"It wouldn't mean a lot to you if I told you. But you can understand this much—chemical analysis of the pebbles I've looked at so far shows fragments of embedded fossils."
"Of plants, you mean?"
Myrwan smiled.
"Plants don't become fossilized," he said. "In one pebble there was a microscopic piece of a metal knife. In another there was half of a fossilized tooth. Ground Dweller relics, true, but human. You must remember that all the hills around here from which you gather the pebbles are really million-ganath-old burial places of the Ground Dwellers. We haven't bothered to dig up most of them because we're so rich in prehistoric remains, with our immensely old civilization, that we have all the fossils and ancient artifacts we need.
"But let's imagine an alien civilization a great deal younger than ours. Let's imagine that in even one of those pebbles—which would be meteorites to them—even a minute trace of that kind of thing should be left. What would they Think?—for they would have to have Thinkers too, to be civilized at all.
"I'll tell you what they'd Think. They'd decide that somewhere out in space there is a rich, undiscovered planet full of valuable knowledge and, even better, valuable artifacts. Probably a world with a culture much more advanced than their own. And they'd try hard to trace the direction from which those meteorites came, and to calculate the distance. Then suppose they had some means of transportation in space.
"That may well be what these new radio waves mean. They may be attempts at communication—if we were foolish enough to respond to them. We don't dare to take any chances.
"So from now on there are going to be swarms and swarms of those meteoroids—and every one of them is going to be a real artifact on its own—a manufactured one, made according to Our specifications, carrying an unmistakable message. A false one!
"They will be cunningly constructed from forms of matter injurious to any conceivable variety of life. We'll cover them all. And they'll be barren of even the most primitive bacteria. They will carry in themselves a silent warning: 'Approach the planet from which these come at peril of your instant death ... not matter what kind of being you are!' That should save us forever."
I'd been wondering why Sephar had kept his big mouth shut all this time. To my way of feeling, he should never have been with us at all. He would never have been a Council member if he hadn't been a multibilibaire. But I'd won a fair fight with him, and officially we had to be friends, so I hadn't protested when I found he was included in the summons.