“What is it?” he asked, looking up.
The man across the table took a long drag on his cigarette, then said, “You tell us.”
So that’s how it’s going to be, Soter thought. He looked at the paper again, ignoring the handwritten modifications and focused on the printed values instead. “Okay. This is a computer printout. The digits probably represent numbers—”
One of them men at the table snorted. “No kidding.”
“Numbers have a discrete value,” Soter explained, “while digits or numerals are merely symbols that may indicate numbers, or something else entirely.” He pointed to the printout. “Here. Read left to right we have ‘111’ but does that signify one hundred and eleven, or is it three separate figures, each with a value of one? Or are the digits a substitution cipher? Perhaps we should replace 1 with the letter A…”
He trailed off, no longer caring about making his point. The circled column of numbers told him that the figures were meant to be interpreted vertically, and that each character was a separate value. Something about the circled string looked very familiar.
“Each character is a number,” he said again, this time with more confidence. “The use of letters would indicate numerical values greater than nine. The numbers in the circle are actually…give me a pen.”
A pen was passed over, and Soter quickly began writing an alphanumeric key.
A=10
B=11
C=12
D=13
…
When he had found a numerical value for each letter in the sequence, he wrote out a new set of numbers:
6, 14, 26, 30, 19, 5
“Okay, these are the actual values of the alphanumerical characters.” Soter hastily sketched a graph and plotted the points in order.
One of the men at the table shook his head and muttered, “Damn, that was fast.”
Soter met the gaze of the smoking man. “You already knew this, I take it?”
“We’re not trying to be coy, Dr. Soter. It’s important that we get your unbiased impressions.”
The other man — the one who had been impressed by his speed — added, “When you hear where this came from, it’s going to blow your mind.”
Soter thought about the hand-written note on the print-out and decided that the man wasn’t merely being dramatic. “Well, if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a frequency table.”
“Radio frequencies.”
It was an odd thing to say, and odder still, it didn’t sound like a question. “No. In this case, it’s the frequency of whatever event these data are recording. These numbers all add up to one hundred, so this is probably an expression of percentages. Most are in the middle…average. That’s the peak here. The sum of these two values in the middle is fifty-six, slightly more than half. Further out, you have two smaller groups that are slightly above or below average, and then out on the edges, even smaller groups that are extremely above or below average.” He shrugged. “This is a textbook probability curve.”
The smoking man’s face drew into a frown, and he snatched the paper. After studying it for a few seconds, he shook his head. “I’ll be damned. They do add up to a hundred. How did they miss that?”
Soter glanced at the assembled group. “Gentlemen, I can continue to make uninformed guesses if you’d like, but I suspect I’ll have better luck making sense of these data if you’ll tell me where they came from.”
The men in the room looked at each other for a moment, and arrived at a silent consensus. The smoking man spoke again. “Dr. Soter, the data here are radio frequencies, received at a listening station in Ohio. You were correct in pointing out that the digits are not precise numerical values. They are actually indicators of signal intensity. The highest value there — thirty — indicates a signal that is thirty times stronger than normal. So you see, it’s literally a frequency table, but not in the sense you thought it was.”
“I don’t think you brought me here just for some anomalous radio signal. What’s really going on?”
“The listening post I refer to is the Big Ear radio telescope, part of the Ohio State SETI project.”
SETI! Soter recognized the acronym immediately. “This is a transmission from space? From extraterrestrials?”
“It is from space,” the smoking man confirmed. “It appears to originate somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius. It’s too soon to say if there is an intelligence behind it, but it is remarkable for several reasons. To begin with, the peak intensity of the signal was about 1420.4 MHz. To give you a frame of reference, that’s in the Ultra High Frequency range. HAM radios operate in the 1300 MHz range. This signal — we’re calling it the Wow! Signal for obvious reasons — happens to fall at the precise bandwidth of hydrogen, which is the sort of thing astronomers look for as an indicator of extraterrestrial intelligence.
“The spike in intensity was caused by the rotation of the Earth. The signal was constant, but the telescope’s window of observation was only oriented toward the source for seventy-two seconds. That was five days ago. On successive passes, the Big Ear failed to detect the signal again.”
Soter digested this for a moment. “What do you want from me?”
“It is critically important that we determine whether or not this signal is a broadcast from an alien intelligence. If it is, we need to figure out what it’s saying. I don’t need to tell you that mathematics is a universal language. If anyone can decode this transmission, it’s you.”
Soter reached out for the paper, looked at it again, then shook it in the air. “This isn’t a transmission. There’s nothing to decode here.”
“Dr. Soter, in thirty seconds, you saw a pattern that no one else did.”
“That isn’t a pattern,” Soter protested. “It’s a fluke. A coincidence.”
“Do you really believe that?”
Soter tapped the circled values. “You said it yourself. These numbers weren’t part of the transmission. They were generated by the computer program that monitors the intensity of the signal.”
“If the intelligence behind this transmission understood our capabilities, what better way to send a message?”
“In order to do that…in order to produce that exact sequence of values, it would require precise synchronization — to the nanosecond — as well as knowledge of the precise calibration of our equipment, and all that across light years of space. This signal might have originated years ago, centuries even. It would require extraordinary computing power, advanced intelligence, to say nothing of the ability to see into the future.”
“That’s exactly what concerns me, Dr. Soter.” The man stubbed out his cigarette. “Take this apart. Assume that there’s a message here. Find it. Can you do that?”
Soter frowned and looked at the paper again. What if the man was right? What if there were other patterns hidden in the signal?
6, 14, 26, 30, 19, 5
Don’t think of them as numbers. They are symbols. What do they represent? Spatial coordinates? Dates? Times? Elements on the periodic table?
“I can’t do it alone. I’m going to need experts — astronomers, cryptologists, xenobiologists.”
“We’ll put together a team…wait, xenobiologists? What’re those?”
“It’s a new field. Theoretical biology, predicting how life might evolve on other worlds.”
The man grunted. “You’ll have whatever you need.”
“It could take a while. And I have other obligations.”