"Chapter 01" - читать интересную книгу автора ((novel) (ebook) - Perry Rhodan 0127 - (119) Between the Galaxies [HTML])1/ "ARE YOU A TRUE LIFE FORM?" There was nothing but a deathlike silence and
emptiness in this region of the universe. In a ship suspended in space far removed
from the outer rim of the Milky way, the mass detectors had nothing to detect.
The only equipment capable of picking up anything was the broad-surfaced
collector shields on trans-C velocity ships which now and then probed into this
abyss between the island universes. In about every 10 cubic meters there might
be a single hydrogen nucleus. To collect just a single gram of matter it would
be necessary to comb through a space sector big enough to contain 5000 planet
Earths. That’s how empty it was out here. Well,
to the devil with it, thought Eric Furchtbar. He only had a few, more days to go
before they’d come to pick him up. No one was assigned to duty for more than
three months on board the BOB (Barrier-line Observation Station) 21. In the
beginning it had been estimated that the men could endure a half year of service
out here but it hadn’t worked out. After about 3Ѕ months the crews began to
get "space happy." They would start seeing ghosts and begin to hear
mysterious cries emerging from emptiness. It wasn’t so bad if a man took time to
think about it, theorized Eric Furchtbar. All you had to do was sit still
somewhere and get it into your head that there were no such things as ghosts and
that sounds were impossible out there in the awful void. But who ever had time
to go into such meditations? Usually they sat with each other and conversed.
What did they talk about? The terrible emptiness. How ghastly it was and how
hard it was to imagine such an endless abyss. They thought of how frightful it
would be if the BOB 21 suddenly sprang a leak—although it would not be any
worse than a leak occurring somewhere in the middle of the galaxy. And then it would happen suddenly. When
they went to bed and started to fall asleep. All of a sudden they would hear
voices. And then they would see the grey shadows flitting about. Instead of
becoming meditative they would start to yell and rave, or the more
impressionable ones would shiver under their sheets. In short, they would go out of their minds. Eric had to admit that it wasn’t always
so simple. He looked around him. The room he was in was rectangular if one
overlooked a slight outward curvature of one of the lateral walls. The walls
were covered with instruments, meters, viewscreens and control panels. There
were a few seats located here and there. In the centre of the room was a large
table that was covered with star charts, coordinate tables and stacks of
programming sheets which were still in the original order as on the first day.
No one had ever used the positronic input forms. There was no reason to make any new
programming inputs. Nothing ever happened. The 25-man crew of the BOB 21 spent
their time in merely determining that this sector of the universe was absolutely
eventless. Day after day, week after week, month after month. The instrument needles stood at zero as if
they had been turned off. Every 10 minutes Eric would get up and press the
switch of the master test board. A green lamp would light up to reveal that all
instruments in the room were working and ready to respond. Of course Eric knew
this but he only went through the routine each time to see the lamp come on.
Just that at least was an event to break the monotony. The only equipment that was really shut
down was the viewscreens. Matter tracers and reflex sensors were capable of
picking up anything coming from the outside much faster than the conventional
optics. Besides, the aspect of the empty void between the galaxies wasn’t
worth turning on the screens. on the contrary: it increased the anxiety factor. No, it really wasn’t pleasant duty here.
