There was no lead in this direction, and they had to get the basic
facts of the story before the ship came. The _Times_ asked, "What led
up to your contacting them?"
Nathen answered after a hesitation. "Static. Radio static. The Army
told you my job, didn't they?"
* * * * *
The Army had told them nothing at all. The officer who had conducted
them in for the interview stood glowering watchfully, as if he objected
by instinct to telling anything to the public.
Nathen glanced at him doubtfully. "My job is radio decoder for the
Department of Military Intelligence. I use a directional pickup, tune
in on foreign bands, record any scrambled or coded messages I hear, and
build automatic decoders and descramblers for all the basic scramble
patterns."
The officer cleared his throat, but said nothing.
The reporters smiled, noting that down.
Security regulations had changed since arms inspection had been
legalized by the U.N. Complete information being the only public
security against secret rearmament, spying and prying had come to seem
a public service. Its aura had changed. It was good public relations to
admit to it.
Nathen continued, "I started directing the pickup at stars in my
spare time. There's radio noise from stars, you know. Just stuff that
sounds like spatter static, and an occasional squawk. People have been
listening to it for a long time, and researching, trying to work out
why stellar radiation on those bands comes in such jagged bursts. It
didn't seem natural."
He paused and smiled uncertainly, aware that the next thing he would
say was the thing that would make him famous--an idea that had come to
him while he listened--an idea as simple and as perfect as the one that
came to Newton when he saw the apple fall.
"I decided it wasn't natural. I tried decoding it."
Hurriedly he tried to explain it away and make it seem obvious. "You
see, there's an old intelligence trick, speeding up a message on a
record until it sounds just like that, a short squawk of static, and
then broadcasting it. Undergrounds use it. I'd heard that kind of
screech before."
"You mean they broadcast at us in code?" asked the _News_.
"It's not exactly code. All you need to do is record it and slow it
down. They're not broadcasting at us. If a star has planets, inhabited
planets, and there is broadcasting between them, they would send it on
a tight beam to save power." He looked for comprehension. "You know,
like a spotlight. Theoretically, a tight beam can go on forever without
losing power. But aiming would be difficult from planet to planet. You
can't expect a beam to stay on target, over such distances, more than a
few seconds at a time. So they'd naturally compress each message into
a short half-second or one-second-length package and send it a few
hundred times in one long blast to make sure it is picked up during
the instant the beam swings across the target."
He was talking slowly and carefully, remembering that this explanation
was for the newspapers. "When a stray beam swings through our section
of space, there's a sharp peak in noise level from that direction.
The beams are swinging to follow their own planets at home, and
the distance between there and here exaggerates the speed of swing
tremendously, so we wouldn't pick up more than a bip as it passes."
"How do you account for the number of squawks coming in?" the _Times_
asked. "Do stellar systems rotate on the plane of the Galaxy?" It was a
private question; he spoke impulsively from interest and excitement.
The radio decoder grinned, the lines of strain vanishing from his face
for a moment. "Maybe we're intercepting everybody's telephone calls,
and the whole Galaxy is swarming with races that spend all day yacking
at each other over the radio. Maybe the human type is standard model."
"It would take something like that," the _Times_ agreed. They smiled at
each other.
The _News_ asked, "How did you happen to pick up television instead of
voices?"
"Not by accident," Nathen explained patiently. "I'd recognized a
scanning pattern, and I wanted pictures. Pictures are understandable in
any language."
* * * * *
Near the interviewers, a Senator paced back and forth, muttering
his memorized speech of welcome and nervously glancing out the wide
streaming windows into the gray sleeting rain.
Opposite the windows of the long room was a small raised platform
flanked by the tall shapes of TV cameras and sound pickups on booms,
and darkened floodlights, arranged and ready for the Senator to make
his speech of welcome to the aliens and the world. A shabby radio
sending set stood beside it without a case to conceal its parts, two
cathode television tubes flickering nakedly on one side and the speaker
humming on the other. A vertical panel of dials and knobs jutted up
before them and a small hand-mike sat ready on the table before the
panel. It was connected to a boxlike, expensively cased piece of
equipment with "Radio Lab, U.S. Property" stenciled on it.
"I recorded a couple of package screeches from Sagittarius and began
working on them," Nathen added. "It took a couple of months to find
the synchronizing signals and set the scanners close enough to the
right time to even get a pattern. When I showed the pattern to the
Department, they gave me full time to work on it, and an assistant to
help. It took eight months to pick out the color bands, and assign them
the right colors, to get anything intelligible on the screen."
* * * * *
The shabby-looking mess of exposed parts was the original receiver that
they had labored over for ten months, adjusting and readjusting to
reduce the maddening rippling plaids of unsynchronized color scanners
to some kind of sane picture.
"Trial and error," said Nathen, "but it came out all right. The wide
band-spread of the squawks had suggested color TV from the beginning."
He walked over and touched the set. The speaker bipped slightly and
the gray screen flickered with a flash of color at the touch. The set
was awake and sensitive, tuned to receive from the great interstellar
spaceship which now circled the atmosphere.
"We wondered why there were so many bands, but when we got the set
working, and started recording and playing everything that came in, we
found we'd tapped something like a lending library line. It was all
fiction, plays."
Between the pauses in Nathen's voice, the _Times_ found himself
unconsciously listening for the sound of roaring, swiftly approaching
rocket jets.