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.
Rizzo cocked a weary eye at me. «Atoms?»
«Atoms. Elements. Look …»
I grabbed up a fistful of the sheets and thumbed through them. «Look … each message starts with a list of numbers. Then there’s a long blank to separate the opening list from the rest of the message. See? Every time, the same length list.»
«So?»
«The periodic table of the elements!» I shouted into his ear. «That’s the key!»
Rizzo shook his head. «I thought of that two days ago. No soap. In the first place, the list that starts each message isn’t always the same. It’s the same length, all right, but the numbers change. In the second place, it always begins with 100000. I looked up the atomic weight of hydrogen—it’s 1.008 something.»
That stopped me for a moment. But then something clicked into place in my mind.
«Why is the hydrogen weight 1.008?» Before Rizzo could answer, I went on, «For two reasons. The system we use arbitrarily rates oxygen as 16-even. Right? All the other weights are calculated from oxygen’s. And we also give the average weight of an element, counting all its isotopes. Our weight for hydrogen also includes an adjustment for tiny amounts of deuterium and tritium. Right? Well, suppose they have a system that rates hydrogen as a flat one: 1.00000. Doesn’t that make sense?»
«You’re getting punchy,» Rizzo grumbled. «What about the isotopes? How can they expect us to handle decimal points if they don’t tell us about them … mental telepathy? What about …»
«Stop arguing and start calculating,» I snapped. «Change that list of numbers to agree with our periodic table. Change 1.00000 to 1.008-whatever-it-is and tackle the next few elements. The decimals shouldn’t be so hard to figure out.»
Rizzo grumbled to himself, but started working out the calculations. I stepped over to the dome’s microspool library and found an elementary physics text. Within a few minutes, Rizzo had some numbers and I had the periodic table focused on the microspool reading machine.
«Nothing,» Rizzo said, leaning over my shoulder and looking at the screen. «They don’t match at all.»
«Try another list. They’re not all the same.»
He shrugged and returned to his desk. After a while he called out, «their second number is 3.97123; it works out to 4.003-something.»
It checked! «Good. That’s helium. What about the next one, lithium?»
«That’s 6.940.»
«Right!»
Rizzo went to work furiously after that. I pushed a chair to the desk and began working up from the end of the list. It all checked out, from hydrogen to a few elements beyond the artificial ones that had been created in the laboratories here on Earth.
«That’s it,» I said. «That’s the key. That’s our Rosetta Stone … the periodic table.»
Rizzo stared at the scribbled numbers and jumble of papers. «I bet I know what the other lists are … the ones that don’t make sense.»
«Oh?»
«There are other ways to identify the elements … vibration resonances, quantum wavelengths … somebody named Lewis came out a couple years ago with a Quantum Periodic Table …»
«They’re covering all the possibilities. There are messages for many different levels of understanding. We just decoded the simplest one.»
«Yeah.»
I noticed that as he spoke, Rizzo’s hand—still tightly clutching the pencil—was trembling and white with tension.
«Well?»
Rizzo licked his lips. «Let’s get to work.»
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!»
Rizzo grinned. «Afraid of breaking radio silence?»
«Hell no. I just want to wait until we’re relieved, so we can make this announcement in person. I’m not going to let some old wheezer in Washington get credit for this… Besides, I want to know just what they’re trying to tell us.»