If you took the psychological problems into consideration, the BOB 21 was
actually undermanned. At least two men should be in each room together. Eric
would have liked to have somebody to talk to but he was sitting here alone in a
room that was almost 50 square meters in extent. 8 other men were sitting
somewhere in other rooms, and the remaining 16 were off duty. Eric got up restlessly and slowly
paced the room. With his almost 6Ѕ-ft frame he might have had an imposing
figure if he had not been so frightfully thin. His uniform, which was the right
length but too wide for him, hung in rather dismal folds about him. But that
didn’t seem to bother him. The only thing he was really aware of was his bald
spot, which was shiny enough to catch his eye wherever he saw his reflection. As
a man of 31 years he endured it with what little of dignity that remained to
him. As he walked alone the curved wall he
almost took a masochistic pleasure in the realization that only about half a
meter of distance separated him from the lightless vacuum that stretched out
from here over millions of light years to the next galaxy. He wondered how he
might feel if he thought that the plastic metal hull really was the only thing
between him and that awful void. Would it make any difference? About 140 years
ago when Terrans were first venturing into space, the hulls of spaceships had
been made of ordinary steel and by comparison to these walls were they were as
thin as an onion skin. And in those days there was no such thing as the defence
screen that protected the BOB 21 from the outer environment more effectively
than any material walls. No, decided Eric, he would still feel safe
without the outer screen. Way out here there were no meteors. What could
possibly happen to do any harm? To the devil with all these grey ghosts and
phantoms, he thought angrily. He almost wished that something really would
happen. He turned and went back to his seat. Sitting down with a sense of
boredom he chanced to glance at one of the meters. The blue-white illuminated needle stood
trembling at the upper end of the scale. * It was the fastest Eric Furchtbar had ever
moved to get onto his feet. In three long strides he reached the main panel and
activated the alarm. Sirens started to shriek, signal light blinked, and the
viewscreens flashed into operation automatically. The mighty observation station virtually
bristled with a sudden vigilance, like a man startled from sleep. Eric returned to his seat. The instrument
that had given the first indication was designed to register para-energy
radiations. It only reacted to hypertype emanations below a certain threshold of
energy and which had no detectable modulations. Such radiations could come from
any number of possible sources. If this had been inside the galaxy, that
particular indicator wouldn’t have been quiescent for a single second. But way out here . . . ? Eric scanned meters on other instrument
panels along the walls. Other needles were quivering with subtle activity now.
One of them registered a light hypergravity shock, and some of the hyperoptic
channels were acting up. All of it was hyper, thought Eric in
wondering puzzlement. No direct indications. He looked at the viewscreen. They revealed
the same black void as they al-ways did when they were turned on. There was
still nothing to be seen. Whatever may have happened it must have occurred too
far away for the light to have reached the station yet. He waited a while
longer. Then he got his first call on the intercom. It came from the Analysis
Section. On the small screen he recognized the red-haired younger man whose
freckled face wore a perplexed and slightly confused expression. "We’ve gone over all the input
tapes, sir. There’s no doubt about the indications. somewhere out there a sun
has suddenly come into existence." Eric Furchtbar almost choked. "A
sun..!" he cried out. "You can talk plainer than that,
Kirkpatrick!" Kirkpatrick unconsciously wiped his brow.
"Taking all observations together, sir, there is only one straight answer.
Somewhere out there is a sun. On a detailed basis– " Eric interrupted the freckle-faced analyst
with a wave of his hand. "Forget the details! How can a sun come out of
nothing, just like that!?" Obviously the question was too much for
Kirkpatrick. He stammered: "That’s something... I–I can’t tell you,
sir..." "OK, skip it! How far away is
it?" "Between 400 and 500 light years,
sir." Eric sighed and looked at the main screens.
It would be 400 to 500 years yet before the light reached them. He wouldn’t
live to see that. "Alright," He said resignedly. "Stay with
it, Kirkpatrick, and call me again when you get the full results from the
positronics." He sank back into his chair. Kirkpatrick
was one of his most dependable men. If he said that a sun came into being out
there a few minutes ago, then there was a sun out there. * Art Cavanaugh was sitting in the messhall
when the alarms started. He had just picked up one of the colourful Gogo pieces
from the bevel-edged playing board and was calculating the move that would beat
his partner, Ken Lodge. When the sirens shrieked, Ken Lodge jumped up and
knocked the board and the pieces aside. The figures rolled off the table and
fell to the floor. "Alert!" he shouted. Cavanaugh got up more slowly, wearing a
frown. "That came just in time for you, didn’t it? one more move and I’d
have wiped you out!" He turned calmly to look at the lighted
call panel at the other end of the room. His eyes narrowed. "It’s coming
from the main control room," he said. "The old Man’s on duty . . .
!" Suddenly he began to move so fast toward
the door that the powerful figure of Ken Lodge couldn’t keep up with him. The
passage outside was filled with shouts and the sound of running feet. Art
Cavanaugh was only a sergeant like his giant friend, Ken Lodge, who stamped out
after him with rumbling complaints. But he had a lively imagination and was
trying to imagine what had set off the alarm. He had studied the awesome void
beyond the walls of the station and had almost become convinced that nothing
would ever happen out there to merit their attention. But now something had
occurred. What could it be? Ahead in the corridor was the green light outside the Com
Room. Art caused the heavy entrance hatch to slide to one side. A man sat there
surrounded by hundreds of instruments. He grinned at him when he came in. "You didn’t waste a second, did you?" he
commented. Art dismissed the remark with a wave of his hand. "What’s
going on? what caused that alarm?" "No idea," said the com man. "It came from the
main control room. I haven’t seen anything suspicious here." "Get up from there," Art ordered. The Com man had the same rank as Art but Art was older. When
he took over the other man’s place his fingers flew over the test buttons.
