"The question," observed Burke, "isn't whether it makes sense, but whether it's fact. According to the last word from Earth, they're still insisting that the ship's drive is against all reason. But we're here. And speaking of reason, would the average person look at this place and say blandly, 'Ah, yes! A fortress in space. To be sure!' Would they? Is this place reasonable?"
Joe Burke is a successful young engineer, the owner of his own R&D consulting firm. But Joe has never felt quite right, never felt that he was like other people. Since he was a kid he has had a recurring dream: a vision of a landscape with two moons accompanied by an unmelodic series of flute-like musical notes, a vision in which he carries a strange pistol and is on a mission to rescue a woman. Are these dreams signs he is insane, or telepathic, or not fully human? His uneasiness about himself and the identity of the woman in the dream has kept Joe from proposing to his childhood friend and sweetheart, Sandy Lund, but on the very day he decides to overcome his worries and pop the question he is interrupted by a news flash, the biggest news of the century!
A message has arrived from outer space! The message is repeated, again and again, always the same, an unmelodic series of musical notes. The message is played on the radio, and Joe recognizes it as the very same odd flutings he hears in his recurring dream!
While scientists the world over are scrambling to figure out where the message comes from, Joe is working feverishly around the clock in his lab; now that he knows the dream is not the result of some mental illness but must be information from some source external to himself, he puts his expertise to work trying to recreate the weapon from the dream. He works out the atomic principles that power the weapon, scientific laws heretofore unknown to human science, and succeeds in producing a working prototype of the weapon! Meanwhile, astronomers have pinpointed the asteroid from which the messages are being transmitted, and the governments of both the Soviet Union and the United States have announced their intentions to send manned expeditions to investigate, though the arrival of these missions at the target is months away.
The Wailing Asteroid includes a lot science and engineering, and we get pretty detailed descriptions of Burke's inventive and investigatory endeavors. That pistol operates by aligning the motion of atoms within a substance--these atoms are normally moving independently--thus converting heat energy into kinetic energy... at least that is what I think Leinster is saying. Anyway, Burke scales up the mechanism of the pistol to create a space drive. Holmes, a yacht builder, and Keller, an electronics whiz, help Burke build a space ship, while Sandy and her sister Pam handle all the clerical and financial aspects. (21st-century readers will perhaps not like the way Leinster handles gender roles in this 1960 novel; the women are more concerned with their relationships--Sandy's with Joe Burke and Pam's with Holmes--than any science stuff, and while they do contribute to the achievements of the three engineers, they are also very emotional, scared or nervous or whatever.)
Besides his hard science speculations, Leinster offers speculations on how the public and politicians might respond to the prospect of meeting aliens, and, as perhaps we expect from this sort of classic-style SF story, the man on the street and the people he has voted into office in Washington or who lord it over him from Moscow don't respond as admirably as do engineering types like Burke, Holmes and Keller. The public panics, fearing contact with aliens will mean the subjugation or extermination of the human race, and there is hysterical fear over the possibility that alien spies already live among us. The government investigates any person at all connected to anything to do with space, Burke among them, and halfway through the novel, to escape arrest, our five heroes have to take off in their not-quite-complete and quite untested space ship. After dodging USAF anti-aircraft missiles, they head for the asteroid belt and the source of the undecipherable messages.
In brief, millions of years ago humans had a space empire that would periodically suffer attack from mysterious aliens; thousands of years would pass between attacks, and each attack would feature different tactics and weapons systems. This fortress on the periphery of the human empire was supplied and garrisoned via teleporter from some place many light years away. In the centuries following the last attack, the empire grew decadent and stopped sending sufficient supplies to the fortress, so the garrison began sending parties via space boats to the Earth to hunt mammoths for food and so on; eventually the empire collapsed altogether or moved to another region of the galaxy, and the garrison deserted the fortress and moved to Earth permanently. Before leaving they set up a computer system to watch for another alien attack and warn them if another was imminent--then they could return to the fort to resist the invasion. Over the centuries these colonists, our ancestors, regressed into barbarism, totally forgetting their history. But the computers on the fortress continued to work, and in the 20th century, when approaching aliens were detected, sent out the automatic alert to Earth.
For books, our space faring ancestors had little cubes that transmit info directly to your brain via a helmet interface, and Joe and company find many such cubes on the fortress that serve as histories and instruction manuals for the fortress's equipment and weapons. These cubes are fragile and liable to leak radiation even when not in a helmet, and if you sleep near one the info will seep into your brain as a dream. Burke had that dream as a kid because a relative acquired one of the cubes brought to Earth during the era of the mastodon and gave it to little Joey. It is theorized that the cubes brought to Earth are entertainment cubes, fiction, but the way that Burke's dream essentially comes true makes me wonder if Leinster might have had some kind of time travel gag in mind.
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