* * * * *
We were like two men possessed. Eating, sleeping, even talking was
ignored completely as we waded through the hundreds of sheets of
paper. We could decode only a small percentage of them, but they still
represented many hours of communication. The sheets that we couldn't
decode, we suspected, were repetitions of the same message that we were
working on.
We lost all concept of time. We must have slept, more than once, but I
simply don't remember. All I can recall is thousands of numbers, row
upon row, sheet after sheet of numbers ... and my pencil scratching
symbols of the various chemical elements over them until my hand was so
cramped I could no longer open the fingers.
The message consisted of a long series of formulas; that much was
certain. But, without punctuation, with no knowledge of the symbols
that denote even such simple things as "plus" or "equals" or "yields,"
it took us more weeks of hard work to unravel the sense of each
equation. And even then, there was more to the message than met the
eye:
"Just what the hell are they driving at?" Rizzo wondered aloud. His
face had changed: it was thinner, hollow-eyed, weary, covered with a
scraggly beard.
"Then you think there's a meaning behind all these equations, too?"
He nodded. "It's a message, not just a contact. They're going to an
awful lot of trouble to beam out this message, and they're repeating it
every seven hours. They haven't added anything new in the weeks we've
been watching."
"I wonder how many years or centuries they've been sending out this
message, waiting for someone to pick it up, looking for someone to
answer them."
"Maybe we should call Washington...."
"No!"