“Sure. Come, I’ll show you.” Seevers arose and moved toward the wall. He stopped before the two hemispheres. “On second thought, you better show yourself. Take down that sliced meteorite, will you? It’s sterile.”
Paul crossed the room, climbed unsteadily upon a bench, and brought down the globular meteorite. It was the first time he had examined one of the things, and he inspected it curiously. It was a near-perfect sphere, about eight inches in diameter, with a four-inch hollow in the center. The globe was made up of several concentric shells, tightly fitted, each apparently of a different metal. It was not seemingly heavier than aluminum, although the outer shell was obviously of tough steel.
“Set it face down,” Seevers told him. Both halves. Give it a quick little twist. The shells will come apart. Take out the center shell—the hard, thin one between the soft protecting shells.”
“How do you know their purposes?” Paul growled as he followed instructions. The shells came apart easily.
“Envelopes are to protect messages,” snorted Seevers.
Paul sorted out the hemispheres, and found two mirror-polished shells of paper-thin tough metal. They bore no inscription, either inside or out. He gave Seevers a puzzled frown.
“Handle them carefully while they’re out of the protectors. They’re already a little blurred…”
“I don’t see any message.”
“There’s a small bottle of iron filings in that drawer by your knee. Sift them carefully over the outside of the shells. That powder isn’t fine enough, really, but it’s the best I could do. Felger had some better stuff up at Princeton, before we all got out. This business wasn’t my discovery, incidentally.”
Baffled, Paul found the iron filings and dusted the mirror-shells with the powder. Delicate patterns appeared—latitudinal circles, etched in iron dust and laced here and there with diagonal lines. He gasped. It looked like the map of a planet.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Seevers said. “That’s what we thought too, at first. Then Felger came up with this very fine dust. Fine as they are, those lines are rows of pictograph symbols. You can make them out vaguely with a good reading glass, even with this coarse stuff. It’s magnetic printing—like two-dimensional wire-recording. Evidently, the animals that printed it had either very powerful eyes, or a magnetic sense.”
“Anyone understand it?”
“Princeton staff was working on it when the world went crazy. They figured out enough to guess at what I’ve just told you. They found five different shell-messages among a dozen or so spheres. One of them was a sort of a key. A symbol equated to a diagram of a carbon atom. Another symbol equated to a pi in binary numbers. Things like that—about five hundred symbols, in fact. Some we couldn’t figure. Then they defined other symbols by what amounted to blank-filling quizzes. Things like—’A star is… and there would be the unknown symbol. We would try to decide whether it meant ‘hot,’ ‘white,’ ‘huge,’ and so forth.”
“And you managed it?”
“In part. The ruthless way in which the missiles were opened destroyed some of the clarity. The senders were guilty of their own brand of anthropomorphism. They projected their own psychology on us. They expected us to open the things shell by shell, cautiously, and figure out the text before we went further. Heh! What happens? Some machinist grabs one, shakes it, weighs it, sticks it on a lathe, and—brrrrrr! Our curiosity is still rather apelike. Stick our arm in a gopher hole to see if there’s a rattlesnake inside.”
There was a long silence while Paul stood peering over the patterns on the shell. “Why haven’t people heard about this?” he asked quietly.
“Heard about it!” Seevers roared. “And how do you propose to tell them about it?”
Paul shook his head. It was easy to forget that Man had scurried away from his presses and his broadcasting stations and his railroads, leaving his mechanical creatures to sleep in their own rust while he fled like a bee-stung bear before the strange terror.
“What, exactly, do the patterns say, Doctor?”
“I’ve told you some of it—the evolutionary origin of the neuroderm parasites. We also pieced together their reasons for launching the missiles across space—several thousand years ago. Their sun was about to flare into a supernova. They worked out a theoretical space-drive, but they couldn’t fuel it—needed some element that was scarce in their system. They could get to their outer planet, but that wouldn’t help much. So they just cultured up a batch of their parasite-benefactors, rolled them into these balls, and fired them like charges of buckshot at various stars. Interception-course, naturally. They meant to miss just a little, so that the projectiles would swing into lone elliptical orbits around the suns—close enough in to intersect the radiational ‘life-belt’ and eventually cross paths with planets whose orbits were near-circular. Looks like they hit us on the first pass.”
“You mean they weren’t aiming at Earth in particular?”
“Evidently not. They couldn’t know we were here. Not at a range like that. Hundreds of light-years. They just took a chance on several stars. Shipping off their pets was sort of a last ditch stand against extinction—symbolic, to be sure—but a noble gesture, as far as they were concerned. A giving away of part of their souls. Like a man writing his will and leaving his last worldly possession to some unknown species beyond the stars. Imagine them standing there—watching the projectiles being fired out toward deep space. There goes their inheritance, to an unknown heir, or perhaps to no one. The little creatures that brought them up from beasthood.”
Seevers paused, staring up at the sunlight beyond the high basement window. He was talking to himself again, quietly: “You can see them turn away and silently go back… to wait for their collapsing sun to reach the critical point, the detonating point. They’ve left their last mark—a dark and uncertain benediction to the cosmos.”
“You’re a fool, Seevers,” Paul grunted suddenly.
Seevers whirled, whitening. His hand darted out forgetfully toward the young man’s arm, but he drew it back as Paul sidestepped.
“You actually regard this thing as desirable, don’t you?” Paul asked. “You can’t see that you’re under its effect. Why does it affect people that way? And you say I can’t be objective.”
The professor smiled coldly. “I didn’t say it’s desirable. I was simply pointing out that the beings who sent it saw it as desirable. They were making some unwarranted assumptions.”
“Maybe they just didn’t care.”
“Of course they cared. Their fallacy was that we would open it as they would have done—cautiously. Perhaps they couldn’t see how a creature could be both brash and intelligent. They meant for us to read the warning on the shells before we went further.”
“Warning… ?”
Seevers smiled bitterly. “Yes, warning. There was one group of oversized symbols on all the spheres. See that pattern on the top ring? It says, in effect—‘Finder-creatures, you who destroy your own people—if you do this thing, then destroy this container without penetrating deeper. If you are self-destroyers, then the contents will only help to destroy you.’”
There was a frigid silence.
“But somebody would have opened one anyway,” Paul protested.
Seevers turned his bitter smile on the window. “You couldn’t be more right. The senders just didn’t foresee our monkey-minded species. If they saw Man digging out the nuggets, braying over them, chortling over them, cracking them like walnuts, then turning tail to run howling for the forests—well, they’d think twice before they fired another round of their celestial buckshot.”
“Doctor Seevers, what do you think will happen now? To the world, I mean?”
Seevers shrugged. “I saw a baby born yesterday—to a woman down the island. It was fully covered with neuroderm at birth. It has some new sensory equipment—small pores in the finger tips, with taste buds and olfactory cells in them. Also a nodule above each eye sensitive to infrared.”
Paul groaned.
“It’s not the first case. Those things are happening to adults, too, but you have to have the condition for quite a while. Brother Thomas has the finger pores already. Hasn’t learned to use them yet, of course. He gets sensations from them, but the receptors aren’t connected to olfactory and taste centers of the brain. They’re still linked with the somesthetic interpretive centers. He can touch various substances and get different perceptive combinations of heat, pain, cold, pressure, and so forth. He says vinegar feels ice-cold, quinine sharp-hot, cologne warm-velvet- prickly, and… he blushes when he touches a musky perfume.”