Green indicator lamps responded. All equipment was in order. He turned around.
"Nothing at all?" "Not a peep, Art. Everything’s quiet as a mouse." Ken Lodge had come in almost aimlessly with his hands in his
pocket. He joined Warren Lee, the younger Com man who was standing behind
Cavanaugh. Art had just turned back to inspect the long rows of indicators. Then all of them heard it at once. With a shrill whistle the
hyper receiver came to life. No one would have been able to move as swiftly as Cavanaugh.
His quickness was incredible as he switched on the oscilloscope and adjusted it.
The swiftness of his movements was unbelievable as he tuned the receiver
frequency so that the signal came in clear and legible. There was nothing else to do. They watched breathlessly as
the green scope began to show a waveform which the hypertransmission was tracing
on the fluorescent screen. The basic oscillation took on the shape of a pure
sinewave. Nothing in the outer void could generate such an exact configuration
unless it had been specifically created for that purpose. Created... Somewhere out there was a transmitter. Somewhere out there were intelligent beings—there in the
vast abyss between the galaxies. * Eric Furchtbar knew what he had to do. A sun and a hyper
signal that so far nobody could decipher—that was enough to set the machinery
going, of which the BOB 21 was only a small part. He had the positronics work out a coded report which clearly
and concisely described both observations. The computer delivered the required
encoding pattern, which Eric fed into the directional-beam transmitter. A
hundredth of a second later the beamed message was on its way to the Earth. The
receiver station there decoded it automatically and relayed it on to the
responsible officer. That officer was Nike Quinto, head of Division 3 of
Intercosmic Social Welfare and Development. If Quinto hadn’t been alone at
that moment he would probably have complained loudly about the rise of his blood
pressure, which such unexpected events always seemed to aggravate. Judging by the reaction to Eric Furchtbar’s report it
seemed as if the Earth had been doing nothing for a hundred years other than
wait for the first message from intergalactic space. The ship that Nike Quinto
and his men always used to get to the scene of the action was standing ready for
takeoff. There was nothing left to do but to go on board and give the order for
departure. The Earth really had waited for this moment. Throughout the
years ships had been held on standby, ready to take the members of the Mutant
corps or Intelligence or Division 3 to various trouble spots affecting galactic
politics. Each time the Terran technology took a step forward, such ships were
always modernized. Thus for the more important missions, first-class equipment
was always available. Also, Nike Quinto’s men had been fully prepared. What they
might expect in intergalactic space, what they had to watch out for, how the
situation might be when they were thousands of light years removed from the
farthest rim of the Milky Way and encountered an alien intelligence—all this
is firmly anchored in their minds. Hypno-training had given them all necessary
information, in such a manner that they would never forget it. It was a specially selected team that Nike Quinto took with
him on that same day, May 2nd of the year 2112. His immediate companions were
Maj. Ron Landry, Capt. Larry Randall, Sgt. Mitchell Hannigan�nicknamed Meech�and
the sworn-in but unenlisted assistant, Lofty Patterson. on previous missions of
Division 3, each of them had proved his mettle. Quinto’s ship was exactly half a year old as of that day.
In the casual vernacular of Division 3, the Joann was a cruising work
shop. It was classed as a battle cruiser but in addition to its excellent
armaments it was fitted out with a full work shop which enabled the crew to
build or repair a number of complicated equipment on board. thus the Joann
was only dependent upon her home base to a very limited extent, which included
any other sources of maintenance and supplies. Quinto knew that in this case such a feature was important.
