old boy simply could not know, but Burke experienced it. He gave a great shout, and bounded forward toward her—and the dream ended.
He dreamed it three nights running, then it stopped, for a while.
Then, a week later, he had the dream again, repeated in every detail. He had it a dozen times before he was twelve, and as many more before he was thirteen. It recurred at random intervals all through his teens, while he was in college, and after. When he grew up he found out that recurrent dreams are by no means unusual. But this was very far from a usual dream.
From time to time, he observed new details in the dream. He knew that he was dreaming. His actions and his emotions did not vary, but he was able to survey them—like the way one can take note of items in a