* * * * *
The question broke our entranced mood. What do we do? What action do we
take? We're thinking men, and we've been contacted by other creatures
that can think, reason, send a signal across seven hundred lightyears
of space. So don't just sit there in stupified awe. Use your brain,
prove that you're worthy of the tag _sapiens_.
"We decode the message," I announced. Then, as an after-thought, "But
don't ask me how."
We should have called McMurdo, or Washington. Or perhaps we should have
attempted to get a message through to the United Nations. But we never
even thought of it. This was our problem. Perhaps it was the sheer
isolation of our dome that kept us from thinking about the rest of the
world. Perhaps it was sheer luck.
"If they're using lasers," Rizzo reasoned, "they must have a technology
something like ours."
"Must _have had_," I corrected. "That message is seven hundred years
old, remember. They were playing with lasers when King John was signing
the Magna Charta and Genghis Khan owned most of Asia. Lord knows what
they have now."
Rizzo blanched and reached for another cigaret.
I turned back to the oscilloscope. The signal was still flashing across
its face.
"They're sending out a signal," I mused, "probably at random. Just
beaming it out into space, hoping that someone, somewhere will pick it
up. It must be in some form of code ... but a code that they feel can
be easily cracked by anyone with enough intelligence to realize that
there's a message there."
"Sort of an interstellar Morse code."
I shook my head. "Morse code depends on both sides knowing the code.
There's no key."
"Cryptographers crack codes."
"Sure. If they know what language is being used. We don't know the
language, we don't know the alphabet, the thought processes ...
nothing."
"But it's a code that can be cracked easily," Rizzo muttered.
"Yes," I agreed. "Now what the hell kind of a code can they assume will
be known to another race that they've never seen?"
Rizzo leaned back on his bunk and his face was lost in shadows.
"An interstellar code," I rambled on. "Some form of presenting
information that would be known to almost any race intelligent enough
to understand lasers...."
"Binary!" Rizzo snapped, sitting up on the bunk.
"What?"
"Binary code. To send a signal like this, they've gotta be able to
write a message in units that're only a billionth of a second long.
That takes computers. Right? Well, if they have computers, they must
figure that we have computers. Digital computers run on binary code.
Off or on ... go or no-go. It's simple. I'll bet we can slap that
signal on a tape and run it through our computer here."
"To assume that they use computers exactly like ours...."
"Maybe the computers are completely different," Rizzo said excitedly,
"but the binary code is basic to them all. I'll bet on that! And this
computer we've got here--this transistorized baby--she can handle
more information than the whole Army could feed into her. I'll bet
nothing has been developed anywhere that's better for handling simple
one-plus-one types of operations."