When you were 500 light years beyond the rim of the Milky Way you operated on
different tactics than you did inside the galaxy where every small hop could
bring you to an inhabited world. The Joann used its trans-light linear spacedrive to
cover the 34000 light years to Arkon 3. After landing, Mike Quinto advised Eric
Furchtbar on the hyper-beam that he was now considerably closer to his position. For his part, Eric Furchtbar had a few new items on hand to
report. * The receivers registered a 2nd transmission on another
frequency. the first signal had been holding steady for 5 hours. It could be
clearly seen on the scope screen that a definite modulation pattern was
repeating itself every 14 minutes. Art Cavanaugh had explained to Furchtbar that it looked like
some kind of distress call which was sent out by an automatic transmitter—in a
repeated pattern until somebody answered it. Eric had retorted that such an
assumption could be made if they were dealing with inhabitants of the Milky Way.
But one had to be more careful about anything that came from "out
there," at least as far as seemingly logical deductions were
concerned. Art didn’t understand too much about the art of logic but
he had enough confidence in his captain not to insist on sticking to his
analysis. Yet in the back of his mind the thought persisted that somebody out
there was frantically yelling for help. Or at least their automatic transmitter
was still operating when perhaps the people it served had already died. Because
that sun that Mike Kirkpatrick had mentioned had meanwhile been defined as a
nuclear explosion of tremendous size. Then this 2nd signal had come in. Whoever was sending it wasn’t
making an effort to repeat it too often. Art adjusted the receiver frequency but
all he could see on the scope was a single decaying wave spike. Then the scope
was blank again. Warren Lee wound the recorder tape back to where he could snip
off the strip that contained the short transmission. Ken Lodge felt he ought to
make himself useful, so he placed the tape strip in a bright red envelope and
sent it through a pneumatic tube to the positronic analysis section. Meanwhile, Cavanaugh had notified the main control room. Eric
Furchtbar was still at his post although he had been 12 hours on duty without
interruption. Eric asked for the tracking readouts, and considering his agitated
condition Art knew he was lucky that the automatic tracker had completed its
task in the meantime. The readout consisted of three triangular coцrdinates and
a radius vector. The radius vector indicated the distance between the BOB 21 and
the unknown transmitter. It turned out to be 410 light years. This was the same distance of the first transmitter, which
placed it in the same area where the nuclear explosion had occurred. * During the next few hours further explosions were detected. A
portion of the mighty energies unleashed were 5th-dimensional in nature and 5-D
hyperfields were registered by the instruments on board the BOB 21 practically
with no lapse of time. Eric Furchtbar began to feel nervous. The BOB 21 was merely
an observation station, not a true spaceship. It had been brought here by a
space tender, which had simply decoupled itself and gone back to where it had
come from. The BOB 21 had no real propulsion system and its only navigational
engines were for limited movements to correct its position. The station was
stationary. In case they should come under attack the crew was supplied with
weapons, fairly effective ones at that—but if the situation became hopeless
there was no way of making a fast exit. During Eric’s 13 hours of duty, 11 explosions were
registered—all of them in relatively quick succession. And there was no change
in the hyper signal that Art Cavanaugh thought as a distress call. It looked as
if a great space battle were taking place out there somewhere. The radiation
fields registered by the instruments indicated that each explosion was caused by
a bomb in the range of 1000 gigatons. Eric had almost forgotten about the 2nd short hyper message
when the analysis section announced that the positronic deciphering run had been
successful. The man talking over the intercom was Lt. Hynes. "After everything we’ve been taught we can’t be
certain that the decoder is actually giving us the true content of the
message," he said. "But everything seems to fit. Every test result
comes up with the same coefficient of probability. What this would indicate—" Eric interrupted him impatiently. "Alright, alright!
What does it say?" In the viewscreen, Lt. Hynes could be seen picking up a piece
of paper. He studied it a few seconds dubiously and then read it aloud:
"Are you a true life form?" * The incomprehensible generates uncertainty and a presentiment
of impending danger. For Eric Furchtbar and the other men on board the BOB 21,
this question about a true life form was the most inconceivable thing they had
ever heard before in their lives. Nonetheless there was little doubt that the
question had really been asked–by somebody who was 410 light years out there
engaged in an argument with somebody else, in the process of which they were
batting around monster fusion bombs. Eric Furchtbar had experienced a sense of uncertainty and
approaching danger before but this feeling now was coming on like a slow panic. However, before he could beam out another message, a dispatch
came in from the Joann, announcing its arrival on Arkon 3. Eric answered
practically on a simultaneous beam, and thus in a matter of seconds Nike Quinto
was the recipient of information which caused him to take off immediately after
just having landed. The Joann sped outward, prepared to leave the galaxy. For the time being, no one had answered the mysterious
question: "Are you a true life form?" 1/ "ARE YOU A TRUE LIFE FORM?" There was nothing but a deathlike silence and
emptiness in this region of the universe. In a ship suspended in space far removed
from the outer rim of the Milky way, the mass detectors had nothing to detect.
