"Yeah, I know. I've been going over the same numbers in my head." He
set a few switches on the computer control board. "Now let's see how
many of the 600 trillion we can pick up." He sat down before the board
and pressed a series of buttons.
We watched, hardly breathing, as the computer's spools began spinning
and the indicator lights flashed across the control board. Within a few
minutes, the printer chugged to life.
Rizzo swivelled his chair over to the printer and held up the unrolling
sheet in a trembling hand.
Numbers. Six-digit numbers. Completely meaningless.
"Gibberish," Rizzo snapped.
It was peculiar. I felt relieved and disappointed at the same time.
"Something's screwy," Rizzo said. "Maybe I fouled up the circuits...."
"I don't think so," I answered. "After all, what did you expect out of
the computer? Shakespearean poetry?"
"No, but I expected numbers that would make some sense. One and one,
maybe. Something that means something. This stuff is nowhere."
Our nerves must have really been wound tight, because before we knew
it we were in the middle of a nasty argument--and it was over nothing,
really. But in the middle of it:
"Hey, look," Rizzo shouted, pointing to the oscilloscope.
The message had stopped. The 'scope showed only the calm, steady line
of the star's basic two-day-long pulsation.
It suddenly occurred to us that we hadn't slept for more than 36
hours, and we were both exhausted. We forgot the senseless argument.
The message was ended. Perhaps there would be another; perhaps not. We
had the telescope, spectrometer, photocell, oscilloscope, and computer
set to record automatically. We collapsed into our bunks. I suppose I
should have had monumental dreams. I didn't. I slept like a dead man.
* * * * *
When we woke up, the oscilloscope trace was still quiet.
"Y'know," Rizzo muttered, "it might just be a fluke ... I mean, maybe
the signals don't mean a damned thing. The computer is probably
translating nonsense into numbers just because it's built to print out
numbers and nothing else."
"Not likely," I said. "There are too many coincidences to be explained.
We're receiving a message, I'm certain of it. Now we've got to crack
the code."
As if to reinforce my words, the oscilloscope trace suddenly erupted
into the same flickering pattern. The message was being sent again.
We went through two weeks of it. The message would run through for
seven hours, then stop for seven. We transcribed it on tape 48
times and ran it through the computer constantly. Always the same
result--six-digit numbers; millions of them. There were six different
seven-hour-long messages, being repeated one after the other,
constantly.
We forgot the meteorological equipment. We ignored the weekly messages
from McMurdo. The rest of the world became a meaningless fiction to
us. There was nothing but the confounded, tantalizing, infuriating,
enthralling message. The National Emergency, the bomb tests, families,
duties--all transcended, all forgotten. We ate when we thought of it
and slept when we couldn't keep our eyes open any longer. The message.
What was it? What was the key to unlock its meaning?
"It's got to be something universal," I told Rizzo. "Something
universal ... in the widest sense of the term."
He looked up from his desk, which was wedged in between the end of his
bunk and the curving dome wall. The desk was littered with printout
sheets from the computer, each one of them part of the message.
"You've only said that a half-million times in the past couple weeks.
What the hell is universal? If you can figure that out, you're damned
good."
_What is universal?_ I wondered. _You're an astronomer. You look out at
the universe. What do you see?_ I thought about it. _What do I see?
Stars, gas, dust clouds, planets ... what's universal about them? What
do they all have that_....
"Atoms!" I blurted.