Tower of Glass

“A race adapted to high radiation levels would probably have a genetic structure that isn’t as vulnerable to bombardment as ours. It would absorb all kinds of hard particles without mutating.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” After a moment Krug said, “Okay, so they came from someplace else and settled your planetary nebula when it was safe. Why don’t we have signals from the someplace else too? Where’s the home system? Exiles, colonists — from where?”

“Maybe the home system is so far away that the signals won’t reach us for thousands of years.” Vargas suggested. “Or perhaps the home system doesn’t send out signals. Or—”

“You have too many answers,” Krug muttered. “I don’t like the idea.”

“That brings us to the other possibility,” said Vargas. “That the signal-sending species is native to NGC 7293.”

“How? The blowup—”

“Maybe the blowup didn’t bother them. This race might thrive on hard radiation. Mutation may be a way of life for them. We’re talking about aliens, my friend. If they’re truly alien, we can’t comprehend any of the parameters. So look: speculate along with me. We have a planet of a blue star, a planet that’s far away from its sun but nevertheless is roasted by fantastically strong radiation. The sea is a broth of chemicals constantly boiling. A broth of mutations. A million years after the cooling of the surface, life is spawned. Things happen fast on such a world. Another million years and there’s complex multi-celled life. A million more to mammal-equivalents. A million more to a galactic-level civilization. Change, fierce, unending change.”

“I want to believe you,” Krug said darkly. “I want. But I can’t.”

“Radiation-eaters,” Vargas went on. “Clever, adaptable, accepting the necessity, even the desirability, of constant violent genetic change. Their star explodes: very well, they adapt to the increase in radiation, they find a way to protect themselves. Now they live inside a planetary nebula, with a fluorescent sky around them. Somehow they detect the existence of the rest of the galaxy. They send messages to us. Yes? Yes?”

Krug, in anguish, pushed his hands through the air at Vargas, palms outward. “I want to believe!”

“Then believe. I believe.”

“It’s only a theory. A wild theory.”

“It accounts for the date we have,” said Vargas. “Do you know the Italian proverb:Se non и vero, и ben trovato? ‘Even if it isn’t true, it’s well invented.’ The hypothesis will do until we have a better one. It answers the facts better than the theory of a natural cause for a complex repetitive signal coming to us in several media.”

Turning away, Krug stabbed at the activator as though he no longer could bear the image on the dome, as though he felt the furious radiation of that alien sun raising deadly blisters on his own skin. In his long dreams he had seen something entirely different. He had imagined a planet of a yellow sun, somewhere, eighty, ninety light-years away, a gentle sun much like the one under which he had been born. He had dreamed of a world of lakes and rivers and grassy fields, of sweet air tinged perhaps with ozone, of purple-leafed trees and glossy green insects, of elegant slender beings with sloping shoulders and many-fingered hands, quietly talking as they moved through the groves and vales of their paradise, probing the mysteries of the cosmos, speculating on the existence of other civilizations, at last sending their message to the universe. He had seen them opening their arms to the first visitors from Earth, saying, Welcome, brothers, welcome, we knew you had to be there. All of that was destroyed now. In the eye of his mind Krug saw a hellish blue sun spitting demonic fires into the void, saw a blackened and sizzling planet on which scaly armored monstrosities slithered in pools of quicksilver under a sullen sky of white flame, saw a band of horrors gathering around a nightmarish machine to send an incomprehensible message across the gulf of space. And these are our brothers? It is all spoiled, Krug thought bitterly.

“How can we go to them?” he asked. “How can we embrace them? Vargas, I have a ship almost ready, a ship for the stars, a ship to carry a sleeping man for centuries. How can I send it to such a place?”

“Your reaction surprises me. Such distress I did not expect.”

“Such a star I did not expect.”

“Would you have been happier if I told you that the signals were after all mere natural pulses?”

“No. No.”

“Then rejoice in these our strange brothers, and forget the strangeness, and think only of the brotherhood.”

Vargas’ words sank in. Krug found strength. The astronomer was right. However strange those beings might be, however bizarre their world — always assuming the truth of Vargas’ hypothesis — they were civilized, scientific, outward-looking. Our brothers. If space folded upon itself tomorrow, and Earth and its sun and all its neighbor worlds were engulfed and thrust into oblivion, intelligence would not perish from the universe, forthey were there.

“Yes,” Krug said. “I rejoice in them. When my tower is done I send them my hellos.”

Two and a half centuries had passed since man first had broken free of his native planet. In one great dynamic sweep the spaceward drive had carried human explorers from Luna to Pluto, to the edge of the solar system and beyond, and nowhere had they found trace of intelligent life. Lichens, bacteria, primitive low-phylum crawlers, yes, but nothing more. Disappointment was the fate of those archeologists who had hatched fantasies of reconstructing the cultural sequences of Mars from artifacts found in the desert. There were no artifacts. And when the star-probes had begun to go forth, making their decades-long reco

Krug had been a young man when the first star-probes returned. It had displeased him to see his fellow Earthmen constructing philosophies around the failures to find intelligent life in the nearby solar systems. What were they saying, these apostles of the New Geocentricism?

— We are the chosen ones!

— We are the only children of God!

— On this world and no other did the Lord fashion His people!

— To us falls the universe, as our divine heritage!

Krug saw the seeds of paranoia in that kind of thinking.

He had never thought much about God. But it seemed to him that men were asking too much of the universe when they insisted that only on this small planet of one small sun had the miracle of intelligence been permitted to emerge. Billions upon billions of suns existed, world without end. How could intelligencenot have evolved again and again and again across the infinite sea of galaxies?

And it struck him as megalomania to elevate the tentative findings of a sketchy search through a dozen light-years into an absolute statement of dogma. Was man really alone? How could youknow ? Krug was basically a rational man. He maintained perspective on all things. He felt that mankind’s continued sanity depended on an awakening from this dream of uniqueness, for the dream was sure to end, and if the awakening came later rather than sooner the impact might be shattering.

“When will the tower be ready?” Vargas asked.

“Year after next. Next year, if we have luck, maybe. You saw this morning: unlimited budget.” Krug frowned. He felt suddenly uneasy. “Give me the truth. Even you, you spend all your life listening to the stars, you think Krug’s a little crazy?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Sure you do. They all do. My boy Manuel, he thinks I ought to be locked up, but he’s afraid to say it. Spaulding, out there, him too. Everybody, maybe even Thor Watchman, and he’sbuilding the damned thing. They want to know what’s in it for me. Why do I throw billions of dollars into a tower of glass. You too, Vargas!”