The only equipment capable of picking up anything was the broad-surfaced
collector shields on trans-C velocity ships which now and then probed into this
abyss between the island universes. In about every 10 cubic meters there might
be a single hydrogen nucleus. To collect just a single gram of matter it would
be necessary to comb through a space sector big enough to contain 5000 planet
Earths. That’s how empty it was out here. Well,
to the devil with it, thought Eric Furchtbar. He only had a few, more days to go
before they’d come to pick him up. No one was assigned to duty for more than
three months on board the BOB (Barrier-line Observation Station) 21. In the
beginning it had been estimated that the men could endure a half year of service
out here but it hadn’t worked out. After about 3Ѕ months the crews began to
get "space happy." They would start seeing ghosts and begin to hear
mysterious cries emerging from emptiness. It wasn’t so bad if a man took time to
think about it, theorized Eric Furchtbar. All you had to do was sit still
somewhere and get it into your head that there were no such things as ghosts and
that sounds were impossible out there in the awful void. But who ever had time
to go into such meditations? Usually they sat with each other and conversed.
What did they talk about? The terrible emptiness. How ghastly it was and how
hard it was to imagine such an endless abyss. They thought of how frightful it
would be if the BOB 21 suddenly sprang a leak—although it would not be any
worse than a leak occurring somewhere in the middle of the galaxy. And then it would happen suddenly. When
they went to bed and started to fall asleep. All of a sudden they would hear
voices. And then they would see the grey shadows flitting about. Instead of
becoming meditative they would start to yell and rave, or the more
impressionable ones would shiver under their sheets. In short, they would go out of their minds. Eric had to admit that it wasn’t always
so simple. He looked around him. The room he was in was rectangular if one
overlooked a slight outward curvature of one of the lateral walls. The walls
were covered with instruments, meters, viewscreens and control panels. There
were a few seats located here and there. In the centre of the room was a large
table that was covered with star charts, coordinate tables and stacks of
programming sheets which were still in the original order as on the first day.
No one had ever used the positronic input forms. There was no reason to make any new
programming inputs. Nothing ever happened. The 25-man crew of the BOB 21 spent
their time in merely determining that this sector of the universe was absolutely
eventless. Day after day, week after week, month after month. The instrument needles stood at zero as if
they had been turned off. Every 10 minutes Eric would get up and press the
switch of the master test board. A green lamp would light up to reveal that all
instruments in the room were working and ready to respond. Of course Eric knew
this but he only went through the routine each time to see the lamp come on.
Just that at least was an event to break the monotony. The only equipment that was really shut
down was the viewscreens. Matter tracers and reflex sensors were capable of
picking up anything coming from the outside much faster than the conventional
optics. Besides, the aspect of the empty void between the galaxies wasn’t
worth turning on the screens. on the contrary: it increased the anxiety factor. No, it really wasn’t pleasant duty here.
