A MAN'S STRONG voice spoke out of the depths of space and time. The words were unfamiliar and meaningless, but the voice itself had meaning. There were authority and pride in it, and a strength that made the resonant phrases rolling out of the loudspeaker echo from the walls of the little laboratory.
DeWitt sat hunched forward, listening, his eyes almost shut and his fingers clenching hungrily with the rhythm of that alien speech, as though he would reach out and tear meaning bodily from the sounds. Fairlie understood how DeWitt felt. What was he speaking of, this man who had lived and died ages ago? Was this the record of some nightmare shock of conflict in the unimaginable war that had once stormed through the suns? Was he telling of triumph, or of defeat?
This was neither the first nor the only time Fairlie had listened to that same voice, but it was impossible to retain the proper scholarly detachment. The blood beat faster, the nerves of the scalp crept and tingled, the palms of the hands were wet. This was a man speaking to other men in the moment of some overwhelming crisis, and every word was charged with importance and a curious immediacy. Curious because the immediacy of thirty thousand years ago could hardly have much effect on a present-day listener—and yet it did.
For some time a most uncomfortable and scientifically reprehensible conviction had been growing in Fairlie that the message he was listening to was as vital to him as it had been for the people to whom it was first spoken, and that he must understand it before it was too late.
Must understand it. And the voice rolled on, and the shapes and forms of speech became almost recognizable, and just beyond, just over the threshold, understanding lurked in the darkness waiting, waiting for the one Word of Power to coax it forth.
Illusion. And the voice stopped, and there was nothing.
DeWitt looked at Fairlie as though he hated him. But Fairlie knew that the hatred was not personal. It was the frustration that DeWitt hated, and Fairlie was only the symbol of it.
"Do you want another one?" DeWitt asked.
Fairlie shook his head. "This is enough for today." He switched off the tape-recorder.
DeWitt rose. He shut off the amplifier and then bent over the square plastic box to which the amplifier was connected. Inside the transparent plastic a two-inch silvery ball was fixed upon a plastic pin. The ball had been turning very slowly. Now as DeWitt watched it the rotation slowed still more and then stopped, and there was the tiniest of audible clicks. DeWitt sighed. With the tenderness of a mother lifting her first-born he cupped his fingers around the metal sphere and removed it from the pin.
Fairlie said, "I still don't understand how so much speech is recorded on that little ball of metal."
"We don't know either," DeWitt said bitterly. He placed the ball in a rack which contained dozens of similar balls, carefully nested. "We got it to working, but that's all. Theoretically the recording device, instead of making sounds form patterns of iron particles on tape, formed patterns of atoms instead, perhaps even electrons. An invisible beam scans them to reproduce the sound-waves, but we haven't even been able to find out exactly what kind of a beam."
He looked at the rack and the rows of bright little enigmas sitting hard and unconcerned in the harsh laboratory light.
"All that knowledge there," he said. "We've got it right in our hands. Their own voices, their own words, right there, all of it, and it's—" He made an abrupt violent gesture with his hands and turned away from the rack. "How are you coming, Fairlie? Haven't you made any progress at all?"
"Mr. DeWitt," said Fairlie. "With what politeness I have been able to muster I've asked you please to quit riding me." He turned on the recorder and punched the rewind. The brown tape went hissing back off the take-up reel and he watched it gloomily.
"Do you have any idea how long it takes to translate a forgotten language even when you have bilingual inscriptions, a Rosetta Stone? Decades. Generations. And in this case—" Fairlie slammed the STOP and the tape was still, quiet and uncommunicative as the silvery balls in the rack.
"We haven't got decades," said DeWitt softly. "We haven't got years. We're lucky if we have months."
Fairlie looked at him.
"Too much pressure," DeWitt said. "One of these days Gassendi will blow wide open, it has to. The UN will force an investigation. After that—it belongs to everybody. If we don't make use of the time we have before that happens, we'll be as dead and lost as the Ur-men. We've got to have this knowledge, and we've got to have it first."
"Then how about getting out of here and letting me work?" said Fairlie irritably. He wavered between admiration of DeWitt's competence and intense dislike of his driving impatience with other people's problems. He seemed to think that a job like this was no different from weaving baskets or hoeing turnips and that all you had to do to speed it up was simply to work harder.
Without waiting for any answer from DeWitt he jacked in the connection between the tape-recorder and the sonograph, turned them both on, and set the recorder control for playback.
