He was busy for three days, buying things by day, designing by night
and finding out new things to order. On the second day, United States
counter-intelligence reported that the Russians were trying to signal
M-387 on their own. An American satellite picked up the broadcast. The
Russians denied it, and continued to try. Burke made arrangements for
the delivery of aluminum-alloy bars, rods, girders, and plates; for
plaster of Paris in ton lots; for closed-circuit television equipment.
Once he called Sandy to give her an order to be filled locally. It
was lumber, mostly slender strips of lathing, to be on hand when he
returned.
"All kinds of material is turning up," said Sandy. "There've been six
deliveries this morning. I'm signing receipts for it because I don't
know what else to do. But won't you please give me copies of the orders
you've placed so I can check what arrives?"
"I'll put 'em in the mail--airmail," promised Burke. "But only six
deliveries? There ought to be dozens! Get after these people on long
distance, will you?" And he gave her a list of names.
Burke said suddenly, "I had that dream again last night. Twice in a
week. That's unusual."
"No comment," Sandy said.
She hung up, and Burke was taken aback. But there was hardly any
comment she could make. Burke himself had no illusion that he would
ever come to a place where there were two moons in the sky and trees
with ribbonlike leaves. And if he did--unthinkable as that might be--he
could not imagine finding the person for whom he felt such agonized
anxiety. The dream, recurrent, fantastic, or whatnot, simply could not
represent a reality of the past, present, or future. Such things don't
happen. But Burke continued to be moved much more by the emotional urge
of the repeated experience than by intellectual curiosity about his
having dreamed repeatedly of signals exactly like those from space,
long before such signals ever were.
He made ready to try to do something about those signals. And, all
reason to the contrary notwithstanding, to him they meant a world with
two moons and strange vegetation and such emotion as nothing on Earth
had ever quite stirred up--though he felt pretty deeply about Sandy,
at that. So he went intently from one supplier of exotic equipment to
another, spending what money he had for an impossibility. Impossible
because Asteroid M-387 was not over two miles through at its largest
dimension, and therefore could not possibly have an atmosphere and
certainly not trees, and it could not own even a single moon!
He spent one day at a small yachting port with a man for whom he'd
worked out a special process of Fiberglas yacht construction. Through
that process, Holmes yachts could be owned by people who weren't
millionaires. Holmes was a large, languid, sunburned individual who
built yachts because he liked them. He had much respect for Burke, even
after Burke asked his help and explained what for.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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