If you took the psychological problems into consideration, the BOB 21 was
actually undermanned. At least two men should be in each room together. Eric
would have liked to have somebody to talk to but he was sitting here alone in a
room that was almost 50 square meters in extent. 8 other men were sitting
somewhere in other rooms, and the remaining 16 were off duty. Eric got up restlessly and slowly
paced the room. With his almost 6Ѕ-ft frame he might have had an imposing
figure if he had not been so frightfully thin. His uniform, which was the right
length but too wide for him, hung in rather dismal folds about him. But that
didn’t seem to bother him. The only thing he was really aware of was his bald
spot, which was shiny enough to catch his eye wherever he saw his reflection. As
a man of 31 years he endured it with what little of dignity that remained to
him. As he walked alone the curved wall he
almost took a masochistic pleasure in the realization that only about half a
meter of distance separated him from the lightless vacuum that stretched out
from here over millions of light years to the next galaxy. He wondered how he
might feel if he thought that the plastic metal hull really was the only thing
between him and that awful void. Would it make any difference? About 140 years
ago when Terrans were first venturing into space, the hulls of spaceships had
been made of ordinary steel and by comparison to these walls were they were as
thin as an onion skin. And in those days there was no such thing as the defence
screen that protected the BOB 21 from the outer environment more effectively
than any material walls. No, decided Eric, he would still feel safe
without the outer screen. Way out here there were no meteors. What could
possibly happen to do any harm? To the devil with all these grey ghosts and
phantoms, he thought angrily. He almost wished that something really would
happen. He turned and went back to his seat. Sitting down with a sense of
boredom he chanced to glance at one of the meters. The blue-white illuminated needle stood
trembling at the upper end of the scale. * It was the fastest Eric Furchtbar had ever
moved to get onto his feet. In three long strides he reached the main panel and
activated the alarm. Sirens started to shriek, signal light blinked, and the
viewscreens flashed into operation automatically. The mighty observation station virtually
bristled with a sudden vigilance, like a man startled from sleep. Eric returned to his seat. The instrument
that had given the first indication was designed to register para-energy
radiations. It only reacted to hypertype emanations below a certain threshold of
energy and which had no detectable modulations. Such radiations could come from
any number of possible sources. If this had been inside the galaxy, that
particular indicator wouldn’t have been quiescent for a single second. But way out here . . . ? Eric scanned meters on other instrument
panels along the walls. Other needles were quivering with subtle activity now.
One of them registered a light hypergravity shock, and some of the hyperoptic
channels were acting up. All of it was hyper, thought Eric in
wondering puzzlement. No direct indications. He looked at the viewscreen. They revealed
the same black void as they al-ways did when they were turned on. There was
still nothing to be seen. Whatever may have happened it must have occurred too
far away for the light to have reached the station yet. He waited a while
longer. Then he got his first call on the intercom. It came from the Analysis
Section. On the small screen he recognized the red-haired younger man whose
freckled face wore a perplexed and slightly confused expression. "We’ve gone over all the input
tapes, sir. There’s no doubt about the indications. somewhere out there a sun
has suddenly come into existence." Eric Furchtbar almost choked. "A
sun..!" he cried out. "You can talk plainer than that,
Kirkpatrick!" Kirkpatrick unconsciously wiped his brow.
"Taking all observations together, sir, there is only one straight answer.
Somewhere out there is a sun. On a detailed basis– " Eric interrupted the freckle-faced analyst
with a wave of his hand. "Forget the details! How can a sun come out of
nothing, just like that!?" Obviously the question was too much for
Kirkpatrick. He stammered: "That’s something... I–I can’t tell you,
sir..." "OK, skip it! How far away is
it?" "Between 400 and 500 light years,
sir." Eric sighed and looked at the main screens.
It would be 400 to 500 years yet before the light reached them. He wouldn’t
live to see that. "Alright," He said resignedly. "Stay with
it, Kirkpatrick, and call me again when you get the full results from the
positronics." He sank back into his chair. Kirkpatrick
was one of his most dependable men. If he said that a sun came into being out
there a few minutes ago, then there was a sun out there. * Art Cavanaugh was sitting in the messhall
when the alarms started. He had just picked up one of the colourful Gogo pieces
from the bevel-edged playing board and was calculating the move that would beat
his partner, Ken Lodge. When the sirens shrieked, Ken Lodge jumped up and
knocked the board and the pieces aside. The figures rolled off the table and
fell to the floor. "Alert!" he shouted. Cavanaugh got up more slowly, wearing a
frown. "That came just in time for you, didn’t it? one more move and I’d
have wiped you out!" He turned calmly to look at the lighted
call panel at the other end of the room. His eyes narrowed. "It’s coming
from the main control room," he said. "The old Man’s on duty . . .
!" Suddenly he began to move so fast toward
the door that the powerful figure of Ken Lodge couldn’t keep up with him. The
passage outside was filled with shouts and the sound of running feet. Art
Cavanaugh was only a sergeant like his giant friend, Ken Lodge, who stamped out
after him with rumbling complaints. But he had a lively imagination and was
trying to imagine what had set off the alarm. He had studied the awesome void
beyond the walls of the station and had almost become convinced that nothing
would ever happen out there to merit their attention. But now something had
occurred. What could it be? Ahead in the corridor was the green light outside the Com
Room. Art caused the heavy entrance hatch to slide to one side. A man sat there
surrounded by hundreds of instruments. He grinned at him when he came in. "You didn’t waste a second, did you?" he
commented. Art dismissed the remark with a wave of his hand. "What’s
going on? what caused that alarm?" "No idea," said the com man. "It came from the
main control room. I haven’t seen anything suspicious here." "Get up from there," Art ordered. The Com man had the same rank as Art but Art was older. When
he took over the other man’s place his fingers flew over the test buttons.
