He got out of the car and opened the door on her side, then unlocked
the office door and went in. He switched on the lights inside. For a
moment, Sandy did not move. Then she slowly got out of the car and
entered the office which was so completely familiar. Burke bent over
the office safe, turning the tumbler-wheel to open it. He said over
his shoulder, "That special bulletin will be repeated on all the news
broadcasts. You've got a little radio here. Turn it on, will you?"
Again slowly, Sandy crossed the office and turned on the miniature
radio on her desk. It warmed up and began to make noises. She dimmed it
until it was barely audible. Burke stood up with a reel of brown tape.
He put it on the office recorder, usually used for the dictation of
the day's lab log.
"I have a dream sometimes," said Burke. "A recurrent dream. I've had it
every so often since I was eleven. I've tried to believe it was simply
a freak, but sometimes I've suspected I was a telepath, getting some
garbled message from somewhere unguessable. That has to be wrong. And
again I've suspected that--well--that I might not be completely human.
That I was planted here on Earth, somehow, not knowing it, to be of use
to--something not of Earth. And that's crazy. So I've been pretty leery
of being romantic about anybody. Tonight I'd managed to persuade myself
all those wild imaginings were absurd. And then the signals came." He
paused and said unsteadily, "I made this tape a year ago. I was trying
to convince myself that it was nonsense. Listen. Remember, I made this
a year ago!"
The reels began to spin on the recorder's face. Burke's voice came out
of the speaker, "_These are the sounds of the dream_," it said, and
stopped.
There was a moment of silence, while the twin reels spun silently. Then
sounds came from the recorder. They were musical notes, reproduced
from the tape. Sandy stared blankly. Disconnected, arbitrary flutelike
sounds came out into the office of Burke Development, Inc. It was quite
correct to call them elfin. They could be described as plaintive. They
were not a melody, but a melody could have been made from them by
rearrangement. They were very remarkably like the sounds from space.
It was impossible to doubt that they were the same code, the same
language, the same vocabulary of tones and durations.
Burke listened with a peculiarly tense expression on his face. When the
recording ended, he looked at Sandy.
Sandy was disturbed. "They're alike. But Joe, how did it happen?"
"I'll tell you later," he said grimly. "The important thing is, am I
crazy or not?"
The desk radio muttered. It was an hourly news broadcast. Burke turned
it up and a voice boomed:
"_... one o'clock news. Messages have been received from space in the
century's most stupendous news event! Full details will follow a word
from our sponsor._"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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