The World Swappers Read Free Page B

knowledge for its own sake–they were desperately seeking a warning of danger. A danger that might be the greatest the human race had ever faced.
    In spite of his awareness of the consequences, Anty Dreean found himself wishing that the waiting might end and that they might find the certainty they feared.
    At the end of the pit nearest to where Anty stood, Wu, the director of the expedition on Regis, and his senior aide, Katya Ivanovna, moved like grotesque, oversized dolls. In Wu’s hands was a sonar detector; its staring telltale eye flickered and changed as its beam recorded the presence of solid matter in the walls of the pit, and Katya dug at it with a trowel. Anty leaned forward, wondering if this was going to be it.
    Abruptly, he was recalled to his task by a sharp command–the voice had probably been Lotus Scharf’s. He stepped up the level of illumination at the opposite end of the pit, and people all around, as though moved by a premonition, hesitated and turned to see what had happened.
    Something glittered in Lotus’ gauntleted hands. She beckoned urgently to Wu, who hurried across to her. For a few moments their hooded heads were bent together as they conferred.
    From the rim of the excavation someone uttered the question which had been burning for long moments in Anty’s own mind; he strained forward to hear the answer.
    A little stiffly, a little solemnly, Wu raised his head and spoke. “It’s a food container,” he said. “An empty can–and it’s not one of ours.”
    So the Others had been to Regis. And that meant they might come back.
    The gathering began to break up; someone went over to the transfax and started it, so that the leakage of light from its tremendous field of pent-up power made the landscape like day. Wu handed his sonar detector over the edge of the pit, and scrambled up after it, as did the rest of the workers. Only Anty Dreean seemed to be frozen to immobility.
    In the few seconds it took for Wu and his companions to leave the pit, Anty found time to review the whole series of events that had climaxed here, now, on the permafrozen tundra of Regis’ north pole. It had begun a very long way away, on Wu’s home world of K’ung-fu-tse, when a laboratory worker engaged in measuring certain atomic resonance frequencies had found his results to be disturbed by vibrations in the very fabric of space.
    There were thousands of sets of vibrations such as these now, spreading through the galaxy like the wake of so many ships. That was exactly what they were–the wake of ships, driven faster than light, and straining the framework of the universe. They could be ignored, of course; they produced no noticeable effects on anything at a distance greater than a few thousand miles. Except when it came to such delicate operations as studying the interior of atomic nuclei.
    There was a standard technique for dealing with the problem, tedious, but adequate, which consisted of determining the source of the vibrations to a high degree of accuracy and then calculating what allowance to make for their influence. Swearing, the laboratory worker proceeded to apply the method–and found that the source was in the wrong place.
    It lay out towards Regis. And because he happened–by a minor miracle–to be a friend of Wu’s and party to a good many secrets which most people did not share, the worker felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.
    There should not have been any vibrations of this kind in the neighborhood of Regis. No human-built ship had ever been to Regis. Men had visited the planet, true, but they had traveled by a different route.
    So he had shouted a warning.
    They had known for a very long time that the laws of chance alone insisted that man was not unique in the cosmos; somewhere there must be other creatures with an urge towards the stars and the technical ability to fulfill that urge. For a shorter time, they had known what the nearest non-human space-going species was, and where it