Green indicator lamps responded. All equipment was in order. He turned around.
"Nothing at all?" "Not a peep, Art. Everything’s quiet as a mouse." Ken Lodge had come in almost aimlessly with his hands in his
pocket. He joined Warren Lee, the younger Com man who was standing behind
Cavanaugh. Art had just turned back to inspect the long rows of indicators. Then all of them heard it at once. With a shrill whistle the
hyper receiver came to life. No one would have been able to move as swiftly as Cavanaugh.
His quickness was incredible as he switched on the oscilloscope and adjusted it.
The swiftness of his movements was unbelievable as he tuned the receiver
frequency so that the signal came in clear and legible. There was nothing else to do. They watched breathlessly as
the green scope began to show a waveform which the hypertransmission was tracing
on the fluorescent screen. The basic oscillation took on the shape of a pure
sinewave. Nothing in the outer void could generate such an exact configuration
unless it had been specifically created for that purpose. Created... Somewhere out there was a transmitter. Somewhere out there were intelligent beings—there in the
vast abyss between the galaxies. * Eric Furchtbar knew what he had to do. A sun and a hyper
signal that so far nobody could decipher—that was enough to set the machinery
going, of which the BOB 21 was only a small part. He had the positronics work out a coded report which clearly
and concisely described both observations. The computer delivered the required
encoding pattern, which Eric fed into the directional-beam transmitter. A
hundredth of a second later the beamed message was on its way to the Earth. The
receiver station there decoded it automatically and relayed it on to the
responsible officer. That officer was Nike Quinto, head of Division 3 of
Intercosmic Social Welfare and Development. If Quinto hadn’t been alone at
that moment he would probably have complained loudly about the rise of his blood
pressure, which such unexpected events always seemed to aggravate. Judging by the reaction to Eric Furchtbar’s report it
seemed as if the Earth had been doing nothing for a hundred years other than
wait for the first message from intergalactic space. The ship that Nike Quinto
and his men always used to get to the scene of the action was standing ready for
takeoff. There was nothing left to do but to go on board and give the order for
departure. The Earth really had waited for this moment. Throughout the
years ships had been held on standby, ready to take the members of the Mutant
corps or Intelligence or Division 3 to various trouble spots affecting galactic
politics. Each time the Terran technology took a step forward, such ships were
always modernized. Thus for the more important missions, first-class equipment
was always available. Also, Nike Quinto’s men had been fully prepared. What they
might expect in intergalactic space, what they had to watch out for, how the
situation might be when they were thousands of light years removed from the
farthest rim of the Milky Way and encountered an alien intelligence—all this
is firmly anchored in their minds. Hypno-training had given them all necessary
information, in such a manner that they would never forget it. It was a specially selected team that Nike Quinto took with
him on that same day, May 2nd of the year 2112. His immediate companions were
Maj. Ron Landry, Capt. Larry Randall, Sgt. Mitchell Hannigan�nicknamed Meech�and
the sworn-in but unenlisted assistant, Lofty Patterson. on previous missions of
Division 3, each of them had proved his mettle. Quinto’s ship was exactly half a year old as of that day.
In the casual vernacular of Division 3, the Joann was a cruising work
shop. It was classed as a battle cruiser but in addition to its excellent
armaments it was fitted out with a full work shop which enabled the crew to
build or repair a number of complicated equipment on board. thus the Joann
was only dependent upon her home base to a very limited extent, which included
any other sources of maintenance and supplies. Quinto knew that in this case such a feature was important.
When you were 500 light years beyond the rim of the Milky Way you operated on
different tactics than you did inside the galaxy where every small hop could
bring you to an inhabited world. The Joann used its trans-light linear spacedrive to
cover the 34000 light years to Arkon 3. After landing, Mike Quinto advised Eric
Furchtbar on the hyper-beam that he was now considerably closer to his position. For his part, Eric Furchtbar had a few new items on hand to
report. * The receivers registered a 2nd transmission on another
frequency. the first signal had been holding steady for 5 hours. It could be
clearly seen on the scope screen that a definite modulation pattern was
repeating itself every 14 minutes. Art Cavanaugh had explained to Furchtbar that it looked like
some kind of distress call which was sent out by an automatic transmitter—in a
repeated pattern until somebody answered it. Eric had retorted that such an
assumption could be made if they were dealing with inhabitants of the Milky Way.