Once more the deep strong voice spoke out across the gulf of thirty millennia, and once more the nerves tightened in the pit of Fairlie's stomach and the spur of need was on him. He resolutely ignored that for what it was—sheer emotional nonsense—and concentrated on the revolving drum of the sonograph, where a phosphor needle was busy constructing on the sensitive paper a graph based on analysis of the sounds played back from the tape and passed through the heart of the sonograph, a battery of tiny radio tubes tuned to successive frequencies.
DeWitt had not gone. He was listening again, listening and peering at the building graph with that hungry-hawk look—rip and tear and pull it out, no nonsense, make it go the way it should go, damn it!
"Why are some parts of the graph so much blacker than others?" he asked.
"Degree of blackness indicates comparative intensity of sound."
DeWitt grunted. "All right. So you make a picture of the sound. Why is that easier to understand than the spoken words?"
In a tone that implied the answer to that ought to be apparent to a five-year-old child, Fairlie explained, "A sound is fleeting. It comes and goes. You can't hold it still to study it, and compare it with other sounds. As a visible graph you can do that. And the first step in studying any spoken language is analysis to determine the number of its basic phonemes, the smallest units of speech-sound."
"Sounds simple enough."
"Try it. And after you have the phonemes, then there are the morphemes and the positional variants and—"
"Fairlie."
"What?"
"I was in Gassendi."
The voice from the tape-recorder sounded its call to arms—or to flight? Or to the last-ditch desperate courage of men who no longer have any choice about dying but only about the manner in which they will do it?
DeWitt watched the complex graph building under the needle and said, "I was one of the first to see it. I can't tell you what that was like. I won't even try. But I walked past those broken doors and into that cavern, and I looked for bodies in the ruins, expecting every minute to see—But there weren't any. The survivors took care of all their dead and injured. They couldn't have had much time, but they made time for that."
And what epic of heroism and endurance was implicit in those words, thought Fairlie.
"One other thing they did was to remove any machines that had escaped damage when the base was shattered. Nothing was left that an enemy might turn to his own use—then."
"But now?" asked Fairlie, knowing that it was expected of him.
"Now an enemy—our enemy—could learn a whole new technology from the wreckage in that base, the machines, the generators, the ships—starships, Fairlie, not just little rockets that have all they can do to jump across the tiny crack that separates us from the Moon. I just want you to think about that, turn it over in your mind, picture a fleet of ships with somebody else's flag on them, a hostile flag, heading out from Earth. Out from Earth, out from the Solar System, clear out—"
His hand made a curving gesture in the air and something about it, coupled with the strange look that had come into DeWitt's eyes and the odd quiet tone of his voice, hit Fairlie with a tremendous impact. For a second the prosaic laboratory was gone and he saw the ships, the vast dark mighty shadows against the stars, heading out . . .
"Out," he asked, "to where?"
In that same remote and quiet voice DeWitt answered, "It must have occurred to you that the Ur-men came to our Solar System from somewhere."
Fairlie reached out and stopped the tape-recorder. The needle hung motionless over the graph.
"Oh, no," Fairlie said. He laughed. "But of course that's impossible. Not their coming, I mean, but our going—anybody going—that far. Not now, at least. Not for many years."
DeWitt turned to Fairlie and smiled. "That depends on you."
He turned away and Fairlie watched him walk across the narrow room to the rack and take from it one of the silvery balls. It was a very odd moment, like the moments in a fever-dream when time and space are both distorted and people move about in a manner quite different from their normal habit and the light is queer. There was a great deal that Fairlie wanted to say but he couldn't find the means to say it. And all the time DeWitt was fixing the tiny ball on the pin and operating the mysterious controls.
When Fairlie did finally speak it was an explosive inanity. "I told you I didn't want any more tapes this time."
The voice of a fretful child. And the ships would go out, and it was up to him—
Up to him.
DeWitt's voice was perfectly casual when he answered. "This isn't a message recording. Purely an entertainment piece. They left behind a lot of non-essential stuff like that—probably the most important records went with them. I just thought you might like to hear this. Give you a little different slant on the Ur-men, their aesthetic rather than their warlike and or mechanical side."
The tiny ball began to turn on its slender pin.
A sound came into the laboratory, the feather-edge of a clear wind blowing across the stars. It came out of infinity, very sweet and distant, and you could hear it coming closer and it was almost more than you could bear, this clear whistling soaring and falling with such joyous purity, and what kind of an instrument made it, anyway—an organ-pipe, a flute, a harp? No, none of these. Something strange, something never played on Earth, and yet there were echoes. The tears sprang to his eyes and the sound swooped down the whole long curve of the galaxy in a beautiful descending trill and then passed on, receding into the infinity from which it came.
Before it was quite lost, the woman began to sing.