But one had to be more careful about anything that came from "out
there," at least as far as seemingly logical deductions were
concerned. Art didn’t understand too much about the art of logic but
he had enough confidence in his captain not to insist on sticking to his
analysis. Yet in the back of his mind the thought persisted that somebody out
there was frantically yelling for help. Or at least their automatic transmitter
was still operating when perhaps the people it served had already died. Because
that sun that Mike Kirkpatrick had mentioned had meanwhile been defined as a
nuclear explosion of tremendous size. Then this 2nd signal had come in. Whoever was sending it wasn’t
making an effort to repeat it too often. Art adjusted the receiver frequency but
all he could see on the scope was a single decaying wave spike. Then the scope
was blank again. Warren Lee wound the recorder tape back to where he could snip
off the strip that contained the short transmission. Ken Lodge felt he ought to
make himself useful, so he placed the tape strip in a bright red envelope and
sent it through a pneumatic tube to the positronic analysis section. Meanwhile, Cavanaugh had notified the main control room. Eric
Furchtbar was still at his post although he had been 12 hours on duty without
interruption. Eric asked for the tracking readouts, and considering his agitated
condition Art knew he was lucky that the automatic tracker had completed its
task in the meantime. The readout consisted of three triangular coцrdinates and
a radius vector. The radius vector indicated the distance between the BOB 21 and
the unknown transmitter. It turned out to be 410 light years. This was the same distance of the first transmitter, which
placed it in the same area where the nuclear explosion had occurred. * During the next few hours further explosions were detected. A
portion of the mighty energies unleashed were 5th-dimensional in nature and 5-D
hyperfields were registered by the instruments on board the BOB 21 practically
with no lapse of time. Eric Furchtbar began to feel nervous. The BOB 21 was merely
an observation station, not a true spaceship. It had been brought here by a
space tender, which had simply decoupled itself and gone back to where it had
come from. The BOB 21 had no real propulsion system and its only navigational
engines were for limited movements to correct its position. The station was
stationary. In case they should come under attack the crew was supplied with
weapons, fairly effective ones at that—but if the situation became hopeless
there was no way of making a fast exit. During Eric’s 13 hours of duty, 11 explosions were
registered—all of them in relatively quick succession. And there was no change
in the hyper signal that Art Cavanaugh thought as a distress call. It looked as
if a great space battle were taking place out there somewhere. The radiation
fields registered by the instruments indicated that each explosion was caused by
a bomb in the range of 1000 gigatons. Eric had almost forgotten about the 2nd short hyper message
when the analysis section announced that the positronic deciphering run had been
successful. The man talking over the intercom was Lt. Hynes. "After everything we’ve been taught we can’t be
certain that the decoder is actually giving us the true content of the
message," he said. "But everything seems to fit. Every test result
comes up with the same coefficient of probability. What this would indicate—" Eric interrupted him impatiently. "Alright, alright!
What does it say?" In the viewscreen, Lt. Hynes could be seen picking up a piece
of paper. He studied it a few seconds dubiously and then read it aloud:
"Are you a true life form?" * The incomprehensible generates uncertainty and a presentiment
of impending danger. For Eric Furchtbar and the other men on board the BOB 21,
this question about a true life form was the most inconceivable thing they had
ever heard before in their lives. Nonetheless there was little doubt that the
question had really been asked–by somebody who was 410 light years out there
engaged in an argument with somebody else, in the process of which they were
batting around monster fusion bombs. Eric Furchtbar had experienced a sense of uncertainty and
approaching danger before but this feeling now was coming on like a slow panic. However, before he could beam out another message, a dispatch
came in from the Joann, announcing its arrival on Arkon 3. Eric answered
practically on a simultaneous beam, and thus in a matter of seconds Nike Quinto
was the recipient of information which caused him to take off immediately after
just having landed. The Joann sped outward, prepared to leave the galaxy. For the time being, no one had answered the mysterious
question: "Are you a true life form?" |
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